Spartan Gold - Clive Cussler

“Enough of this,” Sam said, and stepped back into the main passage.

They found the next tunnel farther down the passageway on their right. This one was slightly longer and contained twenty cells. Moving more quickly now, they repeated the process, passing cell tunnel after cell tunnel until they reached the end of the passageway, where they found a wooden door. It was closed but had neither latch nor lock. Beside the door a placard said in French, DO NOT ENTER. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“Why no lock?” Remi wondered aloud.

“Probably removed so wayward tourists can’t accidentally lock themselves in places they shouldn’t be.”

He stuck his finger through the latch hole and gently pulled. The door swung open an inch. The hinges creaked. He stopped, took a breath, then pulled the door the rest of the way open.

Remi squeezed through the gap, then he followed, easing the door shut behind them. They stood still for a few moments, listening, then Remi cupped her hands around her LED and clicked it on. They were standing on a narrow, four-by-four-foot landing. To the right of the door was a ledge; at their backs, another cylindrical stairwell, this one leading only downward. Together they peeked over the ledge.

The LED’s beam didn’t penetrate any deeper than ten steps.

CHAPTER 32

Following the blue-white beams of their LEDs, they picked their way down the steps to the next landing. As above, they found a wooden door set into the wall, and beside it another Do Not Enter placard. Expecting the shriek of ancient hinges, Sam was surprised when the door swung noiselessly open. They stepped through.

Another tunnel, this one barely four feet wide and five feet tall, forcing Sam and Remi to duck. Spaced at four-foot intervals along each wall was a rectangular cell door, but unlike their counterparts on the upper level, these were equipped with what Sam and Remi assumed were the original vertically barred doors, each one standing open and tethered to an eyelet in the stone with a length of twine. Sam examined the nearest door under the glow of the LED and found the lock and latch were still present.

“Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more depressing,” Remi whispered.

Scanning the walls as they went, they started down the tunnel. After sixty or seventy feet they found a ten-foot-deep side tunnel set into the left-hand wall. At the end was a waist-high rectangular opening. They knelt down and Sam leaned into the opening. A few feet inside, a hatch was set into the floor; Sam shined his light into it. “Another ladder,” he whispered. “It goes down about six feet. I think we’ve found the place.”

“I’ll go first,” Remi said, then slipped feet first into the hatch and started down. “Okay,” she called. “The ladder seems sturdy.”

Sam climbed down and crouched beside her. This tunnel was narrower still: three feet wide and four feet tall. Stretching down the centerline was hatch after hatch after hatch, each one a steel-barred black square that seemed to swallow their flashlight beams.

“God almighty,” Sam whispered.

“How many, do you think?” Remi asked.

“If this tunnel is as long as the ones above . . . Forty or fifty.”

Remi was silent for a long ten seconds. “I wonder how long it took for someone to go insane down here.”

“Depends on the person, but after a day or two your mind would start feeding on itself. No sense of time, no points of reference, no outside stimulus. . . . Come on, let’s get this over with. What was the last line of the riddle . . . ?”

“ ‘From the third realm of the forgotten . . .’ ”

Careful of their footing, they walked down the wall to the third hatch. Under the beam of Remi’s LED, Sam examined the grate. The hinges and latch had been removed and the bars were scabrous with corrosion. He touched one; flakes sloughed off and floated down into the oubliette. He gripped the bars, lifted the grate free, and set it aside.

The oubliette lay at the bottom of a narrow six-foot long shaft, while the cell itself was four feet to a side and three feet deep—neither wide enough for a prisoner to lie fully prone, nor tall enough to stand without being bent at the waist. “I better go,” Remi said. “I’m smaller and I couldn’t pull you back up.”

Sam frowned, but nodded. “Okay.” From his waistband he pulled the miniature crowbar. She took off her coat and laid it aside, then tucked the crowbar into her belt and let Sam lower her into the shaft, dropping the last couple feet on her own. On hands and knees she clicked on her light, stuck it between her teeth, and began examining the stone walls and floor. After two minutes of crawling around she suddenly murmured, “There you are. . . .”

“Spittlebug?”

“Yep, in all its glory. It’s carved into the corner of this block. There’s a good-sized gap here. . . . Hang on.”

