Harvey Bennett Mysteries Box Set 3

by Nick Thacker

  “Excuse me — do you happen to have a cellular phone I can borrow?”

  “Like… for how long?” the young woman asked.

  “I am not sure. I also need a cab — a taxi — may I get that here?”

  The woman smiled, then reached into her pocket. She pulled out a phone and opened it to the dial pad, then looked back up at Canisius. “I can dial it for you.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I — am sorry. I was hoping I could borrow it for a short trip. There’s… somewhere I must be.”

  The woman seemed to dislike this response, but to her credit she continued the smile. “I’m sorry, I really can’t let you take it.” Her eyes lit up. “But we sell phones in the gift shop! You may purchase a set number of minutes, that should be more than enough for an outbound call.”

  Canisius followed her pointing finger and saw the gift shop, just beyond a set of double doors. He thanked her, asked about the taxi once again, then walked to the store.

  After purchasing what the cashier described as a “burner” phone, he returned to the lobby to wait for the car the woman had ordered, then turned on the phone, saw that there was a decent charge, and dialed the number.

  It rang three times before a man’s deep, powerful voice answered.

  “This is Archibald Quinones.”

  48

  Julie

  Julie had totally forgotten about Mrs. E, and it seemed as though everyone else in the room had, as well. The large woman was now barreling toward her and Ben, and she was moving fast.

  Mrs. E was large, but she had honed her stature into a solid mass of muscle and functional strength through years of hand-to-hand combat training, including becoming a master in Krav Maga.

  Julie ducked out of the way, but there was no reason to. The Ravenshadow soldier stood between them and Mrs. E, and it was into this man that the massive woman flew, her head tucked and aimed at the guy’s chest.

  The impact this close to Julie’s ears was almost deafening. She heard — and felt — the sickening crunch as the man’s sternum collapsed, and Ben had barely enough time to duck out of the way before the man came crashing up and over him. Mrs. E was still in motion, her truck-thick legs pumping with more power than speed, and the man tripped over Ben’s extended boot and sailed over his head and into the rear wall.

  Another crunching sound ended the man’s life, but Mrs. E wasn’t finished. She brought the butt of her rifle down onto the man’s head and sealed the deal.

  On the other side of the room, in the doorway, Reggie had also made his move. He punched up with his artificial limb and sent the other soldier’s rifle clattering toward the ceiling. He followed that swing with a solid left hook with his real hand, which was certainly not made of metal alloy but was nonetheless hard as a rock.

  The Ravenshadow man at the door grunted in pain but, to his credit, raised his arms to stave off another attack.

  Reggie was faster. He had his prosthetic lifted, his upper arm out and his elbow and forearm parallel to the ground, and he simply smashed the man’s face as if it were a melon. Julie watched the scene in disbelief, as if she were watching some disturbing science fiction movie.

  But it was real life, and that life, for both Ravenshadow men, was now over.

  Julie stood up slowly, waiting for the rest of the group to react, and waiting for any signs of life from the two downed soldiers.

  Nothing.

  Reggie grinned, twisting the wrist of his prosthetic around and examining it. “Damn,” he said. “Not a scratch.”

  “That’s what you’re worried about?”

  “Hey, it’s like a brand-new truck,” he retorted. “You want to be the first person to scratch it, not some random Ravenshadow asshole.”

  Mrs. E was wiping her pant legs as if she’d simply fallen in the dirt, and then stood to her full over-six-foot height and shook herself off.

  “Well, you’ll probably have plenty more opportunities to test it out,” Ben said, groaning as he rose to his feet as well. “There are lots more of these dudes, and they’re not going to waste any time shooting at us if they catch us out there.”

  “Fair point,” Reggie said. “It’s ironic.”

  “What is?” Julie asked.

  “We worked so hard to get in here,” he said. “And it was easy. The challenge is going to be getting back out.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. Especially since Garza knows we’re here.” Julie stopped herself then thought a moment. “You think there are more of these secret passageways?”

  “The curtain, you mean? That piece of fabric that led to this room?”

  “Yeah, exactly. It’s part of the older mine system, not a newer Ravenshadow development. And, unless I’m mistaken, it wasn’t on the map.”

  “It definitely wasn’t,” Ben said. “And yeah, there are probably more of them. Maybe they thought the tunnels were unstable or something. Didn’t want to risk a cave-in?”

  “Maybe,” Reggie said. “Or, maybe this was Garza’s plan all along.”

  “To trap us in here?”

  “He knew we were coming, right? How else would he have sent men right where we went into the river, and then basically let us through the waste shaft? He acted surprised on the intercom, but this is Vicente Garza we’re talking about. The Hawk.”

  “And he’s been watching us like a hawk since we got here.”

  “And the whole thing with Victoria,” Ben said. “It was all planned. Staged, as if he had orchestrated all of it. We played right into his hand.”

  “So Beale was in on it, too?” Julie asked.

  “No way,” Reggie said. “They were crooked, but they weren’t on the same team as Garza. He was surprised they were there, too. Expected us, maybe, but not them. That’s why he killed them all.”

  “In a way that was meant to demonstrate his power,” Mrs. E added. “And I believe it worked.”

