by K. T. Tomb
“The less you knew, the better off you were,” she grinned, summarizing what I’d told her the night before when she’d pressed me for more information about what we were after. “I suppose you can tell me what we’re after now?”
There wasn’t much point in keeping it secret from her any longer. She was going to see the map soon enough; that is, if Ishi and I could find it. “We’re after something called the Map of the Masons.”
“Seriously? You mean, the Masonic Order, Illuminati and all that?”
“Yeah. See why I didn’t want to tell you?”
“Makes sense why somebody tried to nab you yesterday, but keeping me in the dark wasn’t really gonna help your cause much, Nick. The minute they saw me with you, they would automatically associate me with you and your little adventure. They probably thought that we’d gone into the cave and already gotten the map.”
“Probably,” I shrugged. “Of course, I got to see you go all Yoda on them.”
“Yesterday it was ninja.”
“Yeah, but after I thought about it, it was more like that scene in Star Wars when Yoda went nuts all over Sidious.”
She ignored my observation and asked another question. “Why would Captain Morgan have the map?”
“Though there is a lot of mystery around it, the map is supposedly cut from the same stones as the stones used at Stonehenge. They were cut in Wales, which, coincidentally, is where Captain Morgan hailed from before becoming a privateer. Our information tells us that he brought the map here and buried it among his treasures.”
“It might not even be here then,” Cat responded. “I doubt that I’m the only one that knows about this place. There have been treasure hunters, some of them quite renowned and skilled in their work, who have come repeatedly looking for Captain Morgan’s treasure over the years. There have probably been hundreds who have searched the network of caves down here. For all we know, there might be a way in here from the surface.”
“I told you, Nick, somebody already found it and is using it as a foundation under their birdbath,” Ishi broke in.
“If there’s a way in here from the surface, why did we come in underwater?” I asked.
“Well,” Cat began. “For one, it’s a whole lot more discreet to come in the way that we did and two, it’s the only way I know about.”
“No arguing with that. So, have you explored the caves before as well?”
“Not a lot. I can find my way around enough to make it back here, but I don’t know the caves well.” Cat paused for a moment. She seemed to be trying to gather a mental picture of what she knew of the caves layout. “There are a lot of twists, turns, intersecting tunnels and a few pretty large rooms, but that’s about all I can tell you.”
“Take us to the large rooms,” Ishi suggested and then looked at me. “One of them has to be the key room, right?”
“We have to start somewhere,” I replied.
“Okay,” Cat said. “We could strip off all of this equipment and leave it here so we can move around better.”
We quickly shed all our scuba gear, slipped on the rubber beach shoes we’d carried in our packs along with water, snacks and other gear that we thought we might need to sustain us while we got to the map and recovered it.
“Lead on, fair maiden,” I said, with an exaggerated bow.
“You’re such a dork,” she giggled and started off into the cave.
“I have a very important question for you,” I said after we’d gone a little way into the cave. It really wasn’t a crazy question. Nearly every network of caves in which I’d found myself on my previous explorations had had creepy crawlies and other detestable vermin in them. “Are there any sorts of creatures lurking around in here?”
I couldn’t help but recall a certain uncharted tunnel Ishi and I had entered while being led by another beautiful woman. It seemed like a lifetime ago but the nefarious, genetically altered and very hungry beast we had encountered, was not something we would ever forget… not in a lifetime.
“Maybe some snakes, but probably just a few spiders.”
“Spiders? Oh, great.”
We’d traveled down one of the long tunnels for several minutes in silence and then Cat stopped and turned around.
“So, this map that we’re looking for is made out of rock?” she asked.
“Yes,” Ishi and I answered in unison.
“We’re surrounded by rock and we’re looking for a rock. That’s like hunting for a specific needle in a stack of needles.”
“Yes, but the rock we’re looking for is probably made of either dolerite or rhyolite,” Ishi replied.
“I wouldn’t know one or the other if I saw it,” Cat replied.
“Neither would I, actually,” I told her, leaning in close and using a low tone.
“The bluestones at Stonehenge are made up of either dolerite or rhyolite. They’re both igneous rocks and very different from the rocks here which are more of a volcanic variety.”
“So, we’re looking for a blue rock that is covered with the dust from these rocks,” Cat laughed.
“It might not be blue, actually,” Ishi responded.
“I think it’s pretty safe to say that your rock with a map on it is still here,” Cat said.
“That’s what we’re counting on,” I added, feeling a little left out of the conversation.
We continued down the corridor until it opened up into a larger room.
“This is one of three rooms like this that I know about. There might be others, but I don’t know what this key room you’re looking for would look like. Does it have some sort of key to unlock a door or something?” Cat asked.
“We don’t know what it looks like either,” I replied.
We scanned the room, our headlamps lighting up its features, which were minimal. There were three passages leading into or out of the room, depending on your perspective. One was the one that we had used to enter and there were two others. Ishi took out a paint stick and marked the wall beside the passage where we’d entered with a large one.
