by Nick Thacker
Ben didn’t wait to help Reggie get situated. He turned around and jumped sideways just as the third soldier opened fire. Julie rushed forward at that moment, taking advantage of having the man’s back to her. She brought her hands, fingers laced together, crashing down on the side of the man’s head. He wasn’t wearing any protection over his skull and the knuckles of Julie’s fists cracked against bone and caused him to stumble forward.
Ben sent two rounds into his bulletproof vest, and then one into his thigh. It was enough to send him wheeling backwards into the corner of the room, where he dropped his weapon and grabbed at his leg.
That’s for Reggie, asshole, Ben thought.
They weren’t out of the fight yet, however. Ben turned around to take stock of the situation and found that only Julie, Reggie, Agent Sharpe, and Sarah were still with him in the room.
Everyone else was gone.
The woman, two of the soldiers, Professor Lindgren, and Alex had disappeared.
78
Ben
THE POUNDING ON THE door continued — either the soldiers were trying to get in or their bullets impacting the solid metal door. Reggie seemed to be asleep, but Ben knew better. The man was in pain, and he was clearly trying to focus all his attention on keeping the door closed. He had the heel of his foot dug into a tiny imperfection in the rock floor, and was using his strength and the solid stone floor as leverage against the soldiers.
“What happened?” Ben asked. “Where’d they go?”
He marched up to Agent Sharpe and began to clench his fist, ready to punch the man in the head.
“Stop!” Sharpe cried out, shrinking back. “Please, I didn’t — I wasn’t trying to play you.”
“Play you?” Ben yelled. “You completely duped us. You didn’t follow us here, you led us here!”
“I know — I’m sorry, like I said,” he said. “I was forced to.”
Ben stopped. His fist was still clenched, but he forced his chin up and relaxed his shoulders. “By who?”
“Her,” Sharpe said, pointing into the abyss. “Rachel Rascher.”
“Explain,” Julie said, at Ben’s side.
“She reached out to me a month ago. Told me she needed my professional opinion, and that her government would pay my consulting and travel fees — and they did. I came down here and found out that she was planning something. There was going to be some sort of ‘test,’ and she needed my support.
“She explained a bit about the test and I — of course — was appalled. I told her I wouldn’t help her in any way.”
“What did she want you to do?” Julie asked.
“She wanted me to help her cover her tracks. She was going to do something in Greece, and needed someone like me to make the paper trail work, to give her and her team an alibi.”
“The bomb in Athens,” Julie said. “That was her.”
Sharpe nodded, holding in a breath for a few seconds. He let it out, and Ben could hear his voice beginning to shake.
“I didn’t know exactly what they were planning, I promise. I agreed to help her because I didn’t have a choice?”
“Seems to me you did,” Ben said.
“No, that’s just it — you don’t understand. I had no choice. She told me it was a matter of life or death. But not for me. My sister. My only sibling.”
“She was threatening your sister?”
He nodded again. “Yes. Jennifer Polanski.”
“Polanski,” Julie said. “Where do I know that name?”
Agent Sharpe sighed. “She’s married to a guy by that name. A politician, and a real piece of work. He did a lot of work with the Greek government during their post-bankruptcy phase, and is sort of a local celebrity there now.”
“Ah, right,” Julie said. “And your sister is his wife.”
“Was,” Sharpe said. “They were both at the museum in Athens.”
Ben looked down at the ground. “Shit. I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.
Sharpe stared up at the ceiling, at the single tiny bulb that lit the room and part of the larger space beyond. “It’s — it’s okay. He didn’t make it. She did, but was taken to a hospital, and then…” he stopped, catching his breath. “And then she was taken here.”
“Here?” Ben asked. “Why? This isn’t a medical —”
“I know,” Sharpe said. “That was the threat. She told me to take care of the logistics, which I did, and that if she helped me achieve her final goal — gaining access to this hall — she would let my sister go.”
“So you think your sister’s here somewhere?” Julie asked.
“I do think that. I have to. She didn’t make it, but her body is here somewhere. I have to find her.” He took another deep breath, then straightened up to his full height. “Harvey — Ben — I’m sorry to have tricked you. I won’t be able to forgive myself for that, but —”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ben said. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
“Well it doesn’t matter now. Your sister’s in here somewhere, and I’ve got a team in that…” he looked out into the deep black nothingness of the huge hall. “Whatever that place is.”
He reached out a hand, and Agent Sharpe clasped it. He looked at Julie, who nodded. It’s go time, he could almost hear her saying. He turned back to Sharpe, who seemed to have found a second wind. “Help me make this right.”
Sharpe nodded.
“And if you shoot me in the back, I’m going to be real pissed.”
Sharpe smiled. “I don’t have a weapon.”
Ben chewed on the side of his mouth for a moment while he looked around the room.
When he saw what he was looking for, he spoke again.
“Know how to use one?”
79
Julie
ROOM 23 WAS EFFECTIVELY locked — Julie and Ben had used the slack in the thick power cable as a rope, winding it around the door handle a few times until the cable was taut. The men outside the room were still trying to get in, and Julie knew it was only a matter of time before they were able to pry their way through the metal door.
