by Judith Leon
Here the greenish glow of bioluminescent spores and mushrooms spread along the base of the multilayered mausoleum-like structure on the other side of the ditch. There must be a lot of rotting wood, Lindsey decided. This place looked like it was a cave-in waiting to happen. Less than twenty feet above her head she could see barely discernible features of an old bridge or aqueduct. Was this now supporting a modern street or parking lot? The thought was not reassuring.
In the distance ahead, a single drop of water dripped into what sounded like a pool in an echoing tunnel. They moved as fast as the scary dimness allowed toward the sound. Another dim, flickering orange light revealed a low Romanesque archway.
“That way.” Lindsey stepped forward, but as she put her weight down, she slipped and crunched through an icy surface into black, vile-smelling water that found its way through her boot to her foot. The odors around the frigid puddle intensified into smells of mold. And a swampy methane smell. A spiderweb brushed her cheek, and she shivered and clenched her teeth to swallow back a scream.
“Move closer to the wall.” Marko flashed his tight beam of light along ancient stone with nooks and crannies that probably harbored slithery things. She heard the squeaking of rats from somewhere distressingly nearby. The beam traveled up and across ancient wood and cross-timbers as if they’d entered a basement several centuries old—which they probably had. Bendrich had said that old Prague was built on layers of ruins people hadn’t bothered to deconstruct. Marko especially would have to duck to pass under the old, sagging, creaking beams.
“I think I’m going to faint,” Jeremy gasped.
Lindsey shared the feeling, but would bite off and eat her tongue before she would admit it. Where was that archway? It had disappeared. Her only guide was the occasional drop of water, its sound magnified in the echo of what had to be the tunnel the guard had mentioned.
The sound of the alarm from inside the museum above grew loud. Lindsey, Jeremy and Marko all stopped and looked behind them. The emergency door had opened, maybe the length of a city block away, casting a quick flash of weak light on the layers of past civilizations and on the silhouettes of Foo Hai, his henchmen and Pietro, their mutterings muffled but audible.
Lindsey hardly breathed as she, Marko and Jeremy crept toward where she thought she had seen the archway. A gun fired and the bullet zinged off a stone behind them and then another.
“Sweet Madonna! How could they have known so quickly that we chose this direction?” Marko whispered. “How could they have found us at all?”
Mercifully the archway appeared again, revealed by a strangely iridescent, blue-purple glowing ball that shifted…and then was gone.
Every hair on Lindsey’s head stood up.
“What the hell was that?” Marko asked.
“I think…” Jeremy panted. “I mean, I thought…that Pietro might have put a bug on my car.” Jeremy evidently hadn’t seen the strange light. “But now…” Gasp. “I think it’s me. In my jacket pocket.” He pulled out something that looked like a vitamin capsule.
Marko slammed Jeremy against the stone wall, snatched the unit and pitched it like a bowling ball along the ground behind them. It immediately drew fire.
Bullets must have hit something that released a gassy methane odor, because the air ignited with a boom. Behind her, stone and brick rained down. The floor was suddenly moving as terrified rats scurried toward who knew where.
A wooden beam above Marko creaked and broke. Rocks tumbled from the walls beside her. Water gushed from somewhere, smelling a thousand years old. An ancient cistern? Here and there, pockets of flame burned greenish.
Marko was nowhere in sight. And no Jeremy, either. Lindsey crouched, hand over her nose to keep out still-descending dust, climbed up a step and peeked over the top of rubble now blocking the way back to the museum entrance.
His back against the remains of the stone wall, Jeremy stood on the other side, a look of sheer terror holding his eyes wide open. A stocky Asian man jumped over a beam that pinned down another man and ran up to an apparently paralyzed Jeremy, gun-butted him and dragged him backward.
In the light of the green fires, Lindsey recognized the spiderweb tattoo on Pietro’s neck as he struggled against the weight of the beam pressing down on him. Blood, that in this dim light looked black, ran from his mouth. Pietro was in big trouble. Probably a crushed spleen. He wasn’t going to be walking out of here on his own…if at all.
“Hey! Foo Hai! Help me out here! You owe me!” he called out.
