The Mask of Atreus (43 page)

A. J. Hartley

would kill her. They would torture her till she told them that she had not in fact told the Feds, and then they would kill her, and sprinkle her blood in some quasi-primitive funerary rites for the goose-stepping butcher of millions. It was almost funny. Almost.

But she wasn't done quite yet, and as she had been mulling over her "relationship" with Calvin, she had been teasing the slim nail file out of her back pocket with the tips of her fingers. Now she guided its tip into the silver duct tape that bound her wrists and pushed until she felt it puncture. Gripping the metal tightly she sliced up and down, feeling the webbing of the tape tear, till she could slough it off, and toss it into the shadows.

She stood up and moved to the glass case, feeling with her fingertips for a latch. She found two, one at each end, unsnapped them, and raised the lid. The body smelled of nothing except a faint whiff of formaldehyde perhaps, though she might have imagined that. She reached over, took hold of the mask in both hands, and lifted it free.

The face beneath was wizened but recognizably male. There was a small, bristly mustache and a lock of thin black hair over the forehead, straying across what looked to be a bullet hole. The eyes were closed and sunken.
How many deaths had this man caused? How many more
might these half-rotten bones still cause?

She looked for a weapon, a loose rock with which she could smash the thing to pieces: her final act of defiance.
Or you could try something else.

She considered the idea, pacing around the casket. There was nothing else to be done. She may as well try. It took her perhaps fifteen minutes. When she was done, she pulled the one electric cable she could see until she tore it out of the wall and, without flash or sound, the lights died, and she was left in darkness. She sat against the chill stone, listening to the muffled rumble of thunder, her eyes trying--

without success--to make shapes out of the blackness. She had been there no more than a few minutes when she heard 365

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the locks snap back and the latch click. She got to her feet, snapping her hands behind her back as the doors swung open.

Maybe it's Cerniga.

But it was the White Rabbit, and Calvin was behind him.

"Bitch broke the lights," said the kid.

"Doesn't matter," said Calvin.

"I can't see what I'm doing," said the kid, his hard little eyes peering into the darkness.

Deborah thought they looked agitated, a little panicked, and was glad. They were worried that she would somehow lead the police or the Feds to them here.

"Change of plan," Calvin said, and he was quite calm again.

As the kid threw the blanket back over the top of the display case and started wheeling it out, Calvin aimed his pistol at Deborah's face. Then he smiled a small, brittle smile and said, "Good-bye Deborah."

CHAPTER 76

She didn't hesitate. The moment she saw the gun she took a step backward, then another. He was still well lit, but she could see from the look of irritation on his face that he had lost her in the shadows. He hesitated, the gun moving fractionally from side to side, and she took two more silent steps and dropped quietly to the floor, making herself as small as possible. Her eyes still on the light space beyond the doors where Calvin stood immobile, she slipped out of one shoe and tossed it gently. It landed softly three yards away, and the sound was just enough to give Calvin something to aim at. He fired once, then twice more, the gun booming in the confined space. Deborah heard the ricochet, and she clenched smaller still, her breath sucked in tight, as the bullets zipped around the stone chamber.

"Come on," said the kid outside, clearly impatient now.

"We've gotta move."

Deborah looked up, moving as minimally as possible, in case Calvin's eyes had grown used to the darkness. He was still peering in, the gun raised. He didn't know if he'd hit her or not.

"Did you get her?" said the White Rabbit, looking up from the box he was shoving back up the ramp. He sounded jumpy.

"I need a hand with this. There isn't time--"

"Right," said Calvin. "I think so."

"You
think
so? Get in there and make sure."

"So she can slip past me in the dark like she got past you in Mycenae?" said Calvin, finally lowering the gun. He looked at the kid now, and Deborah could tell from the rigidity of his body that he didn't like being told what to do. "It doesn't matter," he said. "She's dead anyway."

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Not yet, you son of a bitch.

He backed steadily out, and then the heavy doors were closing, latching and locking. The tholos was plunged into total darkness.

