The Pandora Room: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  “You all right?” Sophie asked him.

  Martin smiled. “Not my best night.”

  Dr. Tang called for him to join her at the altar. Martin set the case on the floor, where Dr. Tang unzipped it, pulled back the cover, and revealed the vibrant aqua blue of Lamar’s Miami Dolphins sweatshirt.

  “Jesus,” Martin whispered. “He really did it.”

  Dr. Tang looked confused, but Sophie understood. They had seen Lamar trying to leave with the jar, but the presence of that sweatshirt meant it had not been completely spur of the moment. He had gone back to his quarters to fetch the sweatshirt to cushion the jar.

  Dr. Tang shifted backward and glanced at Sophie. Thus far, only Lamar had actually touched the jar, and the doctor was no archaeologist. It would be up to Sophie to move the artifact.

  Martin went to the plastic crate that Dr. Tang had called a contagion box. He opened the lid, reached inside and arranged the padding there, then looked expectantly at Sophie.

  “Here,” Dr. Tang said, taking a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of her hoodie. “Put these on.”

  Sophie exhaled. Her breath felt warm inside the mask, but her skin had gone cold. She tugged on the gloves, reached into the case, and unwrapped the jar, pushing aside the soft sweatshirt. Gently, she lifted the jar out, glad to have the gloves separating her skin from contact with the ceramic.

  “Well?” Dr. Tang prodded.

  Sophie lifted it to look at the base, turned it in her hands, satisfying herself that it was intact. They were dealing with legends here, but they only needed a single germ of reality for legend to become threat.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  Martin released a muffled sigh of relief inside his mask.

  Sophie crossed the few feet to Martin and knelt beside the contagion box. She set the jar carefully inside, but it sat unevenly on the padding, so she rotated it slightly. Only then did she notice the jagged black line along the seam between lid and jar, where the gray crust of ancient sealant had cracked.

  Frozen, her breathing amplified inside her filtration mask, Sophie stared at that crack. Martin said her name, but his voice seemed very far away.

  Air would have seeped in through the crack, potentially damaging anything that might be inside the jar. But Sophie didn’t care about air getting in.

  She was far more concerned about what might have seeped out.

  * * *

  Walker crouched just inside the entrance to Derveyî. The battle continued, but it had quieted down. No artillery shells had fallen for fifteen minutes or so. A drone bomb had flown overhead and been blown out of the sky by two quick-thinking Kurdish soldiers. Other than that, the night alternated between deathly quiet and quick eruptions of gunfire. The coalition forces in the camp had hunkered down in trenches and behind vehicles. Some had scrambled up onto the hill that rose above Derveyî, snipers with night scopes, ready to put a bullet in any jihadi asshole stupid enough to reveal himself within range.

  It felt like a stalemate, but Walker knew better, and he was sure Major Bernstein knew better, too. The enemy was out there in the night. The quick bursts of gunfire were sparks in the dark, just a reminder from each side to announce they were still there. But the New Caliphate would not wait until dawn. They wouldn’t even wait very long, not when they had no idea when air support might arrive. Maybe they had been working with Lamar, maybe they had expected to have the jar already, but if they had not yet retreated, that meant they still intended to get their hands on it before they went home.

  Meanwhile, Derveyî was under unofficial quarantine. Dr. Tang was a strange woman, but her response to the attempted theft of the jar had been swift and precise. The sentries on duty had been brought inside. The bodies of the dead had been moved to a room in the otherwise empty east wing, where the Beneath Project had wrapped up their work months ago. Most of the staff had been confined to quarters, despite their fear, and told to be prepared to defend themselves. For the moment, they seemed to be cooperating, but Walker did not know how long that would last. He had come topside to evaluate their situation, thinking that if the attack had come from the west, they could flee east toward Amadiya, but the camp seemed to be surrounded. Until reinforcements arrived or the jihadis were driven off, there would be no escape for those underground.

