Valhalla Gold

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

They fell down the chute for several seconds, mercifully falling at a slight incline which slowed their fall. The walls of the tunnel were smooth and obviously carved by man.

Before any of them had a chance to speak or even scream, they hit the bottom — a soft fall because of a thick layer of straw on the floor. They got their bearings back and began to look around their new home. It looked like a natural cavern in the shape of a tear-drop and they could see no way out other than the way they had just arrived.

They looked up the gently inclining tunnel and saw the gilded ceiling of Sala’s study — the face of Thor looking down on them, with disapproving menace.

Scarlet stood up and began to dust herself down. “Oh, well this is just another fine mess you two have got me into. I’m going to start calling you Laurel and Hardy, I think.”

Vincent got to his feet and gave an appreciative nod. “Ah, a comedy classic.”

“Hey, that’s not fair, Cairo,” Hawke said. “Lea looks nothing like Oliver Hardy.”

Lea slapped his shoulder. “Hey! She meant you were Hardy, right?”

Scarlet pursed her lips. “You’re making my point for me now.”

“What are you talking about?” Lea said, getting to her feet and squaring up to her.

“Well, just then when you slapped Joe,” said Scarlet. “You may as well have knocked his bowler hat off or pinched his nose.”

Lea put her hands on her hips “Nose pinching was the Three Stooges, ya eejit.”

“Was it?” Scarlet asked.

“Yes it bloody was!” Lea said. She turned to Hawke. “Was it?”

Hawke sighed as he got to his feet. “Yes.”

“I told you!” Lea said, jabbing Scarlet in the arm. “And that would make you Zippo!”

Hawke sighed again. “It was Zeppo, not Zippo! And he was in the Marx Brothers not a Stooge.”

“Was he?”

Hawke and Vincent nodded simultaneously.

“Are we really having this conversation?” Scarlet said, raising her hands in the air with disbelief.

“Wait,” Lea said. “So who was Zippo with — the Stooges?”

“Oh my God!” Scarlet said, tipping her head back and sighing deeply. Looking up at the trapdoor she froze. “Ah…”

Hawke and Lea stopped talking and looked at her. “What is it?”

“We have company!” Scarlet said, and pointed at the trapdoor.

They stared up at the circular aperture, at least thirty feet above them, and saw the figures of two men appear on the rim.

“Holy craparola!” Lea said as she glanced at them.

Scarlet sighed. “Seconded.”

“I knew I should have ignored your phone call,” said the Frenchman with a sigh.

One of the men was wearing a herringbone suit with an open-necked black shirt, and stood casually with one hand in his pocket. He wore rimless glasses and had long, black hair that hung forward as he peered over into the pit, but the feature that really stood out was that he was holding a golden straw-colored snake in his hands.

They’d never seen the man with long hair before, but they recognized the man beside him immediately. He was the creature behind the vicious attack on Victoria’s beach house back in the Florida Keys who had snatched Lea and the flash drive. Worse, he was the man who had led the assault on the castillo in the Basque Country and murdered Javier and Gunnar before fleeing with the cloak of invisibility and the axe handle. Now, he was standing above them with a KRISS Vector submachine gun gripped in his hands.

The man with long hair gave them a grim smile. “Ah — bona nit, my friends. Please, don’t get up.” He laughed at his own joke and gently caressed the snake.

Hawke knew they were totally vulnerable. With a weapon like the KRISS, the ape on the right could turn all three of them into Swiss cheese in half a second and there was nowhere to run.

“Who are you?” Hawke shouted.

“I am Álvaro Sala, and this is Leon Smets. I believe you had the pleasure of his company in Florida.”

The goon with the KRISS gave them a mocking grin and bowed his head. Now Hawke saw the grenade tattoo once again, and so did Vincent.

“You bastard, Smets!” Vincent yelled.

Leon Smets leaned over the pit and grinned as a look of recognition crossed his face. “Wait — Legionnaire Deuxieme Classe Reno? Could that be you?”

“Why don’t you come down and find out?” Vincent said. “I owe you something.”

“Why don’t you shut your mouth?” Smets said.

Sala hushed Smets and took a step closer. “I am to presume from your presence here that you successfully overcame my men… Tell me, what happened to Deprez?”

“If you mean the baboon downstairs,” Hawke shouted up, “I gave him the boot.”

Sala looked at Hawke with cold, emotionless eyes. “You are very funny considering your death is only moments away.”

