slid down a few feet to the cavern floor. Sydney did the same.
“Amazing,” she said. “I thought water seepage made the columns, but these look too uniform, like they’re all carved.”
She was about to take a step forward when he reached out, stopped her. “Don’t move.”
“What’s wrong?”
He pointed between the columns into the interior, his headlamp sweeping across strangely shaped mounds. It took several moments for his sight to adjust, to see what was beneath the tufo dust that covered everything. The realization of what he was seeing hit him. Urns and chests, each strategically placed around the center columns. “Hell,” he said, not daring to let go of Sydney’s arm.
“But that means the map has to be here.”
“Yeah? And we never discovered the second key. So if it is all true…”
One false step and they were dead.
34
Francesca tried to catch her breath, leaning against the rough wall of the tunnel, while Xavier and Alfredo felt around with their hands. The passageway they’d taken led up, and they’d run the entire way.
“What exactly are you looking for?” she asked, her voice low.
“I just don’t understand it,” Xavier said.
“Understand what?” she replied, not liking the worry in his voice. She had enough to worry about right now, like what had happened to Sydney and Griffin. Were they still alive? Bleeding and injured down in the cavern? The two agents had sacrificed their own safety so the three of them could get away. But how the hell were they going to get help to them if they couldn’t avoid being shot by the men who were chasing them?
“There should be a sign,” Xavier said. “A skull and crossbones that tells me this is the right passageway, just like the one in the tunnel below that led us up here.”
“You mean this might not be the right way?”
Alfredo slammed his hand against the stone wall. “It’s certainly looking that way.”
“Calm down,” Xavier said. “Maybe the signs change. Maybe it’s not supposed to be a skull and crossbones. Maybe that’s one of the things we’re supposed to learn.”
“For God’s sake,” Francesca said. “This is not the time to make that discovery. We should have known this before we even set out.”
“Yeah?” Xavier whispered harshly. “And when was that? Between the five minutes I’d learned you wanted to meet me and the announcement that Alessandra was murdered? You’ve had a hell of a lot longer to look at the flash drive she sent, so get off my case.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “What can I do to help?”
“Not a lot. By all calculations, this should lead to the passageway that di Sangro plotted out.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure where it’s not, and it’s not here.”
“Actually,” Alfredo said, “if I had to guess, this passageway leads right back to the basilica. We’ve gone in one big giant circle.”
“I wonder if that’s what Sydney saw down in the main cavern.”
Xavier stopped pressing on the wall. “What are you talking about?”
“Right before those men shot at us, she called Griffin over. I think she realized something was off down there.”
“Well,” Alfredo said. “Whatever it was, we have to be grateful, or more than likely we’d all be dead,” he said, as he and Xavier continued to push on the rock wall with their gloved hands. “We’d have been sitting ducks if those men had followed us up here right away. All we can do now is hope that your agent friends were able to fight them off and discovered the right passage, and we can get the hell out of here before those guys find us.”
A scuffling sound echoing up from the passage below sent her heart racing. “They’re getting closer.”
“Look there!” Xavier said, pointing his flashlight beam toward a crevice in the wall, narrow at the base but widening as it rose. The light bounced off the tunnel walls into a ceiling that seemed to disappear into a deep blackness. “We’ll make them think we’re gone.”
Alfredo began climbing up the V-shaped crevice. He reached down for Francesca’s hand, pulled her up, as Xavier boosted her from the floor, then followed. Inching their way inward and upward, they didn’t speak. Suddenly Xavier reached over, gripped her arm, his fingers digging into her in warning.
She needed none. She heard the two men coming up the tunnel, and she held her breath, praying they wouldn’t hear anything. Beside her, Alfredo’s foot slipped, knocking loose a bit of tufo that skittered down the crevice into the tunnel below, and she thought this was it.