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by Ruth Hartzler

  “Will there be more of them?”

  “Yes, but I have no idea when or if they’ll find us,” Riley said.

  “That’s not very comforting.”

  Abigail and Riley finished their dinner in silence. Riley pulled Abigail toward him and they both cuddled up together for warmth.

  She awoke slowly. A telephone was ringing somewhere in the museum—a shrill, angry ring. Abigail pushed Riley’s arm off her. She was dismayed to see a big, angry bruise on his forehead.

  She tiptoed through the museum, checking to see if anyone else was there. After she made sure she was alone, she followed the ringing downstairs.

  She meant to pull the phone cord out of the wall. She didn’t want the ringing to wake Riley, who clearly needed the rest. As she did so, a voice called, “I see you, Abigail.”

  Abigail snapped her head to the side. The entrance to the museum was a big glass door, and on the other side of the door, stood a man about the same age as the dead man upstairs. He knocked a gun twice against the glass and grinned.

  “Hello, Dr. Spencer. How is your boyfriend? Oh, don’t tell me; he’s dead?” The man’s voice was just as chilling as his associate’s. “The same fate does not have to await you.”

  “Why is that?” Abigail asked. She tried to keep the tension and fear out of her voice, but it cracked all the same.

  This made the man smile. “I can help you, you know. I don’t like killing women.”

  “How noble of you.”

  “Come on, we don’t want to kill you. We can use somebody with your translation skills. Open the door.”

  It wasn’t just a glass door that stood between Abigail and the man. There were bars too. Abigail turned and ran upstairs.

  Riley awoke as soon as she reached him. He grabbed Abigail by the shoulders and pulled her toward him. “Are you okay?” he asked urgently.

  “They’ve found us. There’s another man downstairs.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “He spoke to me,” Abigail said as she helped Riley stand.

  “What? How?”

  “The phone was ringing. It woke me up.” Abigail felt stupid telling Riley this. She should have just let the phone ring out. “I pulled it out of the wall.”

  “Why?”

  “I was afraid it would wake you. I thought you might have a concussion. A man spoke to me. Then I looked over to the door and he was standing there. Riley, he has a gun.”

  “Yeah,” Riley said. “So do we. Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To the airport. Come on.” Riley walked over to the window and pushed it open. It took a little bit of rattling, but it opened in the end. Riley helped Abigail onto the museum’s rooftop.

  They scrambled over to the edge of the rooftop and glanced down. The neighboring building wasn’t too far down, and it was connected to the museum. Riley helped Abigail down and then he lowered himself after her.

  With adrenaline once more pumping through her veins, it was impossible for Abigail to know how hurt she was. Her ribs pinched a little, but that didn’t stop her from crossing the rooftop and clambering onto another.

  On the third rooftop, Riley let Abigail take a quick break. She peeked over the edge and saw two Range Rovers in the street below. Her friend at the door had no doubt made the call to his associates. They knew they were in the area, so they needed to move fast. “I’m fine now.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Look.”

  Riley glanced over the ledge and saw the Range Rovers. “Yep, you’re fine,” he said, hustling her once more along the rooftops. They managed to get down to the ground through an apartment building, slipping into a bedroom through the open window and then slipping out the front door.

  Riley managed to hail a cab as soon as they hit the street.

  The driver didn’t ask any questions about their rumpled and bloodied appearances, because he in all likelihood didn’t care, and because he was on the phone to his wife yelling about credit card charges. Closer to London, they stopped at a public bathroom to clean up.

  “They’ll think we’re still at the museum,” Riley said as they finally arrived at Manchester airport. He paid the driver and then hurried Abigail inside.

  It took them about fifteen minutes to rendezvous with Thatcher and Ellis, who were eating donuts and drinking coffee.

  “What happened?” Thatcher said. “I’ve got medical supplies. You look like you both need patching up.”

  “A car hit us pretty hard,” Riley told then. “Did you have any trouble?”

  “We were tailed by several Vortex agents for a while. Where did you two go?”

