Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) (27 page)

41

Carter blinked away tears as she plucked the quills from Lazarus’s body with the multi-tool. There were too many of the barbed spines to count, but while they were the least of his wounds, they were also the easiest for her to deal with.

The attack had been ruthless, razor sharp beaks lancing through what was left of his Kevlar armor and into his body, yet he had never faltered. When they had reached the relative safety of one of the ruined buildings, just before collapsing, he had whispered, “I’ll be okay.”

She knew he was right, but seeing him like this, flesh hanging in ragged strips from his bones, felt like a knife through her soul.

After removing the quills, she did what she could to close the larger lacerations, pressing the muscle and skin back into place. Then she used the sharp spines as impromptu sutures to hold everything together. Even with most of the wounds closed, he looked awful. A patchwork man, held together with toothpicks.

As she began snipping the ends of the shafts off with the wire-cutter built into the multi-tool, his eyes opened. He looked at her for a moment, his gaze steady, betraying none of the excruciating pain he was surely feeling. “Pierce?”

She started to reply, but she had to cough to clear away the emotion that had seized her throat. “He went ahead. There’s a temple at the center of the city. He said that’s where they would go.”

“They?”

“Cerberus. Just after…” She faltered. “We heard shooting. The birds went after them, but a few of them made it to the island.”

“He’ll need my help.” Lazarus attempted to rise, but before Carter could even attempt to stop him he sagged back. “Damn. That hurts.”

Carter couldn’t decide whether to laugh or sob. The sound that came out was something in-between. She could tell that he was already beginning to heal. The bleeding had stopped, and some of more superficial cuts had scabbed over. Hopefully, putting everything where it belonged and stitching him together would accelerate the process, but what he really needed was rest. Even a few hours might make all the difference.

Yeah
, she thought.
Good luck with that
.

“Felice. I’ll be okay.”

“You keep saying that, but… You’re not invincible, Erik.”

“Yes, I am.” He grimaced, and then with the determination of a glacier scraping across a continent, he sat up.

A voice came from behind them. “You should listen to your doctor.”

Carter turned to see Pierce, accompanied by two women and a man—the latter clearly a prisoner—entering through the doorway at the back of the building.

Lazarus chuckled softly. “Not bad, Pierce. Jack would be proud.”

“You can tell him all about it when you’re ready.” Pierce moved closer and knelt beside Carter. “How’s he doing?”

“See for yourself.”

“I’ll be okay,” Lazarus said. “You know how this works.”

Pierce nodded. “I do.” He turned to the others. “Felice and Erik, meet Augustina Gallo and Cintia Dourado.” Almost as an afterthought, he pointed to the sullen man standing away from the others. “That’s Kenner. He’s a dick. But he’s going to help us get Fiona back.”

“She’s not here?” Lazarus asked, his forehead creasing in concern.

Pierce shook his head. “She’s at Cerberus HQ.”

Carter frowned. “We barely made it this far. We’ll be cut to ribbons if we try to leave.”

“There’s a canal that goes under the city. We can use it to get outside, and then we swim for the trees. From there, we make our way to the wall and climb out of here.”

“That might work,” Lazarus said, continuing his relentless struggle to get his feet back under him.

Carter hated the plan, but not as much as the idea of staying where they were. If she had learned one thing during her time with the man who now called himself Lazarus, it was to trust him, no matter how dire the situation looked. As she was about to voice her reluctant support, she heard a distant but familiar roar of an engine.

Despite his injuries, Lazarus was the first to reach the outside entrance to the building. As he stared up at the sky, the sound of rotor blades beating the air began echoing from the walls of the sinkhole. “There goes our ride.”

“Rohn,” Pierce said, disgusted. “I should have gone after the bastard. If we can get to the top, we should be able to get a signal out. Call for a pick up.”

“You don’t think he cut the ropes? Or sabotaged them?” Carter shook her head. “We’re in no shape for a climb like that,” she said, then added, “but there might be another way. We just need to find out where the water goes.”

“She’s right,” Gallo said. “The Amazons sure as hell didn’t climb up and down every time they went out. There has to be another way in, and I’d be willing to bet that canal goes right to it. It probably goes all the way to the river.”

“So instead of a climb, we have to swim?”

“Amazons?” Carter glanced from Gallo to Pierce. “You mean…?”

“Like Xena,” Dourado supplied. “Warrior Princess.”

Carter laughed. “Actually, Gabrielle was the—”

Pierce looked up suddenly. “Augustina, you said the Amazons and Sea Peoples were one and the same, right? Well they would have needed something else besides the map to conquer the known world three thousand years ago.” He looked around as if expecting someone to fill in the blanks.

