The Bone Chamber

your own. The narrow tunnels we came down through? Just about killed me to do it. And back in the columbarium? In that tunnel underneath the steps? Trust me. I was not doing well.”

“Great. I don’t like the dark, and you don’t like enclosed spaces. You know what that means? We’re up shit creek.”

He couldn’t help but smile.

“You think we can recover that ladder?”

“I’d rather not have my head blown off, trying to find the damned thing.”

“You think they’re up there?”

“Who knows.”

“I think they think we’re toast, so why bother.”

“Maybe we are,” he said.

“I’m not ready to die…Wasn’t Xavier talking about how soft tufo is? Maybe we can dig our way out. Assuming you can handle climbing through some skinny tunnel.”

“I really, really don’t like enclosed spaces.”

“Now you’re starting to sound like me.” Sydney switched on her light.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for a shovel. Or maybe something we can toss up, try to hook that ladder.” She reached for her pack, then stood, slowly. “Uh, Griffin? You might want to take a look at this.”

He turned. Saw what she saw. What they hadn’t had time to see when they were being shot at. The rock behind them wasn’t the solid mass of tufo it appeared to be. In fact, had Sydney not moved to the side, shone her light just so in looking for the shovel, they might never have noticed the outcropping that hid the tunnel behind it. “You think that arrow you saw in the cavern above was pointing to this?”

“Xavier said he looked down here. There was nothing,” she said. “But if he continued down that ladder past this ledge into the cistern, he could very well have missed this. The ledge isn’t very big, and from where the ladder was situated, you’d never see this.”

“Beats trying to dig our way out.” Griffin scooped up his pack, and followed her between the outcropping and the tunnel hidden in the V of it. “One problem I see.”

“What’s that?”

“It barely looks big enough to fit through.”

“Yeah, well unless you have a better idea…”

He wasn’t kidding about the tight spaces. He hated them. But he’d trained himself over the years to get past the absurd fear that he’d get stuck. He would have never made the ATLAS team otherwise. And hell if he was going to let Sydney show him up. “After you.”

“By all means. Brawn before beauty.”

He hesitated, took a deep breath, then entered. Though tall enough, it was narrow, so narrow in places that Griffin’s shoulders hit the walls, and he had to turn to his side to pass through. The entire passageway was much rougher than the tunnels off the cavern above, as though this particular area had been excavated more hastily, and perhaps, judging from the outcropping that hid it, on the sly to keep it from being discovered. At one point, they had to snake through on their bellies, and he concentrated on his breathing, the better to keep his mind off the confining passageway. “Hard to imagine anyone going to this much trouble for a burial chamber.”

“If we get out of here,” Sydney said from behind him, “I never want to be in another fifty-degree underground chamber again.”

“I’ll second that.” After several more feet, the floor in front of him dropped sharply into a wide cavern that looked like a massive honeycomb of stalactites and stalagmites.

He crawled out, slid down a few feet to the cavern floor. Sydney did the same.

“Amazing,” she said. “I thought water seepage made the columns, but these look too uniform, like they’re all carved.”

She was about to take a step forward when he reached out, stopped her. “Don’t move.”

“What’s wrong?”

He pointed between the columns into the interior, his headlamp sweeping across strangely shaped mounds. It took several moments for his sight to adjust, to see what was beneath the tufo dust that covered everything. The realization of what he was seeing hit him. Urns and chests, each strategically placed around the center columns. “Hell,” he said, not daring to let go of Sydney’s arm.

“But that means the map has to be here.”

“Yeah? And we never discovered the second key. So if it is all true…”

One false step and they were dead.

34

Francesca tried to catch her breath, leaning against the rough wall of the tunnel, while Xavier and Alfredo felt around with their hands. The passageway they’d taken led up, and they’d run the entire way.

“What exactly are you looking for?” she asked, her voice low.

“I just don’t understand it,” Xavier said.

“Understand what?” she replied, not liking the worry in his voice. She had enough to worry about right now, like what had happened to Sydney and Griffin. Were they still alive? Bleeding and injured down in the cavern? The two agents had sacrificed their own safety so the three of them could get away. But how the hell were they going to get help to them if they couldn’t avoid being shot by the men who were chasing them?

“There should be a sign,” Xavier said. “A skull and crossbones that tells me this is the right passageway, just like the one in the tunnel below that led us up here.”

“You mean this might not be the right way?”

Alfredo slammed his hand against the stone wall. “It’s certainly looking that way.”

“Calm down,” Xavier said. “Maybe the signs change. Maybe it’s not supposed to be a skull and crossbones. Maybe that’s one of the things we’re supposed to learn.”

“For God’s sake,” Francesca said. “This is not the time to make that discovery. We should have known this before we even set out.”

“Yeah?” Xavier whispered harshly. “And when was that? Between the five minutes I’d learned you wanted to meet me and the announcement that Alessandra was murdered? You’ve had a hell of a lot longer to look at the flash drive she sent, so get off my case.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “What can I do to help?”

“Not a lot. By all calculations, this should lead to the passageway that di Sangro plotted out.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure where it’s not, and it’s not here.”

“Actually,” Alfredo said, “if I had to guess, this passageway leads right back to the basilica. We’ve gone in one big giant circle.”

“I wonder if that’s what Sydney saw down in the main cavern.”

Xavier stopped pressing on the wall. “What are you talking about?”

“Right before those men shot at us, she called Griffin over. I think she realized something was off down there.”

“Well,” Alfredo said. “Whatever it was, we have to be grateful, or more than likely we’d all be dead,” he said, as he and Xavier continued to push on the rock wall with their gloved hands. “We’d have been sitting ducks if those men had followed us up here right away. All we can do now is hope that your agent friends were able to fight them off and discovered the right passage, and we can get the hell out of here before those guys find us.”

A scuffling sound echoing up from the passage below sent her heart racing. “They’re getting closer.”

“Look there!” Xavier said, pointing his flashlight beam toward a crevice in the wall, narrow at the base but widening as it rose. The light bounced off the tunnel walls into a ceiling that seemed to disappear into a deep blackness. “We’ll make them think we’re gone.”