“Yeah, right,” she replied. “If you ask me, they just sound like giant cash machines, sitting around waiting to be emptied.”
“Well, Cairo,” Hawke said. ‘No one did ask you, and now we know why.”
“Bloody SBS.”
“Hey, James Bond was a Navy man, just remember that.” He turned to Ryan and they both looked up at the ruins. “Crazy, but you’re right — it really does look like some kind of Aztec temple.”
“Not crazy at all,” Ryan replied, taking his jacket off and fanning his face. “There are certain legends which claim it was the same people who built all these temples thousands of years ago — that one ancient antediluvian mega-civilization spanned the entire globe.”
Hawke shook his head. “Leave it to you to give me nightmares.”
They moved closer to the ruins and finally saw what they were looking for — the entrance, but it was nothing more than a fissure in the rainforest floor. At first it looked like a simple mess of tree roots and a shallow ditch, but Ryan assured them it was the location. His explanation about how it lined up with the circumpolar stars and the peaks of three specific mountaintops was barely heard by the others as they lowered their ropes into the ground and cracked open the glow-sticks.
Hawke felt the excitement grow, but he was determined to keep a lid on it. They weren’t there yet, plus they still had no idea where Vetrov and his men were. It had been a long slog from London via Zaugg’s insane vanity and the tortured mind of Sheng Fang, but now they were here and they had to end this the right way. “Ryan — call Eden and Alex back at Luxor and tell them we’ve arrived and that we’re going in.”
Ryan pulled out his phone. “Sure thing.”
Then, after a short briefing with Koura who divided his men into several sub-units, including five to guard the choppers, Hawke led the first team into the mountain, forcing their way through the narrow slit in the rock and lowering themselves into the hole one by one.
They reached the bottom of the hole and began to shine their torches around.
“I don’t like the look of that,” Lea said, shining her flashlight along the crumbling shaft ahead of them. It seemed to twist downwards, and the stark halogen light of the torch picked out every detail in the face of the rock, carved out thousands of years ago by long-dead men, probably the slaves of whoever had given Poseidon and Osiris the map.
“Neither do I,” Scarlet said. “But I hardly think the ancients were going to leave the source of all their power just lying around for any old nob, dick or fanny to pick up. This is the challenge, so let’s get on with it.”
Hawke smiled and they made their way along the winding tunnel until coming to an artificial man-made arch which opened onto a large cave.
He stared at the enormous cavern in front of them. It was a natural space, formed by the rainfall of millennia as its cumulative power dissolved the limestone which towered all around them. All over the bottom of the cavern was a spectacular man-made labyrinth, receding into a silent darkness too overwhelming for their tiny glow-sticks and flashlights to penetrate.
Lea stood next to him and gasped. “Would you look at that, Joe Hawke! It’s incredible…” Her voice trailed away into the eerie silence of the cavern.
He turned to look at her as she spoke and saw she was totally captivated by the immense sight before them. “Yes, it is,” he said quietly.
Scarlet walked over to them and pushed some chewing gum inside her mouth, tossing the foil to the tunnel floor. “Looks like the same crap we saw back in Osiris’s tomb,” she said dismissively. “But is there any gold in here, that’s what I want to know?”
Hawke rolled his eyes and sighed. “Still worried about your retirement, Cairo?”
She nodded, missing the note of sarcasm in his voice. “I’m still way off retirement levels, Joe. I wonder what price I could sell the water of life for?”
“I don’t know but it looks like you’re in luck,” Lea said.
Hawke looked at her. “Eh?”
“What’s that over there?” she asked, pointing to where something sparkled in the darkness. “Gold, right?”
Hawke looked at where she was pointing and saw something sparkling vaguely in the distance. “Could be gold,” he muttered. “Diamonds, maybe.”
“Diamonds?” Scarlet said, raising her eyebrows and spitting out the gum. “Even better.”
“Let’s get over there to those pylons,” Hawke said.
“I don’t see any pylons,” Lea said.
“Right in front of you!”
“Oh sorry… I was looking for those things with wires that make your TV work.”
Hawke rolled his eyes. “I mean those two enormous stone towers over there at the entrance to the tomb.”
“And how the hell did you know they’re called pylons, ya big fool?” said Lea, slapping his shoulder.
“How’d you think?” he said, and laughed, jabbing his thumb back at Ryan. “Someone told me…”
They walked down the broad stone steps carved in the side of the cavern, careful not to slip on the smoothness worn into them by thousands of years of use. As they went, it grew colder and damper, and the eerie silence seemed to wrap around them like a cloak the deeper they went.
At the ground level they walked through a miniature version of the giant pylon at the entrance to the Karnak Temple back in Luxor, but this one was covered in the same hieroglyphics as the map.
“Looks like we did it,” Lea said.
Hawke smiled. “At bloody last.”
“And we beat that bastard Vetrov to it as well,” Lexi said, her voice quiet as she brought up the rear. “He has to be lost in the jungle somewhere.”
Maria clicked her tongue in disapproval. “Don’t divide the pelt of a bear until he’s dead…old Russian proverb.”
“Eh?” Hawke said.
“Don’t count your chickens till they’ve hatched, darling,” Scarlet said.
“Oh…”
They followed what looked like some kind of main boulevard through the labyrinth, stopping occasionally to shine a torch down a silent side-street, not seen for thousands of years, or longer.
But then they stopped in their tracks.
“Bloody hell!” Lea said.
Hawke shared the sentiment as he raised his flashlight from their level on the ground slowly up the wall in front of them and illuminated another pylon. This one was carved into the far side of the cavern and covered in similar glyphs. Thanks to Ryan, Hawke recognized the one at the top — it meant eternity.
“This obviously marks the end of the labyrinth,” Scarlet said.
“And the start of something else,” Hawke said, shining his torch through a small archway at the base of the pylon.
“And I think we all know what,” Lexi said, the excitement in her voice obvious to everyone.
Like the others, Hawke’s mind was racing with a mix of elation and anxiety. He had already uncovered the truth about his wife — not only that the hit in Vietnam was intended for her and not him, but that she was in fact a Russian double agent codenamed Swallowtail. Worse, he had discovered that she was killed by none other than the British Foreign Secretary who officially had ordered the murder on grounds of national security, although in reality he knew it was something to do with this group calling itself the Athanatoi.
Now, the journey which had started out in the British Museum was also coming to an end — or so he thought. He was finally about to come face to face with the source of eternal life — the elixir of eternity that Hugo Zaugg, Sheng Fang and now Maxim Vetrov had all sought at any cost to human life — and all failed to find. Their failure had been eclipsed by the success of him and his team. Part of him couldn’t wait to walk through into the tomb, but another big part of him wanted to blow up the entrance and bury it forever.