“Rav LaPierre, I donotwant to lose you again. But my job with Pendragon takes me all over the world. How could it ever work?”
The real question was buried under that one.
She wanted to know if I’d leave Reynolds to be with her. Could I? I’d have to take a job with Pendragon just to keep up with her. Or would she consider leaving her position? She’d joined them to track down the last of the Greek Fire threat, and that mission was almost over.
I didn’t have an answer. That required too many long discussions and weighing of pros and cons. We’d make it work. We had to.
Instead of answering, I leaned down and kissed her. Slow and tender, pouring all of me into the kiss.Thiswas what we were fighting for today. When I broke apart from her, I whispered, “Do you think this drainage tunnel’s ever been properly christened?”
She laughed quietly, shaking her head at me. “You are going to?—”
Suddenly, Will’s voice came through the earpiece in a rush. “Bloody hell! It’s all in an offshoot tunnel near the scaffolding!”
I snapped apart from Brooke and reactivated my microphone. “Where? What are you seeing?”
“It’s on the first drone’s feed!”
I held up my arm, and Brooke huddled close to see the dark images on my phone.
“Oh, fuck,” she breathed, pointing at items as the drone pivoted slowly to sweep across the discovery. “Containment unit. Pressure tank. Hoses.”
“Where is this?” I asked.
A map notification popped up on my phone, and I swiped to it. Tiny red pins marked our target locations, including the entrance we’d used at the Small Theater, the exit we’d used last time at the House of the Arches, the maintenance shed from the first trip down, and finally, where we’d found the scaffolding under the amphitheater.
And two little dots where the drones were.
Not even a hundred feet away from the chamber with the scaffolding.
I slammed a fist into the stone wall next to me. “We fucking missed it.”
Chapter 35
Brooke
I huddled close to Rav,staring at his phone screen as the drone’s camera swept across the hidden chamber. It was everything we’d been looking for—the entire assembly required to deploy the Greek Fire in liquid form.
“Can you get the drone closer to that containment unit?” I asked Will through my earpiece.
“On it.”
The drone moved silently forward, its camera zooming in on the metal cylinder. If this was the real system, we’d just found what we came for.
“Let’s move,” Rav said, already turning toward the new passage marked on the map.
“Stop!” I blurted, and he halted. “Masks on. No chances.”
“Good thing I’ve got you here.” He dropped his pack and fished out his polycarbonate facemask that attached to the incursion suit’s hood. We hooked each other’s hoses up to the low-profile rebreathers hidden in the bottoms of our bags and tested the seals.
“Good to go,” I said.
He tapped his face shield against mine, then left at a jog. Our headlamps bounced light off stone walls worn smooth by centuries of water flow. The narrow passage forced us into single file, then onto our knees.
“Take the next right,” Will directed. “You should see an opening about fifty feet ahead.”
Rav’s light caught the edge of a break in the stonework—an offshoot tunnel nearly invisible until we were on it. A light brown swath of camo netting draped down from the ceiling. “They scrimmed the entrance!”
However they’d secured the netting, it had come loose, so that only part of the tunnel offshoot was still hidden. We pushed it aside and stepped through.
