by Alex Archer
“Hello, Ms. Pioche,” Laframboise said, pistol in hand.
She was bleeding from her mouth and nose, and her right eye was already starting to turn black. “Laframboise. Sorry. It took me a moment to pick you out from all the other sewer rats down here.”
He grinned at her. “I’m still deciding whether I need to keep you alive.”
She didn’t reply. Instead, she drew her sleeve across her face. It came away bloody.
“Where is Annja Creed?”
She just smiled at him through her split lips.
He smiled back. “Be stubborn if you wish, I won’t have you killed.” He pointed his weapon at Edmund Beswick. “I’ll start with the professor.”
* * *
THE WATER WAS ALMOST ARCTIC and the cold leached into Annja’s bones. She swam effortlessly, gliding through it with both hands ahead of her. In her left hand, the flashlight served only to create a lighted cone for her to swim through. Still, when she was close enough, she could see either the tunnel’s floor or the roof. Either was fine. Both together would have meant the tunnel was narrowing and the way was coming to an end.
She counted her breaths as she went, and made sure she stayed oxygenated. The movement warmed her slightly, but she still felt cold. After twenty-two breaths, the cone of light flattened at the top. She angled upward and came out of the water at about the same time her flippers touched the tunnel floor.
Cautiously, she walked out of the water and sniffed the air. It was fetid and stank of mold, but there was no noxious odor of harmful gases. She took a deep breath and held it, checking for vertigo or any other indication that there wasn’t enough oxygen. She felt fine, so she started breathing normally.
She estimated the time she’d been underwater and figured it was something over a minute based on the number of breaths she’d taken. The average adult breathed between twelve and twenty breaths a minute based on physical shape and circumstance. She guessed she’d been breathing about fifteen breaths a minute and revised her underwater trip estimate to just over a minute and a half.
If she’d known that, she could have simply held her breath.
Except that there had been no way to know.
She took the flippers off and left them at the water’s edge. Then she widened the flashlight beam and moved forward. She had to guess at the distance she’d covered swimming. Olympic swimmers averaged a hundred meters in a minute. She wasn’t an Olympic swimmer even with the fins. Her best estimate was that she’d covered forty or fifty yards underwater.
The tunnel rose only a few feet, just enough to keep it from the water. According to the map on the sat-phone, there was only one more intersection.
Annja found the four-way juncture another twenty-six yards ahead. She had to use the laser distance meter to accurately measure the distance, but the intersection was clearly marked on the map. She took the left turn and ended up in a short corridor that dead-ended.
That had been on the map, too.
Excitement tingled through Annja. The map had shown a door, a secret place that existed just beyond the door. She widened the beam again and played the light over the moldy surface of the wall.
Like the rest of the walls, the surface was uneven and irregular. The stones hadn’t been shaped into any kind of standard dimensions. But there was a difference in the mortar. The grouting between the stones was smoother, and it wasn’t pitted. The color was almost the same, and if she hadn’t been looking for the differences, she knew she would never have found them.
Anton Dutilleaux was an illusionist. Why wouldn’t he hide his treasure behind an illusion?
Edmund would love it. For a moment, she felt guilty that she was seeing everything before he did. This had been his mystery. He deserved to be here for the discovery.
She ran her hands over the wall, but felt only the rough surfaces of the stones, no irregularity. Turning the flashlight beam toward the stone floor, she studied the surface in front of the wall.
There were no scars, no scratches, to show that the door swung outward.
If the door didn’t open outward, it had to open inward.
Annja fisted the flashlight and put both hands on the door. Gently, but with increasing pressure, she pushed. Just as she was about to give up, the door moved.
Grinding over loose debris, it slid backward about two feet and stopped. No matter how hard Annja pushed, the door wouldn’t move any farther.
Using the flashlight, she spotted openings on either side of the door. She chose the one on the right and went through.
The air inside the room was thicker and stank more of rot. Evidently the door had been shut for a long time.
