Douglas Preston - The Book of the Dead

The fifteen minutes that passed next were the longest of his life. As they ticked on into twenty, he became increasingly uneasy. Twenty-five minutes passed… thirty…

Diogenes found his mind racing with speculation. She could not possibly know that he was there. He was certain she could not have been alerted to his presence.

Something else might be wrong.

Was she too weak to have climbed this high up the mountain? He had assumed her hatred would carry her far past the point of normal exhaustion. But she was only human; she had to have a breaking point. She had been following him for days, hardly eating and sleeping. On top of that, she would have lost a fair amount of blood. To then climb almost three thousand vertical feet up an unknown and exceedingly dangerous trail at night… maybe she just couldn’t make it. Or perhaps she’d been hurt. The decrepit cobbled path was strewn with loose stones and eroded blocks, and the steepest parts-where the ancients had built stone staircases-were slick with rubble and missing many steps, a veritable death trap.

A death trap. It was entirely possible-indeed, even probable-that she had slipped and hurt herself; fallen and twisted an ankle; perhaps even been killed. Did she have a flashlight? He didn’t think so.

He checked his watch: thirty-five minutes had now passed. He wondered what to do. Of all the possibilities, the likeliest was that she had been hurt. He would go back down the trail and see for himself. If she was lying there with a broken ankle, or collapsed in exhaustion, killing her would be simple…

He paused. No, that would not do. That was, perhaps, her game plan: to make him believe she’d been hurt, to lure him back down-and then ambush him. A bitter smile passed across his face. That was it, wasn’t it? She was waiting him out, waiting for him to descend. But he would not fall into that trap. He would wait her out. Eventually her hatred would force her up the mountain.

Ten more minutes passed, and once again he was beset by doubts. What if he waited for her all night? What if she had declined to bring the battle into the terrain of the mountain itself? What if she had gone back to town and was lying low, planning something new? What if she had alerted the police?

He couldn’t bear the thought that this might continue. He could not go on in this manner. It must end this very night. If she would not come to him, he had to force the issue by coming to her.

But how?

He lay on the hard ground, peering down into the murk, his agitation increasing. He tried to think as she would, anticipate what she would do. He could not afford to underestimate her again.

I escape the house, run up the trail. She stands there, wondering if she should follow. What would she do? She knew he would be going up the mountain; she knew he would wait for her, that he intended to fight her on his own ground, on his own terms.

What would she do?

The answer came to him in a flash: find another route. A shorter route. And cut him off. But of course there wasn’t another route-

With a sudden, dreadful prickling sensation along his neck, he recalled an old story he had heard told around the island. Back in the eighth century, the Saracens had attacked the island. They had landed at Pertuso, a cove on the far side, and made a bold and dangerous crossing, which required climbing up one side of the volcano and down the other. But they had not taken the Greek trail down-they had blazed their own route in order to fall upon the town from an unexpected direction.

Could she have taken the Saracen trail up?

His mind worked feverishly. He hadn’t paid any attention to the old story, treating it as yet another colorful legend, like so many others attached to the island. Did anyone even know today where the Saracen trail went? Did it still exist? And how could Constance have known about it? There probably weren’t more than half a dozen people in the world who would know the actual route.

He cursed savagely, racked his brains, trying to remember more of the story. Where did the Saracen trail go?

There was something in the legend about the Saracens losing men into the Filo del Fuoco, a narrow gorge that split off from the Sciara. If that were the case, the trail must have hugged the edge of the Sciara all the way down the Bastimento Ridge-or up it, as the case may be-

He rose abruptly. He knew-he knew!-this was what Constance had done. She was a consummate researcher; she had gotten hold of some old atlas of the island. She’d studied it, memorized it. She’d flushed him from his house, like a badger from a bolt-hole, driven him up the more familiar trail. Allowing him to think that it was his own plan all the time… And meanwhile, she would have cut to the west and taken the secret trail up, flanking him as he’d waited in ambush, wasting minute after precious minute. And now she was above. Waiting for him.

A cold sweat broke out on his brow. He could see the breathtaking subtlety of her plan. She had worked it all out ahead of time. She had expected him to flee his house, run up the trail. And she had expected him to pause somewhere along the trail and wait in interminable ambush, giving her-the weaker one-all the time she needed to get up the Saracen trail to the Bastimento Ridge-

He stood abruptly in horror, eyes focusing on the great black fin of the Bastimento above him. The clouds were tumbling across the peak, the mountain groaning and shaking with each explosion-and then they parted, exposing the ridge to the glare of the eruptions: and in that moment he spied, silhouetted against the horrid lambent glow, a figure in white, dancing… And despite the roar of the wind and the rumbling of the mountain, he was sure he could hear a shrill, manic laughter echoing down toward him…

In a convulsion of fury, he aimed his gun and fired again and again, the bright flashes blinding his own night vision. After a moment, he cursed and lowered the gun, his heart pounding. The ridge was bare, the figure gone.

It was now or never. The end was upon them. He tore up the trail, moving as fast as he could, knowing that she could never hit him in the dark. The fork in the trail loomed ahead, the newer trail running off to the left on a graded path. The right fork was blocked by a fence, rusty concertina wire rattling in the wind, marked by a weather-beaten sign in two languages:

Sciara del Fuoco!

Pericolosissimo!

Vietato a Passare!

Active Lava Flow Ahead!

Extreme Danger!

Do Not Pass!

He leaped over the fence and scrambled up the ancient trail toward the top of the Bastimento Ridge. There was only one possible outcome. One of them would walk back down the mountain; the other would be thrown into the Sciara.

It remained to be seen who, in the end, would prevail.

Aloysius Pendergast paused at the fork in the trail, listening intently. Not five minutes before, he had distinctly heard shots-ten of them in all-over the thundering of the volcano. He knelt and examined the ground with his light, quickly determining that Diogenes-and Diogenes alone-had taken the fork blocked by a fence.

There was much about this situation that he had not yet untangled, enigmas wrapped in mysteries. There had been very few footprints-only where dust or sand had blown into pockets of the rock-but even so, Constance’s prints had ceased, almost at the beginning of the trail. And yet Diogenes had continued on. Why? Pendergast had been forced to make a choice: search for Constance’s prints or follow Diogenes’s. And this was no choice at all-Diogenes was the danger, he needed to be found first.

And then, there had been gunshots-but whose? And why so many? Only a person in the grip of panic would fire ten shots in a row like that.