The Boy Who Stole from the Dead

CHAPTER 44

NADIA SQUEEZED THROUGH the cave’s passageway. It curled into a semicircle around the inner chambers. She had to shuffle sideways, left arm by her side, right arm raised and parallel to the floor. Her hand gripped the flashlight. Her back scraped the wall. She heard the sound but felt no pain. The overalls were amazing. Then she remembered. The overalls weren’t scraping the walls. She was wearing a backpack. The backpack was scraping the wall. The backpack was the problem.

She stopped, lowered her right arm, and tried to shimmy out of it. The backpack slid halfway down her spine and got stuck. Nadia pulled on the straps. The backpack wouldn’t budge.

Light flashed behind her. Rock scraped against rock. The boulder, Nadia thought. A voice. The man with the rifle. No. Two voices. Two men. Entering the passageway.

Shit.

Nadia pushed off against the front wall and tried to compress her backpack’s contents. Plastic cracked. The water bottle, she remembered. Half-empty. She straightened. Pressed against the front wall, face turned sideways. Slipped the pack off her back.

Light bounced off the walls behind her.

Footsteps. Coming.

She grabbed the knapsack by the strap with her left hand and powered forward. She turned the light on. Caught a glimpse of the next twenty steps. Turned it off. Five steps. Ten steps. Fifteen steps. Twenty steps. Flashed the light again.

A solid crystalline wall stood in front of her. Three more steps and she would have smashed her face. A crawl space at the bottom of the wall.

Light flashed forty feet behind her. Closing.

Nadia flung the knapsack into the narrow passage. Dropped to her hands and knees. Shined the flashlight into the crawl space. Saw air beyond the knapsack. Slithered into the opening and pushed forward.

The air thinned. Sweat trickled into her eyes. Crystalline dust drifted into her nose. She tried to suppress a sneeze but to her horror, couldn’t. It didn’t matter if she made noise, she realized. They were right behind her. They knew exactly where she was.

She crawled on her elbows and knees. Pushed the knapsack ahead. Kept the flashlight pointed at an angle to illuminate the ceiling and the tunnel. Considered the possibility the crawl space would end. Imagined being shot from behind, or dragged out by her legs. Or beaten with the butt of a rifle. Gritted her teeth and banished the thoughts. Crawled for twenty body lengths. Twenty-one, she counted. Twenty-two.

Light shone behind her. Voices.

The crawl space opened. Nadia scampered out of the tunnel. Stepped to the right, away from her pursuers’ line of vision. Turned in a circle and made a sweeping motion with her flashlight. Cast an arc of light at her surroundings.

The ceilings soared. Solid walls surrounded her on three sides. The fourth wall provided the only possible escape. It featured a narrow passage that gradually widened the higher one climbed. At a height of thirty feet, a human being could slip through the passage, Nadia guessed. But there was no floor. Just a crack below where the two side walls met. The only footholds were the two walls that defined the passageway.

Nadia turned the light off. Her eyes had adjusted to the dark. She could see twenty feet in front of her. She stashed her flashlight in her pocket. Slung the knapsack on her back again. She considered leaving it but decided she might need the lighter, water, and batteries if she got stuck overnight. She scampered up the left wall. She’d scaled fifty-foot trap rock ridges in the hills of Litchfield County. Climbed up cliffs twice that height on the Appalachian Trail. Sturdy crystalline crevices provided decent toeholds and perches. It was child’s play, she told herself. Child’s play—

“Stop or I’ll shoot,” a man said in Russian.

It was a different voice. Not the rawboned man from Lviv. It was the other one. The man who’d been following them. The one with the pointed chin.

Nadia took a running start and leaped into the crevice between the walls. She spread her legs. Reached out with her hands. Her feet landed at odd angles against the two walls. Her right ankle turned in. She slipped. Started to fall. Pressed hard with her right hand against the wall to keep from falling. The rock stripped skin from her hand.

She winced. Regained her balance. Propelled herself forward, legs straddling the parallel walls. Crystal shards scraped her hands. She kept her knees bent to exert maximum force. She covered five, ten, twenty, yards.

The walls ended. Nadia found herself perched on a cliff. She had to be more than twenty feet high. She couldn’t see the ground below. She reached for her flashlight.

Light shone behind her. Headlamps.

“I see her,” a man said.

Nadia didn’t have time for the flashlight. She found a toehold and descended down the cliff. The slope eased. Nadia ran down the final twenty feet. At the bottom of the cliff, a long horizontal strip of crystal protruded from the floor before giving way to a flat surface. Nature had honed it to a sharp edge. Momentum carried Nadia toward the crystal. By the time she saw it, there was no way she could stop.

She leaped. The running start carried her four or five feet past the jagged edge. Her right foot landed on a stone instead. She turned her leg. Lost her footing. Fell to the ground.