That meant they had a head start, but not a large one. They needed to find the woman — Rachel Rascher — and the rest of their group. She’d disappeared into the massive hall with Alex, Mrs. E, Sarah, and her father in tow.
Julie was under no impression that the woman was going to let them live if she and her soldiers found them.
But Julie was certainly not going to let the woman get away once again.
Ben handed Julie and Agent Sharpe each a MISR rifle from one of the soldiers that had been taken down in the room. Julie was a better shot than he, and if they needed to take someone down from any distance, he’d rather have Julie’s eye behind the sights.
He kept a pistol for himself, a Glock, a weapon he was familiar with. It broke down quickly and easily, and it was near impossible to break. Whatever mess they were about to jump into, a Glock would be as good a sidekick as any.
“Let’s move,” he said.
He and Sharpe split Reggie’s weight between them and the group set off into the depths of the Hall of Records. Julie used the light from Sharpe’s cellphone as a flashlight, working the lead slowly and carefully.
“Once we get around that corner up there, flick off the light,” he said. “We don’t want them to ambush us.”
Julie nodded, then moved a few feet forward. “You think this ‘advanced civilization’ would have thought to add lights down here,” she said.
“They did,” Sharpe said. “That ridge cut through the rock to your right was probably a trench for some sort of flame.”
“Too bad there’s no Atlantean lighter fluid left in there,” she said.
She made it to the end of the main space they’d walked through, and Julie noticed that the room seemed to be about the size of the Sphinx’s base. Makes sense, she thought. We’re directly beneath it.
It left them little to explore, however. A few pilla
rs rose from the floor and connected to plainly decorated ceiling ornaments. The walls on all four sides were bare, smooth rock like the rooms in the preceding antechamber.
The only change in the rock-walled monotony was the turn Ben had pointed out. It happened to be the entrance to a stairwell, one that bent to the right and descended to another sublevel beneath the Sphinx.
“Looks like stairs,” Sharpe said.
“It is,” Julie answered. She turned off the light and gave the phone back to the Interpol agent, hoping that after her eyes had time to adjust she would be able to pick out something useful in the dark.
Unfortunately she was wrong.
“It’s pitch black,” Ben whispered. “I can’t see a thing.”
“Me neither,” she said. “But we know where the stairs are. Maybe we can follow them down to the end and see if the other group has a light? That would at least let us sneak up on them.”
At first she didn’t hear a response, and then she realized that Ben must have shaken his head. “No,” he said. “Too risky — if there’s a stair missing or an edge somewhere, we could walk right off it. Grab the phone and put it in your pocket with the light on. That should at least illuminate the stairs directly in front of you.”
She took the phone back from Agent Sharpe and turned on the flashlight, then stuffed the device in her pocket and wiggled it around a bit. Satisfied, she looked up.
The greenish glow emanating from her front pocket lit up just enough to see three or four stairs down at a time.
“That’ll have to do,” Ben said. “Ready?”
She nodded. “Ready as I’ll ever be. Reggie?”
Reggie grunted from his perch hanging between the two men. “Yeah, I guess. I wouldn’t have let you leave me behind, but I sure wish there was a set of crutches or something.”
“Not comfortable?” Ben asked, shifting his grip on Reggie’s torso.
“No,” Reggie said. “It’s not that. You smell worse than a decaying mummy.”
“Well you’ll have to get used to it, or I’ll drop you down these stairs and let you crawl your way back out.
Let’s roll.”
Julie waited for Ben and Sharpe to get situated beneath Reggie’s weight, then she turned back toward the stairwell. She lifted her foot and prepared to descend farther into the tomb.
She heard shouts and the sounds of heavy boots pounding the hard stone. Beams of light danced around the cavern.
“They got in,” she said.
“Even more reason to get moving,” Ben answered. “Let’s get to the bottom of the stairs, then see about putting up some defense. Up here we’re out in the open.”
She nodded and steeled herself, then jumped down onto the first step.
80
Sarah
SARAH TRIED TO KEEP her breathing steady, controlled. She tried to calm her nerves, to ignore the rhythmic pounding of her heart.
She tried, but she failed.
She was terrified, and it didn’t help that her father was gripping her hand, squeezing the blood out of it until both their fists were white.
She couldn’t see his face, which she figured was a good thing. Seeing his face would mean seeing his fear, which would only amplify her own.
Her group had been corralled off from the larger group in Room 23 and split away. Two of the soldiers had pushed her and her father at gunpoint, as well as Alex and Mrs. E out into the large, cavernous space. The soldiers’ flashlights illuminated the hall, revealing simple structural spires that held the roof up — the roof, she knew, that was the foundation of the Great Sphinx itself.
At the end of the empty hall, they’d found a staircase that led down to another subterranean level. Rachel Rascher had not even hesitated, throwing herself toward the stairs with a fury. She’d jumped the last two and ran into the next room, Sarah and her father close behind her.
