Uncharted: The Fourth Labyrinth

12

At the bottom of the hidden stairs was a corridor. Their flashlights threw ghost shadows along its length. Every twenty feet or so there seemed to be another doorway, and for a moment Drake was reminded of the optical illusion created by standing between mirrors. With one in front and one behind, the reflections seemed to go on forever in a diminishing hallway of gleaming frames. This corridor did not go on forever. It ended in a darkness that beckoned them onward, as if hungry for light.

The silence troubled Drake the most. They were underground, in a place that had been a secret even in the age in which it had been occupied. The dry, cool air seemed thick with ominous portent. If he had been a more superstitious man, he might have said it felt as if it had been waiting for discovery, as if-after so many years-it finally had exhaled. But superstitious or not, he wouldn’t have said the words out loud. Unless you’d had too much tequila, he thought. Tequila makes you say stupid things.

He comforted himself with the knowledge that tequila could make almost anybody say stupid things.

“Spooky as hell down here,” Jada whispered.

Sully chomped on a fresh cigar. When he’d smoked the stub of the other one-or lost it-Drake had no idea. But Sully didn’t light up-not down here. They were surrounded by stone, but there was no telling what they might encounter. Drake figured he didn’t want to drop burning ashes on ancient papyrus or the bandages of a mummy.

“How much time do you think we have?” Drake asked Welch. “If your boss gave Henriksen the full tour, I mean?”

“Twenty minutes,” Welch said. “Thirty if we’re lucky.”

Barely time to get back up the stairs and through the labyrinth to the breach in the wall. No one addressed the renewed urgency, but they hurried a bit faster along the corridor. The slight draft Jada had noticed before persisted. It might be no bigger than a mouse could fit through, but there was an opening down here.

And “down” was the operative word. The floor slanted downward, and the four of them followed. Flashlight beams danced on the painted walls and the floor and the unadorned ceiling. Drake shone his straight ahead and saw that they were coming to an opening; a moment later, he realized it was some kind of junction.

“How far does this thing go?” Sully asked.

“It could be quite extensive,” Welch replied.

“You know how these things work,” Drake added. “Whatever they were hiding down here, the Egyptians loved their secret passages and halls.”

“So far it’s just straight ahead,” Jada said. “Not much of a maze.”

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Welch asked. “Part of the labyrinth and yet not part of the labyrinth.”

Unlike a reflection of a reflection, the corridor did not go on forever. They’d followed it for perhaps fifty yards when it opened into a small anteroom that resembled the one above, and they found themselves looking at the entrances to three separate worship chambers. Each had the triple-octagon symbol engraved in the lintel above the doorway, and each had the trio of steps leading down.

“This is different,” Drake muttered. “The lady or the tiger-or the other tiger?”

“I don’t think we should split up,” Welch said quickly.

Jada laughed. “Yeah. Bad idea.”

“No need,” Sully said, flashing his light into the leftmost doorway. “They’re not much bigger than the worship chamber upstairs. Altar. Same layout.”

Then he stopped and glanced back at them. “Except there’s a door on the other side.”

Drake hurried to the central doorway and stood on the threshold, flashing his light across the small chamber. “Here, too.”

He quickly scanned the room with his torch, agreeing with Sully’s assessment. The layout was identical to that of the worship chamber upstairs. He figured the dimensions would be the same. But as he let the light linger a moment on the altar, he froze, brows knitting.

“Hey, Sully? Does your room over there have the same paintings, hieroglyphics, and stuff as the chamber upstairs?”

Sully flashed his light at Drake’s face. “Yeah, why?”

Drake squinted, putting up a hand to block the brightness as he turned to look at Welch and Jada. “This one has the same altar. An octagon.”

“The shape of the labyrinth’s design, I suspect. It’s a circle, but within the circle, the perimeter of the maze is really an octagon,” Welch explained.

“Yeah, great. Daedalus knew his shapes. Call Elmo. What I was saying is that this one doesn’t have Egyptian writing.” Drake flashed his light into the room and held it on the altar as they all moved to see inside. “It’s Greek.”

