by A D Davies
Her movement dislodged her hand on the knife—on Phil’s knife—sweat slipping away the last of her grip. As if gravity paused in its effects on her, she found the strength to bend her legs against the rock face.
The book fell through the air, dropping now.
Charlie let go of Phil’s knife and sprang out. At full stretch, she flung both arms forward. Her long, dark hair whipped behind with the strength of the jump.
The book fell faster than expected, just out of reach... except...
Its flat pages seemingly slowed its descent. Air resistance. Reducing its speed under Charlie’s dive.
Oh, physics, you teasing minx, you.
Charlie snagged the very end of the open book, wrenching her knuckles as she grasped it. The ancient pages tore slightly, but her fingers became talons, holding on with a superhuman effort that surfaced through sheer willpower—a desperate-to-live surge of strength and adrenaline. Her fingers jarred, but she held on, swinging toward the black wall ahead.
Before she hit, she needed to switch her finger grip to wrap her whole hand around the tight material above the knot. If she didn’t, the impact would jar her loose, and she’d die.
After the initial thump over the edge, Harpal felt Charlie’s weight yank out all the slack. Dan shored up the anchor, joining Harpal and Bridget to await the impact. She slapped into this side of the hole, dragging them all forward.
Safe.
Ish.
Dan and Harpal dug their feet in, Bridget hanging off Harpal’s waist to add that little extra mass. As soon as the swing stabilized, Dan pulled at her, hand over hand, sweat radiating as his effort literally doubled.
A rip sounded.
Dan said, “Hold tight.”
It was unclear whether he meant Harpal or Charlie, but he dived forward, landing belly first, hanging his shoulders and arms over the edge. Harpal bent his legs, arms able only to cement the lifeline in place, not haul her up.
Dan leaned all the way over, almost to his hips, the rest of him bent into the chasm.
The rope went slack, and Harpal fell back, landing on top of Bridget, who shrieked as she hit the bookcase behind. By the time they untangled themselves, Dan was lying on his back, breathing heavily, and Charlie propped herself on all fours, gasping, grinning, verging on laughing.
“Charlie?” came Toby’s voice. “Talk to me, Charlie.”
She inhaled deeply, but only coughed in response.
“She’ll be with you in a minute,” Harpal said. “We’re all okay.”
Like the others, Dan knew all about Phillip Lock’s injuries, inflicted while on duty with LORI. He also knew Charlie and he had been lovers beforehand, and she married him soon after he left the hospital, promising to settle down. But Toby and Harpal were Phil’s friends, too, so even with a fledgling family to look after, he couldn’t demand that Charlie abandon LORI when they needed her.
After learning of this incident, perhaps he would. And Dan would back him on that.
When Dan took over Phil’s role in the group, Phil made him promise to study everything they did wrong prior to his injury, because it wasn’t only the point man, the military and tactical expert, who could suffer if things went sour. And, of course, Dan’s promise extended to protecting his charges with his life.
Now, with his pants back on—having torn a little on the seam—Dan sat, with Charlie hobbled beside him, using his shoulder for support, and he ran that scenario through his head: explaining to Phil why his wife, mother to their three kids, would never be coming home again. Why it was unlikely there’d even be a body to bury.
“We can jump,” Charlie had suggested of the six-foot gap between the library and the door that stood open enough to crawl under.
“The ledge on the other side is only a couple of feet wide,” Dan said. “We can make the jump, easy, but landing there, we’ll fall back into the hole. Nothing to hold on to.”
Bridget agreed, as did Toby, which left Harpal’s vote void, but he voiced no objection, so Dan figured he was on the same page. They decided to attempt a different route.
Reaching the exit back into Thomas’s room, all sat on the floor exhausted. Crashing from the adrenaline as much as the physical drain. Although Charlie came off worst in that respect.
“You should go back,” Dan said. “Stay with Toby.”
“Yeah, okay,” Charlie replied, although her tone made it clear she wasn’t going anywhere.
Dan exhaled through his nose and said, “Seriously, Charlie. You nearly bought it back there. I didn’t predict it, and we barely pulled you out.”
“But you did pull me out.” She leaned in to him and placed one hand on his knee. “And we need to get something else out of here. It’s more important than any one of us. Clear?”
Dan shifted his attention to the other exit. “Think we can get door number two open?”
Door number two hung opposite the library entrance within Saint Thomas’s crypt and was constructed of wood. A heavy slab maintained by people with more advanced skills than first-century priests. The settlers from Kerala, their descendants, clearly looked after the person they believed was their founder.
Following a swift session with the crowbar, the wooden panel, almost a foot thick, opened. There must have been another mechanism behind it, something with a counterweight, because after the initial breach, Dan and Harpal lifted it, backs against the surface. They propped it open with a wooden chest, and Dan ordered all flashlights extinguished; there were unfriendlies about, and their locations were unknown. A beam of light would be more than a tip-off.
Dan led the way, not even allowing Harpal to accompany him. “If I don’t make it back, drop the door and lead the others out.”
