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Once they were beyond the direct line of sight of anyone watching from outside the cordon, Maddock and the others removed the awkward respirators. The streets were eerily desolate, like the scene of some apocalyptic plague.
“A lot of folks are going to be mighty pissed if they figure out that we’re responsible for the bogus alarm,” Bones remarked.
“Hopefully, that won’t happen until we’re long gone.” Maddock opened his bag and brought out the quadcopter. “Corey, I’m activating the drone, now. Are you receiving?”
Corey’s voice sounded in both men’s Bluetooth enabled earpieces. “Five by five.”
Bones rolled his eyes. “What does that even mean?” he whispered.
Maddock shrugged. “I think he heard it from a TV show.” He took a step back as the four rotor blades began to whir. A moment later, the copter lofted into the air, rising to a height of nearly fifty feet, where it hovered, turning slowly to get a panoramic perspective. The drone then zoomed away, surveying the route they had earlier reconnoitered on Google Earth.
“You’re all clear,” Corey said. “There’s no one between you and the church.”
Dragomirov had kept quiet during their walk, but now he spoke up. “Church? The treasure is in the Church of St. George? That explains why you had to clear the area.”
“It’s not in the church,” Maddock said quickly, lest the mobster conclude that he no longer needed them. “The church is just the starting point.”
Maddock led the way around to the south side of the complex where a narrow passage which connected the relatively modern environs outside the Largo Complex to the ruins surrounding the old church. They picked their way through the maze of half walls and exposed foundations, and crossed to the church entrance. Despite Corey’s assurance that they were completely alone, Maddock breathed a sigh of relief when the doors of the church closed behind them.
There were no pews in the rotunda, just an open floor of dark polished stone. At the back of the enclosure stood the ornate wooden iconostasis. While Dragomirov and Riddle looked on, Maddock knelt down and inspected the floor around its base. “Doesn’t look like it’s been moved recently. If ever.”
“That’s good, right?” replied Bones.
Maddock shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”
He circled around the screen and found a stable upright post. Lowered his shoulder to it, and began pushing. At first, nothing happened, but after a few seconds, the iconostasis began moving, scraping loudly across the floor.
“There’s a trapdoor!” exclaimed Riddle.
Maddock manage to hide a look of relief. He didn’t know what he would have done if there had been only bare floor under the iconostasis, but fortunately there was a rusty metal plate, about two feet across and flush with the floor.
“The treasure is down there?” Dragomirov asked. There was an eagerness in his voice—a hunger.
“Slow your roll,” Bones said. “That is the entrance to a hypocaust. It’s basically an old Roman HVAC system. There’s a whole maze of ductwork down there, and we’re the ones with the map, so don’t get any ideas.”
Maddock gave his friend a grateful nod. He did not doubt that Dragomirov would eventually turn on them, and had planned accordingly, but his strategy was contingent on actually finding the treasure first.
He reached into his bag and produced a small pry bar—another acquisition from the same hardware store where they had purchased the coveralls and respirators. Working one end of the chisel under the metal sheet, he was able to raise it and slide it out of the way, revealing an opening. Although the hole was large enough to accommodate even someone of Bones’ size it only appeared to be a few feet deep. The floor itself was about twelve inches thick, but below that, there was only empty space extending out in every direction, like the crawlspace under a typical house.
Maddock donned his headlamp and a pair of leather work gloves before lowering himself into the passage. There were several upright pillars, spaced at regular intervals, supporting the floor. Further out, his light illumed the foundations walls. According to the site plan, there would be hypocaust ducts to the east and west, and if their speculation about the map was correct, the treasure would be found by heading east. He oriented himself in that direction and began crawling until he found the small opening. Warm air wafted out of it, just a faint echo of the heat that the hypocaust had once channeled throughout the ancient complex.
A glance back showed three headlamps bobbing in the darkness beneath the church and headed his way. Without a word, Maddock lowered himself onto his belly, and crawled into the passage.