“Boats?” Carter guessed.

“Ships, actually. We were wondering how the cypress trees got here. Now we know. The Amazons planted them. Cypress wood is extremely hydrophobic. The ancients knew that. It’s long been believed that they used cypress wood for their ships. The Bible says that Noah built the ark out of cypress wood. Don’t you see? This place wasn’t just their city. It was where they grew the timber for their ships.”

“And that helps us…how? Are you suggesting we should build an ark?”

“Of course not. That’s ridiculous.” Pierce grinned. “I was thinking more along the lines of a raft.”

42

Pierce had expected to spend hours hacking away at trees in the canal with Lazarus’s Pathfinder knife. The big man was still in no shape for physical labor, and Pierce was definitely not going to put a blade in Kenner’s hands. Despite the man’s assurances that he would cause no trouble, Pierce had tied him up. Since he was too hardwired for chivalry to ask any of the women to take a turn, Pierce had resigned himself to the prospect of doing all the work himself.

Lazarus, however, had a better idea. He took a spool of what looked like yellow and black rope from his pack and wrapped a length of it around the base of a tree. The trunk was twelve-inches in diameter at the base and about forty-feet tall, a baby compared to those growing outside the city.

“Primacord,” Lazarus explained in response to Pierce’s questioning look. “Basically a rope made out of high explosives. Perfect for small breaching charges.”

“You’re going to blow the trees up? I’ve heard of fishing with dynamite, but never lumberjacking with it.”

Lazarus tucked a slim silver blasting cap into the Primacord knot. “You should probably find cover.”

The detonation was not as spectacular as Pierce had expected, but it was loud and released a shock wave that scattered the Stymphalian birds from their rooftop perch. The strand of explosives did not blow the cypress apart in a shower of splinters, but rather burned through it like an acetylene torch. The tree toppled over onto the terrace with a crash of branches, then slid into the canal.

Using det cord like a laser saw, it took less than an hour to produce the logs necessary to form the raft’s deck, and slightly longer to drag them to the mouth of the tunnel leading out of the city where they began assembling the makeshift vessel. While Pierce and Lazarus lashed the logs together with parachute cord, Gallo, Dourado and Carter wove long strips of bark together to form a shield against another attack by the Stymphalian birds. Once these tasks were complete, they climbed aboard, and Pierce shoved off, using a pole cut from the top of one of the trees to punt the craft toward the daylight at the far end of the tunnel.

As they emerged, Lazarus scanned the sky above for any sign of another attack while the others huddled beneath the bark screen, but the birds didn’t show. Evidently the repeated explosions had driven the creatures off.

Pierce kept his eyes on the water. Gallo had told him about the salamander attack. But his curiosity about the creature was short-lived. All he cared about now was getting out of the sinkhole and finding Fiona.

As Gallo had predicted, the ancient Amazons had erected stone pillars to mark a channel leading south through the swamp. Long before they reached the base of the wall, Pierce could see a gaping hole in the cliff face directly ahead.

Carter stared at it and shook her head. “Great. I hate caves.”

Despite Carter’s apprehension,
the passage out of the sinkhole was uneventful. There were no monsters lurking in the Stygian darkness, no treacherous waterfalls or cataracts, and best of all, no Cerberus gunmen waiting to ambush them. After everything they had endured, it was almost anticlimactic, but Pierce knew their exit was just a brief respite from the ongoing struggle. Cerberus still had Fiona, and he would not rest until she was safe.

The river channel might once have connected with one of the many Amazon tributaries, but time and neglect had altered the landscape. Not long after they emerged from beneath the tepui, the stream became a shallow marsh and the raft bottomed out. They were able to acquire a signal for both GPS and the satellite phone, and made contact with the Aegis office in Rio de Janeiro. Pierce arranged for an extraction. The remoteness of their location meant a wait of nearly a full day, but that would give them time to figure out what to do with Kenner.

“Kill him,” Lazarus said.

Pierce knew, or rather hoped, that Lazarus was bluffing. Shooting the Cerberus men to save Gallo had been one thing, but cold-blooded murder was another. Still, it was a tempting fantasy. “You’re probably right. Leave the body out here. No one will ever find it.”

“No!” Kenner protested. “I can help you. The girl—”

“The girl has a name,” Lazarus said.

“You already said you don’t know where she is,” Pierce said. “You’re of no use to us.”

Kenner’s eyes darted back and forth. “I can tell you what I do know. It might help you find Tyndareus.”

“The plane!” Dourado exclaimed from behind them. She stepped forward and pointed a finger at Kenner. “You were on the Cerberus Learjet.”

