The Seventh Stone (40 page)

“
It’s never really a game with you,” Braydon said. “Is it?” The panel opened to reveal a biometric scanner.

O’Malley smiled. “Model PX-2000, state of the art, just as you recommended.”

Christa stepped in for a closer look. “I never would have pegged the Catholic church as early adapters.”

“
Couple years ago O’Malley asked my advice on a unique security system for a proprietary relic,” Braydon said. “As usual, he escalated the whole thing into a game, designing a safe room out of an underground storage area beneath the cathedral.” At the time, he pegged it as O’Malley’s brand of grief counseling, intriguing him with something beyond loss.

“
Braydon always had a little Indiana Jones in him,” O’Malley said. “Got to play to people’s strengths.”

O’Malley placed his palm on the scanner. One red light turned green. Zeke hesitated, then the shorter man nearly hoisted himself bodily onto the altar to reach forward and press his palm on the scanner. The second red light turned green. A latch unlocked with a click. A panel, disguised as solid marble covering half of the back of the altar, slid open. Dubler sucked in a breath. The dim light beyond revealed that the opening led to a steep, narrow stairway.

“
I will stop the intruders,” Zeke said. He skirted around the altar. He rushed down the center aisle of The Lady Chapel.

Braydon peered into the darkness. O’Malley’s wiry, strong fingers gripped his shoulder. “Hurry, Braydon. It’s up to you now. You must protect the Urim and Thummim.” He removed the crucifix from around his neck and pressed it into Braydon’s hand alongside its original. “This is the key.”

“
The crucifix is the key?” he said. “You know I was kidding about that.” He had placed it in his “imaginary” safe room design as a playful jab at his old friend.

“
It was one of your better ideas,” said O’Malley. “To me, the crucifix is always the key.”

A thud reverberated down the nave, followed by a sudden draft of cold air and the shout, “Homeland Security.” It came from the Fifth Avenue entrance. Braydon couldn’t see them. The main, raised altar, surrounded by its choir screen, blocked the view. That worked both ways. The assault team couldn’t see them. The stairs beneath the main altar descended one floor into the crypt. The narrower stairs at his feet descended even further down, to some sort of sub-basement. “Lead the way,” he said, gesturing to Tommy. Christa and Dubler crouched behind Mary’s altar.

“
Gentlemen!” Zeke shouted at the strike force. “You must not desecrate a house of God!”

O’Malley stepped back. “I must help Ezekial,” he said. “I’ll stall them as long as I can. You’ll recognize what lies below from your design. But realize, my friend, protecting the Urim and Thummim is not a game. The danger is real.”

Before Braydon could object, O’Malley hurried down the central aisle of the chapel, swerving left towards the Pieta and the Rabbi, his black cassock flowing behind him. Braydon repressed the urge to follow. Rambitskov wouldn’t dare hurt a priest and a rabbi, not in front of the assault team. Tommy and Feinstein were buying him precious time. He couldn’t waste it.

He ducked into the opening, his feet quick on the narrow stairs. He leapt off the last riser into a dark narrow hallway. Dubler scrambled down, peeked up Christa’s skirt as she followed. Bastard. The panel slid closed behind her, slicing off the shouts of the agents and any fragment of light from above, pitching them into utter darkness. Christa’s body pressed against his in the narrow space, her breaths short, a curl of hair soft on his cheek. A current tingled through him, a vibration, like a short circuited wire. Scariest part was, it wasn’t coming from the sacred gemstones.

CHAPTER
46

It kicked in with a vengeance. Christa had fought it off in the tunnels beneath the cliff dwelling, too distracted by the more immediate and terrifying threat of the beasts that wanted to tear off her limbs. Now the total darkness intensified her claustrophobia, born when she got trapped in a cave-in at Dad’s dig in the Ural Mountains.

Her heart beat so hard that Braydon and Daniel, pressing against her, had to feel it, maybe heard it. “I’ve got to get out of here, now,” she said. She shoved Daniel aside, grabbed for the stairway railing. Nothing but black, a heavy, suffocating black. Sweat pricked at her forehead.

