Thieves Like Us 01 - Thieves Like Us (33 page)

A searing heat welled up from the split, together with a red, dangerous glow like molten metal.

‘Magma!’ Coldhardt shouted. ‘Jonah, get up! If it spills into here it’ll burn the flesh from our bones.’

Jonah was already struggling to his feet when he felt Yianna twisting free of his grip as she tried to fling herself into the chasm.

‘I’d sooner die than go back to my father!’ she screamed.

Coldhardt grabbed her by the back of the neck and hauled her away from the smoking split in the rock. ‘After what you did to my children,’ he hissed, ‘a death like that would be far, far too quick.’

He squeezed a little harder, and Yianna collapsed to the floor, unconscious.

Jonah dragged her body along to where Tye was waiting beneath the exit hole. Together they handed Yianna up to Con and Patch. ‘Good riddance,’ Jonah murmured as the girl was yanked away from them, her long, bloodied legs vanishing upwards into the darkness. Jonah made a stirrup with his fingers and gestured to Tye he could bunk her up. She used him as
a springboard, Con and Patch helping her through.

Then a further tremor and a fierce wave of heat almost knocked him over. It was like being trapped inside a volcano about to blow. He knew he should jump up for safety, quickly, before …

But he found himself turning. Coldhardt was watching him. The old man’s features seemed almost satanic in the ruddy glare of the underground fire.

Jonah kept his hands in the stirrup shape. ‘Come on, then!’

Coldhardt advanced on him and gripped Jonah by the waist.

And Jonah found himself lifted up to where six reaching hands were grabbing for him. They snatched him up through the hole to safety. The ground was hot and hard beneath his back, and in the fading torchlight he looked up at their grimy, grinning faces. Saw the relief there.

Then Jonah rolled back over and offered his own hands to Coldhardt. He pulled up with all his strength, the others helping him, until suddenly Coldhardt lay panting on the ground beside them, clutching his treasures tightly to his chest.

But still they weren’t safe.

‘Goddamn torch!’ Motti shouted. ‘The door’s jammed, mechanism’s fouled up. I can’t see to fix it.’

The ground shook again, the noise of the rending rock almost too low to hear.

‘We have to get out of here!’ Tye shouted.

‘Duh!’ said Motti. ‘Anyone got a match? I can’t see a damn –’

Con had reached into Coldhardt’s pocket and
pulled out the old arrowhead. ‘Get ready, Motti,’ she shouted, drawing back her arm. ‘I don’t know how long you’ll have – but make it count, yes?’

And she hurled the arrow at the false door in the shallow alcove. The impact detonated the incendiary panel, which burst into white fire like a miniature sun, so bright and hot that Jonah thought his eyes might boil away. At the other end of the short tunnel, Motti whooped for joy.

‘That’s good!’ he shouted. ‘I can see. All right, people, get ready. I’m gonna lick this sucker!’

A roaring, rumbling noise began to build over the sound of the incendiary. ‘And make it fast, Motti!’ bellowed Coldhardt, back on his feet again.

The trembling ground was littered with treasures and relics, and Jonah grabbed at them just as greedily as the others. No longer scared. Determined.

This had to count.

‘Open sesame!’ Motti shouted as the stone slid slowly open.

‘All right, everyone out!’ Coldhardt ordered, leading the charge for the exit. Jonah picked up Yianna and half-dragged, half-carried her out of the smoky cave and into the cold, damp Macedonian night.

The light rain felt intoxicating and cool against his skin. Jonah dropped Yianna and collapsed in a pile of wet grass, pressing his burning cheeks into it, revelling in it.

‘We must seal the entrance,’ Coldhardt insisted. ‘Use the rest of that plastic explosive, Motti. Whatever’s down there now, stays down there.’

‘But we could set off an even bigger earthquake –’

‘
Do it!
’

‘Understood.’ Motti spoke it like a salute and grabbed hold of Patch to give him a hand.

‘Don’t get comfy,’ Tye told Jonah, dragging him back to his feet. ‘This won’t be a very healthy place to be in a few minutes.’

‘Tell that to them,’ said Jonah, pointing behind her to where two men in ranger-style uniforms were shouting and yelling in some foreign language, scrambling down the side of the gully to get to them.

Coldhardt crossed to help Motti and Patch at the cave entrance. ‘Con, deal with them, would you?’

