“Hang on to the wall!”
I glanced back as Meryem took hold of the walls behind me, pressing outward on the corridor with her palms and fingers. The corridor was narrow enough that she could hang on, but in no way was our situation looking good. The stone walls groaned as the fracture widened, the stairs below us gradually separating from the walls until they crumbled away entirely.
But it didn’t end there. With nothing to rest on, the stairs above us kept falling, breaking away from the walls of the corridor. They plummeted behind us, dust billowing everywhere. A long moment of silence was followed by a series of huge splashes. Then I began to slip down the walls of the corridor.
I pushed my hands out harder, arresting my descent. I hadn’t slipped more than a few feet, and when I was finally stable, I could see that I was hanging above some kind of underground cistern, probably another old Roman ruin. I couldn’t see how big the cistern was, not from the light thrown by the torch, but from the moment I opened my mouth, I knew it was huge.
“Meryem,” I said, my words echoing across the cavernous space, “Are you OK?”
“Very good,” she replied.
Which was a real overstatement. The word “good” continued to echo through the cistern while I appraised our situation. We were hanging above the water, but I had no idea how high, because I couldn’t see that far down. As far as I could tell, the stairs had crumbled away entirely. Maybe their support structures had rotted away over time, I didn’t know, but they weren’t there anymore. The first thing I needed to do was obvious. I let go of the torch.
I counted a little over two seconds as it tumbled end over end, before fizzling out in the black water below. Now only Meryem’s light stick cast its pale glow from above. The torch’s two-second-plus free fall told me that we were about eighty feet above the water. I wasn’t able to see the stairs down there, but the torch had lit a large Doric column directly ahead of us as it fell. The column was too far away to get to, however, so for better or worse, we had no way down and no way back. I could already feel the walls of the corridor crumbling under my hands. I suspected the structure had been compromised and I seriously doubted that it would continue to support our weight. The muscles in my arms burned, a bead of salty sweat running into my eye.
“We go back,” Meryem said.
“The walls won’t hold us,” I replied.
“We do not know what is in the water.”
“Stairs,” I said.
“So you would like to jump on the fallen stairs?”
“No,” I said. “I’d like to jump on a marshmallow. But we’re not in a candy store and if there’s enough water for the stairs to disappear, there’s enough water for us too.”
“Are you certain?” Meryem asked.
“Not even close,” I replied. “Can you see me?”
“Yes.”
“Then follow me.”
I jumped. Feet first and as far to the left of where I imagined the stairs had fallen as possible. Eighty feet wasn’t an impossible distance. Cliff divers did it all the time. They usually, however, knew what they were diving into and I didn’t, so I needed to be as cautious as possible. I pointed my toes and clenched my legs tightly together, crossing my arms in front of my torso. The idea was to enter the water like a knife and to extend your arms as soon as you went underwater to arrest your descent.
The idea worked. Like the torch, I was airborne for a little more than two seconds. I landed hard, toes first, and as soon as I went under, I extended my arms to slow my fall. My toes ultimately touched the hard bottom, but barely. I soon broke back through to the surface. I flicked on my light stick and Meryem took it as a signal to go. She jumped, heading straight down for me, her arms crossed and her legs clenched. I was just able to get out of the way as she splashed down. A moment later, Meryem bobbed to the surface, inhaling deeply.
“You are lucky I did not die, Michael.”
“Why?”
“Because I would have killed you.”
I laughed.
“What now?” she said.
“Now we tread water.”
“Are you kidding?”
“I’m definitely kidding,” I said.
But the words had barely left my mouth, before a bullet cracked through the inky blackness. I saw the muzzle flash before I heard its thunderous roar. The bullet had come from a decent-sized gun. Maybe not a rifle, but at least a 9mm. It had been shot from near the ceiling. Whoever had fired it had been lowered down through the stair-less corridor, probably in a climbing harness. The bullet disappeared into the water several feet from us, but they wouldn’t all miss. We needed to get out of there fast.
I switched off my light stick immediately. I didn't want to give them anything to aim at. Then I pulled Meryem toward me and we started to swim the breaststroke. An overhand crawl would have been faster but, given the bullets, I wanted to minimize the noise. It stood to reason that it was Kate’s people shooting at us from above and that meant that they were shooting to kill. A flashlight beam scoured the dark water. The beam revealed that we were swimming directly toward the base of an enormous column.
“Dive around,” I whispered.
I dived, Meryem beside me. A bullet spit into the water, three feet away. They were getting closer. I surfaced at the rear of the column and hung off it with one hand, catching my breath. Meryem joined me.
“How far can you swim underwater?” I whispered.
“Far enough, I hope.”
I could see nothing in the darkness. But I could keep a relatively straight line. And I remembered the lay of the land from the flashlight beam. So I swam. I figured a hundred feet would do it. Keep underwater, conserve our breath, swim slowly but efficiently, and when we surfaced we’d be far enough away that they couldn’t get a bead on us. At least that was my thinking until I saw a dim glow in the water beside me. It was Meryem. She had switched on her light stick. It was probably an accident and she quickly shut it off again, but it was enough. A powerful beam of light raked across the black water above me. Then the water was awash in gunfire. But not single bullets. Automatic gunfire.
We couldn’t swim into it. We needed to swim away. I dived deeper and resurfaced several feet away. The flashlight beam scoured the water where I had been previously. But I couldn’t see Meryem. I could only hope that she was following. A few feet in front of me, the flashlight beam danced off another column standing in the water. This column had a head carved into its base. It was the head of a wolf exactly like the drawing in the journal. I figured it might have been a tribute to Romulus and Remus — the founders of Rome who were raised by a wolf. I was unsure of the history but what was different was that this column wasn’t simply sitting there isolated in the middle of the cistern. It was sitting on an underwater ledge.
The ledge made it impossible for me to swim any farther because the water wasn’t more than a foot deep. Walking would be noisy, I needed a better way. Luckily, a low wall running laterally along the ledge provided a solution. Just a few inches below the water, it gave me a narrow path to the side of the cistern. I pulled myself up on top of the narrow submerged wall and put one foot in front of the other, inching forward into the darkness as silently as possible. I had to assume that Meryem was still following me. It was the only thing that made sense.
Then I saw the headlights — two bright headlights bearing down on me from the side of the cistern. And that didn’t make any sense at all. A second after the headlights lit me up, an engine roared to life. After that, the bullets really began to fly.
Chapter 48
I ran like the wind, one foot in front of the other on the narrow ledge, lead spraying the water on either side of me. So much for invisibility, I was lit up like a Christmas tree. As I sprinted forward, I willed the headlights off me with one-half of my concentration, silently praying that the bullets wouldn’t find their mark with the other half. But the headlights didn’t shut off and the bullets didn’t stop firing. Worse still, I didn't know what I was running toward. Not that it mattered. There was only one way to go.