The look on Welch’s face was almost comical. He went from surprise to childlike glee in an instant, pushing past Drake and hurrying down the few steps into the worship chamber and flashing his light around in fits and starts.

“This is remarkable,” he said, pausing every few seconds to take a closer look at the writing on the wall or the paintings on the base of the altar.

As Jada, Sully, and Drake followed him into the room, Drake saw that it wasn’t exactly like the chamber upstairs, after all. There were several shelves cut into the walls, each holding several large jars. Then, of course, there was also the door at the back of the room, a formidable stone block with no visible means of opening it. But Drake felt sure it was genuinely a door, just one that required some kind of trick to open.

“What does this mean?” Jada asked.

Welch nodded to her but didn’t answer. Instead, he hurried from the room and rushed into the chamber Sully had been investigating at first. Twenty seconds passed, and then he rejoined them, standing on the threshold of the central room, a fervent smile on his face.

“The room on the left is devoted to Sobek, as we would expect. But this one-this one is dedicated to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and madness.”

Drake focused his light on the jars on one shelf, studying the grape design there. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” Jada said, tucking a magenta strand behind her ear and lighting up with a grin. “Daedalus built the labyrinth at Knossos to impress Ariadne, but according to myth, she was the bride of Dionysus.”

Sully slipped an arm around her shoulders and favored her with a proud look. “Someone’s been paying attention.”

“ ‘Bride’ could mean many things,” Welch said. “She could simply have been devoted to him, as a priestess, for instance.”

“Like the Mistress of the Labyrinth?” Drake suggested.

Welch nodded thoughtfully. “Possibly. But you’re all missing the point. The first chamber explicitly refers to Crocodilopolis, and this one to Knossos and the island of Crete.”

Drake stared at him, eyebrows shooting up.

Sully chomped on his cigar and growled, “What the hell are you standing there for?”

Welch stood aside as they rushed out of the worship chamber corresponding to the labyrinth at Knossos. Jada led the way down the few steps into the third room, her flashlight beam bouncing around in front of her.

“Greek!” she said, turning to face them as they followed. “This one’s in Greek, too.”

But as Drake studied the octagonal altar, noticing the triple-octagon symbol in the center, he thought something looked different about the inscriptions on the base. He flashed his light at the walls and at the vases, and his suspicion increased.

“Are you sure-”

“It’s Hellenic, without question,” Welch said, picking up one of the jars and peering more closely at the writing. “But it isn’t any variation on ancient Greek I’ve ever seen. Doubtless a dialect, but something rare.”

He looked over at Sully. “This might be a lost language,” he said excitedly.

“That’s nice, Ian. Really,” Sully said. “I’m sure you and your lost language will be very happy together. But the clock is ticking.”

“Can you tell what god the chamber’s devoted to?” Drake asked.

“Oh, that’s easy enough,” Welch said, moving his flashlight beam across the paintings on the walls. Drake spotted a trident. “The third labyrinth was built in worship of Poseidon. Or some aspect of Poseidon native to-wherever this language comes from.”

“And?” Jada asked, frustrated. “Any idea where that might be?”

A chill went up the back of Drake’s neck, and he felt a shiver. Frowning, he glanced around. Had he heard a whisper?

The four of them moved through the chamber with the flashlights, though Welch concentrated mostly on the jars. Some things required no explanation. There were images on each altar base that showed the same scene as the one upstairs of the Mistress of the Labyrinth, and there were others that depicted the Minotaur. There were labrys, the symbol for a labyrinth, carved into stone and painted on jars. He had noticed in the second chamber that there were paintings clearly showing a throne made of gold and other objects that had been painted that color and might have indicated the presence of treasure. There were similar images here. But the rest of it was unreadable to him.

A shadow moved in his peripheral vision, and he thought he heard the rustle of cloth. He glanced at the entrance to the room and thought the darkness seemed a bit darker than before.

“Did you guys hear something?” Drake asked.

“Just you,” Sully said, gnawing the end of his cigar.

Jada glanced at Drake and shook her head. She hadn’t heard a thing.