Jonah watched, bemused, as Con walked up to the men, all smiles, then floored one with an uppercut to the jaw and knocked down the other with a chop to the neck. He knew it was bad of him, but he couldn’t help laughing.

‘What?’ Con glowered at him. ‘You think I’m talking to park rangers in Macedonian after a night like this? Go to hell!’

‘Hell?’ Jonah looked at Tye, marvelling that they were all still standing. ‘Been there, done that.’

‘Next time,’ she said, ‘we’ll have to get T-shirts done.’

With everyone safely out the way at the top of the gully, Motti let off the charges. The rainy night was lit up firework-bright with a fat explosion. It seemed as though half the foothills were thrown up in the air. In the back of the Jeep, Jonah watched as ton after ton of rock and silt came crashing down over the entrance to the ruined catacombs, burying it for ever. The ground juddered and shook, and soon the car roof rang and rattled with the rain of debris sweeping down from the sky.

The tremors kept on as the echoes of the explosion rolled out to the dark shades of the horizon. Had they triggered a full-scale earthquake?

Then, at long last, the ground was still beneath Jonah’s feet. He waited tensely but as the minutes stretched by it stayed still.

And he thanked God for it.

The rangers dozed through the whole thing, lying side by side in the back seat of their 4×4. One of them had the keys to Samraj’s Range Rover stuffed in his pockets with a note reading KEEP ME, I’M YOURS in Albanian, which was the closest Con could get to their native tongue. After all, she’d argued, no one else would be coming to claim it.

Both men were sweetly oblivious as Coldhardt, his children and their captive drove away into the night’s treacherous terrain.

On board the plane, Patch and Con had fallen asleep and Coldhardt was in a private reverie, gloating over the jewels and chains and coins he had taken from Ophiuchus’s fiery tomb. Yianna was bundled up in the hold, out of sight if not earshot. She’d finally tired of the angry tirades and had fallen quiet, at least for now.

Tye was flying them over an ocean of dark cloud, through the long purple bruise of the night sky.

Jonah wanted to relax, but his mind was still choked with all he had seen. He turned to Motti, who was sitting next to him, idly polishing his glasses on his dusty T-shirt, leaning his head against the window.

‘What’re you thinking?’ Jonah asked quietly.

He shrugged. ‘Just about what happened to me down there. And what happened to the rest of you …’

‘And here I was trying to forget about all that.’

‘You gotta peg it in your head, man, or it just eats you alive,’ Motti told him. ‘I mean, I’m sitting here wondering why I didn’t go head-crazy like the rest of you. I just went
out
, you know? There was something there I tripped, man, some trigger – gas, a blow dart, I dunno. Made me all, “Yeah, come on in, water’s great”, so I didn’t notice the sharks circling.’

Jonah nodded. ‘So you think maybe that whatever hit you stopped you tripping out on the snake-root spores?’

‘If it
was
spores,’ said Motti quietly. ‘I ain’t never heard of shock bringing anyone round from a bad trip before. And why didn’t we just fall straight back under when the blast faded?’

Jonah wasn’t sure he liked where this conversation was heading. ‘What, so you think what happened down there was for real? That Ophiuchus really
did
open those doors to the – the higher realities or whatever? And that those demon wraith things were waiting on the other side?’

‘For you to
join
them on the other side,’ said Motti in a spooky voice. He laughed unexpectedly. ‘Well, it’s one explanation. But then, try this for size. What if the old guy on the altar was just another cultist – one who had the real long lifespan thing going down? Say he’d found a back way in at some point, probably known only to the real-deal cultists – the ones who’d sooner die than go to someone like Samraj for help. And ’cause they know they got some serious secrets to keep down there, and ’cause they know they got, like, this rogue group splinter cell thing going on, they rigged up this state-of-the-art intruder alarm. Some projection-system set up. A big VR rig – virtual reality, right? Anyone comes in uninvited, they see bad, freaky, weird stuff. Drives them out of their skulls, turns them crazy.’

‘But like you said, you never even saw the trip-out stuff,’ said Jonah slowly. ‘Something got to you before that all kicked off.’

‘Right.’ Motti nodded. ‘So perhaps the first person through those big bronze doors – the first intruder – gets hypnotised somehow. Gets
programmed
. While
his buddies stand around helpless being driven crazy by the VR projections, this post-hypnotic suggestion thing kicks in – and it makes him kill every one of them. And the last person he kills is himself. Total wipeout.’