A square room forty feet across—measured by the distance meter—sat empty except for an obelisk in the center. Twelve feet tall, flush against the ceiling, the obelisk was carved of what looked like stone. It was only three feet wide.
Upon closer inspection, Annja realized the obelisk wasn’t carved from a single stone the way a true monolith was. Instead, it was pieced together with large stones. The mortar looked like the same that had sealed the false door. Several of the stones had carvings on them. Faces and strange figures.
Slowly, Annja walked around it. There were no openings that she could find, and no marked areas that indicated hidden places. She had no doubt that Dutilleaux was responsible for the creation of the thing, though. Some of the engravings revealed rough figures from Chinese mythology—dragons and koi and ghostly apparitions.
Maybe it was there as a final warning to anyone who happened into the room, or maybe it was a puzzle Anton Dutilleaux intended for his friend Tsai Chien-Fu. Annja didn’t want to touch it until Edmund had had a chance to study it and give her his thoughts on the matter.
Shining her flashlight around the room, she discovered that two of the walls were piled high with bones. At one point in the tunnel’s history, it had been a storage area for the relocated Parisian dead. The skulls sat neatly among the long bones.
She walked back into the hallway and tested the door. It moved easily forward. Evidently Dutilleaux had used some kind of counterweight to keep the door shut. She directed her flashlight beam toward the ceiling, which she hadn’t checked, and spotted the metal rod that extended through the ceiling.
Further examination of the ceiling over the entrance to the room revealed that the ceiling had been lowered there and a false floor put in. Only the length of the shadows gave it away.
Annja was impressed. Dutilleaux had gone to a lot of trouble to disguise his treasure trove. But that only stood to reason. The Qianlong Emperor’s warriors were searching to kill him and recover their ruler’s lost belongings.
She’d just put her flippers back on when she heard the gunshot.
39
With the sharp report of the gunshot ringing in his ears, Laframboise spun around toward his men, ready to threaten whichever of them had fired. Instead, he stared in confusion as one of his men fell forward, his face a bloody mess.
Then Campra was at his side, bumping him roughly and shoving him toward the wall. Back the way they’d come, the corridor suddenly lit up with muzzle flashes.
Campra lifted his machine pistol and opened fire. Brass tumbled out of the gun. Instinctively, Laframboise brought up his pistol and added to the thunder and lightning, but he was only firing into the mass of muzzle flashes and didn’t see any actual targets. The pistol bucked in his fist.
His men fell, torn to rags by withering fire. The ambush had caught them all off guard. The muzzle flashes lit up the tunnels and threw impossible shadows against the walls one moment, then ripped them away in explosions of light the next.
Laframboise fired his pistol dry, then tried to reload. He stood behind Campra, partly shielded by the man’s bulk. Then Campra fell back on him, taking him down with his dead weight. Laframboise hit the ground hard. His elbow struck stone and he felt the pistol squirt from his fingers. He lay on his side and stretched for it, trying desperately to get his fingers a
round the butt.
When he realized he wasn’t going to reach it, Laframboise twisted and sat up, pushing himself forward with one hand while he reached for Campra’s machine pistol with the other. Campra’s head turned with a sickening looseness. In the light from a nearby dropped flashlight, Laframboise saw the bullet wounds in Campra’s eye and throat. Blood streaked the man’s face.
He curled his fingers around the machine pistol and started to haul the weapon up. A black-garbed figure dashed forward and kicked Laframboise in the face.
Knocked backward, senses spinning, he struggled to hang on to consciousness. His head felt too big, wobbly, and his neck felt as if it was trying to support a pumpkin. A bright light in his eyes blinded him.
“Jean-Baptiste Laframboise.” The voice was harsh and foreign. French was not the speaker’s native tongue. “Can you hear me?”
He blinked until he could see Puyi-Jin. The Asian warlord was in his fifties, a grim-faced man with hazel eyes. His black hair was graying at the temples.
“I hear you.” Laframboise licked his lips and tasted blood.
“Where is Annja Creed?”