  “To a museum,” Abigail said.

  “We thought we needed the culture,” Riley added.

  Ellis snorted. “Yeah, well, next time stick to kombucha. Let’s go.”

  22

  SARDIS: MODERN DAY SART

  Abigail didn’t remember much, if anything, about the plane ride to Izmir, or for that matter, the short journey from the Izmir airport to the ancient site of Sardis. Her ribs were sore and her head hurt. The one major plus was that the flight from Manchester to Izmir was direct, and only four hours. She had drifted in and out of sleep all the way to Izmir, and fell back to sleep in the hire car, waking only when she heard the word ‘Sardis’.

  She looked out the window at the sheer cliffs of the acropolis and gasped at their magnificence.

  Riley tapped Ellis on the shoulder. “Head north from the village and turn east to the ancient site.”

  “I know you have to pay separately to enter the Temple of Artemis and the gymnasium,” Abigail told Riley, shaking herself awake.

  “We’re not here for sightseeing,” Ellis snapped.

  Abigail sighed. “I wasn’t suggesting we were. I thought we should avoid those areas.” She wished she could stay and explore the ruins of Sardis, but she would have to come back another time. If she got out of here alive, she reminded herself.

  “I’ll drive from here,” Riley said. “Abigail, guide me to the cliff face with the tunnels.”

  Ellis stopped the car and the two men swapped places. Abigail didn’t like sitting next to Ellis, but at least it wouldn’t be for long. She realized Riley was driving as close as he could get to the tunnel’s entrance and intended to give Ellis and Thatcher as little warning as possible.

  A pang of misgivings hit Abigail. If anyone was following them, they were leading them straight to the treasure. Still, all she could do was follow Riley’s lead, and she trusted that he knew what he was doing.

  Abigail looked longingly at the ancient site and the reconstructed bath-gymnasium complex dominating the landscape as she directed Riley to swing the car down a dirt road. In ancient times, the gymnasium stood over five acres. From here, she could see the ruins of the synagogue, built around two hundred years after the Book of Revelation. It was one of the largest ancient synagogues ever found, and was in the center of the city rather than where most synagogues were, namely, on the edge of a city. She was awe-struck.

  Sardis possessed a long and significant history. It had been the capital of the great Lydian Empire before the Persians defeated Cyrus, and then it had become an important Persian city, standing at the end of the Royal Road. Darius the Great of Persia built the Royal Road which started at the Persian capital, Susa, and ended in Sardis.

  The distance between Susa and Sardis was 1,677 miles, yet the royal mounted messengers regularly covered the distance in nine days.

  Abigail knew that Herodotus’s comment on these couriers of two and a half thousand years earlier,

  “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,”

  was inscribed on the James Farley Post Office in New York City and is acknowledged as the informal motto of the United States Postal Service.

  Abigail nodded to herself. She always liked to point out modern connections to her students.

  Sar
dis was then conquered in turn by the Greeks, by the Macedonian Alexander the Great, and then by the Romans, under whose rule the population grew to 120,000.

  If only she had time to take photos for her Biblical history students. The Book of Revelation states that Sardis had few worthy inhabitants. As for the others, Revelation says they have the reputation of being alive but are dead. It utters them a dire warning. At the date Revelation was written, Sardis was still a wealthy city. It had been destroyed by an earthquake fifty years earlier but had been rebuilt by the Roman emperor Tiberius.

  Ellis’s words brought Abigail back to the present. “I don’t like the look of that.”

  She followed his gaze to see a scattering of tourists already at the site, taking photos in the early morning light.

  The bumpy dirt road ended at a clump of rocks. Riley got out and stared at the photos, holding them up and comparing them against the landscape before him.

  Abigail looked up at the massive rock face looming above her. How on earth did the Persians take the acropolis? Had a Lydian traitor let the Persians in through an access tunnel? No one had ever discovered the reason, and most likely never would, she mused.

  “What are we doing?” Ellis said. “You’re going to have to tell us, Riley.”

