Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth

4



Blood bubbled from Dr. Cheney’s lips as he tried to breathe, and his whole body shook.

Drake surveyed the scene in an instant. A display case had been shattered in the man’s struggle with the murderer. Blood smeared on the wall showed where the dying man had crashed into it, trying to keep himself from falling.

Sully, Jada, and their guide ducked through the low passage, and when the graduate student saw the dying man, she screamed his name.

“Maynard!” she cried, and rushed to kneel at his side, murmuring denials and prayers in a torrent of heartbreak.

“Don’t touch him,” Sully warned as she went to try to lift his head.

The woman glanced up in confusion, but Drake saw in her eyes that she understood Sully’s caution. The police would not want the crime scene disturbed. She wanted to help the curator, but anyone could see there was nothing she could do.

Drake turned away from her anguish. He ran to the next bend in the corridor and peered around the corner, listening for retreating footfalls. They were no more than thirty seconds behind the killer, but that could be an eternity if the bastard knew where he was going. He was about to give chase anyway but hesitated.

“Hey,” he said, rushing back to the others, realizing he didn’t know the graduate student’s name. “Which way is the staff entrance you were talking about?”

She blinked, lifted her gaze from the dying Dr. Cheney, and looked at him. “Back there,” she said, glancing the way they’d come. “Through the Minotaur’s alcove. It’s the dark area on the left as you—”

But Drake had stopped listening. He remembered. They had just passed it, probably only a second or two before the killer had gone into that darkness. He might even have been hiding there in the shadows, waiting as they went by so as not to make any noise.

“Stay with her,” he told Sully.

Sully nodded, though he didn’t look happy about it.

Drake ran through the passage in a crouch, standing as he emerged in the corridor. He heard Jada following, wished she would wait with Sully, but didn’t take the time to argue with her. A couple of hours with the adult Jada Hzujak and he knew she wasn’t the sort of woman who was going to sit idly by when it came time for action.

They raced through two turns of the labyrinth, retracing their steps, and came to the Minotaur’s alcove. Drake didn’t slow, plunging into the darkness, hands in front of him. He stumbled over loose cables on the floor but caught himself on the wall at the rear of the alcove.

“Watch your step, Jada,” he said, his eyes adjusting as he found a doorknob and twisted it, bursting through into a narrow, dimly lit corridor that looked nothing like the interior of the labyrinth.

Sound equipment and a workbench blocked the way to the right, so they went left, hurtling down the narrow hall created by the hollow backs of the labyrinth’s walls. Plywood and two-by-fours and bare bulbs made him think of being backstage in a theater.

What the hell am I doing? Drake thought. Luka had been murdered, and now Dr. Cheney, who apparently had helped him in his labyrinth research, was dying. Whatever Luka had discovered, someone didn’t want anybody talking about it. If the killers thought that Jada’s father might have shared his secrets with her, she would be a target as well, just as she had feared, and yet here they were chasing after one of the very people who would want her dead.

The corridor cut diagonally to the right, and he followed it. It zigzagged in between turns in the labyrinth, a hidden space, a maze within the maze. He could hear Jada’s footfalls right behind him, her breathing so close that he practically could feel it, and he knew they were being foolish taking this risk. But he also knew that she wanted answers and would never stop just to save herself.

The maze ended abruptly. The walls on either side cut away, the halls of the labyrinth turning, but their narrow corridor arrived at a pair of double metal doors with an exit sign glowing above them and a warning placard stating the door was for the use of staff only.

Drake slammed through the door and found himself on a stairwell landing. Jada skidded to a halt beside him, looking first up and then down.

“Which way?” she asked, her hazel eyes alight with fierce determination, her magenta bangs framing her face.

“No way to tell,” Drake said. “And we’d be fools to try guessing. We’ve gotta get back to Sully and get out of here.”

“What?” Jada snapped, turning on him. “Dr. Cheney’s our one lead, and he’s back there dying. If we catch this guy, we could make him tell us—”

Drake shook his head. “We’re not gonna catch him. He’s got a head start, and we don’t know where he is or what he looks like. Whether he went up or down, by now he’s mixed in with employees or with visitors and is on his way out of this place. Best thing to do right now is get you the hell out of here.”

Jada’s eyes narrowed. “You think I’m in danger?”

“You were hiding out in a friend’s apartment because you thought you were in danger,” Drake reminded her. “It’s just that now I believe you.”

“Nice,” Jada said. “Didn’t you used to be charming?”

“Yeah. Strangely, I’m not in the mood today.”

Jada’s flinty exterior gave way, and for a moment he saw the pain and vulnerability beneath.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s move.”

She ran back down the sawdust-smelling corridor. Drake followed, wondering where it would all lead. He and Sully weren’t bodyguards or private detectives, and they sure as hell weren’t cops. This wasn’t a job for them, but Sully would never see it that way, and Drake had the feeling that he himself was already in too deep to walk away.

Jada had left the door to the Minotaur’s alcove partway open, but when they went back through it, Drake closed it tightly and wiped the knobs on both sides, his mind racing ahead. The police would be there any minute, and then all their options would be taken away from them. Whatever happened after that would be decided by the detectives running the case.

They ducked and went through the low-ceilinged passage, emerging just a few feet from where two security guards stood by Dr. Maynard Cheney’s body, one of them on his cell phone, reporting the crime, and the other just scratching his head in dismay.

When Drake and Jada came in, the guards turned and one of them reached for the Taser at his side.

“Whoa!” Drake said, putting his hands up. “We’re with them, pal.”