Foo Hai stepped out of the shadows, smiled, raised a gun, aimed it at Pietro’s chest and fired. Pietro died with a look of rage pasted on his face.
Foo Hai signaled two men to move the beam blocking their way, and as they did so, Foo Hai shoved Pietro into the chasm with his foot. Pietro dropped in, followed quickly by the sound of a splash.
“Marko?” she whispered. She turned, backed down from the rubble mound and stared into the dimness. “Marko?”
A groan issued from the chasm. The rock avalanche that separated her from Foo Hai and Jeremy had taken Marko over the ledge. Water continued to pour into the trench or whatever it was. She crawled to the edge and called down. “Marko? Are you okay?”
“Nnnnn…help me…”
He couldn’t be more than five or six feet below her, but things were crawling up out of the crevice. Spiders. Dozens of them. One climbed onto her sleeve. She jumped up and flicked it off to see three climbing up her leg. She flapped at them, kicked in a blind frenzy that left her shaking and sickened, sweating and clammy. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”
She turned toward the archway and ran. Blindly, heart beating wildly. She tripped on something and fell. She scrambled to her feet and thought, What am I doing?
She couldn’t leave anyone here, and especially not Marko. She turned back, made her feet move. She’d failed at everything she’d set out to do on this trip. Teal gone, and now, coward that she was, she had come close to abandoning Marko.
Foo Hai had probably killed Monique and the janitor and he now had Jeremy and would soon unleash Jeremy’s brand of evil into the world. Oh, Teal, I’m so sorry… What would the Kestonians do with Teal? And Marko….
She teetered at the edge of the dark chasm, her heart pounding so hard in her chest, it seemed about to burst. Pain gripped her insides and she doubled over and groaned, fighting the need to vomit, shaking uncontrollably, unable to take a step or even think.
Chapter 40
“L indsey!”
Marko’s voice sounded strong, and it reached Lindsey like a lifeline.
“I’m here…I’m coming,” she answered.
She would rather be dead than have things end this way. Nothing, not Foo Hai, not the spiders, nothing could be worse. Hating herself for her cowardice, and still shaking, she crawled to the ledge, scrunching small, hairy things underneath her as she moved. She could hear water still rushing into the dark void.
By the light of the nearest rubble fire, Lindsey saw something that could help. A stout plank. The remnants of some ancient footbridge, maybe. Perhaps a foot and a half wide, six inches thick and eight feet long, the plank spanned the crevice where it narrowed, just a few feet away from Marko. Like the whole damn place, the plank was alive with spiders. Webs hung from it like curtains. She crawled to it, dragged it over to her side, knocked off some of the webs and tiny scurrying bodies and dragged it back toward Marko.
She extended one end of the plank down to him and heard it hit water. He started sloshing around. “Will it help?”
“It’s a beautiful board,” he said. “Got to dig myself out a bit. A mother-bitch of a hunk of stonework has my ankle pinned. Where’s Jeremy?”
“Foo Hai has him.” Swatting spiders and fighting nausea, she told Marko what had happened. While he grunted, strained and cussed in Italian, she noticed what looked to be a light far off to her right. Maybe the exit.
“Hold the noise down,” she said. “I don’t think they can escape
back the way we all came in. They will eventually climb past this rubble to come here. That will take them some time. I see a light. But we may not have much time. I keep hearing more rocks fall into this crevice—whatever it is.”
“Antique shit hole.”
She actually giggled, partly amused and partly out of nervousness. “Yeah, this place is toxic. Green mushrooms don’t grow in places that are optimal for humans.” She recalled a science class in which the professor said that Scandinavians used to mark their way through the forests using smears of glow-in-the-dark spores. Hmmm…
In the distance, another boom let loose and a bright, fiery green glow spread through this hideous underworld then snuffed out. Doubtless another pocket of gas exploding. Maybe Foo Hai’s efforts to find a way out had triggered it. “We need to exit, Marko. Fast.”
Think! How could they get out, get away? How could she recapture Jeremy? Jeremy must have the genuine data on the Lab 33 procedures and the sixteen modified girls hidden safely somewhere.