  Another sustained gunfight began off to his left. Shots came from high on the hill over his head and from the roof of one of the prefab barracks buildings across from the cave entrance. Walker’s hands tensed at his sides, tempted to go out there and help, but he knew the people in Derveyî needed him more than Major Bernstein needed one more gun.

  Footsteps echoed up through the tunnel. Walker turned to see Kim and Martin emerge from the top of the circular steps at the back of the tunnel, both still masked. He knew from her eyes alone that the news wasn’t good.

  “What’s going on?”

  Martin was young and looked fit, but he heaved and huffed and bent to put his hands on his knees to catch his breath. It might have been the illumination, but Walker thought his skin had taken on a yellowish tinge.

  “The … the jar…,” he managed.

  Kim halted him with a gesture. “I’ve been on the phone to my superiors at the U.N. Our unofficial quarantine just became official. If the fighting ends, we can’t let anyone enter Derveyî.”

  A flicker of fear went through Walker, but not for himself. Once upon a time, he had been almost fearless. Now he worried about his son. He felt angry with himself for allowing his work to put him into this position again, to know he might leave Charlie without a father, leave his ex-wife to tell the boy his dad had died.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Did Tang find something? Is there contagion?”

  Martin coughed and wheezed, still partly bent over but starting to catch his breath. “The seal on the jar…” He started coughing again, and then he put a hand on his abdomen and looked up, an edge of despair in his eyes. “Oh…”

  “It’s cracked,” Kim said. “Dr. Tang has sealed it into a sterile box that the techs brought, but the seal is cracked. If there’s anything contagious in there, it’s virtually certain that some of us have breathed it in.”

  Martin turned away from them, retched twice as he yanked back his filtration mask, and then vomited with a splash and the most pitifully anguished roar Walker had ever heard. He put his hands on his hips and held up a finger, taking slow breaths to steady himself.

  “I’m fine,” Martin insisted with a wan smile, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “It’s not … I mean it’s just, with everything going on…”

  They all stared at him. Walker saw the fear in his eyes.

  “I’m fine,” he repeated, less certain now.

  Walker heard shouting, then a whistling, and something exploded out in the camp. A fresh volley of gunfire erupted, and suddenly it seemed like every soldier on both sides began to shoot at once. He shouted at Martin and Kim to get back into the tunnels, and then he followed them, wondering who was in more danger—the soldiers out in the open …

  Or the people trapped below.

  THIRTEEN

  Sophie hurried back to the west wing, trying to ignore the new tremor in the hill overhead. The fighting continued, and all they could do was wait and hope. With the filtration mask on, her breath seemed too loud, as if someone stood just behind her, always just beyond the edges of her vision, breathing warm and eager against the back of her neck. The feeling kept her unsettled and anxious, but at least it distracted her from the pressure in her head and the raw tightness of her throat.

  She coughed lightly, and a bright flare of pain pulsed in her throat. She put a hand on the wall. The rock felt strangely soft and malleable, as if the tuffeau had returned to its original state, something they could carve and shape as they saw fit.

  Frowning, Sophie stared at the wall. Pushed her fingers into it. The stone did not give or shift, seemed as unyielding as ever, and she knew it had been her imagination or a halluc
ination. She swallowed, and her throat gave another bright flare. There were medicines back in her quarters—lozenges and ibuprofen and all sorts of other things that had been sent in the monthly supplies the dig staff received—but she had more imminent concerns.

  Her room in the west wing was small, but it was hers alone, as the director of the project. A heavy curtain hung across the entrance to the room, and as she slipped past the curtain, she worried for the first time about eavesdroppers. There was nothing she could really do to prevent it if someone wanted to listen out in the corridor.

  She went to the small desk in the corner and opened her laptop. Tapping in her password and opening her video conference software, she saw that Alex Jarota had already logged in. He had been waiting for her, and Alex didn’t like to be kept waiting. Still, she risked further ire by taking a moment to plug in her headphones. She wouldn’t be able to keep anyone from overhearing her end of the conversation, but his words would be for her ears only.

