The Tomb of Hercules_A Novel

by Andy McDermott

  She ran into the nearest car, looking back at the fire door. Her attacker could appear at any moment.

  The doors began to groan shut.

  The fire exit flew open. The ponytailed man barreled onto the platform and ran at the train. His sword flashed again—

  The doors slammed closed.

  Nina jumped back with a shriek as the sword sliced through the rubber seal between the doors. The train started moving. Fang ran alongside, glaring at Nina, then was forced to admit defeat and pull out his blade before the accelerating train tore it from his grip. A few seconds later, he vanished from sight as the train entered the tunnel.

  She let out a long breath of relief, then turned to see that she had an audience. The other occupants of the car were staring at her. Even by the blasé standards of New Yorkers, a soaking, bloodied, slime-covered woman being chased on to a train by a man wielding a sword was hard to ignore.

  “Hi,” Nina said wearily, holding up the book. “Overdue. The guy didn’t want to pay his fine.” A couple of people chuckled. She slumped into a seat, belatedly realizing that the man next to her was her erstwhile Good Samaritan from the street near the Brotherhood’s safe house. “Oh, hey, you again,” she said to him, shaking something out from inside the sleeve of her ruined Armani jacket. “Can you hold this for me?”

  He looked at the cockroach she’d just deposited in his hands with utter horror, then threw it onto the floor and hurriedly found a new seat as far away from her as possible. Nina shot him a tired, sarcastic smile, then examined what was left of the book.

  The front cover was missing, as were several folios. She quickly checked the remainder, splinters of cracked glass tinkling out as she turned the pages. She realized that her attacker now had the first four sheets of parchment, almost a fifth of the whole thing.

  She had copies of the text, of course. But clearly there was something that could only be learned from the original, just as she’d thought—otherwise why go to such extreme lengths to steal it?

  That was something she could figure out later, however. Right now, she needed to reach somewhere safe, where she could get first aid.

  And have a very long shower.

  Popadopoulos soundlessly opened and closed his mouth like a fish as Nina spread out what was left of the book containing the ancient dialogue of Hermocrates on her office desk. Pieces of broken glass spilled from the bent frames. “This—this—this is a catastrophe!” he finally managed to say.

  Nina scowled. “I’m fine, thank you.” It was now evening, most of her day having been spent in a police station trying to explain the events that had left several men dead in a downtown office building, and three more burned, crushed or drowned in New York’s subways and sewers. “By the way, our ponytailed pal now has the first four pages.” She picked through the book to show him the missing section, more smashed glass crunching. “I don’t suppose you have any idea who he was or who he works for?”

  “I was about to ask you that very question!” said the little historian, flustered. “I have no idea! The only person I have dealt with directly about the Hermocrates parchments …is you.” He regarded her with sudden suspicion from behind his glasses. “Perhaps this is all your doing, hmm? Hmm?”

  Nina rubbed her temples in exasperation. “Yeah, because whenever I hire a gang of psychos to steal ancient documents, I also ask them to try to kill me!”

  “You survived.”

  “So did you!” She regarded him quizzically, arching an eyebrow. “Anyway, how did you survive? What happened to you?”

  “Let us not speak of that,” Popadopoulos said hurriedly. He bent down, lowering Nina’s desk lamp to illuminate one of the pages. “Oh, no, no! Look! The parchment has been damaged!” He indicated the vertical slit made by the blade.

  “It’s like that on every page, I’m afraid. It got skewered by a sword.” Popadopoulos’s eyes widened. Nina continued before he could express his outrage. “And be glad it did, because if it hadn’t, I’d be dead and our friend would have the entire thing.”

  Popadopoulos’s expression suggested he was weighing the pros and cons of that particular scenario. “None of this would have happened if you hadn’t insisted on removing the text from my archive in Rome,” he finally said, turning the page over. The sheet of glass backing it broke into pieces and fell onto the desk. Nina gingerly lifted the shards away from the fragile parchment as he examined the blank side of the page for more signs of damage. “Such a thing would never have happened there, no, no, no.”