After about twenty feet, he reached a junction. Recalling the pattern on the interior of Krum’s cup, he ignored the passages branching off to the left and right, and continued forward. When he had cleared the intersection, he looked back and saw Dragomirov crawling after him.
Although they had discussed the order of movement, Maddock had placed an unspoken dilemma before the mobster. If he followed right behind Maddock, he would have Bones and Riddle behind him, which would put him at something of a disadvantage. On the other hand, if he brought up the rear, the other three might be able to lay in an ambush. Maddock was pleased that Dragomirov had chosen the former course of action for reasons that had nothing to do with any plan to physically overpower the man.
The journey into the hypocaust proceeded almost exactly as Maddock had anticipated. It was a testament to the engineering prowess of the ancient Romans that the tunnel had survived the centuries more or less intact, especially considering the region’s history of seismic activity. The only real surprise was the heat. The ancient ductwork reminded him of being inside an endless pizza oven. It was an especially apt analogy as the air temperature seemed to increase a degree or two every few feet. It wasn’t unbearable by any means, but in the close confines, even a change of a few degrees felt stifling.
He reached a second intersection, and recalling the course indicated by the map, took a left turn. Dragomirov was still following close on his heels. Maddock took the next turn to the right and continued on for another twenty feet until the passage took a bend to the left. According to the map, the passage also should have continued forward to what he hoped would be the treasure chamber, but that passage had not appeared on the site plan, and there was no sign of it here.
Maddock shone his light on the wall directly before him, looking for some indication of a hidden passage, but it looked no different than the rest of the hypocaust. There were no loose bricks, no breaks or seams in between. If there was a passage continuing forward, it had been bricked up long ago.
“Why do you stop?” asked Dragomirov. His voice was muffled but there was a distinct tone of irritation.
“We’re supposed to go forward here,” Maddock replied. “Somebody blocked the passage we’re supposed to take.”
He did not add that he took this as a hopeful sign. It made sense that Vulchan would have sealed the passage to hide his treasure. The fact that it was still sealed up a century and a half later meant that nobody had come along afterward and removed it.
“So what do we do?” growled the mobster.
“We make our own passage,” Maddock answered, taking out his pry bar again. He worked the chisel-tip into a mortar joint, scraping it repeatedly in the crevice surrounding one of the bricks.
“Better hurry,” Dragomirov said. “It’s getting damn hot in here.”
Maddock didn’t need the admonition. His coveralls were soaked through with perspiration, and the exertion of trying to break through the wall was only making matters worse. Fortunately, the old lime mortar crumbled under the assault, and in a matter of just a few minutes, he had loosened the wall’s hold on the brick enough that a hard blow fractured the remaining bits of mortar holding it in place, and with a little wiggling, he was able to work it free. As he did, a blast of hot, humid air rushed out of the dark hole he had opened.
“There’s a void here,” he announced. Judging by the volume of air that had been exchanged with the breakthrough, it was more than just a small recess. “The passage keeps going.”
He resumed attacking the wall with his pry bar, loosening more bricks until the hole was big enough to crawl through. Beyond the wall, the hypocaust duct continued, exactly as the map in the skull cup had indicated it would, but then, after another thirty feet or so, the passage began to slope downward. The degree of the descent was significant enough that Maddock had to brace himself with the heels of his hands keep from sliding. Heat radiated up through the brick floor, forcing him to keep moving in order to minimize time spent in contact with the hot surface. He was pretty sure that, despite the protection of the leather pads over his palms, he was already well on the way to first-degree burns.
But then, just when he was seriously considering calling it quits, the descent flattened out as the hypocaust tunnel opened into a larger chamber. Grateful to finally have a chance to give his hands and knees a break from the constant slow cooker, Maddock immediately got to his feet. It was only then, as his headlamp came up to illuminate more of the room, that he realized his light was being reflected back at him in a thousand tiny golden pinpoints of light.
“My God,” said Dragomirov, rising to his feet right behind Maddock. “Samuil’s treasure. It’s real.”
––––––––
As Riddle and Bones joined them, adding the illumination of their headlamps, the magnitude of the discovery became fully apparent.
