Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) (10 page)

“I appreciate the pep talk, but the Mother Tongue isn’t just about knowing what the words sound like or even what they mean. It’s deeper than that.”

Fiona struggled to think of a way to explain the mechanics of the mysterious language, a combination of vibrational frequencies and focused intention that could affect matter at the subatomic level. She had no doubt that if she was able to master the words and frame the appropriate mental image, the stone wall would become as insubstantial as mist, but doing that was like trying to move a muscle by telling it to move. Mastery of the Mother Tongue was more a subconscious process than a conscious one.

But there was no other choice.

She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and envisioned a tunnel through the rock wall that led out of the cavern. As she did that, she began to clap her hands against her thighs, pounding out a slow but regular rhythm. Then she began to sing.

Her grandmother had taught her the chant, the first words of the Siletz language that she had ever learned. It was a song to the spirits of the sea, praising the power and beauty of the waves, thanking the spirits for the bountiful gift of fish and oysters that sustained her people from one turning of the seasons to the next.

The thought of her people, the Siletz Nation, all but extinct now, nearly broke her out of the rhythm, but she focused on the words and let herself be carried along, like a leaf on the wind.

The chant was repetitive, but she gradually changed the words of the song, asking the spirits to open the door to the world beneath the sun. It was not meant as a literal prayer. She was, more than anything, hoping to get lucky and find the right words. Hopefully, the words for ‘open the magic door’ were the same in both the Mother Tongue and the language Fiona’s grandmother had taught her, but either her mental discipline was insufficient, or the words just weren’t right.

Nothing was happening.

She tried harder to visualize the rock opening up, and chanted the words again.

Without warning, something like a gust of wind pushed her forward, slamming her against the stone wall and silencing both the chant and the persistent beat she had been clapping. She felt a tightness in her inner ear, the result of a sudden change in air pressure that went from uncomfortable to agonizing in the space of a heartbeat. Before she could start to make sense of it, she was assaulted again, this time by an ear-splitting sound, like a jet engine tearing itself apart.

Is this something I did?

She turned to Pierce, who seemed equally bewildered by what was happening. The noise was coming from behind them, from out of the depths of the Labyrinth. In the dark mouth of the passage back across the bridge, she glimpsed a dull red glow, growing brighter. The maze had been transformed into a passage to Hell itself.

Then the ground heaved beneath her as the world came apart at the seams.

11

Pierce leapt forward and threw the Lion skin over Fiona as a shower of loose earth and rocks rained down. He could feel the impact of larger stones striking the thick pelt. It had weathered a storm of bullets, dissipating their ballistic velocity so effectively that he had barely noticed, but he doubted even the legendary lion hide could protect them against a Volkswagen-sized boulder. He looked out from beneath the skin’s protective shadow, searching for some refuge from the cave in. What he saw was not encouraging.

Fissures appeared in the ledge, zigzagging like lightning bolts, transforming the solid ground underfoot into a fractured and fragile web. The low persistent rumble of the collapse was briefly punctuated by a shriek of twisting metal. The bridge tore loose, along with a generous portion of the ledge, disappearing into the chasm below. Pierce barely had time to press himself and Fiona flat against the wall before the floor crumbled as well. That was when he saw an opening in the wall.

It had not been there a moment before. Either the tremor had broken through, or Fiona’s chant had worked. Regardless of the explanation, there was now a hole where there had been none. Maybe it led to salvation, maybe it led nowhere, but either option was preferable to staying put and waiting to die. He bundled Fiona into his arms and leapt into the gap.

There was no floor beneath them now, just a V-shaped crevice, widening with every passing second. Pierce felt his feet sink deeper like a wedge driven into a log. Each step was a struggle. His left foot caught and he pitched forward, Fiona’s weight pulling him off balance. She seemed to sense that he was falling and slipped free of his grasp, catching herself and steadying him. The shift was just enough to free his foot. He managed to stumble forward out of the spill, realizing only after a few steps that he was on flat ground.

“We made it!” Fiona said.

