The Shroud Key (25 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The tomb explodes in gunfire and bright, instantaneous gunpowder flashes.

I take out the flashlight, drop onto my right side, pour all nine rounds into Mustached Man and his bandits. The show only takes a few seconds from start to finish. When it’s over, I shine the Maglite behind me. I see that the two guards are dead, what’s left of their heads spread all over the stone floor like raspberry jam.

Sameh in still lying on the floor, his baseball cap having fallen off.

Andre is lying beside him.

I call out to them. But no one makes a move or a sound.

Lifting myself onto my knees, I shoot a look at Mustached Man and the bandits. He is lying on his back, his mouth and eyes wide open. He’s more dead than the stone that surrounds him. As I attempt to stand, I see movement coming from one of his bandits. I see his AK being raised up until I’m staring into all eternity.

The shot rings out.

I take a quick step back. I don’t know if I’ve been hit or not.

But then I see the bandit’s head drop down onto the floor. It sounds like a melon tossed against the stone. I turn toward the crypt and see Anya standing inside it. She’s got her pistol gripped in both her hands, her arms still extended and aimed for the now dead bandit, a slight trickle of smoke rising from out of the barrel.

“You’re pretty good with that thing,” I say, my voice echoing inside the hollow stone chamber.

My words break her out of her spell.

“Andre!” she shouts.

Her ex-husband is gathering himself up off the floor. Slowly. The look on his face is not pain, but disgust. Sickness for the grisly task he had no choice but to perform.

“I am a scientist,” he says, tossing the pistol. “Not a killer.”

“It’s over now,” I say as if offering a condolence. Then, “Sameh. Are you okay?”

He’s still lying on his side, his back to me, his bare head pointing to the chamber entrance.

“Sameh,” I repeat going to him, dropping down onto my knees, rolling him over.

That’s when I see the single hole in his forehead, the bullet having exited out the top of his head. A wound that killed him instantly.

I feel my heart go south, as if it’s suddenly turned to limestone.

“My friend,” I exhale, feeling the tears fill my eyes.

“What do you want to do?” Andre whispers. “There will be more guards coming for us.”

I take a moment to breathe. To listen to my aching heart. To say goodbye to Sameh. But time to grieve is not time we can afford. My mind swims with memories of nighttime ambushes in both the sands of Iraq and the rocky valleys of Afghanistan, and the gurgling sounds my friends made just before they died from bullets to the neck or face. You want to lay down your weapon, curl up, and weep on the spot. But you can’t. You reach out, close their eyelids, say a silent but oh so brief prayer that you hope will be heard by God if he exists. Then you slap a new clip into your M4, cover your tear-filled eyes with night vision goggles, lift yourself up from off the ground and resume the fight. Life is fleeting in times of war. Death is even more so.

I stand, and change out the clip on my gun.

My eyes on Andre and Anya, I say, “The mortal remains of the Lord is resting somewhere inside this pyramid. We must do what we came here to do.”

Andre raises a smile that is anything but happy. But Anya does something different. She comes to me, gently kisses me on the cheek.

“I was wrong,” she says. “You do care about us. You saved our lives.”

“You saved mine. Twice. Makes us more than even.”

She kisses me again, then turns, makes her way back over to the empty sarcophagus.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Before we begin our search down under, I make my way back to the pyramid’s entry, head back out to the Land Cruiser. Opening the tail gate, I locate the RPG launcher and slide in a round. From there I carry the weapon, plus a roll of duct tape and some monofilament fishing line with me back inside the small entry. Positioning the RPG up against the wall and against the underside of the exposed metal electrical conduit, I proceed to duct tape the RPG to the metal tubing.

When that’s done, I tie more of the filament line to the trigger mechanism, run it around the trigger guard and all the way to the steel-barred gate. Closing the gate and padlocking it, I then make the filament line taut and tie it off onto the gate’s middle bar. I know that it’s only matter of minutes until a new team of guards make their way back up here. When they do, they are in for quite the surprise.

Turning and crouching, I make my way back down into the chamber and re-join the others. Andre and Anya are already scouring the sarcophagus for any secrets it might reveal, using their Maglites to illuminate their work.

“How many times over the centuries has this tomb been examined and re-examined?” I say, adding my own beam of Maglite to the effort.

“Countless times,” Andre says. He’s kneeling inside the sarcophagus, literally feeling the smooth, carved, stone interior with his fingertips. “But other than the team assembled by the Vatican back in 1978, it’s quite possible I am the first man or woman to be examining it for a secret door or opening. In some ways, that makes this the first time Mankaure’s eternal resting place has ever truly been researched.”

“Exactly what are you looking for, Andre?” Anya asks.

“A small patch or area that is inconsistent with the others. It might be a rough patch of stone, or the tiniest of protrusions or indentations that, if you weren’t looking for it, you might never know was there.”

“It’s all so smooth,” I say.

