As he worked his way around the stone coffins, he came upon a sarcophagus pulled out of the wall. He hopped over it and peered into the hole his new vantage point revealed, the hair on the back of his neck standing up when he saw a thin beam of light within. Instinctively, he fired at where the person holding the light should be, rushing into the darkness on his hands and knees without a second thought.
In an instant, he was surrounded by the pervasive gloom, unsure whether he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing, or his mind was playing tricks on him. He reached for the phone in his pocket, using it to help illuminate his surroundings and confirm that the tunnel and door he sensed in the darkness were real.
The sudden ringing of the phone in his hand startled him. He cupped his hand around the speaker and spoke quietly into the microphone. “Edie?” he whispered, unsure how close the assassin was.
“I’m here,” she said, “but I don’t see you.”
“Left from the stairs, in a hidden recess, behind one of the stone coffins,” he said. “There’s a tunnel.”
He stepped forward cautiously, moving to stand beside the massive stone door, his eyes probing, for Edie, for any sign of Alexis, half expecting her to make a move on him while he was alone and vulnerable. Kneeling, he ran a hand along the floor until he located what he was looking for. Raising his hand to his face, he breathed in the coppery scent of blood between his fingers.
He started into the tunnel, but the sound of feet slipping across stones caused him to freeze mid step. Gun in hand, he swiveled around. As a ray of light reached into the darkness, he realized it was only Edie making her way in from the crypt. He stepped toward her quickly, putting a finger to his lips. Then he grabbed her and wrapped his arms around her.
Into her ear, he whispered, “She’s close. Do you have a spare light?”
Edie shook her head, offering him the mag light she was carrying instead. He took it and put a hand over it, dulling its beam to a pale pink glow. He took Edie’s arm and pulled her low to the floor, showing her the drops of blood in front of the door. “I winged her,” he whispered.
“Any idea where this goes?” she whispered back.
He shrugged. “I’m going in. You coming? Can you get our AFM friends on comms?”
She nodded. Before he could slip away, she grabbed his hand and put a headset into it. “Don’t break this one,” she said when he was up on comms. A moment later, she added, “Right behind you.”
Scott slipped away, moving at a steady pace through the darkness. Despite the pain, he held the flashlight loosely in his injured hand and the gun in the other. The passageway he hurried along was carved from the very bedrock upon which the city of Valetta was built. As he went, he could see where men had picked and blasted their way through, leaving a path that was wide enough so that he couldn’t touch both sides by extending his arms and high enough so that a tall man could walk without worry but not much bigger.
In places, water from above seeped through and made the stones weep and sometimes these weeping stones created thin puddles under his feet. At the first few, he shined the flashlight on the floor, expecting to see a soggy trail leading away, but his target continued to leave behind no sign or trace of her passage.
Coming into a natural gallery filled with stalactites and stalagmites with a shallow pool at its heart, he paused, expecting his quarry to pounce at any moment. This didn’t happen. Instead, the uncanny quiet persisted and he continued through, skirting the pool on his way. The moment he started into the tunnel, he stole a backward glance. He almost expected to see Edie, but there was no sign of her. “Edie,” he whispered, knowing the microphone in the headset would pick up his voice, but there was no response.
Chapter 11
On board the USS Kearsarge, Chief Roberts paced back and forth outside Sit 1, chewing on the end of a hand-rolled Cuban cigar he was trying to talk himself out of going topside to light up. “Talk to me,” he said to the voice in his ear.
“Chief, we’ve located Evers,” Captain Parker said.
“About time,” the chief replied, eyeing his watch. If the director was right about the timeline, they were only minutes away from everything going sideways. “Progress? Tell me, you’ve made progress. The brass is ready to lockdown everything. It’s going to get ugly.”
“What I’m looking at is hard to explain,” Edie said. She paused, then told him about Scott’s pursuit of the target, the church, the secret tunnel she was staring at.
The chief bit clean through the end of the cigar in his mouth and almost choked on it. “Evers has a beat on Gosling? Tell me yes?”
“He’s in pursuit,” Edie said quickly. “We’re close, but we’ve still no idea of the target location. These tunnels could go anywhere.”
“We’ll work on it,” the chief said, ending the call.
The chief rushed into the situation room, making his way directly to analyst position six. “Petty Officer Hansen,” he said, “get me everything you can find on Saint John’s Cathedral in Valetta, the crypt, particularly. I need civil engineering plans for city substructures too. Sewers, tunnels, everything.”
The chief turned to the young petty officer manning analyst position five. “Simms, get me Dave Gilbert at the National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center.”
“On it, chief,” the petty officer said.
The chief eyed Executive Commander Howard across the room. Progress was definitely something he wanted to share. The preliminary reports on the pathogen they’d found in the vial had only told part of the story. Updates were being released every few minutes. The new reports were grim, but the real-time simulations were worse.
Ugly things would happen within minutes of the pathogen being released. Projections showed the virus would sweep through Valetta within an hour of release, dooming everyone in the city. From there, the virus would spread city by city hour by hour until there was no place left on the island to escape it. Within hours, the fate of a half million people would be sealed.
“Gilbert on one, chief,” Simms said.
The chief pushed the button for line 1 as he snatched up the phone. “Gilbert,” the chief said, “I’ve got another job for you and that big black box of yours.”
“Here to help,” a female voice said.
The chief growled into the phone. “You’re not Gilbert. Get me Gilbert, Dave Gilbert.”
“Chief Roberts, I’m Nancy, Nancy Leitner. I work with Dave,” the woman said. “They’ve got Dave—”
“Nothing I tell you is for anyone’s ears but Gilbert’s. Got that?” the chief said, cutting Nancy off. “I know this sounds like a strange request, but I need to him to locate whatever he can on secret tunnels under Saint John’s Cathedral in Valletta, Malta. Everything, got that. No matter how small. I need to know where it goes, what it’s for, who built it. Got that?”
“Understood, chief,” Nancy said, “and there’s not a darn thing you could tell me today that would surprise me. This is one day I’m never going to forget.”
“Not a day I’ll ever forget either,” the chief said just before ending the call.
Hansen handed the chief a diagram of the Saint John’s Cathedral, showing the location of the hundreds of inlaid marble tombs and a large area in the middle with the label “Crypt of the Grand Masters beneath Choir”. Eyeing the garbage, the chief put the cigar in his mouth one last time. Then tossing the cigar away, he marched across the room to the executive commander.
“Parker and Evers,” the chief said, interrupting the ongoing discussion, “they’ve located Gosling and are closing in on her.”