Pierce took a few more steps before Fiona’s words registered. His mouth and nose were full of grit, but the air was clearer, cooler. He staggered to a halt and lifted the Lion skin away from his eyes. Patches of scruffy grass grew across rocky terrain. He looked up, and saw stars in the black expanse overhead.

Behind them, the summit of Mount Psiloritis was outlined against the night sky, and much closer, there was a cliff face rent by a jagged crack. A plume of dust rose from the gap like a smoke signal. He wasn’t sure where they were, but given the serpentine nature of the Labyrinth, they were probably less than a mile from the entrance to the cave.

Fiona bent over beside him, hands on her knees as if on the verge of exhaustion, but laughing. While he shared her sense of relief at their escape, another emotion burned hotter.

Rage.

Kenner had blown up the Labyrinth, probably expecting to seal them in, to die a slow death of starvation, rather than killing them outright. But the intent was the same. He had tried to kill them. Both of them. And Pierce couldn’t let that go unanswered.

Yet, revenge alone was not Pierce’s sole motivation. There was more to this than Kenner’s ambition. The man was working with someone else, someone with a lot of resources and few scruples. Kenner was also now in possession of at least two items that Alexander Diotrephes had seen fit to hide away in the Labyrinth’s forgotten depths. There was no telling where those artifacts would lead him. The
Heracleia
alone might contain enough information to help Kenner unlock the genetic treasure he sought—the secret of how to make viable chimeras—not to mention other revelations that might overturn everything the Herculean Society had accomplished over the millennia.

To say that the situation was dire seemed like an understatement. But like Fiona said, they were alive. Where there was life, there was hope. He allowed her a few more seconds to catch her breath then clapped her on the back. “Come on. We’ve got work to do.”

12

Gibraltar

The skipper of the flat-bottomed launch drove the bow end of his craft up onto the sloping rocky beach and shouted for his lone passenger to jump ashore. Before the words finished leaving his lips, Augustina Gallo had already hopped out. She knew the drill. This was not her first visit to Gorham’s Cave.

She landed lightly on the wet rocks and scrambled up ahead of an incoming breaker. Above the tide line, she turned and threw a wave to her ferryman. Then she picked her way through the shifting mass of driftwood and rocks to the opening in the sheer cliff.

The cave was dark, lit only by ambient daylight, very little of which found its way in. It was still early, but once the sun passed its midday zenith, the east-facing cliff would fall under the shadow of the legendary Rock of Gibraltar, and even this vestige of illumination would be gone. Gallo removed her sunglasses, which helped a little, but she had to wait a few minutes for her eyes to adjust, before continuing inside.

A wooden boardwalk had been constructed through the middle of the vast hollow, branching out to areas where archaeologists had discovered artifacts and other signs of ancient habitation. Once, Gorham’s Cave had been high and dry, three miles from the shore of the Alboran Sea, where it had provided a refuge for a sizable population of Neanderthals for more than a hundred thousand years. Changing climates had spelled doom for the cave’s occupants, and then the sea level raised to the point where the waves were now practically lapping at the door. The inaccessibility of the entrance meant that the archaeological record from that period was virtually pristine. The cave complex, which was awaiting designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was off limits to the public. It was available only to authorized researchers, though at present, no one was working the site. Gallo had the place to herself.

She moved to the rear of the cave, where she left the marked path and climbed up to a concealed niche. Even from just a few feet away, the opening was impossible to see. Gallo paused to turn on her phone’s flashlight, then moved into the recess.

The light revealed a shape carved into the wall, not Neanderthal art, though it might easily have been mistaken for that, but rather a simple circle, crossed by parallel vertical lines. Just past it, a rickety-looking staircase led up to a closed wooden door, secured with a badly rusted padlock.

She reached out to what looked like a nub of rock on the adjacent wall and gave it a twist, revealing a modern handprint scanner. She placed her right palm flat against the glass plate. There was a faint flash of light as the scanner verified her identity, and then the entire door—padlock, frame and all—swung away to reveal another, almost completely unknown, section of the cave.

Gallo entered, careful to keep her right wrist turned up at all times, exposing the mark tattooed there. It was the same mark carved on the nearby wall, the distinctive sigil of the secret society into which she had been initiated, and which her boyfriend, George Pierce, was now the director: the Herculean Society.