Kenner stared back uncertainly, as if trying to gauge how his reaction would be interpreted. “Yes. But I don’t know where I boarded. I was blindfolded from the time I left Tyndareus until the plane was in the air.” He pointed to Gallo. “Ask her. She’ll confirm what I’m saying.”

“It does not matter. I have a record of the plane’s flight plans for the last month. I just need you to tell me how many times you landed before you got to Belem.”

Kenner blinked, but before he could answer, Gallo joined the conversation. “We stopped once. The blinds were lowered so I couldn’t tell where. We were on the ground for maybe an hour.”

“You were in the Azores. That means you left from Rome. Cerberus is in Rome!”

“It’s a big city,” Pierce said.

Dourado shook her head. “Now that I know where to look, I can follow the money moving into Rome from the Cerberus shell corporations. I’ll find it. Just get me to a computer.”

Lazarus stared at Kenner. “I guess we don’t need you anymore.”

“No, wait. I can still help. I know things.”

Pierce glanced at Lazarus, but the big man’s face was unreadable. If eliciting Kenner’s complete cooperation, whatever that was worth, had been Lazarus’s intent, then he had succeeded. That did not solve the problem of what to do with Kenner, but it was a start. “The helicopter will be here in ten hours. That’s how long you’ve got to convince my friend that you’re worth saving. Start talking.”

43

Rome, Italy

“Are you sure this is the place?” Pierce asked.

“Pretty sure,” was the reply, Dourado’s voice in his Bluetooth earpiece. She, along with Gallo, Carter and Kenner, who was zip-tied to his seat, were sitting in a rented van a block away. If Pierce and Lazarus did not make it out, they would call in the Carabinieri.

Dourado didn’t elaborate on the reasons for her certainty, and she didn’t have to. She’d already shown him the financial records tracing the flow of money from a number of Cerberus shell organizations to the
Fondazione Dioscuri
, a nebulous historical preservation society based in Rome. Construction records from the late 1980s confirmed major renovations to the famed Castel Sant’Angelo, underwritten by the same group. And blueprints revealed the extensive work done to parts of the building that were not on the tour route.

Even without the exhaustive compilation, Pierce would have believed her. Dioscuri was the Latin name for Castor and Pollux, the Gemini twins, also known as the Tyndarids—sons of Tyndareus. Their enemy seemed to have a fondness for that particular theme.

Pierce crossed the footbridge over the Fiume Tevere, moving against the current of visitors departing the imposing circular edifice. The structure had served as a mausoleum to Roman emperors, a military fortress, a prison where enemies of the Vatican were held and executed and presently as a national museum. Everything felt so normal that Pierce wondered if they had gotten something wrong.

“It just seems awfully public for the headquarters of a criminal empire.” It was an understatement. Situated less than a quarter of a mile from Vatican City, the
Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo
was in all the guidebooks, and it was one of the most frequently visited landmarks west of the Tiber.

“Camouflage,” Lazarus said, walking beside him. “They’re hiding in plain sight.”

Pierce didn’t know if that was a good thing. He had expected Cerberus Headquarters to be a walled compound, ringed with razor wire, patrolled by uniformed guards with machine guns and dogs. If it had been, he would have brought a squad of Aegis operators, armed to the teeth with all the latest military specs. But for sneaking into a secret basement in a 1,900 year-old castle-turned-museum, less was better, or so Lazarus had assured him.

“Just the two of us,” the big man had said. “Stealth will serve us better than overwhelming force.”

If Kenner was to be believed, most of the Cerberus staff had perished in the sinkhole. Only a token force had remained behind with the head of Cerberus, a man that Kenner had identified as Pollux Tyndareus.

Kenner had not been able to tell them much about Tyndareus, aside from the fact that he was extremely old and very interested in exploiting exotic scientific discoveries for profit. The name was almost certainly an alias, but Dourado had been unable to learn anything about the man, or who he might really be.

As Pierce approached the entrance to the Castel, a museum attendant rushed to intercept him. “The museum is closing,
signore
. No more tickets today.”

“I’m here to see the director,” Pierce replied, his Italian perfect, his manner imperious. “I have an appointment.”

The attendant stared at Lazarus with undisguised skepticism. Both he and Pierce wore loose fitting jackets, which concealed both body armor and weapons, but Lazarus had added a baseball cap, with the bill pulled down low to conceal the scars on his face. The wounds had healed with astonishing rapidity, but even with the tiger-stripe pattern of new pink skin hidden from view, his size alone made him stand out in a crowd. “Both of you?”

