"Well?" John Bartholomew said.
"Murphy is still working with Isis--Dr. McDonald?"
Bartholomew nodded. "They were last seen on their way to Riyadh."
"The Desert Kingdom. Of course, of course. Well, if she's her father's daughter, she should have no trouble deciphering Dakkuri's little puzzle. Perhaps Murphy even has the second piece in his hands as we speak," Merton chuckled.
General Li turned his head a fraction toward Merton. "Then, should we not be taking it out of his hands, as we speak?"
Merton seemed unfazed by the general's tone. "No indeed. I think not. She must have time to translate the next part of the riddle. As you know, the second piece leads to the third, and the third leads ... well, I don't need to tell you what that leads to." The looks of ravenous expectation around the table confirmed he didn't. "We must be patient. When Murphy has the last piece in his grasp"--he nodded in Talon's direction--"that is the time to strike. And perhaps then," he added with a leer, "Dr. McDonald and I might have an opportunity to reminisce a little."
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FIFTY-SEVEN
MURPHY GRIPPED THE iron ring in both hands, braced himself against the wall of the narrow alley, and heaved. He felt the beads of sweat begin to trickle down his forehead as his arms started to shake with the effort, but the stone slab remained firmly in place, exactly where it had been for what he estimated to be several centuries.
"You're sure this is our best way in?" he grunted.
"Definitely. This will take us directly into the main sewer."
"Assuming it still exists."
"Have a little faith, Murphy. Come on, are you sure you're really trying your absolute hardest?"
Out of the corner of his eye Murphy watched her as she leaned beside him in the moonlight, mouth pursed in concentration. If a bullwhip had been handy, he had no doubt she'd have used it on him. He was about to tell her to try lending a
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hand when he felt the great slab shift fractionally. He took a deep breath without relaxing his grip and gritted his teeth. The stone slab started to loosen, and he finally managed to drag it aside. Falling to his knees, he peered into the dark, airless hole.
"Give me the flashlight."
She handed it over and he leaned farther in.
"What can you see?"
The darkness sucked the beam greedily into the depths.
"Nothing much. The brickwork seems pretty much intact near the top, but farther down...I don't know. I guess there's only one way to find out."
She was beginning to look a little nervous now. "How do we...?"
"When in doubt, just jump right in. That's my philosophy."
Her enthusiasm was definitely fading. "You can't be serious. It could be a hundred feet to the bottom."
He swung his legs into the hole and gripped the sides. "I seem to recall this was your idea. Come on." He saw the look of panic on her face and relented. "Okay, they built little handholds into the sides. Just take it slow and follow me."
It wasn't quite a hundred feet, and, remarkably, the ceramic rungs were mostly intact. Apart from the few times Isis lost her footing and a boot came thudding into Murphy's shoulder, they descended without incident. They landed at a junction of four tunnels, and Murphy gave Isis a moment to regain her composure.
"So, where to now?"
Her flashlight beam made her pale face float in the darkness like an apparition as she flipped through the pages of de
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Tocqueville. "Well, the likeliest spot is at the source of the original well. That's what Dakkuri would have been talking about."
Murphy grabbed a handful of dust and let it trickle through his fingers. "How do we find that? It's dry as a bone down here."
Her frown made her look even more ghostly. "We just need to figure out the direction of flow, then work backward."
Murphy crouched down and played the beam over the floor. "Okay, when the water finally dried up, it should have left some striations in the mud, and with a little luck they could have been preserved, like fossils." He shuffled forward a few steps and focused the beam on what looked like a long, flat stone. "Here. Unless I'm very much mistaken, we need to go this way."
She followed him into the dark, guided by his flashlight as it swept from side to side along the walls. Inching slowly through the narrow brick passage, drawing the dead, centuries-old air into her lungs, she was beginning to remember why she had never wanted to be an archaeologist. The clean, modern hotel somewhere above their heads seemed a hundred miles and a thousand years away.
She bumped into Murphy's back. "Dead end," he said.
They retraced their steps to the junction and examined the floor for more traces of the water's passage. Murphy pointed down another tunnel.
"Are you sure?" Isis asked.
"I don't know about you, but this is my first time in a medieval sewer. To be honest, I'm just following my nose."
"Sounds like a plan," Isis said. "In a sewer, I mean."
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They started down the tunnel with less confidence now, hoping for a sign that would tell them they were on the right track. After several minutes of slow trudging, Murphy stopped. He pointed at the ground with his flashlight.
"What do you think that is?"
It didn't look like anything. Just a shadow. Then she gasped. "A footprint."
"Yeah, that's what I thought. And it looks new. I guess that means we're going the right way."
To Isis it didn't mean anything of the sort. It meant someone else was down there. Perhaps Omar had sent someone after them to get the rest of their money. She wanted desperately to retrace their steps as quickly as possible and get back to light and people and the twenty-first century. But she wasn't going to try it on her own. She gave her amulet a nervous tug, and hurried after Murphy's retreating back.
After a few minutes they saw another footprint. Then another. The footprints were coming in clusters now, blurring together, like the tracks of a herd of animals. She tugged Murphy's sleeve. "Should we really be following, do you think? There seem to be rather a lot of them."
