She shook her head, but when she opened her mouth, he couldn’t hear the words through her dry voice.
Wolfgang leaned closer, pressing his ear next to Amelia’s lips so that she could whisper.
“Death,” she said. “Plague.”
“Plague? What are you talking about?”
Amelia beckoned him forward, and he leaned close again.
“This tomb . . . There was a plague, long ago. Black Death.”
Wolfgang jerked away, rushing to his feet. He stepped away from the sandpile, recalling the bones buried beneath the dune. The reality of what he was looking at sank in, and he remembered Amelia’s apartment and the books opened on her desk. He remembered the highlights and the pages opened to a passage about a plague in Ancient Egypt.
This wasn’t the tomb of a pharaoh. It was the mass burial site of an ancient civilization ravaged by a disease that tore through society like an angel of death.
Wolfgang pressed himself against the wall, facing the sandpit. Everything made sense to him—why the Egyptians wanted the scroll back so desperately, even if they already had pictures of it. The scroll wasn’t the map to a burial site packed with treasure; it was a map to a burial site packed with bodies and possibly disease.
Can bodies this old still harbor the plague? Surely the bacteria must be dead now.
Amelia coughed and waved Wolfgang toward her again. He hesitated, forcing himself to breathe.
Don’t panic.
Wolfgang knelt next to Amelia and held his ear close to her mouth.
“Listen,” she said. “The bones can’t hurt you. It’s been too long. But . . .” She swallowed, then coughed.
Wolfgang put a hand on her arm and waited for her to calm herself.
“In the next room,” Amelia continued, “are the catacombs. You can’t touch the mummies. Do you understand?”
Wolfgang nodded slowly. Mummies. That meant this plague was far older than the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages. This disease must date back to Ancient Egypt itself. Could it really be alive for that long? Surely not, but Wolfgang wasn’t about to take the chance. He shone the light back up at the ceiling, searching for the mouth of the chute. He found it, but there was still no sign of a rope or a light or any communication from Megan and Kevin.
It’s only a matter of time. Stay calm.
Wolfgang gave Amelia a gentle squeeze on the shoulder and smiled at her. “We’re going to get you out, Doctor.”
Amelia nodded. “My sister?”
“Ashley’s safe. We already found her.”
The relief that crowded over Amelia’s face was evident. Wolfgang gave her shoulder another squeeze, and then he thought about the second man. There had to be a second man, after all. The first man had uncovered the chute, and he and Amelia had fallen into it. He fell face-first and broke his neck on impact, and Amelia fell to the left side of the dune and triggered enough of a landslide to bury her, breaking her leg somewhere along the way.
But there had to be a second man because somebody had covered the hole. Actually, there was probably a second and a third man, because there was dirt in all four floorboards of Amelia’s car. After Amelia and the first man fell, the second and third men covered the hole because they had the same problem Kevin and Megan had—they needed rope. So, they covered the hole to keep it hidden and took a second vehicle to get rope.
And now they’re coming back.
As if on cue, far away through the chute, Wolfgang heard the distant pop of gunfire, followed by the faint roar of an engine. The sounds were too weak for him to make out specifics, but he thought he heard more than one gun and more than one vehicle.
Wolfgang huddled in the darkness and lowered the light, listening to the noises far above. Gunfire meant that the kidnappers had returned to find Kevin and Megan at their hole, and they were prepared to defend it because they still thought the chute was the mouth of a royal tomb, not a mass burial site. Wolfgang thought about Megan as he heard another string of distant pops.
God, let her be okay.
He’d barely breathed the prayer when the explosion detonated, shaking the ceiling above and sending tremors into the floor. Wolfgang stumbled for balance and looked up as bits of sand and rock rained down from the ceiling overhead. He pointed the light to the ceiling and saw cracks spreading across the stone, fifty feet up. The cracks spread, then several large stones broke free and hurtled toward the sand. A split second later, a ripping, crumbling sound echoed through the chamber, and the entire ceiling began to cave in.
13
Wolfgang didn’t have time to worry about a mummified plague awaiting him in the catacombs. He snatched Amelia up by both arms and hurtled across the sandy floor, dodging falling sections of ceiling. She grunted in pain, half-dragging behind him, her broken leg scraping the floor and bouncing on chunks of rock.
They hurtled through the open entrance to the catacombs and the consuming darkness beyond. There was a deafening boom as his feet crossed through the doorway, and then a wall of sand and sordid air pelted his back, hurling him forward. Both he and Amelia crashed to the ground, tumbling over one another as a deluge of rocks and sand filled the doorway directly behind them. Wolfgang came to rest on his butt, his back slamming against a rock wall as the sand poured in. He thought the deluge would drown them both, but the sand reached the top of the doorway and stopped, completely blocking their escape.
Wolfgang sat in the shadows, the penlight still clutched in one hand. It trembled as he lifted it and stared at the wall of sand and rock. The gunshots and engine noises ceased. In an instant, even the roar of the cave-in fell silent, and all he could hear was the total stillness of the tomb he was locked in, mixed with his and Amelia’s ragged breathing.
Wolfgang forced