Remi worked the pry bar first into one gap, then the other, inching the block away from the wall. With a grunt, she pulled it free and shoved it aside, then dropped to her belly and shined the light into the hollow. “It goes back a couple feet. . . . Damn.”

“What?”

Remi got to her knees and looked up the shaft at him. “It’s bedrock. There are no other openings, no gaps. . . . There’s nothing here, Sam.”

Remi took another two minutes to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, then pushed the block back into place. Sam reached down and lifted her up. She pursed her lips and puffed a strand of hair from her eyebrow. “I was afraid of that. Karl Müller found three bottles here. Something told me we weren’t going to find the rest.”

Sam nodded. “Whatever Laurent was up to, it doesn’t seem likely he’d stash them all together.”

“Well, it was worth a try. We know one thing for sure: Laurent did in fact use his cicada stamp.”

“Come on, time to leave the party and find a way out.”

They replaced the grate and walked down the tunnel away from the door, Remi pressed against one wall, Sam the other. Ten feet from the end, Sam suddenly stumbled backward into an alcove and landed on his butt with an umph.

“Sam?” Remi called.

“Looks like I found something.”

He looked around. Only three feet deep, the rear half of the alcove’s floor was taken up by a hatch, this one unbarred.

Remi walked around the oubliette between them and ducked into the alcove with Sam, who shined his light into the hatch, then dropped through, followed by Remi. Sam clicked on his LED for a moment. Running perpendicular to the tunnel above, a crawl space stretched into the darkness.

On hands and knees they started crawling, Remi in the lead and Sam bringing up the rear. Not wanting to miss any side branches, every few feet they reached out and touched each wall.

After a full minute of crawling, Sam tapped Remi on the butt to call a halt, then clicked on the LED again. Ahead the tunnel stretched on.

“Did you notice the walls?” Remi whispered.

“Yes.”

The crawl space’s walls were not constructed of stone block but had rather been carved from the bedrock. Crawling as they were in a dark and cramped space, inches of travel felt like many feet.

After thirty more seconds of moving, Remi stopped. “Wall,” she whispered. “Branch to the right.”

They made the turn, then crawled another twenty feet to another turn, this one to the left. After another short straightaway and another two right and left turns, they found themselves at a ceiling hatch tall enough for Remi to stand in. She ducked back down and said, “There’s a ledge, then a drop-off into some kind of room.”

“Can you make it?”

“I think so.” She boosted herself up and disappeared. Ten seconds later she called, “Okay.”

Sam stood up, crawled over the ledge, and dropped down beside Remi, who was already surveying the room, which measured ten by ten feet. Like the crawl space, the walls and floor and ceiling were bedrock. Mounted on three walls were what looked like wooden gun cases, each one divided into vertical slots meant for, they assumed, either muskets or swords. In the wall to their left was a truncated arch.

“This must be original to the fort,” Sam whispered. “Probably a last-ditch bolt-hole and armory for defenders.”

“Which means there has to be another way out or in.”

“Unless it got closed up when the château was converted to a prison.”

“Don’t even joke about that.”

“One way to find out.”

They ducked through the arch and into the tunnel beyond.

It was labyrinth. For the next hour they picked their way along the tunnel, into dead ends, through horseshoe hallways, and up and down stairs until Sam finally called a halt. Ahead the tunnel split yet again into three branches like spokes on a wagon wheel.

“What is this place?” Remi panted.

“I don’t know that it has a name,” Sam replied, “but I’m guessing it’s still part of the last-ditch defense theory—attackers come down here, get trapped, then are ambushed by the defenders.” He licked his finger and held it up. “There’s air movement.” He turned in a circle, trying to localize it, then shook his head. “Can’t tell where it’s coming from.”

Remi wasn’t listening. Eyes closed, she turned first this way, then that, her hands at her waist, fingers alternately left and right. “Retracing our steps,” she finally whispered. “That way’s the courtyard.” She pointed down the left tunnel. “I think. If there’s a hidden entrance, it’s got to be there.”

“Good enough for me,” Sam said.

He took her hand and they set off again.

Time and again the tunnel branched off and each time Remi would stop, repeat her slow-motion, eyes-closed spin, then point.

