The Bone Labyrinth (6 page)

The order was blasted in English and French.

Upon hearing that, Wrightson had made a hasty decision. “The bastards are only demanding we show ourselves.” Wrightson faced Roland and Lena. “But not you two. Whoever planned this attack must not know we took you two down here. You weren’t originally scheduled to be here for another day—until the storm accelerated matters. So stay here, stay hidden.”

While such subterfuge was risky, it was the best hope for all of them. With any luck, Roland and Lena could raise the alarm once it was safe to make an escape. With little other choice, she and Roland had crawled into this crack while the two older men headed up to face their fate. Afterward, Lena remained tense, expecting to hear a burst of gunfire as the two scientists were executed.

“Someone’s coming,” Father Novak hissed, reaching over to clutch her fingers.

Alerted by the priest, she noted a soft glow rising from the neighboring cave that led up to the surface. A knot of dark figures, all in black combat gear and wearing helmets, burst into the larger cavern. The beams of their flashlights bobbled as they rushed headlong across the space, ignoring the carefully laid-out bridge of ladders, trampling through this perfectly preserved collection of prehistoric bones and skulls. The team headed directly to the other side and vanished into the far tunnel that led to the strange burial site hidden inside a bricked-up chapel.

“What is going on?” Father Novak whispered.

Through her terror, a twinge of anger flared. She knew looting and grave robbing still plagued archaeological digs. Someone clearly had gotten wind of the discovery here, and they were grabbing what they could before anyone was the wiser.

Scuffling noises, along with the sharper retorts of broken stone, echoed from the far tunnel. Minutes later, Novak squeezed her hand harder.

“Here they come again,” he warned.

The team reappeared, retreating just as carelessly through the cavern, but now two of the men carried a long case between them. It looked like a plastic coffin. Lena could guess what that box held. She pictured the Neanderthal remains carefully interred within that Gothic chapel. Such a perfectly preserved and intact skeleton could fetch a tidy sum on the black market. Still, the men ignored the other valuable artifacts underfoot, crushing hundreds of thousands of dollars of relics under their boots.

Why are they—?

A muffled boom made her gasp. Smoke and rock dust coughed out of the tunnel the team had just evacuated. Lena stared in stunned disbelief.

They must’ve blown up the chapel.

But why?

The looters vanished out of the cavern, taking their lights with them. As darkness returned, Father Novak began crawling out of the hiding place.

“We should wait,” Lena warned, snatching at his coat sleeve. “Make sure they’re gone for good.”

He glanced back at her. “They didn’t look like they were returning, but you’re right. We should remain hidden in these caverns for a bit longer. In the meantime, I intend to see what’s left in the wake of their destruction.”

He shoved free and clicked on his flashlight, muffling the light with the fingers of his other hand.

Lena followed him out, recognizing the wisdom of the priest’s assessment and embarrassingly fearful of being left in the darkness by herself. She took a few shaky steps, but her terror quickly ebbed now that she was moving and had a goal, something to focus her attention on.

Novak led with his light.

As she tagged along behind him, she cast anxious glances over her shoulder, watching for any sign of the thieves returning. Once they reached the smoky mouth of the tunnel, she asked, “What does it matter if anything’s left here?”

“Dr. Wrightson summoned me here personally to solve the historical mystery that’s been hidden here for centuries. I won’t let his and Arnaud’s sacrifice be in vain.”

Lena bit back a twinge of guilt. She pictured Wrightson and Arnaud vanishing into the darkness. She had also been called here to solve a mystery.

In her case, a
scientific
one.

Before entering the tunnel, she took a final look at the carved stalagmites and the impressive swaths of cave art. Father Novak was right.

They might as well learn as much as they could.

Before it was too late.

1:16
P
.
M
.

As the only member of the Roman Catholic Church present, Roland was determined to bear witness to the desecration of this small chapel, a chapel whose construction had apparently been overseen and sanctified centuries ago by Father Athanasius Kircher. As he headed into the tunnel with his flashlight, questions swirled in his mind.

