They descended the stairs quickly. A pair of enormous generators growled, one on either side of the entrance. Canvas tarps had been pulled aside from the breach in the wall, and he imagined that at night they hung across the opening to keep sand from blowing back into the labyrinth tunnels. During the day, Drake presumed they needed the breeze too much to worry about the sand.
As they entered the labyrinth, he heard Jada inhale deeply, as if she could breathe in the ancient history in the air. Drake had no such romantic illusions, but even so, he could feel the age of the place. It made him feel like an intruder, but he was used to such a feeling. He had, in fact, made a career of ignoring it, though sometimes it was harder than others. The past held as many secrets as the future-more, in fact-and people would pay incredible amounts of money to unravel those mysteries and maybe own a piece of the ancient world.
Hell, he loved it himself. When he had been a boy, he had read stories of adventure, of archaeological discoveries that stunned the world. He had loved old movies full of mummies or chariot races. But unlike in those antique films, the mummies he had encountered in real life had never come to life. There had been one time, in Karpathos, Greece, when he had been sure one of them moved, but nothing before or since. Still, he found it fascinating to learn how people had lived hundreds or thousands of years earlier.
So though his breath did not hitch as they entered the labyrinth of Sobek, his pulse did quicken a bit.
The walls were a shade of orange, like clay. The line of lights that hung from pegs on the wall explained the generators growling outside. Bulbs inside plastic cages were strung along the tunnel, vanishing around the corners in either direction. A quick glance showed that they were plugged into one another like strands of Christmas lights.
“This way,” Welch said, turning left.
Jada glanced at Sully as if hoping to share the excitement that seemed to have allowed her to forget her grief a moment, but he didn’t notice. When she turned to Drake, he returned her smile and nodded, a confession that yes, he understood. Then they were hurrying along the tunnel, moving from pools of light to pools of shadow, and the orange walls seemed to close in around them, the dry breath of history soft on their faces.
Drake had questions he wanted to ask Welch about the construction of the labyrinth, but they were moving fast and he decided all such questions could wait. They had come here for a single purpose: to find clues to the secrets that had gotten Jada’s father killed before Tyr Henriksen could do the same thing. If there was a fourth labyrinth, with or without treasure inside it, they had to get there first. More important, whatever mysteries were unraveled, they had to let the world know that Luka Hzujak had been the first to discover the truth and that he had died for it.
And if there was treasure along the way, that would be a nice bonus.
The maze turned in upon itself time and again, offering false paths and optical illusions, but the hard work of solving this part of the labyrinth had been done already. The dead ends had been roped off, the correct tunnels given away by the strings of lights, so they never slowed, even when the floor of the tunnel sloped downward or the maze took them through a door with a massive stone lintel overhead that threatened to come crashing down atop them. In many places, wooden beams had been put into place to support the ceilings and walls, hammered together hastily, and left, as if a construction crew had begun to build something and then walked out on the job.
Twice, they had to go around open shafts in the floor that went down forty feet or more into darkness.
“What’s this for?” Jada asked as they circumvented the first one, a flickering lightbulb casting ghostly shadows into the hole.
“It’s a trap,” Welch replied.
Drake smiled but did not give voice to the obvious Star Wars reference. He doubted any of his companions would get it, even Sully, who he knew had seen the movies.
They passed a pair of archaeology grad students who were carrying a large plastic container in which Drake could see things wrapped in cotton batting.
“Dr. Welch,” one of them-a stout Australian with bright eyes-said in surprise. “Melissa said you didn’t feel well. I figured we wouldn’t see you today.”
He looked curiously at Drake, Sully, and Jada, but Welch trotted out his Smithsonian charade and the grad students seemed duly impressed. If they ran into anyone who was part of the upper hierarchy on the project, it might not fly so easily, but Drake hoped they wouldn’t be that unlucky.
Time seemed to stretch inside the labyrinth. Drake wondered how long they had been inside, realizing they must be beneath the sand now, with thousands of tons of desert on top of them, not to mention the ceilings of the labyrinth. How far behind was Henriksen now? Still pretending to be putting together a documentary? Or would he have hurried Hilary Russo along? Drake thought the latter and began to get anxious. The only thing they had going for them was that it would take Henriksen just as long to make his way through the maze as it was taking them.
“I have no idea where we are,” Jada whispered.
Sully growled. “Ain’t that the point?”
“Seriously,” Jada said. “I tried to keep my bearings, figure out what direction we were pointing in and whether or not we were moving nearer the center or away, but I’ve totally lost track.”
“I didn’t even try,” Drake admitted.
“It would be hopeless without some kind of mapping or a GPS that could transmit through the ground,” Welch said. “Daedalus was smarter than any of us. Probably smarter than all of us combined. From this point, if you tried to make it back to the entrance and the lights weren’t there, there are more than a hundred combinations of turns in the maze. Unless you were very lucky, you would be lost for hours. And we’ve postulated that we’ve only been able to access an eighth of the labyrinth. From the center, you might be lost for days. You could die of starvation and thirst before getting out unless you fell down a shaft or were crushed in a trap first.”
“The places you haven’t been able to access,” Drake said. “Did the ceiling collapse?”
“It buckled in a couple of places, allowing sand in from above. In other spots there are places where what appears to be a dead end is actually a continuation of the labyrinth, but with secret doors to hidden passages. There are portcullis blocks in the walls, but the granite framing is cracked, so the series of weights and levers that would have raised those doors are not sufficient. Essentially, they’re stuck. But we’ll get them open.”
Drake and the others said nothing. They were all familiar enough with ancient Egyptian builders to know that the great pyramids were replete with hidden chambers and secret passages. Only recently Drake had been having a drink with an old friend in Thailand and discussing the work being done at the Great Pyramid of Giza to confirm the existence of a hidden corridor beneath the Queen’s Chamber there.
“You’ve gotta be careful with that stuff,” Sully said, reaching into his shirt pocket and pulling out a half-smoked cigar. “Those things are made to be tricky. One of them closes, you don’t want to be caught on the other side.”