Staff of Judea

by Alex Archer

  Even better, Gardner thought that the tracks were less than an hour old.

  “Hamilton! Crawl in there and check it out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hamilton wiggled his way into the narrow passageway. It was a tight fit, given his broad shoulders, but he managed to push himself along with several hard thrusts of his legs. A few minutes after he’d climbed inside there was a sharp hiss as he lit a magnesium flare, the light spilling back down the tunnel to the rest of them. Another moment passed and then they heard his voice echo back along the tunnel.

  “All clear, sir.”

  Grimes turned to the others. “Johnson and Daniels, you’re on watch. I want you to guard this entrance and make sure no one goes in or out without us. Douglas, Gardner, Beck, you’ve got rear guard. Follow us in.”

  Ready or not, Annja, here we come.

  Chapter 34

  “Right, left or center?” Roux asked, indicating the three entrances outlined in the light ahead of them.

  Annja opened her mouth to reply, then paused. She didn’t know. She didn’t remember Ephraim’s notes mentioning anything about choosing a door. Just to be safe, she set her pack down and dug the pages containing Ephraim’s scribbled notes out of the front pocket so she could double check.

  Nope. Nothing there.

  “We’re going to have to guess,” she said in resignation.

  “Okay, I vote for the center.”

  “The center? Why the center?”

  “Why not?”

  Annja frowned. “Don’t you think we need a more logical reason to make that choice than ‘just because’?”

  Roux laughed. “No. And have I ever told you that you overthink things?”

  Three doors. Which one to choose?

  Like Roux with the middle entry, she would have taken the right one without much thought; it was a natural reaction for right-handed people. That there was the problem. Annja knew from experience that the guys who designed places like this were cut from the same cloth. Not only were they paranoid—knowing you could be beheaded at the king’s whim for the slightest infraction—but they were also devious.

  She tried to put herself into the architect’s shoes. She didn’t know much about the history of Mal’akh, but as a last fortress and refuge for King Herod, it made sense that the architect would make it difficult for an enemy to reach him. If it had been up to her, she would have booby-trapped two of the three entrances, at the least.

  So if the natural inclination for most people is to take the right passage, wouldn’t that be the one the architect would most likely use as a false entry?

  On the other hand, as a Jew, Herod would have seen the left hand as the unclean one and therefore might have objected to using that passage as the entrance into his private sanctum.

  Which brought her right back to Roux’s suggestion, the center passage.

  I’m probably going to regret this.

  “Fine,” she said. “Center, it is.”

  They approached the opening cautiously and shone their lights over the threshold. A narrow corridor continued beyond as far as they could see. Unlike the previous corridor, this one was squared off, like a corridor in a freestanding building rather than the rounded natural tunnel they’d just left behind.

  A light breeze was blowing down the hall, just enough to stir the dust on the ground slightly, and Annja found herself marveling at the engineering involved to funnel fresh air this deep beneath the surface. It made her question what other wonders they were going to find in the halls ahead.

  Not seeing anything to concern her, Annja stepped over the threshold.

  There was a sharp click.

  She froze, not daring to move, thoughts of pressure plates and booby traps racing through her mind.

  The click had come from behind her.

  Without moving her feet or lower body, Annja turned her head and looked back.

  Roux was standing there, pistol in hand. He slapped the magazine back into place again with a sharp click.

  He realized she was watching him. “What?” he said. “Better safe than sorry, right?”

  Her heart pounding in her chest, Annja wanted to strangle him but she settled for a mumbled “right” and turned back to what she’d been doing.

  They followed the corridor beyond for a short distance before coming to another doorway. This one was shorter than the one before, and they had to duck to pass through it. On the other side was a small room.

  The chamber was roughly ten by twelve, if Annja had to hazard a guess, but it seemed smaller because much of the floor space was gobbled up by a large ceremonial-looking pool. The water in it was clear and appeared to be reasonably deep; Annja guessed it was at least six feet, if not deeper. The pool was surrounded by a low stone wall that didn’t quite reach her knees but was just high enough to contain the water.

  As Roux walked over to look inside the pool, Annja headed for the far wall, searching for a way out. At first glance there didn’t seem to be one and that didn’t make much sense.

  Plop!

  Annja spun around. Roux had a rock in his hand and was getting ready to drop it into the water.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I was curious how deep the water was. It seemed rather deceiving so…”

  That was as far as Roux got. A loud grinding sound filled the chamber and both he and Annja spun around to the door.

  A thick stone slab was already more than halfway across the entrance.

  “No, no, no, no!” Annja cried as she ran across the chamber, frantically looking for something to jam into the opening to keep the slab from closing all the way.

  With a muffled thud the slab fell into place.

  Annja reached it about the same time Roux did and they both threw their shoulders against it, trying to lever it back open.

