“Who are they?” she asked anxiously.
“Loyal employees,” Zaugg said.
Before she could ask anything else, someone grabbed her from behind and she felt a warm cloth over her mouth. Then she was out cold.
It didn’t take Lea long to realize where she was — she was slumped against a cold wall in a wine cellar. She rubbed her eyes and winced in pain at the headache — the chloroform had been given to her sloppily and in too strong a dose.
She was probably lucky to be alive. She tried to get up, but she was still dizzy, and she had to fight back a wave of nausea as she struggled to her feet and regained her balance.
The cellar was vast — smooth polished marble floors, and labyrinthine in its construction. She walked along a corridor — flanked on either side from floor to ceiling with wine bottles, carefully stored inside stone alcoves. A series of narrow striplights cast a ghostly silver light on everything.
She stopped at a crossroads to see just more wine-filled corridors stretching away into the distance, the far wall at the end of the corridor was perhaps over one hundred feet away. The sound of her shoes clicked loudly in the cool silence as she walked. Even her breathing seemed to echo off the walls.
“Now this is a wine collection,” she said, her voice unexpectedly loud in the enclosed space.
Before she had time to investigate her surroundings properly, or look for a way out, she heard the sound of heavy footsteps coming from behind her — somewhere outside the cellar she heard the unmistakable sound of Zaugg’s voice, only he was speaking in his native Schweizerdeutsch. It was followed moments later by the sound of Heinrich Baumann’s hideous chuckle.
The talking stopped. A moment of eerie silence was followed by the sound of heavy keys clunking on a metal hoop, and then one of the men was unlocking the door.
Only as the two men stepped into the cellar and confronted her did her fate begin to dawn on her. She wondered if Joe and Ryan and the others had survived the flooding of the tomb, knowing that if they hadn’t she had no options left, and that her time had almost run out.
“Guten abend,” Zaugg said.
“What the hell is this, Zaugg?” She knew what the hell it was, but she was asking in an effort to buy herself more time to think. She peered behind them to see what was outside the cellar but all she saw was a flight of stone steps receeding out of view to the right.
“As you will recall, I have promised you to Baumann here, Miss Donovan, to calm one of his many mutinous rages. He is a loyal employee after all, and it would be churlish of me not to indulge his… fantasies from time to time. He is not exactly a gentle man, but what he lacks in tenderness he makes up for with creativity. My advice is not to struggle.”
Baumann chuckled again, almost uncontrollably, as he looked Lea up and down like a piece of meat in a market.
“I’m sorry I cannot stay but as you will appreciate, I have important work to do, and a very important map to locate which was not where it should have been. A real mystery, to be sure, but one I will certainly solve. As for you, your friends are all dead — their bodies trapped in the tomb, somewhat ironically, and you will soon wish you had died with them. Auf wiedersehen.”
Zaugg turned on his heel and closed the door behind him.
Baumann shuffled toward her, at first looking as though he were on an awkward first date. Then he grinned, and his good eye blinked. She looked at the long scar running down the other side of his face, the one that had cost him his eyesight and left his eye an opaque, milky egg staring at nothing.
Lea held her breath in fear and slowly stepped back from Baumann, never once taking her eyes off him. Up close he was even bigger than she had realized, his enormous bulk towering over her like a bear. His metal hand made a terrible scraping noise as he flexed its fingers, his one eye blinking in the half-light of the damp cellar.
Then he lunged at her.
Lea ran back from him, wrenching the arm of her sweater out of his meaty hand. She stumbled back a few paces and turned on her heel, running away for her life.
Baumann laughed loudly and pulled a long hunting knife from a holster on his belt. “This is going to be beautiful.” he said, in a grim, hoarse whisper. Then he started after her.
Her mind raced with fear. She knew Joe Hawke would know what to do, but she was out of her depth. She needed him, but she didn’t even know if he was dead or alive. The last time she saw him was back in the caves of Kefalonia when Zaugg had ordered Baumann to blow the wall of the tomb and drown them all.
Baumann smiled. He knew what she was thinking.
“If you’re waiting for your action-hero, he’s dead,” he said. “All of your friends are dead. They drowned like sewer rats. No one’s going to save you.”
Without warning, Baumann leapt forward and lunged at her again with the metal hand, catching one of the pockets of her jeans and tearing it off. The shred fell to the floor and Baumann giggled insanely.
Lea screamed and jumped back, hitting a wall of wine bottles. Panicking, she quickly searched for the fastest way out and decided to make a run for it along the corridor to her right. As she sprinted down the corridor into the darkness, she heard Baumann whooping with joy behind her and banging his hand on the steel frame of a wine rack with excitement.
“You can make this last all night, bitch!” he screamed.
Then he sprinted after her.
Lea was breathing hard, and terrified to stop, but an instant later she ran into a dead-end. Before she could back out of it Baumann rounded the corner. He smirked at her and made a fake sad face in mockery of her.
“Shall we have merlot or cabernet sauvignon?” he asked.
Without taking his eyes off her, he reached out and pulled a bottle of red wine from the wall, snapping its neck off with his metal hand. The shattered glass splinters fell to the concrete floor and he took a large gulp of the wine before wiping his wide mouth with the sleeve of his jacket.
“It’s time for our date,” he said, and padded toward her.
Lea struggled to concentrate, but she knew now was no time to lose her mind to panic and fear. He approached her, placing the wine on a shelf. Before she could think, Baumann was upon her, grabbing her shoulder with his metal hand.
She heard it contract and then something in her shoulder cracked. She screamed in pain, but he laughed loudly and powered his other hand, his human hand, hard into her stomach.
She doubled over in agony, gasping like a fish out of water and she strained to heave the air back into her winded lungs.
“As first dates go, bitch, I have been on worse.”
On her knees now, and struggling to breathe, she could sense the hideous man above her, and watched in horror as his steel toecapped boots shuffled closer toward her, now almost touching her thighs.
She heard him take up the wine bottle, drink heavily, and after belching loudly in the semi-darkness he smashed the bottle into the floor with extreme force. A great puddle of wine seeped out like blood all around his boots.
Lea flinched and felt her face — some of the glass had cut her cheek. Out of pure instinct, she cried out, and Baumann laughed again, even more heartily. He really was enjoying this.
“You remind me of the waitress I killed in Salzburg,” he said, suddenly very serious, and his voice a cold whisper. “Some of them struggle, but others, like you and the Salzburg girl — they just go without a fight. Very disappointing.”
She felt his human hand caress the back of her neck, and then heard him humming with sordid pleasure as he moved closer. Lea had seconds to think, seconds to react. This was her life to live, not his to take, and she wasn’t going out of this world on his terms, not in this way. And then the answer came to her — sparkling on the floor like a ruby ring was a long splinter of glass from the wine bottle.