The Vault of Poseidon

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The powerful Sikorsky swooped over the town of Sion and thundered through a narrow valley, flanked on either side by steep tree-lined mountainsides and rocky precipices.

Less than thirty minutes ago they had touched down at Sion International Airport in the 767, and they were now racing toward Zaugg’s stronghold in the mountain peaks to the south of the town.

Zaugg himself had been out of sight in his private cabin for the duration of the flight from Kefalonia, but now he was sitting opposite Lea Donovan in the luxury cabin of the helicopter, along with Dietmar Grobel and Heinrich Baumann.

After what he had done to her, she hated the sight of him, sitting there so close to her in the confined space of the helicopter. She wished she could push him out of the door and watch him fall to his death in the rocky valley below.

“How long until the men get the hoard to the mountain?” Zaugg asked.

“No more than an hour,” Grobel replied.

“Good.”

Lea saw the silhouette of Zaugg’s compound on the horizon. They drew nearer, and now she saw more detail below the helicopter — his private ski lodge was nearby, a stark postmodern black against the smooth white snow all around them. Elevated above the other buildings was a large building, constructed in glass and chrome in another modern architectural style — Zaugg’s mansion.

“We are here,” he said, peering through the window as the chopper descended to the helipad outside the enormous house.

Baumann pushed her out of the Sikorsky, but there was something about the way he touched her that made her flinch with revulsion. He had stroked her shoulder before nudging her forward at gunpoint.

Ahead of her, a short distance from the mansion and down a shallow snow-covered slope she saw what looked like some kind of cargo bay carved into the mountainside. A forklift was moving large metal containers from the back of a Mil Mi-26 transport helicopter into the gaping hole in the mountain, while a group of men carrying clipboards were issuing others with directions. They looked like they were waiting for something important to happen.

“Who are they?” she asked anxiously.

“Loyal employees,” Zaugg said.

Before she could ask anything else, someone grabbed her from behind and she felt a warm cloth over her mouth. Then she was out cold.

It didn’t take Lea long to realize where she was — she was slumped against a cold wall in a wine cellar. She rubbed her eyes and winced in pain at the headache — the chloroform had been given to her sloppily and in too strong a dose.

She was probably lucky to be alive. She tried to get up, but she was still dizzy, and she had to fight back a wave of nausea as she struggled to her feet and regained her balance.

The cellar was vast — smooth polished marble floors, and labyrinthine in its construction. She walked along a corridor — flanked on either side from floor to ceiling with wine bottles, carefully stored inside stone alcoves. A series of narrow striplights cast a ghostly silver light on everything.

She stopped at a crossroads to see just more wine-filled corridors stretching away into the distance, the far wall at the end of the corridor was perhaps over one hundred feet away. The sound of her shoes clicked loudly in the cool silence as she walked. Even her breathing seemed to echo off the walls.

“Now this is a wine collection,” she said, her voice unexpectedly loud in the enclosed space.

Before she had time to investigate her surroundings properly, or look for a way out, she heard the sound of heavy footsteps coming from behind her — somewhere outside the cellar she heard the unmistakable sound of Zaugg’s voice, only he was speaking in his native Schweizerdeutsch. It was followed moments later by the sound of Heinrich Baumann’s hideous chuckle.

The talking stopped. A moment of eerie silence was followed by the sound of heavy keys clunking on a metal hoop, and then one of the men was unlocking the door.

Only as the two men stepped into the cellar and confronted her did her fate begin to dawn on her. She wondered if Joe and Ryan and the others had survived the flooding of the tomb, knowing that if they hadn’t she had no options left, and that her time had almost run out.

“Guten abend,” Zaugg said.

“What the hell is this, Zaugg?” She knew what the hell it was, but she was asking in an effort to buy herself more time to think. She peered behind them to see what was outside the cellar but all she saw was a flight of stone steps receeding out of view to the right.

“As you will recall, I have promised you to Baumann here, Miss Donovan, to calm one of his many mutinous rages. He is a loyal employee after all, and it would be churlish of me not to indulge his… fantasies from time to time. He is not exactly a gentle man, but what he lacks in tenderness he makes up for with creativity. My advice is not to struggle.”

Baumann chuckled again, almost uncontrollably, as he looked Lea up and down like a piece of meat in a market.

“I’m sorry I cannot stay but as you will appreciate, I have important work to do, and a very important map to locate which was not where it should have been. A real mystery, to be sure, but one I will certainly solve. As for you, your friends are all dead — their bodies trapped in the tomb, somewhat ironically, and you will soon wish you had died with them. Auf wiedersehen.”

Zaugg turned on his heel and closed the door behind him.

Baumann shuffled toward her, at first looking as though he were on an awkward first date. Then he grinned, and his good eye blinked. She looked at the long scar running down the other side of his face, the one that had cost him his eyesight and left his eye an opaque, milky egg staring at nothing.

Lea held her breath in fear and slowly stepped back from Baumann, never once taking her eyes off him. Up close he was even bigger than she had realized, his enormous bulk towering over her like a bear. His metal hand made a terrible scraping noise as he flexed its fingers, his one eye blinking in the half-light of the damp cellar.

Then he lunged at her.

Lea ran back from him, wrenching the arm of her sweater out of his meaty hand. She stumbled back a few paces and turned on her heel, running away for her life.

Baumann laughed loudly and pulled a long hunting knife from a holster on his belt. “This is going to be beautiful.” he said, in a grim, hoarse whisper. Then he started after her.

Her mind raced with fear. She knew Joe Hawke would know what to do, but she was out of her depth. She needed him, but she didn’t even know if he was dead or alive. The last time she saw him was back in the caves of Kefalonia when Zaugg had ordered Baumann to blow the wall of the tomb and drown them all.