"You got a better idea?"
"Apart from going back, you mean?"
Murphy turned to face her. "Look, this may be a wild-goose chase, but it's the only wild-goose chase in town right now. At least we know we're not heading down another blind alley. These tracks must go somewhere." He waved the flashlight in the direction they'd come, and as it passed across her face he saw raw fear etched on her elfin features. "Look, I'm not going to force you to carry on. Do you really want to go back?"
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A wave of relief went through her, followed by a curious hollow feeling, as if in that instant her life had suddenly become meaningless. She took a deep breath, then turned him around and gave him a gentle push forward. "No, no. I just felt a little light-headed for a moment. The dust, probably. I'm fine now."
He grunted, and they set off again. She kept the beam of her flashlight pointed straight ahead, not wanting to see any more traces of their invisible companions.
When they came to another junction, with tunnels branching off to the left and right, she kept her eyes closed and concentrated on keeping her breathing steady.
"It's going to get narrower," Murphy said over his shoulder. "You okay?"
"I'm not claustrophobic, you know," she said with as much indignation as she could summon. It was true, she'd never been frightened of confined spaces. Once, when Miss McTavish had locked her in a storage cupboard for a whole afternoon, she'd felt nothing but a blessed sense of relief to be out of the clutches of her schoolmates for a few hours and able to let her mind wander free among the gods and creatures of mythology who were already thronging her imagination.
But this was different. Not only were they in a catacomb of dark and increasingly airless tunnels, they were not alone. According to Omar, no one had been down here for generations. So whom did the footprints belong to? Her anxiety was heightened by Murphy's own
lack of concern. Clearly his philosophy really was simply to charge blindly forward, trusting some higher power would keep him from falling down a deep, dark hole. Not to mention her.
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She had steeled herself for the plunge into the next tunnel, but Murphy was still rooted to the spot. "Do you hear something?"
She cocked her head to one side. "Like what?"
"I don't know. Wind, maybe?"
She held a hand in front of her face and shook her head. "Not a breath. No, it sounds like ... water."
He nodded. "And the footprints go in the same direction. Look."
He set off down the left-hand tunnel, crouching so he didn't bump his head against the roof. Isis clung to his arm, no longer caring what he thought. As they went farther, the rushing sound got louder, until she was sure she could actually smell the water above the scent of dust and decay.
When they started to hear another sound, they stopped instinctively. This time they both knew what it was. It came in waves, louder, then fainter, then louder again. Isis put a trembling hand to her amulet and waited for Murphy to say something.
"Can you make out what language that is? It doesn't sound like Arabic."
She forced herself to listen. It had an odd singsong quality, a definite rhythm, as if they were chanting. "I... I don't know. There's a hint of Aramaic, perhaps. It could be my imagination. What are we going to do?"
We're going to be careful," Murphy said, pulling her forward.
As she stumbled after him, a crazy mix of thoughts swirled around in her head. Had she locked her filing cabinet, the one where she kept her private diary? Had she remembered to return
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her copy of Gilroy's commentary on the Epic of Gilgamesh to Professor Hitashi? Had she removed all the mousetraps Fiona had insisted on putting down in her office?
With a start she realized she wasn't expecting to return to Washington. She had convinced herself she was going to die. Well, if she had to go now, at least she wasn't leaving any family behind. A thought that led her to speculate on who would attend her funeral. Not many, she supposed. But of course they'd never find her body. So there wouldn't be a funeral. She would just be missing, forever. Like a lost soul...
Murphy was touching her on the shoulder and pointing up ahead. There was a distinct rushing sound like water moving swiftly over stone, and the chanting now sounded ominously close. And there was light, too, a ghostly flickering against the tunnel walls.
They inched forward, and Isis felt her toe connect with something hard. The floor of the tunnel was littered with bricks. She looked up and saw a ragged hole in the tunnel wall. Her legs carried her toward it, independent of her will. She no longer felt fear. Her mind seemed to have shut down, just a primitive core remaining--enough to keep her body moving. The last thought she had was that this was what it must feel like to be a zombie.
Murphy was shaking her, jolting her back into full consciousness. In the uncertain light, he was looking at her with a stern expression, a finger to his lips. She nodded and slowly turned her head to look through the hole in the tunnel wall. Her eyes seemed to have closed of their own accord, and she forced them open.
The skulls were the first thing she saw. There were seven of
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them arranged in a rough semicircle like Halloween pumpkins, eye sockets ablaze with an oily light that spilled greedily over the body arranged on the dirt floor. The body was stiff, but she was clearly a girl who could not have been older than ten. A ragged cotton blanket covered most of her body, and her narrow face looked waxy, but you could see hints of the beauty she would grow to be.
If she wasn't already dead, that is.
The three men were naked to the waist, swaying back and forth, propelled by the rhythmic chanting that filled the shadowy space. Isis gasped as she saw the long butcher's knife each clutched in his lap, and Murphy clapped a hand over her mouth.
She took a deep breath and he slowly took his hand away, then pointed beyond the skulls.