Welch was crouched at a lower shelf, one of the jars-or honey pots, if that was really what they were-in his hand.

“Here we go,” he muttered.

Drake and the others turned to stare at him. Welch whispered to himself, translating under his breath and nodding.

He gave no warning before his legs went out from under him and he sat down hard, the jar slipping into his lap, protected from breaking by the loose cotton of his shirt.

“Thera,” he said.

“Never heard of-” Sully began, but then his eyes lit up.

“Thera as in Santorini?” Drake asked.

Welch’s face had gone slack. Drake thought he’d had too much revelation and epiphany for a single day and his archaeology geek brain might have blown a circuit.

“I’ve been there,” Jada said. “It’s beautiful.”

Drake agreed. The whitewashed buildings and blue domes, the multicolored boats and shutters, the bells, the ocean, the wine. There was nothing about Santorini he did not love, though he’d been there only once. But he had a feeling Welch wasn’t thinking about vacation spots.

“Talk to us, Ian,” Drake prodded.

Welch looked up at him. “Daedalus built the third labyrinth on Thera.”

“Santorini,” Jada said, apparently trying to clarify that they were talking about the same place.

But Welch shook his head. “No.”

“The whole thing’s an active volcano,” Sully said.

“Right,” Jada said, snapping her fingers as she recalled. “There are a bunch of little islands that make up the rim. So you’re talking Thera before it exploded or whatever?”

Welch smiled. “Oh, yeah.”

Drake frowned, not sure what he was getting so excited about. In modern times, Thera was an archipelago, but really the string of islands formed a circle around the deepest spot in the Mediterranean. The islands were all that remained of the much larger Thera as it had been before the massive eruption in-he thought it was the fourteenth century B.C., but it might have been the fifteenth. He didn’t remember any lava flowing on Santorini, but he knew that some of the smaller islands in the archipelago had volcanic vents and were still active.

“Minoan civilization collapsed around the same time as the destruction of Thera,” Welch said.

Jada threw up her hands in frustration. “Well, that’s great. So if the third labyrinth was there, we’ve lost any clues we might’ve found in a volcanic eruption thousands of years in the past.”

“Maybe and maybe not,” Sully said quickly, jabbing at the air with his unlit cigar to emphasize the point. He turned to Welch. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

Welch grinned. “I think I am.”

“Would the two of you stop talking in riddles!” Drake snapped. “It hurts my head.”

Sully arched an eyebrow and shook his head. “Oh, Nate, you’re going to kick yourself for not getting this one. You’ve been to Santorini. There’s only one archaeological dig going on there that’s of any consequence.”

“Yeah,” Drake said, shrugging, the beam of his flashlight bouncing on the wall. “Akrotiri.”

“Which was a Minoan settlement,” Welch said. “One that many modern scholars believe once went under a different name.”

Drake heard the strange rustling again but barely noticed. He stared at Welch and Sully and grinned.

“You can’t be serious.”

“It all fits, Nate,” Sully said.

Jada punched Drake in the arm to get his attention. When he shot her an angry look, she hit him again.

“Hit him!” Drake said, pointing at Sully.

“Tell me!” she demanded.

Drake gestured at the other two men. “These two-they think this language was lost because all of the people who spoke it were killed in that volcanic eruption. They think the third labyrinth was in Akrotiri, on Thera.”

“So?” Jada asked.

Drake smiled. “They’re talking about Atlantis. ”

She hit him a third time. “I’m serious. Tell me.”

“Ow!” Drake shouted. “I just did.”

Jada turned to Sully. “Tell me he’s kidding.”

“You didn’t hear the stories about the dig at Akrotiri when you went to Santorini?” Sully asked.

“I went shopping and to the beach. I flirted with guys and drank too much ouzo and rode bicycles with my friends,” she said. “We didn’t have the kind of fun time I seem to have with you, Uncle Vic.”

“Sarcasm? Now?” Drake asked.

“Seems like it’s always time for sarcasm with you,” she said.

