Water was flooding into the stairwell now; soon it would reach the lowest of the hand holds and the step would be gone. The subterranean chamber was filling up much faster than he would have believed possible. It must have been half of the Tiber emptying into the chamber. There wasn’t a second to waste worrying about the fate of a bloody sword.
“If you don’t jump now, you’ll die here with it. We know where it is. We can come back.”
But Lili ignored him.
Instead of surrendering the blade to an uncertain fate, she carefully threaded it into her belt, and only when it was secure did she gather herself for the jump.
Shaking his head at her sheer bloody obstinacy, Frost worked himself around the angle to give her more room. She was athletic. Lithe. But she wasn’t a long jumper. She didn’t make it. Her foot caught the edge of the stone step. She tried to adjust but couldn’t, and fell forward, the side of her head hitting the wall as she lunged only to fall back. She hit the rising water and went under and Frost knew he didn’t have a choice. He launched himself from a height, spearing down into the water, kicking and splashing as it rose relentlessly, and swam across to where she was floating facedown like a starfish, bleeding.
He turned her in his arms, tilting her head so she wasn’t swallowing water, and trod water while it rose around them. He couldn’t climb with her in his arms and he couldn’t leave her behind.
He looked at Denison. “Go. Get that fucking thing open or we’re all dead.”
Denison didn’t hesitate.
He took a few steps back to get a running start, and then jumped easily across the gap, then hand-over-hand climbed with a surety that belied his age.
Soon he was up by the aperture, and trying to get some sort of purchase on it to force the gap wider. The mechanisms grated back on themselves but the sound was lost in the sheer tumult of churning water flooding the chamber, but the aperture was visibly wider.
Denison looked back down at him, nodded once, then kicked off the side and scrabbled upwards, pulling himself through the aperture.
He was swallowed by the darkness.
Now all Frost could do was wait for the chamber to flood and the water carry him toward the aperture.
Lili kicked out, struggling suddenly, and nearly dragging him down.
“Relax,” Frost said, “I’ve got you. You’re safe. Stop struggling.” But she wouldn’t. She fought him, and her struggles dragged them down.
Frost swallowed a huge lungful of water.
All he could see was black water.
There was nothing else.
Lili thrashed, splashing, and pulled away from him.
He pushed for the surface but his jeans snagged on the head of Caesar, keeping him under. Frost thrashed in panic, kicking out, wriggling and writhing and twisting trying to tear it free, and then he was loose and rising.
When he broke the surface he saw Denison reaching down through the aperture to help Lili up.
His heart was hammering in his chest.
For a moment—just a moment, a single sickening fraction of a second—he’d thought he was going to die, and thought Lili had done it deliberately, betraying them for the sword.
Gulping down a breath of stale foetid air he could hardly breathe a sigh of relief, but he was so, so glad to be wrong.
She disappeared up into the darkness.
Frost trod water, gazing up, waiting for Denison to reappear with his helping hand. The water rose mercilessly. Time was lost in the surge and churn and splash of water, and then the jets were under the surface, making a brutal battering undertow that threatened to drag him under. “In your own time, mate!” He yelled up at the hole above him.
When the other man finally reappeared, it wasn’t to lend a helping hand.
Denison plummeted through the opening, crashing onto Frost before he could even think about trying to swim out of the way, and both men were dragged under.
16 Beacon
Rome—0327 Local (0227 UTC)
THE IMPACT OF Denison’s fall coupled with the sheer power of the jets pumping water mercilessly into the chamber dragged Frost down. There was nothing he could do to fight it. Water buffeted and battered him from all sides, twisting him as he tried to claw his way back to the surface.
His light was gone, his and Denison’s. The dark left him disoriented. He knew he had to fight his way back to the surface and just wait it out as the water rose.
And pray they didn’t seal the aperture before he did.
He reached out desperately trying to grab on to anything solid. His fingers closed on something soft and yielding instead. “Tony?” He called out. The darkness swallowed his words. It was a body. It had to be him.
He pulled Denison close, lifting his head above the surface.
He was breathing. Thank god. He hooked his arm under and around Denison and held his head above the water until Denison broke into a fit of coughing.
“Tony?” Frost’s teeth chattered. He clenched them. The cold gnawed away at him as he trod water. The exertion of keeping them both up coupled with freezing cold made each word an ordeal. “What the hell happened?”
“Waiting for us,” Denison managed between shivering and choking. “They took Lili...they... took the sword.”
“It’s just a sword. We’ve got to get out of here.” He tried to process with it meant: Denison’s enemies had found them, had followed them into the hidden passages and lain in wait. Something about that didn’t feel right, and that nagged away at Frost and wouldn’t let go. But the urgency of their current predicament had to take precedence. “There’s got to be another way out of here,” he shouted above the pouring water. Whitecaps frothed around them from the churning undercurrents.
A light flared suddenly as Denison reached with one hand up out of the water. The MagLite was waterproof. It was the first bit of luck they’d had in ages.
