Christopher Golden - Uncharted - The Fourth Labyrinth

“Is that Henriksen?” he asked.

Jada mumbled her assent, staring at the group. She had gone pale despite the flush of the heat, and when he touched her arm to comfort her, she flinched. Her skin was cold.

“The tall woman with the dark hair is Hilary Russo. She’s the director of the expedition, in charge of the whole dig,” Welch said. “I take it you know the blonde.”

Drake said nothing. They did indeed know the woman trailing the rest of the group. Her golden hair had been tied back in a ponytail, and she looked more suited for a safari than an archaeological dig, her clothing the female equivalent of Henriksen’s Lands’ End perfection.

“I guess she’s a better actress than you thought, huh, kid?” Sully muttered, glancing at Drake.

“What the hell are they doing here?” Jada whispered, hugging herself now as if she were in an icebox instead of the desert.

“I told you, Henriksen’s taking over funding the dig,” Welch replied, hands fluttering up to tug at his hat and adjust his glasses, squirrelly as ever. “Phoenix is the sole sponsor now. He’s financing this dig and the next three that Hilary undertakes-years of funding for her and her team, which includes me if you being here doesn’t get me fired-but in exchange he gets control of the disposition of the relics, all media rights, and rights to museum exhibits. All of that. The documentary team is supposedly putting together some footage to prepare for a TV series he wants to make about all of this. Last night you mentioned how big a discovery this is, and you weren’t wrong.”

Drake paced back and forth between the tents. Jada kept staring at the group across the depression from them, but he caught Sully looking at him.

“We’ve gotta get down there before they do,” Sully said.

Drake nodded. He turned to Welch. “What you said about your job. Are you going to bail on us, Ian? We need to know. Luka and your sister’s boyfriend are dead, and we think Henriksen is the guy behind it. But it sounds to me like you’re having second thoughts about helping us.”

Jada turned to watch the exchange, her eyes wide with hurt. It had not occurred to her that Welch might go back on his word.

Welch hesitated, squirming, a man caught between the points of his moral compass. After a few seconds, he gave a small shrug. “Gretchen would kill me if I didn’t help.”

Drake thought how fortunate the man was that Henriksen’s goons had been after Jada the night before and not him. His sister would kill him if he didn’t help, and Henriksen might have him killed if he did. They had to warn him what kind of danger he was in-as soon as he showed them the labyrinth.

“So, how do we beat Henriksen into the labyrinth?” he asked. “They’ll be going inside any minute now.”

Welch smiled, nodding to himself. “Hilary wants to give them the whole tour, make a show of it. They’re supposed to be filming, right? She wants to impress, which means she is going to take them in through the front.”

Drake stared at him. “You’re saying we go through the side door?”

Jada pointed at the larger excavation, the original part of the dig, where the wall of the labyrinth had collapsed. “Can we get in that way? Is it clear?”

“Not only is it clear, it’s a hell of a lot closer to the worship chambers and the anteroom we just started digging out. One of the grad students working down there told me this morning that they’ve started to unearth clay jars and tablets that might be connected to whatever rituals were performed there by the Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

“No one’s going to stop us?” Sully asked.

Welch frowned thoughtfully, then shook his head. “For today, all three of you work for the Smithsonian.”

“We’re already traveling under false identities,” Sully said. “You can use those names.”

If Welch thought this odd, he barely frowned at the revelation. “All right. Hilary’s the only one who’d know we don’t have any visitors from the Smithsonian, and if we play our cards right, we won’t even cross paths with her.”

“I wouldn’t mind crossing paths with Henriksen,” Jada said.

Her hand fluttered toward the small of her back as if she were about to tap the gun she had hidden there to reassure herself of the solidity of its presence and its mortal promise. She hesitated and dropped her hand, but Drake had seen her reaching and found himself hoping they didn’t run into Henriksen at all. Even if Jada managed to kill him, she would only be assuring herself a prison sentence, and the secrets her father had died over might never see the light of day.

They watched as Hilary Russo led the group from Phoenix Innovations under the awning and in through the entrance to the labyrinth of Sobek.

“Let’s move out,” Sully said.

They hustled out from between the tents and across a patch of desert toward the excavation of the collapsed outer wall of the labyrinth. It was a brisk walk so that they would not draw undue attention, but the men working at the dig frowned and wiped their brows as they stared at the newcomers.

There were ladders in the ditch beside the excavated wall, but Drake was surprised to find that the expedition had installed temporary stairs as well, leading down from the edge of the dig to the remaining rubble just outside the shattered wall. He wondered how many tons of sand already had been removed in the excavation. In a dig like this, archaeologists would uncover certain sections, map and photograph and study them, retrieve artifacts, and then fill in the areas they had excavated to prevent them from being damaged by the elements and by entropy trying to catch up with them. But the way Welch had described it to them, much of the labyrinth was being excavated from within instead of uncovered from above; so as long as they shored up the ceilings, they might be able to explore a great deal of the interior maze without ever having to fill it in.

They descended the stairs quickly. A pair of enormous generators growled, one on either side of the entrance. Canvas tarps had been pulled aside from the breach in the wall, and he imagined that at night they hung across the opening to keep sand from blowing back into the labyrinth tunnels. During the day, Drake presumed they needed the breeze too much to worry about the sand.

As they entered the labyrinth, he heard Jada inhale deeply, as if she could breathe in the ancient history in the air. Drake had no such romantic illusions, but even so, he could feel the age of the place. It made him feel like an intruder, but he was used to such a feeling. He had, in fact, made a career of ignoring it, though sometimes it was harder than others. The past held as many secrets as the future-more, in fact-and people would pay incredible amounts of money to unravel those mysteries and maybe own a piece of the ancient world.

Hell, he loved it himself. When he had been a boy, he had read stories of adventure, of archaeological discoveries that stunned the world. He had loved old movies full of mummies or chariot races. But unlike in those antique films, the mummies he had encountered in real life had never come to life. There had been one time, in Karpathos, Greece, when he had been sure one of them moved, but nothing before or since. Still, he found it fascinating to learn how people had lived hundreds or thousands of years earlier.

So though his breath did not hitch as they entered the labyrinth of Sobek, his pulse did quicken a bit.

The walls were a shade of orange, like clay. The line of lights that hung from pegs on the wall explained the generators growling outside. Bulbs inside plastic cages were strung along the tunnel, vanishing around the corners in either direction. A quick glance showed that they were plugged into one another like strands of Christmas lights.