Why did the reverend father sanctify this place centuries ago? Why was it kept hidden—and more important, why was it looted and desecrated just now?

Hoping for answers ahead, he followed his beam through the churning rock dust and residual smoke. At last he reached the cratered remains of the Gothic chapel. The stone walls were now a pile of rubble. It looked like most of the debris had been blasted in such a manner as to completely bury the grave site with its strange petroglyphs and carefully laid-out bones.

The American geneticist—Lena—coughed behind him, doing her best to suppress the noise with a fist pressed to her lips. “Looks like they were covering their tracks, obscuring evidence of their theft here.”

“But you took photos earlier, yes?”

“Damned straight, I did.” The note of righteous indignation in her voice tweaked a smile out of him. “Sorry, Father. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s all right. I’m
damned
glad you took those pictures, too. And please call me Roland. I think we’re beyond formalities here.”

She joined him at the edge of the blast site. “I don’t think we’re going to salvage anything here.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

Roland carefully stepped and climbed through the worst of the desecration, hoping the thieves were so focused on their goal that they failed to examine the far wall of the chapel, especially the side facing the old entrance to this cavern system.

Before he could cross through the rubble, Lena called behind him. “Father . . . Roland, come see this.”

He turned to see her shining her helmet lamp toward the cavern wall opposite the ancient gravesite. The blast had collapsed a section of bricks there, revealing what appeared to be another alcove hidden on that side. He joined her and added his light, shining it into the space once sealed by the chapel’s brick wall on this side.

He gasped at the sight. On the back wall of the alcove was another large star-shaped petroglyph. Again made of palm prints. “It’s just like the one across the way.”

“Not exactly,” Lena said.

“What do you mean?”

She pulled out her cell phone and pointed it into the space. “The prints are smaller and more numerous, and note all the pinkie marks of these palms . . . they’re bent askew, like the artist’s finger was broken and healed crooked. Definitely someone different made this petroglyph. And from the size of the prints, maybe a female.”

As Lena snapped a series of pictures, Roland glanced back to the pile of rocks covering the opposite grave. “Maybe that other man was this woman’s mate.”

“Maybe, but we’ll never know.” Lena angled her light to the bottom of the alcove. “There are no bones here.”

At least not any longer
.

Roland turned and worked his way to the far side of the rubble. He dropped to a knee and studied the twin set of scrape marks gouged in the floor that he had noted earlier. The centuries-old trail headed away from the chapel and toward the former entrance.

Maybe today’s thieves were not the only ones to steal something from here.

He straightened and returned his attention to the toppled section of the back wall of the chapel. He overturned loose bricks, examining each, a silent prayer on his lips.

“What’re you looking for?” Lena asked.

Before he could answer, his beam glinted off a piece of metal poking from under a stone. He flipped the brick over, sighing with relief.

“This,” he said, running his thumb over the name inscribed at the bottom of the metal plate bolted to the brick. It was the small grave marker that he had examined before.

Lena joined him, staring over his shoulder.

“Written here,” he explained, “might be some clue to solving these mysteries. Though the surface is heavily corroded, given time, I think I can—”

Another boom rocked through the cavern, echoing from a distance away. Roland grabbed Lena’s arm.

“What is it?” she asked.

Fearing the answer, he hurried with her down the tunnel to the main cavern. The beam of his light picked up a fresh wash of smoke and dust coming from the far passageway that led to the smaller cave and the surface.

“No . . .” Lena moaned, clearly understanding what this meant.

The thieves must not have been satisfied with merely blowing up the chapel. They also intended to seal up the entrance to this cavern, further masking their crime.

“What are we going to do?” Lena asked.

As he started to answer, a deep rumbling shook the floor underfoot. A large chandelier-like chunk of fragile helictites broke from the roof and shattered onto the stone, scattering snow-white pieces to the toes of his boot.