“Okay. That’s mostly true,” he replied. “But a lot of people think Akrotiri is what remains of Atlantis-that Atlantis was a branch of Minoan culture-the perfection of it, really. And whether that’s true or not, if the third labyrinth was on Thera, the only chance we have of finding any trace of it or any records of it would be in Akrotiri.”

Welch gazed at the jar, studying it closely. He spoke without looking up.

“It can’t be Akrotiri. They’ve been excavating there since the sixties and have they found any hint of a labyrinth? I don’t think so. If there’s any trace of it left, it has to be somewhere else on the caldera.”

The caldera-the cauldron-was how the locals referred to the part of the deep circle of water ringed by the islands of Thera.

“So we’re going to Santorini,” Sully said, wearing a dubious expression, “and we’re going to search every crevice in each of those islands for the ruins of a labyrinth that no one-in thousands of years-has stumbled across before?”

Jada gave a small shrug, refusing to be defeated. “No one’s ever known what they were looking for.”

But Drake had been watching Welch and could see the man’s lips moving while he studied the jar.

“You’re reading,” Drake said.

Welch nodded, a smile stealing across his face. “Yeah.” He gestured in the direction of the other chambers. “The room dedicated to Dionysus-the writing in there is Linear B, an ancient syllabic script used primarily by the Mycenaean Greeks. Now that I’ve had a minute to look at this, it’s really not very different. Linear B-2, let’s call it.”

“So?” Sully asked. “You got a point?”

“Oh, yes,” Welch said happily. He lifted the jar as if it were a trophy. “Here’s your link. I should’ve thought of this immediately, but I’m a little overwhelmed today, y’ know?”

Jada smiled at him. “We know.”

Welch looked grateful. “Anyway, there were texts found in the excavation of the temple at Knossos, written in Linear B, that decreed that all the gods were secondary to something called qe-ra-si-ja. Scholars have argued whether or not this was a god or a king or a kingdom. One school of thought translates qe-ra-si-ja as Therasia, a settlement on the precataclysm island of Thera.”

The archaeologist looked up, inspired. “But Therasia still exists. It’s small, and the side facing the caldera is all cliffs. Only a few hundred people live there.”

Drake felt an old, familiar excitement building. Whatever perils they had faced, whatever tragedies had led them here, they were on the trail of a secret.

“So we’re headed to Therasia,” he said.

“I’m coming with you,” Welch said quickly. “After Melissa’s done telling Hilary what went on today, I’ll be fired anyway.”

“First we have to get out of here without Henriksen’s goons killing us,” Sully said.

Jada scoffed. “He’s not going to shoot you with the expedition staff and workers around as witnesses. Rich people can get away with almost anything, pay off anyone, but it’d be pretty damn hard to cover up killing the entire crew up there.”

“I hope you’re right,” Sully said. “Still, we need to go.”

Welch held the jar he’d taken from the shelf as he stood. “All right. But I’m taking this with us. I want to have a closer look, and if we don’t have time now-”

“Where’s the gold?” Drake asked suddenly.

They all looked at him.

“The gold,” Drake went on. “Midas or Minos or whoever was supposed to be an alchemist, right? Daedalus paid the workers in gold. The cult of Sobek put gold crests on crocodiles.”

“We found some of those already,” Welch said.

“Yeah, okay,” Drake replied. “But if the mistress took the offering of honey from the worshippers and fed it to the Minotaur and the Minotaur was here to protect the gold, then where is the gold?”

“Gone, apparently,” Welch said thoughtfully.

“From here,” Jada said. “But if Daedalus and his people moved the gold from here-maybe from all three of these chambers-the logical place for them to have moved it is to one of the other labyrinths. Maybe they moved it around to keep it safe. It could have been on Thera, maybe destroyed in the eruption.”

Drake nodded. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s in the fourth labyrinth.”

“Look around you,” Welch said, gesturing at the walls and the altar. “Do you see any reference to a fourth?”

“I can’t read this,” Drake replied. “And no one alive is exactly fluent in ancient Atlantean.”

“I told you, it’s a variation on Linear B,” Welch said. “I could muddle my way through a basic translation, but so far I haven’t seen any indication of a fourth labyrinth. And the three-labyrinth symbol is everywhere.”