A hand grasped her upper arm. The grip was strong, confident, a little rough. It had to be Braydon. “Not that way,” he said. His whisper sounded like a shout in the confined silence. Footsteps thumped the floor above. Determined men, no doubt bristling with weapons and fierce in their black ops uniforms, stomped around the white purity of the Mary statue.

Her heart fluttered. She couldn’t catch her breath. A burning sensation seared through her cheeks. “I can’t stay here,” she stammered out, not about to confess her irrational fear. She couldn’t even talk. This was ridiculous. It was dark; they were underground. That’s all. They were safe, as long as she didn’t give in to panic.

“
No, we can’t,” Braydon said. He grasped her hand and coaxed her away from the ladder. He had to be just inches from her. His breaths came short and quick. “We’ve got to find the Urim and Thummim.”

Only one place was more terrifying than the darkness ahead, the threshold she teetered on, the precipice between reality and belief. “But the Urim and Thummim are the two most sacred, powerful and legendary stones in history. The original Lux et Veritas, the fundamental light and truth.”

“
I might not bet my life on my faith in divine power,” said Braydon, “not yet, anyway. But I would bet it on my faith in Tommy O’Malley. He and the rabbi are Urim and Thummim’s guardians in the Circle of Seven, passed down to them for generations.”

She’d seen the priest’s crucifix. It matched Salvatierra’s exactly. “So the Circle of Seven does still exist.” She let him lead her a few feet deeper into the darkness.

“
And your mother,” he said, “was the guardian of that Emerald hanging around your neck. Which means you’re next.”

She yanked her hand from his. “I’m a history professor, not some mystical guardian. I don’t have Mom’s courage, her resolve, her integrity.”

“
We’ll soon find out.” An overhead light tripped on. She shut her eyes and blinked until they adjusted. “Motion sensors, just like in my design,” Braydon said. They were in a hall so narrow it couldn’t fit two of them side by side. So much for relieving her claustrophobia. The light intensified it. Cinderblock walls, painted white, pressed in on them and led only into the darkness ahead. No ornamentation, just a low ceiling and two dim fluorescent bulbs behind textured plastic panels. They hurried on. At the outer reaches of the light, a second overhead light flicked on; the first one turned off, leaving the staircase up to the chapel in utter darkness, snuffing out any thoughts of retreat.

They reached an intersection. Three hallways spanned out in front of them. The light clawed into each hallway only a few feet. Each hallway looked exactly the same, cinderblock, painted white. Except for one thing. Each hallway had a bronze plaque. Each plaque was embossed with a different symbol. The first was a star. The second a cross. The third, a circle.

“
These guardians don’t make it easy,” she said. Symbols. Granted they bridged languages, but symbols could be misinterpreted. Without her gut feeling that she should choose the Pakal over the other three symbols in that cliff dwelling, she’d be crushed right now. Claustrophobic or not, being crushed was still a distinct possibility. The massive weight of the cathedral above seemed to bow the ceiling in this part of the hall.

“
If Tommy followed my design concept, only one hallway will lead to the safe room,” Braydon said. “Go down the wrong one and a motion sensor will trip a door, trapping the intruder and filling the space with a deadly gas.”

“
Poison gas?” echoed Christa.

“
Seems in bad taste now,” said Braydon, “but at the time, I thought of it as a game. I had different symbols for the three hallways. Mine had to do with the Trinity.”

“
Three hallways,” said Christa. “Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Which was the right one in your design?”

“
Spirit,” said Braydon with a shrug. It was the first time she had seen him looking sheepish. “Tommy had a taste for whiskey. The symbol was a tongue of fire.”

Daniel pushed by them. “He’s a priest,” he said, “just like I trained to be. The hallway we should choose is obviously the one marked with a cross.”

Braydon yanked Daniel back. “The best security systems are intuitive to the owner,” he said, “so they don’t have to call in help to remind them how to access the very thing they’re trying to keep safe from others. At the same time, the safety system should not be obvious to anyone but the owner. And you are nothing like Tommy O’Malley.”

