Blown Circuit (24 page)

 
The guard headed directly for us. Not to the display on his right or the path to his left, but to us, right in the middle of the sculpture garden. When he stopped, mere feet away, I could almost reach the sidearm he kept in his black leather holster. Meryem crouched beside me, her eyes locked with mine. The guard then pulled out a half-full pack of cigarettes and lit up, birds chirping in the olive trees above. He took a long drag and returned to his rounds, leaving us alone once again.
 

Meryem and I exhaled simultaneously and continued up the stairs to the second level, where we followed another sign across the courtyard to the castle wall. Once we reached the cannon embrasure, we were rewarded with a fantastic view of the sea coupled with an unfortunate sight. The Turquoise Fox had made port. She sat moored in the azure waters directly in front of the castle. I moved past the embrasure in the wall and continued up another set of narrow stairs.
 

We reached the top and continued along the rampart, and then back down another set of stairs into a huge, square upper courtyard. There was a high flagpole on the northwest corner flying a giant red Turkish flag with its sickle moon and stars. There was also a construction crane, a big one, maybe three-hundred feet high. Restoration work was clearly being performed on the castle. The crane’s central location gave it access to all corners of the structure, including the minaret that rose from the southwest corner.
 

Below the crane were generators and the necessary support equipment, but, more importantly, there was a stone tower on the northern castle wall. At its base was another metal plaque. If the previous plaque had been correct, we had located the entrance to the dungeon. Now, we needed to avoid the CCTV camera and go down. The camera, however, was more of a problem than I had initially suspected. It was mounted above the dungeon door to provide a wide pan of those entering the tower. It panned right, then left, patrolling exactly the area where we wanted to go.
 

“Stay close,” I said.

I waited for the camera to pan left and raced along, tight with the east wall. Meryem followed me, move for move, until we reached the inside corner. The camera had a wide angle, I figured, but not that wide. Surely not wide enough to catch us as we huddled in the corner. Meryem faced me, her body tight with mine.

“This is very close,” she said.

“A necessary precaution,” I smiled.

The camera panned back toward us, finishing its sweep. It was pointed almost directly at us. Not quite, though. It looked as if we were in its blind spot. I waited for it to resume its pan in the other direction. But it didn’t. Instead, it stayed focused directly on us. Then the alarm sounded and I knew we had been caught.

Chapter 46

T
HE
CLANGING
ALARM
eliminated the need for stealth. Which meant it was time for a change of strategy. Time to hide in plain sight. I walked directly toward the lens, axe behind my back, my face buried in Meryem's neck, punch drunk in love. Meryem picked up on the act and played right along, nibbling at my ear. We passed in front of the lens, its servos buzzing to keep up.

“At least this way, they think we’re harmless,” I said.

“You are not harmless, Michael Chase. Nor am I.”

The iron plaque mounted on the tower wall confirmed that we had indeed found the dungeon. I quickly opened the heavy, iron-banded door and we snuck inside to find a narrow stone stairwell. It was dark so I passed Meryem one of the waterproof light-stick flashlights I’d picked up in town. They were little more than a red LED on one end and a green LED on the other, but they threw enough light that we could see, and if the illustration on the package was to be believed, they floated.

There was a chain wrapped around the inside handle of the door with just enough play that I could reach the iron rings mortared into the stone walls. I pulled the chain taut and tied a simple square knot. It wouldn’t keep anyone out forever, but it would slow them down. We continued down the steep staircase, the little red and green LEDs casting their dull glow.

Then I stopped in my tracks because I saw the bloody face of a tortured man. I felt Meryem squeeze my shoulder. I realized what I was looking at. It was a latex dummy manacled to the stone wall. A display for the tourists. Behind the dummy, a padlocked iron gate cordoned off a pit filled with medieval torture tools. There was a giant iron pot to boil prisoners in oil, a rack, and the like. But what interested me was a second set of iron bars in the rock wall on the far side of the pit. They blocked off a passage that went somewhere, I was guessing down.
 

