The Lost Relic

Chapter Forty

The flickering yellow flame of a Zippo wasn’t quite as useful as a torch for finding your way up a black tunnel. Better than groping about blindly, though it had other disadvantages. The lighter’s brushed steel body was getting uncomfortably hot in Ben’s fingers, and he was beginning to worry about the fuel-soaked cotton inside reaching flashpoint. But singed fingers were some way preferable to zapping yourself into a piece of crispy bacon in about a millisecond when you happened to step on the electrified rail in the dark.

He reckoned enough time had passed by now for the police to seal off the whole underground network. Call it instinct, call it experience, but his sense of growing unease as he’d ridden the near-empty tube train through two stations had made him want to bail out before reaching the third. Three was pushing his luck. And he was fairly sure that, before too long, they’d be swarming through these tunnels like ferrets down a rabbit hole.

As he walked down the dirty gravel path between the rails, his shoe scraped against something solid and heavy. In the dim flame he saw that it was an old wrench. It was rusted and pitted and had probably been dropped by a workman decades earlier. A thought came to him, and he picked the wrench up and lobbed it gently against the electrified rail.

No flash, no bang. The wrench lay against the dead steel. He had suspected that would happen, and it could only mean one thing – that he’d been right, and that the cops had shut down a section of the line and were already coming after him on foot. The next station back down the track was probably swarming with them by now, and they’d be working their way back to trap him in the middle. ‘At least, that’s what I’d do,’ he muttered to himself.

And he couldn’t afford to be spotted. He snuffed out the lighter, dropped it in his pocket next to the Ruger, and pressed on in darkness. At least he didn’t have to be concerned about where he stepped. He passed the dim light of a service lantern, then moved on blindly. Every few metres he reached out his left arm to touch the tunnel wall to orientate himself. The stonework felt gritty and loose against his fingers. A few hundred metres further, his hand brushed something smooth and soft, that gave way with a rustling crackle when he pressed it. It was a thick plastic sheet, and it was covering a hole in the wall that seemed to go on for quite a few metres, nearly as wide as the tunnel itself. He found the edge of the plastic and pulled it away from the stonework. A breath of cooler air chilled the sweat on his face.

Wherever this was leading him, it was taking him away from where he didn’t want to be. He stepped through the hole into even blacker darkness. Taking small, careful steps, he found his way to the nearest wall. After a few minutes’ groping around he came across what he quickly realised was a plastic switchbox attached to the wall. He threw the lever, and blinked as a dozen powerful floodlights came on. He looked around him, shielding his eyes from the blinding glare. He saw towering lattices of scaffolding. Heavy earth shifting equipment. Electrical cables as thick as anacondas snaking across the floor, hooked up to humming transformers the size of small cars. Keep-out and hard-hat-zone warning signs everywhere. It was a construction site for a new tunnel, branching off perpendicular to the one he’d just walked up. The heavy plastic sheeting had to be there to screen off the site so that work could carry on while the trains were in service.

Except that it looked as if no work had gone on here for a while. A fine layer of black soot had found its way in around the edges of the plastic sheeting and settled over everything. No prints or marks on any of the machinery to suggest they’d been used lately. There was mould growing inside an abandoned Thermos flask of coffee.

The new tunnel curved away to the left. Ben was about to check it out when he heard a sound from beyond the plastic curtain. He stiffened, listening. Voices. An echo of footsteps. Maybe ten people, maybe twenty, maybe more. A walkie-talkie fizzed. The sounds were still a long way down the main tunnel, but closing steadily.

He ran back to the electrical switch and threw it. The hum of the transformers died and he was plunged back into total darkness. Glancing again from behind the sheeting, he saw the first trembling pool of torchlight sweep the curved tunnel wall in the distance.

They’d be here in minutes.

Tracing a path from memory in the dark, Ben made his way across the construction site and followed the line of the new tunnel – and his heart sank when, just forty or fifty metres down the line, he bumped into another wall of plastic sheeting. Dead end.

Only, it wasn’t quite. He pushed against the plastic and could feel another opening in the solid wall. He reached for his Zippo, risking a little light. Punched a hole in the plastic and tore his way through.

