Drake shrugged. “Pretty much.”
“It’s probably a safe bet,” Sully agreed after thinking about it for a second. “But if we’re out here long enough, someone will get the police to check on us or come looking themselves.”
“Then stop talking and get to work,” Jada said, smiling.
Sully snapped off a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”
For more than an hour, they explored the courtyard and the rooms of the fortress. Some were completely shattered and full of debris, and Drake tried not to wonder what was beneath the rubble. If what they sought had been closed off by the earthquake, it would take a lot more than bare hands to uncover it.
Other rooms were well preserved but empty, dust on the floor a reminder of the unsteadiness of the whole structure. The wind off the Mediterranean gusted powerfully from time to time. When it whistled over the hill and through the cracks in the walls, it seemed to make the very foundations shiver.
The second and third hours found them peering beneath fallen stairs and investigating darkened alcoves. Throughout the fortress there were cracks in the walls, and in some places the floor had given way. They treaded carefully there, warily creeping through rooms Drake wouldn’t ever have dared to enter by choice. They all carried their guns, and Sully and Jada each had one of the industrial flashlights they’d stashed in their duffels before boarding the ship from Egypt. Sully’s kept flickering, the battery threatening to die, but so far it worked well enough.
Many of the breaks in the walls and floor opened into jagged nooks, and they examined those holes carefully, searching for any indication that there might be more open space below. In one of the less damaged corners of the fortress, Drake found a doorway with stairs leading downward.
“Jada, I need a light,” he called.
She and Sully abandoned their searches to join him, shining their flashlight beams down into the dark of the old stone stairwell. One part of the left-hand wall had fallen in, but Drake started down, careful not to get ahead of the pool of illumination. They managed to pick their way over the debris on the stairs and found a bit of hallway at the bottom. Only a bit, however, as the corridor to the left had been entirely blocked by a rockfall from above. The ceiling had given way there, and whatever lay in that direction was closed to them.
The right-hand side held much more promise.
If the door had been made of metal, they’d never have gotten through. The earthquake had shifted and buckled the frame enough that the lintel pressed down on the door from above. The whole frame seemed off kilter, slanted to the left, and the door was tightly jammed within the new angles of the frame, squeezed from the top and sides. But the pressure had been enough to split the wood down the middle. The boards were thick planks, but they had splintered and now the two sides of the door were held together only by thin iron bands on the top and bottom.
“I’m a little worried the whole thing’s going to come down on top of us if we try to break through,” Jada said.
Drake and Sully studied the doorway. Sully ran his fingers along the top of the broken door, where the ceiling pressed down onto it.
“I can’t promise you it won’t,” he said.
Drake scoffed. “Come on. You think this piece of wood is holding up the thousands of tons of rock above us?”
“No,” Sully said, frowning as he looked at the door. “But if it’s what kept the doorway from collapsing-”
He shrugged-“Ah, screw it”-and put all his weight behind a kick that made the wood shriek and dust sift down from above. Sully kicked the door twice more in rapid succession and then winced, backing away. He massaged his knee.
“You all right, old man?” Drake asked, smiling.
“Why don’t you give it a shot, wise guy?” Sully growled.
“I would’ve been happy to if you’d let me know before you started unleashing all your righteous kung-fu fury on the mean old door.”
Sully sighed heavily and stood, preparing to kick the door again. Jada covered her mouth, trying not to let him see her laugh.
“All right, grumpy,” Drake said. “Let me give it a shot before we end up having to carry your geriatric butt out of here.”
“My geriatric butt is still young enough to knock you unconscious,” Sully warned. Then he stretched his leg, still trying to work the kinks out of his knee. “But yeah. Have at it.”
Drake smiled, knowing it was a cocky grin but unable to help himself. He stared at the door, determined, and shot a hard kick at the split in the wood. It shrieked, the crack widening, but the thin iron straps were not going to give so easily. The impact on the door had shot up his leg hard enough to rattle his teeth, but he wasn’t going to let Sully know that. Drake kicked again, and it might have been that the stone lintel shifted a little, or it might have been the door frame. It was hard to tell.
He glanced at Jada, wondering if she was right to be concerned. If they hadn’t run out of fortress to search, he would have suggested that they keep looking, but this room was their dead end. If they found nothing beyond the door, they would have to start over. Drake would go over the various chambers and sublevels of the fortress even more carefully, and Jada would go with Sully into the village to start asking around about the earthquake and what might have been on the hill before the fortress was built.
“This is turning out to be a waste of a day,” he said.
Jada had her hair back in a ponytail, and when she frowned and crossed her arms, she looked like someone’s recalcitrant teenage daughter.
“Are you giving up?” she asked.
“Nah,” Drake said, deciding this was not the moment to suggest they call the taxi back and head somewhere for a drink. He slid the gun from the back of his waistband and handed it to her. “Hang on to that for a second, will you?”
As she took it, he drew a deep breath, glanced at the door, then ran at it. Even as he launched himself off the ground, he knew what a stupid idea it was. Trying to be Action Man always ended in bruised ribs and a bruised ego. His regret lasted a millisecond, and then his feet struck the crack in the door and it burst inward in a shriek of metal and wood.
Drake tried to put a hand down to break his fall but still rapped his knee hard when he struck the ground. He grimaced, sucking air between his teeth, and got up slowly, massaging the same knee Sully had been nursing a minute before.
“You’re no Bruce Lee,” Sully muttered.
“I got the damn door open,” Drake countered, dusting off his trousers.
“Do you two ever not bicker like children?” Jada asked.
Drake and Sully exchanged a look, and then both of them grinned.
“Not really,” Sully said.
“It’s always his fault,” Drake said. “I’m innocent.”
Sully rolled his eyes. “How is it I’ve let you tag along with me so many times over the years?” he asked, stepping through the wreckage of the door, shining his flashlight around a room that had been closed up for more than half a century.
“You? I’m the one who lets you tag along. But that’s going to change, trust me. Grumpy old man with stinky cigars.”
“Enough with the cigars,” Sully called back to them, his voice echoing off the walls of what seemed like a fairly large room.
“I agree,” Jada whispered to Drake. “Enough with the cigars.”
“I heard that,” Sully said.
“Good,” she shot back.
Jada handed the gun back to Drake, who returned it to his waistband as they followed Sully through the shattered door. As they passed over the threshold, Drake looked up at the buckled frame. He said nothing to Jada, but he didn’t like the look of it. The split door had been acting as a massive support beam, just as she had feared. Grit sifted down from cracks in the stone above the ruptured wooden frame. But it was only a single room and the last one open to them. If they left without examining it, they would always wonder.
“Suddenly I’m thirsty,” Sully said, waving his flashlight around.