The Betrayed Series: Ultimate Omnibus Collection With EXCLUSIVE Post-Shiva Short Story (87 page)

She read slowly and carefully. “For ye were afraid…or scared or…ill?” Rebecca hesitated. Like she said, ancient Hebrew was a bitch. The language was primarily oral back in biblical times. The speaker’s inflection and tone helped define the words. The written language was a bit loosey-goosey. She picked up where she left off. “Because of the fire…or flame…or brightness…and…” Rebecca stopped the translation, stepping back from the pedestal as well.

“Will one of you tell me what is so damned scary about that passage?” Brandt insisted.

Gulping, Rebecca finished the passage, “And went not up into the mount, seeking instead to huddle…or cower…or hold tightly to its base…”

“Um,” Harvish said, “I still don’t get it. I may be seriously lapsed, but that’s not any part of the Ten Commandments I have ever heard of.”

“Exactly,” Brandt agreed.

The sergeant might be well versed in his Catholic traditions, but he was a bit sketchy on his Jewish ones.

Rebecca found her voice. “That is because you are both used to the King James Version. It is like the
Reader’s Digest
version of the Bible, stripped down, easier to read and digest.”

Brandt frowned. “And your point?”

She knew that under any other circumstance Brandt would have gone toe-to-toe after she dissed the King James Version, but these weren’t any other circumstances, were they? They were down in a secret vault while a man above offered his life so they might obtain this information.

Rebecca skipped the history lesson. “The closest mainstream Torah translation of the Ten Commandments is considered the Mechon-Mamre. It reads, ‘For ye were afraid because of the fire, and went not up into the mount.’”

“So someone just etched in those words,” Brandt suggested. “Anyone familiar with that translation, right?”

She shook her head. “Except for those last words, ‘seeking instead to huddle at its base.’ Those words aren’t found in any accepted Torah translation of Deuteronomy.”

Brandt’s frown deepened. “Spit it out.”

“An archeological dig did find an ancient scroll in Jerusalem that included those added words.”

“Alright, so someone just copied it from that,” Brandt tried to reason.

Rebecca had to make him understand. “That scroll wasn’t found until the 1970s. If anything that scroll copied down the words of this slab.”

“And that scroll,” Bunny added, “was dated back to around 1000 BCE.”

Brandt’s eyes searched Rebecca’s face. She knew he wanted her to somehow disagree or prove the younger woman wrong. That he wanted Rebecca to tell him that no way, no how were these small stone fragments the remains of the actual Ten Commandments.

The only problem? She couldn’t.

“So we can’t say for sure that these are truly the slabs of stone Moses brought down the mount,” Rebecca said, splitting the difference. “But what we can say, with quite a bit of certainty, is that these fragments are contemporaneous to biblical times.”

That was the best she could do, and even that did not seem to be enough for Brandt.

“But—”

A loud boom and then a scream interrupted Brandt. Everyone in the room knew what it meant. The door had blown open and the tomb was engulfed in flames along with Tolst. Rebecca pulled Bunny close as the scream abruptly stopped.

They all stared down the dark tunnel, waiting for any sight of light. Any sign the fire had made its way down here. But the seal must have held. Only the sounds of crackling flame filled the stairwell.

“I don’t want that sacrifice to be in vain,” Brandt stated.

None of them did.

“Screw traditional or accepted or whatever translations,” Brandt said more heatedly. “We need a location where the rest of the tablets might have been buried so they can lead us to Amed’s payload.”

Rebecca nodded. He was right. They needed to honor Tolst the best way they could. She turned to read more of the fragment’s passages when a not just ear-splitting, but soul-wrenching
crack
sounded all around them.

They stood there for a moment that seemed suspended in time. Whatever caused that sound was
not
good. To prove her instincts right, small fissures in the rock walls surrounding them appeared. These grew to larger splits that grew into gaps.

Pebbles fell from overhead as the entire chamber shook.

* * *

Aunush readjusted her binoculars. What she was seeing could not be what she was seeing. Yet no matter how she fiddled with the focus, the Cathedral of the Protection of Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat listed. First to the right, then to the left.

