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by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  Merrit turned off his flashlight. This would be over very soon.

  Then it wouldn’t matter how much noise J.R. made.

  Lit only by the green chemical radiance of the lightstick in the passageway, David held up his hand to signal silence, listening.

  “Two people,” he whispered. “First passage. Before the branch.”

  “The lightsticks lead right to us,” Jess whispered back.

  “Any idea who it is?”

  “Ironwood? Who else would have a map of this place?”

  David knew. He spoke softly, urgently. “Merrit’s here to kill us.”

  Jess immediately unzipped the top of her coveralls and reached inside for a small pistol.

  David was startled. “How’d you get that?” They’d carried nothing but a few quickly purchased clothes and toilet articles on their flight to England. There was no possible way that gun would have escaped detection.

  Jess didn’t answer. She was already edging toward the open doorway. David stayed with her.

  The sound of rocks scattering created an instant mental image for him of Merrit and his accomplice pushing through the large debris pile. They’d be here in a minute. David glanced behind him. The details of the wall map were being swallowed as the lightstick faded, sapped of its strength by the cold floor. “Jess,” he said as quietly as he could, “is there another way out of this chamber?”

  She shook her head.

  More stones fell. Running footsteps now. Past the rocks. No flashlights. Guided by the dying lightsticks. David had a sudden thought. “We could blind them.”

  “For a second, maybe.”

  “Enough to run down one of the other two corridors?”

  “If there’re no other obstructions—they both go two hundred feet straight before they hit another branch. No cover.”

  “You could shoot first.”

  Jess nodded, and David realized she’d already planned to do that.

  A foot scraped loudly; someone cursed. Loudly.

  David knew the voice. “J.R.—Ironwood’s son,” he breathed.

  “How close?”

  He cocked his head, intent. “Twenty feet.”

  “Ready at ten,” Jess whispered back. “Hold the flashlight as far to the side as you can.”

  David held up the flashlight and silently began the count. Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen . . .

  Merrit stopped, his free hand raised to make J.R. hold position. He took a moment to attain situational awareness. He smiled as he saw the green lightstick lying on the floor. Ironwood’s treasure room would be ahead and to the right, and the tunnel—duplicating the one he’d swum through in the Pacific—would be on the left, directly opposite the entrance to that room.

  He guessed—no, he knew—that his quarry was already in the chamber, and it would be wise to assume they’d heard him approaching. Or, to be more realistic, that they’d heard J.R.

  Not that that would change anything. Weir was a civilian, and thus unskilled. The MacClary girl, though, had turned out to be more of a problem than expected. She’d survived J.R.’s ill-considered grab in Canada and fought back well in Weir’s lab.

  Merrit considered the situation from her perspective. She had the same map he did, so she’d know there was no escape route. When we get close enough, she’ll leap out and start shooting, he decided. Maybe, for the advantage of a second or two, she’d try to blind him with a flashlight as well.

  Covering his left eye with the palm of his hand, Merrit told J.R. to do the same but not to move until ordered. Then he put his back against the wall and slowly and silently began to advance again, his Glock 9 mm leading the way.

  Sun Tzu, a thousand years earlier, had summed it up best: In a situation such as this, with no possible escape, an adversary could only fight to the death.

  Merrit asked for nothing more.

  Ten . . .

  David held his breath to improve his hearing. No footsteps. Either Merrit had stopped at about fifteen feet, or he was moving forward with exceptional care.

  He lightly touched Jess’s arm, pointed to his ear, shook his head. She’d have to risk making the first move. They couldn’t wait for Merrit and J.R. to suddenly appear in the doorway.

  Jess held up her left hand, two fingers and a thumb.

  David nodded, understanding. A silent count of three.

  She folded in her thumb first, then a finger.

  He tensed to lunge.

  The first explosion struck the corridor.

  The force of the blast blew Merrit and J.R. backward.