“Oh yeah?” Lea shouted. “So what are you going to do about this then?” She waved the axe handle in the air. “If you want your little clue back you’re going to have to come down here and get it, ya loser!”

Sala smiled. “I think not. We have already taken several photographs of the handle, so you are more than welcome to keep it for yourself. Perhaps you can use it to try and defend yourselves!” He let out a low chuckle.

Lea turned to Hawke and Scarlet and lowered her voice. “Defend ourselves against what, guys?”

Hawke shrugged his shoulders.

“That’s very kind of you,” Scarlet shouted back. “But how can an axe handle defend us against your breath?”

“You will see this is no laughing matter, but now I must go.” Sala gently rubbed his lips, lost in the moment. “When I find what I seek, the world you know will be destroyed forever. Everything you think you know about humanity will be smashed on the rocks of the epiphany I will bring to you all…” he paused and drew a long, deep breath. “I have few regrets in my long life, Lea Donovan. One is not being able to watch you die in this snake pit, and the other is not being chosen to kill your father.”

Lea’s blood ran cold, but before she could find any words, Álvaro Sala dropped the snake into the pit and ordered Smets to close the trapdoors.

The snake hit the straw and lashed out with a violent hiss. Hawke and the others jumped out of its way and kept a concerned eye on it as Smets continued to shut the doors.

Now with one door closed, all they could see were each other’s outlines. Then, as Smets hauled up the other half of the trapdoor and secured the bolts, total darkness fell upon them.

“Joe?”

Hawke heard Lea’s voice in the dark, small and scared. “It’s okay.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“He was just winding you up,” Scarlet said. “He’s obviously a total tossrag.”

Hawke knew it was more than that, and by the sound of her voice, so did Lea, but now was not the time. “Listen, I presume you have a lighter about your person, Cairo?”

“C’est une bonne idée,” Vincent said. “I can hear that damned snake moving around in the straw.”

Scarlet’s reply came a second later when Hawke heard the rotation of a sparkwheel and Scarlet’s face was suddenly in front of him, amber in the glow of the tiny butane flame. “Bien sûr,” she said with a cat-like glance at Vincent.

“I knew I could rely on you.”

“Just call me Zippo,” she said, looking at Lea with a smug grin.

“Like Zippo the clown or Zippo the climbing monkey?” Lea said.

“All right, let’s just get on,” said Hawke, interrupting Scarlet’s reply before it left her lips. “We need to find a way…”

His words were stopped by a strange grating noise which had begun to fill the small cavern.

“What the hell is that?” Scarlet asked.

Vincent frowned. “Sounds like metal scraping against rock.”

“No — something’s moving,” Scarlet said.

Lea stared at the floor. “She’s right! The floor’s moving.”

Hawke realized they were right — the floor was moving. It was almost imperceptible, but slowly he was moving closer to the wall behind him. Worse, he realized Vincent and Scarlet seemed to be moving away from him and Lea at the same time.

“Get this straw out of the way!” he shouted, and began to kick the straw matting away with his boot.

The others did the same but soon wished they hadn’t. Beneath the straw was a metal grated floor that was divided in two and joined in the center. Now, the two halves were retracting toward their separate sides of the cavern, and beneath the grating was a deep pit of snakes sliding over one another in a mass of hissing, slithering tangles.

“Oh — it’s my lifelong dream!” Scarlet’s words were heavy with sarcasm.

“So when the grated floor is fully retracted,” Lea said slowly, “we’ve got nowhere to go but down. Have I got this right?”

Hawke looked grim. “Yes.”

The snake Sala had dropped into the cavern slid down over the edge of the grating and joined the others.

“Not digging this one, Joe,” Lea said.

“I’m not exactly cock-a-hoop over it, either.”

Vincent frowned. “Translation, please.”

“He says let’s get the fuck out of here,” Scarlet said.

The floor continued to slide back into the walls. Now, Hawke and Lea were divided from Scarlet and Vincent by almost a yard.

Hawke strained his eyes around the dimly lit cavern. If the grated floor was retracting like this then it must mean the walls weren’t particularly thick. Sala’s goons wouldn’t have been able to carve the retraction slits into them otherwise, and that gave him hope.

“This isn’t a natural cavern,” he said. “This whole thing is man-made.”

“You think?” Lea said. “Looks pretty realistic to me.”

“Looks realistic, sure, but looks can be deceiving.”

Scarlet sighed. “Ain’t that the truth.”

“I noticed it on the way down — the chute was obviously man-made, and I think all of this is too.”

