“Maybe and maybe not,” Edward replied. His eyes began to narrow and he tilted his head cockily. “Maybe I’ll keep it quiet and let it be a surprise. Imagine how exciting to find the bodies and maybe even a relic of the King too!”
Roberto’s head snapped around. “What relic?”
“Oh, now he’s interested, isn’t he! Maybe you have to wait too! I have a secret … I have a secret…” Suddenly he jumped up and down excitedly. “I have to tell you! I hate you, but I can’t wait to tell someone! Excalibur’s down there too!”
“For God’s sake, Edward! How do you know that?”
“It’s all in the book. Excalibur’s called Caledfwich – that’s its name in Welsh – and the book said it rests with the King. The sword’s there too! How about that!” He danced a jig around the room, his face contorted in a maniacal grin.
Despite the man’s personality shift, Roberto was infuriated. “You damned idiot! Why didn’t you tell us today? Don’t you think this information is critical to the project? Don’t you think the archaeologists need to know this before they start indiscriminately shoveling dirt around? What the hell…”
As Roberto yelled, Edward suddenly stopped dancing. Within seconds his face and his demeanor were calm, quiet. The dark side went away for the moment. Without answering Roberto, he turned to the hole where the monarchs were buried.
They stared at the grave in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. Edward had spent the entire week planning and plotting, ensuring this discovery would be his alone. He’d help the Russians finish Juan Carlos Sebastian’s career once and for all. That plan was already in place. He didn’t know when they’d strike, but he knew it was going to happen soon. He’d been promised he could have everything so long as they got revenge against Juan Carlos, nee Slava Sergenko of Russia.
Roberto thought of the future without this lunatic, a man whose psychotic interludes had caused bizarre problems time and again. The original plan had been that they would be partners. For a brief time the idea made sense. Very early on he realized that could never happen. There was no room for the two of them. Especially when one had a maniac living inside his head. Roberto would take care of things. Very, very soon.
Each pondered the significance of what lay ahead. They had found the burial site of the mythical King and Queen of Camelot. The King’s relic – the sword Excalibur – was in the grave with its owner. Words couldn’t adequately describe the once-in-a-lifetime discovery.
Suddenly Roberto raised his head, a quizzical look on his face, and sniffed the air.
“Do you smell smoke?”
“Look!” Edward yelled, pointing at the ladder. Smoke was pouring down into the crypt through the hole from the basement of the bookstore.
“Fire! We have to get out of here!”
By now thick smoke made climbing the ladder impossible. They ran next door to the Roman crypt below Roberto’s building and saw an identical situation. Heavy black clouds poured down the hole from above, and visibility was getting bad quickly. The rooms were already getting dark and cloudy – within seconds they would be full of dense smoke.
“What the hell have you done? Did you set the buildings on fire? Have you gone completely crazy?” Roberto couldn’t believe Edward would sacrifice the entire project. Lamorak, Arthur and Guinevere were still here, and fifty ancient Roman citizens were entombed in ledges along the ancient passageway. But the man was insane; there was nothing rational about his thought process.
Edward merely smiled. This was the work of the Russians. He wasn’t sure of their plan, but it was fine. He’d be fine. They’d promised him that.
But as he smiled, he had one slight, nagging fear. What if his dark side had started the fire? What if the bad thing inside him had gotten free without his knowledge?
His smile was the last straw for Roberto. “Goddamn you, you maniac! You did this, didn’t you? You set this fire yourself!”
“Or perhaps you did,” Edward screamed, speaking in an accusatory, childlike voice. “Maybe you’re the crazy one!” He began to cackle hysterically and dance around. He coughed as the smoke became thicker.
Roberto ran down the long passageway toward the old iron bars that led to the Thames River. Immediately he noticed a problem. The air rushing through the opening at the far end by the river created a strong draft. It propelled the dense smoke quickly throughout the tunnel. Within minutes it too would be engulfed in smoke. There was almost no time to escape.