Harpal hadn’t liked it any more than he liked his role as the rear guard, but it was even more important now that the others survived. If Valerio escaped, someone would need to track him down.
Dan flicked off his own headlamp, waiting for his eyes to adjust somewhat, and crawled under the raised door. In the tiny room, reminding him of an entry hall, he stood to his full height. Ahead, the walls narrowed but remained just wide enough for him to squeeze through.
Beyond this, a passage presented itself, a corridor of sorts, illuminated by a weak light source. As he reached the edge of the aperture, he heard voices. Not a language he recognized, but they were deep, rough sounding, muted.
They didn’t want to be heard too obviously.
Which meant they were close.
Dan pricked his ears; determined their direction was to his right, toward the light source; and slid his head out to spy out who he was up against.
The two men crouched with guns aimed up the corridor, obviously guarding against any incursion from the same direction they entered. Their main light source was glow sticks, although they also wielded gun-mounted flashlights.
To his left, deeper into the dark, the path sloped down, underground. The militiamen were his main concern, though.
Dan estimated the daylight was half a mile away, a blob uncovered by the explosives they heard earlier. He also spotted a pack at the men’s feet; cylindrical, tightly wrapped, the length of Dan’s forearm, with a rectangular box on top.
Explosives?
Surely they’d be better off setting charges in places to cause maximum damage like... like crevasses in the wall.
Dan then looked at his feet. The faint light outlined another package down there.
Right.
He retreated through the passage and back into the now-darkened room. He flicked on his headlamp and got Harpal to help him lower the door silently. Once done, they turned on the bigger bulbs, returning light to the room.
“I think I can confirm they’re not interested in Saint Thomas himself,” he said. “The whole place is wired. But we’re on the right level. We can’t follow the same route Jules took. And it’s heading down into the hill.”
Bridget stared at the closed door. “If we can’t go that way, how do we carry on?�
��
Dan pointed into the library. “That way. We need to make a bridge. One way or another, we’re learning what’s out there.”
Part Seven
Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion —Calvin Coolidge
The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies —Napoleon Bonaparte
Where is all the knowledge we lost with information? —T. S. Elliot
Chapter Forty-Eight
Logic dictated the most important business occurred at the center of... whatever the heck this was. Jules still hadn’t allocated it a name. Valerio had been calling it a cathedral, but Jules now accepted it predated any religion modern man had ever heard of. Besides, it was far bigger than any church, cathedral, or temple. More comparable to an underground city. If designed to lord over the dead, perhaps it was a giant acropolis.
Thanks to the blazing light, their path no longer depended on electricity, and whatever fuel burned did so at a far cooler temperature than gas or alcohol. The flames were blue in places, tipped with yellow and orange. That’s not to say it wasn’t warm—like a sauna, but not close to wandering through a burning building.
Or a burning city for that matter.
They admired the twenty-foot statues and needles, the slabs and pillared boxes that may have been habitable once upon a time.
“It’s like different folks built each of these,” Jules commented.
“Offerings,” Valerio agreed. “Some advanced carvings, others architecture, all of it unique from the others.”
Horse remained on alert as if someone threatened to scurry from a building or a statue might come to life and bite someone’s head clean off. He stopped by a column standing alone. “This looks Greek.”
“And that looks Egyptian.” Jules referred to a man-size humanoid with the head of what may have been a dog or a squat lizard.
They made it to the foot of the stairs leading to the central pavilion three stories above. It looked almost Aztec in nature, a simpler, miniature Machu Picchu-type pyramid. Horse and the Ravi brothers scouted around the base, then all three ran up the stairs, guns aimed ahead as if breaching some terrorists’ safe house.
Valerio sweated profusely.
“You okay?” Jules asked.
“A bit out of breath. This exercise...” Valerio coughed, hacking from the base of his lungs. “This smoke isn’t helping. Ingenious ventilation, but... nothing’s perfect.” He coughed again.
Jules tried not to feel sorry for the guy. Murderous rampages tend to stick in the mind even when a person is laid low, barely able to lift his head.
Horse returned, calling from halfway up. “All clear.”
Once again, Valerio set the pace, a mooching plod when Jules wanted to run, sprint all the way up, like Rocky Balboa during a training montage.
A wheeze, another coughing fit.
Horse came to help, Jules unwilling to touch the man who’d brought him to the verge of answering every question he’d been able to summon.
On the top step, Valerio sat, gazing out over the flickering cityscape. The Ravis stood sentry at either end of the platform while Horse stuck close to Valerio. Jules remained standing, a 360-degree view, enough to note that Horse must have issued an order to take the high ground.
A gunman was now posted at each of the three staircases leading to a door at the pinnacle of the higher balconies. He was taking no chances with further ingress points no matter how unlikely.
Below, the layout resembled a maze, a crisscrossing labyrinth of streets lined with art and engineering feats. A collection of sorts, reminding Jules of a...
It can’t be.
No way.
Nothing’s that simple, is it?
The ground seemed to sway ever so slightly, and like Valerio, Jules had to sit to catch his breath. He checked his logic again, fired it through all he’d learned—the pictograms, the frescos—and assuming Valerio only got a fraction of his interpretations right, Jules found his own conclusion sound.