“
All right, then,” Daniel said, pointing to the second hallway. “That’s the Star of David, the symbol of Judaism. Urim and Thummim were the divining stones used in the Breastplate of Aaron by the Jewish high priest during the Temple of Solomon era.”

She felt like an idiot, but she held her hand open to each of the three hallways in turn. It was like an electric current laced the air, that metallic, tingly feeling that comes before a lightning strike. “The circle is the right path,” she said.

“
I’m telling you, it’s the star,” said Daniel. “The circle isn’t a Christian symbol.”

“
The Circle of Seven,” Christa said. “That’s what this is all about.” But if they chose it, and were trapped, it would be her fault.

“
Except it isn’t a circle,” Braydon said. “You see the two bands? It’s a ring. O’Malley drove me crazy with his opera music when we’d meet to play with the design of the safe room. He insisted on listening to Wagner’s opera trilogy, The Ring. He said it helped him commit abstract ideas to memory.”

“
I’m the one with the degree in theology, like your friend, O’Malley,” said Daniel. “He’d know that the Star of David is also significant for the number seven. The star’s six points and its center are relevant to the seven names of angels and Kabbalistic traditions. Urim and Thummim are two of the seven sacred stones. This has got to be the way.” He passed beneath the Star of David and strode quickly down the hallway. A loud click stopped him in his tracks, but no light switched on. He spun around. Before he could retreat, a steel door sliced downward from the ceiling, trapping him behind it. The last thing Christa saw was the terror in his eyes.

“
Daniel!” she yelled. “The poison gas!” She lunged for the door, pressed her palms against the cold, hard steel, fighting to push it upwards and free him.

Braydon pulled her back gently. “He’s fine,” said Braydon. “Even in the game, Tommy objected to the idea of poison gas. I changed it to the trap door setting off an alarm.”

As if on cue, an intensely loud siren blared from behind the trap door. Christa clamped her ears with her palms. Braydon was either grimacing at the noise, or smiling at Daniel’s bad fortune, maybe both.

“
Tommy should have gone with the poison gas,” shouted Braydon over the din. “Then Dubler would only be killing himself. That alarm is going to lead Rambitskov right to us.”

“
We can’t leave Daniel,” she shouted back. “How do you get that door open?”

“
We got five minutes. Then that door opens, but the other trap doors come down, permanently. It was O’Malley’s way of allowing the intruder a chance to escape.” He raced down the hallway marked with the circle. She ran after him. The alarm faded as they distanced themselves from Daniel, lights turning on then off behind them as they progressed. It had to be a whole crosstown block, the length of the cathedral above, before the hallway dead ended at a bolted steel door. An electronic scanner, like the one that opened the panel to the stairway down here glowed on the wall to her right. “Doesn’t make sense,” she said, struggling to catch her breath. “O’Malley wouldn’t send us down here without a way forward.”

“
It’s not biometric,” said Braydon. “In my design, it’s a sophisticated metal detector. I figured if I had to listen to Wagner’s The Ring when we played around with the safe room design, I’d incorporate a magic ring that gave its wearer special powers. In this case, he’d press his hand on the scanner to gain entry. The scanner will unlock the door when it detects the metal and mineral content of a unique ring.”

“
Or in this case, a crucifix is the key,” said Christa.

“
Of course,” Braydon said. “When we get through this you, me and O’Malley got a date at McSorley’s. Drinks are on me.” He placed the crucifix on the scanner. The door slid aside with an ethereal whoosh.

Christa felt her hand clasp Braydon’s. It was like a world opened up to them and they were the first to see it. He squeezed her fingers. Together, they stepped across the threshold.

“
We are still underground,” she said. “Right?” The chamber wasn’t even that big, once she got her bearings.

“
Seven sides,” Braydon said, “appropriate.”

“
Only ten feet across, but look up there.” She pointed towards the high-domed ceiling. It was painted like a cerulean sky blazing with bright halogen lights centered in gold leaf starbursts. “It feels more like a transportation device than a room,” she said. And, in a way, it was.