  “I believe that, too,” Ben said. “Those… things… the exosuits? They’re unbelievable. All controlled by a human operator — someone under Garza’s spell. He could take out an entire army with them.”

  Julie nodded. “Which means we can’t get anywhere near them. One shot from those turrets and we’re toast.”

  “More like Swiss cheese,” Reggie said.

  “So we need to find another way out,” Ben said. “But the map we saw showed tunnels and hallways that all basically lead to that demonstration floor, where the machines were. This place is crawling with Ravenshadow men, too.”

  “So let’s hope there’s another set of these tunnels, then?” Julie asked.

  “Yeah, and let’s hope they lead somewhere besides back to the monsters.”

  They were interrupted by the sound of voices echoing into the room from outside in the hallway. Men’s voices, low and clearly discussing how they were going to breach the room.

  “They’re here,” Ben said. “Julie, grab that guy’s weapon. The rest of you guys, get into a corner. We want to fight our way out, but we don’t want to hit each other.”

  Julie did, and the weight of the rifle gave her a moment of relief. She no longer felt naked, vulnerable.

  She was armed once again, and she was going to fight her way out of this hell.

  49

  Ben

  The Exos had started to move. Ben knew that because he could hear the faint sound of the high-pitched whine as the machines moved throughout the base. The sound was more like a piercing, shrill poke — a physical sensation — than it was a sound. It made sense to Ben, since he knew that sound was literally a pressure wave. The Exos made noise as they powered up, and it was enough noise that they essentially broadcasted their location as they moved.

  Not exactly stealth, Ben thought. Perhaps that was why Garza was still working on them? Why Beale — and his boss, Sturdivant — wanted an update? Maybe Garza couldn’t figure out how to get the whining noise out of the Exos’ modus operandi. While Ben hardly thought the Exos were meant as stealth infiltrators — their lumbering,
monstrous machine bodies thundered around, preventing any hope of moving incognito — Ben knew that a high-pitched sound at that decibel level would travel massive distances, alerting any enemies to their locations long before they were in firing range.

  One of the Exos had marched down the hall and past the CSO group, narrowly missing them. They’d hidden by sliding to the floor, lying flat and hoping that the Exo was merely patrolling, not actively pursuing them. They’d gotten away without being spotted. Apparently the suits were incapable of determining enemy locations without a decent amount of light, and the onboard human host was incapable of using its own senses for that purpose.

  Ben had watched it closely as it passed, taking it in, memorizing what he could. The sleek aluminum braces around the vertical leg shafts shone against the dim light cast by its own flashlight, mounted on the opposite shoulder as the thing’s turret. Ben saw a battery pack the size of its torso strapped to the alloy frame, where there were also a few canisters that he assumed held some sort of hydraulic equipment or ammunition.

  The thing’s feet were diamond-shaped pads, split down the middle horizontally, allowing the “toes” to bend. The arms were mounted on ball-socket swivels, and he saw that they had claw-shaped grips on the ends, extensions that could be used to grab rocks, branches, and other objects.

  And he had no doubt the thing knew fifty ways to kill a man. They didn’t even need weapons, Ben realized as it passed. They could simply walk through a human, smashing it into the dirt around its feet. The vice-grip hands could likely crush a human skull without much trouble. In all, it was a tank on two legs, capable of running them down and killing them without burning any extra battery life.

  Ben’s group had run down the hallway after leaving the stone chamber Victoria had locked them in, opposite the direction from which they’d come. They’d decided that running toward where they thought the center of the base was would lead them to another exit.

  It was a risk, but Ben knew it was time to act. They were pinned down here, inside Ravenshadow headquarters. Garza knew they were here, and the longer they spent inside the base the better chance they’d all spend eternity here.

  And Ben wasn’t a fan of that option.

  Beale’s group had experienced that fate, and it hadn’t ended well.

  But Ben also wanted to continue their mission. While Beale had betrayed them, Ben intended to redeem their deaths. He added theirs to his tally of reasons to seek vengeance.

  It had all started with Joshua Jefferson, and by extension Julie, and she had led them all here. But Garza had killed and kidnapped many others along the way, and there were likely countless more they would never even know about.

  Garza and his men were a scourge, a virus, one that Ben hoped to eradicate. Beale’s team of professional soldiers had failed, but they had gone into the battle with different expectations. Ben wouldn’t make the same mistake. Garza was prepared to kill them. All of them. And Ben wouldn’t miss the chance to take a shot at him.

  He knew the others felt the same as well.

  Reggie, leading the group through the maze of tunnels, stopped at another t-intersection.

  “Which way?” Ben asked.

  “I think we should go right,” Reggie responded. “But that’s not why I stopped.”

  Ben slowed to a halt and stood next to his friend. “What’s up? You hear something?”

  Reggie shook his head. “No, thank god. Those monster robot things are loud, thankfully. So we won’t miss them coming. The Ravenshadow men will be running as well, so we should be able to pick them off when we hear them.” Reggie turned and felt the wall, then spoke again. “Remember the briefing? Beale said this place was a mine.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “The locals mined it a hundred years ago.”