Deborah exhaled and wondered if, as the bullets had been flashing from stone to stone, she had been praying.
A little, perhaps, yeah. Part of you still is . . .
So now what? It felt like they weren't coming back--which seemed like good news--but they seemed confident that she was no longer a danger to them, and that was odd. They didn't want a hostage and didn't want to drag her along, but could they think she would merely starve to death, locked in this chamber with only a corpse for company?

"She's dead anyway," Calvin had said.

Bravado, or did he really believe it?

The thought alarmed her. How long before Tonya found the perfume? That had been the code she had left on her answering machine. If her vague, half suspicions about Calvin were right, she would leave a sign which Tonya would stumble on during her cleaning. It was to be something feminine which Deborah wouldn't usually use. Something "girly," as Tonya had put it: a slash of lipstick across a mirror, a carefully placed earring, a puddle of Chanel No. 19 that any woman would detect the moment she stepped into the building. These were signs of her discovery . . .
And of another failed effort to be . . .

What? Female? Nonsense. She needed no doting man to prove her femininity.

So you keep saying.

And will continue to do so.

Any loss, any pang of regret that there would be no further flirtation with Calvin Bowers was dwarfed, was rendered laughably insignificant, by the look in his eyes when he had called her--so carefully, with such exquisite deliberation--

Jew
.

Goddamn him straight to hell.

She had known she had been right, and if any part of her 368

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wished she hadn't found out, she should find where it lived and cut it out--even from her heart--because it was preposterously sentimental, stupid, and self-destructive. Cut it out, and let it burn with him.

Let it burn . . .

As half her mother's family had been burned at Auschwitz by the likes of Calvin Bowers, by the ragged huddle of bones that Atreus was so keen to preserve.

Let it burn.

It was some time before she realized that the chamber didn't feel as cold as it had done, longer still before she realized the precise way they had intended to accelerate her death. She was inching her way hopelessly around the darkened chamber, feeling around the walls for any sign of looseness in the masonry, when it struck her that the stones were warm.
Let it burn.

You're imagining it.

But it was quite plain, and the longer she went, the clearer it was that the stones were getting hotter by the second. After another minute or so, she was fairly sure she could smell smoke. She fumbled her way round to the doors and listened. She heard a distant crash and a rush of something dreadful and familiar, something very like the hungry surge of spreading fire.

"She's dead anyway."

Oh, God.

The house was ablaze, and the stone tomb was nothing more than a great oven. Long before the solid cedar doors burned through, long before the fire department got the inferno under control, she would be dead, dehydrated and baked like a mummy interred in the baking fires of the Sahara sand. And for a moment, for one moment that looked in the pitch-blackness of the tomb very like despair--not depression or hopelessness but despair in its true, soul-sucking, annihilating horror--the phrase came back and lingered . . .
Let it burn.

CHAPTER 77

No, she thought. She would not give up. Not yet. She pounded on the door and shouted for help till the strain on her throat made her retch. The air was drying fast, and she could taste the smoke she couldn't see. She inched around the chamber walls, clawing again, feeling the mounting panic as the air grew thick and acrid. She forced herself to stare into the blackness, in case the flames outside would reveal a crack in the masonry, but she knew that the tomb had been hollowed out of the ground itself; if she were able to move the rocks at the back, she would find only the impervious Georgia clay stacked dense and thick.
Think!

She considered trying to climb, but the bell jar shape of the tholos made that impossible, and even if she could get up to the top, there was no way out. The smoke would be thicker up there anyway, the air hotter, doubly so if--as seemed likely--the entire structure above it was ablaze.
Quite the hellish little clambake,
she thought.
The flames
don't need to get in for you to cook nicely.
Tonya wouldn't detect the perfume till morning, and even if she did, the police wouldn't know where to go.
Think.