“She dove into the water. The tunnel’s submerged.” Laframboise didn’t want to answer, but he didn’t want to die, either.
You will never see the treasure.
He tried to screw up the courage to grab for the machine pistol again, or maybe to spit in Puyi-Jin’s face. But his mouth was so dry he couldn’t manage it.
“You should not have betrayed me.” Puyi-Jin pointed his pistol.
“The lantern’s cursed. That’s what made me to do it. The curse.” Laframboise wanted to face death bravely, but he couldn’t. His teeth chattered. “If you go after it, the curse will get you, too.”
Puyi-Jin shook his head. “I do not believe in curses.” He squeezed the trigger.
Bullets hit Laframboise in the face, then darkness closed in around him.
* * *
ANNJA SWAM THROUGH THE water, her flashlight barely lighting her way. Then she saw two figures in the water ahead of her, backlit by a flood of lights in the tunnel on the other side. She could barely make out Fiona. As she came up for a breath, the other woman grabbed her arm and pushed her back under. Muted gunshots echoed through the water.
Edmund was beside Fiona, also barely recognizable in the dark water. He wasn’t a strong swimmer. Annja pulled him past her, then grabbed his belt and swam on top of him, dragging him along at a faster clip since she had the fins. A moment later, he started flailing in panic.
Realizing that Edmund thought he was about to drown, Annja took the Spare Air mouthpiece from between her teeth and passed it over to him. The short hose just reached to him. He shoved the mouthpiece between his teeth. Annja kicked strongly with her flippers and got him going again.
Twenty or thirty seconds later, she angled up and the three of them were safely on the other side.
Annja shone her flashlight over them. Fiona’s face was bruised and swollen, but she was concentrating on the machine pistol she’d brought with her. Water drained from the barrel and the empty magazine space. She held the magazine in her other hand.
The gunfire continued sporadically.
“What’s going on?” Annja kicked her flippers off and wished she had her boots.
“Laframboise’s men were following us.” Fiona held up the machine pistol’s magazine and checked the load. The magazine was taped to another. She reversed the magazine and shoved the other one back into the weapon.
“How did they follow us?”
“Let’s figure that out later.” Fiona glanced around. “Does this tunnel continue?”
“No. It’s a dead end.”
Fiona cursed. “Not good.”
The gunfire ceased.
“Laframboise and his people aren’t shooting one another.” Annja led them toward the room where she’d found the obelisk.
“I think Puyi-Jin and his people arrived.” Edmund looked pallid in the dark. “I didn’t see much because Fiona grabbed me by the shirt and hurled me into the water, but the men I saw looked Asian.”
“One thing was for certain.” Fiona flicked on a flashlight attached to the machine pistol. “We couldn’t stay there.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “I should think Puyi-Jin’s men will be along shortly.”
A single gunshot rang out.
Annja glanced back and spotted light dawning in the darkness of the flooded tunnel. Swimmers were on their way. “Come on. Dutilleaux managed to hide a room. If we can get there, we might be able to hide, too.”
Annja guided them into the room, then turned and forced the door closed. She shut off her flashlight because she didn’t want the glow leaking around the door. For a moment all she could hear was Fiona and Edmund’s ragged breathing in the darkness.
Then they heard footsteps out in the hall. Voices filtered through a moment later.
Annja couldn’t tell how many voices there were. The sounds were too confusing and her hearing was blunted from the gunshots. Certainly there were more than three opponents. She stood behind Fiona, who held her captured machine pistol at the ready. Quietly, Annja reached for the sword and pulled it into the chamber.
Someone spoke in Chinese, angry and commanding.
Fiona whispered just loud enough to be heard. “That must be Puyi-Jin, or perhaps one of his lieutenants. He doesn’t believe we’ve disappeared.”
Light glared along the bottom of the hidden door. Annja focused on keeping calm. They could see the light on this side of the door, but the men on the other side couldn’t see the crack.