The door rattled above. The guards had already found us.
 

“Move out of the way,” I said.

I ignored the rattling of the door and inserted the blade of the axe between the hasp and the bars of the iron gate in front of me. The hasp popped free. I hopped down to the dirt and rock floor below and made my way to the second gate. I couldn’t see what was on the other side of the bars, but I saw right away that this one was going to be trickier.

The smaller gate was chained. There was no hasp to break. I’d have to attack the hinges themselves. I tried the lever trick, but the hinges were well anchored into the rock. So I swung at the top hinge with the axe. Some dust billowed out, but the hinge was solid. I hit it again. Still fairly solid, but this time I loosened a chunk of rock. I took another big swing. I almost put my eye out with a chip of rock, but I loosened it enough that I was able to get the head of the axe between the metal bar and the rock to lever the gate out. It popped, leaving me with just enough room to slide in over the top of the gate.

“You’re going to love this,” I said.

There were cobwebs everywhere. I crawled in, Meryem behind me. The tunnel wasn’t more than three feet high, with a dirt floor. The guards continued to pound the door above, their beating less frantic, but more directed, as if they had some kind of plan. We crawled forward through dust and dirt for about a hundred feet, my light stick casting a dim glow in front of us. I heard a thud as the dungeon door swung off its hinges behind us. Then I fell.

I fell because the dusty ground was suddenly uneven below my right hand. For a moment, it felt like my palm was on a teeter-totter, and then the ground broke way beneath my knees. I plunged through the air for maybe seven feet. Luckily, I managed to land in a crouch. Not quite catlike but close enough.
 

“Are you okay, Michael?” Meryem whispered from the passage above.

“Never better,” I said.

I looked around. I was in a decent-sized corridor. A stone staircase descended in front of me, the ceiling just tall enough for me to stand. The wooden trapdoor had landed on the floor behind me. Clearly, it hadn’t been inserted properly in its frame. I picked it up and handed it up to Meryem in the passage above.

“Throw some dirt on it, and put it half into place. Then lower yourself down.”

“I do not like this place, Michael.”

“Neither do I.”

Meryem lowered herself down, stepping into my hands.
 

“Now push it back into its frame.”
 

She shoved the trapdoor back into position where I hoped it would hold in place for our pursuers. Then I let Meryem down. The guards’ footsteps were muted above, but I could hear that they were getting closer. There were even more cobwebs than there had been in the passage above. And there were wooden torches on the walls. I grabbed one from an iron sconce and lit it with the disposable lighter I’d purchased. It must have had some kind of kerosene on it because it ignited immediately, the flame casting its warm glow down the sloping corridor. We continued forward through the cobwebs. We had walked several yards before Meryem spoke again.

“Michael?” Meryem said from behind me.

“Yeah?”

“Give me your torch.”

I turned back to see Meryem standing absolutely still, her face buried in a cobweb, five or six leggy arachnids descending toward her. I handed her the torch. Meryem slowly pulled her head back and raised the torch, burning the web, spiders singing in the flame.
 

“I thought you were afraid of spiders,” I said.

“I said that I did not like them. There is a difference.”

The spiders cringed away, their roasting carapaces smelling like burning hair. Meryem handed back the torch and we continued down the corridor. I was optimistic because the dank air felt less stale, and that meant we might be getting somewhere, if only to a larger space. We continued for several minutes, the corridor sloping down in a reasonably straight line. I could no longer hear our pursuers. In fact, I heard nothing but the flicker of the torch’s flame as the ever-cooler air blew past it. Then I heard a plop.

It sounded like a stone falling in water, echoing up through the corridor like a drum. But I couldn’t tell from where the stone had fallen. The path had narrowed into the steep staircase that we now descended. I dragged a free hand along the stone walls as I went down, damp lime dust coating my fingers in a paste. I was slow and methodical because I didn’t know what was down there. But it wasn't long before I heard another watery plop, this one bigger than the last. Then, there was an enormous cracking groan and the five or six stairs that I could see in front of me fell away, crashing into the darkness.