  “We’re leaving the car here and going on foot,” Riley said. “We’ll need the night vision goggles and the chem lights.”

  Soon the men were donning backpacks. Riley handed Abigail some night vision goggles. She turned them over in her hands, concerned that they were so bulky.

  “You’ll get used to them,” he said.

  The sun beat down on them, reflecting off the rocky landscape. Abigail was afraid of what lay ahead.

  “Care to brief us now?” Ellis asked.

  “Sure,” Riley said. “There should be a tunnel somewhere here and it possibly leads to a subterranean Temple of Artemis.”

  “To the treasure?” Ellis asked, rather too eagerly for Abigail’s liking.

  “It’s likely,” Riley said.

  “It’s possible an earthquake blocked the entrance,” Abigail told them. “There was a massive earthquake at Sardis in 17 AD, so it is an earthquake region.”

  She wondered what they would do if they found the tunnel impassable, but she figured Riley would call for backup. Really, she had no idea. She still wondered why they hadn’t had altercations with Vortex agents since arriving in Turkey. And worse still, she didn’t want to go into an underground passage. It crossed her mind to ask if she could wait outside but figured that would be too cowardly. Besides, they would need her if the place was booby-trapped.

  Abigail hadn’t heard of any Greek temples being booby-trapped, but then thousands of inscriptions were discovered every year, many of them at Ephesus. These inscriptions often provided new information about ancient times. She couldn’t take any chances.

  Abigail turned to Riley. “There are possibly booby-traps.”

  He nodded. “I thought as much. Any in particular we should look out for?”

  Abigail shrugged one shoulder. “I don’t have a clue, to be honest. I simply brought it up as a possibility. If this is where Croesus stored the bulk of his treasure, then it would make sense it was guarded in some way by something other than people. His wealth was legendary and he wouldn’t have left it unguarded.”

  “This is the location Professor Briggs indicated,” Riley said. “We’ll look for the entrance to the cave now. Abigail, stick close to me. Let’s keep each other in sight at all times.”

  Abigail looked around. To her left, the valley fell away to the Pactolus River, where the mythological King Midas was said to have washed away his gold. In front of her stood a hill of significant height. Some of it was impassable, but the passable section was nevertheless steep and rocky. She could see tracks left by goats.

  “I don’t need to tell you that the entrance to the tunnel won’t be obvious,” Riley said.

  Abigail hoped Jason and Professor Briggs had been right about the location. She didn’t fancy spending a few hours wandering around, looking for a tunnel entrance. Ellis and Thatcher shimmied up the rocks at some speed whereas Abigail went far more slowly. She was fit and jogged most mornings, but she couldn’t match the agents for speed and strength.

  Riley helped her gain footholds as they scrambled from one boulder to another. It was hard going and soon Abigail was fighting for breath. She didn’t want to look down but every now and then risked a glance. She would certainly do herself a terrible injury if she fell, although the going wasn’t too steep. She just had to watch where she put her feet.

  Ellis and Thatcher both disappeared around the edge of a boulder, earning a grunt of disapproval from Riley.

  Abigail jumped as a scream echoed around the hills.

  23

  SARDIS: UNDER THE ACROPOLIS NORTH

  Thatcher climbed toward them over a boulder. “Ellis fell!”

  “Stay there,” Riley said to Abigail, seconds before he vanished over the boulder with Thatcher.

  Abigail stood there shaking. Was Ellis all right? And if someone as capable as Ellis had fallen, would she? Had a Vortex agent shot him? Were Vortex agents out there now, watching them at this very minute? Or maybe Ellis was a Vortex agent and had gone to report what they were doing to Vortex.

  She sat down on the dirt and clutched a large rock with both hands, shutting her eyes tightly.

  She had no idea how long she sat there, but finally she heard Riley’s voice, “Abigail.”

  She opened her eyes. “Ellis?”

  “We can’t find him. We can’t see any sign of him.”