After another hour their tunnel came to an abrupt dead end—or near dead end. Leaning against the wall was a wooden ladder; roughly hewn from what looked like red oak, the uprights and rungs were slightly crooked. They shined their lights upward. The ladder, well over thirty feet tall, ended at a wooden hatch.

“Smell that?” Remi said. “It’s rain, Sam. We’re close.”

He nodded absently, eyes poring over the ladder. “This is ancient,” he murmured. “It could be original. This could be hundreds of years old.”

“That’s wonderful, Sam, but right now all I care about is whether it’ll take our weight.”

He gave the ladder a twist, then put his weight on the bottom rung. It creaked, but held. “Give me the pry bar, will you?”

He tucked it into his belt and climbed up to the hatch. “It’s locked,” he called down.

He wriggled the pry bar under the edge and wrenched once, then again, then once more and the latch popped open. Sam threw open the hatch. Fresh air rushed through the opening and down the ladder.

“We’re in one of the turrets,” Sam whispered down.

He boosted himself up and out, then Remi followed. As her head cleared the opening, outside the door they heard the scuff of a shoe on stone. Sam helped Remi the rest of the way out and together they crept to the door.

Over the railing they could see a guard—the one from before, they assumed—strolling across the courtyard, flashlight panning left and right. The man turned around, shined his flashlight briefly over the walkways, then disappeared through the arch.

They gave him thirty seconds to move off a safe distance, then trotted down the walkway, left down the steps, then through the courtyard and into the tunnel they’d first entered.

Outside it was still raining and the temperature had dropped twenty degrees. The cold washed over them. They looked around to get their bearings; they were back where they’d started. Ahead, across the plaza, lay the red-roofed outbuildings. His progress marked by his flashlight, the guard was a hundred yards away and heading toward the reception area.

“Had enough prowling for one night?” Sam asked Remi.

“And then some,” Remi replied. “Besides, knowing you as I do, I’m sure there’s plenty of skulking left in our future.”

“Safe bet.”

Together they stepped out into the rain.

CHAPTER 33

GRAND HÔTEL BEAUVAU

An hour later, freshly showered and enjoying their second room-service Bombay Sapphire Gibson, Sam and Remi sat on their balcony and looked out over the Vieux Port. The lights of the city reflected off the water’s surface in a mosaic of red, yellow, and blue that slowly rippled with the falling rain. In the distance they could hear the mournful howl of a foghorn, and closer in the occasional clang of a buoy.

The phone trilled. Sam checked the screen: It was Rube. As soon as they got back to the hotel he had called Haywood, given him a purposely vague recounting of the night’s events, and asked him to call back.

Sam closed the balcony door, then answered and put the phone on speaker. “Rube, please tell us Kholkov and his merry band are in custody.”

“Sorry, no. The French DCPJ can’t find them.”

“Wish I could say I was surprised.”

“Me, too. Ready to quit and come home now?

“Not on your life.”

“Remi?”

“No chance.”

“Well, on the bright side, Kholkov’s name and picture are everywhere. If he tries to leave the country through an airport, port, or train station, they’ll pick him up.”

“Then again,” Sam said, “from what you told me it sounds like the Spetsnaz are trained to slip across borders. And he doesn’t strike me as stupid enough to walk into an airport.”

“True.”

“What about Bondaruk?” Remi asked. “Any chance of digging into his family’s skeleton closet and figuring out what’s driving him?”

“Possibly. It turns out the Iranian Pasdaran colonel who was Bondaruk’s handler during the border war ran into some trouble with the Ayatollah a few years later. We’re not sure what the rigmarole was about, but the colonel—his name is Aref Ghasemi—escaped to London and started working for the British. He’s still there. I’ve got someone reaching out to him.”

“Thanks, Rube,” Remi said, and hung up.

The next morning they slept in until nine and had breakfast on the balcony. The previous night’s rain had disappeared, leaving behind a blue sky with scattered cotton-puff clouds. Over coffee they called Selma, who was awake despite it being nearly midnight in California. As far as they could tell, their chief researcher slept only five or so hours a night but never seemed the worse for it.

Leaving out the finer details, Sam told her about finding the Château d’If hiding place empty. Remi added, “The cicada was there, though, and it looked like a perfect match for Laurent’s chisel stamp.”