  Merrit hit the stone floor hard, any sound of the impact lost in the deafening thunderclap that reverberated around and through him.

  His first thought was that the girl had gone insane. That she was destroying her temple so Ironwood couldn’t claim it.

  His second thought was for his gun. The Glock was no longer in his hand.

  In the dark and dust-filled chamber, David and Jess scrambled to their feet. David held his hands to cup his ears, still ringing from the explosion. Jess held her hands over her mouth, trying to stifle coughs.

  They swayed on their feet as another explosion shook the ancient chamber. Something metallic dropped to the floor from high overhead and, unseen in the darkness, clattered like a spinning coin.

  “This is deliberate.” Jess’s voice was tight with fear. Not for her life, David knew, but for the loss of this place, this echo of her family. My family, too? “But who? It can’t be Merrit. Ironwood wants this place as much as we do.”

  “Who else knows about the temples?”

  The thunder of a third explosion assailed them, its impact different from the other two. This time, not all its energy was channeled through the corridors. David began to build a sound image. Someone was blasting in, forcing a different opening.

  Jess was horror-struck. “Take pictures, David! Fast as you can. We have to make a record!” Jess rushed back to the door, gun held ready.

  David sprang into action. The first three sites had all been looted, without artifacts and ornamentation. But in this one, the ornamentation, the world map, was pristine. If the chamber didn’t survive tonight’s attack, then at least the information in it would.

  He found their packs and pulled out a fresh camera. Standing with his back against the stone table, he began taking photos swiftly, moving the camera to the right a few degrees after every flash. He went all the way around the room, capturing the map.

  “Ceiling!” Jess said.

  David looked up, snapped a flash, then checked the image on the camera’s display.

  The chamber’s roof was hemispherical, like a planetarium dome, but studded with metallic disks, silver. They’d flared in the lens flash.

  He grabbed a second camera, chose a setting to reduce the flare, completed a full sweep of the ceiling.

  Now for close-ups of the map. David picked up a third camera, realized he’d need more light. He held a lightstick up. “Jess . . . I have to see the map.”

  “Do it!”

  He cracked the lightstick, shook it. Looked for Cornwall. Found it.

  He snapped a close-up of the bladed-cross mark, the sign that showed where to find . . .

  He paused, stood back, then moved the lightstick across the mural on the wall. There. Another bladed cross on an island in the Mediterranean. And there. In sub-Saharan Africa.

  The thud of boots. Shouting. German? “Jess—”

  She twisted around, gun in hand, her silhouette wreathed in green-glowing dust motes. “Did you get it?”

  “Yes!” David stuffed all the cameras he’d used into his coverall pockets, discarding the canvas bag and backpack, leaving nothing that would identify them. Protein bars, water bottles, digging tools, batteries, a first aid kit . . . everything was expendable except for the memory cards in the cameras.

  “Did you get it all?”

  “Yes! Jess, we have to go.” They were almost here. Couldn’t she hear them? At least eight . . . David shook
his head. His ears still thrummed with the white-noise rush of the explosions. There could be more than eight . . .

  A glint of something metallic on the floor caught his eye. It was the source of the coinlike sound he’d heard when the second explosion shook the walls. One of the ceiling disks had dislodged. He picked it up, then ran to Jess, still by the doorway. He heard the nearby sound of whispers, the rustling of heavy fabric, the click of metal . . .

  This time she heard them, too. “The lightstick!”

  David berated himself for not thinking of it first, sprinted back for it, and shoved it inside his coveralls, restoring protective darkness.

  The other lightstick they’d left outside had been shifted by the explosion, but it still glowed and lit the entrance to the intersecting passageway.

  “This is where they’ll come first,” Jess said, her lips by his ear. “We have to find someplace else to hide.” She pointed to the other passage.

  Neither he nor Jess had checked it. No way to know if it was blocked or clear.

  “On three?”

  David nodded.

  Gunfire.

