Serpent of Moses Read online

  It was an escape route Jack could not take. To make matters worse, the only other way out would now be blocked. It was also possible that they had sent some of their number after him.

  Jack stared at the wall for a few more moments, until he heard noises behind him that had nothing to do with running water. Turning away from the wall, he dropped to a knee and swung his pack from his shoulder. Experience had taught him that when fate removed one option, a man had to move quickly to the next one. He unzipped the pack and pulled out the one item in it that lacked any connection to the practice of archaeology.

  He held the gun up, bringing it into the light. For most of his professional life he’d never traveled with a gun, and even now he didn’t like keeping one near. Esperanza hated it, even if she understood why he sometimes chose to take it along when he traveled. However, he hadn’t fired one since Australia.

  The sounds of his pursuers grew more pronounced; he knew they would have seen the glow of his light.

  Jack moved to his left, putting his shoulder against the rock, and then turned off the flashlight. It took several blinks and a handful of seconds before he could see the approaching illumination displacing the darkness that surrounded him. He raised the gun and waited.

  It didn’t take long.

  When the first of them appeared, stepping clear of the curving wall, Jack sighted on the flashlight in the man’s hand. Just as the light began to turn in his direction he started to squeeze off a shot. At the last moment, though, he shifted and put the bullet into the wall a few feet to the side of the shadowy form.

  With the time that had passed since the last time he’d fired a gun, Jack almost lost his grip on the weapon. The man he’d shot toward dropped the flashlight in his scramble to get out of the line of fire. Jack smiled in grim satisfaction and settled back to wait for whatever would play out next. He kept the gun raised, but no one else stepped out and he suspected the men who had chased him to this point were debating the merits of making themselves targets for a desperate archaeologist entrenched in a defensible position.

  Several minutes passed in that fashion, and every so often Jack thought he heard voices over the sound of the water. However, when the minutes began to stretch out without any activity, he began to grow irritated at the delay. He was about to call out when a voice came from down the tunnel.

  “So what happens now?”

  The man had an accent—English, Jack thought.

  “What happens is that I shoot anyone who steps around that corner,” Jack called back, channeling as much confidence as he could.

  The immediate response was a chuckle that Jack barely caught.

  “Your last shot missed by a considerable margin,” the other man said, humor in his voice. “You’re either a horrible shot, in which case we might just try our luck and come in after you, or you don’t have it in you to kill someone.”

  “That first one was a warning,” Jack answered. “I won’t miss a second time.”

  “Assuming I believe that,” the Englishman said, “how do you think you’re going to get out of here?”

  Jack did not have a ready answer to that question. After a pause he shrugged and said, “I haven’t quite figured that part out yet.”

  “And while you figure it out, all we have to do is wait. We have the benefit of being able to restock once our supplies run out, so we can simply set up camp here until you starve.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Jack said. “Unless you have a pass from the Libyan government, which I’m guessing isn’t the case, then you’re in the middle of an illegal antiquities operation. Are you really going to wait around and hope the local authorities don’t stumble in here while you’re waiting for me to die?”

  There was no response to his question.

  “You know, I didn’t even get what I was after,” Jack went on. “So, to be honest, I’m not sure why you’re concerned with me anyway. The staff is still back there.”

  Even as he said it, he knew they wouldn’t take his word for it. They’d been looking in the wrong place, and the bullets had started flying before they could have gotten a good look at what he was doing. They wouldn’t let him go until they assured themselves that he didn’t have the artifact.

  “I’m sure it is,” the Englishman said. “The problem is that I have a few friends with me who are not so trusting.”

  “Are these the same friends who shoot before making proper introductions?”

  “Sadly lacking in social skills,” the Englishman conceded. “And that might be why they’re discussing where to place the C-4 that will bring the entire cavern down on you.”

  Jack didn’t reply to that. Instead he squatted in the dark, his gun at the ready, wondering if they could possibly have an explosive. He thought the odds were against it. As a general rule, things like C-4 seldom lent themselves to the discipline of archaeology. Too, if they were not content to let him go for fear that he had the artifact, he considered it unlikely they would bury him beneath several tons of rock.

  As he considered that, he saw a flash of movement—something flying out from behind the wall and landing on the ground.

  “That’s so you don’t think I’m making up the bit about the C-4,” the Englishman shouted. A few seconds later a beam of light emerged from the enemy cover to illuminate it. The object was gray and about the size and shape one would expect C-4 to look like. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

  Jack had to concede that if it was a bluff, it was a good one—one that left him with few options. Even so, it took almost a full minute before he pushed himself away from the wall, struggled to his feet, and after thumbing the safety in place, tossed the gun a few yards in front of him. The second the weapon left his hand, doubt washed over him and he wondered if he’d just made a terrible mistake. Yet he fought the urge to go after the gun.

  “That was the sound of me tossing my gun away,” he said.

