“How secret is this place?” her gran whispered. It seemed to echo off the bare confines of the stairwell.
“Not very, but it’s not public knowledge either. It’s mentioned in passing in the brochure, and Maria knew about it. I doubt more than a few of the staff know about the painting. Though the cellars under the building on the other side of the courtyard are used for wine. This side isn’t used at all.”
They fell into another nervous silence, which was suddenly broken with running footsteps and shouting. Angry male voices echoed in the chapel. Someone ran up the small staircase to the pulpit, cursed, then ran back down again. They heard doors slam. More shouting. Footsteps retreating.
They were being hunted.
Julia let a few minutes pass before she broke the silence. “We wait here until we’re sure it’s safe.”
There were mumbles of agreement.
“What if I need to go to the toilet?” her gran said. “I drank a lot of tea this morning.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
Right now, Julia had more important things to worry about than her gran’s weak bladder. She had to tell Joe about the patterns she’d discovered in her notes. She had to tell him what she suspected. That there was a traitor in their midst. That someone they trusted as a friend cared more about the gold than their lives. That they had been sold out to their enemy.
Julia reached into her messenger bag and pulled out her phone. But when she switched it on, she found there wasn’t any signal.
“Elle,” Julia said, “can you see if your phone has a signal?”
And her friend immediately dug out her phone.
Chapter 22
The men headed to a suburb high in the hills outside of Cusco. Joe could see the red roofs of the city behind them, but his focus was on the green hills in front of him. About two miles outside a tiny village that considered itself a suburb of Cusco—if the sign was anything to go by—Ed turned the SUV into a narrow dirt road.
“There only one road into this area?” Ryan asked from the back seat.
“There’s another on the other side of the caves,” Ed said as he negotiated the bumps.
“I don’t like it,” Callum said from the passenger seat. “We’re further from the city than I thought we’d be. It means we’d be riding without cover for a good chunk of the journey.”
“T
he other road is better,” Ed said.
“Then why didn’t we take the other road?” Ryan asked.
“Longer. This way is faster.”
Joe kept his eyes glued to the windows while he dug out his phone. He switched it on and hit the speed dial for Julia. No answer. Joe felt the hairs on his arms stand to attention. Julia would answer her phone. It was constantly with her, in that big, bottomless bag she hauled everywhere.
He tried again, but still no answer. He cut the call and rang Elle. He got voicemail. Now his sixth sense was screaming at him. Something was wrong. He knew it. He tried Julia again. Still no answer. He’d give it another couple of minutes, and if he still couldn’t contact the women, he’d tell Callum they had to go back.
“The caves are up ahead, beyond that hill,” Ed said. “It’s said they were used during the Spanish-Incan wars. The Incas would lie in wait for the Spaniards in the crevices of the rocks.”
Something in Ed’s voice didn’t sound right. The car swerved around a curve in the road, hugging a small hill. Large rocks appeared on the landscape. The grey stones jutted out of the earth at random angles, sharp and deadly in appearance.
“You said nobody comes up here?” Callum asked, his tone perfectly level, but Joe knew him well enough to pick up that he was worried about something too.
They were all getting edgy. One glance at Ryan told Joe he was alert too. Their trained senses were flashing alarms at them, telling them something wasn’t right. But what? Joe scanned the barren landscape. If there was a threat, it was well hidden.
“Nobody comes here,” Ed answered Callum.
A buzz from Joe’s phone almost made him sag with relief, but when he looked at the text, it had come from Elle, not Julia. And what it said made his heart stop.
This is Julia. Ed’s mother never left Lima. She couldn’t have taken him to these caves. I think he called Esteban. There are men here looking for us. I think he sold us out. You are in danger.