“That’s the deceiving part,” Andre says, slowly moving his fingertips over the rock. “You wouldn’t think to look for anything here other than what it appears to be. A sarcophagus carved in granite and that’s all.”

Anya and I stand in silence while we watch him work.

Until his fingers suddenly stop.

“That’s it,” he says. “That has got to be it.”

“What is it?” Anya says, pointing her light to a spot in which his index finger has stopped moving.

I feel my heartbeat pick up. I might be a writer now, but the sandhog in me has never gone away.

“This is a trigger for a counterweight,” Andre says. Then, turning his head to me over his shoulder. “Chase, would you happen to have a coin?”

I dig into my pocket, pull out a single Egyptian pound, hand it to Andre. He takes the coin and gently slips it into a slot that I would never have located with my naked eye. Turing the coin counter-clock-wise, he leans back.

“Get back everyone. I’m not sure what’s going to happen. Watch for something to drop from the ceiling or the walls. A weight of some kind or even a heavy block.”

I hear a distinct click that echoes inside the chamber. Quickly Andre takes to his feet, jumps out of the tomb. Together, the three of us eye the bottom of the tomb as it begins to tremble. The trembling is accompanied by a rock grinding on rock sound as the bottom of the tomb begins to slowly drop down revealing an open space beneath it. At the same time, behind us, a small portion of the chamber’s ceiling opens up. It begins to rain sand and gravel down onto the floor. The counterweight is revealed.

“My God,” Anya states, her wide eyes glued to the moving rock.

“Exactly,” I say.

The entire right side of the tomb’s bottom slab then drops and stops.

“Look,” Andre announces. “It’s a ramp.”

“For climbing down inside,” I add, stating the obvious.

I shine the light into the newly formed opening. It’s a tunnel not unlike the ones we’ve already descended into the tomb, only narrower. Tighter. Far shorter, too.

“Who’s going first?” Anya asks.

“I’ll do it,” Andre says.

I take hold of his arm.

“Not a chance, Professor,” I say. “There’s some kind of booby trap waiting for us down there, better that I deal with it. You’re the scientist. I’m the hired muscle.”

“You put it that way, Chase old man,” he smiles. “Be my guest.”

“Easy, Renaissance Man,” Anya interjects. “Bravery will get you good and killed.”

“So will stupidity,” I say.

Setting my posterior onto the sarcophagus wall, I swing my booted feet over the side and set them down onto the angled stone.

“Watch my back,” I say.

Pointing the Maglite into the ancient unknown, I enter into the tunnel.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Because of the angle and the smooth flatness of the stone, I am forced to descend the ten foot long ramp and the cramped, twenty-plus feet of descending tunnel it accesses from down on my ass until I come to a stone floor. That’s when I turn and look back up at two faces looking down upon me.

“Anya,” I say. “Send down a rope, and the hammer drill.”

She does it, sliding both items down the ramp.

Forced to crawl back up the tunnel, I take hold of the cordless hammer drill with one hand, grab hold of the rope with the other. Because this half ton of perfectly engineered stone ramp operates like a well-balanced see-saw, I can easily move it up and down with only my pinky finger if I so choose. It means that if the guards invade the tomb, I can easily seal the entry back up.

The equipment in hand, I once more make my way back down the tunnel and prepare myself for entering into the unknown chamber. But first things first. The place is pitch dark. Setting the tools down, I pull the Maglite from my pant waist, shine the bright light on the chamber’s interior, careful to look for anything that might cause my immediate injury and/or death.

I find it right away.

Shining the light down at me feet, I can see that the area of stone I am walking on can’t be more than three feet wide. If I were to take another step, I would drop immediately into a pit. I shine the light into the pit, poke my head over the edge. I can’t see bottom so much as something that appears to be in motion and at the same time reflects the light. Like an underground stream or river. Like I’ve already mentioned, I’ve heard legends of the pyramids being constructed over underground aquifers, but I’ve never actually seen evidence of them. Until now. It also explains how the 1978 Vatican team might have gained access to the secret crypt. Not through the Mankaure sarcophagus’s secret trap door, in which they would have upset the counter-weight, but instead by having entered through the pit that accesses the underground river. All that would have been required of them was to scale the pit’s stone walls like an expert rock climber scaling a cliff.

As far as I can tell, the room is perfectly circular; almost tube-like. There’s a solid stone ceiling that’s maybe ten feet overhead. The walls are also solid, other than a small, square-shaped opening located directly across the pit from me. I can only assume this is the narrow shaft designed thousands of years ago to capture the sun as it rises during the dawn. If that’s the case, there must be a place located on the circular wall directly opposite it which will accept the ancient mirror I presently have stored in my trouser pocket along with the cross I stole off the Vatican soldier back in Florence. Shining the light on the portion of wall to my left, I locate the precise section of indented wall. Pulling the mirror from my pocket, I fit one piece into the space, and then set the second broken piece into the space beside it. It fits together like two missing puzzle pieces, and as exactly and tightly as the blocks in the Third Pyramid’s limestone walls.