  Abigail was shocked. “How is that possible?”

  Riley shrugged. “He must’ve fallen into a crevice.”

  Thatcher was standing behind Riley. “I wasn’t watching him when he fell. He’d gotten ahead of me. I only heard him scream and when I looked around, he wasn’t there.”

  “What do we do now?” Abigail said. “Do we climb down and look for him?”

  Riley shook his head. “He’s likely at the bottom of a crevice. There’s nothing we can do and we didn’t see him at the bottom of the hill. We’ll just have to keep going.”

  “He wouldn’t have survived the fall,” Thatcher added, “so there is no urgency to find his body.”

  Abigail thought that was a callous thing to say, but she kept her opinions to herself.

  Riley took Abigail’s arm and said, “Hurry. For all we know, Ellis was shot. We have to keep moving.”

  Abigail’s stomach clenched. She had thought of that possibility. That would explain why he fell. Maybe the Vortex agents had taken his body.

  She kept climbing, higher and higher, spurred on by the thought she might be shot, when Riley said, “There.”

  Behind a large boulder Abigail saw the entrance to a tunnel. Given that it could only be seen at that angle, it was well hidden.

  “Go in first,” Riley instructed Thatcher.

  Thatcher dropped to his hands and knees to crawl inside the small opening between the boulders. He disappeared from view. Moments later, he stuck his head out. “It’s quite big in here.” He reached out to his backpack and pulled it inside.

  Riley went next and then waved his hand out the door, signaling for Abigail to go in. She steeled herself to crawl through the narrow space but once inside, was relieved to see the cavern before her was large. To her left was a pile of rubble no doubt caused by a previous earthquake. She expected the cave to smell musty and moldy, but the air was fresh and clear, with no scent.

  Riley already had his flashlight from his backpack and was shining it over the walls. Abigail saw a little stream of running water to her left and wondered if the running water kept the cave air odorless.

  “Professor Briggs was right,” Riley said. “There is indeed a tunnel. How on earth would he have discovered this place?”

  “Probably from ancient texts,” Abigail said. “The ancient Athenian soldier, Xenophon, mentions an altar to Artemis
in the time of Cyrus.” She would have said more, but Thatcher interrupted her.

  “But we know about the Temple of Artemis at Sardis. We passed it on the way here.”

  Abigail shook her head. “Not a temple, an altar. No one has ever found the altar. Maybe Professor Briggs was looking for it. At any rate, he found the bones near the tunnel entrance.”

  Thatcher shone his flashlight over some boulders. “There’s another tunnel there.”

  Abigail and Riley hurried over to inspect it.

  “It does look like this tunnel goes for a fair way as far as I can tell.” Thatcher cracked a chem light and threw it into the tunnel. “Hmm, just as I thought,” he muttered to himself.

  Abigail had hoped she would be able to stand upright in the tunnels but no, it was just as she had feared. She would need to crawl. The Harvard expeditions had discovered Roman tunnels of this size running under the burial mounds in Sardis. Still, she had hoped for bigger tunnels under the Acropolis North given that Lydians had built these tunnels.

  Riley placed his hands on Abigail’s shoulders. “Now, it’s the same as when we were in Greece. Remember what I said? I’ll go first and if the tunnel gets too narrow, you can always back out. Are you all right with that?”

  “Yes,” Abigail said in a small voice, although she was anything but all right. She liked closed-in spaces even less than she liked heights. Still, she had no choice but to follow Riley and Thatcher.

  Riley pressed the car keys into her hands. “Put these in your pocket.”

  A fresh wave of terror hit Abigail. Did that mean Riley thought he might not get out of there alive? She trembled violently.

  As she stuffed the keys deep in her pocket, she felt something strange in the lining. “What’s this?” She pulled off her jacket and handed it to Riley.

  Riley picked up a piece of jagged rock and ripped the jacket open, producing a tiny black box. “It’s a tracking device. It must have been in your jacket the whole time. Who had access to your jacket? That is, since we left your college?”