What he found there was something that definitely hadn’t been part of the subway network plans. His flame shone off massive stone blocks that were craggy and pitted with age and looked as if they’d been here since biblical times. It was some kind of chamber, and from the jagged hole he’d just climbed through and the fresh scrape marks on the stone, he guessed that one of the excavation machines had made an unexpected discovery down here.

The chamber was long and narrow, just a metre and a half wide, disappearing into darkness. Its ceiling was a high arch, the floor compacted earth thick with the dust of centuries. Long, deep recesses were set into the walls at intervals, stretching all the way up to the ceiling. The recesses housed towering, crumbling wooden structures with stacked platforms like shelving.

The place smelled dank and ancient. Like a grave.

And when Ben walked on a few metres down the passage, he realised that was exactly what it was. By the amber glow of his lighter flame, thousands of sightless eyes stared at him from the darkness. He was looking at human remains. Mountains of them, heaped high on the wooden towers either side of him; fibias and tibias and femurs and others he couldn’t identify, stacked carefully like firewood kindling. Many of the skulls were intact, grinning at him, while others were missing jawbones or bore the marks of the injuries that had killed them.

How long had they been here? Two thousand years? Three?

Ben kept moving along the passage as it opened up in front of him. He came to a fork, then another. A whole labyrinth of corridors. He couldn’t begin to estimate how many dead had been stored down here. Fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, a million.

He pressed on. There had to be a way out of here.

The Zippo gave a sputter, then seconds later the flame choked and died. He stopped, his heart beginning to beat hard. He shook the lighter, flipped the hot striker wheel a couple of times. Nothing except a strong smell of evaporating fluid. He swore, and his voice sounded dead and flat in the cramped underground space.

He fumbled and groped his way forward. His fingers caressed something brittle and jagged. Teeth raking his skin. He jerked his hand sharply away from the skull’s mouth and stumbled on. He was fighting hard to deny it, but the realisation was growing on him.

That he was lost and buried in a forgotten mass grave beneath the city.

The lingering petrol scent of her prey had been subtle at best, and now Darcey couldn’t smell it at all any more. She’d lost the trail, and that perplexed her.

Where have you gone, Hope?

She didn’t want to say it out loud, didn’t want Buitoni or the others to know what she was thinking. She kept walking, feeling the tension in her neck spreading to her shoulders. The tramping footsteps of the Carabinieri echoed around her. Her heart jumped and her fist tightened on the Beretta when she saw the glimmer of light ahead in the tunnel – but the flush of excitement quickly died to disappointment when she realised it was the torches of the police team coming the other way down the tunnel. At least forty of them, to add to the fifty with her and Buitoni. The place had never been so crowded.

‘Shit,’ Buitoni said. As they all met, he began talking in rapid Italian to the officer in charge. There was a lot of arm-waving, and pretty soon a general argument had broken out and shouts were echoing through the tunnel.

Darcey left them to it. This couldn’t be right. She doubled back on herself. A hundred metres back down the tunnel, her torchlight flashed against shiny plastic. She cursed herself. How could they have missed it? She poked the torch through the hole, then called Buitoni over. He came running.

She showed him. ‘This is where he went.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘It’s where I would have gone.’

Buitoni shouted for the rest of the team. In moments he and Darcey were running across the construction site with ninety uniformed officers in their wake. Darcey flashed her light from side to side, following the path of the beam with the muzzle of the Beretta. They followed the bend in the tunnel and came to the second plastic curtain. ‘Gotcha,’ she muttered, seeing the ripped hole in it. ‘Come on.’

There was no Ben Hope on the other side, but her light flashed on the passage’s other, more permanent, occupants and she let out a breath. ‘Jesus. What the hell is this place?’

‘Some kind of crypt or catacomb,’ Buitoni said, looking around him in fascination. ‘Why do you think the Rome metro is still so underdeveloped after all these years? They’re forever having to suspend digging because of some unexpected archaeological find. There may still be thousands of archaeo-logical sites under the city, just waiting to be discovered, and armies of conservationists and historians lobbying for the protection of our ancient heritage. A treasure trove for them, but a nightmare for the city planners.’

But Darcey wasn’t listening to him. ‘It’s hot down here.’ She quickly peeled off the polo-neck and tossed it away. She was wearing a tight black sleeveless vest underneath. ‘Let’s go.’ She took off at a run down the passage with her pistol out in front of her.

Buitoni sighed, then followed.