The true mystery was which of those vessels they had found. Before they reached port in San Francisco, they had to know.
"He didn't seem too concerned that one of his crew has just been brutally murdered." Bryan cast a worried glance at Jane.
"I suspect he and his crew have been involved in more than a few unsavory situations," Neville replied. He looked to the Turkish men. "I asked you to secure us safe passage."
"You asked me to find quick passage," Saygin said. "The two are not necessarily good bedfellows."
"But with a pirate?"
The word shocked Jane. It held so many connotations.
"We've used him before," Saygin said. "He's trustworthy, and once bought, his silence is assured."
"Even if someone starts killing his crew?"
"The dead man was trying to break into the hold to see what we’re transporting. You really want them to know?"
"No," Neville said softly, and Jane was surprised to hear such vulnerability in his voice.
"We'll reach dock soon," she said. "Whatever happened, we'll be away from it."
"Really?" Neville looked down, seemed to gather himself, then lifted his gaze again to Patrick and the other specialists. "How close are you to completing the translation?"
"Come and see," Patrick said. "Seems to me that staying together will be safest for us all, anyway."
As they left the mess hall, Jane glanced back to see Saygin and Halis sitting at a table, heads close in conversation. Saygin saw her and smiled, then waved her on. We have things to discuss, that wave might have said. Or perhaps, we have plans to make.
Walking along dank corridors that stank of diesel and sweat and boiled vegetables, listening to the groans and clangs of the vessel flexing and tipping through the ocean's swell, she understood how people could go mad out here. Or if not mad, then at least a bit unraveled, their ways of living, moral codes and outlook on life radically changed. Against the vastness of the ocean, Man was small, and to be at its mercy every second of your life would be humbling and mind-altering.
She also watched the shadows. Light came from shielded oil lamps set into the walls of the narrow gangways. As flames flickered, so the shadows seemed to stretch and dance, reaching for them as they walked past and then drawing away again. Any one of them might have harbored a killer.
They entered the cabin that Bryan, Patrick, and Cesare were sharing. Neville and the museum director always referred to the men as specialists, but they preferred the term freelance archaeologists. They were essentially adventurers for hire, traveling the globe and working for the highest bidder, no matter what the commission. Rough and harsh, Jane had also come to know them as sharp and intelligent. In many ways, they were more knowledgeable than Neville, because their experience covered vast swathes of the world's buried histories, not just one small aspect of it. Each had his own self-professed specialty. Patrick’s was societies and geography, while Cesare's was military history and anthropology. Bryan’s expertise was in ancient languages.
Their cabin was a mess. Three cots had been unbolted from the floor and pushed against the wall, and they were covered with tangled blankets, unwashed food plates, and scattered clothing. A fourth cot held a selection of books and papers, while the floor area had been cleared as much as possible. Across the floor lay heaps more papers, all of them indexed with a pencil mark in one corner showing where and when the rubbing had been taken. A white cloth sheet was pinned to the wall, and Jane recognized the general layout of the chamber in which the jar had been found.
"Sorry about the mess," Bryan said, not sounding sorry at all. "We're getting there, though. I know a lot more about the jar than I did when we left port."
"But you know there's a lot more you don't know," Cesare said.
"Every answer poses another two questions," Jane said, and Neville threw her a distracted smile. He'd told her that the first time they'd met, when she had taken up her post at the Golden Gate Museum. It had turned out to be so true, in many aspects of life as well as archaeology.
She thought of Franca and her incessant questioning when she was younger. Why this, where that, when the other. As she had grown into her early teens the questions had come less frequently, but only because the girl asked them inside, keeping more mysteries to herself and not being quite so open with her curiosity. It was an adolescent thing, Jane knew, but it seemed foreign to her because she herself had undergone the opposite change when she entered her teenage years, starting to ask more questions than ever. She hoped that Franca would emerge from this phase soon.
If she doesn't die… she thought, and her daughter's illness struck her yet again. I'm doing everything I can. If I could fly to you like a bird, I would. And if I can, I'll bring something that might make you better, my sweet girl.
"Jane?" Neville said.
"Hmm, what?"
"You with us?"
"Just thinking about that poor man who died."
"Yes, well," Neville said, and it was evident that he hardly cared at all.
"Death surrounds the jar like sand around a desert oasis," Bryan said. "At least that's what some of the writing seems to say."
"It's quite common to build such myths around sacred objects," Patrick said. "Whoever put this jar down where we found it wanted it left alone."
"And it's worked, at least three times through history," Bryan said. "See here. These sheets are from the walls lining the last passageway down towards the final chamber." He pointed to the sheet on the wall, climbing onto the grouped cots and kicking aside a pile of dirty plates. The room was cramped with them all inside, but Jane was used to being in enclosed spaces with these people. Holes in the ground, stuffy library rooms, exhibit stores in museum basements. She had known them all for a long time, and trusted them in spite of their roguish approach to their work. That was why Michael had left her several years before. He claimed that she liked her work colleagues more than she liked him, and though that had never been true, she knew there was more to it than that. Michael had always been a traditionalist, and he didn't like Jane's adventurous side. As far as he was concerned, her place was at home with Franca.