  Nina was about to ask if he was sure about that when Hector Amoros entered the office. “Nina! Mr. Popadopoulos! I’m glad you’re both all right.”

  “Thanks. One of us is too,” she replied. Popadopoulos pursed his lips in annoyance, then continued his careful survey of the pages beneath the lamp.

  “How are you feeling?” Amoros asked.

  “Like I’ve been stuck with about fifty injections of antibiotics. I think I’ll live, though.”

  “That’s a relief. It turns out you’re not the only member of the IHA who’s been involved in an… incident today.” He looked at Popadopoulos. “Mr. Popadopoulos, could I ask you to wait outside, just for a moment? I need to discuss something with Dr. Wilde in private.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to jump out the window with it again,” Nina said, gesturing at the scattered pages on the desk. Popadopoulos harrumphed, then left the room. She looked back at Amoros. “What do you mean?”

  “I just got off the phone with Eddie.”

  “What?” Nina said, suddenly concerned. She’d all but forgotten him in the chaos of the day. “What happened? Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine. He’s on his way back to New York right now; he called from the plane. He’s been trying to contact you all day, actually.”

  Nina glanced at the phone on her desk, noticing for the first time that its message light was flashing. “Oh… Well, I did kind of have other things on my mind.”

  “Indeed.” Amoros rubbed a thumb through his salt-and-pepper beard thoughtfully. “You said that the men who attacked you today were Chinese?”

  “East Asian, certainly. I didn’t have a chance to check their passports.” The link struck her. “Wait, you think there’s some connection between them and Eddie going to China?”

  “Eddie went to Shanghai,” Amoros explained, “because he said he had a lead regarding the sinking of the SBX rig at Atlantis three months ago.”

  “What kind of lead?”

  “Some classified IHA files were downloaded from the rig via its satellite link just before it capsized. Eddie says he has copies of those files. They included information about the lost Plato texts,” he nodded at the pages on the desk, “and IHA personnel files. Eddie’s …and yours.”

  Nina felt a chill. “You’re saying the rig was deliberately sunk? And that it’s got something to do with what just happened to me?”

  “There might be a connection, yes. What it is, we don’t know yet… but I assure you, we’re going to do our damnedest to find out. If someone was willing to kill everybody aboard the rig just to cover up stealing our files, it must be for something big.”

  “Jesus.” Nina went back to her desk and leaned against it, shaken. “Where did Eddie get these files? Who had them?”

  Amoros’s face became more grim. “According to Eddie, Richard Yuen.”

  “What?” She remembered him from the party aboard René Corvus’s yacht. Arrogant, smug, cocky, overbearing … but she hadn’t imagined he might also be a killer.

  “We’re going to get to the bottom of this, Nina, don’t worry. But there’s not much I can do until I see the files for myself.”

  “So when will Eddie get back?”

  “Sometime early in the morning, around five a.m. He’s going to come straight here.”

  “Right.” She remembered something Amoros had told her earlier. “Wait, when you said he’d been involved in an incident…”

  “The important th
ing is that he’s fine,” Amoros quickly assured her. “And so are you. And you still have the Plato text.”

  “Most of it,” she reminded him glumly.

  “What do you want to do with it?”

  “I think Pops out there wants to bundle it up and jump straight on a plane back to Rome,” said Nina, gesturing at the door. “But we need to keep it safe, until we can find out why Yuen’s willing to kill to find out the location of the Tomb of Hercules.”

  “We don’t know for sure that it’s Yuen behind this,” Amoros pointed out.

  “Eddie seems to think so.”

  “Let’s wait until we get all the facts before we start making any accusations. Especially against one of the IHA’s own directors.” He headed for the door. “I’ll go find Popadopoulos, try to convince him to let us keep hold of the text for now.”

  “Thanks,” said Nina. He nodded and left the room. She sighed, suddenly feeling more exhausted than ever. What the hell had Chase been up to in Shanghai?

