She pulled on the door, but it was locked. Removing her gun from its holster, she cleared the safety, then shot at the knob. It blew apart, and she was able to open the door.
“Let me go first,” he told her. “Leave the door open. That way, it’s clear to Demon which way to go when he catches up.”
The door at the back of the maintenance room was an old wooden one they hadn’t bothered to replace. Everything in the room was neatly cleared around the door, suggesting that someone had moved through it recently. Steel pulled on it and found it unlocked.
Daleyza grabbed a large flashlight from a shelf at eye level next to the door. When she turned it on, the beam was strong and steady. “The door to the crypt is unlocked, and there’s lighting here that someone’s used recently.”
Demon burst through the door from the fountain. “We’ve got twenty minutes to get him and get out of here.”
The crypt was little more than a ten-foot-wide passage with a dirt floor, brick walls, and a ceiling. Both walls had three recessed hollows, like bunks built into the wall, and on the shelves lay shrouded skeletons. Between each of the hollows, between the foot of one and the head of the next, sat raised sarcophagi, with religious reliefs carved into the sides and lids.
“Feels like I’m in an Indiana Jones movie,” Demon commented.
“As long as there are no spiders or snakes, we’re good. We’ve already got rats.” Steel flashed the light to his right, where a large one had been sitting on top of one of the skeletons, and they watched it scurry away when exposed.
“Any clue what I can expect for our prisoners?” the medic asked.
“As to what happened before being imprisoned, no. Other than cutting the trackers out. If one is near the spine, I don’t know how they would remove it.” Her gaze at him was pained. “My father had a surgeon on his payroll, but the man was a complete hack. Lost his license due to his drug addiction. Made him a perfect target. Low wages but all the drugs he could want in exchange for his services.”
Steel told him, “Since it was one of my brothers who picked him up, chances are it was Hector’s surgeon who pulled the trackers, and Leeza’s family is merely the jailor. His odds for being able to walk out of here are better, if that’s the case, but imprisonment in one of these oubliettes will make that challenging even for someone going in healthy.”
“Meaning?” Demon asked.
“At the most basic level, his injuries will include the common captivity factors. The trackers would have been the first things they looked for. They have medical scanners, so that’s probably how they located them. Hopefully, they haven’t damaged his spine removing that one. Closing the wound? They won’t give a shit about infection, so he’ll probably have that to contend with, as well.
“Beatings are a no-brainer. That would just be for fun, with noreal expectation of information or cooperation. Aside from cuts and bruises from fists, he’ll likely have injuries to his ribs and kidneys. When they’re ready to get down to business, knives will be part of their first real attempts to intimidate him.”
Demon grunted, his eyes surveying their surroundings as they continued through the crypts. “They won’t get far with him through physical torture. He lasts longer at that than ‘the quiet game’ with TB.”
“Given his experience in Cairo, I would tend to agree. Beyond that, your biggest concern will be whatever drugs they’ve used to break him. They’ll use repetitive dosing and maximum strengths.”
“Dangerous. They could kill him that way.”
“If this puppeteer wants to play with him, that gamble would be half the fun. They’ll deliberately try to overdose him, then Narcan him back. Redose him once he’s sober. Over and over and over. They’ll get him hooked, and hooked fast. If it were me”—he grimaced because at one time it had been him—“when that happened, I’d put him in a cell, or in this case, the oubliette, for a few days to let him detox without supervision.”
“And if he still doesn’t give anything up?”
“Then the messier stuff. Broken bones. Removing teeth. Amputating extremities. Blowtorch burns. And that will just be the start. It’s doubtful they’ve gotten to that stage yet. He hasn’t been missing long enough for that.”
Demon stopped where he was, a few steps behind them. He flashed his light back the way they’d come from. “Shouldn’t there have been at least one guard down here? Or if not here, at the maintenancedoor?”
“Not necessarily,” Steel said. “Remember, the three stooges up there just took out the security towers with grenade launchers. It’s all hands on deck up there right now. Besides that, there’d be no need to guard the oubliette itself. Even if he were in one hundred percent prime shape, he would have a difficult time getting out. An oubliette is basically a jail cell in the ground. It will be deep, with no way out unless a ladder is extended down. Between the open wounds and the dank conditions, infection will set in quickly, so that would slow him down, and that will be another issue that will affect his mobility.”
Daleyza added, “Not to mention that the cells are narrow. The cells are purposefully constructed so there’s no way to lie down, or sometimes even sit. He’ll be stiff, and it won’t be easy for him to move.”
They’d come to a portion of the crypt that began to look less like an underground tomb and more like a primitively roughed-out cave. They also began to catch the faint hint of human excrement, urine, blood, and decay. If Waters and Ka-Bar weren’t here, someone had been.
“Shine your light on the floor,” Steel told them. “You’ll be looking for open spaces with a lattice of iron bars across. They’ll look like drains or hatches. Be careful when you shine your lights down into them. Start at the top and go slow with the beam down the wall so you don’t blind them. Light will be incredibly painful, even if they’ve only been down here a couple of days.”
“Waters, are you here?” Demon called out.
There was no reply at first. When a voice did come from the darkness, it wasn’t their team leader’s. “You guys have shit timing,” the raspy voice said.
The first two hatches they found led to nothing but dark space. The third held the longtime missing Navy SEAL and Mythos contractor, Ka-Bar.
Steel shone his light down along the wall until he came to the man perched on a rocky outcropping within his cell. “Ka-Bar, it’s Steel. Is there anyone else down here?”
“Don’t know who it is, but there’s someone down the way from me. He hasn’t said a word since they dumped him in here,” he warned. “Not even a moan.”