“So, which way, guide?” I asked.
“There’s another large room at the end of each of those tunnels,” Cat replied. “Pick your favorite.”
For no particular reason, we went into the tunnel on the right. After several minutes, just like Cat had promised, we arrived in another large cavern. It was similar to the one we’d left previously. We took the left tunnel. In the next tunnel, we went to the right, and then to the left and then… It was becoming pretty tedious.
“Do we have any idea what we’re looking for?” Cat asked another time. She’d posed the question in each of the large rooms.
“Something different. Anything different,” I responded. I was getting pretty tired of searching as well. “Ishi, got any ideas?”
“Not me,” he replied. “All we can do is keep looking until we find something different. It has to have something to do with a pentagram.”
“Do we know that for sure?” I asked. I’d agreed with the theory when we were studying the information we had, but I wasn’t seeing anything like that in reality.
“Well, there was a side tunnel back along one of the tunnels a couple of times back,” he said. “Maybe we should try it?”
“That would be something different,” Cat agreed. “Everything else has been pretty much the same.”
“Let’s do it,” I said, extending my hand toward Ishi, signaling for him to lead the way.
Chapter Fourteen
It was several tunnels back along our route before we came across the side tunnel that Ishi was talking about.
“Look,” he said. He was taking a much closer look at the opening than he had before. “This one has been tooled. It wasn’t formed naturally.”
“How can you tell?” Cat asked.
“It’s marked up with gouges and burns from having a pick, drills and blasting used to open it up,” I replied, showing Cat the markings that Ishi had found.
“This is probab
ly it. I don’t know why I didn’t check this out earlier. It would have saved us some time.”
“Sometimes you get into a rut,” Cat replied.
We followed Ishi down the tunnel and came to a large room. It was definitely different.
“This has to be the key room,” Ishi announced as he scanned our surroundings.
The room had five entrances. Between each of the entrances were other tunnels that had been caved in.
“Ten tunnels,” I said. “If at all we were looking for a pentagram. That could be five points of a star, could it not?”
“Not ten tunnels,” Ishi responded. “Five tunnels and five chambers that caved in or had been caused to cave in.”
“Okay, five tunnels and five chambers,” I admitted.
“Look at the geometric symmetry,” he responded. He knelt down and drew a pentagram in the dust on the floor. “What do you see?”
“A pentagram,” Cat replied.
“A pentagon,” I said.
“You’re both right. Each of the lines of the pentagon creates, when extended creates a point of the pentagram and each of the intersections of the pentagram’s lines creates an angle of the pentagon. Connect the points of the pentagram…” He drew lines connecting the points. “What did we create?”
“Another pentagon,” Cat replied.
“It can go on and on into infinity,” I whispered.
“This is why the pentagram has always been seen as either a good or evil symbol,” Ishi responded. He spread his arms and legs, looking like the anatomy maps that I remembered seeing, though I couldn’t really recall where. “Standing upright, like this, it symbolizes the order of creation, the five senses and the natural order of man. Turned upside down, however, it becomes a symbol of evil, creation out of order.”
“Okay, so what does that have to do with the map?” Cat asked.
“The pentagram and pentagon are symbols of the Masonic Order and several other orders related to them.”
“Cut to the chase, Ishi,” Cat said, becoming impatient. “What does all of this have to do with the map that we’re looking for?”
“I don’t know yet,” Ishi admitted, almost sounding defeated. He went to the center of the room and started scraping away the dust on the floor with his foot.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“A pentagram carved into the floor,” he replied.
“Sure, because people do that sort of thing,” Cat laughed.
“You do if you’re creating a treasure map,” I said, joining Ishi. We scraped aside a large portion of dust in the center of the room and hadn’t found anything. “Shouldn’t we have discovered one of the lines by now?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, pausing to scratch his head.
“Why do we need to find a key, again?” Cat asked.
“Remember what you said about hunting for a needle in a pile of needles?” I responded.
“Either one of the tunnels or one of the cave-ins is where we’ll find our map. Do you want to search all of them?”
“Gotcha.” Cat joined in clearing the dust on the floor.
We’d covered the entire room and found nothing carved into the floor.
“Now what?” Cat asked.
“It must not be the key room,” Ishi responded. He went to the tunnel where we’d entered and placed a ‘one’ next to it. He repeated the process with each of the five tunnels. “We’ll see where each of the tunnels lead.”
“That might take forever,” Cat pointed out.
“We can do three individually and then come back here if we find something or if it runs into an obstacle or a dead end and then we’ll do the fourth together.”
I shrugged. “That might work, as long as we don’t detour from our path and get lost.”
“We could time ourselves and come back after a certain amount of time,” Cat suggested.
We all had watches on. Since knowing how much time a diver has at a particular rate of oxygen usage, a diving watch was standard equipment for scuba diving.
“Let’s say, fifteen minutes before we turn back,” I suggested.