The chamber was large and roughly square—about twenty feet long and almost as wide, with a low, barrel-vault ceiling that was just barely high enough to allow Maddock to stand fully erect only if he stood exactly centered between the walls. Bones was forced to slouch a little in order to stand upright. There was an arched opening at the opposite end of the chamber, which was presumably the original means of entrance and egress.
To either side were enormous piles of gold coins, surely numbering into the tens, if not hundreds of thousands. They lay heaped against the walls, along with the mostly rotted remains of the chests that had once contained them. There were other items as well—cut stones, jewelry, statues of marble and bronze. Some of the latter were encrusted with oxidation, but Maddock did not doubt that even those pieces would be judged priceless. While he couldn’t begin to make even a lowball estimate of the worth of the treasure, on the value of the gold alone, it had to be worth billions.
“This isn’t just a treasure,” Maddock said. “It’s a treasury.”
Riddle, who had been uncharacteristically quiet since his conditional liberation, found his voice again. “This is fantastic.” He knelt over a heap of glittering discs. “These coins are just like the ones we found at Tsarichina.”
“There’s no way that Vulchan dude brought all this stuff down here through that passage,” Bones said. “Not by himself.”
Riddle gestured down the length of the hall. “Maybe he used the front door.”
“Then why make a map that shows the passage from the church?” Bones shook his head.
Dragomirov swung his gaze toward Bones. “Vulchan Voivode? How is he a part of this?”
“He’s the one who drew the map on Krum’s cup,” Bones explained. “And I don’t think he hid the treasure here. I think it was here all along.”
Maddock was inclined to agree with his friend. “I think you’re right. Remember what Slava told us about Samuil? How he was surrounded by his enemies at the end? He probably didn’t want to risk moving the royal treasury, so he hid it all down here, and then sealed off the entrance.”
“Maybe we can unseal it?” suggested Dragomirov.
Maddock shot him a sidelong glance. The mobster sounded almost as if he regarded them as partners in the endeavor. Whether that was a calculation on his part, or if he had merely gotten caught up in the moment, Maddock couldn’t say, but he knew better than to trust this apparent shift in their relationship. “Doesn’t hurt to check,” he replied.
As he started down the length of the vault, he became aware of a strange, low-frequency hum in the air, growing louder as he approached the arch.
“You hear that?” Bones asked from right behind him.
“Yeah. I know I’ve heard something like it before, but...” He shook his head. “Maybe we’re underneath the tram line, or something.”
“Nah. It’s more like a waterfall, or rapids.”
“That’s exactly it.” He snapped his fingers as the revelation led to another. “The hot springs. They must flow nearby.”
Bones swiped a hand across his forehead and then flung beads of perspiration against the brick wall. The dark spots vanished almost instantly. “You think? It’s like a friggin’ crawdad boil in here.”
“No kidding.” He glanced back at Dragomirov, and lowered his voice. “I think it’s just about time to get out of the kitchen.”
The noise kept building to a low rumble as he neared the arch, but as his light shone through, what it illumed almost made him forget about both the sound and the treasure.
“I guess that answers that,” he said,
The room beyond was more like a long walk-in closet than a passage. It was about ten feet wide and twenty feet deep, with no other visible exits, but that wasn’t the strangest thing about it. In the glow of his light, it looked as if the chamber was covered with thick white ice.
It wasn’t ice, of course, but the glistening white substance that seemed to ooze from between the bricks, running down the walls to puddle on the floor like molten candle wax, looked remarkably like icicles hanging off a gutter in winter. The back wall was almost completely covered in the translucent material.
“That’s not something you usually see in a church basement,” mused Bones.
“Flowstone,” Maddock murmured.
“What’s that?” asked Riddle.
“It’s a type of mineral formation. It’s caused when water carries dissolved minerals through tiny fissures in rock. Or in this case, through the cement mortar holding the bricks together. The water evaporates, leaving behind mineral growths. Same principle as stalactites and stalagmites, only flowstone usually forms against walls. If I had to guess, I’d say this is travertine. It’s a type of flowstone you usually find near hot springs.”