Just now she would have agreed with him. But she was not one for regrets. She had chosen this unusual life for herself.
"Alexander the Great?" Neville said, snapping Jane's attention back to the moment.
"From what I can make out, he captured the region, discovered these chambers and ordered them guarded,” Bryan said. “He didn't even venture deep inside. Just destroyed the entrances he could find and ordered them sealed up forever."
"Forever wasn't quite as long as that, though," Cesare said.
"Nope. The chambers were discovered again four hundred years later. A great battle was fought, thousands died, and their corpses were used to plug the access routes into the underground network."
Jane shivered at the thought. "We didn't find anything like that."
"It must have been a route still hidden away," Neville said.
"So we were working close to thousands of bodies all the time," Cesare said. "Well, that's enough to give me nightmares for the rest of my life."
"If that isn't enough, this last section I've translated will be," Bryan replied. He knelt close to the sheets he had spread across the floor and looked up at Cesare, and Jane realized that he appeared haunted. The Irishman had never seemed troubled by signs of death and decay, and they had found plenty in their searches of hidden, ancient places. Sometimes the death was ritualistic, the victims arranged in poses or positions designed to convey certain messages in this world or the next. Sometimes the deaths were violent, evidenced by holed skulls and scattered bones with blade scars across their pale surfaces. Even when they found dead infants, Bryan seemed able to disassociate himself from them. They were archaeological artifacts, not dead people, he would say. Mysteries for people like them to unravel. He was never spooked, and she knew that he held his faith close.
He was spooked now, though.
&n
bsp; "So?" Neville prompted.
"These were taken from inside the chamber," Bryan said. "Remember, Alexander wanted this place and its contents hidden away forever. Those who discovered it later fought battles to keep it secret, using the dead to dissuade anyone from digging deeper."
"And now we've gone and plundered it," Jane said. Plunder was not a word any of them would normally have used, but right then no one questioned her usage. They were too focused on Bryan.
"Maybe we shouldn't have," Bryan said. "There are warnings. They're quite detailed, and fairly intricate in their––"
"Paraphrase," Neville said. One word, and he possessed the room.
Bryan sat back on his heels, no longer needing to read from his sheaves of notes and rough translations. He gave Jane a long, searching look before he continued. "Anyone who enters the chamber of Pandora will be forever damned," he said.
"Pretty standard," Cesare said, shrugging. "In that case I've been damned a thousand times."
"The main part is more important," Bryan said. "It goes something like: If you accept your damnation and dare touch the jar of Pandora or that of her sister Anesidora, then the Keeper—whom we interpret as some kind of guardian of the jars––will rise, hunt you down, cut your throat and take your eyes."
"Take your eyes," Jane muttered. "That's horrific."
Neville was quiet, staring at the papers in front of Bryan. It was almost as if he was taking these warnings seriously. Jane had never seen him troubled by ancient writings such as these, equating them to superstitious words muttered by countless people down through the ages. He was a scientist, he said, with no time for superstition.
"Neville?" she said softly.
"The crew member with his throat cut also had his eyes gouged out," he said.
No one spoke. Jane looked at the rubbings of engravings scattered around the room, the scribbled translations underlined and crossed-out, and, feeling threatened by something more than she could understand, she was more terrified for her dying daughter than ever.
There was a knock at the door. Soft, polite. Jane was closest, so she reached out and tugged on the metal handle. The door swung in and Captain Gavriil stood in the opening, glancing briefly at each of them in turn. His gaze settled on Jane.
"The funeral later will be a busy one," he said. "Does anyone know Muslim funeral rites? Your Turkish friends are dead."
The air was thick and close in the gangway that led down into the hold, and yet it was strangely cold, as if the chill of the ocean had made an icebox out of the hull. The seas had grown rougher and the ship listed to and fro, not enough to make Jane lose her footing but enough so that she had to take a wide stance and ride the swaying of the vessel. Seasickness had never been a problem for her, not even below decks in rough seas. It could only have been the sight of the two dead men that had turned her stomach queasy and made bile burn the back of her throat.
She kept her dinner down, but barely.
Halis lay in a fetal tuck on the dirty gangway floor. His abdomen had been cut open, the stinking tangle of his guts in a glistening pile in front of him. He had his hands on them as if they were a newborn infant he had died to protect. His body was turned away from them, and Jane thought that was best. She could see the pool of blood, and if she had seen his torn throat and mutilated eyes, horror would have overcome her revulsion and she would have broken down into a sobbing mess. Saygin’s corpse lay further ahead, in the shadows beneath the sealed hatch that led into the hold. In the darkness, beyond the light of the crew’s lanterns, he stared at them with impossible black holes where his eyes ought to have been. Jane couldn’t help feeling as if Saygin stared directly at her, baleful and critical.
She looked away.
“What were they doing down here?” the captain asked, shooting Neville an accusatory glance. “Not trying to steal your precious cargo, I assume. These were your people, so why were they trying to get into the hold?”