We all check our watches, and then each of us started down a different tunnel. I had gone ten minutes down the tunnel I was following neither finding anything of particular interest, nor what looked like an ending. I was staring at my watch and was considering turning back, when someone stepped out in front of me, shined a light in my eyes and said my name.
“Nicholas Caine,” a familiar voice from the day before said.
“Ah, hey, fancy meeting you here.” It was a stupid thing to say, but it was all that I could come up with on short notice.
“Where are your friends?” the female voice of the pair asked.
“Do you want another ass kicking?” I chuckled.
“Can it, smart ass,” the male said. “This time, we won’t mess around, we’ll just shoot you.”
“For what? I’m just a treasure hunter and I have to tell you that I’m not having much luck.”
“We know who you are and who you work for,” he responded. “Now, where’s the map?”
“I don’t have a map. I’m really just looking around. You know, rumors of Captain Morgan’s…”
“You know the map that we’re talking about; The Map of the Masons,” he snapped.
“Oh, that map,” I responded. “I haven’t found it yet. You’re welcome to join me, but take the light out of my eyes and put the guns away.”
“Yeah, right. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he chuckled, moving the light from shining in my face to illuminate the pistol in his hand. “You just turn around and go right back to where the others are. If anyone tries anything funny, we’ll shoot them dead.”
For a moment, as I walked along with a pistol pointed at my back, I considered leading them off down the first corridor we came to, but then it dawned on me. Ishi and Cat were going to meet me back in the main room after our time was up.
Depending on timing, I was either going to lead trouble to Ishi and Cat or lead my captors into a trap where Ishi and Cat could ambush them.
Chapter Fifteen
As I got closer to the key room, it dawned on me that I needed to come up with some way to warn the others of the danger I was in. I didn’t need them walking into a trap. Since I’d always used talking as a distraction, I figured that I might as well use it as a warning. After all, sound carried very well through the tunnels.
In the larger room, I started to turn around, careful to avoid making any sudden moves and keeping my hands in sight. There was no reason for me to get shot for being stupid.
“Look, put the gun down and let’s talk…” I didn’t finish the sentence because the man holding the gun moved up behind me and hit me in the head with it.
When I hit the ground and turned over, my headlamp was pointed at the ceiling. In the brief moment before the lamp was snatched off of my head and the gunman leaned down to whisper in my ear, I saw something and I knew exactly what it was.
“That sounded like a warning to me,” he whispered. “Try that again and I’ll shoot you. You just lie still now and try to behave yourself. Lacy and I will be back in those corridors waiting for your friends, understand?”
The gunman positioned the light far enough away that I couldn’t reach it and made it so that it kept me lit up; that way, it would be easy for him to shoot me if something happened. Needless to say, outside of getting back to the central room before Ishi and Cat, things hadn’t worked out exactly the way that I’d planned.
If I called out another warning, I’d be shot. If Ishi or Cat came rushing into the room to make an attack, I’d be shot; maybe one of them too. All I could do was wait and it wasn’t easy.
It wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in a situation where I was about to be shot, stabbed, have my head cut off or somehow otherwise disposed of. I had to think of a way out. I could usually create a distraction and then make my move, but that option had been taken away from me. This
was something entirely new; I was being used as the bait. All I could really do was hope that Cat, Ishi or both of them would come up with a plan.
Not having my light to examine the tunnel entrances, I wasn’t sure which tunnel the others were in. I knew that Cat went into the tunnel that was between the two that Ishi and I followed, but I wasn’t sure which one I’d gone into. I’d lost my orientation after being knocked down. I wasn’t sure if it would even help me to know where they were, but trying to figure it out was keeping my mind occupied and made me feel like I was doing something.
When I saw Ishi’s shadow as he crept up to the entrance of the tunnel he’d been in, I had to grit my teeth to keep from trying to warn him that it was a trap. Surely, after having been in so many situations before, he’d have already figured that out.
In the dim light, I could see him coming out of the tunnel and creeping along the wall as he tried to get a better idea of what was going on. In the next moment, I saw the gunman strike quickly from a nearby tunnel entrance, place his hand over Ishi’s mouth and place the muzzle of the pistol against his head as he whispered instructions. I saw Ishi’s head nodding.
Quietly, with the muzzle still pointed at the back of his head, the gunman brought Ishi to where I was and shoved him to the floor beside me. What happened next, wasn’t exactly what I’d expected, especially after seeing how easily Ishi had been captured.
Before the gunman could turn around, Cat appeared with the woman easily under control and with a pistol pointed at the woman’s temple.
“How about you hand over that gun to Nick before I decorate this cave with her brains?” Cat ordered.
God, I loved her, especially after the gunman turned the pistol around in his hand, extended it toward me butt first and then backed up slowly with his hands in plain sight.
“Ishi,” Cat ordered. “Check him for other weapons.”
Ishi recovered a small pistol from a holster on the man’s ankle.
“She probably has one too,” Cat said, moving further into the room, but not releasing her hostage until all was secure.