Sala hushed Smets and took a step closer. “I am to presume from your presence here that you successfully overcame my men… Tell me, what happened to Deprez?”
“If you mean the baboon downstairs,” Hawke shouted up, “I gave him the boot.”
Sala looked at Hawke with cold, emotionless eyes. “You are very funny considering your death is only moments away.”
“Oh yeah?” Lea shouted. “So what are you going to do about this then?” She waved the axe handle in the air. “If you want your little clue back you’re going to have to come down here and get it, ya loser!”
Sala smiled. “I think not. We have already taken several photographs of the handle, so you are more than welcome to keep it for yourself. Perhaps you can use it to try and defend yourselves!” He let out a low chuckle.
Lea turned to Hawke and Scarlet and lowered her voice. “Defend ourselves against what, guys?”
Hawke shrugged his shoulders.
“That’s very kind of you,” Scarlet shouted back. “But how can an axe handle defend us against your breath?”
“You will see this is no laughing matter, but now I must go.” Sala gently rubbed his lips, lost in the moment. “When I find what I seek, the world you know will be destroyed forever. Everything you think you know about humanity will be smashed on the rocks of the epiphany I will bring to you all…” he paused and drew a long, deep breath. “I have few regrets in my long life, Lea Donovan. One is not being able to watch you die in this snake pit, and the other is not being chosen to kill your father.”
Lea’s blood ran cold, but before she could find any words, Álvaro Sala dropped the snake into the pit and ordered Smets to close the trapdoors.
The snake hit the straw and lashed out with a violent hiss. Hawke and the others jumped out of its way and kept a concerned eye on it as Smets continued to shut the doors.
Now with one door closed, all they could see were each other’s outlines. Then, as Smets hauled up the other half of the trapdoor and secured the bolts, total darkness fell upon them.
“Joe?”
Hawke heard Lea’s voice in the dark, small and scared. “It’s okay.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“He was just winding you up,” Scarlet said. “He’s obviously a total tossrag.”
Hawke knew it was more than that, and by the sound of her voice, so did Lea, but now was not the time. “Listen, I presume you have a lighter about your person, Cairo?”
“C’est une bonne idée,” Vincent said. “I can hear that damned snake moving around in the straw.”
Scarlet’s reply came a second later when Hawke heard the rotation of a sparkwheel and Scarlet’s face was suddenly in front of him, amber in the glow of the tiny butane flame. “Bien sûr,” she said with a cat-like glance at Vincent.
“I knew I could rely on you.”
“Just call me Zippo,” she said, looking at Lea with a smug grin.
“Like Zippo the clown or Zippo the climbing monkey?” Lea said.
“All right, let’s just get on,” said Hawke, interrupting Scarlet’s reply before it left her lips. “We need to find a way…”
His words were stopped by a strange grating noise which had begun to fill the small cavern.
“What the hell is that?” Scarlet asked.
Vincent frowned. “Sounds like metal scraping against rock.”
“No — something’s moving,” Scarlet said.
Lea stared at the floor. “She’s right! The floor’s moving.”
Hawke realized they were right — the floor was moving. It was almost imperceptible, but slowly he was moving closer to the wall behind him. Worse, he realized Vincent and Scarlet seemed to be moving away from him and Lea at the same time.
“Get this straw out of the way!” he shouted, and began to kick the straw matting away with his boot.
The others did the same but soon wished they hadn’t. Beneath the straw was a metal grated floor that was divided in two and joined in the center. Now, the two halves were retracting toward their separate sides of the cavern, and beneath the grating was a deep pit of snakes sliding over one another in a mass of hissing, slithering tangles.
“Oh — it’s my lifelong dream!” Scarlet’s words were heavy with sarcasm.
“So when the grated floor is fully retracted,” Lea said slowly, “we’ve got nowhere to go but down. Have I got this right?”
Hawke looked grim. “Yes.”
The snake Sala had dropped into the cavern slid down over the edge of the grating and joined the others.
“Not digging this one, Joe,” Lea said.
“I’m not exactly cock-a-hoop over it, either.”
Vincent frowned. “Translation, please.”
“He says let’s get the fuck out of here,” Scarlet said.
The floor continued to slide back into the walls. Now, Hawke and Lea were divided from Scarlet and Vincent by almost a yard.
Hawke strained his eyes around the dimly lit cavern. If the grated floor was retracting like this then it must mean the walls weren’t particularly thick. Sala’s goons wouldn’t have been able to carve the retraction slits into them otherwise, and that gave him hope.
“This isn’t a natural cavern,” he said. “This whole thing is man-made.”
“You think?” Lea said. “Looks pretty realistic to me.”
“Looks realistic, sure, but looks can be deceiving.”
Scarlet sighed. “Ain’t that the truth.”
“I noticed it on the way down — the chute was obviously man-made, and I think all of this is too.”
The floor continued to push back. Now they were on ledges just a few inches wide.
“These grates can’t be rolling back into solid rock,” Hawke continued. “Also, think about where we are — we fell thirty feet from Sala’s study but that was on the top floor. This can’t be the bedrock. This whole place is artificial and if you ask me these walls are fake. It’s just some hideous theater where Sala can watch his victims die.”
As he spoke, he turned on the ledge and pulled out his gun. He aimed it at the rock above Scarlet’s head and fired.
She ducked and the bullet blasted a hole through the rock.
“Thanks for the warning, darling!”
“My pleasure, Cairo.”
“But it worked!” said Lea.
“So get shooting!” Hawke screamed.
They got busy emptying their magazines into the rock face, which they quickly realized was as Hawke had surmised — totally fake and built out of some kind of plaster. Seconds later the holes were big enough to climb through, and they made their way out of the pit with seconds to spare as the floor fully retracted with a heavy thud.
They were now standing on opposite sides of Sala’s killing room and saw it was just as Hawke had described — nothing more than a set made for killing people. It was housed inside what looked like the furnace room.
“That was a close one,” Lea said.
“You can say that again,” Scarlet said. “Just as well we sent Ryan down with Victoria or there’d be a shortage of Huggies in Andorra for the next week and half.”
Vincent frowned. “Why don’t you talk in English?!”
“It’s not worth translating, Vincent,” Hawke said, scowling at Scarlet.
“So what now?” Lea said.
Hawke clenched his jaw. “We need to get this axe back to base because it looks like Sala has a head start on us.”
He scanned the room and saw two doors. One led to a set of metal steps going up to the house, but the other opened out onto stone steps carved out of rock.
“That’s the real bedrock down there,” Hawke said. “Not like Sala’s theater. I say we see where this takes us — we have no idea how many men he’s left up in the main house.”
They made their way down the steps and quickly found themselves in a series of tunnels carved into the rock deep at the base of the château.