“How much longer?” she asked instead.
“Still another ten minutes.”
Krista wanted to scream, but she simply turned and strode away.
Overhead, one of the helicopters swept past. Its rotors stirred the thick pall of smoke. Sunlight dappled brighter, then sank back to a murky twilight. The air reeked of oil fires and cordite.
She heard the helicopter’s guns chatter as it sped toward the skirmish line. Her forces fought to keep the prison war from spilling over them. Orders were bellowed. Men cried and screamed. The fighting was unusually brutal. She watched one of her commandos drag a fellow soldier into the cloister. The man on the ground writhed, pressing his guts into his belly with a fist.
Like the fallen soldier, they couldn’t hold out forever.
She turned to Khattab.
He raised nine fingers.
She took a deep breath to calm herself. They could last that long. Once the tunnel was opened, she was going down that hole and laying waste to all that stood between her and the key.
She glanced down to the suitcase at her feet.
Nothing would stop her.
4:05 P.M.
Seichan steadied Gray with a hand on his shoulder. He had stepped away from the cross, but he continued to hold it with one arm. She knew what he was thinking as he stared up at the spears sweeping down from above. Lines of agony etched his face.
“Should I yank the lever?” Kowalski hollered. He was on his knees, yelling under the closing slab of rock as it sealed the only exit.
“No!” Gray called back.
The others were safely in the tunnel, out of immediate danger from the impaling spikes. Only she and Gray were at risk. She knew the choice Gray had to make. If the lever was yanked, the trap would reset, but it might also open the secret door, allowing the soldiers to flood inside. If they saved themselves, the others would die.
There was no winning here.
All Gray’s decision did was buy the others a slim chance. If Krista’s forces were chased off before the door was blown open, the others might still live.
It was long odds, but it was a chance.
She stared upward.
She would take those odds right now.
Seichan stopped and faced Gray. She drew his eyes from the death descending on them. He had to know the truth.
What did secrets matter now?
But Gray suddenly twisted away. “What if I wasn’t wrong?”
“What?”
“Hold the cross steady while I turn the wheel,” he ordered.
She obeyed, baffled.
“Maybe it’s not a booby trap. Maybe it’s a timer. Once you attempt to solve the combination, you’re allowed only a certain length of time to complete it.” He motioned to the roof of spikes.
“So we’re not allowed to guess. No trial and error.”
“Exactly.”
Gray reached to the weighted string of sinew and made sure it draped smoothly. He ran his fingers along the wheel of the cross. His lips moved as he counted the marks. He reached a spot that must have corresponded to his calculation.
“Here goes,” he whispered.
He gripped the wheel and turned it until the spot he marked drew even with the weighted plumb line. He stopped and held his breath, his lips stretched thin with tension.
A gong sounded like before.
“That’s got to be it!” he said.
Unfortunately, the spikes dropped even faster now. They plummeted toward the floor.
“Gray!”
He saw and counted quickly. Out loud this time. “Eight, seven, six, five, four.”
Reaching the proper mark, he held his finger there and spun the wheel the other way. It required turning it almost a full circle.
Seichan ducked as a spike headed for her face. They were both driven to their knees. Seichan held one arm high, supporting the cross. Gray had both limbs up: one to hold the marked position, the other to spin the wheel.
As she watched, a spear point sliced along her arm.
Gray cried out as a spike stabbed into the back of his hand and pushed his arm off the wheel.
Kneeling in a slightly different position, Seichan snaked her arm between two spikes and got her hand on another section of the wheel.
“Tell me when to stop turning!” she gasped out.
It required shifting up to gain leverage. The wheel was hard to spin. She pressed her cheek into a spike. It pierced all the way through. Blood filled her mouth, flowed down her neck.
She struggled to turn the wheel, but it was too tight.
Panicked, her eyes caught Gray’s. She couldn’t talk with her cheek impaled. Agony wracked her. She willed all her grief and agony into that one glance, bared herself to the man, hiding nothing for once.
Not even her heart.
His eyes widened, perhaps truly seeing her for the first time, recognizing what lay hidden between them. A hand crossed that gulf and found her leg. He squeezed her knee and whispered three words that no one had ever uttered to her and meant.
“I trust you.”
What pain failed to do, his words accomplished. Tears welled and flowed down her cheeks. She pushed into the spear, driving it deeper. Her fingers gripped harder. She tugged on the wheel. It slowly turned.
Time stretched to a razor’s edge.
Pain tore through her.
She felt the spear tip on her tongue.
Still, she turned.
“Stop!” Gray finally called out.
She let go. She slumped, sliding off the impaling spear and onto the floor. Distantly, a third gong sounded.
Three spirals, three gongs.
Her vision darkened at the edges, but she saw the spikes pull back, retracting slowly toward the roof. With her skull on the floor, she heard huge gears turning below, like listening to God’s pocket watch.
Closer at hand, the cross straightened and righted itself.
Gray was suddenly at her side. He scooped her up and dragged her onto his lap. She curled around him, hugging him. He held her tight.
“You did it. Look.”
He lifted her higher in his arms. She stared out across the room.
As the gears wound below, each of the three spirals began to flip, revealing false floors. The sections rotated full around. The spiral sides vanished, turning upside down to reveal what had been hidden for all these centuries.
Bolted to the underside of each floor was a glass cradle.
As the three floors settled to a stop, the three cradles swung in their stanchions.
Even from here, Seichan knew they weren’t babies in those oversized cradles, but bodies.
The cradles were actually caskets.
“It’s the tombs,” Gray said.
Across the chamber, the door unsealed, and the slab pulled back up. The others rushed into the chamber.