The Last Odyssey: A Thriller

by James Rollins

  How I wish I had never followed those clues found in Homer’s Odyssey and discovered the entrance to Tartarus, where hid the Great Enemy of the poet’s time, the blight that brought three kingdoms to fiery ruin. But I did find it, and in my excitement to return home, I brought back a barrel of what we believed to be Medea’s Oil, as fiery proof of my discovery. But at that time, I had not dared to venture any deeper than the threshold into Tartarus, as I had too few men and my supplies were running low.

  Upon returning home, I told my tale, and we four brothers constructed the Storm Atlas, fueled it with Medea’s Oil, and protected it with the Key of Daedalus. But only I was allowed to possess the beams of the Ship-Star, the three tools necessary to unlock the one true course amidst the map’s many false paths. It was you, my brother Ahmad, who rightfully warned that only I should know the location of Tartarus, lest our enemies torture it out of those who stayed behind at the House of Wisdom.

  Praise be to Allah for whispering such wisdom into Ahmad’s ear.

  Ten mighty dhows left our shores a year ago, ready to reap what could be found—but only one of those ships ever escaped Tartarus, and it will be my grave. I will keep this vigil beside the Storm Atlas until my last breath. For there is another reason I fear to take hammer to our greatest achievement. If what resides in the deepest bowels of Tartarus—those monstrous Titans—ever escape, the Storm Atlas may hold the only hope for the world. To that end, I will hold the keys to that salvation closest to my heart.

  Still, a question plagues me: How long will the world be safe?

  That unknown terrifies me more than any fiery demon.

  Elena read through the last several pages, which were predominantly an expression of affection for the brothers who had been left behind, along with a litany of regret. She began to skim through the rest, but before she could reach the end, voices rose from behind the door. Lost in the story, she had not heard anyone approach her cell.

  Gasping, she grabbed both books from the table and struggled to tuck them into her pants. As she did so, something fell out of the spine of Hunayn’s journal. The objects struck and clinked against the stone floor. She dropped to a knee and discovered a trio of four-inch-long nails made of bronze. One end of each bore a tiny flag inscribed with a letter in Arabic.

  What are these—

  The bar on the door scraped behind her.

  With her heart pounding harder, she snatched the bronze nails from the floor and pocketed them as she stood.

  The door opened behind her with a complaint of old hinges. A familiar figure strode in. From the dark shade of the Daughter of Moses’s features and the flash in her eyes, Elena could tell that something must have gone wrong overnight. The woman waved Elena brusquely forward, then immediately turned on her heels and headed back out.

  “Eajluu,” she ordered in Arabic. “Come with me.”

  Elena hurried after her, drawing two armed men in her wake. “Where are we going?”

  The woman refused to look at her. “To teach you the first of many lessons.”

  From her captor’s hard tone, she was not marching Elena to some classroom or even to the dark library upstairs. In fact, they remained on this dungeon level.

  As they crossed down a cavernous hall, Elena kept one hand in her pocket. She palmed the ancient bronze trinkets, keeping them from tapping against one another, fearing they would be heard.

  Then out of the darkness ahead, a scream echoed.

  She froze, but one of the guards prodded her with the muzzle of his rifle. She stumbled along, fearing the worst.

  They’re going to torture me.

  At the end of the hall, they reached a double set of doors flanked by fresh torches, the flames dancing high. The Daughter of Moses pounded a fist, and the door was promptly opened.

  The woman forced Elena inside. More fiery brands lit the stone chamber ahead. The heat was intense, the air smoky. To one side stood a bronze brazier atop a tripod, its basin aglow with ruddy coals from which the leather handles of branding irons protruded.

  The heavy-browed giant who had accompanied them from Greenland returned to the brazier with a glowing iron and shoved its hot tip back into the coals.

  Elena cringed as she identified the source of the earlier scream.

  A huge man lay strapped to a wood table in the room’s center. He’d been stripped to his boxers, his sweating, muscular bulk stretched across the planks. His arms were tied above his head. Thick leather straps secured his torso and legs to the tabletop. A blackened, blistering wound marred his upper left thigh, the flesh still smoking from the press of a hot brand.