Frost saw the aperture, still open. The water had risen nearly a metre since Denison’s fall. If the aperture stayed open they would be able to pull themselves through it as easily as climbing out of a swimming pool.
Assuming there was no one waiting up there to put a bullet in our heads as soon as they appear.
The chill sapped his strength by degrees. His clothes and shoes were like cement weights dragging him down. He had to battle for every breath, but he had trained for situations like this, facing cold and mounting exhaustion. He could shut off part of his brain and just survive. The ache in his arm was a bitch, but the one good thing about the cold water was his entire body had long since gone numb. And that numbness could still prove to be a killer: he couldn’t seem to stay above the surface long enough to draw more than a breath or two, before the cold clamped his chest and he started to sink again.
He couldn’t seem to get enough air to maintain buoyancy.
And then, like a light at the end of an impossibly long tunnel, the aperture was only a few feet above the still rising water.
With an all out effort, he kicked hard and propelled himself up, reaching for the lip of the aperture to haul himself up over the top. He struggled to support his own weight and would have fallen back into the water if Denison hadn’t swum beneath him and braced his kicking legs. He made it over the top and rolled onto his back shivering, panting, otherwise motionless.
The killers were gone.
They’d been targeting Denison—at least that had been his assumption. But if that was the case why they had taken Lili? Why had they pushed Denison back through the aperture rather than put a bullet in his head?
He was missing something important.
He wasn’t thinking clearly.
All that mattered to him now was getting out of this place.
Denison dragged himself up. They were back in the sacellum—the chamber where a modern priesthood still conducted rituals to honour the Roman god of war.
And there was only one way out of this place that he knew of, back the way they’d come along the Path of Mars.
&n
bsp; “Any other way out of here? I’d rather not go back the way we came in case they’re expecting us.”
Denison shook his head. “Unlikely.”
“Great.”
The two men didn’t speak after that. They shuffled toward the exit, willing their hypothermic legs into a jog. Denison’s light was inadequate. They moved mainly on memory.
Then they reached an intersection.
Frost stared at the crossroads in consternation. Lili had effortlessly guided them through the maze of passages, with a familiarity that he had found troubling. He’d paid attention to their route but even so, it was suddenly difficult to be sure which way they’d come and this was only the first of a dozen such crossings.
“I think we went straight through,” Denison said, without conviction.
Frost nodded and they started moving again, but at a more subdued pace.
And that was the only thing that saved their lives.
Seven steps up the passage, the floor abruptly vanished beneath Denison’s feet.
The entire section of floor, at least twenty metres long, had tilted as soon as Denison stepped onto it; one end angled down steeply with his added weight, while the other end rose sharply, like a playground seesaw.
Frost lunged forward and grasped ahold of one of Denison’s pin-wheeling arms as he desperately struggled to catch his balance. Frost hauled him from the pitfall trap. The pivoting section rose and fell, back and forth, slowly balancing again to its original state.
“I told you guys, Indiana bloody Jones,” Frost shook his head.
“I don’t think we came this way,” Denison remarked wryly.
Frost just nodded. He understood now why Lili had been so quick to accept the possibility that the ancients had utilized a booby trap to protect the Crocea Mors; she must have known about other traps in the underground complex—meaning this was the first of many.
“We backtrack,” he said. “Process of elimination.”
Denison agreed, “It’s not like we have a choice.”
They retraced their steps to the junction and took the right-hand passage, walking slowly now and searching out every step of the passage ahead. There were no obvious traps or mechanisms, but this was of little comfort. The purpose of the maze was two-fold: to disorient a would-be intruder, and protect the Path of Mars, meaning there would be only one correct path, and potentially dozens of false trails that ended in death. And there was nothing to say each trap would be some tilting path or giant rolling ball.
In the distance he could hear the churning water.
He remembered seeing the water table marks and realised that eventually the entire Path of Mars would be flooded out.
That didn’t help his mood.
They arrived at another junction. This time they methodically chose the right hand passage but after a few steps Frost noticed that the walls and ceilings were perforated with dozens of holes, each large enough for a spear to be thrust through and assumed that a few steps on they’d hit a pressure switch that would release spring-loaded spikes, They retreated, taking another path. And then another. And another. Thoroughly turning themselves around and around again.
There was nothing they could do about it. They had to explore one section of the labyrinth after another, and the time ticked mercilessly one. Frost noticed the film of water on the ground beneath their feet. They splashed on. It would still be hours until the entire subterranean network flooded, even if there was the sheer volume of water capable of making that happen. Sometimes a tunnel led them into traps, sometimes it took the pair to dead ends and forced them to retreat.
They did not speak, except as it related to their immediate need, and the silence was every bit as oppressive as the threat of the deadly pitfalls and spear-traps.
Then, with no real sense of having made any progress, they arrived at a stairwell leading up.
Frost looked at Denison.
“This is it,” Denison said, visibly relieved. “Let’s make like a shepherd.”
“And get the flock out of here,” Frost finished for him.