As he reached the end and gripped the heavy iron bars blocking access to the river, Roberto could hear faint sirens in the distance. They’d be of no benefit to the two men trapped down here. He sank to the floor as clouds of black smoke overhead drifted lower and lower. Soon the tunnel would be full from ceiling to floor and there’d be no air left to breathe.
Closing his eyes to keep out ashes, Roberto tugged and pushed at the iron bars, but they held firmly. He moved to the gate’s edges and tried again. No luck. As old as the bars were, they were still solidly in place.
Suddenly something gripped his ankle tightly. Startled, he lashed out with his leg and heard Edward scream.
“Shit! You kicked me in the face! Get me out of here!”
Billows of smoke engulfed the men lying by the iron gate, so close to freedom yet so far away. Life-giving air lay just beyond the bars that held them prisoner. But they couldn’t break through the ancient barricade; that precious air might as well be a mile away.
Behind them down the long passageway Roberto could hear crashing and groaning as three stories of wooden building began to collapse into the crypt. His eyes burned and ash stung his eyeballs. He forced them closed and continued to try anything he could. Keeping his fingers tightly wrapped around the iron bars, he pushed with all the strength he had left. His lungs were quickly filling with sooty ash; time was running out.
Roberto felt Edward’s hand still clutching his ankle. Coughing hard and trying to breathe, he said, “Crawl up here by the gate! There’s a little air coming in and maybe we can breathe!”
There was no response. As he lay next to the gate and sucked in smoky air, he felt Edward’s hand go limp. The air became heavy with ash, so thick he could see nothing. He gave the iron bars one last thrust as everything began to fade away.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
The narrow two-block street of St. Mary Axe was a difficult place for vehicles to maneuver. Big tour buses couldn’t do it and neither could forty-foot-long fire trucks. A ladder truck might have extinguished the roaring inferno; instead it sat idling helplessly on Leadenhall Street a block south of the blaze. It was simply too long to turn the corner. All night long three engine trucks poured streams of water. They worked at first on the two burning buildings, one vacant and one housing a bookstore. As the fire grew stronger, the trucks were forced to move. The buildings were so close to the street that the towering blaze threatened to engulf the engines themselves. The firemen moved down the lane, working to save nearby structures while those two burned themselves out.
The sun rose the next morning over a ghastly sight. The firemen had lost the battle; an entire block lay in blackened ruin. Eight ancient wooden buildings from the 1500s, each an important example of Middle Ages architecture, had burned to the ground.
The Guild archaeologists arrived for work and were shocked at the loss of the things in the crypt. They told police that a major archaeological site ran below the two buildings where the fire had occurred and off southwards to the Thames. They explained how they’d moved Lamorak’s sarcophagus and discovered what they assumed was an ancient gravesite beneath it. Today’s plan had been to excavate that grave.
How could this have happened? Was it deliberately set? No one knew. Fire investigators would spend days sifting through the ashes but never arrive at a definitive answer.
The Guild told authorities about their two benefactors, the eccentric Edward Russell and the Swiss businessman Roberto Maas. They were gone, presumably perishing in the fire. It would take
months, maybe years, before the rubble could be removed and the crypt reopened. And it might never happen. The extent of the damage caused when two three-story wooden structures implode into their basements, collapsing tons of burning lumber into the ancient chambers below, was unfathomable. The buildings themselves were gone, a quaint sorcerer’s shop was destroyed, and two men had vanished. The knight Lamorak’s body and the possible burial sites of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere were buried beneath thirty feet of smoldering ashes.
There were many questions but no answers as to what happened and why.
Perhaps, the Bad Man thought, I went a bit overboard.
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The Crypt of the Ancients
The Crypt Trilogy: Book Two
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The Crypt of the Ancients
The Crypt Trilogy: Book Two
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to three loyal and faithful friends
who sit in my office by my side every single day
for months as I write.
Sometimes they’re nice and quiet,
as well behaved as you could ever ask.
Sometimes they make so much noise I can’t work.
