That would have explained the hours they’d hung around after the killings. Any kind of a sizeable haul of gold would take as long to lug up to ground level as a truckload of beer. Maybe even longer, depending on how much of it there was to shift. Maybe there’d been so much gold that one bar dropped here or there didn’t make any difference.
Maybe so much of it that the killers had begun to argue among themselves. Hence the dead guy in the cloister. There wasn’t always honour among thieves.
Ben moved on a few more yards towards the carved-out cavern he’d visited two days ago with Roby. Two days ago wasn’t a long time for someone who tended to notice small details the way Ben did. And while he could have sworn that the passage walls and ceiling had been smooth and undamaged before, now he was noticing a widespread lacework of cracks and fissures, some only hairline, others wide enough to stick his thumb into, on both sides and above his head. The dust underfoot was deeper and his boots crunched on small pieces of stone that had been dislodged from gaps that hadn’t been there before. Ben might have been worried about it, if he hadn’t had worse things to worry about.
Now the passage opened out into the cavern that had been dug out of the rock. The place Père Antoine hadn’t wanted to talk about. Where Ben had found the skull, and the section of brickwork that walled off the way ahead. The skull was still there, crushed from the rock Ben had dumped on it. It lay half-buried in fresh dust, from the cracks that had opened up everywhere. Next to it lay a fourth gold bar, apparently dropped in the same careless way as the last, gleaming dully in the light from Ben’s torch-phone. But he paid it only a moment’s attention, because he was distracted by a far bigger discovery.
The partition wall blocking off the cavern wasn’t there any more. It had been blown away.
Chapter Sixteen
Ben held his light up at eye level and examined the hole where the brickwork had been. It was almost perfectly circular, about five feet in diameter, a circumference of just under sixteen feet as neatly blasted away as anything he had ever seen. The rubble lay scattered about on both sides of the hole. It looked as though a giant bullet had punched right through the wall.
Now Ben understood the cause of the cracks he’d noticed in the walls and ceiling of the passage leading up to it. Only one kind of munitions could have produced such a perfect hole. A shaped charge. Plastic explosive, wired in place and remotely detonated. That wasn’t exactly the kind of hardware you could get via mail order. And whoever had rigged it was some kind of artist. It must have been a delicate operation. A fraction too much charge, and he could have brought the whole mountain down on top of himself and his team. Ben could still smell the faint tang of cordite from the explosion.
The tracks in the dust headed right through the hole. Evidently, whatever they’d come for lay beyond. Ben ducked and clambered over the rubble and followed the tracks into the blackness.
The first thing that hit him was the smell. The air had been trapped in here for who knew how many centuries, but that alone couldn’t explain the sickening rankness of the stench that made Ben want to gag almost at the first breath. He pulled up the hem of his shirt and clamped it tightly over his nose and mouth as a rudimentary filter. It helped, but only slightly. He took a few more steps inside and cast the light around him. Its glow didn’t reach the sides, and there was no telling how big the space around him was. The ground sloped away gently, rough and stony. He advanced one cautious step at a time, feeling his way. He could have done with a brighter light, and was certain that the intruders had come a little better equipped than he was. Head-torches, maybe, or six-cell Maglites enhanced with LED bulbs that could slice through the murk as well as a car headlamp. His light was beginning to dim as the phone’s battery faded. Now and then it gave a little flicker, and its colour was yellowing. He might have ten more minutes before it gave out entirely, or he might have five. Either way, it wasn’t reassuring. He could smell and hear better than he could see.
What he could hear was the echo of his footsteps resonating inside the dark space, and something else. A scuttling sound, furtive and intermittent. He raised the light higher and ventured forward a few more steps. His right foot made contact with something soft and mushy. It felt like stepping into a pile of rotten fruit. He shone the light downward, saw the glutinous yuck he’d stepped in and smelled its awful stench through the material of his shirt. It was the decomposing flesh of something furry, half-eaten and extremely dead. Now he understood the cause of the stink in here, and he understood the scuttling noises that echoed all around him.
The place was full of rats. Hundreds of them, or thousands, everywhere. He saw their dark shapes flitting from shadow to shadow as they scattered and hid, disturbed by his presence. The chamber was strewn with their carcasses and bones. A few yards away lay the body of the biggest rat Ben had ever seen. It had to be two foot long from nose to tail, but what struck him more than its size was that it was deformed, twisted and apparently eyeless. They must have been living down here in the darkness for so many gener-ations that they’d lost their sight.
Ben had no great love for rats, but they possessed certain qualities it was hard not to admire in a morbid kind of way. When it came to survival skills, rats left humans far behind, simply because of their sheer adaptability. They could thrive in the very worst conditions, drink water that would poison most other creatures, devour things that not even a starving dog would go near. If required, cannibalism was not an issue for them. And that was how Ben realised they must have been living down here, subsisting off the flesh of their own kind. Which perhaps accounted for the deformities. Maybe eventually they would die out, given enough time, but they seemed to have managed to keep going for a few thousand generations at least. There must have been enough moisture in the dirt to keep them hydrated, just enough oxygen filtering in through minute cracks in the mountain to prevent asphyxiation. Millions of them, being born and surviving and dying and giving sustenance to their fellows, while the sorry saga of human history rolled meaninglessly onwards through the ages, above them and below them and all around them.