  The Daughter of Moses grabbed Elena’s arm and dragged her closer. Once at the foot of the table, her captor patted its surface. “The Daesh jihadis invented this simple but effective device. They call it the Flying Carpet.”

  Elena girded herself, knowing the Daesh were better known in the West as ISIS.

  The Daughter drew her to the side and nodded to the giant. “Kadir, a demonstration, please.”

  Kadir lumbered past them and stepped alongside the center of the table. He reached to a large steel wheel there and slowly turned it.

  The table started to bend. The hinged middle rose up, while the ends dropped down. The man strapped and sprawled across its length groaned as his spine was bent backward. Each crank brought his vertebrae closer to breaking.

  The Daughter lifted a hand. “For now, only a small demonstration, Kadir.”

  The giant stopped turning the wheel and straightened. “Özür dilerim, Nehir,” he mumbled apologetically, then quickly bowed his head and corrected himself. “Ana asfa, Bint Mūsā.”

  Elena eyed her female captor, whose face went even darker. Kadir’s first apology had been in Turkish, then repeated in Arabic. Elena studied both of them as the realization struck her.

  Could they be Turks . . . either masquerading as Arabs or using their language for some reason? Elena also learned one other detail from Kadir’s slip of the tongue: the true name of her captor.

  The Daughter of Moses’s real name must be Nehir.

  Clearly irritated, the woman dragged Elena onto the top of the table and brusquely shoved her toward the tortured man. “Either help us, or this American will suffer in your stead.”

  Elena turned to the figure on the table. Horrified by all that had happened, she had failed to get a good look at him. Sweat dripped from his strained brow. Dried blood caked his swollen nose. She had not expected to recognize the man—but she did.

  It was the man Maria Crandall had been seeing for two years. Though Elena had never met him, Maria had sent her pictures, posting even more on Instagram. Elena remembered the two of them had been planning to meet her in Greenland. She stared down at the man, shocked and confused.

  What is he doing here? Where’s Maria?

  “Joe . . .” she whispered at last.

  “Don’t help them,” he croaked back at her.

  His words set off the already angry Nehir. She cursed, and from the way she glared at the man, Elena suspected Joe might be the source of her dark mood this morning.

  But what did he do?

  Nehir waved to Kadir. The giant swung back to the crank and began to slowly turn the wheel. The table bent more—as did Joe’s spine. His neck stretched in agony; fresh blood flowed from his nostrils.

  “Stop!” Elena yelled, fearing Nehir might shatter the man’s spine before her fury could be reined in. To appease the woman and focus her attention elsewhere, Elena reached to the back of her pants. “Here . . . I found these aboard the ship in Greenland.”

  Elena pulled out the two weathered books and shoved them at Nehir.

  The woman took them. She quickly noted their titles, and her eyes grew wide. She barked to Kadir, who then rewound the crank, drawing the table flat again. Nehir promptly headed to the door and hurried out with her newly acquired treasures. But not before ordering the armed guards to return Elena to her cell.

  As Elena was prodded at gun
point toward the exit, Joe frowned at her, looking angry at her capitulation. She turned away, knowing the truth, hearing it clink in her pocket.

  Don’t worry, Joe. I haven’t given them everything.

  At the room’s threshold, she turned back to the table, plagued by one immediate question.

  “Where’s Maria?” she called out.

  He let his head drop to the table and sighed. “Safe . . . she’s safe.”

  Relieved, Elena allowed herself to be led away.

  Finally, a bit of good news.

  16

  June 23, 7:10 A.M. CEST

  Castel Gandolfo, Italy

  This is bad . . . and only getting worse.

  Maria listened as a hush fell over the subterranean vault hidden beneath the Pontifical Palace. The barrage had ended a few minutes ago. The bombing had been brief, but brutal. Even now, rocks continued to fall with muffled crashes deeper down the tunnel in which they were trapped.