“So the fourth one came later,” Drake said. “Companies change their logos all the time. Daedalus didn’t get a chance to do the rebranding he needed down here before he died. The point is, Jada’s father thought there was a fourth one, and somebody killed him because he was investigating the possibility. That’s evidence right there, as far as I’m concerned.”

Welch cradled the jar against his chest, looking like he was in the mood to argue. Not too bright, Drake thought, considering how urgent it was that they get out of there.

When Sully drew his gun, whatever Welch had been about to say was forgotten.

“Nate. Did you say you heard something?” Sully asked, the question almost a snarl around the cigar clamped in his teeth.

Drake reached for his gun, turning to face the entrance to the Thera worship chamber. “I did, yeah.”

Both weapons were trained on the doorway. Drake narrowed his eyes and peered at the darkness out in the antechamber. Jada looked at them in confusion and then reluctantly pulled out her pistol. Welch wore a worried expression but didn’t ask them about the guns, smart enough not to want to tip off whoever might be out there listening to their conversation. Drake figured if it was Henriksen or the dig director, Hilary Russo, they would have been interrupted already.

Drake padded quietly toward the door, gun at the ready. Sully used his flashlight to wave Welch back. The archaeologist shuffled backward past the altar, looking faintly ridiculous with his unruly hair and glasses.

Drake wondered if he held the vase because of its value or for comfort, the way a toddler clutches a stuffed animal.

That rustle of cloth came again. Drake frowned, all his attention on the open doorway now. He and Sully moved in, one on either side of the three stairs that led up into the darkened antechamber. They had guns in one hand and flashlights in the other, trying to figure out if there was anything for them to shoot at or if they had been spooked by nothing. They kept their flashlights aimed away from the opening, hoping that whoever lurked out there would show themselves. Jada hung back, just in front of the altar, her gun and flashlight both pointed at the floor.

Drake glanced at her, on the verge of issuing a snarky remark about how useless it would be to shoot a bullet into the floor. But when he glanced back at the doorway, he caught the shadows moving, one separating from the others, and whipped his flashlight beam up to spotlight the open doorway.

Something dashed by. Someone. No question now. They weren’t alone.

“Sully,” Drake said.

“Yeah.”

More motion, deeper into the antechamber, shadows within shadows. Drake whipped his flashlight beam up, illuminating the man dashing across the opening so quietly that he might have been a ghost. Only he wasn’t a ghost; they had seen him before. He was one of the killers who had stopped Jada from being abducted and killed by the hit squad Henriksen had sent to do it. Hooded and veiled, the man froze, glancing into the worship chamber at them.

They told us to go home, Drake had time to think.

The assassin narrowed his eyes and then leaped into the room, drawing a short curved blade as he raced at Sully. Drake and Sully fired at the same time. Though Drake’s bullet missed, Sully’s shot took the assassin in the chest, and he staggered backward, wheeling toward the steps. For a second, Drake thought he would run out of there as fast as he’d jumped in, but then the wounded, bleeding man spun and lifted his blade, about to hurl it at Drake.

Jada shot the assassin twice, once in the thigh and once in the abdomen. The blade whickered out of his hand with the speed of a boomerang, but she’d ruined his aim and the curved dagger clanged off the altar inches from her. He fell on his back, rolled, and began to drag himself out of the worship chamber.

“Don’t let him get out!” Sully barked.

“ Him? I’m worried about us getting out,” Drake said.

“Where did he come from?” Jada asked.

Other rustling noises came from the anteroom, and Drake swore loudly, pressing himself against the wall beside the stairs.

“There are others!” he said. “ Of course there are others!” It was their luck.

A scraping noise came from behind him. For a second he thought Jada was the cause, but then his mind sorted out the distance and the weight of stone on stone and realized the sound came from farther back. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Welch’s flashlight had died. In the gloom at the back of the chamber he saw shadows that did not belong, then heard the scuffle of a struggle. He swung his flashlight beam over in time to see another of the hooded assassins dragging Ian Welch through the partially open stone door at the rear of the room.