The handprint reader was the last of a series of measures designed to protect this secret part of the cave from unwanted visitors. The tattoo on her hand was a different sort of defensive mechanism, designed to protect
her
from what lived inside.

Long before being ‘discovered’ by its namesake, a British infantry captain in 1907, Gorham’s Cave had been one of more than a score of citadels established by the Society and its enigmatic founder, Alexander Diotrephes. The citadels had served an important role in an era when weeks or even months of travel was required to reach far-flung destinations. In modern military terms, the citadels served as both forward operating bases and supply depots for Society agents carrying out important missions around the globe. But for a brief period starting in 2009, when it had been temporarily abandoned, this cave, the original citadel, had served as the headquarters for all Herculean Society operations. It was not a coincidence that, from ancient times, the strait that separated the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean had been called the Pillars of Hercules.

Now that high speed air travel had shrunk the world, the citadels served more as repositories for the secrets the Society was obliged to safeguard. It was one such secret that prompted Gallo to pause a few steps beyond the doorway and lift her gaze to the ceiling. The upper reaches of this cavern were cloaked in shadow, but she could hear them, creeping stealthily amidst the hanging stalactites.

They were called the Forgotten, and once, long ago, they had been human. Now they were…something else.

In ancient times, Alexander Diotrephes, the man who would someday be remembered as the legendary Hercules, had waged a long war against mankind’s greatest enemy: Death. In the early days of that struggle, he had conducted radical scientific experiments with human tissue, and inadvertently unleashed a plague that had transformed an entire city—men, women and children—into terrifying monstrosities. Imbued with the very immortality he sought, but cursed with a primal thirst for human blood, the wraith-like creatures were the inspiration for nearly every legend of ghouls and vampires.

The Forgotten were Alexander’s greatest regret, the offspring of his hubris. He labored for centuries, looking for a cure, and in return, the Forgotten served as guardians for the Herculean Society citadels. It was a dangerous alliance. Although Alexander had eventually synthesized a compound to satiate their macabre hunger, the instinct to hunt and consume living victims remained strong. Finding some kind of permanent cure for the Forgotten remained one of the Herculean Society’s secondary missions, but the prospects for a workable solution were not good. The problem had confounded Alexander for more than three thousand years.

The tattoo on Gallo’s wrist had no special intrinsic power to repel the creatures. But it was the symbol of an ancient agreement, made with a man who no longer inhabited the world of humankind. The Forgotten were on the honor system.

“I really do despise this place.”

Her voice was soft, with a flowing drawl that was in stark contrast to most people’s first impression of her. Despite her surname, to say nothing of her appearance—long black hair, olive complexion, and both the face and physique of an Italian swimsuit model—Augustina Gallo was about as Roman as a Georgia peach. A decade living abroad, teaching classical studies and mythology at the University of Athens, had reduced none of her genteel Southern charm.

Pierce, seated at a table in the center of the room, nodded but did not look up from his computer screen. The citadels were short on creature comforts, but one thing they did have was an electronic lifeline to the outside world, courtesy of concealed fiber optic lines that provided high speed Internet access for both computers and phones.

Behind Pierce, Fiona lay stretched out on a cot. She rolled over and propped herself up on her elbows. “Hey, Aunt Gus.”

Gallo returned a patient smile. “Darlin’, just because we happen to be in the same after-school club, don’t think for a second that you are entitled to eschew proper decorum.”

Fiona rolled her eyes, and then in an exaggerated approximation of Gallo’s style of speech, said, “Professor Gallo, I humbly beg your pardon for my overly familiar manner of address.”

“Better.”

Ordinarily, Gallo would have quietly tolerated Fiona’s youthful banter, but Pierce’s demand that she drop everything and fly to Gibraltar to join him in the citadel, surrounded by an army of creepy vampires, had trimmed her fuse down to a nub. She stopped by Pierce, who was too preoccupied by his work to even notice the exchange between his adopted ‘niece’ and his long-time girlfriend and confidant. She cleared her throat. “Ahem.”

