The Prisoner's Gold

68

Sarah stared at the barrel of Feng’s gun. There was no fire. There was no smoke. There was no projectile hurling its way toward her face at the speed of sound.

The knife had sunk securely into his left eye, the blade tunneling deeply into his skull and the handle lodging firmly up against his orbital bone. Yet it was the right half of his face that had left her in awe. It wasn’t just damaged, it was shredded, the skull beneath having been pulverized into skeletal fragments.

The reality of the moment slowly crept into her brain.

Feng never got off a shot.

Someone else pulled the trigger.

Feng’s body tipped over to the side, and Sarah glanced over her shoulder to see who had joined the fray. She breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of Cobb; she didn’t have the strength to fight more of the Brotherhood.

‘Nice timing,’ Sarah croaked before dropping to the ground in exhaustion.

Cobb raced forward to catch her, but she held up a hand to signal that she was okay. He crouched beside her. ‘I think what you meant to say was, “Thanks for saving my life.”’

Sarah grinned as she gulped in air. ‘Nah, I had him. The knife killed him first. You just made things messy.’

Cobb was about to laugh when he noticed Maggie’s crumpled body near the other side of the room. He sprang up to investigate, but Sarah grabbed the cuff of his pant leg.

‘Don’t,’ she pleaded. ‘She’s not worth it.’

Cobb’s troubled stare told her that she needed to explain.

‘She was working for Feng. She sold us out for a paycheck, then she turned on me.’

Cobb was confused. ‘She couldn’t have been in his pocket all along. Not with all the help she gave us. That doesn’t make any sense.’

‘I don’t know when he flipped her,’ Sarah admitted. ‘All I can tell you is that she definitely wasn’t working for us at the end. Xenophobia. Nationalistic fanaticism. I really don’t know. But it was either her or me.’

‘Well, you made the right choice,’ Cobb said.

He went through Feng’s pockets and found a small electronic device. He dropped it on the floor, then stomped on it with his boot. As he ground the remnants into dust with his heel, they heard Garcia in their ears.

‘— repeat. Radio check. I have no audio. Jack? Sarah? Maggie?’

‘Hector, we’re here,’ Cobb replied. ‘Sarah and I are back on comms.’

‘Any sign of Maggie?’ Garcia asked.

‘She’s dead,’ Sarah explained. ‘So is Feng. They were working together. We don’t know when or how, but he turned her.’

‘Son of a bitch,’ Garcia replied incredulously. ‘That explains how they were able to tail us so relentlessly.’

‘Everyone else is dead, too,’ McNutt said as he entered the chamber. ‘The bad guys, I mean. And Rodrigo still has the satellite keeping an eye on things up top.’ McNutt looked down at Maggie’s corpse. ‘So Miss Maggie was a traitor, eh? And here I thought our luck was changing. I wonder if anything she said about Polo or his treasure was true.’

‘It was,’ Sarah assured him. She had caught a peek inside just before the confrontation with Feng. She walked over to the wooden door that was still ajar and pushed it open wide. ‘I think we found it.’

On the other side of the door was a massive chamber, bigger than any of the natural caverns they had seen so far. The room was filled with ornate wooden chests, all of them bigger than a military footlocker. Cobb guessed there were as many as a hundred chests filling the space. He swept his flashlight around the room slowly so Garcia could record it all.

‘You getting this, Hector?’ he asked.

‘That’s a lot of chests,’ Garcia replied.

Sarah moved to the nearest one. None of the chests were open, but their lids did not appear to be locked in any way. Instead of swinging upward on hinges, the tops had been seated straight down onto the crates, like the covers of cardboard file boxes. She set her flashlight on the ground and hefted a heavy wooden lid, using the light from the glow sticks to peek inside.

A moment later, she dropped the lid and grinned at the gold.

‘Well?’ Garcia asked.

Cobb could only smile as McNutt’s boisterous laugh echoed throughout the chamber.