第 49 页

It was always about choices, Natasha thought. There was no reason to fire on the construction workers unless the stakes had been raised. She considered Lourds briefly and wondered how much trouble he was in.

Then one of the stray bullets scraped the ground nearby and caught the gasoline pool on fire. It blazed immediately.

“Move!” Natasha ordered. She butted Gary into motion with her head and rushed him toward the other side of the earthmover just as the flames under the pickup twisted up and ignited the gas tank.

The explosion wasn’t so big as the ones on television, but the concussive wave knocked her down and sent fiery debris in all directions.

Natasha scrabbled upright again and kept moving. She reminded herself to use her peripheral vision and not try to look at the Swiss Guards straight on. Too many hiding places had been given away by the gleam of an eye. She popped up on the other side of the earthmover and pointed her left pistol long enough to squeeze off three shots.

At least one of them hit the charging Swiss Guard in the face and knocked him from his feet. The two others took cover.

As she held her position, her nose and throat burning from the smoke pooling against the cave ceiling, Natasha saw one of the Swiss Guards break cover and throw a grenade against the mobile building.

The grenade turned out to be an incendiary one. It went off with a bamf! that carried to Natasha’s ears. Immediately flames clawed up the side of the building.

“There are people in that building!” Gary yelled.

Natasha glanced at the windows and saw the men’s faces pressed against the glass.

“They’re locked in,” Gary yelled.

“I know.”

“We can’t let them burn.”

“I know. Let me think.”

But there wasn’t time for thinking, and Natasha knew it. There were still two armed—

Gary broke cover at once and ran for the building. One of the Swiss Guards stood up and shot him. Even as Gary fell, Natasha targeted the man in the darkness by marking his muzzle flashes. She fired several shots and didn’t stop until the man fell out of the darkness to the ground.

Shoe leather scraped on stone behind her. Knowing she’d been flanked by the other man, she ducked. A bullet caught her hip and sent her sprawling.

Lourds’s subsequent exploration of the buttons revealed that each of them was connected to a bone hammer. He studied the stalactites enough to see that each of them had been carefully shaped. The cave was no longer growing, so the stalactites hadn’t changed in thousands of years.

“I’ve seen something like this,” Lourds said as he stood once more in front of the engraving showing the First Son. “There’s a cave system in Luray, Virginia. Luray Caverns. It has what’s called the Great Stalacpipe Organ, but it’s based on one of the oldest musical instruments we’ve ever found: a lithophone. Normally lithophones are made up of stone bars of different lengths. Or wood.”

“Like a xylophone,” Murani said.

Lourds nodded. “Exactly. However, the Great Stalacpipe Organ was constructed using the same design. It uses electricity to power the clappers. They play the huge organ and actually sell records of songs they make.”

“But why is this here?”

Lourds shone his light at the symbols under the buttons. “Believe it or not, but I think it’s an alarm code. If you trigger the right sequence, maybe the Book of Knowledge will be revealed.”

“What happens if you trigger the wrong sequence?” Gallardo asked.

“You mean, what if there’s a trap?” Lourds asked. The possibility hadn’t occurred to him. He’d been mesmerized by the whole setup.

“Yes.”

“Then we’re hosed,” Lourds said.

Gallardo didn’t look happy.

“The trick is to not get hosed.” Lourds studied the wall and thought about everything he’d learned. “The Keepers believed the instruments were the key to opening the ‘Drowned Land.’ The inscriptions on the walls outside said the key was in five parts.”

“I thought that was just the clue to the hidden room,” Murani said.

“Maybe there’s more,” Lourds suggested. “Let’s have another look at them.”

Murani sent Sbordoni to retrieve the instruments. When they were brought back, everyone examined them again. The susurration of the sea sounded outside the rock walls and echoed within the chambers.

Without warning, Father Sebastian ducked forward and evaded the Swiss Guards for a moment. He stomped the drum and shattered it to pieces before the Swiss Guards got him under control again.

“Don’t help him!” Father Sebastian shouted at Lourds and the Guards. “He intends to use the Book of Knowledge! If he does, he’ll bring God’s wrath down on us again!”

Murani pointed his pistol at the priest. There was no doubt he was going to kill the man.

Lourds shifted his weight and caught Murani’s wrist just in time to yank the cardinal’s arm up. When he fired, the bullet ricocheted from the ceiling above.