Lena clutched his elbow, waiting for the shaking to stop.

Roland remembered how a 5.2-magnitude earthquake had broken off a shoulder of the stone giant that was Klek Mountain and revealed this ancient cavern system at its heart. The sudden storm and the weight of all that flowing water must have put additional strain on the fault lines underlying the mountain, triggering an aftershock—or maybe even the concussions from the recent blasts contributed to the new quake.

Either way, they were in deep trouble.

He held his breath until the tremors finally faded and the ground stopped shaking.

“It’s all right,” Roland whispered, trying to reassure his companion as much as himself.

“Look!” Lena pointed toward the crack where the two of them had hidden earlier.

From the mouth of that crevice, water now gushed forth.

The quake must have altered the hydrology of the mountain, shifting the veins and arteries of the giant Klek, turning that storm surge toward this open pocket. From other smaller cracks and crevices, more water flowed.

Lena stared up at him, her face stricken, looking to him for some hope, some plan.

He had neither.

4

April 29, 1:38
P
.
M
. CEST

Paris, France

The phone rang at a most inopportune moment.

Commander Gray Pierce stood naked before a steaming tub in the hotel bathroom. From the window of his suite, he could look out upon the majestic and historic tree-lined Champs-Élysées of Paris. Still, the view closer at hand was far superior.

From the mists of the lavender-scented water, a sleek leg hung over the lip of the tub. A layer of bubbles did little to mask the figure luxuriating within the bath. She was all long limbs and sweeping curves. As she shifted, a fall of damp hair, as black as a raven’s wing, fell away to reveal emerald-green eyes.

Irritation at the interruption shone there.

“You could ignore it,” she said, stretching that leg high, before lowering it slowly into the bubbles, stealing away the sight.

He was tempted to follow her suggestion, but the ringing did not rise from the hotel phone; it was from Gray’s cell on the bedside table. The unique ringtone identified the caller: his boss, Painter Crowe, the director of Sigma.

Gray sighed. “He wouldn’t call unless it was urgent.”

“When is it not?” she murmured, sinking fully underwater, then rising again. The surface of her face steamed as water sluiced along her wide cheekbones and down her delicate neck.

It took all his strength to turn away from the tub. “I’m sorry, Seichan.”

He headed into the bedroom and fetched his phone. For the past three days, he and Seichan had been enjoying the delights of Paris—or at least what could be viewed through the windows or ordered from room service. After being apart from each other for three weeks, they had found themselves seldom venturing far from their suite at the Hôtel Fouquet’s Barrière.

Seichan had flown to Paris directly from Hong Kong, where she had been overseeing the construction of a women’s shelter. He had come from the other direction, from D.C. He was taking a brief vacation—not only from the demands of Sigma, but also from managing his father, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. His father at least seemed more stable of late, so Gray had felt confident enough to leave for a short spell. While he was gone, a daytime nurse and Gray’s younger brother split his father’s caretaking duties.

Still, as he picked up the phone, he felt a twinge of foreboding, expecting this call to be about his father. Day in and day out, that fear sat in his gut like a chunk of granite: hard, cold, and immovable. A part of him was always girded, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He clutched the phone to his ear as the scrambled connection to Sigma headquarters was made. He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror above the dresser, reading the anxiety in the hard set of his jaw. Impatient at even this small delay, he swept damp hair from his eyes and rubbed the dark stubble over his cheeks.

C’mon . . .

Finally the connection was made, and the director immediately spoke. “Commander Pierce, I’m glad I could reach you. I apologize for interrupting your vacation, but it’s important.”

“What’s wrong?” he said, his fear spiking sharper.

“We have a problem. About twenty minutes ago, I fielded an emergency call from General Metcalf.”

Gray sank to the bed, letting go some of his fear. This wasn’t about his father. “Go on.”

“It seems French intelligence received a frantic SOS dispatched from one of their units in Croatia.”