There was nothing
to
think. She couldn't get out and couldn't sound an alarm. The fire department would come eventually when some neighbor spotted the blaze--assuming there even
were
neighbors--but by then it would be too late. The stones closest to the door were the hottest, and she instinctively backed away from them. That made sense: The fire was burning in the house and basement, but the rear of 370

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the tholos backed into dirt and rock. In this great oven, of course, it made little difference. She might take a little longer to die back here, but the difference would be measured in minutes only.

And then something struck her.

"It's an exact replica of the original," Calvin had said.
OK. What do we know about the original that might help?

Nothing. There's nothing to know. It's a stone chamber
with wooden doors that will take longer to burn than you will
to roast.

No. There's something else.

She ran forward toward the door and spread herself against the warm stones to the left of the great doorway.
This is crazy. It's cooler back there.

She began to feel for handholds in the rock.

You can't climb. It's concave.

"The first ten feet are vertical. I just have to get a little way up."

She found a niche with her fingers and began to pull. Slowly, first one foot then the other left the dirt floor and scrabbled for a purchase on the rim of one of the Cyclopean blocks. Her fingers ached as she searched the stone with her toes. Nothing.

She dropped, coughing, to the dirt.

It can't be done.

She moved to the other side of the door, conscious to avoid the huddled body against the wall.

Again she reached up, probed with her fingers and dragged herself up. This time her feet found a ledge, and she was able to push up another two feet, high enough to reach the lintel above the door. Half reaching, half falling, she grabbed at the square edge and let her body swing sideways with a cry. For a second she hung by one hand, flailing, then she reached up and made a grab with her other. She knew as she did it that if she couldn't pull herself up with this lunging stab of her arm, she would fall.

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She caught it, felt the sharp edge biting into her palm like relief, and pulled herself up.

The lintel was a foot and a half wide, just enough for her to crouch against the great triangular slab. She put her hand close to it, feeling its heat, hardly daring to hope.

"You said it was an exact replica, you son of a bitch," she muttered. "Now let's see."

She rose slowly to a standing position, hugging the stone blocks on either side of the great carved triangle, the angle of the dome pressing her to lean backward into black space. Then she drew back one foot as far as she dared, poised to kick forward at the hot stone panel, carved on the outside with its imperial lions.

"A replica," she spat. "One-third size."

Which means that this stone slab should be no more than
an inch thick, the originals being designed to spare excessive
weight on the lintel . . .

Well. Let's see.

She kicked hard.

Nothing but a jarring of the bones in her leg that made her shout out, so that her concentration wavered, and she almost fell back into the tomb.

She kicked again, harder, shouting out as she made contact. A pause, then again, harder still, throwing her whole weight into the kick, knowing it might shatter her leg. It didn't, and this time the jarring, unyielding rock seemed to give fractionally. She kicked again and heard the tiniest crack. Deborah grinned wolfishly.

Two more kicks, and she heard splinters of stone falling. A third, and she could see light: red, flickering, angry light, admittedly, but light all the same.

She returned to a squat on the lintel and began pushing and hammering with the heels of her hands. Another crack appeared, amber in the dark, like lava pouring down a volcano crater at night, and then a slab the size of her head 372

A. J. Hartley

popped out. Exhilarated, she put her shoulder to it, swung out and then back with a heavy thud against the hot stone. It gave a little, the panel grating like a broken molar as she tested it. She repeated the action again and again, till the triangle split raggedly and the top two-thirds yawned wide.

Deborah pushed it free and heard it fall below, shattering. She could just about get through the hole now, she thought, though the sight of the inferno raging on the other side gave her pause. It looked like the entire timber framing on the underside of the house was ablaze. Eventually, it would collapse, and whether or not it brought the tholos tomb crashing down with it was a moot point. If she didn't get out now, she wouldn't get out at all. She took one last look into the burial chamber, lit now by the dancing firelight without, and clambered out onto the external lintel. The heat on her skin was tremendous. She squatted, turned to face the building, and gently lowered herself as far as she could before dropping to her feet and rolling, to take the shock out of her knees and ankles.