Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,70

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.

13

Santorini was unlike any other place in the world. The towns overlooking the caldera were built into the caves and folds of the cliffs left behind when the volcano at the heart of ancient Thera exploded. The blue domes of the larger buildings matched the blue of the swimming pools that dotted the cliff towns and the water of the caldera. Drake reckoned there must have been tens of thousands of stairs just in the village of Oia alone, all of them curving around the inner wall of an island that was part of the rim of a sleeping volcano. Some of the beaches had black sand—volcanic sand—and the beauty of the caldera somehow allowed the people to tell themselves that the sea would never erupt with lava and flame, killing them all.

But it might. Drake knew that, and though Santorini had a beauty and serenity greater than almost anywhere else on the planet, it was this strange peace with potentially imminent destruction that fascinated him most.

It was Sunday night, and the warmth of the day still lingered though the sun had gone down. Drake and Jada walked side by side along the alleys and stairways overlooking the caldera, surrounded by bars and restaurants and shops. Many of the shops were closed on a Sunday night in October, but some remained open, and they wandered and window-shopped, sometimes talking about their lives and sometimes in companionable silence.

They had managed a great deal in just over twenty-four hours. In Port Said they had found a marina where captains offered their boats for day trips. It was an expensive proposition and even more costly when they explained that they wanted the captain to take them to Santorini but didn’t plan on making the return trip. The weathered Egyptian captain made noises about the laws they were asking him to break but was happy enough to break them when money had changed hands.

They had slept fairly comfortably on board the ship, all things considered, and arrived at Santorini in midafternoon on Sunday. It had been a stroke of genius—or luck, Drake allowed—that they had checked out of the Auberge du Lac and brought their duffels with them, guns and ammunition stuffed in among their clean and dirty clothes. They had left the Volvo abandoned in Port Said, but once they took the cable car up from the Santorini docks, getting a taxi was easy enough. Hungry as they were, they had shopped first. October nights could get chilly on the islands, so Sully and Drake each picked up sweaters, and Jada purchased a stylish leather jacket.

Or, rather, Drake purchased them all, as well as a couple of changes of clothes for each of them. He felt bad about using the fake credit card he’d gotten on the way to Montreal, but he couldn’t exactly use his own, and he had to conserve the significant amount of cash he was still carrying from his adventure in Ecuador. He promised himself that when this was all over, he’d pay the store back; he’d even kept the receipt. Drake might have broken the law on a fairly regular basis—that came with the territory in his line of work—but he drew the line at ripping people off.

They’d gone into the first decent hotel they’d found in the village of Oia, pretended not to be twitchy about the exorbitant prices, and booked a suite so they could all be locked up behind the same door that night. In the summer they would never have found a vacancy so easily, but in October rooms weren’t in such high demand.

Dinner had followed, and now Sully was back at the hotel, trying