Mostly that’s when the postman comes around.
I love and appreciate you, Katie, Brother and Sister – three four-legged kids who make our lives happier and more meaningful.
CHAPTER ONE
The state of Chiapas, Mexico
Present Day
The rebel who stood in the front of the bus wearing a ski mask and holding a machete terrified the tourists. What had been nothing special twice today was different this time. The masked man had come on board first, glaring with dark, fierce eyes at a group of intellectuals who had paid to visit archaeological sites. A second man stood at the bottom of the stairs in the open doorway of the bus, his finger on the trigger of a Kalashnikov rifle.
This all started as just another routine checkpoint along Highway 199, the road to Palenque. Zapatista rebels occupied much of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. Roadblocks were designed more to irritate the local police than to intimidate the populace. Masked men with automatic rifles had stopped the driver and thirteen passengers on the modern private bus twice already this morning. When the rebels boarded the bus, they saw a Mexican driver and thirteen foreigners on an archaeology mission and accepted a few pesos for their cause. They left and the group continued toward the ancient Mayan city of Palenque. Each time it had taken only minutes from start to finish. This time it was different.
As far as the tour participants knew, only three people on the bus were fluent in Spanish. The driver spoke no English. Two others, a local guide and the archaeologist who’d been hired to accompany the group, spoke both English and Spanish. When the rebel boarded, he’d said something to the driver, who muttered a coarse vulgarity in response and looked away. Suddenly the man spoke again. Everyone heard him, including those who didn’t speak his language. There was no mistaking his intention. He spoke in a cold, harsh tone and his eyes blazed furiously. When he stopped talking, the driver spat on the floor near the man, turned off the engine, removed the key and handed it over. From his seat immediately behind the driver’s, the archaeologist heard the exchange of words. He observed the driver’s defiance and heard him curse at the rebel. Then came the clipped words of the man with the knife. “Turn off the bus and give me the keys, you fool. This isn’t about you, but I’ll kill you if you cross me again.”
Hoping to diffuse this situation quickly, Dr. Mark Linebarger, the archaeologist, jumped in and spoke calmly in Spanish. “We have no issue with the Zapatistas. I’m guiding this group of Americans on an archaeology tour. How about we donate a hundred pesos to your efforts and wish you success? Then we can get on to Palenque before the sun is too hot!”
The people on the bus would never forget the horrifying scene that happened in the next ten seconds. Everyone had read this situation incorrectly. This wasn’t another routine Zapatista roadblock at all. It was anything but.
The driver handed over his keys, figured this was a hijacking and decided he wasn’t going to let it happen. He’d be fired if his employers lost a brand-new tour bus, so he made a snap decision. While the archaeologist talked to the masked man, the driver slowly moved his left hand down alongside his seat. He’d stuck his old .22 pistol in a pouch just in case of something like this. You never knew what could happen in rural Mexico, and it paid to be ready. He was ready, but not for what happened. Unfortunately for the driver, things went wrong in an instant.
As Dr. Linebarger watched helplessly in what seemed to him like slow motion, the driver brought the pistol up in a sweeping move. He had it across the steering wheel and almost aimed at the masked intruder when the man noticed it.
A single swoosh of the rebel’s two-foot-long machete cleanly severed the driver’s head. It hit the floor with a noticeable thump that every single one of the stunned passengers heard clearly. Held in place by a seat belt, the driver’s body remained upright. The hand holding his gun fell limply to his side and dropped the pistol. It landed on the floor near the head.
Then the screams began.
CHAPTER TWO
Half an hour earlier this busload of archaeology enthusiasts was motoring down a two-lane paved highway on the way to the Mayan ruins at Palenque. Two days ago they’d all met in Villahermosa, Tabasco. They’d spent two nights at a rustic hotel and visited nearby ruins at Comalcalco and La Venta. This morning after breakfast they boarded the bus that would carry them to other archaeological sites over the next several days.