Chapter 47

I
WATCHED
THE
stairs fall away in front of me, seemingly in slow motion, even as I slammed either palm against the corridor walls to prop myself up. I still had the torch jammed against the wall with one hand which made it pretty clear that the stone step I was standing on wouldn’t last long. It was now obvious that the narrow corridor opened beneath my feet into a wide, cavernous space. I watched as the fracture in the wall beside me widened until I felt the stair I was standing on move. It was solid rock, but I could feel it slipping out from beneath me, even as I lifted my weight away.

“Hang on to the wall!”

I glanced back as Meryem took hold of the walls behind me, pressing outward on the corridor with her palms and fingers. The corridor was narrow enough that she could hang on, but in no way was our situation looking good. The stone walls groaned as the fracture widened, the stairs below us gradually separating from the walls until they crumbled away entirely.

But it didn’t end there. With nothing to rest on, the stairs above us kept falling, breaking away from the walls of the corridor. They plummeted behind us, dust billowing everywhere. A long moment of silence was followed by a series of huge splashes. Then I began to slip down the walls of the corridor.
 

I pushed my hands out harder, arresting my descent. I hadn’t slipped more than a few feet, and when I was finally stable, I could see that I was hanging above some kind of underground cistern, probably another old Roman ruin. I couldn’t see how big the cistern was, not from the light thrown by the torch, but from the moment I opened my mouth, I knew it was huge.

“Meryem,” I said, my words echoing across the cavernous space, “Are you OK?”

“Very good,” she replied.

Which was a real overstatement. The word “good” continued to echo through the cistern while I appraised our situation. We were hanging above the water, but I had no idea how high, because I couldn’t see that far down. As far as I could tell, the stairs had crumbled away entirely. Maybe their support structures had rotted away over time, I didn’t know, but they weren’t there anymore. The first thing I needed to do was obvious. I let go of the torch.

I counted about two seconds as it tumbled end over end, before fizzling out in the black water below. Now only Meryem’s light stick cast its pale glow from above. The torch’s two-second free fall told me that we were about sixty feet above the water. I wasn’t able to see the stairs down there, but the torch had lit a large Doric column directly ahead of us as it fell. The column was too far away to get to, however, so for better or worse, we had no way down and no way back. I could already feel the walls of the corridor crumbling under my hands. I suspected the structure had been compromised and I seriously doubted that it would continue to support our weight. The muscles in my arms burned, a bead of salty sweat running into my eye.

“We go back,” Meryem said.

“The walls won’t hold us,” I replied.

“We do not know what is in the water.”

“Stairs,” I said.

“So you would like to jump on the fallen stairs?”

“No,” I said. “I’d like to jump on a marshmallow. But we’re not in a candy store and if there’s enough water for the stairs to disappear, there’s enough water for us too.”

“Are you certain?” Meryem asked.

“Not even close,” I replied. “Can you see me?”

“Yes.”

“Then follow me.”

I jumped. Feet first and as far to the left of where I imagined the stairs had fallen as possible. Sixty feet or so wasn’t an impossible distance. Cliff divers did it all the time. They usually, however, knew what they were diving into and I didn’t, so I needed to be as cautious as possible. I pointed my toes and clenched my legs tightly together, crossing my arms in front of my torso. The idea was to enter the water like a knife and to extend your arms as soon as you went underwater to arrest your descent.

The idea worked. Like the torch, I was airborne for a little more than two seconds. I landed hard, toes first, and as soon as I went under, I extended my arms to slow my fall. My toes ultimately touched the hard bottom, but barely. I soon broke back through to the surface. I flicked on my light stick and Meryem took it as a signal to go. She jumped, heading straight down for me, her arms crossed and her legs clenched. I was just able to get out of the way as she splashed down. A moment later, Meryem bobbed to the surface, inhaling deeply.

“You are lucky I did not die, Michael.”

“Why?”

“Because I would have killed you.”

I laughed.

“What now?” she said.