by Rob Jones
Huber’s mind raced. He did want to live yes – he had three grandchildren and he wanted to see them grow up. Something told him the Mexicans weren’t bluffing either, so he decided not to aggravate them with lies and delays. “In St. Michael’s Church around the corner… you can access a network of tunnels that go all over the city.”
“Do you know them?”
Huber shook his head. “Access is very restricted for everyone’s safety.”
“Take us there!”
With the police keeping a safe distance but never letting him slip from their sight, Huber led the Mexicans past the café terraces of Herrengasse until a magnificent Romanesque church came into view.
“Die Michaelerkirche,” Huber said, with not even the terror around him diminishing the lifelong pride he felt for the eight hundred year-old church. “Go into the crypt here and you can disappear forever.”
They crossed the expansive Michaelerplatz and drew closer to the church. Normally buzzing with tourists snapping pictures of the neoclassical architecture or lining up to ride on the famous horse-drawn carriages, the explosion of the Touran and the presence of a hovering police helicopter had cleared the area of civilians.
Huber led Mendoza and Aurora inside St. Michael’s Church and along the impressive nave as he walked them toward the famous Michaelergruft, the enormous crypt which lay beneath the ancient building.
It was noticeably colder now as they hurried past the numerous marble tombs, each holding the bones of a different aristocratic dynasty. Except for the four thousand corpses, they were now alone inside the church, but the sound of the police above gave Huber a shred of hope that he would live to see another day.
“Where?”
“That door.”
Aurora raised the pistol and blasted the lock open.
“Open the crypt door,” Mendoza shouted.
Huber obeyed, heaving the old door open, and it wasn’t until this moment that he realized his error in telling Mendoza that he had no knowledge of the tunnels. Then, as if he could read his mind, the Mexican cartel boss closed in on him.
“Wait!” Huber cried desperately, raising his hands in a pathetic attempt to stop the horror unfolding.
But it couldn’t be stopped, and Mendoza rammed the switchblade up into the base of Huber’s ribcage. The old man gasped and fell forward closer to Mendoza. For a depraved moment they almost looked like two old friends embracing, but then blood bubbled out of Huber’s mouth and Mendoza pushed him to the floor. “There can be no witnesses to this, Herr Huber. Please accept my most profound apologies, and gratitude.”
Mendoza took the gun from Aurora and slipped it into his jacket pocket, tightening his scarf around his neck and then they descended into the crypt. He lit their way with the light on his phone and hoped the battery would last long enough to see them to safety in the world above. He’d read stories about people getting lost and dying in the famous Catacombs of Paris, but they surely couldn’t be any more labyrinthine and disgusting than the tunnels beneath Vienna.
No wi-fi down here in the sewers and crypts, but Mendoza had saved the map of Vienna, and knew from his childhood in the jungles of Mexico how to count the turns and keep track of north. They trudged through the slime of the tunnel network, a left meant south so the next right was west… a gentle bend in the tunnel meant he was now walking southwest… good.
What was that noise? It sounded like it was coming from behind him. No, he was just imagining it – but there it was again. A sewer rat, maybe… trailing him in case he fell and knocked himself unconscious… He had no choice but to push on, looking for exits as he went. A few hundred meters would put them beyond the area that the police must surely have cordoned off by now. If they could reach the station all they would have to do was get on a train to Munich and then make contact with Dirk Kruger, the man who sold relics.
He stared at his phone. “Two hours until the next train to Munich.”
“Two hours in these tunnels?” Aurora asked, looking into the darkness and shivering.
Mendoza looked over his shoulder and illuminated a sewer rat as it scuttled away into the darkness.
“Let’s go,” he said firmly.
*
They emerged from the tunnel system an hour later and killed more time hiding behind newspapers before boarding the train to Munich. Now, as the train rocked comfortingly back and forth on its western journey, Silvio Mendoza followed the woman’s hand as it snaked up his thigh and made its way to his waistband. He gripped it by the wrist, pulled it out of his trousers and pushed Aurora Soto away. “You think now is the time for that?”
She pouted, and a look of contempt flashed in her obsidian black eyes. “A man like you should take what he can get, mi cielo.”
Mendoza flashed into action, pulling his ejector knife from his jacket pocket and spinning around in the train seat. Less than half a second after her comment, he was pushing the tip of the knife into her carotid artery. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She flinched as he twirled the blade around and pushed it against her skin harder, pricking open the surface and drawing blood. “Nothing… lo siento, Silvio.”
A grin spread on his face as he watched her squirm under his power. He nodded in self-satisfaction and retracted the blade. “Good. We don’t know where they are – never forger that. Remember how easily they took Wade’s empire apart and killed my brother, Jorge.”
Aurora watched the black light of revenge play in his eyes. She had been there on Alcatraz, hiding in the crawlspace when Juana Diaz had murdered his brother. Better he believed that ECHO had done it, and so she kept the truth locked in her heart.
They crossed the border at Salzburg and watched the Bavarian landscape slip by. Not long after, the train stopped for a few moments at Rosenheim Station and then pulled away again onto the final northbound stretch to Munich and their final destination.