  It was no use. The stone was too heavy. They couldn’t even budge it.

  Roux cursed.

  Annja turned back to find another way out when the surface of the water caught her eye. A moment ago it had been clear. Now there was a spot of color.

  Specifically, red.

  “What on earth?”

  She hurried over to take a look.

  A thin spiral of red was filling the center of the pool, lazily rising up from somewhere at the bottom. Already she was having trouble seeing the bottom as the red began to drift throughout the pool.

  The thick, viscous nature of the stuff reminded her of blood.

  Even as she watched, the water in the pool, now tainted with a slight blush of red, sloshed over the side of the wall. It wasn’t much, just a cupful really. But then that one little breach became two, then three. In the space of a few seconds, water was dripping over the stone containment wall in half a dozen places, pooling on what had seconds before been dry ground.

  “Roux, we have to get out of here.”

  He spoke without turning. “Brilliant deduction, Annja. I salute your powers of reasoning. Of course we have to get out of here. The only question is determining—”

  “Roux!”

  He turned back to her, the indignation plain on his face. “What? I know we—”

  “Look.”

  He did. He took in the water—now a much deeper red than it had been only seconds before—and the speed at which it was overflowing and that was all it took. He immediately left off trying to force the door and began searching the walls.

  Annja started on the other side of the door and began to do the same thing. There has to be a way out. You don’t build a room with no way out of it unless…

  …unless you wanted to trap someone in it.

  She glanced back at the pool.

  The water was flowing much faster now, spilling out on all s
ides and beginning to accumulate.

  She ran her hands over the surface of the wall. She was looking for a nook, a niche—anything that might conceal a trigger to stop what was happening around her. She’d encountered hundreds of booby traps during her years as an archaeologist and adventurer, and more often than not there was a safety, something that could be used to stop from springing the trap or reset it.

  The question was whether they would find it in time.

  Warm water splashed against her lower leg. The pool now covered the floor about an inch deep.

  The smell of the stuff hit her. That unmistakable metallic scent that clung to the back of her throat and made her want to retch.

  Her first inclination had been right; it was blood.

  And at the rate it was rising, if they didn’t do something soon, they were going to drown in it.

  * * *

  CONNOLLY AND HIS GROUP stood in front of the entrance to the fortress, flares held high, staring at footprints in the dust on the floor that led to the center doorway.

  Clearly Annja and her companion had passed this way.

  Grimes glanced at the professor and noticed a frown cross the man’s face.

  Interesting.

  “Is there a problem, Professor?” he asked aloud, startling the others as he broke the silence. His words seemed to echo in the large space.

  “No,” the older man said. He gestured. “We need to use the left entrance.”

  He took a step toward it but Grimes stopped him with a hand on his elbow.

  “Why the left?” Grimes asked.

  “The place of honor at the table is always on the right. That’s the obvious choice, therefore it won’t be safe. It will be, how do you say it, booby-trapped in some way?”

  Grimes kept eye contact with the man, looking for a sign that he was lying. The professor didn’t even bat an eye.

  “All right, we’ll take the left passage,” Connolly told Grimes. “And the professor will go first.”

  Chapter 35

  With the pool rising around them at a rapidly increasing rate, Annja knew time was of the essence. She tried to ignore it, tried to pretend that every heartbeat didn’t sound like the ticking of some massive clock, but it was no use. That’s exactly what it did sound like.

  Not finding anything in their respective positions, they moved farther along the walls in opposite directions, broadening their search.

  As the minutes ticked past, the bloody water rose around them, reaching their ankles, then their knees, then midthigh. It stank to high heaven. As the water rose higher it became harder to think as the air remaining in the room became polluted with the carbon dioxide they were exhaling.

  Annja glanced at where Roux was standing, looking up and letting the beam of his headlamp play across the rock surface that was really only a few feet from his head.

  “Anything?” she asked, pausing in her own search for a moment.

  “Nothing,” he replied.

  For what seemed like the millionth time, she glanced around, but the room was empty, except for the pool.

  The pool.

  She turned toward the source of their trouble, only to realize the low walls that marked the edge of the ceremonial basin had long since disappeared beneath the rising liquid. If it hadn’t been for the bubbling fount in the center of the space that marked where the fluid was being pushed up from below, she wouldn’t even have known it had been there in the first place.

  The blood had to be coming from somewhere. The flow hadn’t been triggered until Roux had dropped something into the pool, which meant there was some mechanical process attached to either the height of the water or the additional weight on the bottom of the pool. Annja guessed the latter. When the stone hit the bottom, it must have triggered a sluice of some kind that, when opened, flooded the room. Given how quickly the room was filling, that sluice had to be pretty big.

  Annja stripped off her pack and handed it to Roux. “I’ve got an idea. Hold this,” she told him. She unzipped the pack and dug out her climbing rope. She tied one end around her waist, knotting it securely and handed the other to Roux.