“I guess now we know why Vulchan didn’t come in through the front door,” added Bones.
Riddle probed one of the smaller extrusions. With a little effort, he succeeded in snapping off a piece about the same size as his pinkie finger. “It’s brittle. Maybe we could break through.”
Maddock shook his head. “I don’t think that would be wise. There’s a hot spring just behind these walls. If we start messing with it, there’s a chance we might break the dam and flood this whole place.”
Riddle dropped the travertine icicle and retreated a step.
“The Roman engineers who excavated these chambers would have known better than to put them so close to an active hot spring,” Maddock went on. “I don’t think it’s an accident that this passage is sealed off. I think after Samuil moved his treasury down here, he bricked up the passage and then diverted a spring to fill in behind it. What better way to keep it safe from his enemies.”
“And his friends,” added Bones.
“Well, we’re not getting out that way.” Maddock made a show of checking his watch, and nodded to Bones, silently communicating that the moment of truth had arrived. He faced Dragomirov. “We kept our end of the bargain,” he said. “Samuil’s treasure, as promised. Now, the three of us are going to walk away. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same. You don’t want to be down here when the authorities lift the cordon.”
The mobster started, as if only now remembering everything that had led up to this point. For a few seconds, he could only gape at Maddock, as if struggling to comprehend what he had just been told. But then, he did the thing that Maddock had both expected and dreaded.
Tearing open his coveralls, Dragomirov reached down to his waistband, drew his pistol, and aimed it at Maddock. “You aren’t going anywhere,” he snarled.
“Wow,” Bones deadpanned. “I did not see that coming.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Maddock said, projecting a bravado that was not entirely genuine. “We knew you’d pull a stunt like this and we took precautions.”
A glimmer of uncertainty flashed in Dragomirov’s eyes, but he shrugged it off. “I have friends in the police department. They will believe me before they believe your hacker friend.”
“They’ll believe their own eyes.” Maddock reached up and tapped the side of his headlamp where he had affixed a small GoPro Hero.
“Smile,” Bones said. “You’re on Candid Camera.”
“We’ve been broadcasting the whole time. Not only that, but our hacker friend is going to send the footage viral if we don’t make it back. The whole world is going to know that Samuil’s treasure is down here, and we found it.” He glanced over at Riddle. “How’s that for great television?”
Riddle managed a nervous chuckle.
“We can edit this part out,” Maddock went on. “Make you look like a partner in the discovery. That’s got to be worth something. Kill us, and you won’t even get that.”
Dragomirov seemed to be at a loss for words, but then he nodded once. “No. You might be recording with that camera, but there’s no way your signal is getting out. Not from down here.”
“Ordinarily, you’d be right,” said Bones. “The GoPro uses a Wi-Fi network for upload. Short range, and more or less line of sight transmission. That’s why I left a trail of these.” He held up a cheap-looking mobile phone. “They’re networked together to bounce the signal all the way home.”
“I told you,” Maddock said. “We expected this.”
“It’s like that old fable about the scorpion,” Bones added. “You couldn’t help yourself. It’s just your nature to be a douche-canoe.”
Dragomirov nodded again. “No. You’re bluffing. Trying to trick me.”
Maddock shrugged. “You want proof? Bones, put it on speaker.”
Bones thumbed the screen of the burner phone. “Corey, my man. Are you digging the show?”
Maddock waited for Corey’s reply.
And waited.
The anxiety drained from Dragomirov’s face as the silence grew. A cold knot of dread twisted Maddock’s gut. He knew that their daisy chain of repeaters had worked because Corey had signaled back every time Bones, bringing up the rear, had activated another burner phone.
So why wasn’t Corey acknowledging now?
“Corey, don’t worry about trying to come up with something clever. Just let us know that you’re receiving. Five by five, remember?”
A new voice filled the chamber, but it wasn’t Corey. “Save your breath. He can’t hear you.”