Water dripped from Annja’s wet clothes, curling around her ankles and running between her toes. Suddenly she knew that their hiding place wasn’t going to remain secret for long. With all their wet clothing, they’d left a trail.
“Let’s hope they muddied our tracks with theirs before anyone noticed,” she whispered in Fiona’s ear. “The door will only come into the room a couple feet. For just a moment, they’re going to be trapped there.”
“Good. It will give us a temporary kill box. I’ll make the most of it.” Fiona adjusted her grip on the machine pistol.
Annja waited tensely. The men out in the hallway stopped talking and things got quiet.
Then a deafening blast ripped through the chamber and the secret door flew into chunks of debris that ricocheted off the walls. Light flashed and ripped away the darkness for a moment. The concussive wave knocked Annja backward off her feet. She lost the sword and it vanished. She barely clung to her senses as vertigo slammed through her and sickness twisted her stomach. She swallowed to ease the pressure in her ears.
Dizzy, she tried to get to her feet to pull the sword back. Before she could, an Asian man dressed in black pressed a pistol against the back of her head.
“Move and you die.”
Annja remained still, struggling just to stay on her feet even with the man holding her.
Only a few feet away, Fiona tried to get up, as well. Her hand flashed out for the machine pistol, but one of the men in black kicked the weapon away. Her opponent pointed his weapon at Fiona’s face and Annja knew he was going to pull the trigger.
A man’s voice barked out of the darkness.
The other man pulled back his weapon, then grabbed a handful of Fiona’s hair and yanked her roughly to her feet.
Edmund quietly got to his feet and stared at their captors. Eight men all dressed in black stood in the room. All of them heavily armed.
The man Annja figured must be Puyi-Jin strode in and trailed a flashlight around the room. She recognized him from his pictures. He gave orders and, within seconds, the men had lanterns set up around the room.
Most were trained on the obelisk.
The Asian crime boss surveyed it in silence for a long moment. Then he turned back to Annja. “Miss Creed.”
The man holding Annja jerked her forward to within arm’s reach of Puyi-Jin.
“You are surprised to see me here?” Puyi-Jin
smiled broadly, but there was nothing friendly in his expression. “You found your way into Shanghai very easily, but I have informants among airport customs. I knew when you arrived, and I knew when you left. Following you here was child’s play. I had men on the flight with you.”
Annja wasn’t about to give the man the satisfaction of a reply.
He shrugged. “The only thing I want to know from you, Miss Creed, is where Tsai Chien-Fu’s treasure is.”
Annja glared at him.
Puyi-Jin motioned to the man holding Edmund captive. The warrior pulled out a sharp blade and pressed it against Edmund’s throat, slicing just enough to draw blood.
“Now, Annja, I want to know the location of that treasure.”
Reluctantly, Annja thrust her chin at the obelisk. “This is what I found when I got here. Evidently the treasure’s gone. Maybe the Qianlong Emperor’s assassins got it when they tracked and killed Dutilleaux in the catacombs.”
“No.” Puyi-Jin’s hazel eyes glittered. “I would know that if it had happened. I know the story of the captain assigned to bring Anton Dutilleaux back to Shanghai—with the things Tsai Chien-Fu took from the Qianlong Emperor. One of his assassins killed Anton Dutilleaux before locating the treasure. The captain himself was killed when he returned to Shanghai. The Qianlong Emperor had no mercy for those who failed.”
Annja’s ears still rang from the explosion. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as Fiona and Edmund were brought closer. Fiona was measuring the opposition, memorizing the locations of the men and their weapons. Edmund was staring at the obelisk.
“The treasure has not left this room.” Puyi-Jin gazed at the stacks of bones and at the obelisk. “It remains here, and you must find it.”
The man holding Annja released her with a shove. She held out a hand. “I need a flashlight.”
One of the warriors passed her a flashlight.
Annja switched on the beam and approached the obelisk. She studied the carvings, trying to make sense of them. The dragons, koi, ghosts and foxes didn’t appear to have any real order.