Andy McDermott - The Tomb Of Hercules

Chase screamed as the heavy-duty drill bit tore into his flesh. Blood sprayed out, spattering the floor. Even Corvus seemed shocked.

“Stop!” Nina wailed, begging Sophia. “Stop, stop it! I don’t know, I don’t fucking know! But I’ll find out, I’ll tell you, just please stop!”

Sophia considered for a moment, then flicked a finger back at the little table. Looking disappointed, Komosa returned the drill to its place, blood dripping from the tip.

Not caring if anyone tried to stop her, Nina ran to Chase. The wound in his back was about a half inch wide, a torn hole running with blood, so much that she couldn’t see how deeply the drill had penetrated. Chase shivered, face twisted with mute pain. She knelt and pressed one palm over the brimming gash, feeling hot liquid ooze between her fingers as she looked up at Sophia. “For God’s sake, help him! I’ll do what you want, I’ll work out how to get into the Tomb!”

“Fix him up,” ordered Sophia. Komosa pulled Nina away from Chase. She protested and struggled, but then two more men lifted the barely conscious Chase and took him from the room.

“Glad to have you aboard,” Sophia told her with frosty triumph. “Get to work-you have until we find the Tomb to decipher the text. Otherwise Eddie will need more than a few bandages to fix what Joe does to him.” She started across the room as if to follow the men carrying Chase, then suddenly stopped and kicked Nina hard in the side with the pointed toe of her boot. Nina doubled over in agony. “And if you ever call me a bitch again, I’ll cut out your fucking tongue.” With that, she turned on her high heels and left the library.

“Get up, Dr. Wilde,” ordered Corvus. “You have work to do. I shall arrange for an expedition to Algeria as soon as possible.” He too left the library, pausing at the door. “By the way, go and wash. I don’t want you to ruin the parchments.”

With that he exited, leaving Nina to stare at the blood on her hands.

The three helicopters thundered over the Sahara, nothing in sight below but mile after mile of gnarled, shimmering sand dunes. In the shade, the temperature would have been around eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit…but there was no shade, the merciless glare of the sun baking everything with an extra twenty degrees of sickening heat.

The cabin of the lead helicopter, a large Sikorsky S-92 transporter, was air-conditioned, but neither Nina nor Chase took any comfort from the fact. It had been two days since they were reunited, but in that time Nina had come no nearer to uncovering the final secrets hidden within the Hermocrates text.

And her time was rapidly running out.

“Ten minutes,” announced Sophia. She and Komosa were in the rear section of the cabin with Chase and Nina, Corvus riding in the copilot’s seat up front. “I hope you have a brainstorm soon, Nina.”

“These aren’t exactly ideal conditions,” Nina complained. Her hands were cuffed in front of her so she could still work with the parchments. Chase’s hands were locked behind his back. The wound to his shoulder had been treated and bandaged, but he was still in considerable pain. For no apparent reason other than her own sadistic amusement, Sophia had given him back his leather jacket-which because of the handcuffs he could now not take off, sweating even under the cooling breeze from the air conditioner.

The same breeze ruffled the pages Nina was holding, to her irritation. But the distraction was a minor one, her mind focused as fully as it could be on her task.

She was more convinced than ever that there was a clue within Plato’s words, a cryptic linguistic key that would unlock the puzzle. With each new reading of the ancient Greek text, that key seemed to come a tantalizing step closer.

But not close enough for her to turn it. She frowned.

“No joy?” asked Chase. Compared to his usual self, he had been distinctly muted since his injury.

She shook her head. “All I can think of is that there’s some kind of cipher code which is used to find the relevant words describing how to get into the Tomb-like if word three, line six, page one is ‘turn,’ word seven of line twelve is ‘key,’ and so on. I mean, it flat-out says that there are words hidden among other words! But I can’t find anything that could be the cipher itself. There needs to be a starting point, a way to know where to begin and how to proceed, otherwise it would be impossible even for the intended recipient to work it out. Only… there isn’t one.”

“There’s nothing else on the paper?” Chase asked. “Hidden messages or anything?”

“What you see is what you get,” said Sophia. “Something as simple as invisible ink was the equivalent of quantum encryption in Plato’s time, so there’s nothing else to uncover. The clues must be in the words themselves.” She checked her watch. “Which you now have six minutes to find.”

Nina turned her attention back to the parchments, scanning through the text as quickly as she could. Words hidden within words… but which words? She read faster, the ancient, mottled ink almost becoming a blur as her eyes sped over each page.

But she knew she would find nothing that she hadn’t already discovered. If there was a cipher, its key was not contained within the text of Hermocrates . Either it was to be found in some other source not in her possession, in which case she had absolutely no chance of working it out…or there was no cipher.

“I know that face,” said Chase, for the first time in a while sounding hopeful.

Nina looked up at him. “Hmm?”

“That’s your crossword face, when you’ve just cracked a clue. What’ve you found?”

“Yes, what have you found?” said Sophia, taking a new interest. Corvus turned in his seat, watching Nina closely.

“I…I’m not sure yet. But I think I’ve been looking at the problem from the wrong angle. The reference to words being hidden within other words, I just assumed it was a cipher-specific individual words from the text combining to form a message.” She shuffled through the parchments to the first page. “But what if it’s not? The clue to finding the map on the back was quite literal-so maybe this is too. ‘The words of our friend Hermocrates reveal still other words within’…And ‘erubescent glass’…erubescent, red glass, colored glass…”

She looked up at the cabin roof. Above the front seats were windows in the ceiling, there to give the pilot a clear view of the rotor blades. They were tinted green to act as a sunscreen. Nina leaned forward and held out the page so the light of the sun overhead fell upon it. The entire page changed color to a garish emerald shade, the muddy tones of the ink becoming a darker brown.

Nina practically jumped from her seat. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it!”

“Got what?” Chase asked, confused.

“I need something red , red plastic or glass.” Nina looked around the cabin. “Come on, come on!” she snapped at Sophia. “Make yourself useful, find something!”

Sophia frowned, but did as she was asked. “Joe, hand me my bag. The blue one.” Komosa reached behind her seat, lifted out a traveling case and passed it to her. She searched through the contents. “Here,” she said, handing Nina a binder. “Will this do?”

“Perfect,” said Nina, snatching it from her. The binder contained pages bearing translations of Hermocrates from Greek to English, but she discarded them. The binder itself, with a cover of transparent red plastic, was what she wanted.

She placed the first sheet of parchment inside the binder, then held it by one of the windows, trying to get as much direct light onto it as possible. Beneath the plastic, the reddish-brown text almost vanished, its color absorbed by the red filter to leave nothing but a faint shadow.