. . . awarding the finder untold power. The knowledge of the world.
Ultimate knowledge.
Forging history... or forged in history.
“The Mongolians dated the Ruby Rock bangle to between thirty and fifty thousand BC,” Jules said. “The curator you murdered, Amir, he was certain, but... it sounded like crap.” His head buzzed, thick with conflicting notions, what he knew, what he learned, what this place indicated. “If those frescos are right, they predicted the flood from melting ice—”
“Yes, at a time when humans were supposedly struggling to use flint to cut animal hide.” Valerio was perking up. “The only possibility, if true, is that they explored the north, which had been covered in ice for all their lifetime, observed melting, and when they saw the sea encroaching on coastal cities, they worked it out. Doesn’t need satellites or fancy instruments. Just willpower and brains.” He coughed again—five big, dry hacks—then thumped his chest before resuming his calm outer shell. “Are you starting to believe?”
“What if this place is a record?” Jules’s frown pressed deep into his skin, unable to believe his own words. “Like a museum. If they knew civilizations’d be swamped but couldn’t know the extent of the flooding on its way... a stupidly huge door that repels saltwater when the right person touches it... the different architecture... all of it.”
His head spun. This was too much. He couldn’t accept it blindly. Where was the actual proof? The empirical evidence? Plus:
“How’d they get it up here, smartass?” Horse asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Valerio answered quickly.
Too quickly.
“You know,” Jules said. “You know how they did it. Don’t you?”
Valerio stood shakily. “Let’s see what we have here.”
Jules wasn’t getting an answer, so he simply complied and followed Valerio to the pavilion where four pillars held a square slab aloft, as wide and long as a family car. Beneath, a pool shimmered in the firelight. The water sat in a deep, roughly hewn depression. It was gray with a faintly colorful film, a stagnant pond. Dead insects bobbed on the surface, a blanket of beetles, spiders, millions of flies and mosquitoes.
Horse scratched his head. “I don’t get it, boss. How is that still here? After even a year, it’d evaporate or bleed off someplace. If no one’s been here for centuries...”
“Maybe the instruction manual will tell us.” Valerio crouched to a knee-high plinth where a stone tablet lay upon it like a Bible before a priest. He wiped a layer of dust from the surface, then produced a soft-bristle brush that fit in the palm of his hand and dug out the last of the dirt without damaging the surface.
It was infused with etchings depicting the language they’d witnessed a couple of times now—columns rather than rows, scratches and shapes rather than pictographs.
Valerio beamed. “Their own language.”
“Just how much did you have translated?” Jules asked. “And how?”
“A bit of guesswork, a bit of human input, and a supercomputer back in Ladoh did the rest. Those Indian graduates really are very smart.”
“A supercomputer.” Jules stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Why does that feel like cheating somehow?”
Valerio dipped his hand in the pool, then withdrew it and shook it off. “Here.” With his dry hand, he tossed the stone plate to Jules who caught it.
Surprised how light it was, Jules expected it to glow, but nothing happened. “What do I do with this?”
“Give it to Horse.”
Jules obeyed. “What now?”
“The healing powers of this pool reflect many of Jesus’s own miracles, so with the artifacts in hand, it wasn’t hard for Thomas to persuade the local scholars or incoming pilgrims that this place and Thomas’s religion shared an origin: God. This is God’s pool.”
Jules pulled back and swallowed. “You wanna drink that, be my guest.”
“Oh good lord, no, it’s not for drinking.” Valerio rubbed his chin. “Now take off your shirt, handsome.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Bridget felt terrible about dismantling an artifact as important as Saint Thomas’s desk, but its top section would allow them to progress—it was sufficient to reach over the hole, light enough to transport without industrial machinery, and able to hold their weight.
This latter condition was subject to much debate, mainly surrounding the notion that two-thousand-year-old wood could survive that long. It had been treated with oils, though, a blend of Bronze Age varnish, and did not appear to bend when they propped it against the wall and each person pressed their body weight onto it.
Having carried it through the library, they laid it across the chasm that had almost swallowed Charlie, more than wide enough, with almost a foot of purchase on either side.
“I’ll go first,” Dan said.
“No argument here.” Harpal stood aside.
“Bridget goes first,” Charlie said.
Bridget turned cold but said nothing. They lit the scene with the camping-style lamps that had brightened Thomas’s crypt. The effect here was less, but they could see all they needed, from this part of the library to the door Charlie had cranked.
“There’s a foot of grace either side,” Charlie added, referencing the amount of wood that met the ground on both ends. “That’s six-to-seven feet of relying on the molecules to hold together. After centuries of lying inert, I reckon giving it the biggest shock is the wrong move. Introduce weight to it slowly. Bridget’s the lightest, then Harpal, then me, then Dan.”
“I’m not heavier than you?” Harpal sounded insulted.
Charlie smoothed her hands over her hips. “I’m still fitter, Harps. But you squeeze out three kids and try to weigh the same as a twenty-year-old.”
Harpal held up his hands. “I’ll take your word for it.”