Gallardo hit Lourds hard enough to drive him to his knees. Pain exploded inside his head, and the coppery taste of blood filled his mouth. He tried to get to his feet, but he was rubbery-legged.

By the time Murani brought the pistol back down, three of the Swiss Guards stood in front of Father Sebastian and created a wall of living flesh protecting him.

“No,” one of the guards said, the one with the scar on his face. “There’s not going to be a murder here in this place. We’re here to do the work of the Society of Quirinus. If we find the Book of Knowledge, it needs to be locked away.”

Murani said nothing, but Lourds could see that he wasn’t happy. The Swiss Guards were dividing among themselves. Two groups had started to form, one that stood with Father Sebastian, the other that aligned themselves with Murani.

Lourds was stuck between them, and it was the wrong place to be. He looked down at the drum to check to see if it was salvageable. The instrument was a tangle of broken pottery and leather cords. Thankfully the shards had broken into big pieces. He thought he might be able to reassemble the fragments. Even better yet, the inscription with the two languages looked salvageable.

Then he saw an inscription inside a drum shard, a series of lines with marks drawn on them.

“What is that?” Murani knelt down beside Lourds.

“I think,” Lourds said, fascinated, “it’s a musical score, maybe a diatonic scale. The ancient Greeks worked with music theory. They called it genera and developed three primary types. The diatonic was used for the major scales and church modes, so it was also called the Gregorian mode.”

“Could it be the key the inscription was talking about?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible that—” Before Lourds could say anything more, Murani shattered the bell.

Lourds almost cried at the artifact’s loss.

But the inscription inside was clear.

The shards had to be pieced together to reveal the musical score. Murani broke the cymbal, pipe, and flute in quick succession. So much history, gone forever. But inside each of them, inscriptions revealed a musical score.

“They go in order, right?” Murani asked. “As they’re shown on the engraving?”

“Who knows? Maybe.”

Murani arranged the score on the ground and ran through the buttons again. Then he began to play.

The cave came alive with the sound of music. Excitement filled Lourds. The beautiful notes took away some of his fear. Leslie joined him, standing beside him as the echoes of the music filled the space. She took his hand in hers. She held on tightly.

For a moment after the last note was played, nothing happened. Then an explosion was followed by a rattle of gunfire. Everyone turned back in the direction of the caves they’d come through, looking to see where the sound originated.

In the next moment, the two factions of Swiss Guards separated even further. The had rifles pointed at each other. It seemed each side was willing to kill—or to die—for their cause.

Then stones ground out in the center of the cave and jerked their attention back in that direction. The grumbling, rumbling noise filled the cavern as it echoed and re-echoed.

As Lourds watched, the cavern floor irised open at the center. Cunningly wrought stone teeth retracted and revealed a pit. A golden glow dawned inside the darkness.

Lourds started forward immediately. Leslie hung on to his hand and followed.

Murani hastened past Lourds, though, and reached the pit first. He aimed his flashlight, then the pistol, into the pit.

Surprising himself, Lourds hesitated a little as the thought of an Old Testament demon or lurking evil hit him. You don’t believe in things like that, he reminded himself. But here, with all the evil surrounding him, with all the impossibilities he’d uncovered so far, he suddenly found he could believe in anything. He took a tighter grip on Leslie’s hand as he approached the pit.

Liquid fire burned Gary’s side as he took a breath. For a moment there after the bullet had struck him, he’d forgotten how to breathe. That had scared him more than he’d ever been scared in his life. And that was saying something, because there had been several close calls since he and Leslie had hooked up with Lourds and Natasha.

Get up, you great wanker! Them people are going to burn to death while you lay about!

Painfully, fearful of another bullet striking him because he still heard gunfire echoing in the cavern, Gary forced himself to his feet. He felt light-headed, but he managed—and that surprised the hell out of him.

He concentrated on breathing and walking. It turned out to be more of a lurch, actually, but he made it work for him. He felt the heat coming off the mobile building as he neared it.

Men had already broken the glass out of the windows, but there wasn’t enough room to squeeze through to safety. They screamed at him in frustration.

Increased dizziness clawed at Gary’s mind. He felt the darkness eating away at the edges and waiting to consume him.

The harsh, flat cracks of more gunshots sounded behind him.