  Sophie moved the cursor and clicked to begin the conference. Alex’s face appeared on the screen almost immediately. He settled himself into the chair in his office on Rue Monge, just a few blocks from the Sorbonne, where he lectured as a visiting professor to make himself feel as if he were still an archaeologist.

  Such bitterness, she chided herself. The man had given her the job of her dreams, but she could not deny that his approach to the work and his general demeanor had been sapping her love of her job for some time. And now this.

  “Sophie! What in the name of God is happening there?” he asked in a French accent thinned and warped by decades doing business with foreigners and watching too many American films.

  The only question that mattered, really. And so she answered it, as briefly as she could, and in spite of his expressions of disbelief. Alex Jarota looked like a nineteenth-century duke with a proper, well-groomed mustache and thinning gray hair whose every wisp had been tamed by gel and comb. He wore a three-piece suit, and even alone in his office, he kept jacket and vest on, and his tie cinched up tightly as if to strangle himself.

  “Lamar Curtis is dead?” Alex asked, incredulous. “And the jar … the jar is cracked?”

  “Well, the substance used to seal the jar, but yes to both.”

  Alex’s scowl might have been silent, but it came through loud and clear. Sophie felt queasy. She coughed slightly, ignored the pain, and watched Alex’s face to see if her coughing alarmed him, but he was either too self-involved or too foolish to notice or to worry.

  “The U.N.… I’ve been calling my contacts there, but no one will speak with me,” Alex said. “This is a disaster.”

  Thinking of himself, not of his employees or what kind of danger they were in.

  “The coalition soldiers will hold off the jihadis,” Sophie replied, more to comfort herself than to comfort Alex. “Kim Seong says the U.N. has promised her a decision on possession of the jar by the time the peacekeepers arrive. For now, it’s in a containment box, ready for transport. Dr. Tang will put on a hazmat suit and transport it herself once it’s secured and we know where it’s going.”

  Alex nearly snarled. “It doesn’t matter where it’s going now, don’t you get it? The Americans will take possession. Or the fucking Russians. Someone who isn’t us. Tests will be run. The jar will be opened. Before Lamar decided to get himself killed trying to team up with fucking jihadi terrorists—”

  She winced.

  “—we might have had a chance at controlling this, making sure we were a part of whatever team examines it, and making sure we could get it back at the end. Now all of that is finished. We will be shunted aside as if all our work means nothing.”

  Sophie heard a whisper and glanced at the curtain over the doorway. Was someone eavesdropping after all? Her throat tightened and pain flared again, and she wanted only to finish this conversation so that she could take some medicine. She needed to rest, but she doubted this night would provide an opportunity.

  “Are you even listening?” Alex snapped.

  “Yes, I’m fucking listening!” She lifted a hand to her throat, wincing. Raising her voice had been a bad idea for so many reasons.

  Alex leaned closer to his computer, his face looming larger on the laptop screen. “Who are you shouting at like that? Swearing like that? Me?”

  “I’m … It’s been a long night, and it’s not over,” she replied, knowing it was not an apology.

  Alex sat back in his chair, looking down his nose and mustache at her as if she had shrunken down to a miniature version of herself.

  “My dear Sophie, you were to be my shining star,” he said. “This project was to be your ticket to greater things, and when you discovered the Pandora Room … well, it felt like serendipity, did it not? It should have been our crowning glory. Both of us. Now you have made it an albatross around both our necks.”

  “Me? What have I—”

  “Well, what is to be done now?” Alex asked, shaking his head. “Nothing. You are there, on-site, and so whatever decisions must be made about the staff and the jar and the United Nations, I leave it to you.”

  Sophie felt her upper lip curl into a sneer. “This is the time you decide to let me make decisions about my project?”

  “Yes, well, I am not there, am I? I cannot be responsible for—”

  Sophie laughed. She couldn’t help herself. “Okay, Alex. Thanks so much for your support. I understand completely.”

