A marvel of engineering, the tunnel cut straight through the mountain for nearly four miles, linking the Aosta and Martigny valleys and offering a weather- and avalanche-proof route beneath the pass above.
“Another time,” Sam said as they drove past and continued up the SS27. It would add almost an hour to their drive and with no way of knowing how long it would take to follow the riddle’s last line, they erred on the side of caution.
After another thirty minutes on the switchbacking road they passed through a narrow canyon and pulled into the lake basin. Split by the imaginary Swiss-Italian border, the lake was a rough oval of blue-green water surrounded by towering rock walls. On the eastern shore—the Swiss side—sat the hospice and monastery; on the western shore—the Italian side—three buildings: a hotel-bistro, staff quarters, and a cigar-shaped Carabinieri barracks and checkpoint. High above Sam and Remi the sun burned in a cloudless blue sky, glinting off the water and casting the peaks along the southern shoreline in shadow.
Sam pulled into a parking spot at the lake’s edge across from the hotel. They got out and stretched. There were four other cars nearby. Tourists strolled along the road, taking pictures of the lake and surrounding peaks.
Remi slipped on her sunglasses. “It’s stunning.”
“Think about it,” Sam said. “We’re standing in the exact spot where Napoleon marched when America was only a couple decades old. For all we know, he’d just found the Karyatids and he and Laurent were hatching their plan.”
“Or they were worrying about how to get out of these mountains alive in the middle of a blizzard.”
“Or that. Okay, let’s find ourselves a temple. It should be on top of the hill behind the hotel.”
“Excuse me, excuse me,” a voice called in Italian-accented English. They turned to see a slight man in a blue business suit trotting toward them from the hotel’s entrance.
“Yes?” Sam said.
“Pardon.” The man stepped around Sam and stopped at the bumper of their rental car. He looked at a piece of paper, then the license plate, then turned back to them. “Mr. and Mrs. Fargo?”
“Yes.”
“I have a message for you. A Selma is trying to reach you. She said it is urgent you call her. You may use the phone inside, if you wish.”
They followed him inside and found a house phone in the lobby. Sam punched in his credit card number and dialed Selma. She picked up on the first ring. “Trouble,” she said.
“We haven’t had a cell signal since Saint Rhemy. What is it?”
“Yesterday when I was talking to you on the phone one of Rube’s bodyguards—Ben—was walking around the workroom. I didn’t think much of it at first, but it started nagging me. I did a scan on all the Mac Pros. Someone had installed a hardware keylogger, then removed it.”
“In English, Selma.”
“It’s essentially a USB drive loaded with software that records keystrokes. You plug it in and leave it. However long it was installed it downloaded everything I typed. Every e-mail, every document. Do you think Bondaruk got to him?”
“Via Kholkov. Doesn’t matter right now. Is he there now?”
“No, and he’s late for his shift.”
“If he shows up, don’t let him in. Call the sheriff if you have to. When we hang up, call Rube and tell him what you told me. He’ll handle it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Assume we’ve got company coming.”
They walked outside, grabbed their packs from the car, then circled to the back of the hotel and started up the slope. The grass was starting to green around the rock outcrops, and here and there they saw purple and yellow wildflowers poking up. When they reached the top of the hill, Sam pulled out his GPS unit and took a reading.
“You think they’re already here?” Remi said, scanning the parking area with her camera’s zoom lens.
“Maybe, but we can’t second-guess ourselves. There are hundreds of people here. Unless we want to leave and come back later, I vote we push on.”
Remi nodded.
Eyes fixed on the GPS screen, Sam walked south a hundred feet, then east for thirty, then stopped.
“We’re standing on top of it.”
Remi looked around. There was nothing. “You’re sure?”
“There,” Sam said, pointing beneath his feet. They knelt down. Faintly visible in the rock was a chiseled straight line, roughly eighteen inches long. Soon they could make out other ruts, some intersecting, others moving off in different directions.
“Must be what’s left of the foundation stones,” Remi said.
They walked to what they guessed would have been the center of the temple, then faced east. Sam took a bearing with the GPS, picked out a landmark on the other side of the lake, and they headed back down the hill. At the bottom they crossed the road they’d driven in on and followed a path along the shore, past a stone block bistro fronted by a wooden walkway, then onto a rock shelf that ran along the water to a sheer ledge. Here they dropped down and followed a trail around a small cove to another flat area littered with boulders and patchy grass. Above them the cliff shot up at a fifty-degree angle. In the shade of the peaks, the temperature had dropped ten degrees.
“End of the line,” Sam said. “Unless we’re supposed to climb.”
“Maybe we missed something back the way we came.”
“More likely two hundred years of erosion turned whatever ‘bowl’ was here into a saucer.”
“Or we’re overthinking it and they were talking about the lake itself.”
A gust of wind whipped Remi’s hair across her eyes and she brushed it away. To Sam’s right he heard a hollow whistling sound. He snapped his head around, eyes scanning.
“What’s wrong?” Remi asked.
Sam held a finger to his lips.
The sound came again, from a few feet away. Sam moved down the face and stopped before a granite slab. It was ten feet tall and four feet wide. Two-thirds of the way up was a diagonal crack filled with yellow-green lichen. Sam stood on his tiptoes and pressed his fingertips to the crack.
“There’s cool air blowing out,” he said. “There’s a void behind this. That top piece can’t weigh more than five hundred pounds. With the right leverage we could do it.”
From the packs he withdrew a pair of Petzl Cosmique ice axes and slipped them into his belt. Though unsure of what they’d find once they reached the pass, it had seemed unlikely the Karyatids were tucked away in a closet in the hospice. The most likely hiding place would be either in some high, hidden cranny or somewhere underground.
Remi said, “Next adventure, less spelunking, more tropical beaches.”
“Anyone looking?” Sam asked.
They scanned the opposite side of the lake and the roads.
Remi said, “If they are, they’re being careful about it.”
“Do you mind playing ladder?”
“Have I ever said no to that?”
Sam slid his fingers into the crack and chinned himself up. Remi put her shoulders beneath his feet and he boosted himself onto the top of the slab. He turned himself around, his back against the slope. Next he jammed the pick end of each ax into the scree between the slab and the slope so the handles were pointing outward. He gripped a handle in each hand as if he was going to set dual parking brakes.
“Look out below.”
Sam set his jaw, heaved back on the ax handles, and pressed with his feet. The cracked slab tilted outward, teetered for a moment, then toppled over. Sam’s feet went with it. He spun himself onto his belly and crossed his arms, catching them on the ledge. The slab crashed to the ground, sending up a puff of dirt.