Marko groaned again. “The water’s up to my neck. It’s so cold I can hardly move, but it keeps the pain from…. Aaaughhh!” Marko splashed wildly, angled the plank, hoisted himself up and caught Lindsey’s arm. He was waterlogged and heavy, but he clambered up onto the ledge. He lay there shivering. She threw herself on top of him, embraced him, shaking even more violently than he was. “Thank you, God,” she whispered. “Are you okay? Can you wiggle your feet?”
Marko moved his right foot and then as he moved the left one he winced. But then he grinned at her. “I will work around it.”
At that moment, Lindsey knew something, a precious something that she could only tuck into her heart since the timing was so rotten. Yet this new certainty stopped her shaking. She would do anything, give her life, to get him out of this place.
“I have only one bullet left. You?” she asked.
“Wet gun. Ammo long gone.”
“Hold on to me while I lean over the edge and retrieve that ‘beautiful’ board. I have an idea.”
“One of those American so-crazy-it-just-might-work ideas?”
“Yeah. One of those,” she said. Foo Hai must be feeling as desperate to escape this cold hell as Lindsey was. A quick recon revealed that the light farther on indeed entered from an exit. But they needed Jeremy. The opening was passable, but she and Marko—who, though limping badly, uttered not one word of complaint—set blocks in front of the opening so that no light shone in. The way out would not draw attention.
She began to smear little dabs of dimly glowing spores to mark where she laid the plank across the chasm. No one could pass by here and not see this little glowing trail and footbridge.
She hoped it looked as if locals might sometimes use the plank. Surely, Foo Hai would reason, there would not be a plank across the chasm unless it led to somewhere, and that somewhere would most likely have an exit. He would have to at least try it.
The plank actually dead-ended. There was no exit on this side. They took up ambush positions, Marko on top of a beam that overlooked the path and Lindsey squatting down behind a half-fallen stone wall. Lindsey had secured the Danger tape to the end of the plank and entirely covered the tape with peaty dirt. The other end of the tape she held in her hand.
With glowing fingers, she waited and watched and listened. After an excruciating three or four minutes, she heard whispers. No more than thirty feet away. The men were past the rockfall now and should soon reach the plank. The still-burning fire above revealed two Asians, followed by Jeremy, followed by Foo Hai.
They stopped. Argued. A flunky came across first. Jeremy kept saying that he refused to cross the plank, but Foo Hai aimed a big Glock at him and, of course, he did. Next came the second flunky, and then Foo Hai. The minute he was across, Lindsey yanked on the Danger tape, drawing the plank to her and off the crevice. The four men, stunned, turned toward the chasm and stared.
Marko, a stone the size of a grapefruit in his hand, dropped onto one of the Asians. The lackeys were his responsibility. Lindsey stood and aimed the Beretta at Foo Hai and commanded, “Drop your—!”
But before she could finish the sentence, he was firing. She heard Jeremy scream as she placed a neat shot between Foo Hai’s eyes.
Foo Hai fell. Marko had bashed the first blackguard immediately into unconsciousness. He was rolling, struggling with the second thug, then bashed him into unconsciousness, as well. Jeremy had fallen onto the floor and kept screaming.
“Shut up, Jeremy,” she shouted.
He obeyed, but he lay bleeding and moaning.
From behind, Marko gave her the biggest, strongest bear hug she would probably ever feel. He pulled back and winked. “Do we really need to bother with Jeremy? He’s obviously going to die here. I say we leave him.”
“You can’t leave me,” Jeremy shrieked.
“Why shouldn’t we?” Lindsey asked, staring down at Jeremy in disgust. “I think Marko is right. You deserve to be left in this dark hole to bleed to death.”
She stepped away from Jeremy. “Let’s go.” She bent to the plank and placed it back across the dark chasm.
“You can’t leave me.”
“Sure we can,” Marko said, sounding quite happy.
Lindsey stepped onto the plank. Jeremy howled. “No. Wait. Take me to a doctor. I will give you the information. All of it.”
Jeremy, who had been clutching his wounded leg, fumbled to make the leg bend and then fumbled with the heel of his shoe. It pivoted open and he took out what Lindsey immediately recognized as a flash drive.