The archaeologist’s hands twitched and dropped the jar, which shattered on impact.

“Welch!” Drake shouted, turning to Sully. “They’re getting in through the other door!”

Jada rushed toward the stone door, beating Drake there. He wanted to tell her to back off, afraid they’d drag her in as well, but she wouldn’t have listened and he didn’t have time to get the words out before she was already there. She aimed her flashlight and gun together, not firing for fear of hitting Welch, and started to take a step through the gap in the door.

“Dr. Welch!” Jada called. “Ian!”

A hooded figure rushed from the darkness and grappled with her, pushing her gun away, trying to twist it from her grasp. Drake shot him in the shoulder. The attacker spun, blood spraying from the wound, and staggered back against the wall. In the shadows where Welch had vanished, others were moving. Welch was gone-maybe dead-and they had to get the hell out of the labyrinth before they joined him.

“Come on!” Drake shouted. “Jada, let’s go!”

They bolted, racing around the altar on either side and then toward Sully and the three steps to the exit together. Sully had his back to the wall on the left, but when he saw them coming, he led the charge, rushing up the stairs into the antechamber.

Drake heard the first shot but didn’t see it. Then he and Jada were out of the Thera worship chamber. The assassin they’d shot lay on the floor of the anteroom, bleeding but alive, but he was the least of their concerns. Two others were in the anteroom, and Drake saw motion off to his right. Several other hooded men were emerging from the darkness of the other doors.

“Look, if you want us to go home that bad, we’ll go home!” he shouted, swinging his aim over to cover them.

Loud footfalls came echoing along the tunnel through which Drake and his companions had arrived. A glance showed flashlight beams bouncing off the walls. They were about to have even more company.

A woman’s voice shouted in Italian and then in English.

“Who’s there? Ian, what the hell is going on down here?” she called angrily.

Hilary Russo, Drake thought. But her deputy, Welch, wasn’t going to answer. He was a captive of those hooded men or had become just another part of the labyrinth’s history, another thing that needed to be excavated from this place.

There were a lot of voices and a lot of footfalls, and Drake had the idea that at least a dozen people were headed their way. Maybe that was more people than the assassins were ready to kill at the moment or more people than they could risk letting live after having seen them down there in the secret corridors under the labyrinth. Drake and Sully and Jada weren’t even supposed to be there. Who would believe them?

One of the hooded men Sully and Jada were aiming at lunged, and Sully shot him.

“Go!” Sully shouted, and started to run.

Trust saved Drake. He couldn’t see if the way was open, couldn’t tell if Sully had done any real damage to the guy he’d shot or if they had the second or two they needed to get clear, but he and Sully had been friends since Drake was a kid. They might not have always gotten along and sometimes they frustrated the hell out of each other, but Sully had been his mentor for almost twenty years. In a moment like this, they had to trust each other or they’d both have been killed years ago.

Jada rushed into the tunnel, Drake right on her heels. He flashed his light ahead of them with his left hand even as he covered the assassins coming from the Knossos and Sobek chambers with the other, arms spread wide.

He could hear Sully to his left, muttering, “Go, go, go.” A swift glance showed him that the one Sully had shot had fallen but still lived, and Sully had his gun aimed at the face of the other assassin, who gazed back coolly in the semidarkness of the anteroom. The only light remaining in that junction room came from Sully’s flashlight, and Drake wondered how the assassins could see so well in the dark.

It occurred to him that these were not ordinary men. He thought of the swiftness with which they killed Jada’s would-be abductors in the parking lot the night before and realized that the assassins were no longer trying very hard. As he glanced back and saw Sully racing after him into the tunnel-Sully fired a bullet into the darkness as if for punctuation-he understood that they were not following. It might have been the number of people or the possibility of defeat that made them vanish back into the secret heart of the labyrinth, but whatever their reason, Drake thought they would be all right now. They would be safe, for the moment at least.

The brunette woman running toward them had to be Hilary Russo.

“Sully, gun,” Drake murmured, noticing that Jada already had put hers away as she saw the people running toward them, waving flashlights in their faces.