  Merrit and J.R. were crouched in darkness, even the outlines of their bodies hidden by the rock pile behind them, beyond the reach of the glow from the lightstick at the entrance of the treasure room.

  “We gotta get outta here!” J.R. started to get up, but Merrit grabbed his shoulder, forced him back down. Merrit knew exactly what was happening; he just didn’t know who was behind it. Whoever had blasted their way in here wasn’t interested in preserving anything or anyone. It was doubtful they’d leave witnesses.

  He threw a lightstick over the mound of debris he and J.R. had just scaled, and its light winked out on the other side, safely out of sight. The water-damaged passageway beyond led back to the small opening in the bluff. That would be his escape route. By using explosives to blast through from the other side, the intruders had revealed they didn’t know about the shoreline cave.

  “First we get Weir. Then we go.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “She can’t deliver your father to the Feds.”

  “My father’s safe?!”

  It was true. Ironwood’s escape, long planned and often rehearsed, had gone off like clockwork. The moment Merrit’s inside source from the Atlantic City police alerted him to the staging of an interdepartmental task force at police headquarters preparing a raid on Encounters, Merrit had roused Ironwood and the helicopter pilot kept on standby to ferry VIPs and whales between the casino and local airports.

  Twenty minutes later—more than an hour before the raid began—Ironwood was on his way to Philadelphia International on the resort’s Sikorsky. By the time Encounters was surrounded, Ironwood was airborne in a private 777. As much as his employer hated flying, it was preferable to prison, and the jet had the range to take him beyond reach of the U.S. government.

  All of these precautionary moves were simply a holding action—denying the government the advantage of surprise. Ironwood could only stay away from the day-to-day operations of his business empire for so long. Nor would Ironwood’s empire remain an empire for long if the government announced the billionaire had been charged with theft of classified military computer assets.

  Merrit felt vindicated. He’d predicted that Weir would be turned by the air force investigators, and that’s precisely what had happened.

  But Ironwood’s son was thinking of himself as usual. “So if my father’s safe . . .”

  “Only for a few days,” Merrit cautioned. “Maybe less if the Feds go public. But when I get rid of Weir, that threat’s over.”

  “We have to kill the girl, too.”

  “Why?”

  “She knows too much.”

  “About what?” Merrit asked. Then he heard running up ahead, commands shouted in what sounded to be German.

  “Who the hell is that?” J.R. said.

  Merrit was already on his feet, rushing forward. “Stay here!” He sensed movement far along the corridor straight ahead and, more from instinct than rational thought, fired three times into the darkness, then dove to the ground fast and hard as an answering volley of automatic fire sprayed overhead, sparking and ricocheting off the walls.

  The instant the volley ended, Merrit darted forward again, firing as he rolled to the side, just avoiding a burst that stitched across the floor where he’d been moments before.

  He was past the dimming lightstick now, the entrance to the treasure room on his right. The opening on his left was closer.

  Merrit fired twice more, then threw himself into the intersecting corridor as more bullets whined past him. He positioned himself with his back to the far wall and assessed his situation. To his right was the passageway that duplicated the one he’d swum through in the South Pacific. To his left, across the width of the passageway he’d just escaped, was the entrance to the treasure chamber. At his back were the shooters. Somewhere in the direction he faced was J.R.—presuming he’d survived the gunfire.

  Merrit dropped the magazine from his Glock but caught it to avoid making noise. He quietly slipped another into place. His eyes were becoming accustomed to the almost complete absence of light. The faintest of pale green rays still shone from the almost exhausted lightstick that lay a few feet back in the direction from which he’d come.

  A harsh voice called out, echoing against the stones. “Throw out your weapon and you won’t come to harm!”

  Merrit risked a glance into the intersection, keeping alert for sounds of movement.

  In that glance he saw, in the doorway leading to the treasure room, two silhouettes in the watery green light.

  Weir and the MacClary girl.