She returned to stand over him. “You lied before. How can we know this isn’t just another trick? I’m telling you, Jeremy, that if you don’t convince me you’re telling the truth, we’ll take your flash drive and then leave you here.”
Jeremy’s hands, covered with blood, were back on his wound. Lindsey wasn’t sure now whether the wound was superficial, as she originally thought, or if he in fact might be seriously hurt. “I suggest you talk quickly.”
“I swear, this is what you want. Names. Identities. Talents. Locations. All the genetic procedures. Would I have left this behind? No!”
“How did you set up the kidnapping? To tell you the truth, Jeremy, you don’t seem like a particularly capable criminal.”
“It wasn’t me, not really. There is someone. A blackmailer. Someone who knows all about Aldrich and his lab. After the lab went down, I contacted this person, at first pretending to be Aldrich. I thought I might develop the same kind of mutually beneficial relationship with him. I was stupid. I thought their relationship had been profitable and amicable. But this bastard has been blackmailing me ever since. He put me in contact with the Colombians.”
Excited, sure that he was telling the truth and that this was information that Christine and Allison didn’t know, Lindsey leaned close to Jeremy. “What’s his name?”
“I don’t know his name. He only identifies himself as A.”
Another lie. Lindsey scoffed and stood. “Let’s leave him.”
“Please, no! I swear on my life I do not know his name. I have never met him. He signs e-mails and faxes only with the letter A and there is always a spider image or spiderweb on them.”
Did she believe this? Jeremy was panicked, afraid he was dying, and he’d given up the flash drive, which Lindsey did believe held the genuine information. That he didn’t even know who was blackmailing him actually had the ring of truth.
“I buy it, Linds,” Marko said, confirming her judgment.
She nodded. Marko used two plastic handcuffs to make a tourniquet. Toting Jeremy in a fireman’s carry, Marko lugged the twisted scientist across the plank, then, supporting Jeremy between them, they made their way to the tunnel opening. She called Sam to pick them up. She figured Tito and his team would be on their way out of the country and Sam and Jeremy would be on a military plane back to the States within the hour.
Chapter 41
A t 11:05 a.m., Lindsey leaned on the corridor wall while
Marko used the key card to her hotel room and opened the door. He held it for her. Just pulling herself from the wall required extreme effort, but she managed it and walked inside, beyond exhausted, too wired to relax, shaky with adrenaline letdown, sore in a hundred places, weak, so hungry she probably couldn’t eat, as thirsty as if she’d been in a desert, and worst of all, still feeling like a worthless failure over losing Teal. K-bar’s deep voice boomed in her memory, “We’ll have to talk about what you could have done differently.”
Marko followed her in and let the door close. “Want to talk?” he asked. “Or do you want to be alone?”
Alone? God, no. I want to sit on your lap and have you rock me to sleep. But she was a sullen wretch and probably looked like hell. Why would anyone want to be with her? Especially after going through the same ordeal. Marko had sprained his ankle and said he had bruises in eighty places. If he didn’t want to stay, though, he wouldn’t have let that door close.
“I don’t want to be alone.”
He stepped in, eyes fixed on her, reading her. Bless him. He had to feel like more of a mess than she did—at least physically. He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand, a grimy, dirt-encrusted hand that matched hers.
“Want a drink?” she asked.
“Sounds great.” He took off his parka and dropped it on the floor.
She stripped off her borrowed parka, tossing it on the chair at the window. She grabbed a water bottle off a table and sank into the chair. “Make mine strong. Double scotch.”
As she gulped water, the image of Teal’s face in the helicopter’s window flashed into Lindsey’s mind yet again. Anguish immediately struck her heart. Teal’s being snatched away again was simply too hard to bear. She extinguished the image by focusing on Marko’s profile as he stood at the bar.
Her duties were not yet over, however, and she used a secure cell phone, freshly supplied by Bendrich, and punched in Allison’s number. Allison knew already from Sam that they had lost Teal again. Mercifully, Lindsey wasn’t required to go over the sickening, embarrassing, sad details of her failure. “I wanted to talk with you personally,” she said to Allison, “about the issue of Jeremy’s blackmailer, this mysterious A.”