  “We don’t have time to waste, Annja. What do you think you are doing?”

  “Getting our asses out of here, that’s what. All this stuff—” she waved a hand at the crimson tide that was nearly waist-deep at this point “—has to come from somewhere. The pipe that’s pushing it in here is probably our only way out. I’m going to dive down and see if it’s wide enough for us to fit through. While I do that, you’re going to hold on to the rope. If you feel three tugs in a row, I want you to start pulling me back up as fast as you can.”

  He stared at her. “You’re nuts, you know that?”

  “Yep, but nuts is better than drowning here, don’t you think?”

  “Hurry,” he said.

  She sloshed her way over to the edge of the pool, using the fountainlike bubble in the center to guess where the edge was. She still managed to bang her knee on the retaining wall when she guessed incorrectly.

  Once in position she took a couple of deep breaths, flashed a thumbs-up at Roux and then dove over the wall into the ceremonial pool.

  Annja had always been a good swimmer, and that helped her now as she cut downward through the thick, viscous liquid. It was warm and seemed to press in at her from all sides, but she did her best not to pay attention to it. If she started thinking about where all that blood came from she’d probably have a break with reality.

  There was a strong current coming from somewhere below here, which was exactly what she was looking for. With one hand against the inner wall of the pool and the other stretched out straight ahead to keep her from swimming headfirst into the bottom of the pool, Annja propelled herself downward with a couple of kicks from her powerful legs. She reached the bottom and tread there for a moment, fighting both her own upward buoyancy and the push of the current that was trying to shove her back to the surface. She let the flow of the water tell her where that current was coming from—the side of the pool off to her left rather than the bottom—and then struck out toward it.

  By following the inner wall, she was able to come up on the opening from one side without being shoved away by the current. Her heart was beating in her ears and her lungs were starting to protest the lack of fresh oxygen as she reached out toward the flow.

  She felt a surge of hope when she realized that the opening was, in fact, quite large. Her hand encountered a wide curve that slid out of reach in either direction. By sticking her hand directly into the flow she discovered that the current wasn’t strong. She thought she could swim against it.

  That left her with a decision to make.

  Turn around, resurface and tell Roux what she had found, or try to swim up the sluice to see if it provided a way out. If she chose the latter and there was no fresh air within just a short distance on the other side, she was in trouble. She’d black out long before she made it back out again, current or no current, and that would be that. If she didn’t take the chance, however, they might head up the sluice only to find it narrowed considerably just a few feet beyond the opening and they’d die, anyway.

  Better to know for sure.

  Even the few seconds she’d taken making up her mind might make the difference between life and death so Annja didn’t hesitate any longer. She kicked off and swam directly into the current, like a fish swimming upstream, fighting against the push of the water as hard as she could.

  The water slammed her into the side of the channel and tried to force her back out, but she kicked and clawed her way forward, her lungs screaming now. She clenched her jaw shut and pushed on, determined to get to the end.

  The angle of the channel changed. She was no longer swimming horizontally but was now moving diagonally upward. She kicked harder, pulling at
the bloody water around her with everything she had.

  Like a whale breaching the surface of the ocean, Annja burst out of the channel. She couldn’t see—the water was way too thick—but she could sense space around her opening up.

  She gulped down a great lungful of air. She could feel the warm, thick water flowing down her head and across her face. The smell made her want to gag. She tried to wipe it away with hands as equally slick.

  Her headlamp, still strapped tightly around her forehead, showed she was in a room similar to the one she had just left behind. They would have been identical, except this one had a closed stone doorway on the right side of the room rather than the left.

  That’s when she understood. When the trap was sprung, the liquid that had previously filled this room was sucked into the sluice and deposited in the room she’d just left.

  Roux!

  Annja sucked in a deep breath and dove back under, reversing her previous route. This time it was much easier. The current snatched her the moment she entered it and she shot through the channel like a bullet from a gun, to come bursting out the other end.

  She surfaced…and promptly banged her head on the ceiling.

  “Oh, good. I was starting to think I was going to drown all on my own. Nice of you to join me in this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  Annja turned around and found Roux treading water nearby, their respective backpacks slung one over each arm. The water was just below his neck. He smiled at her, steadfastly refusing to show anything but bravery right to the very end. A knight of old.

  “Nobody’s drowning today,” Annja said. “There’s a way out.” She filled him in on what she had learned.

  Roux’s smile turned genuine as he passed her pack over to her. “If we wait until the last moment, the pressure will have slackened considerably and we should be able to traverse the connecting tunnel without fighting against the current.”

  He was right. If they could steel their nerves as the water rose higher, by the time they ducked beneath the surface and reached the tunnel, the flow might even have stopped altogether.