  David yanked Jess back from the entrance. “It’s Merrit!”

  “Throw out your weapon!” the harsh voice in the corridor called again.

  The unknown gunmen were edging forward, along the wall that led to the half-open doorway to the chamber.

  “Did he see us?” Jess whispered.

  “Couldn’t miss us.”

  “But the others, they don’t know we’re here.”

  “Maybe. Can’t be sure.”

  “So we stay quiet, hope Merrit draws their attention, and—”

  Sudden scuffling, a round of automatic gunfire, a dark shape hurtling toward them.

  Now they weren’t the only ones inside the chamber.

  Merrit rolled back to his knees and held his Glock on his hostages.

  “Put your guns on the floor—very slowly—then slide them away.”

  “If we had them, you’d be dead.” That was MacClary. Weir didn’t speak.

  Merrit wondered if J.R.’s silence down the passageway meant he’d caught a bullet. Could be good news all around.

  He got up, gun held steady. “Okay,” he said. “New orders. You’re going to charge across that passage when I say. I’ll cover you.”

  “I can’t outrun a bullet.”

  “Theirs or mine. Your choice.”

  Merrit allowed himself a smile. His plan could work. Since the gunmen didn’t know about the entrance to the cave, they couldn’t know these two were in here. They’d be expecting J.R. or him. So when Weir stepped into the corridor . . . Merrit smiled again. The other shooters would do his work for him, and when they came in to check the body, that’s when he’d have them.

  “Get ready to run.” Merrit stepped back so he could see directly out the doorway. Weir was standing, his back to the wall. The girl was still hunched over on the floor beside him.

  Merrit saw movement, shifted his gaze. The girl had reached up to hold Weir’s hand.

  “Now!”

  Weir turned his head suddenly and ducked down to cover Jessica MacClary with his body. In the seconds it took Merrit to wonder why, the grenade landed in the corridor outside the entrance and—

  Seconds after he heard the rustle of the thrown grenade, the thunderclap of its explosion deadened David’s hearing to a high-pitched whine. Simultaneously, he saw Me
rrit thrown back as if a wave of light had crashed over him.

  Merrit hit the stone table, and his limp body sprawled across it, unmoving.

  The sudden wall of heat was startling, sucking the air from David’s lungs. He could feel Jess clawing at his chest to pull out the lightstick he had hidden in his coveralls.

  She scrabbled to her feet and held the lightstick up, lips moving. David couldn’t hear a word. Only the whine.

  Jess pointed to the entranceway. Carved stone blocks. Loose shale.

  It was collapsing.

  David reached for her hand, and together they ran through the doorway. No flash of gunshots met them.

  Left or right? Or straight ahead?

  David squinted down the corridor to the right. Thick billows of dust were lit by wild flashlight beams that swung back and forth like swords of light through a waterfall of falling rock. Whoever was responsible for the explosions, they’d blasted through from the other side, not come in from the shore. There was no escape in that direction, and the T-intersection ahead was a complete unknown.

  The only path remaining was the way they’d come.

  He and Jess ran to the left, stopping only when they saw a body, facedown, before the pile of rocky debris. David started to reach for the body, to turn it over. A flash of light. Another. Something sparking.

  Jess’s hand was on his shoulder. He saw her lips move, read her urgent words. They’re shooting! Run!

  Leaving the body unexamined, they scrambled up and over the debris pile, falling down the other side. They stumbled down the damp, chill passageway until—

  The slightest perceptible sounds began to penetrate the still-persistent whine in David’s ears. A far-off rumble. Creaking stones. The whisper of an ocean breeze. They’d reached the tunnel to the inlet cave.

  Jess first, then David, dove headfirst through the slick, wet opening, leading down to where they could run again. Where the rocky ceiling became too low, they crawled forward on their hands and knees.

  The air quickened, fresh, alive, from the sea outside. David saw pale moonlight shine through the narrow opening just ahead.