Deep Silence Read online

  “Well, that’s a bunch of shite,” complained the Irishman.

  Nasser ignored him. “The same warning is here, and it is meant for anyone except the priests whose job it is to protect what is hidden. Below the warning are instructions for those priests.”

  “Read them, damn you,” snarled Ghul.

  The professor nodded and bent close. “It says, ‘Push high with four hands, push low with six, and four to bow before wisdom and pull. Left and right and back.’”

  There was a beat.

  “What the sodding hell does that mean?” demanded the Irishman.

  Ghul chuckled. “It means the professor is about to earn his bonus.”

  Nasser straightened and ordered his colleagues back as he walked around the pillar, dabbing now and again with the mixture. A few more symbols appeared. Nasser instructed some of the guards to place their hands in very specific places. Two big men were positioned with hands on the central stone in the pillar, at about chest height. Three others were made to squat with their palms on the lowest stone. And then two more had to kneel and dig their fingers into the narrow crack between the base of the pillar and a rectangular flagstone.

  “Put your backs into it,” said the professor. “Ready? Go!”

  The men pushing on the middle ring of the pillar pushed to the left, the lower three to the right, and the kneeling men pulled. They were big men, picked for this task. The pillar was heavy and ancient and held part of the ceiling. The other guards and scientists stood watching, their faces filled with equal parts confusion and skepticism.

  There was a sudden harsh, deep, dusty, grating sound. Then the three pieces of ancient stone moved. The central stone rotated one way, the stone below it turned the other, and the flagstone slid away from the base. The men strained until some of them screamed with the effort.

  “Stop,” gasped Nasser, and the men staggered back, sweating, gasping, cursing, exhausted by their efforts. Then they all fell into a shocked silence. Violin felt her heart turn to ice and she heard a small, strangled sound from Harry.

  A section of the floor began to move, folding downward with a grating rumble, revealing by slow degrees a set of stairs hidden for hundreds of years. And from below, from where those stairs vanished into swirling dust, there was a sudden ghostly green glow.

  The men staggered back as gas and dust billowed up from below. Even from her lofty perch Violin caught a whiff that smelled like old, rotting fish.

  “Perfect,” breathed Nasser.

  Violin turned, hooked a hand out, caught Harry by the sleeve, and pulled him close so she could whisper in his ear.

  “It’s time,” she said.

  Harry looked at her. “Wh-what?”

  She did not answer. Instead she hit the release button on her tether and dropped down, drawing her knives as she fell.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WEST LAFAYETTE AVENUE

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  I played follow the leader with the Secret Service agents as I worked my way over to the battlefield that is West Lafayette. Something like 16 percent of Baltimore buildings—homes and commercial properties—are abandoned. That makes for a large, spread-out, and very spooky ghost town within the thriving city. Lots and lots of ghosts there. Lots of bad things happening there. Crack houses, murder scenes, quiet places for all manner of horrific sexual abuse. Lonely places to hide, or be abandoned to die—or to be alive and hurt but left wondering if death was a useful doorway out.

  Driving along West Lafayette is like driving into an Edgar Allan Poe opium dream, especially as you turn onto North Arlington and see the big, old, and sadly forgotten hulk of Sellers Mansion. It’s a sprawling pile built in 1868 for Matthew Bacon Sellers, president of the Northern Central Railway. Once upon a time it was a showpiece, but those times are long gone. Three stories tall, sturdily built, and although long empty it never felt to me like it was actually dead.

  Not saying it’s a haunted house, but there is some kind of residual energy there, and we’re not talking Casper the Friendly Ghost. More like something from a James Wan horror flick. The kind of place where if some weird haunted doll suddenly stepped out through the bare laths you’d be like—yeah, that fits.

  So, that’s where I led my entourage.

  I put the pedal down to make some time and had Calpurnia hack into the traffic lights to slow the pursuit cars down. Did I mention that gadgets like this give me a woody? They do.

  The rain had chased all the neighbors indoors. Good. I parked behind the mansion, took some goodies from a lockbox in the back of my car, told Calpurnia to secure the vehicle, then ran through slanting rain to the back door. Ghost’s nails were padded with silicone tips that muffled the sound of him running with me.

  The door was locked, but I was in a hurry and the place was a dump, so I kicked it in. I gave Ghost the order to range ahead to check and clear, while I made my way carefully through gloom and shadows and dust to the staircase. The place was by definition a death trap, with holes in the floor, exposed wiring, water damage, rat droppings, human waste, garbage, and refuse I did not want to even speculate about, and the skeleton of what looked like a raccoon. No idea how that got there, and don’t really want to know.

  Calpurnia whispered like a ghost into my ear. “The Secret Service vehicles have arrived at your location. Total five agents.”

  I smiled and faded into the shadows.

  INTERLUDE THREE

  SPETSES, CAVO SERENO

  ATTICA ISLANDS, GREECE

  SEVEN YEARS AGO

  Valen hired a boat to take him to the Kostas mansion, which was a sprawling and vulgar piece of real estate so vast it nearly qualified as its own city.