“Say that he’s your
consigliere
,” Dourado suggested in Pierce’s ear. “Like Sil in
The Sopranos
.”

Pierce ignored her. “Yes. Both of us.”

The attendant shrugged and waved them through.

They passed through the gateway and entered the open walkway that separated the outer walls from the main fortress. Dourado had loaded the blueprints into their phones, along with turn-by-turn instructions to get them to the locked door that would access the secret basement levels under the building, but Pierce did not need to consult them. He knew the place like the back of his hand, and not just because he had studied the maps during the final leg of their flight. Pierce had been here before.

It had been years since his last visit, but one thing about a city like Rome, where you couldn’t throw a Frisbee without hitting a historically significant landmark, was that nothing really ever changed. But as he was fond of telling his students, even in an old place, you can still find something new.

They passed through a long corridor with walls of travertine blocks, through the atrium, where a statue of the famed Roman emperor Hadrian had once stood, and descended the ramp that led to his tomb. Their destination lay along that route, beneath a sign that read:
ascensore
.

Elevator.

The lift was a relatively new addition to the Castel. It was only three hundred years old, installed by Pope Clement XII in 1734. In addition to being the Vatican’s Death Row for several centuries, Castel Sant’Angelo was also a secondary papal residence, connected to Vatican City by a half-mile long aboveground tunnel called the
Passetto di Borgo
. Clement XII, one of the oldest men ever to be elected as pontiff, had been a forward thinker with respect to accessibility.

The elevator had been upgraded since its installation. Now it looked like a relic from the early 1900s. Pierce and Lazarus waited until the corridor was empty before opening the door and moving into the waiting cage-style car. Pierce slotted a skeleton key into the control panel, and then turned the manual control wheel to the left. Beyond this point, they would have no communication with Dourado. No way to call for help.

As the car descended, Lazarus opened his jacket and readied his MP5K. “Remember why we’re here,” he told Pierce. “Everyone that isn’t Fiona is hostile.”

“Thanks for the ‘stay frosty’ speech, but I’ve done this before. With Jack.” Pierce said.

Lazarus smiled. “Heard you punched a woman.”

Pierce shrugged. “She had it coming.”

It wasn’t true. The woman had been another trespasser at the Roman Forum he had mistaken for a guard, but his nonchalance pulled a chuckle from Lazarus. He’d heard about this routine. Soldiers joking before battle. Reaffirming a bond, like friendship, but deeper. He’d experienced it with Jack, but never with the big man who so rarely said anything.

Lazarus added, “I’ll take point. You watch my six.”

The elevator descended through alternating layers of masonry and bedrock until arriving at the basement. Officially, the subterranean levels of the fortress remained unexcavated, but clearly that was not the whole story. A simple passage led away from the elevator. A metal door awaited them at the far end. Although newer than the elevator, it was shrouded in cobwebs and spotted with corrosion.

“Doesn’t look like anyone’s used this door in ages,” Pierce remarked. “They must have another way in. Something that doesn’t show on the blueprints.”

“That may work in our favor,” Lazarus said.

Pierce approached the door and swept it with his black box. The readings showed no electrical fields indicating an alarm system, so he tried the door. “Locked.”

“I’ll knock.” Lazarus stepped forward and placed a length of what looked like foam insulation over the latch plate, fixing it in place with tape. He motioned for Pierce to back up a few steps, and then he hit the detonator switch. There was a loud bang, like a car backfiring, and the door flew open. Lazarus immediately charged through, his MP5K at the ready. Pierce moved in behind him, searching for a target in the smoky room.

Pierce recognized the corridor from both the blueprints and firsthand accounts from Gallo and Kenner. There were doors to either side, and at the far end, a modern elevator, but little else of note.

“It’s clear,” Lazarus said. “But stay sharp. We don’t know what’s behind these doors.”

Pierce maintained a watch on the corridor while Lazarus methodically searched each room. They found personal quarters, classrooms and storage closets, but no Cerberus personnel and no Fiona. As they neared the end, Pierce finally voiced the thought that had been nagging at him for several minutes.

“Where is everyone?”

“We knew there would be minimal personnel,” Lazarus said. From his tone, Pierce guessed that the big man was as anxious about the situation as he. He stared at the sliding metal doors to the elevator for several seconds, then walked toward it.

The doors slid open revealing an empty car. Lazarus stepped inside, but as Pierce moved to join him, he raised a hand. “Better wait here.”

“If they’re waiting for you,” Pierce said, “you’re going to need me.”

“If they’re waiting, they’ll kill us both.”

Before Pierce could protest, the doors closed and he was left alone.