Mendoza saw the tiny towns and hamlets flash past the window before gradually melting into the suburbs of southern Munich – Zorneding, Vaterstetten, Haar. High above them in the sky a savage storm was gathering on the horizon and he watched as a bolt of forked lightning ripped down from the cloud base and struck somewhere in a forest to the east.
Lightning was his oldest enemy.
He was only young man when it struck him, blasting through the pungent ozone of the stormy air and tearing down his body. Using him as a conductor to reach the earth and almost killing him. He’d seen it coming – flashing down into the sugarcane fields with explosive fury. He and Jorge were out walking when the storm struck. They both ran for the cover of a barn but Jorge had all the luck that day because the gods had decided to punish Silvio.
It felt like someone had smashed him around the back of the head with a baseball bat and when he woke his body was numb. It wasn’t until Jorge ran to him and gasped in horror that he knew something had changed. Jorge carried him home and that was when he saw the scarring on his face, the Lichtenburg figure, a shower of scars like electrical sparks running all over his face and neck.
Another bolt of lightning flashed on the horizon and a few seconds later a tremendous roar of thunder.
“The storm is getting closer,” Aurora said, bringing him back from the sugarcane fields of his mind.
“In more ways than one,” he said absent-mindedly.
CHAPTER THREE
Joe Hawke hated watching Alex Reeve as she pushed herself into the room in her chair. Her collapse on Alcatraz had almost cost her life at the hands of Aurora Soto, and now she was confined to a wheelchair once again. Aurora had slipped away in the Alcatraz night, and now they knew it was true about the elixir’s restorative properties only being temporary. It also meant they needed another source of it – one they could secure permanently this time.
They were sitting in the expansive glass-walled briefing room which overlooked the cliffs on the western part of their secret island base. Beyond the tinted glass a tropical Caribbean sun was burning bright and ev
en after so long here the former SBS operative continued to be dazzled by its beauty and isolation.
When he had first met Lea and came to the island it almost seemed like it was a dream, but he had been here with these people for long enough now that it was his previous life that seemed dreamlike. Now this was reality… turquoise seas, white sand, tropical palm trees and the best camaraderie he’d ever known.
His appreciation of paradise was shattered by the sound of raised voices as Scarlet Sloane and Ryan Bale argued about the relative merits of vodka and cold beer, but Hawke’s mind soon returned to Alex as he absent-mindedly watched the surf crashing on the beach below.
“How are you?” he asked as she moved next to him.
“I’m fine,” she said, a note of determination in her voice.
Hawke fixed his eyes on her. “We’ll find more, Alex. I promise.”
“We have other things to worry about, Joe.”
He knew it was true, but it didn’t matter. He glanced around the room at the others. The entire team was now there with the usual exception of Vincent Reno who had returned to the south of France after the events in the Lacandon Jungle.
Lexi was sitting with her eyes closed and her boots up on the desk, pretending to sleep but he knew she was listening to everything. Maria was arguing with someone on the phone in what he guessed was not polite Russian, and Lea was returning to the room from the veranda.
“Oh good,” Eden said, walking into the room and sitting at the table. “You’re all here already.”
“So what’s the problem?” Scarlet said, taking a seat at the far end of the table and placing not one but two chilled vodka and tonics in front of her. “Superman need his pants pulling up again?”
Ryan made a big show of checking his pants. “Nope.” He smuggled something from his pocket into his mouth and started chewing.
Scarlet smirked. “What’s that you’ve got there?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, right.” A few seconds later she was pinning his arms down and putting her hand in his pocket.
“Get off!”
“Don’t say you’re not enjoying this, boy. It can’t be everyday a good-looking woman wants to know what’s inside your trousers.”
“Hey!” Maria said. “I’m not bad-looking!”
Scarlet didn’t reply. Instead, she victoriously pulled the little paper bag from Ryan’s pocket and waved it in the air.
“Give it back!”
“What have we here?” she said, peering inside the bag. “Gummy Bears?”
“I mean it, Scarlet.”
“Stop whining,” she said. “It doesn’t become you.”
“Whining is good,” Ryan said. “After all, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”
“If you say so. I’ll have a couple of these, thank you very much,” she said, and then tipped the bag up, emptying half the contents of the Gummy Bears into her mouth. “Yummy!” she said with her cheeks bulging out.
“I got those in Acapulco,” Ryan said, waiting until she swallowed. “They’ve been inside my trousers for days. Still yummy?”
Before she could respond, Lea clicked the outside door shut and joined them, and then Eden cleared his throat and began to speak.
“I know how you all feel about what happened in Mexico, but we need to move on. Friendly contacts within the American and Mexican Governments have extended their gratitude to me, and I’m passing it on to you. I know we lost the idol, but we took out Morton Wade and that was something we should all be proud of. You might like to know that the FBI raided his property in Texas and found another room similar to the obsidian chamber we saw in Mexico and…” he paused for a moment as he let out a long sigh. “They also found more evidence of human sacrifice so it looks like he’d had a few practice runs before getting to Mexico. You ended that, so well done.”
“But like you say,” Lea said. “We lost the idol.”
“And that’s why we’re here today. Hawke – over to you.”