A straightaway awaited her ahead. Nadia ran. She managed fifteen strides before the gunshot exploded. The noise was deafening. She stopped in her tracks. Waited for the pain.

None came. He’d missed.

He’d also taken his sound suppressor off, Nadia thought. As though he wanted to make noise. It occurred to her that if they wanted to kill her they would have done so by now. It seemed as though they wanted to capture her instead.

“Stay where you are,” the man with the pointed chin said.

He waited until the rawboned man with the rifle appeared behind him. He was limping. He took one look at the cliff and stopped. He aimed his rifle at Nadia. The man with the pointed chin descended down the cliff.

Nadia eyed the sharp strip of crystal. With any luck he’d trip and fall headfirst onto it. She realized her odds were low. The man kept coming though, arm extended, gun pointed at Nadia. He gathered momentum as the cliff became manageable. Broke into a slow trot as Nadia had done. She held her breath. He didn’t appear to see the strip of crystal.

But then at the last second he looked down, as though his instincts had alerted him to possible danger. He leapt. It was a weak jump off one foot only, and the back foot at that. But it was enough to clear the razor’s edge that Nadia had been hoping would take him down.

He sailed over the crystal and disappeared beneath the earth. A scream filled the air. It grew more distant with each second but its echo continued. It seemed to last forever.

Nadia remembered the guide’s warning about fissures in the floor. Fissures large enough to swallow a human. She realized she must have leapt over the hole to avoid the sharp rock.

The other man was equally transfixed by his colleague’s fall. Nadia didn’t waste time. She hurried along the passage toward the entrance to the cave. Kept her flashlight on. Didn’t turn back. The rawboned man with the rifle was injured, she thought. He couldn’t keep up with her.

She stopped after ten minutes to consult her map. Oriented herself, and hurried on to the original cave entrance.

A ray of light. A collection of small rocks and boulders obscured the opening. Nadia tossed them aside. Daylight streamed into the cave. So did the sound of rain. She cleaned out dry sticks, leaves, and branches. A large pile of animal dung appeared fresh. From her experience, it looked like it belonged to a bear. She looked around again. No animal in sight.

She slipped through a circular opening and emerged on a mound of grass. Rain pelted her. Nadia stayed low and looked out. The field looked familiar but the other entrance to the cave was nowhere in sight. She crept around the mound and glanced in the opposite direction.

An old Range Rover was parked a hundred yards beside the main entrance to the cave. Her guide’s car was gone. Fog obscured the Rover’s windows. Someone was inside, she thought.

Nadia sat and waited. Stuck her hands out to let the rain wash the blood away and clean her wounds. Marko had been talking. Then she’d heard the thump. And not another sound from Marko.

He was dead. He had to be dead. It was only logical, and yet she couldn’t contemplate the thought. A sense of loss paralyzed her. Marko had just reached the point in his life where he was comfortable with himself. He wasn’t drinking. He’d discovered contentment and joy. She sat there trying to imagine a life without him and couldn’t fathom it. And it was her fault. He was here on her behalf.

She sat in a quiet stupor for ten minutes until a noise rousted her. The rawboned man with the rifle emerged. She was shocked how quickly he made it out given how badly he’d been limping. Ex-military, she thought. He looked like it, and moved like it, too.

Rain pummeled him. He slipped the rifle off his shoulder and looked around. Found the Range Rover. Sealed the lid to the cave and limped over to the vehicle. He opened the passenger’s side front door and lowered his head to speak to someone inside. The driver, Nadia thought. A few seconds later he opened the rear passenger door.

Marko stepped out of the Range Rover.

He was alive. A sense of euphoria swept Nadia. It left her giddy.

He had a bandage on his head. His hands were cuffed in front of him. The man with the rifle took him by the arm and directed him to the front passenger seat. Even put his hand over Marko’s head to make sure he didn’t bump his wound on the way in.

Marko carried himself with a fearlessness that belied his situation. He even stopped to say something to the man with the rifle before climbing in the front seat.

Another pair of men must have followed the two she’d encountered, Nadia thought. Perhaps they’d gone to search the other khatki, or the water source on the opposite side of the Gypsum Giant. They probably had shortwave radios. As soon as they heard shooting they must have come running. From there they took Marko to the car while the other two pursued her.

The thump must have been a warning shot. Followed by a rifle butt to the head.

Marko was alive.

Nadia’s joy was short-lived. Karel. She’d put him out of her mind. The image of his head bursting open flashed before her eyes. His final words rang in her head.

Valentin. He knew the name. There was a connection between Bobby and Valentin. It involved something called the Zaroff Seven.

And one more thing. It was so unbelievable as to be laughable. But Karel hadn’t wavered in his conviction. Not for a moment.

The formula was real.