Sarah didn’t have a choice — she was safe for now, but only if she went along with whatever Rachel’s plan was. The woman was crazed and delusional, but Sarah could also feel the excitement. She couldn’t help it — as a scientist herself, Sarah was every bit as fascinated to discover what the Great Sphinx’s lair had been keeping secret all these years.
So far, though, the answer was a resounding nothing. The ‘Great Hall’ was empty. The large hall that had opened with a touch of Sarah’s necklace, the stairwell, and now the smaller room the stairs emptied into.
Rachel was spinning in a slow circle, pointing a flashlight at every corner and edge and flat wall in the space.
“It’s… it’s empty,” she said. “There’s nothing here.”
The soldier whose flashlight she had commandeered stepped up to her as the rest of the group spilled out into the room. “Maybe there’s another door, like the —”
“No,” she said. “No, that’s not possible. There’s one entrance to the Hall of Records. The Book says so. It’s clear that there is one entrance, and that entrance was in Room 23.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’re too late,” she said, turning in one final circle before dropping the flashlight’s beam to the ground. “We didn’t get here in time. This place has been looted. It’s gone.”
“Gone?” Alex asked. “How do you know there ever was anything here? For all we know, this is just a crypt. A tomb, like the pyramids themselves.”
“It’s not a crypt,” Rachel said. “You and the rest of the world have been brainwashed to believe that these people would build elaborate burial chambers for their kings and queens. Not so. The pyramids may have been used as tombs, but they weren’t built to be tombs.”
“What were they built for, then?” Mrs. E asked.
Rachel looked around the room, her eyes landing on the tall, broad-shouldered woman who’d addressed her. “They were built by my ancestors. They are a testament to their intelligence. An example of their power, and a warning to future civilizations.”
Sarah frowned, then shook her head. “You’re crazy. You sound like you’re reciting some ritualistic chant. You actually believe that? That the pyramids here were built to show off? To scare people away?”
Rachel seethed. “I don’t believe it. I know it. The Book of Bones — the lost book of Plato — says as much. This whole plateau was created to keep people out. The people who weren’t pure.”
Sarah groaned. “There you go again. Pure people? You’ve got to be kidding me. The bell that your Nazi friends used to ‘test’ people? It’s a sham. Remember? I proved that — it’s not a real test. The ‘pure’ people in the chamber were pure only because they had the key to get out.”
She held up her necklace. “This. Tourmaline. It’s a rock. Nothing more, nothing less. It didn’t make me pure, but it opened the door. It’s a magic trick, Rachel.”
Rachel was rocking back and forth on her heels, shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No, there has to be more. My life… my entire like I’ve been searching for this…”
“And you found it,” Sarah said. “Congratulations. Now let’s get out of here. For all we know that door up there closes after an hour, and we don’t want to get —”
“No,” Rachel said. “No, no. It’s not… it’s not possible. No one’s been inside this space since it was sealed. It can’t be —”
“Empty?”
Sarah turned to see who had spoken and saw Ben and Agent Sharpe holding Reggie between them. Julie was standing next to them, holding one of the soldiers’ weapons.
The two soldiers that had accompanied them quickly their weapons up, but Ben and Sharpe added their own guns to the mix and Julie spoke again.
“Keep them down,” she said. “You try to shoot, you’re dead. You move in a weird way that I don’t like, you’re dead.”
Sarah felt the relief washing over her. She nodded to Julie, who returned the motion.
The two soldiers lowered their rifles, then stepped back to the sides of Rachel, protecting their boss.
Only then did Sarah n
otice the problem. Oh no, she thought. She looked up at Julie and the rest of the newcomers, but knew she didn’t have time to warn them.
Rachel is holding the only flashlight.
The soldier that had been lighting the way had turned his light off a few minutes ago, leaving Rachel with the only flashlight in the room. It was the source of all the light — and it was the only way Julie’s group was able to see.
Rachel knew this, too, and Sarah watched the woman slowing moving her finger over the button. She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping that by preparing her eyes for the oncoming darkness she would be able to see better. But that plan, Sarah also knew, depended on there being any light whatsoever.
She needed to do something else, and there weren’t too many options to choose from. She looked around at the standoff, then made up her mind.
She was in motion by the time Rachel flicked off the light. Sarah figured they had two, maybe three seconds before the soldiers picked up their weapons again and fired into the space Ben and the others were standing in.
She was wrong — the soldiers had anticipated Rachel’s move, and their guns immediately came to life. Sarah heard the deafening cracks of the rifles. Two, then three more shots. She hoped the other group had thought to dive out of the way, but she had other things to worry about at the moment.
She crouched a bit, pulling her chin down toward her chest, and hoped her aim was true — and that Rachel hadn’t moved from where she’d been standing.
The room was pitch black, but Sarah pushed off the ground, trusting her position and hoping for the best, and flew as hard as she could into Rachel’s side.
The woman let out a guttural sound, something like the sound of a bag of rice being popped open and spilled onto the ground, and buckled sideways. Sarah wrapped her arms around the woman’s thick waist and the pair shot to the floor.
