Henriksen, Olivia, and Corelli followed the first half dozen mercenaries, ignoring Drake and Jada. Now that they had found the way into the emperor’s tomb, their former animosity was forgotten. Their full focus was on the yawning darkness below, and Drake understood why. As much as he wanted to find Sully, he had no problem letting some of the goon squad precede him. If the spooky ninja dudes were waiting, he was more than happy to let the hired guns take the first few hits.
They descended the stairs and found themselves in a long, sloping corridor. The rest of the mercenaries fell in behind Drake and Jada, though two of them hung back, staying to guard their exit. That made fourteen in Perkins’s squad and nineteen all together, counting Drake and Jada, Henriksen and Olivia, and Corelli. Nobody spoke as they moved along the corridor, listening for any sign of a potential attack coming from ahead and watching for hidden doorways.
The tunnel spiraled downward, taking them deeper, and then straightened out again and ran on for perhaps fifty yards before it ended in a vaulted chamber that caused them all to come to a halt. Two passages led away and farther downward from the chamber, and mercenaries were investigating both paths. But the rest of the group had focused elsewhere, and as flashlight beams illuminated the walls and ceiling, Drake stared in amazement.
“This isn’t man-made,” Henriksen said. “It’s a natural cave.”
Moss grew in thick patches on the walls. Stains on the solid rock showed the patterns where water had dripped down from above, and Drake shone his flashlight upward. He pressed himself against the wall alongside Olivia, who was doing the same thing.
“Do you see it?” she asked.
“A crevice,” he said.
Long, thick roots jutted from stone and earth and hung down, partially blocking the view, but Drake could see the glint of his light off jagged stone. Far above, where his beam could not reach, was a thin sliver of moonlight.
“Another one over here,” Garza called from the other side of the cave.
Corelli swore softly. “Olivia. Better have a look at this.”
Drake frowned and glanced at Henriksen, who had turned to look at Corelli. The bodyguard had his light trained on a blanket of moss, but there were hints of white among the green and brown.
“They’re flower buds,” Olivia said, a tinge of wonder in her voice.
“Not just buds,” Jada said, from a jagged alcove where the moss grew particularly thick. She shined her flashlight at a spot perhaps ten feet off the cave floor, where a trio of white flowers grew, dangling and half wilted.
“Those look familiar to you?” Drake asked.
Jada nodded. “Sure do.”
Henriksen came over to inspect them. “These aren’t white hellebore at all. They look similar-could be related-but the petals have a different shape.”
“And white hellebore can’t grow in moss with this little light,” Olivia added, coming up behind him.
Drake pushed against the wall and looked up, spotting another crevice. The moss was wet from the rain that ran down into the cave when it stormed. He pushed back and thrust his fingers into the moss, finding thick vines beneath it. He tugged them out to show the others.
“There you go,” Corelli said, as if to himself.
Perkins called for Henriksen, but Drake kept his eyes on the flowers. Cave hellebore, he thought, wondering if they had discovered a new species of flora.
“-no sign of diamond carvings or any other differentiating marks,” Perkins was saying.
Drake stiffened and turned. He stared at the two men and then at the two doors, and he realized something they obviously had figured out already. Two doors-two possible choices-this was the start of the fourth labyrinth.
“Jada,” he said. “Where’s the emperor’s tomb?”
Jada nodded slowly, but it was Olivia who answered.
“Maybe it was never here. Your professor friend in Oxford said they’d established it was here because they knew something was here. It made sense to assume it was the burial site-the underground palace.”
Corelli had gone over to the right-hand passage and begun to explore it, searching for markings the mercenary team already had established weren’t there. Drake liked the man less and less as the minutes ticked by. For a flunky, he seemed fairly presumptuous, almost as if he forgot from time to time that he was just an employee.
Henriksen glanced at Drake. “I have a theory.”
Drake nodded. “Let’s hear it.”
“It never made any sense to me that Daedalus would’ve marked the correct path through the Thera labyrinth.”
“He didn’t,” Jada said. “He marked the wrong path.”
“Granted,” Henriksen replied, blue eyes turned gray in the reflected illumination of so many flashlights. “But how long did it take us to figure that out? A man who would design such a puzzle would never offer so simple a solution. But what if those markings were added later, when it no longer mattered if intruders could find their way?”
“After the Thera eruption?” Drake asked. “Why bother?”
“No, it makes sense,” Jada said, and he could see it pained her to admit that Henriksen had a point. “If we’re going on the theory that there even was a golden hoard and that Talos-or someone-supervised the removal of Daedalus’s treasure from Thera, wouldn’t it go faster and much more smoothly if those moving the gold couldn’t get lost?”
Drake thought about it, then nodded reluctantly. “I guess. If they were really abandoning it.”
“Half of it had already collapsed,” Henriksen reminded him. “They wanted to move the gold to the fourth labyrinth, as Daedalus had done at least twice before.”
“It’s all about the gold with you, isn’t it?” Drake asked.
Henriksen smiled. “There are other treasures, but as far as motivations go, gold has its appeal.”
Drake knew he was supposed to hate the man, so he turned away before he let himself smile. Henriksen had a point. He had been motivated by gold plenty of times in his own life. This time, he had other interests: saving Sully’s life and getting vengeance for Jada’s father. The thought made the smile die on his lips.
“How do we choose a path?” Olivia asked. “I don’t think splitting up is a good idea.”
“Why not?” Jada asked. “There are plenty of us.”
Corelli snorted derisively. “Maybe because we’re not the only ones down here.”
Nobody acknowledged the comment. The mercenaries were already wary-they were paid to be-and Drake didn’t need reminding. He went over to the doorways into the two passages and studied them with his light. Runnels had been carved in the cave floor over time by rainwater from heavy storms searching for somewhere to drain. But in both of the doorways he saw that gutters had been cut into either side of the sloping passages. More of the runnels seemed to go to the left-hand passage, but that seemed like it must be a natural phenomenon. Still, the different levels of wear had him searching his mind. The water erosion triggered a thought.
Drake slipped off his pack and pulled out a sports bottle full of water. He uncapped it, went to the entrance of the left passage, and knelt to pour a few ounces across the threshold there. Jada had followed, giving him the benefit of her flashlight.
“What the hell are you doing?” Corelli asked.
“Thinking,” Drake replied. “Try it sometime.”
He went to the right-hand passage and repeated the process, nodding as he saw the water running into tiny cracks and pooling into depressions as it trickled down the slope into the tunnel.
“This way,” he said, standing and going back to stow the water and slip his pack back on.
“What was that?” Henriksen asked. “Are you Tonto now?”
“If they had so much gold then they had to mark the path for workers to carry it all out of the labyrinth on Thera, there was a hell of a lot of traffic going in and out of here at one point,” Drake explained. He pointed to the right-hand passage. “There’s a hell of a lot more wear on that side and hardly any erosion on the left. Not a lot of foot traffic that direction.”
Henriksen considered that but looked unsure.
