The Doomsday Key (Sigma Force 6)

Another shake rattled through the tilted floor. From inside the sarcophagus, Malachy’s Bible tumbled out. It fell into the pit and was speared through the middle, impaled on one of the spikes.

Wallace groaned at the loss, but they had more immediate concerns.

Bobbled by the quaking, Seichan lost her grip. She fell without making a sound, as if she expected it, deserved it. One of Rachel’s hands lost its grip, but her other fist remained twisted in Seichan’s coat.

She stopped the woman’s plunge with a wrench of her shoulder. But the weight dragged her over the edge of the sarcophagus. Only Wallace’s grip on her ankles stopped them both from a deadly plunge.

Rachel’s upper body hung upside down, her hips and legs remaining atop the coffin, pinned by Wallace. It was hard to breathe. Seichan dangled below, hanging from her coat. Her only sign of fear was how tightly she clutched that coat to her neck with both hands.

Rachel wanted to let her go, but the woman was her only lifeline.

The floor shook again. A piece of the cavern roof broke away. A large slab dropped, and shattered against the spikes.

She closed her eyes and prayed for some way out.

Her angelic answer came from the most unlikely of sources.

“What the f**k!”

The shout came from the other side of the tilted floor, where the tunnel led up to Lord Newborough’s crypt.

It was Kowalski. He must have come down either out of impatience or because he had heard the booby trap being sprung.

“Help!” Rachel yelled, but with her chest stretched and her belly squeezed, it came out as a squeak.

“Hello!” Kowalski called. Plainly he hadn’t heard her.

Gray bellowed as he hung. “Kowalski!”

“Pierce? Where are you? All I see is a pit and a blank wall. How did you all get across?”

From Kowalski’s vantage point in the tunnel, all he must see was the underside of the fake floor—and the pit.

Gray yelled again. “Go back and pull the bar!”

“Pull my what?” He sounded offended.

“The lever! Up the tunnel!”

“Oh, okay! Hang on!”

Rachel stared down at Seichan, then over to Gray. Hang on. That’s all they could do.

“Hurry!” Gray called out. He had begun to slip again.

Kowalski’s voice came back fainter. “Quit nagging me!”

Rachel clung as tightly as she could. She closed her eyes and pictured the bar sticking out of the floor. She had spotted it earlier. It made sense that there would be a reset button for this trap. While the mechanism might kill any thieves who stumbled down here, the engineers of the trap would have needed a way to reset it. Otherwise, they’d be cut off from the key, too. Some sort of reset had to lie outside the chamber.

But was it the lever?

She prayed Gray’s intuition was right.

She had her answer a moment later.

The entire floor suddenly vibrated. A great grinding of gears shook through the room. The floor began to tilt again—but the wrong way. It started to rotate upside down. Rachel dared not even scream as her body began to slip across the stone. They were going to flip over.

Then something caught. The floor stopped with a stomach-jarring jolt. With a harsher grinding of gears, the floor slowly reversed itself. It swung back in the proper direction.

Rachel clung hard, her lips moving as she said the Lord’s Prayer.

She watched the floor’s edge rise under Gray’s toes and push him back up. She rolled off the side of the sarcophagus and onto the leveling floor. They all lay flat, breathing hard. Even Gray slumped to his rear beside the cross.

Kowalski came back with a flashlight. “If you’re done playing down here…”

Rachel glared in his direction.

“I came to tell you that the storm’s getting fierce. Lyle says we better move it if we want to get off this godforsaken island.”

Before anyone could move or respond, another section of the roof crashed down, striking the floor like a bomb. Water and a flow of bricks came next. The tower was coming down on top of them.

“Out!” Gray yelled.

They all shot to their feet and ran for the exit. A resounding snap jolted the entire floor. It began to wobble, teeter-tottering as something broke in the ancient mechanism.

Off balance, Rachel tumbled to the side, but Gray caught her around the waist and rushed with her toward the tunnel. They all flew into it as more of the cavern imploded.

A last glance showed the floor tilted askew as a waterfall of bricks and rain flooded into the room. Then she was too far up the tunnel to see any more. A moment later, an earthshaking crash chased them. A flume of rock dust rolled up the tunnel and over them.

Coughing, they reached the exit and climbed up, one after the other, back into the storm. Up top, a stunned Lyle offered them umbrellas.

Rachel took one, but she kept her face turned up toward the sky. She let rainwater wash over her.

We made it, Rachel thought.

1:42 P.M.

Gray stared over at the wreckage of the abbey tower. It was now only a tumbled pile of rubble sunk halfway into the ground. Water had already begun to pool around it.

The cavern was surely gone.

A roar rose behind him as Lyle started the tractor. The storm wailed—the winds had picked up while they’d been down there. Rain pelted out of the sky, whipping horizontal at times as the winds swept off the Irish Sea and across the island. Even the lightning had grown more subdued, as if cowed by the growing intensity of the storm.

They loaded up into the trailer for the ride back over the hill to the harbor. Lyle hunched in his seat and pushed the tractor into gear. The trailer lurched as it began to move.

They all crouched low, trying to keep out of the rain and the wind.

Wallace gazed back at the fallen ruins of Saint Mary’s Abbey. “First rule of archaeology,” he said, then glanced sidelong at Gray. “Don’t touch anything.”

Gray did not blame the professor for scolding him. He had acted without properly considering the dangers. He had been so shocked to discover that the cross predated Christianity, that the wheel component actually turned. He leaped before looking. Unlike Father Giovanni. Judging by all the priest’s calculations, he had gone after the puzzle in a systematic and studied way.

But then again, the priest had been trained as an archaeologist. And Father Giovanni didn’t have a woman’s life hanging in the balance.

His group had only another two days to solve this mystery. Gray wouldn’t apologize for pushing their investigation hard, for taking chances, for eschewing caution to get results.