“Who are you people?” Hilary, the dig’s chief archaeologist, demanded. “Was that gunfire?”

Jada collapsed into her arms and hugged her tightly, then pushed her back and stared at her. The look on Hilary’s face could only be shock.

“There are-there are people back there!” Jada said, glancing frantically from Hilary to the dark length of tunnel behind them and back.

“That’s not possible! Where’s Ian Welch?” Hilary demanded.

Drake and Sully surveyed the others. Past the brightness of the flashlights it was difficult to make out faces, but he was sure he’d caught a glimpse of Olivia Hzujak’s hair, and the tall blond silhouette had to be Henriksen. But there was no cameraman, and most of the people seemed to be workers from the dig.

“He was with them,” Guillermo said, stepping forward. “He came down here with them.” He pointed. “She’s supposedly Luka Hzujak’s daughter.”

Hilary glanced behind her, and now it was clear who she was looking at. “What about it, Mrs. Hzujak? Is this your stepdaughter?”

“Olivia!” Jada cried, and rushed to her stepmother’s embrace. She hugged the older woman tightly, and the beautiful mask of concern Olivia wore cracked with surprise.

That was when Drake realized he’d underestimated Jada. He had thought that she had snapped, that panic and hysteria were setting in. But the whole thing was an act. The girl was hustling them all. He wanted to kiss her. If Sully wouldn’t have frowned on it, he might have. Though at this point it would have been more like kissing his sister.

“Jada, are you all right?” Olivia asked, and if she was feigning concern, her acting skills were as good as her stepdaughter’s. Olivia pushed her back and stared at her face and shirt, which were dappled red from when Drake had shot her attacker. “Whose blood is that?”

“Where is Ian?” Hilary demanded. “Who was shooting?” She glared at Sully and Drake. “And who are you two? Not from the damned Smithsonian, I know that much!”

“Dr. Russo,” Drake said, hoping for profound sincerity even as he tried to remember the false name he’d been using. “I’m Nathan Merrill. We’re friends of Jada’s, trying to help her figure out if there’s any connection between her father’s recent trip to Egypt and his murder.”

“Murder? Oh, my God!” Hilary said, and she snapped an incredulous glance at Olivia, wondering why she hadn’t been told of this before.

“You’ve got three worship chambers at the end of this corridor,” Sully said. “There are stone doors on the other side of each. When we found the secret passage, Dr. Welch let us investigate it with him, but we weren’t alone down here. There were other people here.”

“That’s impossible!” a voice piped up from the back.

Sheepish but worried now, ginger-haired Melissa moved forward, pushing past the towering blond statue that was Tyr Henriksen. They were clustered together now, and his face was illuminated. He stared at Drake with ice blue eyes, but he said nothing. If he wanted Jada, Sully, and Drake dead, he’d have to kill everyone else there as well and then everyone up top. He might be a vicious son of a bitch, but he still had an international corporation to run, and covering up a mass murder could have gotten messy-but he sure looked like he wanted to shed some blood.

“No one else went down,” Melissa said. “I was by the entrance the whole time.”

“There’s gotta be another way in, then,” Sully said. “Those doors in the worship chambers-people came out of them and attacked us. They’ve taken Dr. Welch.”

Hilary Russo stared at him in obvious disbelief. “That’s a lie.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s not,” Drake said. “They dragged him through one of the doors, and-”

But she wasn’t listening anymore. Hilary rushed along the corridor, picking up speed, with Guillermo and a couple of others behind her. Drake wished they could stay and help look for Ian Welch, but if the man was there to be found, his colleagues would find him. Drake, Sully, and Jada needed to get the hell out of Crocodilopolis before things got even messier for them, at which point they would not be allowed to leave. Drake didn’t relish the idea of spending time in an Egyptian prison.

“We need to get Jada some air,” Sully said to Olivia. “You understand.”

Olivia seemed to be practically vibrating with indecision. She glanced at Henriksen, who had his hands clenched into fists. Melissa and a couple of other dig employees had stayed with them, and Drake thought it was touch and go for a moment as to whether he might start breaking people’s necks with his massive hands.