  This little fragile pocket is not going to last much longer.

  And they all might run out of air before that.

  The group pressed cloths over their noses and mouths, trying their best to filter out the rock dust choking the space.

  The bobbling beam of a flashlight approached as Gray returned with Major Bossard. The two men had gone to inspect the rockfall that blocked the tunnel a short distance down. They passed Seichan, who inspected one of the darkened vault doors with another flashlight.

  “No way through,” Gray reported as he joined the group huddled at the tunnel’s end. “I also tried my sat phone over there. Still no signal.”

  No surprise on either count.

  “Bastards are nothing if not consistent,” Mac said as he sat with his back against the wall, his slung arm cradled to his chest. “Second time in two days those jackasses sealed me up in a tomb. First one made of ice, now rock.”

  Something he said gave Maria pause, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  Father Bailey cast a chagrined look at the climatologist. “I’m sorry I brought you down here.”

  “Hey, I’m not complaining. If you’d left me up in the medical ward, I’d likely be dead by now. Sounded like they bombed the crap out of everything up there. So even if this ends up being my tomb, you bought me a little more time.”

  Maria straightened.

  That’s it.

  “But this isn’t a tomb,” she said and swung to Monsignor Roe, who knelt beside the map box, as if intending to protect the Da Vinci treasure with his last breath. “Didn’t you say that the Holy Scrinium had been installed in the cellars of an old Roman house?”

  Roe lowered the fistful of cloth from his mouth. “Si, the villa of Emperor Domitian.”

  “And it’s down here where the Romans dug out the villa’s water cisterns?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But where did the water come from to fill those cisterns? Do you know if they were drawing water from Lake Albano?”

  “I . . . I believe I read about that.” Roe nodded. “The Romans excavated these cisterns to be below lake level and angled aqueducts up to the lake, so gravity would bring fresh water down here.”

  Gray joined her, giving her a nod of approval. “Could those aqueducts still be there?”

  “I don’t know,” Roe admitted. “But I do know that the Holy Scrinium doesn’t occupy the villa’s entire foundations. The library complex was walled off from those older sections centuries ago.”

  “Do you know where?” Maria asked.

  “Sì, certo,” Roe said, but he looked sickened as he pointed. “It’s at the end of the other tunnel. The one to our south.”

  Mac groaned. “Sounds like we picked the wrong rabbit hole to run into. No way we’re burrowing our way over there.”

  “There might be another way,” Roe said. “Let me show you.”

  They gathered around the monsignor as he used a finger to draw in the dust on the floor. He inscribed three radiating lines, then connected them with concentric arcs.

  Designed by author

  “All three main tunnels are connected to one another by the library vaults, which curve from one tunnel to the other,” he explained. “If we could get through one of these doors in this tunnel, we could cross through its library vault and over to the next tunnel.”

  “But there’s no power,” Maria said. “And the doors are still locked. We can’t—”

  “I can,” Seichan said. She stood up from her inspection of the only door not buried under tons of rock and pointed a steel dagger at its electronic lock. “But we’ll have to be quick. And we’ll only have one chance.”

  7:14 A.M.

  Sometimes it’s good to be bad.

  Gray silently thanked the heavens for Seichan’s illicit past. “Didn’t know breaking into bank vaults was part of your Guild training,” he said as he watched her work.

  She shrugged. “I learned this trick long before the Guild. It’s not much different than hot-wiring a car. Back when I used to joyride through the backstreets of Seoul as a kid.”

  Gray tried to imagine a carefree version of this woman, a wild-eyed girl running roughshod through the streets of Southeast Asia. Even now, there remained large swaths of her past that were unknown to him. He prayed he would have the chance to fill in those gaps.

  “Quit wiggling the light,” she scolded him.

  He refocused his flashlight. She had already used her blade to pry open the electronic lock’s front plate. She squinted as she wired the open back of his satellite phone to the guts of the lock.

  She turned to Monsignor Roe, who stood next to her. “If this works, we’ll only have seconds for you to swipe your card and for the locking mechanism to release. After that, the circuitry will be toast. Are you ready?”