  There was no immediate response, and Jack was about to make the announcement again when a lone figure stepped into view. Even with multiple lights in his face muddling his perspective he could see that the man was enormous. That impression was solidified when three other men joined the larger one, all of them dwarfed by the first. As the parties regarded each other, the previous feeling Jack had entertained—the one that told him he’d made a mistake—returned with a vengeance. While he was already late getting back to Caracas, he suspected his current circumstances would make him a good deal later—if he got there at all.

  “I have a friend who’s going to be really upset about this,” Jack said, adopting a rueful smile.

  At that, a man standing to the right of the giant took a step forward. Almost blind, Jack could make out nothing of the man’s features, though he suspected it was the Englishman.

  “We all have friends who are angered by the choices we make, Dr. Hawthorne,” he said.

  “You don’t understand,” Jack said with a headshake. “You’ve never seen Espy angry.”

  The Englishman did not respond right away, but Jack could intuit the smile he wore.

  “And you haven’t met Imolene,” the Englishman said.

  Then the giant began to move toward Jack, who only in that moment thought to wonder how the Englishman knew his name.

  3

  As his captors marched Jack back along the route down which he’d fled, he decided that being forced to endure the indignity of retracing his steps bothered him almost as much as the pain of his minor bullet wound. Yet he couldn’t blame anyone but himself, as Mukhtar had warned him of these men before Jack left Al Bayda. Four men—three of them European, one Mukhtar had guessed was Egyptian. They’d slipped into and out of the city with a quietness that suggested a desire for secrecy, and when one required certain types of items, such items often had to pass through Mukhtar’s hands. And that suggested they were after the same thing Jack was. Even so, Jack had kept on task, intent on being the first to touch the artifact in perhaps a thousand years.r />
  He hadn’t realized he’d slowed until the large man—whom the Englishman had called Imolene—placed a hand between Jack’s shoulder blades and shoved. Jack tightened his lips against the rough handling but remained quiet. Instead, he focused all his attention on the tunnel ahead, seen now in greater detail with the addition of three more flashlights.

  His research told him this cavern slicing through the mountainous part of northeastern Libya had existed since at least the time of Cyrene, and he suspected the ancient Greeks had used it for defense, even as modern Libyans had used it to resist the Italian occupation. By his estimation the tunnel through which he walked was at least two centuries older than the others he’d explored in the area. Whoever built it had taken great pains to hide the entrance. It had been cut into the mountain at an angle so that the shadow falling across the opening gave it the appearance of a much narrower fissure. Hours ago, walking toward it, knowing he was heading in the right direction, he could not find the opening against the brown and gray rock until he was right on top of it. The experience made him wonder if, unlike most secret places surrounded by encroaching civilization, this one might have remained unspoiled.

  “This tunnel is older than the others,” the Englishman remarked. It was the first thing any of them had said in some time, and Jack was taken aback by how the comment mirrored his own thoughts.

  “At least two centuries older,” he agreed.

  The Englishman walking next to him offered Jack a smile but didn’t say anything more. When they’d started out, Jack had asked his name and, failing to receive a response, pressed the man further as to how he knew Jack’s. That question had also gone unanswered.

  They walked on for another twenty minutes, until Jack began to notice a change in the light. He guessed the darkness in the tunnel had been lightening for some time, but so gradually that he hadn’t picked up on it. Up ahead, he could see the place where the tunnel curved to the left, leading to the antechamber he’d been forced from before having the chance to do anything other than have a look around.

  At the thought of what lay beyond the curve, Jack’s feet began to move faster. Despite the circumstances that occasioned his return to the cavern, he had no more control over his growing excitement than he did his own breathing. It was a feeling tied to a need to uncover the secrets hidden within the chamber regardless of all else. It was what had brought him back to the field after what had happened in Egypt, and what had kept him there following the events in Australia.

  Moments later they reached the turn where, just ten yards more, the cavern opened up before them. Jack hadn’t realized he’d stopped until Imolene propelled him forward, moving toward a ten-foot drop-off to the cavern floor, where a rope ladder provided by Mukhtar awaited. As Jack waited his turn, the Englishman and another of his associates preceding him down the ladder, he kept a wary eye on Imolene, lest the man find that one final shove was sufficient to get Jack where he wanted him. In this case, though, the giant exercised patience. With the ladder clear, Jack turned and swung his legs over the side.

  The cavern was thirty yards across at its widest point, stretching twice that to the back wall. The four battery-powered floodlights his predecessors had wrangled through the darkness barely reached those boundaries and did even less to illuminate the ceiling a hundred feet above them.

  When he’d arrived in the cavern the first time, the other men now in his company had passed through and taken a smaller tunnel into the treasure room, as the original designers had intended. Jack had hoped to use their preoccupation to his advantage by taking what they wanted right out from under their noses. In covert archaeology, however, timing was everything, and Jack’s timing hadn’t been as perfect as he’d counted on.

  “I’m assuming the treasure room was a misdirection,” the Englishman said.