  It squatted on a kind of peninsula that thrust so aggressively into the sea that from the air it looked very much like the Kostas family was making a “fuck you” statement to anyone who could afford to see it. That was entirely in keeping with what Valen remembered of Ari. The man was a sexual animal. More goat than bull, with unsavory appetites that he could never quite assuage, but who had enough money to keep trying—and to handle any resulting legal or financial consequences. If he had not been very good at what he did for the family business, no doubt they would have shipped him off to some remote spot and then erased it off the map. But Ari, despite deep character flaws, was brilliant. He could find anything for anyone, and then get them to pay more than the market would bear to possess it. A dealer of antiquities, rarities, and art for the most discerning clientele, he’d made his first billion by age twenty-three. That was above what he inherited as the second son of a dynastic family of procurers.

  Ari met him at the dock. Barefoot and smiling; a deep-water tan, generous belly, and sparkling white teeth. White trousers and an untucked white shirt that opened midway down a hairy chest. As they hugged and slapped each other’s backs, Valen recalled the last time he’d seen his old college roommate. It had been a few days after graduation, when Valen helped Ari bury a body in an unmarked grave near San Gabriel Park. A college girl who had gone to the wrong party and whose body would never be found. Or, if it was found, would never be connected to Aristotle Kostas. Valen insured that by lining her grave with plastic tarps and dumping in ten gallons of bleach. There would be no forensics to collect and the bleach would ruin even the tissue samples. Ari, who’d sat on a tree stump trying out various just-in-case alibis, had done very little digging. He’d been too drunk.

  Lunch was served on a private patio overlooking the flawless deep blue of the rippling waters of the Mediterranean. They ate grilled fish and vegetables and, being a good host, Ari had provided Old Rip Van Winkle twenty-five-year-old bourbon. The thirteen-thousand-dollars-a-bottle whiskey was very fine and went down exceptionally well.

  “You never just come to visit,” he said as honey-soaked dessert pastries were laid out. “So, why are we here getting drunk on a Tuesday afternoon?”

  Valen nodded. “I am in the market for something that needs a delicate touch but a long
reach to find. You once told me that you could get anything that can be gotten. That’s how you phrased it.”

  The young Greek gave a small shrug. “I have had some luck in that department.”

  “Which is why I came to you first. I have been asked to find something.”

  “You are not the buyer?”

  “You know better than that,” said Valen. “I have no money, and you know that I haven’t pursued a career in seismology. No, since college I’ve become something of a fixer. I help facilitate things for parties who, for various reasons, choose or need to remain anonymous. I’m the fellow who goes and fetches what they want.”

  Ari nodded, accepting it as something quite right and proper in the world as he knew it. “What is it you need to find, my friend?”

  “Can I trust that our conversation is confidential?”

  Ari pretended to be offended. “This is something you ask me? An old friend? A Kostas? I am wounded unto death, Valen. I am bleeding. See the cut all the way to my heart?”

  “Yeah, yeah, cut it out. It’s a serious question, because I am working with serious people and it’s more than my life is worth to breach their trust. I ask because I am expected to ask.”

  Ari grinned and patted Valen’s arm hard enough to nearly knock him out of his chair. Then the young Greek leaned forward and dropped his voice. “Tell me what you need and I will tell you how much it costs.”

  “You mean you’ll tell me if you can procure it?”

  Ari threw back his head and laughed. The guards glanced their way, but neither moved nor spoke. “No, Valen, you beautiful fool. If it is there, I can get it. Cost is the only factor.”

  They smiled at each other.

  “It has many names, but among a certain community of—shall we say—credulous believers, it is called Lemurian quartz. The green variety, not the white.”

  “There’s a lot of green quartz out there. How will I know I’m getting the right stuff for you? I don’t want to waste a lot of my own time. No offense.”

  “None taken,” said Valen. “Check your e-mail later. I sent a molecular profile to you. There are several kinds of quartz that are almost—but not quite—identical, and my employers are particular. To that end, I can provide a portable scanner to help you assess samples before you purchase. And, for any items you obtain that have been made from the Lemurian quartz—artworks, or whatever—we would like you to use luminescence dating to determine how long ago those minerals were last exposed to sunlight or sufficient heating. We are most interested in any green quartz objects older than 1000 B.C.E. Particularly any that are found on, or come from, Crete or neighboring Aegean islands.”

  Ari sipped his wine. “Are you looking for Minoan artifacts? You’re confusing me. First you mention Lemurian quartz, but in the same breath you want stuff from where people thought Atlantis used to be. I mean, it’s pretty well accepted these days that Plato created Atlantis as a way of explaining the wonders of the Minoan culture, and that an eruption on Thera—what is now Santorini—was what destroyed their civilization. The submergence of some areas is the basis for the myth of the so-called continent of Atlantis sinking. Basically, exaggeration by Plato based on indifferent reportage by scholars of previous eras.”

  Valen nodded, pleased at his friend’s expertise. “And correct, insofar as what you know. However, as with all things, there is much more to the story.”

  Ari looked interested. “Tell me, then.”

