“Olivia disagrees. She believes that Daedalus must have accumulated vast wealth, and perhaps she’s right. But we won’t know until we reach the center of the labyrinth. If she cared only for the white hellebore, she’d have turned around the moment we found it as we entered Diyu. But she wants that gold.”
Drake scowled. “While all you want is to sell mind control to whichever government is the highest bidder.”
Henriksen shrugged. “Someone’s going to profit from this. I’d rather it were me.”
Jada took a step backward. “This is what my father wanted to stop,” she said, staring at him.
“I have no doubt,” Henriksen agreed. “But I’m not some James Bond villain, Jada. It’s not as if I’m going to try to take over the world. I’m only a businessman.”
“Do you have any idea what this could be used for?” Jada demanded. “Think of the espionage applications. Dosing world leaders so you could control their decisions. Never mind the military uses. You know that soldiers would be experimented on. And what about dictatorships that want more pliable people?”
“As I said,” Henriksen replied, “someone’s going to do it.”
“Unless we destroy the white hellebore,” Jada said. “Burn it all.”
Henriksen clenched his fists. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”
“Whoa!” Drake said, dropping his hand to the gun on his belt. “Let’s all take a breath, okay?” He shone his flashlight at Jada and saw the emotions wracking her features. “Henriksen might not be a world conqueror, but right now, we have no idea what Olivia has in mind.”
“Oh, make no mistake,” Henriksen said. “If whoever she hires for the science can synthesize the chemicals, there’s nothing Olivia would like more than to have presidents and despots as her puppets.”
Drake glanced back and forth between them. “Our goals haven’t changed. I’m here for Sully.”
“I’m here for my father,” Jada corrected him. “I love my Uncle Vic, but I’m here to stop Henriksen- or my stepmother-from getting what they want.”
“Just hang on!” Drake snapped. “Do not fight this fight right now. We have two choices, all three of us. We go forward or we go back. If Sully’s really still alive, I’m not leaving here without him, and I’m guessing both of you need to know what’s at the heart of this place, yes?”
“I’m not going back,” Jada said.
Henriksen’s eyes blazed with his own intent.
“Then let’s get going,” Drake said. “One fight at a time.”
They had lost time with revelations and argument, and as they renewed their exploration of Diyu, Drake felt constantly aware of the darkness they’d left behind. Every shadow and crevice breathed with menace because they had no idea how many hooded men might remain, but the longer they went without being attacked, the more his main concern became Olivia and the surviving mercenaries. It had sounded like Massarsky had taken charge when Perkins had been killed. He’d seemed okay for a guy who used his military training as a soldier for hire, and maybe a killer for hire if the price was right. But Drake had a feeling they wouldn’t be having a beer together anytime soon.
They moved swiftly, making fewer wrong turns, working half on instinct now. Jada froze Henriksen out as if he weren’t there at all, and that sat just fine with Drake. If the two of them weren’t talking, it meant he didn’t have to worry about breaking up a fight. Having to walk through three additional torture chambers-they were more plentiful down in the twisted bowels of the maze-only put more of a damper on any idle conversation. No one was feeling chatty except for Drake, and even he stopped trying to fill the silence after a while.
When they discovered the living quarters of the Protectors of the Hidden Word, they drew their guns and didn’t holster them again. Yet amid the stone chambers-filled with wooden frame walls and floor platforms, as well as blankets and makeshift beds from a variety of eras-they met no resistance. Drake tried counting rooms and beds but decided the quicker they left the place, the better.
“Nate, do you hear it?” Jada whispered, her breathing low and even, her gaze shifting about with a new degree of skittishness.
Drake nodded. They could hear the sound of running water, but not from pipes. He led the way with his flashlight, and at the rear of the warren of rooms that made up the living quarters, he found a small door that led into a natural fissure. The smell hit him even before he entered, and he knew he’d found what passed for a bathroom. Twenty feet below, a narrow river sliced through rock, rushing along an underground course it must have followed for centuries, even millennia.
“That’s disgusting,” Jada said.
“But necessary,” Henriksen said. “Somewhere they’ll have a kitchen. They must hunt for their food and gather greens in secret. They might even go into the city to find-”
“We don’t care about their culture,” Drake said, giving him a hard look.
Henriksen nodded. Interested as he was, he understood this wasn’t why they had come. It wasn’t an anthropology study.
Drake threaded back through the rooms, ducking through doorways until he had led them back to the tunnel they’d diverted from to investigate the quarters. The river had him thinking, wondering if the ravine they’d jumped also once had had water at the bottom. He had a feeling they had almost reached their destination, so he was surprised when the contortions of the labyrinth began to take them upward.
The sound began as a dull roar.
“What is that?” Drake asked.
They backtracked along a dead end turn and then started along a zigzag tunnel that had started as a natural cave and been smoothed and widened by human efforts. The sound diminished and then built again, growing ever louder, until the hissing roar filled the tunnel around them.
When Drake’s flashlight beam picked up the gleam of moisture on the tunnel wall ahead, he knew what they had found.
The cavern was longer and wider than either of the others they’d encountered thus far. The river came rushing in from the right and over a ledge, creating a forty-foot wall of crashing water that filled the vast cavern with a damp chill and a deafening white noise. Their tunnel ended on a plateau at the top of the waterfall.
“It’s beautiful,” Jada said in surprise, raising her voice to be heard.
Their flashlight beams strobed the walls, picking out faded characters and symbols painted in some places and engraved in others. Far above, slits of moonlight provided no real illumination but a glimpse of eyelet crevices that would allow the tiniest bit of sunlight in on a clear day. Long strips of moss ran down the far wall and covered the rocks on either side of the waterfall, both there on the plateau and in the lower half of the cavern below them, and vines of white hellebore, long since adapted to this bizarre subterranean hell, were plentiful amid the moss.
Though the flashlights were powerful, they could make out few details below. But Drake saw at least one tunnel leading away from the area around the bottom of the waterfall, and he suspected that what looked like deeper patches of darkness beyond all but the dimmest glow of their lights might be other such tunnels.
“This is it,” he said. “Down there somewhere.”
Jada scanned her flashlight beam across the other side of the rushing river, then ran it along the plateau toward the edge of the waterfall. Drake saw the stairs the same moment she discovered them, carved into the wall beside the waterfall, descending into the lower cavern. They gleamed with spray, and he knew they would have to watch their step.
The violence began so quickly, Drake barely knew what was happening. Henriksen grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, reaching for his wrist. Drake held his gun in one hand and the flashlight in the other, and for several heartbeats he thought that Henriksen was attacking, making his move now to eliminate them to save the white hellebore. He cracked the man across the skull with the barrel of the Glock, and Henriksen staggered back, dropping to one knee, blood welling on his forehead.