Pierce looked up, but his expression was not the least bit apologetic. “Grab a chair. There’s a lot to go over.”

His uncharacteristically intense demeanor stopped her in her tracks. Whatever the crisis he was dealing with, it had robbed him of his customary easy-going nature. She decided to dial back her own irritation in favor of a more supportive role, and settled in beside him. “What can I do?”

Pierce, who was in the midst of sending a live-chat message, did not immediately answer. Gallo recognized the user name of the person on the receiving end. It belonged to Cintia Dourado, the Herculean Society’s senior logistician.

Dourado’s affiliation with the Society went back even further than Pierce’s. As a teenaged prodigy living in the slums of her native Belem, Brazil, the self-styled ‘black hat’ had, on a whim, followed a trail of whispered rumors to their source. She hacked the Herculean Society’s computer network. Alexander, impressed by her innate talent, and perhaps more importantly, recognizing that the best defense against a hacker of Dourado’s skill was Dourado herself, had personally recruited her into the fold. He had used her to organize operations around the globe and to search out and erase rumors of the sort that had led her to the Society in the first place. Gallo had never met Dourado in person—the young woman was the quintessential telecommuter, now operating from a slightly more upscale residence in Belem—but they had communicated often by e-mail and teleconference.

Pierce sent his message, and then he turned to face Gallo. His expression remained grim, which prompted Gallo to lean forward and give him a light kiss on the lips. When she drew back, she saw little change. “What’s wrong?”

“Fiona and I had a little run-in with your old boyfriend.”

The acid in his tone felt like a physical assault. “My old…?”

“Liam Kenner. He tried to kill us.”

“Kenner and I were never… Wait. Tried to
kill
you? How? Why?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. He knew we’d go to Heraklion. He knew that we would be going after the Phaistos Disc.”

It took a moment for the significance of this to sink in. Gallo felt her pulse quicken as her body went into full defensive mode. “You don’t actually think that I had anything to do with that? I haven’t spoken to Kenner in years. I haven’t even thought about him. And not that it’s any of your business, but we were never together. He asked me out. I refused. End of story.”

Pierce closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” he said, eyes still closed. “I guess almost getting buried under Mount Psiloritis has me a little on edge.”

Gallo glanced over at Fiona, who was watching the exchange wide-eyed. The mere fact of the girl’s presence was enough for her to bring her ire under control—she was averse to causing a scene. Though the matter was far from resolved. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

Pierce nodded and related the events of the previous evening, beginning with the immediate aftermath of their escape from the museum, when Kenner first accosted Fiona, and ending with the early morning flight to the citadel.

“He’s been tracking us,” Pierce concluded. “Stalking me, all these years. Piecing it all together.”

Gallo resisted the urge to emphasize that it was Pierce, and not she, that had been Kenner’s target. After listening to Pierce relive the ordeal he and Fiona had narrowly survived, she felt a little more inclined to excuse his brusque manner. “You weren’t exactly the soul of discretion back then.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t think anyone took me seriously.”

“I did. And evidently, so did Kenner.”

Pierce mumbled his agreement, and then added, “But he’s not working alone. Someone is bankrolling him. I’ve got Cintia working that angle. We have to find out who, and then shut them down.”

Gallo looked around. “Why did you come here? Athens would have been a lot closer.”

“If he’s figured out that Fi and I made it out, then he might come after us again.”

“Him, or that ogre he was with,” Fiona added.

“And you think he might come after me, as well,” Gallo said. She did not elaborate on what Kenner’s intent might be in such a scenario.

Eight years ago, when she had arrived in Athens as a freshly minted post-doc, eager to carve out a niche for herself in the academic world, she had fended off the relentless advances of more than a few of her colleagues. Liam Kenner, who was not quite as dashing and sophisticated as he imagined himself, had been just another strutting peacock trying to catch her eye.

Pierce alone had treated her as an equal, not a prize to be won. They had become friends first, and only later had their relationship deepened. When Fiona’s adopted father had asked Pierce to take over the Herculean Society, as he had from Alexander, Pierce had not hesitated to include Gallo. They were more than just ‘in a relationship.’ They were a team.