Jada rushed into the tunnel, Drake right on her heels. He flashed his light ahead of them with his left hand even as he covered the assassins coming from the Knossos and Sobek chambers with the other, arms spread wide.
He could hear Sully to his left, muttering, “Go, go, go.” A swift glance showed him that the one Sully had shot had fallen but still lived, and Sully had his gun aimed at the face of the other assassin, who gazed back coolly in the semidarkness of the anteroom. The only light remaining in that junction room came from Sully’s flashlight, and Drake wondered how the assassins could see so well in the dark.
It occurred to him that these were not ordinary men. He thought of the swiftness with which they killed Jada’s would-be abductors in the parking lot the night before and realized that the assassins were no longer trying very hard. As he glanced back and saw Sully racing after him into the tunnel-Sully fired a bullet into the darkness as if for punctuation-he understood that they were not following. It might have been the number of people or the possibility of defeat that made them vanish back into the secret heart of the labyrinth, but whatever their reason, Drake thought they would be all right now. They would be safe, for the moment at least.
The brunette woman running toward them had to be Hilary Russo.
“Sully, gun,” Drake murmured, noticing that Jada already had put hers away as she saw the people running toward them, waving flashlights in their faces.
“Who are you people?” Hilary, the dig’s chief archaeologist, demanded. “Was that gunfire?”
Jada collapsed into her arms and hugged her tightly, then pushed her back and stared at her. The look on Hilary’s face could only be shock.
“There are-there are people back there!” Jada said, glancing frantically from Hilary to the dark length of tunnel behind them and back.
“That’s not possible! Where’s Ian Welch?” Hilary demanded.
Drake and Sully surveyed the others. Past the brightness of the flashlights it was difficult to make out faces, but he was sure he’d caught a glimpse of Olivia Hzujak’s hair, and the tall blond silhouette had to be Henriksen. But there was no cameraman, and most of the people seemed to be workers from the dig.
“He was with them,” Guillermo said, stepping forward. “He came down here with them.” He pointed. “She’s supposedly Luka Hzujak’s daughter.”
Hilary glanced behind her, and now it was clear who she was looking at. “What about it, Mrs. Hzujak? Is this your stepdaughter?”
“Olivia!” Jada cried, and rushed to her stepmother’s embrace. She hugged the older woman tightly, and the beautiful mask of concern Olivia wore cracked with surprise.
That was when Drake realized he’d underestimated Jada. He had thought that she had snapped, that panic and hysteria were setting in. But the whole thing was an act. The girl was hustling them all. He wanted to kiss her. If Sully wouldn’t have frowned on it, he might have. Though at this point it would have been more like kissing his sister.
“Jada, are you all right?” Olivia asked, and if she was feigning concern, her acting skills were as good as her stepdaughter’s. Olivia pushed her back and stared at her face and shirt, which were dappled red from when Drake had shot her attacker. “Whose blood is that?”
“Where is Ian?” Hilary demanded. “Who was shooting?” She glared at Sully and Drake. “And who are you two? Not from the damned Smithsonian, I know that much!”
“Dr. Russo,” Drake said, hoping for profound sincerity even as he tried to remember the false name he’d been using. “I’m Nathan Merrill. We’re friends of Jada’s, trying to help her figure out if there’s any connection between her father’s recent trip to Egypt and his murder.”
“Murder? Oh, my God!” Hilary said, and she snapped an incredulous glance at Olivia, wondering why she hadn’t been told of this before.
“You’ve got three worship chambers at the end of this corridor,” Sully said. “There are stone doors on the other side of each. When we found the secret passage, Dr. Welch let us investigate it with him, but we weren’t alone down here. There were other people here.”
“That’s impossible!” a voice piped up from the back.
Sheepish but worried now, ginger-haired Melissa moved forward, pushing past the towering blond statue that was Tyr Henriksen. They were clustered together now, and his face was illuminated. He stared at Drake with ice blue eyes, but he said nothing. If he wanted Jada, Sully, and Drake dead, he’d have to kill everyone else there as well and then everyone up top. He might be a vicious son of a bitch, but he still had an international corporation to run, and covering up a mass murder could have gotten messy-but he sure looked like he wanted to shed some blood.
“No one else went down,” Melissa said. “I was by the entrance the whole time.”
“There’s gotta be another way in, then,” Sully said. “Those doors in the worship chambers-people came out of them and attacked us. They’ve taken Dr. Welch.”
Hilary Russo stared at him in obvious disbelief. “That’s a lie.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s not,” Drake said. “They dragged him through one of the doors, and-”
But she wasn’t listening anymore. Hilary rushed along the corridor, picking up speed, with Guillermo and a couple of others behind her. Drake wished they could stay and help look for Ian Welch, but if the man was there to be found, his colleagues would find him. Drake, Sully, and Jada needed to get the hell out of Crocodilopolis before things got even messier for them, at which point they would not be allowed to leave. Drake didn’t relish the idea of spending time in an Egyptian prison.
“We need to get Jada some air,” Sully said to Olivia. “You understand.”
Olivia seemed to be practically vibrating with indecision. She glanced at Henriksen, who had his hands clenched into fists. Melissa and a couple of other dig employees had stayed with them, and Drake thought it was touch and go for a moment as to whether he might start breaking people’s necks with his massive hands.
“Of course,” Olivia said, but her eyes were on Henriksen, keeping him in check with her pleading gaze. “I’ll come up with you.”
“No,” Henriksen snapped, the first time they’d heard him speak in his crisp, deep voice. “I need you here.”
Olivia hesitated. Drake studied her, hating that he couldn’t read her. Was she really a victim in Henriksen’s thrall, or was she in on the whole thing and simply trying to prevent him from doing anything stupid? Did she care about Jada at all or care that her husband had been murdered? Had she helped murder him?
“Fine,” Olivia said. She gave Jada a little push. “See you outside. Don’t go far.”
“Yeah,” Drake said, glancing at Henriksen. “We’ll stick close.”
Drake held Henriksen’s icy stare as he backed away, cognizant of the weight of the gun he’d tucked into the back of his waistband and hoping he didn’t have to use it in such close quarters.
“What did you find?” Melissa asked as they walked past her. “What’s down there?”
Drake looked at her, then at Henriksen, wanting the bastard to know that they had beaten him to it and were that much closer to solving the mystery he’d killed Luka Hzujak to keep from talking about.
“Secrets,” he said, smiling at Henriksen. “Stuff that’s going to blow your mind. Things you never would have expected.”
Henriksen lifted his chin, sneering. “Some secrets can be dangerous. Sometimes it’s safer for them to remain secret. Men can become very wealthy keeping secrets.”
Drake smirked. Was the guy trying to buy him? Not that he was offended by the idea of someone trying to pay him to shut up and go away. But Henriksen was the kind of arrogant bastard who thought he was king of the world. He’d had people murdered, including Jada’s father, because he thought he was too special to have to follow rules or share his discoveries with the world.