  Alex’s eyes narrowed. He sat a bit straighter in his chair. “I thought you might.”

  He had shifted all responsibility for what happened next to her. Whatever came of the Pandora Room now, of the jar, Lamar’s betrayal, all of it … he would lay it at her feet. He wanted to be able to wash his hands of it all, in case things became even worse.

  Sophie said adieu and ended the conference. She hung her head, pain in her throat flaring. With a sigh, she got up and began to rummage around in her medications, glancing up when she heard a rustle at her door.

  Beyza poked her head around the curtain. “Are you done with Alex?”

  Sophie sighed. “You have no idea how done I am.”

  “Good, because there’s something else you ought to know,” Beyza said, glancing back out into the corridor before letting the curtain fall into place.

  “I’m not going to like this, am I?” Sophie asked.

  “I doubt it,” Beyza said. “It’s about Ben Walker. I’m not entirely sure he’s on our side.”

  * * *

  At its height, Derveyî had housed well over a thousand people. Martin had always thought calling it a city seemed to be overstating its importance, but he’d never dared say such a thing to Sophie or Beyza. Among his fellow grad students, the place was sometimes referred to as the warren, but he tried to avoid the term because it made him think about the novel Watership Down, and he knew that life in the warren hadn’t ended well for them.

  Still, whether it had housed one hundred, one thousand, or ten thousand, Derveyî had felt magical to him from the beginning. Just as he found himself fascinated with Sophie, whom it had taken him months to stop calling Dr. Durand, he felt a constant sense of wonder about this underground world. He liked to sit quietly in its more remote corners, to ponder by himself, but he’d had the tendency to do such things ever since he could wander from his childhood home on his own. He’d grown up on a small dairy farm in Belgium, where his exhausted father had run out of curse words to hurl his way for forgetting his chores and rambling off to the river or climbing the highest trees just to sit and absorb the world.

  Even at that young age, he had liked his quiet places, especially the oldest places, where traces of earlier families and farms and peoples remained. His deeper fascination had begun when a neighboring farm had expanded and discovered a battle site from the First World War. Watching the excavation that resulted, seeing archaeologists at work, he had realized he would never be a dairy farmer.

  But he still retreated to the quiet places, still cherished isolatio
n.

  In Derveyî, his favorite place to be alone was the kitchen, which made it sound much smaller and less dramatic than the reality. He’d pushed for Sophie to call it the oven, but the name had never stuck. There were smaller ovens in various wings and levels of the city, but this had been the central food preparation space. Columns made the vast chamber look more like a primitive church, but there were six large stone ovens, and the room had the best ventilation in Derveyî. When the ovens had all been in use, the kitchen would have been infernally hot, but without fires burning down there, the ventilation—even after thousands of years—made the room cold and drafty. It had been one of the first spaces the Beneath Project had studied, yielding dozens of minor artifacts. Since then, hardly anyone came down here. They had nowhere near the numbers, so Dmitri used a smaller, more central space with only a single oven.

  Which left the kitchen to wanderers like Martin.

  In better days, he’d come here to let his mind drift, to wonder, to read or scribble in a notebook. Tonight he had come because he knew of nowhere else he might hide his shame and fear. Down here, the muffled, insistent punch of gunfire couldn’t reach his ears, and any explosion outside registered only as a faint thump.

  “Coward,” he whispered.

  Inside the mask, it sounded like someone else talking. Alone in the vast kitchen, he stripped it off his face.

  People were dead. Shot and stabbed. One of those people had been a friend and mentor to him, and Martin did not know how to process that. His mother would have spit on Lamar, maybe even on Lamar’s corpse, but Martin only wanted to shout at the shadows. More than anything, he wanted to get on the next helicopter or into the next vehicle leaving this place, but of course nobody would be going anywhere tonight. There were wolves out in the dark, hunting them, a pack of terrorists who wanted the soldiers in the camp dead and wanted to take the most important archaeological find of the century out of the hands of the team who’d discovered it.