  He nodded and held aloft his glossy black keycard.

  “On my mark.” She touched the final wire to the lead on phone’s lithium-ion battery. “Go.”

  The crimson light on the lock briefly flickered. Roe hurriedly swiped his card across the reader. The lamp switched to green. A rumble of gears sounded—then a bright spark snapped across the exposed circuitry, and the light went dark.

  Seichan stood up, tugged on the door handle, and swore when it didn’t budge. The lock had failed to complete its cycle.

  They’d been so close . . .

  Clearly frustrated, Seichan stepped back and kicked the vault. The impact shook the frame, and something loud clicked and tumbled inside the door. Everyone looked at each other and held their breaths.

  Seichan reached again and pulled on the handle.

  The door swung open this time—to the cheers of those gathered behind her.

  Gray drew her into a hug. “My beautiful bank robber.”

  “We’re not out of here yet,” she reminded him.

  Her words were punctuated by the loud crash of a boulder down the tunnel.

  Gray got everyone moving through the door and along a dark, curved hallway, both sides lined by hermetically sealed glass doors. He caught glimpses of bookshelves and cases holding shadowy treasures, some glinting gold or silver in the meager light. But they had no time for sightseeing in this forbidden library.

  They quickly reached the far door. It had a manual lever on its inside, meant to facilitate the escape of anyone trapped in the vault.

  Like us.

  Gray pulled the lever down and pushed the door into the next tunnel. He flashed his beam around. The next passageway was blocked on the right by a pile of rock and debris. But on the left, it ended at a brick wall.

  He led the others to it.

  “What now?” Maria asked as she ran a palm over the bricks. “How are we getting through there?”

  Major Bossard pushed to the front and lifted his H&K submachine gun. “I may know a way.”

  Gray got everyone back into the shelter of the vault as the Swiss soldier unloaded his entire magazine at the wall, concentrating on a pair of bricks that looked the most fragile. By the time his deaf
ening barrage ended, he had pulverized those two to dust and knocked out several bricks around the opening.

  Gray followed Bossard back to the wall to inspect his handiwork. The major shoved and kicked the opening larger. Gray then leaned his head and an arm through the hole and shone his flashlight into the next space. It was cavernous, excavated from the volcanic rock, and at the bottom, his light reflected off a black mirror.

  Water.

  He sighed with relief.

  In short order, they knocked down more of the wall and climbed down a series of carved steps into the next room. In the center, a square pool thirty feet across was full of water. Gray circled its edge, probing its depths. On one side, he discovered an arched opening of a tunnel—the mouth of an old Roman aqueduct—a yard or so below the surface.

  The others gathered around him.

  “I’ll swim down there,” Gray said. “See if it’s passable all the way to the lake.”

  Seichan stepped in front of him. She had already shed her jacket and blouse and now kicked off her boots. “I’m the faster swimmer.” She poked his midsection. “And there’s the matter of this.”

  Gray wanted to object, but he knew she was right—maybe not about his gut, but she was definitely part fish, if not full mermaid. If anyone could make it to the lake, it was her.

  “All yours,” he said.

  She doffed her trousers and picked her flashlight up off the ground. As she straightened, her eyes glinted in the light.

  Her excitement set his own heart to pounding. “Be caref—”

  She dove smoothly into the water and, with barely a ripple, vanished into the black depths.

  Mac joined Gray. “You’re a lucky, lucky man.”

  Don’t I know it.

  7:27 A.M.

  Seichan thumbed on her flashlight as she kicked into the dark tunnel. The passageway was barely wider than her shoulders, which hindered her kicks, but the closeness of the walls allowed her to push against the stone and propel herself forward.

  She led with the flashlight extended in her other hand.

  She didn’t know how far she was from the lake, so she conserved her energy, moving with speed, but wasting no effort. Each stroke and kick was controlled, meant to propel her forward with an economy of movement. She kept her lips pressed closed; her chest relaxed.