Spartan Gold - Cussler Clive (полная версия книги .TXT) 📗

“What is this place?” Remi panted.

“I don’t know that it has a name,” Sam replied, “but I’m guessing it’s still part of the last-ditch defense theory—attackers come down here, get trapped, then are ambushed by the defenders.” He licked his finger and held it up. “There’s air movement.” He turned in a circle, trying to localize it, then shook his head. “Can’t tell where it’s coming from.”

Remi wasn’t listening. Eyes closed, she turned first this way, then that, her hands at her waist, fingers alternately left and right. “Retracing our steps,” she finally whispered. “That way’s the courtyard.” She pointed down the left tunnel. “I think. If there’s a hidden entrance, it’s got to be there.”

“Good enough for me,” Sam said.

He took her hand and they set off again.

Time and again the tunnel branched off and each time Remi would stop, repeat her slow-motion, eyes-closed spin, then point.

After another hour their tunnel came to an abrupt dead end—or near dead end. Leaning against the wall was a wooden ladder; roughly hewn from what looked like red oak, the uprights and rungs were slightly crooked. They shined their lights upward. The ladder, well over thirty feet tall, ended at a wooden hatch.

“Smell that?” Remi said. “It’s rain, Sam. We’re close.”

He nodded absently, eyes poring over the ladder. “This is ancient,” he murmured. “It could be original. This could be hundreds of years old.”

“That’s wonderful, Sam, but right now all I care about is whether it’ll take our weight.”

He gave the ladder a twist, then put his weight on the bottom rung. It creaked, but held. “Give me the pry bar, will you?”

He tucked it into his belt and climbed up to the hatch. “It’s locked,” he called down.

He wriggled the pry bar under the edge and wrenched once, then again, then once more and the latch popped open. Sam threw open the hatch. Fresh air rushed through the opening and down the ladder.

“We’re in one of the turrets,” Sam whispered down.

He boosted himself up and out, then Remi followed. As her head cleared the opening, outside the door they heard the scuff of a shoe on stone. Sam helped Remi the rest of the way out and together they crept to the door.

Over the railing they could see a guard—the one from before, they assumed—strolling across the courtyard, flashlight panning left and right. The man turned around, shined his flashlight briefly over the walkways, then disappeared through the arch.

They gave him thirty seconds to move off a safe distance, then trotted down the walkway, left down the steps, then through the courtyard and into the tunnel they’d first entered.

Outside it was still raining and the temperature had dropped twenty degrees. The cold washed over them. They looked around to get their bearings; they were back where they’d started. Ahead, across the plaza, lay the red-roofed outbuildings. His progress marked by his flashlight, the guard was a hundred yards away and heading toward the reception area.

“Had enough prowling for one night?” Sam asked Remi.

“And then some,” Remi replied. “Besides, knowing you as I do, I’m sure there’s plenty of skulking left in our future.”

“Safe bet.”

Together they stepped out into the rain.

CHAPTER 33

GRAND HOTEL BEAUVAU

An hour later, freshly showered and enjoying their second room-service Bombay Sapphire Gibson, Sam and Remi sat on their balcony and looked out over the Vieux Port. The lights of the city reflected off the water’s surface in a mosaic of red, yellow, and blue that slowly rippled with the falling rain. In the distance they could hear the mournful howl of a foghorn, and closer in the occasional clang of a buoy.

The phone trilled. Sam checked the screen: It was Rube. As soon as they got back to the hotel he had called Haywood, given him a purposely vague recounting of the night’s events, and asked him to call back.

Sam closed the balcony door, then answered and put the phone on speaker. “Rube, please tell us Kholkov and his merry band are in custody.”

“Sorry, no. The French DCPJ can’t find them.”

“Wish I could say I was surprised.”

“Me, too. Ready to quit and come home now?

“Not on your life.”

“Remi?”

“No chance.”

“Well, on the bright side, Kholkov’s name and picture are everywhere. If he tries to leave the country through an airport, port, or train station, they’ll pick him up.”

“Then again,” Sam said, “from what you told me it sounds like the Spetsnaz are trained to slip across borders. And he doesn’t strike me as stupid enough to walk into an airport.”

“True.”

“What about Bondaruk?” Remi asked. “Any chance of digging into his family’s skeleton closet and figuring out what’s driving him?”

“Possibly. It turns out the Iranian Pasdaran colonel who was Bondaruk’s handler during the border war ran into some trouble with the Ayatollah a few years later. We’re not sure what the rigmarole was about, but the colonel—his name is Aref Ghasemi—escaped to London and started working for the British. He’s still there. I’ve got someone reaching out to him.”

“Thanks, Rube,” Remi said, and hung up.

The next morning they slept in until nine and had breakfast on the balcony. The previous night’s rain had disappeared, leaving behind a blue sky with scattered cotton-puff clouds. Over coffee they called Selma, who was awake despite it being nearly midnight in California. As far as they could tell, their chief researcher slept only five or so hours a night but never seemed the worse for it.

Leaving out the finer details, Sam told her about finding the Chateau d’If hiding place empty. Remi added, “The cicada was there, though, and it looked like a perfect match for Laurent’s chisel stamp.”

“That’s better than nothing,” Selma said. “I’m making some headway on deciphering lines three and four on the bottle, but as for the rest, zilch. And I think I know why: There’s a third key.”

“Explain,” Sam said.

“Laurent’s book is one key and the bottle we have is another—at least the first four lines are. I’m guessing the third key is another bottle. We need all three to cross-reference and decode the rest of the lines.”

“This feels convoluted,” Remi said.

“From our perspective, maybe, but we’ve got to make some assumptions: first, that Laurent intended to hide the twelve bottles from the original case individually, at scattered locations—his ‘arrows on a map’ to whatever’s at the end of all this.”

“We need to find a name for this thing,” Sam said.

“Napoleon’s Gold,” Remi suggested with a shrug.

“Works for me.”

Selma said, “Okay, Napoleon’s Gold. I suspect he meant it to work like this: Find one bottle, decode it with the book, then follow the riddle to another bottle—”

Sam caught on: “Then use that label’s code with the book and the first bottle to decode the next line—”

“And its riddle, which leads to yet another bottle . . . and so forth. The good news is—and this is another guess—I don’t think there’s any sequence to the code—in other words, Laurent designed it so any bottle would lead to another riddle.”

Remi said, “If all this is right, why did he hide three bottles together at d’If?”

“No idea. We might find out down the road.”

“We’re ignoring the elephant in the room,” Sam said. “We know for sure one of the bottles is lost—the shard from the Pocomoke proves that. Without that bottle, we could be missing the last riddle—the one that points us to Napoleon’s Gold.”