  “The first significant artifact of this special kind of green quartz was found in a chamber beneath Minoan temple ruins in Gournia, in Crete. The site was first excavated in 1903. There were several small hexagonal pieces recovered. Three are in the British Museum, four are at the University of Pennsylvania, but nine others went missing at some point after they were described and stored away. These nine were very special, Ari, because they had the same molecular structure as what I want you to find for me.”

  “What makes them special?”

  “That’s something we can discuss later.”

  “Which means you don’t know,” said Ari, laying a finger beside his nose and nodding sagely. “You’re working for someone and they haven’t told you all of it. Or … maybe they don’t know all of it yet. No, don’t look so surprised. You’re not the first person to come to me looking for something all tangled up in history and myth. Kind of a thing in the antiquities trade, my friend. So, tell me … how much of it do you need?”

  Valen finished his glass of whiskey and held it out for a refill. “All of it.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  SELLERS MANSION

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  The back door opened with a creak and swung all the way in, spilling gray light and rain onto the dusty floor. There was a beat when the doorway stood empty, and then two figures came in fast, breaking right and left, pistols up and out. Then the front door burst inward, the lock torn roughly from the splintered frame by a breaching tool swung by a brute of an agent. He stepped aside, dropping the heavy tool, and drew his gun as two other agents ran quickly past him.

  They moved through the downstairs with professional competence and speed, clearing each room, pointing guns into closets. There were four men and one woman. All were grim-faced, unsmiling, and efficient. The two who had entered through the rear went down into the vast, unlighted cellar, which was a warren of small storage and service rooms left over from when the mansion had been occupied. The other three moved quickly to the stairs and went up, making sure to check their corners and watch each other’s backs. It was all done in a smooth and ghastly silence.

  But they did not see the dark shape that waited for them beneath the stairs. It was not the natural place for them to look first. It wasn’t where their flashlight beams fell as they came down to the concrete basement floor. The two agents did everything right.

  It wasn’t enough.

  * * *

  Upstairs, the three agents from the black SUV moved along the hallway in a three-point cover formation. One checked the hall behind and in front, moving in quick but smooth 180-degree turns. The second offered cover to the third, who pushed open doors to check and clear the rooms. For the larger rooms, they went in as a team, breaking to either side of the door while the first man watched their backs to prevent ambushers from coming from unchecked rooms.

  They cleared four bedrooms and an old empty library and found nothing.

  The second held up a fist to signal them to stop, then he pointed to the floor. There, in the dust, was a line of animal tracks. Heading toward the stairs to the third floor.

  “He has a dog, doesn’t he?” asked the first very quietly.

  “Yes,” said the third. “Big white combat dog.”

  The second agent touched a smudge near the baseboard. They all studied it; they all nodded. It was the kind of smudge someone made if they were walking on the edges of their shoes in an attempt to avoid leaving footprints. But there was too much dust in the old place. The agents looked down the hall, following the lines of animal and human tracks around the corner toward the stairs.

  They smiled. There were three other rooms to check, but the tracks were an arrow pointing to their quarry. The first two agents began to move; the third agent hesitated for a moment, knowing that they were doing it wrong. They were tracking an expert, a senior covert operator. The others were almost to the foot of the stairs.

  “Wait…,” he called.

  One second too late.

  The door to the second-to-last bedroom stood slightly ajar. They had less than one full second to register the fact that something was moving through the air toward them. Small. About the size of a soda can.

  The agent behind them tried to yell, “Grenade!” But the flash-bang flashed and banged. Real damn bright, too damn loud.

  * * *

  The agents in the cellar heard the blast and turned toward it. Toward the stairs.

  Toward the big man with the dark goggles and sound-suppressing headphones.

 
They never even glimpsed the stun grenade that blew them backward against the wall, burned their vision from white to blackness, and dropped them into huddled masses so shocked that they could not even hear their own screams.

  Top Sims kicked their guns away from them and had both agents—male and female—belly down and cuffed in seconds. Only then did he remove his sound suppressors and nearly opaque dark glasses. He was grinning. It was not a nice grin.

  He cocked his head and listened to the cries and groans from upstairs. And then the harsh, angry, triumphant barks of a very big dog.

  It made his smile very bright in the dusty darkness.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SELLERS MANSION

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  Five little agents all in a row.

  They sat in the dust against a wall in the basement. Zip cuffs on wrists and ankles, pockets turned out, personal expectations and feelings of self-worth shattered. The effects of the flash-bangs had mostly worn off, though I think all five of them might need to see an ear, nose, and throat guy sometime soon. Maybe put Miracle-Ear on their birthday wish lists.

  Top and I stood on either side of Ghost. All of their weapons and equipment were laid out on the floor. Top was examining their IDs and handing them off to me. The last person in the line was Agent Virginia Harrald, who was a snub-nosed woman with hate in her gray eyes and a stern slash of a thin-lipped mouth.

  “You have no idea how much shit you just stepped in,” she muttered. She spoke too loud, the way people do who can’t hear all that well.

  Top gave her a warm and fatherly smile. “Trouble? That’s adorable. Isn’t she being adorable, Cap’n? Making threats like a grown-up.”