Then the ground heaved beneath her as the world came apart at the seams.
11
Pierce leapt forward and threw the Lion skin over Fiona as a shower of loose earth and rocks rained down. He could feel the impact of larger stones striking the thick pelt. It had weathered a storm of bullets, dissipating their ballistic velocity so effectively that he had barely noticed, but he doubted even the legendary lion hide could protect them against a Volkswagen-sized boulder. He looked out from beneath the skin’s protective shadow, searching for some refuge from the cave in. What he saw was not encouraging.
Fissures appeared in the ledge, zigzagging like lightning bolts, transforming the solid ground underfoot into a fractured and fragile web. The low persistent rumble of the collapse was briefly punctuated by a shriek of twisting metal. The bridge tore loose, along with a generous portion of the ledge, disappearing into the chasm below. Pierce barely had time to press himself and Fiona flat against the wall before the floor crumbled as well. That was when he saw an opening in the wall.
It had not been there a moment before. Either the tremor had broken through, or Fiona’s chant had worked. Regardless of the explanation, there was now a hole where there had been none. Maybe it led to salvation, maybe it led nowhere, but either option was preferable to staying put and waiting to die. He bundled Fiona into his arms and leapt into the gap.
There was no floor beneath them now, just a V-shaped crevice, widening with every passing second. Pierce felt his feet sink deeper like a wedge driven into a log. Each step was a struggle. His left foot caught and he pitched forward, Fiona’s weight pulling him off balance. She seemed to sense that he was falling and slipped free of his grasp, catching herself and steadying him. The shift was just enough to free his foot. He managed to stumble forward out of the spill, realizing only after a few steps that he was on flat ground.
“We made it!” Fiona said.
Pierce took a few more steps before Fiona’s words registered. His mouth and nose were full of grit, but the air was clearer, cooler. He staggered to a halt and lifted the Lion skin away from his eyes. Patches of scruffy grass grew across rocky terrain. He looked up, and saw stars in the black expanse overhead.
Behind them, the summit of Mount Psiloritis was outlined against the night sky, and much closer, there was a cliff face rent by a jagged crack. A plume of dust rose from the gap like a smoke signal. He wasn’t sure where they were, but given the serpentine nature of the Labyrinth, they were probably less than a mile from the entrance to the cave.
Fiona bent over beside him, hands on her knees as if on the verge of exhaustion, but laughing. While he shared her sense of relief at their escape, another emotion burned hotter.
Rage.
Kenner had blown up the Labyrinth, probably expecting to seal them in, to die a slow death of starvation, rather than killing them outright. But the intent was the same. He had tried to kill them. Both of them. And Pierce couldn’t let that go unanswered.
Yet, revenge alone was not Pierce’s sole motivation. There was more to this than Kenner’s ambition. The man was working with someone else, someone with a lot of resources and few scruples. Kenner was also now in possession of at least two items that Alexander Diotrephes had seen fit to hide away in the Labyrinth’s forgotten depths. There was no telling where those artifacts would lead him. The Heracleia alone might contain enough information to help Kenner unlock the genetic treasure he sought — the secret of how to make viable chimeras — not to mention other revelations that might overturn everything the Herculean Society had accomplished over the millennia.
To say that the situation was dire seemed like an understatement. But like Fiona said, they were alive. Where there was life, there was hope. He allowed her a few more seconds to catch her breath then clapped her on the back. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”
Labors
12
The skipper of the flat-bottomed launch drove the bow end of his craft up onto the sloping rocky beach and shouted for his lone passenger to jump ashore. Before the words finished leaving his lips, Augustina Gallo had already hopped out. She knew the drill. This was not her first visit to Gorham’s Cave.
She landed lightly on the wet rocks and scrambled up ahead of an incoming breaker. Above the tide line, she turned and threw a wave to her ferryman. Then she picked her way through the shifting mass of driftwood and rocks to the opening in the sheer cliff.
The cave was dark, lit only by ambient daylight, very little of which found its way in. It was still early, but once the sun passed its midday zenith, the east-facing cliff would fall under the shadow of the legendary Rock of Gibraltar, and even this vestige of illumination would be gone. Gallo removed her sunglasses, which helped a little, but she had to wait a few minutes for her eyes to adjust, before continuing inside.
A wooden boardwalk had been constructed through the middle of the vast hollow, branching out to areas where archaeologists had discovered artifacts and other signs of ancient habitation. Once, Gorham’s Cave had been high and dry, three miles from the shore of the Alboran Sea, where it had provided a refuge for a sizable population of Neanderthals for more than a hundred thousand years. Changing climates had spelled doom for the cave’s occupants, and then the sea level raised to the point where the waves were now practically lapping at the door. The inaccessibility of the entrance meant that the archaeological record from that period was virtually pristine. The cave complex, which was awaiting designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was off limits to the public. It was available only to authorized researchers, though at present, no one was working the site. Gallo had the place to herself.
She moved to the rear of the cave, where she left the marked path and climbed up to a concealed niche. Even from just a few feet away, the opening was impossible to see. Gallo paused to turn on her phone’s flashlight, then moved into the recess.
The light revealed a shape carved into the wall, not Neanderthal art, though it might easily have been mistaken for that, but rather a simple circle, crossed by parallel vertical lines. Just past it, a rickety-looking staircase led up to a closed wooden door, secured with a badly rusted padlock.
She reached out to what looked like a nub of rock on the adjacent wall and gave it a twist, revealing a modern handprint scanner. She placed her right palm flat against the glass plate. There was a faint flash of light as the scanner verified her identity, and then the entire door — padlock, frame and all — swung away to reveal another, almost completely unknown, section of the cave.
Gallo entered, careful to keep her right wrist turned up at all times, exposing the mark tattooed there. It was the same mark carved on the nearby wall, the distinctive sigil of the secret society into which she had been initiated, and which her boyfriend, George Pierce, was now the director: the Herculean Society.
The handprint reader was the last of a series of measures designed to protect this secret part of the cave from unwanted visitors. The tattoo on her hand was a different sort of defensive mechanism, designed to protect her from what lived inside.
Long before being ‘discovered’ by its namesake, a British infantry captain in 1907, Gorham’s Cave had been one of more than a score of citadels established by the Society and its enigmatic founder, Alexander Diotrephes. The citadels had served an important role in an era when weeks or even months of travel was required to reach far-flung destinations. In modern military terms, the citadels served as both forward operating bases and supply depots for Society agents carrying out important missions around the globe. But for a brief period starting in 2009, when it had been temporarily abandoned, this cave, the original citadel, had served as the headquarters for all Herculean Society operations. It was not a coincidence that, from ancient times, the strait that separated the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean had been called the Pillars of Hercules.