Hawke nodded and began to speak. “As you all know, when the dust was settling at the Mexican temple, I said I thought I’d seen the idol somewhere before – and I had.”
“What are you talking about?” Lexi said.
“I thought about it a lot on the way home,” he continued. “And since returning to Elysium it’s been driving me crazy. I was agonizing about it because I was sure I’d seen it on TV or even read about it.”
“TV’s more likely in your case, surely,” Ryan said with a smirk.
“Thanks. Anyway, after a while I realized where I’d seen the damned thing, and it was right here.”
They all turned to look at him except Lea. He’d already told her.
“Less than an hour ago it finally clicked where I’d seen it, so I went to check it out and I was right.” As he spoke he pulled the idol out of a bag on the floor and placed it gently on the smoked glass tabletop. It was almost identical in its design and style as the idol of Tanit, but was of a bearded man instead. The base was indistinguishable from the base of the Tanit idol, fashioned into an intricate seven-pointed star with an inverted ziggurat receding inside it.
Ryan gasped. “Oh my God!”
“Where did you get that?” asked Scarlet.
Hawke grinned. “Like I said – from right here on the island.”
“But where did it come from originally?” Maria said.
“I know where he got it from,” Ryan said. He looked at Hawke and the two men shared a glance for a second. “The Arctic Circle… via the Elysium treasure vault.”
“Ryan’s right,” Hawke said, bringing everyone’s attention back to the golden idol standing solemnly on the briefing room table. “It took me a long time to work it out but then the penny dropped. I’d seen it while the hoard we took from Valhalla was being inventoried, but we never got around to logging it because we were less than halfway through when Ben was murdered and Mexico kicked off.”
A wave of realization rippled over the team as they understood what had happened.
Hawke looked at his friends. “This idol was in Valhalla. Small enough to be overlooked by us like much of the hoard, and waiting patiently in our vault to be inventoried.”
“And it changes everything,” Eden said.
“You bet your arses it does!” Ryan said. He got up from his seat and walked around the table. Picking it up, he weighed it in his hands and looked at his reflection in the shining golden contours of the ancient idol.
“Do we know who it is?” Maria asked.
“Oh my God!” Scarlet said. “Is it Father Christmas?”
Ryan sighed and rolled his eyes. “It’s not Father Christmas.”
“But it does look a little like Santa,” Alex added, deliberately jibing Ryan.
“It’s not bloody Santa.”
“So who then?” Lexi asked.
Ryan replied without hesitation. “It’s Búri, no doubt.”
“And who the buggering hell is he when he’s at home?” said Scarlet.
“A Norse god, father of Borr.”
“Borr?” Scarlet said with a smirk. “Is he a relation of yours, boy?”
“Borr!” Ryan said, rolling the Rs for effect. “Not bore.”
“Ah.”
“He’s Odin’s grandfather if it makes it any easier for you, and this is highly significant.”
“How so?” Lexi said.
“Because the idol I saw in Mictlan was a depiction of Tanit, and she was the supreme female deity of Punic and Phoenician cultures.”
“Not putting the dots together,” Lea said.
Alex smiled and nodded – she was a step ahead. “I know where this is going.”
“Then be a doll and enlighten the rest of us,” Scarlet said, pulling a cigarette out of her packet and flicking it from one hand to the other.
“They’re both the senior divine figures of their religious cultures,” the American woman said.
Ryan nodded, clicked his fingers and pointed at Alex. “Give th
at woman the star prize! Búri was the first god of the Norse, and Tanit was the supreme deity of Carthage, and now we know they each have idols fashioned in their likenesses.”
“And yet those cultures were entirely separate,” Hawke said.
“And the bloody Carthage one was found in Mexico,” said Scarlet.
“So the same people must have made these idols?” Lexi said.
“I’m seeing where this is going,” Lea said.
“Right,” Eden added firmly. “It’s going to a place that seems to be pointing toward some kind of parent culture.”
“This is starting to freak me out,” Lea said.
“Or in English,” Scarlet added. “Shit’s getting real, baby.”
Eden frowned, but they all knew she was right. “Yes, I supposed shit is getting real,” he said, the italics audible in his words. “Also, and with many thanks to the Mexican authorities, we now have photographs of all the symbols and pictograms inside both the Temple of Huitzilopochtli and the subterranean complex we’re calling Mictlan.”
As he was speaking he switched on the plasma screen and began to swipe through a number of images of decorative pictograms and wall-carvings from inside the ruined complex. “As you can see, we have more to go on than you might think. Not only do we have the Búri idol from Valhalla, but now we also have images of these carvings and pictographs from Mictlan as well.”
“So what’s our next play?” Maria said.
“Our next play,” Eden said firmly, “is to retrieve the idol we lost at Mictlan.”
“Business as usual then,” Scarlet said.
“Not this time, I’m afraid,” Eden said. “This time is very different.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Different?” Lea asked. “How?”
“This time we’ve been hired by the Mexican Government. They want us to locate the idol for them.”
“Fair enough,” Lea said. “It was theirs to start with, I guess. If they want it for one of their museums then there’s not much we can do about it.”