“Of course,” Olivia said, but her eyes were on Henriksen, keeping him in check with her pleading gaze. “I’ll come up with you.”

“No,” Henriksen snapped, the first time they’d heard him speak in his crisp, deep voice. “I need you here.”

Olivia hesitated. Drake studied her, hating that he couldn’t read her. Was she really a victim in Henriksen’s thrall, or was she in on the whole thing and simply trying to prevent him from doing anything stupid? Did she care about Jada at all or care that her husband had been murdered? Had she helped murder him?

“Fine,” Olivia said. She gave Jada a little push. “See you outside. Don’t go far.”

“Yeah,” Drake said, glancing at Henriksen. “We’ll stick close.”

Drake held Henriksen’s icy stare as he backed away, cognizant of the weight of the gun he’d tucked into the back of his waistband and hoping he didn’t have to use it in such close quarters.

“What did you find?” Melissa asked as they walked past her. “What’s down there?”

Drake looked at her, then at Henriksen, wanting the bastard to know that they had beaten him to it and were that much closer to solving the mystery he’d killed Luka Hzujak to keep from talking about.

“Secrets,” he said, smiling at Henriksen. “Stuff that’s going to blow your mind. Things you never would have expected.”

Henriksen lifted his chin, sneering. “Some secrets can be dangerous. Sometimes it’s safer for them to remain secret. Men can become very wealthy keeping secrets.”

Drake smirked. Was the guy trying to buy him? Not that he was offended by the idea of someone trying to pay him to shut up and go away. But Henriksen was the kind of arrogant bastard who thought he was king of the world. He’d had people murdered, including Jada’s father, because he thought he was too special to have to follow rules or share his discoveries with the world.

Sully took Jada’s hand and led her along the corridor, headed for the stairs that went up into the labyrinth. Drake hung back a moment, still locking eyes with Henriksen. Then he glanced at Melissa and smiled.

“Nothing stays a secret forever.”

He didn’t want to turn his back on Henriksen, but he figured if the guy was going to paint the walls with his blood, he’d have done it already. Still, it was all he could do not to run for the stairs, knowing those icy, soulless eyes were behind him, wanting him dead. Not that I’m afraid, of course, he thought. I’m just also not stupid .

Fifteen minutes later they were outside.

Four minutes after that, they were in the Volvo wagon, racing across the desert, wondering how long it would take the authorities to get out to the dig once someone radioed them.

Three hours later they were on a boat racing north on the Nile, headed for Port Said in hopes of finding a ship’s captain willing to run them northwest across the Mediterranean to Santorini. There would be ferry service, but a ferry would have other stops and might take a couple of days to get them there, and they didn’t have a moment to spare. They had a head start on Henriksen, but that wasn’t likely to last very long. Henriksen had more money than God, and he had the luxury of traveling under his real name, not a false identity that might not hold up under real scrutiny.

They did have a few things in their favor, however. Welch had given them their destination before he’d been abducted and maybe killed-more blood spilled over this secret-and since Hilary and her team didn’t know what Henriksen was looking for, they would come to their revelations more slowly. Also, Hilary and her staff would be occupied with the police, trying to figure out who had taken Welch and trying to get him back.

They would beat Henriksen to the third labyrinth, Drake decided. They had to.

As for Welch’s abduction, Drake, Jada, and Sully avoided that subject as much as possible, partly because they knew the police would assume they had something to do with it. Fleeing the scene hadn’t helped their case, but there had been no other choice. Now they were armed fugitives and suspected kidnappers.

Somewhere along the way, Drake figured, he had taken a wrong turn. He promised himself that if he survived this mess, he was going to find another line of work. Something quieter and safer, like fighting fires or sticking his head in a lion’s mouth after hitting it with a whip. Something nice and quiet. None of the perils of racing around the world with Victor Sullivan. If they could just get to Santorini and off the island again without anyone else dying, he would consider himself lucky.

But when it came to his adventures with Sully, he couldn’t fool himself for long. Their luck rarely turned out to be the good kind.