No response.
“Last chance!”
“Go to hell!”
The gun boomed again. The bullet thunked into the opposite wall.
“Suit yourself,” Sam muttered. He popped up, cocked his arm, and jammed the spear into the opening. It struck something soft and they heard a gasp. Sam jerked the spear back out, then ducked down. They waited, expecting to hear their pursuer calling to his comrade, but there was only silence.
Sam peeked his head up. A man lay motionless a few feet inside the slit. Sam reached in and grabbed his gun, a .357 Magnum revolver.
“I’ll take it,” Remi said. “You’ve got your hands full. Unless you want to part with your poker.” Sam handed her the revolver and she said, “It’ll take them a while to get him out.”
“Bondaruk won’t bother unless he has no other choice,” Sam predicted. “They’re trying to find another entrance.”
They looked around to get their bearings. This cavern was kidney shaped and smaller than the main one, with a twelve-foot ceiling and an exit in the right-hand wall.
Sam and Remi searched among the stalactites but found no other man-made objects.
“How many Persians and Spartans did Bucklin say survived?” Sam asked.
“Twenty or so Spartans and thirty Persians.”
“Remi, look at this.”
She walked over to where Sam was standing beside what looked like a pair of stalactites. They were hollow, their sides reaching up like flowstone flower petals. The spaces inside were perfectly cylindrical.
“Nothing in nature is that uniform,” Remi said. “They were here, Sam.”
“And there’s only one place they could have gone.”
They walked to the wall and ducked into the tunnel, which meandered for twenty feet before opening onto a ledge. Another rock bridge, this one only two feet wide, stretched across a chasm and into another tunnel. Sam leaned right, then left, checking the bridge’s thickness.
“Seems solid enough, but . . .” He looked around. There were no stalactites to rope onto. “My turn.”
Before Remi could protest, Sam stepped onto the bridge. He stopped, stood still for a few seconds, then made his way across. Remi joined him. They wound their way through a tightly packed forest of stalactites, then stepped into an open space.
They stopped short.
Remi murmured, “Sam . . .”
“I see them.”
Caught in their headlamps, the Karyatids lay side by side on the floor, their golden faces staring at the ceiling. Sam and Remi walked forward and knelt down.
Cast with immaculate care, the women’s golden torsos were draped in robes so finely detailed Sam and Remi could see tiny creases and stitching. On each woman’s head rested a laurel wreath; each stem and leaf and bud was a work of art unto itself.
“Who moved them?” Remi said. “Laurent? How could he have done it by himself?”
“That,” Sam replied, then pointed.
Lying beside the wall was a makeshift sled constructed of a half dozen overlapping shields. Made of lacquered wicker and leather, each shield was a five-foot-tall hourglass. They were bound together with what looked like catgut to form a shallow canoe shape.
“We saw one of these at Bondaruk’s estate,” Sam said. “It’s a Persian gerron. Imagine it: Laurent, in here working alone for days, building his sled, then dragging each Karyatid across that bridge. . . . Amazing.”
“But why leave them here?”
“I don’t know. We know there’s a gap in his biography a few years before he hired Arienne and the Faucon. Maybe Napoleon ordered him to try to get the columns out. Maybe Laurent realized he couldn’t do it without help, so he left them behind assuming he’d return.”
“Sam, daylight.”
He looked up. Remi had moved farther down the wall and was kneeling beside a shoulder-wide crack in the wall. The interior had collapsed and was choked with rock. A pencil-sized shaft of sunlight showed at the far end.
“Napoleon and Laurent might have come in this way,” Remi said, “but we won’t be using it to get out.”
“Time to go,” Sam said. “Let’s go get reinforcements.”
They found another opening, this one barely larger than the slit they’d come through earlier. At the other end was an alcove and another side tunnel, this one leading back in the general direction of the main cavern. For twenty minutes they picked their way along until finally they reached an intersection. To the left they heard the sound of rushing water.
“The waterfall,” Remi said.
They crept down the tunnel to the mouth, stopping a few feet short. Directly across from them lay the dragon’s-teeth curtain; to the left, the platform. They could just make out the glow of Sam’s chem light on the wall behind the barrel stalactite.
“I don’t see anyone,” Sam said.
“Me neither.”
They started across the cavern, angling toward the platform.
Sam saw the movement in the corner of his eye a split second before the gun roared. The bullet struck the stalactite beside Sam’s hip. He ducked. Beside him, Remi spun, took aim on the charging figure, and snapped off a shot. The figure spun and fell, but almost rolled onto his side and started to rise.
“Run!” Sam barked. “That way!”
With Remi in the lead they sprinted for the dragon’s teeth, through the gap, and onto the water-slick bridge. Never slowing, Remi crashed through the waterfall, followed by Sam. When they reached the far ledge Remi kept going, ducking into the tunnel, but Sam skidded to a stop and turned back.
“Sam!”
Through the waterfall he could see a figure running across the bridge. Sam dropped the Xiphosand the spear, scooped up a double handful of gravel, and tossed it across the bridge. A second later the figure crashed through the waterfall, his gun extended before him. His lead foot skidded over the gravel and shot out from under him. Eyes wide, his arms windmilling, he stumbled backward, his face upturned into the waterfall. He slammed back first onto the bridge. His leg slipped over the edge and he scrambled with his opposite leg, trying to find purchase. Then he was gone, screaming as he tumbled into the crevasse.
Remi appeared at Sam’s shoulder. He picked up the spear, then stood up and turned toward her. “Two down, two to—”
“Too late for that,” a voice said. “Don’t move a muscle.”
Sam pivoted his head. Surrounded by billowing mist, Kholkov stood on the bridge in front of the waterfall. His nine-millimeter Glock was pointed at them.
Remi whispered, “I’ve got one more bullet. They’re going to kill us anyway.”
“True,” Sam murmured.
Kholkov barked, “Stop talking. Fargo, step away from your wife.”
Sam turned his body slightly, still covering Remi’s gun hand as he very slowly extended the spear toward Kholkov. Instinctively the Russian’s eyes flicked toward the spearhead. Remi didn’t miss the moment. Instead of raising the .357 to shoulder height, she simply lifted it to waist level and pulled the trigger.
A neat hole appeared in Kholkov’s sternum; a red stain spread across the front of his sweater. He collapsed to his knees and gaped at Sam and Remi. Sam saw Kholkov’s gun hand twitch, saw the Glock start to rise. Spear held before him, Sam charged onto the bridge. Kholkov’s fading reflexes were no match for the spear’s seven-foot reach. The steel head plunged into Kholkov’s chest, then out his back. Sam leaned forward, wrenched the Glock from Kholkov’s hand, then planted his feet and gave the spear a twist. Kholkov tumbled over the side. Sam stepped to the edge and watched him spin out of sight.
Remi walked up. “Couldn’t have happened to a nastier person.”
Back in the cavern, they picked their way through the stalactites, frequently checking behind and to the sides on their way back to the platform. Bondaruk was nowhere to be seen. They half expected him to step from the darkness of one of the tunnels, but nothing moved. Aside from the distant rush of the waterfall, all was quiet.