Ben lifted his boot from the stinking ooze he’d stepped in and moved deeper into the cavern, straining his eyes to see in the slowly, steadily dimming light.
Then he stopped and stood still and gazed at the sight that greeted him a little way further from the entrance.
A wide section of the cavern floor was covered with human bones. Mounds of them, several feet deep in places. Ribcages and fibias and tibias and sticks of spine and skulls, all piled and tangled up. It was impossible to tell how many skeletons were strewn among the rocks and the dust, because so few of them were still intact. They’d fallen apart with age, or been picked apart by rats. Many of the bones were partially eaten away. There was no telling how many must have been gnawed into calcium-rich dust by generations of sharp little rodent teeth. Maybe they were too ancient now to offer any nutritional value to the rats. Ben didn’t know. All he knew was that he was looking at the remains of an awful lot of people.
He stepped closer and shone his light down at the grisly boneyard. He knew how to tell a female skeleton from a male by the shape and relative width of the pelvic bone, and he could see female remains among the piled mass. Children’s bones were easier to tell apart, and he saw those, too. Then he looked more closely and saw more. Lengths of iron chain, red and pitted with corrosion, lay twisted and coiled among the human remains. Iron shackles were riveted at intervals along their length, still tightly clamped around the skeletal wrists and ankles of men, women and children alike. Iron plates bolted into the rock, with iron rings holding the chains securely to the floor. These people had been bound up like galley slaves.
You didn’t put the dead in irons.
And that was because this wasn’t a grave. The place told its own story. Once upon a time, many centuries ago, hundreds of men, women and children had been dragged in here alive, shackled in chains and then left to rot as the chamber was sealed shut beh
ind them. No food, no water. No light, little air. Maybe they’d survived a while, the way the rats had. Ben could almost hear their screams of desper-ation. How long had they echoed for, until they’d finally died away to the last whimper, and then to nothing at all?
The Church’s past is tainted by many sins, and to force good men to do evil in the name of God is but one of them.
Père Antoine’s words. Had the prior known about this place, about what was hidden behind the wall?
Whether he had or not, someone else had known something.
The skeletal remains apparently hadn’t been the only secret contents of the walled-up cavern. The gold had come from here, too.
And that was something that made absolutely no sense to Ben. None of it did, as he stood there in the darkness, staring at the pitiful spectacle all around him and trying to understand.
His light was fading for real now, slowly dying from white to yellow to amber. The little halo around him was shrinking, and the darkness was encroaching all around him like a black fog, slowly enough to allow his vision to adapt.
And in the midst of the fog, a tiny movement caught his eye and made him turn. Not a movement, but a small blinking glow of light.
A series of red light-emitting diodes. A row of digits. Glowing faintly from an unseen panel somewhere in the darkness. A decidedly non-medieval device. One that someone had left behind not very long ago.
Counting down.
Counting down very rapidly, tenths of a second ripping into seconds, rolling into minutes. Minutes that had already run out.
The digital readout showed:
00:00:16:08.
In the time it took for Ben to blink and realise what he was seeing, the numbers raced on downwards. Now the panel showed:
00:00:15.57—
—Time to move. Now.
Ben turned and ran through scattered bones and splashed through rotting filth and sprinted for the entrance faster than he’d ever moved in his life.
And then the cavern blew.
Chapter Seventeen
It blew with a shattering detonation and a shock wave of expanding superheated gases that instantly vaporised the contents of the cavern, both the dead and the living. The whole mountain rocked with the violence of the blast. First the explosion, then the implosion as the cavern fell in on itself. An avalanche of car-sized pieces of rubble came crashing down. Millions of tons of stone and dust tumbled and poured and slid and obliterated everything as the walls and ceiling gave way under the vast weight that had been bearing down on them for centuries. The neatly blasted-out circular entrance of the cavern collapsed like a giant mouth snapping shut, swallowing up everything that had been inside it seconds before.
Ben just made it through the hole before the roof came crashing down. The shock wave saved him, and almost killed him at the same time. It lifted him off his feet and propelled him out of the exploding cavern, all arms and legs. Tumbled him through the air and cannoned him against the rocky wall of the passage and flung him down on his side, knocking the wind out of him. The dragon’s breath of the blast erupted from the cavern, close enough to sear his skin. Just as it seemed as if the fireball would engulf him, the collapsing ceiling swallowed the explosion. Then, suddenly, deafening silence.
The air was filled with dust and smoke. Scorched, battered, stunned and blinded, barely knowing if he was dead or alive, Ben somehow scrambled to his feet and ran, utterly convinced that the whole rock tunnel was going to fall in and bury him down here for all eternity. But he kept running anyway, feeling the way ahead, blinking dust out of his eyes and coughing up the crap that filled his lungs, stumbling over the uneven ground, scraping his shoulders and elbows against the rough walls as he sprinted like a crazy man through the darkness. Showers of dust and stones rained down on him as he went. He couldn’t tell whether the ground was still shaking, or whether he was just unsteady on his feet.