  Jack didn’t reply. Instead, he swung his pack around so he could raise the flap and slip his hand inside. Only when he felt Imolene’s huge hand on his shoulder—with enough strength to let Jack know he could crush every bone beneath his fingers—did he look over at the Englishman, who shook his head, his eyes on his enforcer. Jack felt the man’s grip ease and so returned his attention to his pack. He pulled out a notebook, flipped it open, studied it for a few moments, and then, without consulting his captors, started off toward the cavern’s far wall, which was opposite the exit to the treasure room.

  As he neared the corner, the others trailing close behind, his eyes ran along the wall, noting the unnatural smoothing of the surface by ancient tools, the intricate patterns carved into the rock. His first time through, he’d made it no farther before being discovered.

  The lights did little to lessen the shadows, forcing him to pluck a flashlight from the hand of one of the Europeans in the party, a man who had not uttered a single syllable since Jack had been forced to join their group. Though the man frowned at losing his light, he remained mute. After looking at the notebook again, Jack began to run the light over the wall. It took him several seconds to find the focal glyph. While that vexed him, it also elicited respect for the ancient puzzle makers who had designed the system, who had set up the false treasure room where the others had wasted their time.

  Slipping the notebook back into his pack, he used his free hand to wipe away the centuries of dust that had accumulated on the wall, revealing Semitic text, part of which matched what was written in a scroll he’d pulled from the sarcophagus of the Archbishop Giovanni Visconti in the Milan Cathedral. With a smile of gratitude that the effort to procure that scroll had not been in vain, he ran a finger over the text, his lips moving as he did the calculations. He did them twice just to be sure, and once he was certain of the result, it was all he could do to stop himself from putting the data to use.

  Instead, he held back the thing inside of himself that desperately wanted to see his research and labor rewarded and stepped away from the wall, looking toward the Englishman.

  “Here’s where we decide how we’re going to work this so you get what you came for and I get out of here in one piece,” Jack said.

  The Englishman did not answer right away, but Jack had the impression he’d been awaiting the statement.

  “I’m not sure you’re in a position to bargain,” he said.

  “Probably not,” Jack acknowledged. “But since the odds are good that you’re going to kill me as soon as you have it in your hands, then it’s probably my only option.”

  The other man granted that to Jack with a nod.

  “Except that I believe you’re overestimating your worth,” he said. “Now that we know it’s not in the treasure room, and as we would also have possession of your notebook if you were dead, it would only be a matter of time before we found it ourselves.”

  “Which would at least be a moral victory,” Jack said. “If I’m going to die anyway, I’d rather you do some of the work.”

  The Englishman’s lip curled. “But then you would miss the opportunity to see something that no one else has seen in a thousand years.”

  It was the one thing his captor could have said that stood a chance of enlisting Jack’s help, and he did not have a ready response beyond a rekindling of the excitement that had ebbed over the last few minutes. To get as far as he had, to have waded through the research and traveled half the world until he was finally standing in a cave in Libya, and then to be denied the chance to see, to touch the thing he sought, was difficult to swallow.

  While he did not respond, he could see that the Englishman could read his thoughts.

  “Relax. No one’s going to kill you, Dr. Hawthorne. This is about the staff, nothing more.”

  There was no way to test the truth of that statement, so Jack didn’t try. He returned his attention to the wall and located the glyph. Then, using the symbol for its assigned purpose, he counted through the other symbols for the right spot. The one he landed on looked no different than the others, though he would have expected nothing else.

  He tapped it once before reach
ing into his pack and pulling out a small hammer. After a glance at Imolene, to make sure the giant would not snatch the tool from him and use it for some purpose for which it was not intended, he struck the wall, the sound echoing in the chamber. It took a second strike before the hammer went through the thin stone and into the hollow beneath it. A feeling of exultation coursed through him, but he pushed that aside and began to pull away the shattered pieces, revealing a hole less than eight inches across. It took less than a minute to remove the shards, and once he’d cleared the hole he put his hand in, all the while wondering if the men behind him would allow him to do the honors or if they would pull him away now that his usefulness was expended. When no hands closed on him, he decided to reach into the opening.

  His hand touched something coarse yet malleable. It took him a moment to recognize it as fabric, but then he felt the solid thing it encased. He tightened his grip and tugged, expecting some resistance but finding none. The thing slid out as if coated in oil—long and slender, wrapped in timeworn linen.

  In that moment Jack was alone in the cavern.

  He held the artifact up, his eyes bright with the pure joy that came from such a discovery. It was the right size, yet the only way to be sure was to remove the wrappings. That, however, was an honor he would not be allowed.

  As he turned away from the wall he felt the hands on him, an arm wrapping around his chest. The Englishman stepped forward and took the artifact from Jack’s hands, an apologetic smile his only payment. An instant later the rock wall from which Jack had just pulled the relic came rushing forward, and then all was blackness.

  4

  When Esperanza entered the store, the violence with which she thrust open the door displayed the anger she’d carried with her from her office and through the streets of Caracas. Even as she let the door swing shut behind her, she reminded herself that none of this was Romero’s fault.