On the end of a pole stuck in the dirt was a thick S-shape of gleaming metal.
The middle section of the Brazen Serpent!
As she realized what it was, she felt herself being sucked down through the centuries into a world of primitive darkness. It was like being in Miss McTavish's cupboard, but this time with real gods and demons and no hope of ever being let out. A whimper rose in her throat and she barely managed to choke it off.
Then Murphy was pulling her back into the tunnel and she felt her whole body relax. They were going back. They were going to survive.
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FIFTY-EIGHT
MURPHY GRIPPED ISIS by the shoulders and tried to gauge her expression. In the gloom of the tunnel all he could see were her eyes, and they seemed to be pleading silently. "Can you do it?" he asked.
A whisper escaped her throat. Was that a yes? He gripped harder, almost shaking her, and she nodded. That would have to do. There was no time to go through it with her again. He crawled back to the hole in the wall and she watched as he waited for his moment, then slid into the flickering shadows.
Shuffling after him, she crouched at the entrance, a hand clamped to her mouth to stop herself from crying. She could hardly bear to watch him. But she couldn't tear her eyes away. If she lost sight of him she'd be truly alone. She gripped the flashlight as a drowning man might clutch a life preserver.
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Murphy chanced a glance back in her direction as he belly-crawled his way through the bricks and loose rocks on the other side of the tunnel wall. He could feel her eyes on him, but otherwise she was just another shadow blending into the dark.
He was confident the soft dust covering the floor would muffle his approach, but when his knee struck a brick and sent it skittering into the dark, his whole body tensed. He buried his face in the dirt, not daring to look up, hardly daring to breathe. But the chanting of the three executioners maintained its dirgelike rhythm. They seemed to be in some sort of trance, maybe high on something, but he knew at some point the chanting would stop and those vicious-looking knives would come into play.
He blamed himself for leaving his competition bow back at the hotel. Who knew he'd find himself interrupting a human sacrifice in a medieval sewer, but by now he should have learned to expect the unexpected. He flashed back to the initial phone call with Methusaleh. If he'd known where it would lead, would he have told the old man what he could do with his artifact, Daniel or no Daniel? The killings, the bombing at the church, Laura--it all seemed to have started somehow with that phone call. But he knew there was no point thinking about it. He was sure now that God had set him on a certain path and there was nothing he could do but follow it to the end.
Whatever the cost.
The image of the girl lying just moments from being a human sacrifice came back to him, his courage rising, and he wondered if Isis would be able to follow through. She'd
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seemed taut as a bowstring when he'd first met her. Now, having been catapulted out of her academic cocoon, he was afraid she was on the edge of a total emotional collapse.
He prayed her nerve would hold.
He started to move again, keeping as far away from the three swaying bodies as he could. Was it his imagination, or was the rushing sound getting louder? He didn't want to end up as a bonus sacrificial victim, but he didn't want to disappear into an underground stream either. If they turned their heads to the right, he was in their line of sight now. He couldn't rely on their drugged-up state to keep them oblivious of his presence much longer. He turned his wrist, and the luminous dial of his watch told him there was another minute to wait. Too long. He was suddenly convinced the three executioners would finish their prayers any second and then it would be too late.
Keep going, fellas. Just a few more verses . He concentrated on the haunting sound and felt his focus slipping. He willed the hands of his watch to move faster. Then, just as his head began to throb and his grip on the real world b
egan to loosen, he heard a clatter of dust and rocks and craned his neck to look behind him.
What he saw made his heart jam in his throat.
Framed in the hole in the tunnel wall where he had last seen Isis, a ghastly apparition now appeared, as if the heathen chanting had summoned up a demoness. Lit from below by the flashlight, her corpse-white face seemed to be emitting an unnatural glow of its own as it floated unsupported in the darkness.
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For a crazy moment be wasn't sure if it really was Isis, then reality took hold again and he sprang forward. As he'd hoped, the three men were now on their feet, gesturing toward Isis in horrified silence. They didn't seem to notice as he stumbled past them toward the pole and the glowing Serpent, but who knew how long they'd buy Isis's circus act? He bent down to grasp the shoulder of the unconscious girl.
She was not restrained in any way and she was as stiff as a stone angel. Let's hope she's not already playing that role , Murphy thought. If she was still alive, then they must have drugged her into this unconscious state, and it could be a mistake to try to bring her awake suddenly, but whatever the consequences, Murphy figured they would be better than being slaughtered by the Serpent worshipers.
After two firm shakes of her shoulders, the girl's eyes shot open and she started to scream at the sight of Murphy. He was counting on Isis keeping the men completely distracted, but to be certain be covered her mouth with one band while be put his other to his own to try to mime quiet . The girl's eyes were nearly popping out of her head with fear, with no sign of any drug aftereffects, but she managed to nod that she understood Murphy's gesture for silence.
He rose and turned toward the pole holding the Serpent's body. Its fiery glow in the reflection of the blazing torches was mesmerizing. He reached up and with trembling fingers began untying the hemp cords securing the bronze segment to the pole. Murphy held it in his hands and marveled at the weight of it, which seemed to perfectly match the feel of the tail.