He kept going. No fear, no restraint. No thoughts at all, just pure animal energy driving him forwards through the darkness, his muscles working like pistons and his heart thudding like a demented thing that threatened to burst out of his chest. And the ceiling didn’t come down to bury him. He made it through the twists and turns of the passage, and then to the fallen gold bar. This time he did trip over it, and tumbled headlong. He landed hard on his hands and heaved himself up with barely a pause, and kept running, upwards and upwards towards the light and the air. Then suddenly he could breathe, and see.
The glare of the sun hit him in the face as he reached ground level. Ben burst out of the doorway, caught it with his shoulder, spun and fell in a wheezing heap in the dirt. It took a few seconds before he fully realised that he’d made it out alive. Or just about. His hair was singed and the skin on his left cheek felt tender where the heatwave of the blast had scorched it, his hands were cut and bleeding and embedded with grit, and every muscle in his body was screaming in agony. He sat up and leaned against a wall, wiped the stinging dust out of his eyes and coughed up more of it that he’d swallowed. All the time, he was thinking furiously.
The killers had used a shaped charge to blow through the cavern wall, only to take what was inside and then plant a second, delayed, much bigger charge to seal the cavern off again.
Why would they do that?
Right now, he had no idea.
He rested five minutes, then another five, until his breathing had settled and he was convinced he had no major injuries. Just dozens of minor ones. Which was fine. He was functional, and that was all he needed to be.
Smoke was drifting from the doorway leading to the underground passages as he gathered himself up, dusted himself off and began walking back down the cloister. He was dizzy and nauseous, and a loud constant whine had set up in his ears from the explosion. He could see in his mind the faces of the dead. Roby, Père Antoine, all of them. He should have been able to do more for them. Many had been his friends, and many more he knew he’d have befriended if he’d been able to spend more time with them.
He couldn’t bury them. It would take him a month on his own with a shovel. The cops would have to deal with the clean-up. Ben felt obliged to call them in, but he didn’t intend to be here to face questioning when they turned up. Nor did he have a lot of confidence in their ability to sort out what the hell had happened here. Generally speaking, and for a variety of reasons that could be more or less summed up as professional differences, Ben and police officers didn’t mix well. It might have had something to do with the fact that he tended to obtain results, when they tended to fail. On occasion, it might also have had something to do with the kinds of methods he employed to get those results, which they didn’t always appreciate.
Ben limped back to his personal quarters, knowing he was seeing them for the last time. The first thing he did was use a rag to wipe down every surface he’d ever touched. Sooner or later, the monastery was going to be the subject of a major crime investigation, and the last thing he needed was for the cops to know he’d been here. With his past record, he was the perfect patsy for frustrated local detectives looking for someone to pin this on. Once he was satisfied that all his prints were erased, he gathered his few possessions and stuffed them inside his canvas bag, then slung it over his shoulder and left with a final glance at the rooms that had been his home.
After that, he headed back to the cloister where the dead shooter was still sitting exactly where Ben had left him, minding the two gold bars. Ben relieved him of them and put them in his own bag along with the rest of his stuff. The extra kilos hung uncomfortably from his bruised shoulder as he returned to the main yard, threading a path between the scattered bodies of the monks. The crow was back, continuing the meal Ben had interrupted earlier. He felt like flinging a stone at it, then reasoned that it had as much right to survive as anyone else.
With a painful effort, Ben hauled himself into the truck’s cab, dumped his heavy bag on the passenger seat and then started up the engine. It sounded quieter than before, but that was
only because he was a little deaf after the blast. He forced the gearstick into first, touched the gas and the truck lumbered deeper into the yard. He brought it to a halt, crunched the stick into reverse and twisted the huge ship’s wheel to U-turn right around to face the gates, then straightened up the wheels and turned round in his seat to look out of the rear window as the truck backed up with a nasal transmission whine. He reversed as far as he could towards the buildings, careful not to let the knobbly tyres run over any of the dead monks. Leaving the diesel running in neutral, he jumped down from the cab, walked back to the dead shooter and grabbed him by the collar. ‘You didn’t think I was going to leave without you, did you?’ he said as he started dragging the body towards the truck.
It was a short drag and the guy wasn’t terribly heavy. Ben slalomed him in between the drying blood pools, then when they reached the truck he let go of the dead man’s collar and his forehead smacked limply to the ground. Ben undid the ties holding the tonneau cover down to the truck’s flatbed on one side, then turned back to the body. Rolled him over with his foot, bent over him and grabbed him by both arms to yank him into a sitting position before heaving him upright. The dead man’s knees kept giving way, and Ben supported him like a drunk carried from a wild party. He slammed him against the side of the truck’s flatbed and let his upper body topple backwards through the loose canvas, then bent down and grabbed his ankles and lifted both floppy legs off the ground, one after the other. With some twisting and heaving, he managed to get the body lying flat on the pitted wooden cargo bed.
The Martyr’s Curse (Ben Hope, Book 11) Page 9