Frost ascended cautiously. There was always the possibility that Denison was wrong and the Roman’s had left one last kick in the nuts for any intruders clever enough to get this far. There was always the potential for ambush, too.
However, the stairs did look familiar.
As he reached the top, he saw the gouges and scrapes on the floor where the loose section of the pilaster had been moved to alternately open or seal the entrance to the Path of Mars.
The men who’d taken Lili had dragged the block back into its original place, shutting the door. “Give me the torch,” he told Denison, and played the light around the seams looking for any chinks or fissures they could get ahold of from this side. There were four very basic handholds carved into the block. Working together they worked it open inch by inch until fresh air—warm and humid—washed over them.
Frost saw the purple hue of pre-dawn twilight overhead.
They had made it.
There was no obvious ambush waiting for them. He scanned the area before stepping out: no sign of anyone at all. Even so they stayed in the shadows as they crept out of the Mausoleum of Augustus and made their way back to the waiting car.
Denison sank wearily into the passenger seat and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He’d aged twenty years overnight. “I’m sorry, Frosty. I don’t know what comes next. They beat us.”
Frost regarded his old friend.
You’re on the wrong side...
He didn’t want to believe it.
He didn’t even know what the sides were.
But beyond the simple fact that they had been hunted—tracked halfway across Europe—there were other pieces of the puzzle that just didn’t fit, no matter how he looked at it, not the least of which was the fact that somehow, he’d been cut off from Nonesuch.
“Okay, mate, something’s not right about this.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“We’ve missed something.”
“No we haven’t. We had the sword. We lost it. We lost Lili. What’s to miss?”
“These guys—these agents of the evil New Order, or whatever you called them —were after you, Tone.” He stabbed a finger into Denison’s chest to emphasize the point. “Kill Tony Denison: that was their only objective, right? So riddle me this: why did they take Lili? And why after all the trouble it took to track you down in an entirely different country, didn’t they kill you when they had the chance?”
Denison blinked at him. “I don’t—”
“I don’t either but I’m beginning to think you were wrong about them, what they wanted, fuck even who they really are.”
“I...” The other man shook his head.
“Because I feel like I’ve been sold a dummy.” Frost started the car. “One thing’s for sure: we can’t do anything to help Lili, or ourselves, until we know what’s really going on.”
He didn’t elaborate on how he intended to bridge the knowledge gap because, in truth, he didn’t know.
As he threaded the Fiat through the unfamiliar streets, searching for a main thoroughfare he spotted a battered phone box on the side of the road and something approaching inspiration dawned. He wasn’t fluent in Italian, but that didn’t stop him from finding what he was looking for in the ratty directory that hung from a chain beneath the actual phone: a listing for a twenty-four hour cybercafé. He cross-referenced the address against the torn pages of map in the back of the directory. If he was right it was only a few streets away. He tore the map out of the phone book and clambered back into the car.
The next time he stopped Frost parked on the northern edge of a triangular piazza near the cybercafé. The piazza was dominated by an incredibly elaborate fountain, rendered in travertine, depicting a merman—Neptune, Frost supposed—resting on the upraised tails of four dolphins. Water spat from a conch shell. It was familiar even though he’d never seen it before, but that wasn’t surprising given the worldwi
de obsession with the artwork and sculptures of the Eternal City post Dan Brown. There were puzzles and secrets in all of them if the thriller writer was to be believed. Lili would know what it is, he thought.
The cybercafé was nearly empty; unsurprising given the hour, but the clerk spoke decent English for an Italian and didn’t seem to care about their bedraggled state, but given the fact the rear wall of the place was given over to seedy porn magazines and little index cards and tear-off adverts on a cork noticeboard it was hardly surprising. He passed over a slip of paper with their temporary access code. Frost nodded his thanks.
He found a terminal which allowed him to keep his back to the wall and offered a view of the door and the plate glass window while keeping him away from the handful of other patrons. He sat and fired up the machine.
Denison, who had scarcely spoken a word in the last half-an-hour, sank into a nearby chair. He looked like a man who’d lost everything.
Rather than being annoyed and wanting to kick his arse into shape, Frost was grateful for his old mate’s pessimistic turn; the last thing he needed right now was Denison looking over his shoulder.
He started by immediately trying to log into the Ogmios intranet, but hit an ‘unauthorised access’ warning. The bounce amplified the sense of dread he’d felt since Saint Albans.
The wrong side....
He was still trying to work out how his decision to help Denison could’ve blown back so hard and so fast onto Nonesuch, but there was no getting away from the fact that the gunman on Holywell Hill had known exactly who he was. That presented two likely alternatives: either Ogmios had also been targeted, or Sir Charles had chosen to disavow him. Everything they did was deniable.
No, he thought. The old bastard wouldn’t do that.
But another voice in his head kept whispering: You’re on the wrong side of this.
He tried his personal, unsecured email account—nothing of interest there unless he was thinking about prescription meds, penis enhancement and cheap auto-insurance—and then, checking his reflection in the security mirror in the corner to ensure Denison wasn’t looking, tapped a request into the search engine:
WarGod Page 16