Are we winning? he wondered. Even he couldn’t see how they would prevail.

When he reached the building, he almost had to turn back from the heat. Instead, he made himself reach for the door. Someone had wedged a crowbar into the door to block escape. He grabbed it. The heated metal scorched his hand, but he held on just long enough to yank it free. Then he threw it to one side.

The men poured out of the mobile building. Two of them grabbed him up under the arms and carried him away from the fire. All of them spoke Italian, and Gary couldn’t understand most of what they were saying.

Somewhere in there, just as it was starting to dawn on him that he’d been a hero and gotten shot for his trouble, Gary fell into unconsciousness.

Steps carved into the side of the pit tunnel led down into darkness. Even though Lourds added his flashlight beam to Murani’s, the darkness didn’t retreat enough to reveal what was held below.

The glow seemed concentrated down in the bottom of the pit.

Murani pointed his pistol at Lourds.

“You first,” the cardinal commanded.

Lourds thought about objecting and knew it wouldn’t do any good. But that was only a small part of why he started down the steps. The other part, the larger part, was that he had to see what was there.

If the Atlanteans, or whatever they’d called themselves, had taken the time and trouble to hide the Book of Knowledge in such an elaborate place as this, what else could be hidden there?

The smart thing to do was lower a light into the yawning abyss and see what pitfalls—literally—lay ahead. But Lourds knew that neither he nor Murani were willing to wait long enough for a cautious examination of the site.

One of these days that curiosity of yours is going to get you killed, Lourds chided himself.

The pit was colder than the room above. The sea gurgling against the rock was louder as well. Lourds couldn’t help thinking how far below the ocean’s surface they were at the moment. It had to be 250 or 300 feet at least. And it was two miles back to the cave entrance.

The steps were cut narrow and shallow. There was barely enough room for Lourds to walk down. He hadn’t seen any bodies of the Atlanteans, but he was willing to bet they’d been small people.

Footsteps rasped behind Lourds. When he stopped and looked up, he found Leslie behind him.

“It might not be safe down here,” he said.

“It’s not safe out there,” she replied.

“I suppose it isn’t.”

“I couldn’t let you go alone.”

Lourds gave her a small smile. She could have, and they both knew it. He was willing to wager that her curiosity pushed at her as sure as his propelled him.

“Let’s hope that coming down here was the smart thing to do.” He turned and headed back down into the darkness.

A door lay at the end of the steps. It wasn’t locked, and it opened inward easily at Lourds’s touch. The air inside the room was stale and musty, but it carried odors that suddenly made the professor’s heart beat faster and chase away the remaining fear in his head.

“Do you smell that?” Lourds asked excitedly as he went forward with more confidence. He knew those scents immediately, and he’d know them till his dying day.

“What? The dust?”

“Parchment,” Lourds said. “Ink. Lots of it.”

He shone the flashlight inside the room and was astounded to see rows of books. They stood neatly ranked on shelves on the walls as well as in free-standing shelves that occupied the floor space.

Lourds walked to the nearest shelf and plucked a book from the row. The book was bound in a leatherlike material, but it wasn’t leather, at least not any leather that Lourds knew about. Leather wouldn’t have held up for thousands of years without showing some kind of aging. This book—all the books—looked as though they’d just been written.

Lourds balanced the book, bound in bright blue, on his left forearm and opened it with his left hand. He held the flashlight in his right. It was hard doing that with his hands cuffed. Symbols like the ones he’d decrypted on the musical instruments filled the crisp white pages.

He shone the flashlight around the room again. There were hundreds—perhaps thousands—of books on the shelves. The titles hinted at histories, biographies, sciences, and mathematics.

“My god,” Lourds said softly. “It’s a library.”

“Is that all you see?” Leslie sounded distracted. “Look at this!”

Lourds followed the line of her flashlight beam as Murani, Gallardo, and the others entered the room.

Drawn by the beauty before her, Leslie reached out her manacled hands to touch the amber figurine standing at the end of one of the shelves. Light glinted from the polished surface and fired the veins of its matrix with gold.

The figurine stood almost four feet tall and displayed a man holding the model of a solar system in his hand. Six planets of different sizes orbited the sun.

“They had the solar system as sun-centric,” Lourds said. “They were thousands of years ahead of everyone. And the size ratio looks right, too.” Wonder overcame him as he looked at the rest of the books.