It was noticeably colder now as they hurried past the numerous marble tombs, each holding the bones of a different aristocratic dynasty. Except for the four thousand corpses, they were now alone inside the church, but the sound of the police above gave Huber a shred of hope that he would live to see another day.
“Where?”
“That door.”
Aurora raised the pistol and blasted the lock open.
“Open the crypt door,” Mendoza shouted.
Huber obeyed, heaving the old door open, and it wasn’t until this moment that he realized his error in telling Mendoza that he had no knowledge of the tunnels. Then, as if he could read his mind, the Mexican cartel boss closed in on him.
“Wait!” Huber cried desperately, raising his hands in a pathetic attempt to stop the horror unfolding.
But it couldn’t be stopped, and Mendoza rammed the switchblade up into the base of Huber’s ribcage. The old man gasped and fell forward closer to Mendoza. For a depraved moment they almost looked like two old friends embracing, but then blood bubbled out of Huber’s mouth and Mendoza pushed him to the floor. “There can be no witnesses to this, Herr Huber. Please accept my most profound apologies, and gratitude.”
Mendoza took the gun from Aurora and slipped it into his jacket pocket, tightening his scarf around his neck and then they descended into the crypt. He lit their way with the light on his phone and hoped the battery would last long enough to see them to safety in the world above. He’d read stories about people getting lost and dying in the famous Catacombs of Paris, but they surely couldn’t be any more labyrinthine and disgusting than the tunnels beneath Vienna.
No wi-fi down here in the sewers and crypts, but Mendoza had saved the map of Vienna, and knew from his childhood in the jungles of Mexico how to count the turns and keep track of north. They trudged through the slime of the tunnel network, a left meant south so the next right was west… a gentle bend in the tunnel meant he was now walking southwest… good.
What was that noise? It sounded like it was coming from behind him. No, he was just imagining it — but there it was again. A sewer rat, maybe… trailing him in case he fell and knocked himself unconscious… He had no choice but to push on, looking for exits as he went. A few hundred meters would put them beyond the area that the police must surely have cordoned off by now. If they could reach the station all they would have to do was get on a train to Munich and then make contact with Dirk Kruger, the man who sold relics.
He stared at his phone. “Two hours until the next train to Munich.”
“Two hours in these tunnels?” Aurora asked, looking into the darkness and shivering.
Mendoza looked over his shoulder and illuminated a sewer rat as it scuttled away into the darkness.
“Let’s go,” he said firmly.
They emerged from the tunnel system an hour later and killed more time hiding behind newspapers before boarding the train to Munich. Now, as the train rocked comfortingly back and forth on its western journey, Silvio Mendoza followed the woman’s hand as it snaked up his thigh and made its way to his waistband. He gripped it by the wrist, pulled it out of his trousers and pushed Aurora Soto away. “You think now is the time for that?”
She pouted, and a look of contempt flashed in her obsidian black eyes. “A man like you should take what he can get, mi cielo.”
Mendoza flashed into action, pulling his ejector knife from his jacket pocket and spinning around in the train seat. Less than half a second after her comment, he was pushing the tip of the knife into her carotid artery. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She flinched as he twirled the blade around and pushed it against her skin harder, pricking open the surface and drawing blood. “Nothing… lo siento, Silvio.”
A grin spread on his face as he watched her squirm under his power. He nodded in self-satisfaction and retracted the blade. “Good. We don’t know where they are — never forger that. Remember how easily they took Wade’s empire apart and killed my brother, Jorge.”
Aurora watched the black light of revenge play in his eyes. She had been there on Alcatraz, hiding in the crawlspace when Juana Diaz had murdered his brother. Better he believed that ECHO had done it, and so she kept the truth locked in her heart.
They crossed the border at Salzburg and watched the Bavarian landscape slip by. Not long after, the train stopped for a few moments at Rosenheim Station and then pulled away again onto the final northbound stretch to Munich and their final destination.
Mendoza saw the tiny towns and hamlets flash past the window before gradually melting into the suburbs of southern Munich — Zorneding, Vaterstetten, Haar. High above them in the sky a savage storm was gathering on the horizon and he watched as a bolt of forked lightning ripped down from the cloud base and struck somewhere in a forest to the east.
Lightning was his oldest enemy.
He was only young man when it struck him, blasting through the pungent ozone of the stormy air and tearing down his body. Using him as a conductor to reach the earth and almost killing him. He’d seen it coming — flashing down into the sugarcane fields with explosive fury. He and Jorge were out walking when the storm struck. They both ran for the cover of a barn but Jorge had all the luck that day because the gods had decided to punish Silvio.
It felt like someone had smashed him around the back of the head with a baseball bat and when he woke his body was numb. It wasn’t until Jorge ran to him and gasped in horror that he knew something had changed. Jorge carried him home and that was when he saw the scarring on his face, the Lichtenburg figure, a shower of scars like electrical sparks running all over his face and neck.
Another bolt of lightning flashed on the horizon and a few seconds later a tremendous roar of thunder.
“The storm is getting closer,” Aurora said, bringing him back from the sugarcane fields of his mind.
“In more ways than one,” he said absent-mindedly.
CHAPTER THREE
Joe Hawke hated watching Alex Reeve as she pushed herself into the room in her chair. Her collapse on Alcatraz had almost cost her life at the hands of Aurora Soto, and now she was confined to a wheelchair once again. Aurora had slipped away in the Alcatraz night, and now they knew it was true about the elixir’s restorative properties only being temporary. It also meant they needed another source of it — one they could secure permanently this time.
They were sitting in the expansive glass-walled briefing room which overlooked the cliffs on the western part of their secret island base. Beyond the tinted glass a tropical Caribbean sun was burning bright and even after so long here the former SBS operative continued to be dazzled by its beauty and isolation.
When he had first met Lea and came to the island it almost seemed like it was a dream, but he had been here with these people for long enough now that it was his previous life that seemed dreamlike. Now this was reality… turquoise seas, white sand, tropical palm trees and the best camaraderie he’d ever known.
His appreciation of paradise was shattered by the sound of raised voices as Scarlet Sloane and Ryan Bale argued about the relative merits of vodka and cold beer, but Hawke’s mind soon returned to Alex as he absent-mindedly watched the surf crashing on the beach below.
“How are you?” he asked as she moved next to him.
“I’m fine,” she said, a note of determination in her voice.
Hawke fixed his eyes on her. “We’ll find more, Alex. I promise.”
“We have other things to worry about, Joe.”
He knew it was true, but it didn’t matter. He glanced around the room at the others. The entire team was now there with the usual exception of Vincent Reno who had returned to the south of France after the events in the Lacandon Jungle.