The floor continued to push back. Now they were on ledges just a few inches wide.

“These grates can’t be rolling back into solid rock,” Hawke continued. “Also, think about where we are — we fell thirty feet from Sala’s study but that was on the top floor. This can’t be the bedrock. This whole place is artificial and if you ask me these walls are fake. It’s just some hideous theater where Sala can watch his victims die.”

As he spoke, he turned on the ledge and pulled out his gun. He aimed it at the rock above Scarlet’s head and fired.

She ducked and the bullet blasted a hole through the rock.

“Thanks for the warning, darling!”

“My pleasure, Cairo.”

“But it worked!” said Lea.

“So get shooting!” Hawke screamed.

They got busy emptying their magazines into the rock face, which they quickly realized was as Hawke had surmised — totally fake and built out of some kind of plaster. Seconds later the holes were big enough to climb through, and they made their way out of the pit with seconds to spare as the floor fully retracted with a heavy thud.

They were now standing on opposite sides of Sala’s killing room and saw it was just as Hawke had described — nothing more than a set made for killing people. It was housed inside what looked like the furnace room.

“That was a close one,” Lea said.

“You can say that again,” Scarlet said. “Just as well we sent Ryan down with Victoria or there’d be a shortage of Huggies in Andorra for the next week and half.”

Vincent frowned. “Why don’t you talk in English?!”

“It’s not worth translating, Vincent,” Hawke said, scowling at Scarlet.

“So what now?” Lea said.

Hawke clenched his jaw. “We need to get this axe back to base because it looks like Sala has a head start on us.”

He scanned the room and saw two doors. One led to a set of metal steps going up to the house, but the other opened out onto stone steps carved out of rock.

“That’s the real bedrock down there,” Hawke said. “Not like Sala’s theater. I say we see where this takes us — we have no idea how many men he’s left up in the main house.”

They made their way down the steps and quickly found themselves in a series of tunnels carved into the rock deep at the base of the château.

“Your Zippo is required again, Cairo.”

Scarlet fired her lighter up and joined Hawke at the front.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. We have to get out of here, darlings and it’s this way! I see light!”

Scarlet led the way in the gloom using only her lighter for illumination, and they made their way along the carved rock tunnel until reaching another small cavern, only this time it was the real thing. Ahead of them they saw the unmistakable sight of moonlight in a narrow fissure in the rock face outside. Hawke estimated they were halfway between Sala’s morbidly theatrical snake pit and freedom.

“I think we’re almost there,” he said.

But then they turned the corner and a terrible vision of torture and suffering met their eyes.

“What the hell is that?” Scarlet said, horrified.

Vincent recoiled in shock.

Hawke looked at the far wall in the cavern and saw what had once been a man was now strung up on the slimy rock face. They moved slowly over to him and by the light of Scarlet’s Zippo they were able now to see something that horrified all of them. It was obviously a human skeleton, but pieces of flesh were hanging from parts of the frame here and there, and what looked like a desiccated heart was snagged on the bottom of a badly deteriorated rib cage. In a hideous kind of grim mockery, there were still two shoes on its feet and above its head was a strange apparatus involving a bowl and a burned out candle was in a lantern on a nearby table.

“That’s not nice at all,” Lea said, covering her mouth.

Vincent made the sign of the cross. “Mon dieu…”

Hawke leaned in closer, the terrifying decayed corpse flickering in the warm glow of the lighter flame. “You know what I’m thinking?”

“That at least he died with his boots on?” Scarlet said.

Hawke gave her a look. “No, funnily enough I was not thinking that.”

“Then do enlighten us.”

Lea spoke next, her voice trembling in the damp cave. “I think I know what you’re thinking, Joe.”

“Oh, someone just tell me!” Scarlet said.

Lea spoke next. “That what’s left of this guy has more than a passing resemblance to what old Maxim Vetrov ended up looking like.”

Hawke nodded grimly.

That is exactly what he was thinking.

“And what do we make of that?” Scarlet said. “That we’re looking at the corpse of someone who tried to take the elixir?”

Hawke shook his head. “I’m not sure of anything anymore. All I know is we need to get the other half of this axe before Álvaro Sala gets his grubby hands on it. If this is how he treats people now, just imagine what he’ll do when he gets hold of whatever power’s lurking in Thor’s tomb. His hammer alone could have unimaginable powers.”

And with that sobering thought, they made their way out onto the mountainside and called the chopper up from El Serrat.