  She sniffed. There was an odd smell, and it wasn’t her—

  “Shit!” Nina whipped around to see that one of the pieces of parchment was still directly beneath the hood of her lamp, the leathery sheet beginning to shrivel under the heat from the bulb.

  She snatched the lamp away, flapping a hand and blowing on the ancient document to cool it. Her heart raced in panic at the thought of the text going up in smoke right there on her desk, but to her enormous relief it had survived, if more crinkled than before. The smell wasn’t burning …

  So what was it?

  The odor was faint but somehow familiar, a sharp, sour tang that some part of her mind immediately associated with the kitchen. Like vinegar, or lemon juice…

  Nina clapped a hand to her mouth, muffling a “Whoa!” as she realized the significance of the scent. She brought the lamp back down, warming the blank side of the parchment.

  Faint brown marks slowly appeared. At a casual glance they seemed unremarkable, nothing more than random stains and scribbles. But Nina knew that the mere fact they had been hidden meant there was far more to them.

  She picked up the parchment and shook off the remaining splinters of glass. Then she turned to the other pages …

  Popadopoulos reentered the office. “Dr. Wilde, I—Aah!” He froze, mouth goldfishing again as he saw Nina smashing open the frames and plucking the fragile pages from the broken glass. “What are you doing? You, you—lunatic vandal woman!”

  Nina held up a hand to shut him up. “The backs of the parchments,” she said, speaking as rapidly as her mind was working. “Nobody ever examined them before, right?”

  “There was nothing to examine! They are blank!”

  “Oh yeah?” She showed him the page on which the markings had appeared. His flustered horror suddenly became fascination. “You agreed it was unusual that only one side of the parchment was used, right? But all the centuries that the Brotherhood had Hermocrates in its archives, nobody ever thought to ask why. Well, I’ll tell you why.” All the pages now removed from the glass, Nina used the edge of a plastic binder to sweep the broken fragments aside before laying out the pieces of parchment on her desk, facedown. “Because Plato wanted to use the backs of the pages for something else! Look!” She lowered the lamp over a different part of the first page. More markings faded into view. “He drew something in invisible ink!”

  “My God!” Popadopoulos exclaimed, hunching down and staring intently at the page.

  “Invisible ink,” Nina said again, with a slightly accusatory, mocking tone. “One of the oldest tricks ever invented for concealing information…and the Brotherhood never once thought to check for it in over two thousand years.”

  “Our purpose was to keep knowledge of Atlantis out of the hands of others,” Popadopoulos sniffed, “not go treasure-hunting for unrelated Greek myths.” He carefully moved the parchment around under the lamp, searching for more hidden markings. “How long will the ink remain visible?”

  “I don’t know—it might be permanent, or it might fade again once it cools. Either way, I’ll make sure everything’s photographed.” She tipped her head to one side. “That’s odd.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever this is meant to show, it looks as though it’s been cut off.” She pointed at a particular area near the center of the page. “See? All the marks suddenly stop along a straight line, as though… as though another page had been laid on top of it!” She slid the edge of another sheet of parchment over the first to demonstrate. “We need more lights.”

  Nina ran from the room, soon returning with two more lamps swiped from nearby offices. She plugged them in and placed them on her desk. “Warm them all up. We need to see the markings on every page.”

  It took several minutes, but with the help of Popadopoulos each of the parchments was given the same impromptu heat treatment as the first. They all turned out to have faint marks hidden on them. “I can’t tell what it is meant to represent,” Popadopoulos complained, stepping back to get an overview of the whole collection.

  “I can,” Nina told him. “Or at least, what it’s going to be. Look at this.” She indicated a group of small symbols on one page. “These are Greek letters—the bottom halves of Greek letters, at least. And the top halves are …” She searched the other pages, spotting more symbols along the edge of a different sheet. When they were brought together, the symbols matched up perfectly to form a word—βoθvó. Mountain. “The whole thing’s a map! It’s like a jigsaw—all we have to do is put it together and it’ll tell us how to find the Tomb of Hercules!”

