The Last Odyssey (Sigma Force #15) - James Rollins Page 0,57
brutal. Even now, rocks continued to fall with muffled crashes deeper down the tunnel in which they were trapped.
This little fragile pocket is not going to last much longer.
And they all might run out of air before that.
The group pressed cloths over their noses and mouths, trying their best to filter out the rock dust choking the space.
The bobbling beam of a flashlight approached as Gray returned with Major Bossard. The two men had gone to inspect the rockfall that blocked the tunnel a short distance down. They passed Seichan, who inspected one of the darkened vault doors with another flashlight.
“No way through,” Gray reported as he joined the group huddled at the tunnel’s end. “I also tried my sat phone over there. Still no signal.”
No surprise on either count.
“Bastards are nothing if not consistent,” Mac said as he sat with his back against the wall, his slung arm cradled to his chest. “Second time in two days those jackasses sealed me up in a tomb. First one made of ice, now rock.”
Something he said gave Maria pause, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
Father Bailey cast a chagrined look at the climatologist. “I’m sorry I brought you down here.”
“Hey, I’m not complaining. If you’d left me up in the medical ward, I’d likely be dead by now. Sounded like they bombed the crap out of everything up there. So even if this ends up being my tomb, you bought me a little more time.”
Maria straightened.
That’s it.
“But this isn’t a tomb,” she said and swung to Monsignor Roe, who knelt beside the map box, as if intending to protect the Da Vinci treasure with his last breath. “Didn’t you say that the Holy Scrinium had been installed in the cellars of an old Roman house?”
Roe lowered the fistful of cloth from his mouth. “Si, the villa of Emperor Domitian.”
“And it’s down here where the Romans dug out the villa’s water cisterns?”
“That’s right.”
“But where did the water come from to fill those cisterns? Do you know if they were drawing water from Lake Albano?”
“I . . . I believe I read about that.” Roe nodded. “The Romans excavated these cisterns to be below lake level and angled aqueducts up to the lake, so gravity would bring fresh water down here.”
Gray joined her, giving her a nod of approval. “Could those aqueducts still be there?”
“I don’t know,” Roe admitted. “But I do know that the Holy Scrinium doesn’t occupy the villa’s entire foundations. The library complex was walled off from those older sections centuries ago.”
“Do you know where?” Maria asked.
“Sì, certo,” Roe said, but he looked sickened as he pointed. “It’s at the end of the other tunnel. The one to our south.”
Mac groaned. “Sounds like we picked the wrong rabbit hole to run into. No way we’re burrowing our way over there.”
“There might be another way,” Roe said. “Let me show you.”
They gathered around the monsignor as he used a finger to draw in the dust on the floor. He inscribed three radiating lines, then connected them with concentric arcs.
Designed by author
“All three main tunnels are connected to one another by the library vaults, which curve from one tunnel to the other,” he explained. “If we could get through one of these doors in this tunnel, we could cross through its library vault and over to the next tunnel.”
“But there’s no power,” Maria said. “And the doors are still locked. We can’t—”
“I can,” Seichan said. She stood up from her inspection of the only door not buried under tons of rock and pointed a steel dagger at its electronic lock. “But we’ll have to be quick. And we’ll only have one chance.”
7:14 A.M.
Sometimes it’s good to be bad.
Gray silently thanked the heavens for Seichan’s illicit past. “Didn’t know breaking into bank vaults was part of your Guild training,” he said as he watched her work.
She shrugged. “I learned this trick long before the Guild. It’s not much different than hot-wiring a car. Back when I used to joyride through the backstreets of Seoul as a kid.”
Gray tried to imagine a carefree version of this woman, a wild-eyed girl running roughshod through the streets of Southeast Asia. Even now, there remained large swaths of her past that were unknown to him. He prayed he would have the chance to fill in those gaps.
“Quit wiggling the light,” she scolded him.
He refocused his flashlight. She had already used her blade to pry open the electronic lock’s front plate. She squinted as she wired