“Here!” Alyia announced. “The figure of a woman.”
An angel, Kris thought. Albert had described her, the way he had seen her as a child. The image etched in stone at the wall. She wore a headscarf and an apron. No angel, but possibly the image of a nurse, carved decades earlier by some soldier who had been taken there?
“Tell me!” he demanded.
She caught a glance from Valentine. A tear slipped down her cheek. She furiously shook her head.
“A military insignia with words in French.”
“What words?”
“Never give up.”
He repeated the words, then in French as he searched down the side next passage the beam of the flashlight playing across the walls.
“It is here!” He shouted. “Bring them.”
Faridani grabbed hold of her arm, and pushed her down the passage. She caught a glimpse of the insignia on the wall.
“The next one,” Marcus demanded.
“The year 1918,” she thought back over that list of symbols even as she looked around at the floor of the passage for something she could grab.
“And the word paix.”
“Peace?”
They continued down the passage as Marcus scanned the beam of the flashlight along the wall.
“It is here,” he called out when he found it. “The next one!”
“Rows of crosses.”
They passed other rooms, some with cots, others completely bare, then a large room that opened onto another, those marks on the wall, tiny crosses cut in stone, that matched the drawing in the letter.
She stumbled in the shadows. Faridani cursed and dragged her back to her feet. The words were broken English, but the message was clear.
“Cut the rope,” Marcus ordered. “It does no good if we have to keep picking her up.”
Faridani hesitated, then cut the rope on her wrists.
She rubbed both hands, massaging the blood back into her numb fingers.
“The next image,” Marcus demanded.
And the last one, Kris remembered. Was the tapestry there, in a room inside the mine where she believed Micheleine had hidden it from the Germans decades earlier?
She thought of the photograph Cate had sent, a black-and-white photograph of a medieval tapestry that had disappeared over eighty years ago. Is that what Micheleine meant in that last letter?
“I pray it will be safe in the hospital...”
“Tell me!” Marcus shouted at her.
“A lion standing over a dragon.”
He nodded. “Just so, the English lion and the German dragon.”
Marcus moved ahead, playing the beam across the walls at each turn. She was pushed after him. Alyia was behind them with Valentine.