Ten passengers had paid around three thousand dollars each to Crestmark, a Durango, Colorado-based company that specialized in archaeological adventures for armchair explorers. Over the years, the quality of these tours had earned the company a sterling reputation; nowadays their groups often included academics and professionals in the fields of archaeology and anthropology. Today’s was no exception. In addition to Mark Linebarger, the trip’s hired archaeologist, there were three professors, a surgeon, the retired director of the Texas Archaeology Society, a PhD candidate in archaeology and several amateurs. Everyone wanted to visit the ruins. It was a diverse group, but these tours thrived on diversity. It kept things interesting.
The paying customers consisted of seven men and three women seeing ruins in the southern states of Tabasco and Chiapas. Over ten days they would visit five important sites. In addition to the ten, there were three others who were on staff. Ted Pettigrew, the tour director, was a man in his thirties from Durango who led the group’s activities and kept things running smoothly. Mark Linebarger, a renowned professor of archaeology from the University of Toronto, was paid to come along and enhance the experience for the guests. And there was Julio. He was a native of Villahermosa who spoke fluent Spanish, English and Mayan. Julio fulfilled the government’s rule that a local Mexican guide be along when they visited the ruins. The fourteenth person on the bus was Manuel, the driver from Mexico City who had picked up his passengers in Villahermosa.
When they returned from the Olmec ruins at La Venta yesterday afternoon, they had a welcoming reception and dinner. These receptions were always interesting and fun – everyone stood, gave names, occupations and said why he or she was on the trip. Later over cocktails and dinner, several people paired up with new friends and got to know the people they’d be spending ten days with. Although most of the group were singles in their thirties, there were two couples – Warren and Mary Spence and Win Phillips and Alison Barton. The Spences were in their seventies. Win and Alison weren’t married – they had only been dating a few months.
After breakfast they had boarded the bus for a three-hour trip to the beautiful ruins at Palenque. Tonight they would stay at the Palacio Hotel, built in the 1600s as a conquistador’s hacienda. In only two hours they had already been stopped twice at makeshift rebel checkpoints. Zapatistas controlled a good deal of this occasionally volatile Mexican stat
e. Angry at the federal government for years, the group wanted the state of Chiapas to secede from Mexico. The officials responded by ignoring their occasionally disruptive behavior.
Some passengers grumbled about more delays as the bus had once again slowed to a crawl, then stopped for the third time. At the last two stops, the rebels had blocked the highway with rusty green tanks they’d stolen from armories, but there were no vehicles this time. Two masked men stood in the middle of the road, one with an automatic rifle and the other holding a machete. The bus driver erred on the side of caution and stopped. He wouldn’t have run them down anyway; the rebels were a nuisance, but everyone in Chiapas knew they were basically harmless.
“Why don’t the police come out here and stop this nonsense?” Mary Spence asked impatiently.
The guide Julio responded cheerfully, “It won’t take long. These are my people, protesting a lack of concern by the federal government. They mean us no harm.”
Those words couldn’t have been further from the truth.
CHAPTER THREE
“Oh my God!”
“He’s going to kill us all!”
“Stop him! Stop him, somebody!”
These were the terrified, unbelieving, piercing screams of people whose lives were transformed in seconds.
There was pandemonium as the horrified passengers watched blood first spurt, then dribble from the headless body strapped in the driver’s seat. The sickly smells of vomit and involuntary human excrement spread as quickly as the panic. Mary Spence, recently retired and sitting beside her husband, Warren, fell into the aisle in a dead faint. He leaned into the aisle to help her.
Ted was the leader of the group and a vice president at Crestmark, the tour company. He sat in the right front seat and struggled to avoid throwing up. The man with the machete stood directly in front of him, so close Ted could have touched him. The driver’s body was two feet away. He thought it strange that he felt more responsibility than fear. He’d never been remotely close to danger, but he was in charge of this group. He had to be strong for the others. His mind raced to create a plan. Presuming the passengers had any time left for planning. There was no telling what this madman wanted or what he’d do next.
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