Drake felt a chill. “You think that’s a reference to the gold Daedalus’s nephew moved from Thera?”
“It’s possible,” Henriksen said.
“Wouldn’t someone have found it by now?” Olivia asked, her eyes alight with interest now. Eager, she leaned forward in her seat. “It sounds like this gate must get a constant stream of tourists. Even if you assume the labyrinth’s protectors would abduct or kill anyone who found an entrance, they would have to come and go themselves. It doesn’t seem likely there’d be a way into the labyrinth from somewhere so public.”
“Maybe it isn’t there at all,” Jada said. “How many people could vanish in that one spot without the authorities taking a much closer look?”
Drake nodded and stared out the window as the limo crossed a bridge over the Qinhuai River, the calm water replete with yellow-canopied riverboats. Jada’s argument made sense, and his momentary excitement had been extinguished.
“Regardless, we can’t simply go there and start searching,” Henriksen said. “Whatever we do, we require the cover of night, and if we find the labyrinth, its hooded killers are sure to be waiting for us, which means we need reinforcements. I have a security team on the way. They’ll be here by midnight. And of course the government and the police will be watching us. I need time to put the appropriate bribes in place to make sure they look the other way when the moment comes.”
Drake swore, hands clenched into fists as he thought of Sully.
Jada touched his arm. “He’s a tough old guy. He’ll be all right until we can get to him.”
“We go to the hotel,” Henriksen said, pulling out his phone. “Meanwhile, we get Yablonski looking at the Nanjing Metro map and see what else is as old as the China Gate.”
“He’s already compiling a database of disappearances,” Olivia said. “If we see a concentration of people going missing in one particular spot over the centuries, that’ll help, too.”
Drake couldn’t argue with any of them, and that made his frustration all the worse. Several long minutes passed as Henriksen phoned Yablonski, and then the interior of the limo fell into a silence broken only by the white noise of the engine and the hum of the tires on pavement. He stared out the window toward the east, where the city gave way to a forested mountain. When he glanced over at Jada, she looked as if she wanted to crawl out of her skin. She and her stepmother were on the same seat but sitting as far apart from each other as the space inside the limo would allow.
How did it come to this? Drake wondered. Relying on the people we were out to stop from the beginning? Henriksen and Olivia might not have killed Jada’s father, but Luka had wanted nothing more than to stop Henriksen from getting to the fourth labyrinth before him.
So what would you have done if you got here on your own? he thought. What would be the next step?
Drake turned to Henriksen and held out his hand. “Give me your phone.”
The big man narrowed his icy blue eyes. “What?”
Jada studied them both, a what-the-hell-are-you-doing look in her eyes.
“Phone?” Drake said.
Henriksen shrugged and handed him the smart phone. Olivia seemed nervous, as if she was worried Drake had something tricky up his sleeve. The limo slowed a bit as Corelli glanced in the rearview again, apparently thinking the same thing. Drake thought about reminding them that he wasn’t a ninja, either, and it wasn’t like he was going to be able to use the phone as a deadly weapon. He decided to let it go. If wondering what he had in mind kept them nervous, that was probably for the best.
Internet access was limited in China, so that was no good, but a quick call to London information services got him the phone number for the archaeology department of Oxford University, and moments later he sat listening to the phone ringing half the world away.
“Margaret Xin, please,” he said when a male voice answered.
Henriksen’s eyes widened in alarm, and he reached for the phone. Drake slapped his hand away, though he was impressed that the man had recognized Margaret Xin’s name.
“Relax, blondie,” Drake said. “We’re in this together for now.”
He hated saying the words, wanted to spit to clear the taste of them out of his mouth. As far as he was concerned, they were in it together as long as their fate was twined together and not a moment longer. He figured Henriksen felt the same way.
A quiet female voice came on the line. “Hello?”
“Maggie, it’s Nathan Drake.”
“Nate? This is a surprise. Are you in London?”
“No, Maggie, listen-Sully’s in trouble,” Drake said. “I know you two ended kind of messy, but I need your help.”
He heard a deep intake of breath, and when she spoke again, there was a tremor in her voice.
“This isn’t cheating-at-cards sort of trouble, is it?”
“Would I be calling you if it was?”
“I guess not,” Maggie said softly. “You’re right, Nate. It ended messy between Victor and me. In fact, messy probably doesn’t begin to cover it. I wish he was a different sort of man, but I can’t blame him for that. How can I help?”
Drake let out a breath, relieved. He gave a slight nod to Jada.
“Nanjing,” he said. “Something old. Maybe underground. Catacombs, maybe, or a fortress or palace.”
“You’re in China?” Maggie said. “What are you doing in-”
“Now’s not the time. When it’s all over, I’ll call you and tell you everything. Right now I just need to know what you can tell me.”
Maggie hesitated, thinking. “Well, you’re not going to find real catacombs there. The rest-I mean, fortresses, palaces-there are all sorts of things. But underground, the only thing that comes immediately to mind is the palace of Zhu Yuanzhang, who you might know as the Hongwu Emperor. He was the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty. The palace is supposed to be under the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, inside the Treasure Mound.”
Drake froze, his heart thrumming in his chest along with the limousine’s engine. “Treasure Mound,” he repeated, wanting to be sure he’d heard her right.
“Well, there isn’t any actual treasure there,” Maggie explained. “It’s a reference to the emperor’s tomb and whatever might have been buried with him.”
“Why do you say it’s supposed to be there? Don’t you know?” Drake asked.
“Nobody does for sure. The mausoleum is a complex of twenty buildings that took decades to complete. The Treasure Mound is a hill in the midst of the complex, which is east of the city. Archaeologists have used geomagnetic surveying equipment to confirm the presence of tunnels under the mound. Turned out the whole mound was covered with large bricks from the Six Dynasties, dated to the fifth century, which suggests there was another structure there at some point.
“In any case, the team analyzing the Treasure Mound found tunnels that go right to its heart. Part of the mausoleum complex is a structure called the Soul Tower, the base of which goes fairly deep into the mound. They were able to map the tunnel, and it leads to the base of the Soul Tower and some kind of opening, but couldn’t go any further.”
Drake frowned. “What do you mean they couldn’t go any further? Was there a cave-in?”
“I’m not clear on some of the details,” Maggie said. “I found the research fascinating, but I haven’t written about it or taught it in class, so I can only tell you what I remember, which is that some kind of room was found but no real entrance. Still, the archaeologists working at the mound were convinced they’d found the actual burial site of Zhu Yuanzhang.”
Drake gazed out at the glittering lights of Nanjing. “I don’t get it. Why didn’t they excavate?” he asked.
“It’s against the law.”
“What?”
“The only one of the Thirteen Imperial Tombs of the Ming Dynasty that’s been excavated is the tomb of Emperor Wanli in Beijing, and that was back in the 1950s. After that, the government forbade the excavation of any of the other ‘underground palaces.’ ”