8:48 a.m.
Sharyn waited with the others. The group gave Russo and Katch space to challenge the steps, then slowly followed behind.
As they descended, she remembered a moment yesterday on these same stairs, when Russo had told them the campfire was ready. The lynx had hidden behind the woman’s legs and stared down—not at them, but at the steps heading deeper.
Knowing the cat’s cooperation had a time limit, Sharyn offered a suggestion. “We should go straight to the third level. I think that floor spooks him the most.”
Russo agreed. “When I fed him last night, I could only get him down one floor. He balked at going any farther.”
“Makes sense,” Archie said. “If I was hiding a door, I’d put it as deep as possible.”
Russo kept her charge moving along the steps, skipping past the second level. Momentum and guilt got Katch all the way down. But as they exited onto the third floor, the group only managed to cross a handful of yards before Katch hissed and retreated to the left, banging into some of the rusted bunkbeds in his haste to escape.
Duncan pointed to the right. “He clearly doesn’t like that direction.”
“Then that’s where we must go,” Sharyn said.
Through trial and error and an angry spray of urine from Katch, they slowly narrowed the search to a corner of the floor. Already, Sharyn’s headache had returned.
Others suffered, too.
“I feel a migraine coming on,” Duncan noted with a wince.
“If we stay down here too long,” Sharyn warned, “this boobytrap may prove deadly.”
Laurent frowned. “Back in Libya, the traps were cruder, easier to avoid if one paid attention. This is far more insidious. Invisible and slow.”
“It could be a reflection of the book,” Duncan noted. “The encryptions got harder to solve between the First and Second Adages. Maybe these traps mirror the same escalating difficulty.”
Finally, they reached a room that Katch refused to enter. His panic grew severe, far worse than when he had been leashed. He hissed and spat and finally fled off into the darkness, likely aiming for the steps to head up on his own.
Sharyn faced the room, which had its share of skeletal beds shoved to one side. All three walls were chiseled rock. The far side had been bricked over.
“Could that be it?” she whispered.
Duncan stepped over the threshold. “Only one way to find out.”
They all followed him into the room, even Russo, who must have decided to give Katch some privacy and space to calm down.
Once at the wall, they spread out to inspect its length. It stretched five yards across and half that in height. Like many areas of the bunker, it had been heavily tagged with graffiti, marred by neon swaths of spray paint. Its surface was pitted and pocked by broken bricks. Sections showed crumbling mortar, forming deep crevices.
Sharyn pointed her flashlight into an empty pocket created by a pair of missing bricks. At the back, raw rock reflected her light’s shine. The wall there showed the same chiseling as the others. As she reached in, she felt a slight gap between the masonry work and the imperfections of natural stone.
Archie called from a few steps away. “Look at this!”
She shifted over, drawing the others.
“Or I should say,feelthis.” Like her, Archie had stuck his hand into a hole formed by anL-shaped pattern of lost bricks. “There’s a crack in the rock back here.”
They each took turns to confirm it.
Sharyn probed the fissure, but her fingers were not long enough to discern how far it went. But she had a guess. “I wonder if this is the source of the gas, something seeping in from down deeper.”
Laurent grabbed the ax he had slung over his shoulder. “If it is deadly, we should not waste any time.”
No one argued.
Sharyn’s head already pounded hard.
