“How many bars?” Holliday called out.
“Five. I’ll have to remove them all, and even then it will be a tight squeeze, especially for someone as large as you and your companion.”
The sound of straining metal continued for a long ten minutes and then stopped. There was a series of sounds from Ivanov as he slithered forward, his feet scrabbling for purchase and throwing back dirt into Holliday’s face. Finally the boots disappeared altogether and Holliday crawled forward, his lamp illuminating the grate Ivanov had been working on.
Ahead lay a letterbox-shaped opening perhaps four feet wide and two feet high. Holliday could see the ancient cement frame that had held the iron bars in place. The bars were gone, leaving nothing but gaping holes like the sockets of rotting teeth. He could see almost nothing beyond except a wall of pitted, dressed stone, the blocks fitted so tightly together there had been no need for mortar.
Struggling, Holliday dug his feet in and pushed himself forward, eventually reaching the opening. He put his arms above his head and slithered forward, finally pushing his shoulders through and then his hips. Halfway through the opening he rolled over and pushed hard with his heels, finally popping completely out of the rectangular opening.
Standing, Holliday saw that Ivanov was shining his lamp down a long, dark corridor about four feet wide, the arched ceiling not much more than six feet overhead. There were low, riveted iron doors with massive hinges every five feet on both sides of the passage. The doors were solid, each equipped with a heavy iron bar set onto massive iron brackets.
Holliday shone his own light down at the opening he’d just come through and watched as Eddie struggled to free himself. From the looks of it, the grated opening had been some sort of overflow channel for water. Eddie, cursing resoundingly in Spanish with every inch gained, finally pulled his big muscular frame through the hole and stood up. A few moments later Genrikhovich appeared, coughing and choking and spitting out dirt.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” Holliday asked Ivanov.
The priest nodded. “If I’m not mistaken, these are the dungeons of Ivan Chetvyorty Vasilyevich the Fourth, better known to the world as Ivan the Terrible.”
34
They moved off down the dark, stone-walled passage. The silence was something you could almost taste, heavy and oppressive, with a tart tang of blood-soaked earth. History was alive down here in the worst of all possible ways, like writhing worms and ancient nightmares. Holliday stopped at the first door they came to and lifted the heavy wooden bar. He pulled on the rivet-studded door and it eventually moved, groaning as he manhandled it open. He shone his light into the interior of the cell.
The chamber was ten feet on a side, and lying in tumbled heaps were the skeletons of at least a dozen men, tossed like so many broken marionettes into a dark corner of a child’s cupboard. There was no obvious facility for hygiene, not even a hole in the floor, which was mostly covered with a thick layer of black earth no doubt made from their own waste. The limbs on some of the skeletons had been torn away, the dead feeding the living for a little while longer.
Holliday shivered; the sounds from this place would have been like the moaning of some hellish choir, the sounds fading with each passing day until there was only silence. There would have been no hope here: no hope of redemption, no hope of food or water, only a slow, hideous death. The cell Holliday stared into was the very definition of horror and evil personified, and the man who ordered its construction had been without compassion and had no love in his cold heart for any living thing on the planet. Reflexively, from an almost forgotten past, Holliday made the sign of the cross and whispered the formulas as he did so.
“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.” Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that Eddie was doing the same thing.
“En el nombre del Padre, del Hijo y del Espiritu Santo. Amen.”
“We have no time for this foolishness, Colonel Holliday; we have much more important things to concern us now,” said Genrikhovich, his voice a little petulant. “We have better things to do than mourn the deaths of prisoners five hundred years ago.”
“Whatever else they were or might have been, they were men once, and their bones deserve a little respect from the living.”
“We won’t be living much longer if you insist on dawdling and saying your prayers, Colonel. I can assure you of that.”
Eddie dropped a big hand on Holliday’s shoulder. “You are a good man, mi coronel, no matter what this idiota thinks.”
Holliday closed the door to the cell but he left the bar off; the dead men had been imprisoned long enough; now at least their spirits could be free. When he’d shut the door he went after the others down the low-ceilinged passageway.
The passage seemed to go on forever, sometimes curving, sometimes dipping down or up, depending on the terrain, but by Holliday’s calculation they were always heading in roughly the same direction. Ivanov answered the unspoken question.
“We are traveling south. Most of the research points to the Tainitskaya Tower, or the Secret Tower, as it is sometimes called, since it is the oldest.”
“Is that the only reason?” Holliday asked.
“No. It is thought that the Tainitskaya Tower also had two tunnels, one leading to the nearby bank of the Moskva River, the other leading across Red Square to the cathedral.”
“Was any such tunnel ever found?”
“They filled in the tunnel to the river in the 1930s, when the tower was completely sealed. They never found the second tunnel,” said Ivanov.
It was well past midnight before they reached their objective, at least according to Ivanov’s GPS, programmed on the basis of Father Ignatius Stelletskii’s eighty-year-old maps of the underground city. They stood in a small circular chamber with a rib-vaulted ceiling and finally stripped off their respirators and stepped out of their Tyvek suits.
At the base of each rib in the chamber’s vault there was a carved rosette, and beneath the rosette a pillar reaching to the dressed-stone floor. Twelve ribs, twelve rosettes and twelve pillars arranged in a circle around a raised stone plinth set in the middle of the floor.
Around the plinth a deep circle had been carved into the floor, surrounding it, carved wavering rays of light extending outward from the circle like a great, flaming sun with the raised dais at its center: an altar. On the plinth was a stone sarcophagus of a knight carrying a long shield, and on the shield a carved Templar cross. The fourth Templar, who carried the Sword of the South, Octanis, the last of the swords sent forth from Castle Pelerin. In the knight’s mailed fist he clutched a broadsword, and along the blade there was an inscription:
YA OHRANNIK VELICHAISHIE SOKROVISHCHA MIRA.
“It’s Old Russian,” said Ivanov. “It says, ‘I guard the greatest treasures of the world.’”
“A Templar tomb,” murmured Genrikhovich.
“I’m not so sure,” said Holliday.
Genrikhovich snorted disdainfully. “Don’t be absurd. The stone effigy is carrying a shield with a Templar cross blazoned on it.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you about the stone carving; I’m just disputing the fact that it’s a tomb.”
“What else could it be?”
Holliday, who’d seen something much like this not too long ago in the middle of Ethiopia’s Lake Tana, just smiled. He turned to Eddie. “Lend me a hand, will you?”
“Of course, compadre,” said the big Cuban. Holliday put both hands about six inches apart on the edge of the plinth closest to the effigy’s head. Eddie joined him.
“On three, push as hard as you can,” instructed Holliday.