  Popadopoulos regarded the parchments in disbelief. “But that would mean…”

  “The clue was right there, all along! ‘For even a man who cannot see may know the path when he turns his empty face to the warmth of the sun’! Empty face—blank page! Critias must have told Plato how to find the Tomb, but for whatever reason they wanted to obfuscate the details—maybe they didn’t want Plato’s students to run off and raid the place. So when Plato dramatized what he’d been told into the dialogue of Hermocrates, he put hints on how to find the map within the text itself—and hid the actual map right there on the master transcript!”

  “Only for the ancient Brotherhood of Selasphoros to steal it,” mused Popadopoulos. “All they cared about was suppressing the section of the dialogue concerning Atlantis, but they never realized how much else was in it…”

  “But now we do,” Nina reminded him. “Let’s put it all together.”

  It took some time to assemble the puzzle, the faintness of the markings and damage to parts of the pages obscuring details, but eventually they succeeded. Mostly.

  “Bollocks!” Nina burst out. Popadopoulos gave her a strange look. She blushed. “That’s, er, something I picked up from my boyfriend. He’s British. But look, we’re missing a whole section of the map.”

  The assemblage of pages looked almost random, sheets of parchment overlaid upon one another at different angles, some nearly hidden under two or three others. But the image that was revealed was clear enough. It was a map, a path leading to a representation of a mountain annotated with a single Greek word.

  Hρακλεφ. Heracles. Hercules.

  The Tomb of Hercules. It existed, was an actual, physical place. Nina felt a surge of adrenaline at the sight. She’d been right.

  But it was impossible to reach…

  “I see,” said Popadopoulos, examining the map. “This river, it curves and twists as it widens, as if it is about to reach the sea. But… no sea.”

  “The coastline,” Nina moaned. “The map of the coastline’s on the other pages, the ones we don’t have. And if we don’t have the coastline to use as a point of reference, there’s no way we can find the Tomb!”

  “There is one good thing, though, hmm?”

  “What?”

  “Whoever stole the other pages cannot find the Tomb either!”

  “You have a point.” Nina looked back at the map. So close to finding what sh
e was looking for, yet she couldn’t take the very first step … “I’ll photograph this, make sure all the details are recorded.”

  “Good! Then I can arrange for the return of what is left of the text to my archive, yes?” asked Popadopoulos hopefully.

  Nina considered this. “Not yet,” she said, ignoring the historian’s glower. “I still think there’s more to it. There are other phrases in the text that Plato seems to have left as clues, like he did about the map. But I’m sure I’ll need the original copy of the text to work them out.”

  Popadopoulos growled in frustration. “Very well, Dr. Wilde, very well. The parchments are already so badly damaged they will be difficult to preserve… But I do not see how you will be able to find the Tomb even if you do decipher other clues. You are still missing several pages.”

  “Then we have to get them back.” Nina set her jaw in determination. “I already think I know who’s got them. We go after him and get them back.”

  “Assuming,” Popadopoulos warned, “that he doesn’t come after you first.”

  8

  Come on in,” said Chase, opening the apartment door and leading Sophia inside. “Nina? You home?” No reply. “She must be at the office.” He gestured at the couch for Sophia to sit, then went to the kitchen area. “Cuppa?”

  “I’d love one. Thank you.” Sophia, now wearing nondescript casual clothes that Chase had bought at Pudong airport, perched on the edge of the couch. “So this Nina… how did you meet?”

  Chase put the kettle on the stove. “I was her bodyguard.”

  Sophia raised an eyebrow. “That sounds rather familiar.”

  He ignored the remark. “After the job was over, we got together. That was about a year and a half ago.”

  “And how have things been going since then?” Again, Chase didn’t respond. “I see.”

  “There’s nothing to see,” he said defensively.

  “Hmm.” She looked around the room. “So this is your place.”

  “Yeah. Been living here for five or six months.”

  “I have to say, it makes me think more of Dr. Frasier Crane than of you. Well, except for that.” She glanced disdainfully at the Castro cigar-box holder on the counter. “I remember that awful thing all too well.”