Baumann smiled. He knew what she was thinking.

“If you’re waiting for your action-hero, he’s dead,” he said. “All of your friends are dead. They drowned like sewer rats. No one’s going to save you.”

Without warning, Baumann leapt forward and lunged at her again with the metal hand, catching one of the pockets of her jeans and tearing it off. The shred fell to the floor and Baumann giggled insanely.

Lea screamed and jumped back, hitting a wall of wine bottles. Panicking, she quickly searched for the fastest way out and decided to make a run for it along the corridor to her right. As she sprinted down the corridor into the darkness, she heard Baumann whooping with joy behind her and banging his hand on the steel frame of a wine rack with excitement.

“You can make this last all night, bitch!” he screamed.

Then he sprinted after her.

Lea was breathing hard, and terrified to stop, but an instant later she ran into a dead-end. Before she could back out of it Baumann rounded the corner. He smirked at her and made a fake sad face in mockery of her.

“Shall we have merlot or cabernet sauvignon?” he asked.

Without taking his eyes off her, he reached out and pulled a bottle of red wine from the wall, snapping its neck off with his metal hand. The shattered glass splinters fell to the concrete floor and he took a large gulp of the wine before wiping his wide mouth with the sleeve of his jacket.

“It’s time for our date,” he said, and padded toward her.

Lea struggled to concentrate, but she knew now was no time to lose her mind to panic and fear. He approached her, placing the wine on a shelf. Before she could think, Baumann was upon her, grabbing her shoulder with his metal hand.

She heard it contract and then something in her shoulder cracked. She screamed in pain, but he laughed loudly and powered his other hand, his human hand, hard into her stomach.

She doubled over in agony, gasping like a fish out of water and she strained to heave the air back into her winded lungs.

“As first dates go, bitch, I have been on worse.”

On her knees now, and struggling to breathe, she could sense the hideous man above her, and watched in horror as his steel toecapped boots shuffled closer toward her, now almost touching her thighs.

She heard him take up the wine bottle, drink heavily, and after belching loudly in the semi-darkness he smashed the bottle into the floor with extreme force. A great puddle of wine seeped out like blood all around his boots.

Lea flinched and felt her face — some of the glass had cut her cheek. Out of pure instinct, she cried out, and Baumann laughed again, even more heartily. He really was enjoying this.

“You remind me of the waitress I killed in Salzburg,” he said, suddenly very serious, and his voice a cold whisper. “Some of them struggle, but others, like you and the Salzburg girl — they just go without a fight. Very disappointing.”

She felt his human hand caress the back of her neck, and then heard him humming with sordid pleasure as he moved closer. Lea had seconds to think, seconds to react. This was her life to live, not his to take, and she wasn’t going out of this world on his terms, not in this way. And then the answer came to her — sparkling on the floor like a ruby ring was a long splinter of glass from the wine bottle.

Baumann moved closer, purring with a depraved kind of satisfaction at the misery he was inflicting on her, and then she took her chance, thrusting the glass splinter hard into his thigh and yanking it down as if she were trying to saw through wood.

He screamed in agony and kicked her in the face out of pure reflex action. She flew backwards but stopped herself from banging her head on the wall. She looked up to see Baumann hunched over in agony and blood pouring down from the wound.

She had obviously hit the artery in his leg. Baumann looked at her, a terrifying mix of rage, fear and revenge crossing his face like a dark shadow, and he stalked towards her, dragging his wounded leg behind him in a trail of blood and wine.

Hugo Zaugg stared at the small statue on his desk. It was a small, smooth sculpture in bronze, over two thousand years old — a perfectly water-preserved rendering of Poseidon. The god was looking meaningfully out across the expansive room, and across time itself, with pensive eyes and a firm grip on the trident.

A few inches to the left of the statue and in a commanding position in the exact center of his desk was a shiny black Bakelite telephone. Zaugg’s eyes moved from Poseidon to the phone.

He had been waiting anxiously for it to ring for some time. Yes, he had located the tomb. Yes, he had found the trident wrapped in furs inside the otherwise empty sarcophagus.

But no, he had not found the map.

And so he waited nervously to explain the news.

And yet the gods made him wait.

He drummed his fingers along the edge of the smooth mahogany desk and closed his eyes. His mind wandered immediately to what could be such a glorious future, if only he held the map in his hands. The torment of delay could only be soothed by the concomitant sweetness of victory.

How many times had he cradled that dream in his mind — seeing the smooth, golden water running through his dreams, staring at his ageing face in its rippled bronze surface? How many times had he read those Ancient Greek texts with their tantalizing references to eternal life? And how much he needed the missing map to solve this most glorious and divine of puzzles.

But he knew he had to remain calm, and proceed in a tactical, measured way. The map must surely exist — it was inconceivable that the tomb and the trident could be real but not the map. He would simply have to redouble his efforts if he wanted to drink of the divine nectar.

He would search harder for the map — there would be other clues in the tomb and with them would come the location of where to find the source of the water of life.

And then the telephone rang harshly in the soft silence of the climate-controlled study.

Zaugg fumbled for the receiver, almost dropping it on his way.

“You have good news for me?”

As usual, the voice was distorted behind a series of morphing applications. It sounded ghostly, and distant. The only man in the world Hugo Zaugg genuinely feared.

“Yes. We have secured the tomb and we have the trident.

“Good. This pleases me.”

“I am honored.” Zaugg was sweating.

“And what of the map?”

Zaugg waited a few seconds before giving his rehearsed reply. “We have not found the map yet, but my men are searching through the contents of the tomb.”

“Don’t fail me, Zaugg.”

“No, sir. It is just a matter of time.”

“Everything is just a matter of time.”

And the phone line went dead.