  “They said the locals mined it. And I looked it up — that’s what the general consensus says, anyway. That this mountain was some sort of mine, cut into the rock over a hundred or two-hundred years ago.”

  “What’s the point?” Ben asked. He was feeling impatient, knowing that around any corner might be an exit — or a group of Exos ready to kill them. He wanted to get out. He wanted to go home.

  “The point is that I don’t think this place was ever a mine.”

  “You don’t?” Julie asked.

  “I don’t. These walls — they were cut, but then smoothed.”

  “Could have been water, over thousands of years.”

  “Then it was definitely not a mine,” Reggie said. “If water had any part of it, it would have had to have started long before civilized people took to mining.”

  Julie seemed to be just as impatient as Ben. “Okay, then —”

  She stopped herself, then looked at Ben and Reggie, then Mrs. E.

  “You don’t think…”

  “It has to be, Julie. We knew they were here.”

  Ben nodded. The original descendants. The Chachapoyas. The ‘fair-skinned’ tribe who had simply appeared in the jungle, their civilization complete and in existence in an instant.

  “They were here,” Reggie continued. “We saw their temples and their writing.” Ben thought back to the Chachapoyas valley, just on the other side of this mountain, where they had encountered the gigantic soldiers Garza had been trying to build and the Guild Rite, the ancient fraternal order that had ties to Freemasonry. “They were in this mountain. After they fled their previous home, they settled here.”

  “Those temples outside,” Ben said. “You think they were just that? Temples?”

  “I do. It makes sense now — they didn’t live there. They worshipped there.”

  “Because they lived here,” Julie said, finishing his thought.

  “Exactly. Look around — this place was never a mine. Sure, it has long, straight tunnels and shafts, but there are rooms, large spaces cut into the walls that are ordered and organized. Not like a mine.”

  “Like a city,” Ben said.

  “Like a city.” Reggie brushed his hand along the wall. “The Peruvian locals around here invented stories and myths about this place, about the inhabitants, and they simply assumed it was a mine. That their predecessors built it.”

  “They would not have known that their predecessors did build it,” Mrs. E said. “But that it was not built a single generation before them, but many generations before them.”

  “Yes,” Reggie said. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. When Ravenshadow came in here, it was out of necessity. Garza needed a place to work, a place away from prying eyes.”

  “And since we now know Beale was here to snoop, they probably wanted a place that couldn’t be seen from above, either. By satellite.”

  “Reggie,” Julie asked. “Are you saying what I think you are? That this isn’t just the lost city of the Chachapoyas, but also their original goal? The entire reason they came here?”

  Reggie nodded solemnly. “I am suggesting that. I believe this place was the home of the descendants we’ve been chasing. The lost civilization of Atlantis. The survivors fled from their homes on their island nation after the catastrophe 11,000 years ago. They spread around the globe, building monuments to their gods and teaching the uncivilized world about farming, agriculture, philosophy.

  “They built the pyramids, and the original sculpture that eventually became the Great Sphinx. Then they moved again — likely driven out by warring factions.”

  “And they ended up here.”

  “Yes,” he said. “They ended up right here. But that’s not all — they would have taken their collection of records with them. They would have brought them to protect them, and this would have been the perfect place to store them — just like Garza, they would have wanted to keep them out of sight of prying eyes, of enemies who would take advantage of them.

  “I believe that somewhere inside this mountain is the lost Atlantean Hall of Records.”

  50

  Edmund

  “Hello, Mr. Quinones,” Canisius began.

  “Please, c
all me Archie,” the voice returned in perfect Spanish.

  Canisius felt relieved, and immediately felt more at home. “Very well, Archie. I hope I did not catch you at a bad time.” He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say, and he wasn’t sure that what he’d said was even appropriate. Too late.

  “Nonsense, I appreciate your taking the time to reach out. I hope you are well, and I hope you will forgive my breach of privacy, but I have a matter to attend to that I believe is of the utmost importance.”

  “And what matter is that?”

  “As I mentioned in my email, I do some work with the Civilian Special Operations. They are currently here in Peru, investigating a company whom we believe to be involved in the murder and kidnapping of innocent civilians.”

  Canisius sucked in a breath. He had never been part of anything like this, and he certainly had no idea how to handle it, or how to respond. “I — I am sorry to hear that.”

  “Rest assured, I am not accusing you of anything, Father. I merely want your help.”

  Canisius waited.

  “I know you are in Peru for the convention, though it seems a bit strange as to why your office would send such a high-ranking cardinal.”

  “And I thought I was not being accused of anything, Archie?”

  “No, of course. I am merely wondering if you were in Peru for another reason altogether. A reason that involves the buying and selling of assets?”

  How did he know? Edmund Canisius felt the blood inside him run cold. No, he thought. He can’t know. There is no way to know — both the buyer and the broker have been completely silent about this matter.

  He relaxed a bit. Archie’s words hadn’t revealed anything suspect, though they had been close to the mark.

  “I can confirm that I have additional business to handle while I’m here.”

  “Very well. Please understand that I am not trying to uncover the details of that deal. But I am afraid that there may be more at stake than a simple transaction.”