Jonah frowned. ‘You really think that’s possible? That it was all computers and special effects and not … not demons and stuff?’

‘Man, I gotta believe it.’ Motti turned and looked back out at the dark, brooding landscape through the plane window. ‘’Cause if I
was
under some devil-charm shit … if I wasn’t meant to see all that scare-you-out-of-your-mind stuff …’ He swallowed. ‘… then just what did those creatures down there have waiting in store for me?’

Jonah felt a shiver run through him. It stayed in his spine till the first pink rays of sunlight came to rouse and warm the uncertain sky, and they were close to home.

Home
, he thought.

He closed his eyes and lingered on the word. It stayed solid and real, while the horrors slowly ebbed away.

The next day Tye found herself back in the driving seat – although this time, the ride was far smoother. Besides the sale of the treasures looted from the Macedonian tomb, there was just one other piece of business to take care of: Yianna.

So with Coldhardt for company, Tye had driven the girl back to Demnos’s mansion outside Florence. Now, while Demnos and Coldhardt talked business in private,
she kept watch over their charge in a luxurious sitting room. And as she watched Yianna, miserable and distracted in the home that had become her prison, Tye felt just a trace of kinship. She knew what it was like trying to measure up to a memory – though thank God her own father had been too poor to reach Demnos’s levels of obsession. That was the privilege and curse of the truly loaded, Tye decided. You could come so close to making your dreams reality, but then you had to live with the consequences.

She looked up as Demnos and Coldhardt re-entered the room. Yianna gazed coldly ahead; Tye had the distinct impression that if the girl’s good leg hadn’t been half-pulverised in the rockfall she’d have been kicking the place in. As it was, she was a captive audience in every sense.

Demnos looked at his daughter, his eyes brimming with tears and compassion. ‘Coldhardt has told me how Samraj abducted you. Brainwashed you. Turned you against me.’

‘She did no such thing,’ Yianna hissed. ‘I have
always
hated you, Father.’

‘You see?’ said Coldhardt sadly. ‘Samraj did her job well.’

‘He’s lying, you idiot! Can’t you see that?’ Yianna cried. ‘He was working for her, against you! His people broke into here when you were away, photographed your pieces of the Ophiuchus parchment –’

Coldhardt sighed. ‘Such a shame to see a young mind so poisoned.’

Tye wasn’t sure whether to feel happy that they were getting away with it, or sorry for Demnos. It was
obvious that he didn’t believe Yianna’s accusations for a moment – or, more likely, didn’t want to believe that his daughter could despise him so deeply without an enemy’s help. ‘Oh, my poor child,’ he said, ‘I have neglected you so badly. You shall see the finest psychiatrists, specialists –’

‘There’s nothing wrong with my mind, you useless old fool!’ Yianna shouted. But Tye could see that with every mean word she dug her grave a little deeper.

‘These people will help you … no matter how long it takes. I will have you back again, my own sweet Yianna.’

Coldhardt cleared his throat. ‘Of course, now it’s clear that Amrita is a dead end, perhaps conventional medicine can help Yianna’s body while you care for her mind.’

‘We shall explore every possible route,’ said Demnos, putting a bearlike arm around his skinny daughter, who held herself stock-still in his grip. ‘From now on I shall tend you more closely than ever. Whenever you turn around I shall be here. Ready to cherish you.’

Yianna let out a deep, mournful wail.

Demnos smiled and nodded fondly. ‘From now until our dying days.’

Coldhardt and Tye saw themselves out.

‘Yianna may not live for ever,’ said Tye, ‘but I’ve a feeling it’s going to seem like it.’

Tye was glad to learn that Con had put the champagne on ice for their arrival back in Geneva. The job was pretty much a wrap, and it was time to celebrate
– a good result, and no casualties.

This time.

Demnos had paid Coldhardt well for his services, not only for laying bare the truth of Samraj’s entire operation, but for bringing back his daughter. Now he had information on Serpens Biotech’s horrible researches on the cultists’ genomes, he intended to use it to his own advantage. Revelations of illegal human experimentation could knock millions off Serpens’ stock value, allowing him to steam in and buy up the whole enterprise – always assuming he had any money left once he’d attended the forthcoming auction of Ophiuchus’s treasures and relics. A select handful of private collectors had been invited to Berne to bid. Coldhardt was expecting record levels of profit – and his Talent would each receive ten per cent for their labours.