“The Minotaur?” Jada asked. “Or whoever the Mistress of the Labyrinth made up to look like a Minotaur?”
“Could be,” Drake said.
“These guys in the hoods,” Corelli said. “If they’re still down there, how many do we think there are?”
Drake could see he was thinking in terms of combat. How many guns would they need to get past the hooded killers of the labyrinth, the Protectors of the Hidden Word?
“Are there still slaves?” Olivia wondered aloud.
Drake thought of Sully and Ian Welch, and he knew the answer. It enraged him to think what Sully might be going through-he didn’t want to think about the images of torture in Diyu-but it reassured him as well. If all of their conjecture held together, it meant that Sully was still alive.
Henriksen looked contemplative. “There’s a famous story about an army detachment-three hundred men-who disappeared while returning to Nanjing in 1939. They were expected, but they never arrived.”
“Maybe they did,” Drake said. “But they hit a detour.”
Olivia cried out as the plane shook violently. The laptop slid from the table. Corelli made a grab for it, but the aircraft pitched to starboard and he toppled after the computer to the floor. The large screen winked out as the laptop landed with a crack, Corelli sprawling on top of it.
Jada slid into Drake, who held on to the table to keep from falling from his chair. Henriksen stood, but the pitch of the plane threw him into the wall. He made his way to the door and flung it open. Drake could see into the vacant passenger cabin, and his stomach lurched as he got a better view of just how badly they were listing.
“What the hell is going on?” Drake asked, following Henriksen into the passenger cabin. They leaned on seats and braced themselves on the overhead compartments as they struggled toward the cockpit. The tall man had a small spot of blood seeping through his shirt where his knife wound had been bandaged.
“I don’t know,” Henriksen replied, eyes dark with resignation. “But this isn’t turbulence.”
They reached the front of the cabin. Henriksen began pounding on the door to the cockpit, shouting for the pilot or the copilot to let him in. Drake shifted his stance and felt something sticky under his boot. When he glanced down, he swore under his breath and tapped Henriksen, pointing out the narrow pool of blood trickling out from underneath the door.
“Back up!” Drake shouted, drawing his gun.
Henriksen moved aside, eyes wide, and covered his ears against the boom a gunshot would make in such a closed space. Drake tried not to think about the possibility of a ricochet and what would happen to the plane at this altitude if a bullet ripped through the aircraft’s skin.
Then he pulled the trigger three times, blowing apart the cockpit’s lock.
Drake kicked the door in, Henriksen right behind him.
The pilot lay dead on the floor, his slashed throat gaping like a bloody, mocking grin. The copilot held a disturbingly familiar curved blade, the same sort used by the Protectors of the Hidden Word. The guy looked Greek; he sure as hell wasn’t Chinese. For a second, Drake wondered if everything they had been assuming was wrong, if they really knew nothing at all about the threat they were facing and the people trying to keep them from finding the fourth labyrinth. Then he noticed the glazed look in the copilot’s eyes, his lost and distant gaze, and he knew the man was not in his right mind.
“Drop the knife or I will shoot you,” Drake said.
The copilot didn’t even acknowledge them. Instead, at the mention of the knife, he glanced down at the gleaming blood-streaked blade, eyes wide with recognition. His face slack and expressionless, he slashed his own throat.
“No, damn it!” Drake shouted, reaching for the copilot with his free hand.
The man crumpled to the ground, twitching, blood pulsing from his wound. The cut was deep and long, blood vessels severed. There would be no saving him.
Henriksen stared slack-jawed at the two dead men even as the hull of the plane screamed around them, air currents twisting the craft, dipping it even harder to starboard. Any second, the plane would begin to dive.
Drake tucked away his gun and dived for the pilot’s seat. He grabbed the stick and held on, trying to keep the plane from shaking apart around them.
“Please tell me you know how to fly an airplane,” Henriksen said.
Drake didn’t spare him a glance as he replied. “Does ‘sort of’ count?”
19
Tyr Henriksen seemed capable of wielding his wealth like a scalpel or like a club, depending on the circumstances. Either way, the man clearly was used to smoothing the path of his life with money. But no matter how rich he was, he could do nothing to hurry the Nanjing police. When a handful of Americans and a filthy rich Norwegian made an emergency landing at the local airport with two dead men on board, the cops were going to have questions.
Any other day, the boredom drilling into Drake’s brain would have had him on the verge of screaming. But considering that a couple of hours earlier he had landed a jet, talked in to the runway by air traffic controllers whose entire English vocabulary seemed to have been learned from old Tom Cruise movies, all he really wanted was a beer. Not that he blamed the air traffic controllers for not speaking his language-he was in their country, after all. But the first time one of them called him “Maverick,” he had pretty much assumed he was going to die.
Not dying, in contrast, had made his day.
They’d left Santorini just after eight p.m.-two in the morning, Nanjing time-and the flight had taken just under twelve hours even with the unfortunate murder/suicide interruption. Now looking out the windows of the airport security office, Drake could see the shadows growing long as the daylight turned late afternoon gold. The clock read just after five p.m.
Jada had curled up on a sofa and fallen asleep-adrenaline hangover, he figured. Corelli sat on an uncomfortable-looking plastic and metal chair across from Drake, hands in his lap. He looked like a waxwork dummy of a 1940s movie gangster, Jimmy Cagney’s bulkier brother. Or a robot someone had shifted into the idle position.
Through a glass partition, Drake could see Henriksen and Olivia standing in sullen silence as Nanjing police, airport security, and a dark-suited representative of the Chinese government argued with representatives from the Norwegian and American embassies. The copilot had been a paid assassin or a terrorist, the diplomats were insisting, bent on the murder of a prominent and wealthy businessman. Henriksen and his people were lucky to be alive; they shouldn’t be treated as victims.
That was essentially how the argument was going from the snippets of it Drake had heard through the glass and through the door when security agents went in and out. The real conflict going on in that room had to do with the guns that had been found on the plane. While Drake had been trying not to crash the aircraft, Corelli had gathered all the weapons from their bags, wiped them down, and hidden them inside a food service cabinet. Now Henriksen and Olivia were insisting that they knew nothing about the cache of guns and that they must have belonged to the copilot assassin. The Chinese authorities were having difficulty believing that one killer would need half a dozen guns, but the representatives from the U.S. and Norwegian embassies were putting the pressure on. Drake had a feeling that it wouldn’t be long before they were allowed to leave, though not without the government putting some kind of surveillance on them. It was going to be an interesting night.
Drake stood and walked toward the exit. Corelli frowned, shattering the notion that he might be a robot, and watched his progress. A pane of glass was set into the metal door, and through it Drake could see a pair of guards in the corridor outside. The security director and the police investigators had been polite enough, though their manners came with a frosty demeanor. Polite or not, though, there could be no mistaking this for anything other than a detention area. As far as Drake could tell, nobody had said they were in custody, but until they were released, they might as well be behind bars.