The church always seemed something out of Candyland only on some form of hallucinogenics, to Aunush. Now the structure swayed and rocked. Then the forwardmost church turret broke off from the rest of the building.

Down in Red Square, the sheeplike revelers clapped. The morons. Not until the bright blue and white tower cracked off did the crowd scream in unison, scattering like cockroaches when the light was turned on. Like a quartered onion, the remaining towers broke off one by one, revealing the heart of the church, the shrine to St. Mary. Blues and golds glistened from the firelight.

Alright. Perhaps this was a tad too public.

Nannan stood beside her, his mouth slack, his jaw dropped so far that only his flabby neck stopped it from dislocating.

Besides leaving them vulnerable to scrutiny, Aunush cared little for the destruction of the church. The Disciples’ pedigree went back far farther than a sixteenth-century church built to commemorate a tyrant’s petty war victories.

No, the problem was, given the fact the church was laid open like a dissection, yet showed only one body, where were the infidels?

* * *

As larger and larger chunks of ceiling fell onto their heads, Brandt used his arm to sweep the tablet fragments into his pocket. “Harvish, another exit?”

“Sarge,” the point man replied, “it’s a dead end.”

It couldn’t be a dead end. Ivan the Fucking Terrible was about as paranoid as it got. He wouldn’t leave himself without an exit plan.

“Here,” Rebecca called out. “It’s a false wall.”

She was right. The wall looked continuous, except it wasn’t. A piece of the wall stood a good two feet out from the rest of the wall. A passage led out behind it.

“Let’s go,” Brandt said, urging Harvish and the women to hurry forward as the ceiling behind them first sagged and then collapsed. The rest of the chamber caved in as he shimmied through the narrow passage into a wider tunnel.

Harvish’s flashlight’s beam bobbed in front of them as they followed the slanted tunnel. Each step carrying them farther and farther away from the imploding church. The rumble followed them, coursing around them like a soundtrack of destruction. Silt drifted down, but the tunnel held.

Then the natural hand-hewn passage ended abruptly, dumping them into a much more modern tunnel.

“What the fuck?”

Since no one answered him, Brandt looked to their options. This smoother tunnel led off into three different directions. But to where?

“This must be the labyrinth Ivan built to hide the library,” Rebecca commented. She turned to Bunny. “Any idea which way leads up?”

The younger woman just shook her head, still hugging her midriff.

“Harvish? Any ideas?” Brandt asked.

“They all seem the same, Sarge.”

Gritting his teeth, Brandt missed Svengurd all over again. The tall Swede had an almost sixth sense for an escape path.

“There’s three,” Rebecca stated.

Brandt tried to be patient, but come on. “Yes?”

“In Christianity, three is the most sacred number. It represents not just the trinity but the three aspects of God.”

“Great, does that help us decide which one to take?” Brandt asked as the tunnel trembled behind them. He couldn’t rule out a complete cave-in.

“There’s Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.”

Bunny spoke up, “Or Omniscience, Omnipresence, and Omnipotence, but I don’t think it is either of those Christian concepts.”

“Of course,” Rebecca murmured. “The Russian Orthodox are much more married to the Jewish traditions, so to them, three would present Unity, Discord, and Harmony.”

“
And?
” Brandt pressed.

The women looked to one another, but it was Rebecca who spoke. “Harmony is considered good ‘doubled.’”

“Then right it is,” Brandt said, getting them moving again as the tunnel behind them groaned. He urged them to pick up the pace. He had no idea where this tunnel might lead, but it couldn’t possibly be worse than what lay behind them.

Could it?

With
their
luck he was not going to answer that question.

CHAPTER 13

══════════════════

Underground Moscow

10:42 p.m. GMT

Harvish set quite the pace as Rebecca struggled to keep up. Bunny charged ahead, exhibiting another perk of her youth. Brandt was hard on Rebecca’s heels. Literally. Like his urgency could get her legs to move any faster.

Worse, the tunnel sloped upward. No, it slanted upward. Her quads screamed at each step. Yet Rebecca kept up the pace as every few moments the tunnel would quake from the death throes of the cathedral, reminding them they wouldn’t be safe until above ground.

“Door ahead,” Harvish shouted, pointing his light toward the exit.