“You had a sentry on duty,” Neville snapped. “Where is he, I’d like to know.”
One of the crewmen shuffled a bit awkwardly, and gave a sniff. “A fella has to piss, he has to piss. I was gone all of three minutes and I come back to this.”
Seconds ticked by without another word spoken. Jane felt the ship closing in around her, all the breath forced from her lungs. Neville and Captain Gavriil began speaking again, both at the same time, and all she could hear was the fear in their voices—fear that it would happen again. They’d put more sentries in the gangway and two on the deck. Five days remained, and no one was to wander the ship alone.
“I’ve…I’m sorry, I need air,” she said, and she turned and stumbled along the gangway, up the metal stairs, and onto the starlit deck.
At the railing, she held on tight and threw up over the side. Cool wind swept over her and sea spray dappled her face as she breathed in and out, trying to purge the stink of death from her nose, and from her memory.
The captain’s question hadn’t been answered. He’d asked what the Turks were after, down there in the hold. If they were part of the team, why attempt to break in?
God help her, Jane thought she knew the answer.
Sleeping, cradled by the gentle roll of the sea, Jane clung to sleep as if it were a lover who, once released, might never return. Rest had been hard to come by the past few days. Exhausted and on edge, she found herself with no appetite. Each night she lay her head down, body leaden and thoughts muddled, but sleep would elude her for hours. When at last her mind succumbed to weariness, she slept more deeply than she ever had before, and mornings were not welcome.
The knock came softly, but insistently, again and again. At first, she thought she must be dreaming, but then she became aware of her surroundings, heard the creak of the ship and the soft knocking at her door, and her eyes opened to find her cabin was still in darkness. Outside the portholes, night still claimed the world. She heard a distant bell clang and sat upright as her mind struggled to make sense of that sound.
Again, the knock.
The ship was not moving. All was silent save the lingering echo of that now silent bell and the wash of the sea against the hull.
And that gentle knocking.
Jane stared at her cabin door a moment, then bolted from the bed. The white blouse and long black skirt she’d had on the night before lay across the top of the trunk containing most of her things, but she reached for the thick robe at the foot of the bed and pulled it on. The knock came again and she almost went to the door, then thought better of it and dropped to her knees to slide her valise out from beneath the bed. Rooting in the darkened room—her only illumination what little starlight came through the porthole—she felt first the bundle that did not belong in her valise. Jane had put it there herself but even so, her touch was startled by its presence. Then her foraying fingers moved on, brushing the handle of the small Browning pistol she kept in her bag. It fit perfectly into her small hand and she plucked it out and went to the door.
“Who is it?” she whispered.
No answer.
Jane held her breath. They had a murderer on board. Only a fool would open that door. And yet she had secrets of her own, desperate desires that might welcome a soft knock at the door in the small hours of the night.
She turned the lock and drew the door open, stepping back quickly with the gun aimed at the silhouette that now moved across her threshold.
His hands went up and he shifted enough that she saw the thick wave of blond hair that swept across his forehead and the nervous, self-effacing grin that had won her over so immediately when they’d first met.
“Watch where you point that, woman,” Bryan whispered.
Jane rasped his name, reaching out to drag him into the cabin. Bryan closed the door, quickly and quietly, then turned to her wearing an entirely different expression. She saw fear in his eyes, and excitement, but more than anything she saw the urgency in him.
“What’s happe
ned?” she asked.
Bryan kissed her, cupping his hands on the sides of her head and making it linger, so that before the kiss ended they each were breathing the other’s breath, as if they shared one body, one set of lungs. He pressed his forehead against hers and stepped back, seemed to contemplate a moment and then nodded.
“Get dressed, Jane,” he said. “We’ve got little more than an hour before dawn, but we’ve got to move now if we’re going.”
Her skin prickled. Nothing made sense to her. Yes, they’d had a plan, or the nascent beginnings of one, but this…
“Where are we?” she asked. “We had a day or two remaining, surely.”
“Dress while I explain,” he insisted, and she set about it, placing the gun on her bed.
Jane slipped out of her robe and left it in a heap on the floor. She reached for her skirt, unconcerned about Bryan seeing her in her underthings. He’d seen her wearing less.
“Gavriil ordered all speed days ago,” he said. “We’ve been burning extra fuel, straining the engines to make port as swiftly as possible. The crew didn’t let on. If I hadn’t woken, I’d have been none the wiser until he returned with the police.”
She froze, one arm through a sleeve of the blouse from the night before. Her thoughts went to the valise, and to the package inside. “Police?”
“He’s gone ashore to bring back detectives,” Bryan said. “I guess that rules the captain out as our killer, unless he’s run off and never returns. Still. “
“If we’re getting off, it has to be now.”
Bryan nodded. “Now. Take nothing with you, save perhaps that gun.”
Jane sat on the bed and pulled on her boots, lacing them almost unconsciously. Her valise contained the only things of value she had with her––photos of Franca, her identification, a ring that had belonged to her grandmother—and the only thing she had ever stolen in her life. She thrust the gun back into the valise and stood, blouse untucked, hair in disarray.
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