Catching up, Rebecca put her hands on her knees, bending over and trying to catch her breath as the men talked.

“Any idea where we are?” Brandt asked.

Harvish shrugged. “Best I can tell is near street level northwest-ish of the church.”

Rebecca knew Brandt was going to frown at the northwest-ish even before the sergeant’s lips turned down. Svengurd never would have put an “-ish” on anything.

“As long as the damn thing doesn’t open into the river,” Brandt said. “We should be good.”

Crap. Rebecca had forgotten the Moscow River was just east of the cathedral.

“Or the Kremlin,” Bunny added, clearly more familiar with the area than any of them.

“That too,” Brandt grunted, nodding for Harvish to open the door.

Rebecca was braced for anything except the sight before her. Bright lights made the row upon row of shops seem almost as stark as daylight. Shoppers were scurrying about, most rushing to the southern shops to look out the windows to the fiery cathedral. The huge vaulted glass ceiling above them glowed ruddy from the nearby fire.

“GUM,” Bunny explained. “We’re in the department store.”

And just as clearly as Rebecca had not expected to find tourists—she was far more used to stumbling out of dark tunnels to land in front of an assassin’s weapon—the shoppers were just as shocked at a group of four people barging in with guns.

“
Ruzyah!
” a woman screamed, pointing at them.

Rebecca could only imagine that stood for gun or weirdos or more likely
terrorists
. Whatever it meant, others turned and pointed. The screams exponentially increased.

Then Brandt stepped out in front of the foursome and shouted, “
Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii!
”

Bunny whispered, “Federal Security Service.” When Rebecca frowned, the younger woman added, “The new KGB.”

Ah, now it made sense.

The sergeant indicated down the tunnel.
“
Oni prikhodyat!
”

“They are coming,” Bunny translated.

Brandt then
charged toward the growing crowd.
“
Poluchit
’
bezopasnosti!
”

Rebecca didn’t need an interpreter for that one. The throng broke, turning and surging toward the exit. The sergeant had scared the crap out of them, not necessarily without reason. Whoever attacked them at the cathedral could easily turn their attentions to the shopping mall.

“Weapons away,” Brandt ordered as they traveled in the crowd’s wake.

Attention might be off of them as they brought up the rear of the stampeding crowd, but how long could they trust that the actual authorities didn’t show up? Their ruse certainly couldn’t hold up to any kind of scrutiny.

Brandt grabbed her arm, urging Rebecca ahead. “We’re going to blend in until we’re out the north exit, then melt into the chaos.”

Which would have been a great plan except Harvish screamed, grabbing his arm. Blood seeped through his fingers. He’d been shot.

So Brandt hadn’t been lying after all.

They
were here.

* * *

Brandt shoved Rebecca into the nearest shop and then yanked Bunny in behind her. To his credit, Harvish kept it together and backed into the shop. A crystal vase shattered beside him. Brandt urged them farther back into the maze of glass cases. A display of tiny crystal figurines exploded, sending glass shrapnel everywhere. Perhaps Swarovski’s wasn’t the best place to hole up from a sniper.

Finally though they drew deep enough into the store to avoid the sniper fire.

Anger brewed in Brandt’s belly. How the fuck had they found them so quickly? And why the hell wasn’t Talli providing cover? There had to be muzzle flashes. Brandt risked a quick glance down the large central courtyard of the shopping mall, but got chased back by a bullet whizzing past his hairline. Waning screams indicated that the crowd had headed east, leaving absolutely no cover between the store and the closest exit.

That long, glass-domed central aisle way was now nothing more than a shooting gallery. But if they stayed hunkered down here, either the enemy would find a window to take them out one by one or the actual FSS would show up. Either way. Lights out.

Sirens wailed, gaining speed as they approached Red Square.

He turned to find Rebecca dressing Harvish’s wound. It was just a through and through of the upper arm. The point man should be ready to go in a few seconds. Where exactly they were going was still in question.

Brandt grabbed a feather duster from the top of one of the cases and stuck it out into the view of the sniper. A bullet ripped through the duster, sending plumage flying. The angle of that shot was fairly steep. Given that the large glass ceiling of the shopping mall was intact, the fuckers were somewhere on the second floor.