The guards looked over to Sully and the graduate student, who sat against the wall a short way down the corridor.

“It’s okay,” the woman said. “They were with me when I found him.”

The guards ignored Drake and Jada after that. They looked quite shaken, and Drake thought they would be very relieved when the police arrived.

He glanced over at the body. Dr. Cheney lay in the same position, still bleeding, flesh turning paler as the blood drained from him. The man’s chest had ceased to rise and fall. One glance at the graduate student’s red-rimmed eyes and her tears and the way Sully held her—self-conscious and awkward at the intimacy of her grief and the comfort he offered—and it was clear no ambulance would be needed. Not that Drake had needed confirmation. The moment he had seen the extent of Cheney’s wounds, he had known the man’s fate was sealed.

“Uncle Vic,” Jada said softly, her eyes beginning to well up at the sight of the dead man. “We need to go.”

Sully gave a shake of his head, cautioning them to be wary of what they said around the guards. He leaned in and spoke to the graduate student in gentle tones Drake rarely had heard from him.

“Gretchen,” he said quietly, “tell them what you told me. And quickly, please. We don’t have a lot of time.”

Apparently the graduate student had a name, and Drake thought it fit her well. Drake and Jada drew nearer, and he glanced over his shoulder to make sure the guards weren’t making any effort to overhear them.

Gretchen looked at Jada. “You’re Luka Hzujak’s daughter?”

Jada nodded.

“And he’s really dead?”

Jada took a deep breath, wiping away a tear, visibly fighting her grief. “Yeah. Murdered. And whoever killed him probably killed Dr. Cheney, too.”

“What’s the connection, Gretchen?” Drake asked quietly, glancing again at the guards, wondering how long before the police pulled up in front of the museum. “Jada’s father was studying labyrinths. He made some kind of discovery, figured out some kind of mystery that had him excited.”

“I don’t know everything,” Gretchen said. “It’s just—my God, it’s just history. But I know that Maynard told Professor Hzujak about a connection he’d found between the labyrinthine tomb from Egypt’s Twelfth Dynasty and the labyrinth of Knossos—the one with the Minotaur—”

“I thought that was just a legend,” Drake interrupted.

“So did I,” Gretchen said, nodding. “But the historical record says there was something being shown there in the first century A.D. It’s accepted that the labyrinth of Knossos existed, but the question is how much of the story is real and how much is myth.

“Maynard thought he had found part of the answer. The museum is running an archaeological dig near the City of Crocodiles in Egypt right now—my brother Ian is one of the managers on the project—and they’ve found some amazing things.”

“My father was in Egypt just a few weeks ago,” Jada said in a hushed voice.

Gretchen nodded. “Yes. He visited the dig. You didn’t know why he traveled there?”

Jada hugged herself. “Research was all he told me.”

“Maynard had been translating the writing on the artifacts that have been coming back from the dig,” Gretchen went on. “He found references to three different labyrinths, all in use at the same time and all designed by Daedalus.”

“Another myth,” Drake said.

“Based on a real person,” Gretchen said.

“Come on, Nate,” Sully put in. “How many times have we proven that most legends have at least a kernel of truth?”

Drake nodded. There was no arguing with their own experiences.

“What about Midas?” Drake asked, thinking of Luka’s research into alchemy.

Gretchen shook her head. “No. As far as Maynard knew, all of that ‘Midas touch’ stuff, turning things to gold, was just a story. It meant something, but he hadn’t figured out what just yet.”

“Dr. Cheney thought he had proven the rest, though?” Jada asked.

“He was sure of it,” Gretchen said, a bit breathless now, wiping at her tears as she glanced at the guards. She had no reason to believe their story except that she saw Jada’s grief reflecting her own and must have felt how vital this information was to them.

“There were even references to the Minotaur,” she went on. “Not just the one in Crete, but in Egypt, too. Both labyrinths had monsters in them, according to the writing at the Egyptian dig. There’s more than a kernel of truth to this stuff, and he had the evidence. As soon as he started accumulating all of that, he got the go-ahead from the museum to proceed with this exhibit.”

Sully began to rise. Gretchen reached for him, as if fearing to be left alone, though the security guards were there. Sully took her hand and helped her stand as well.

“Jada,” Sully said, “Dr. Cheney told Gretchen that he thought whatever your father was searching for must be at the center of the third labyrinth.”

“Where was that one?” Drake asked.

“That’s the thing,” Gretchen said, glancing back and forth between Drake and Jada. “It’s a mystery. But your father called Maynard a couple of days ago, and when they got off the phone, Maynard was so excited. Your father thought he’d worked out the location of the third labyrinth. He wouldn’t say where it was until he’d confirmed it, but Maynard believed in him. He said if anyone could find it, Luka Hzujak could.”

The two young women exchanged a look of shared sorrow, and Drake lowered his eyes, feeling like he and Sully were intruders. But then Jada touched his arm, and he looked up at her.

“This has to be it,” she said, but she was staring at Sully. “This is why they killed him, Uncle Vic.”

“To keep the secret?” Gretchen asked, doubtful.

“Or to keep Luka from getting there first,” Sully said, turning to Drake.

“Henriksen?” Drake said. “He was already our best guess.”

The security guards’ radios crackled with voices and static. The police were on their way up. They would be upstairs in moments.

“We need to go,” Sully said, looking at Jada.

“Gretchen, listen,” Drake said, staring at her intently. “You said your brother’s working on that dig in Egypt. If we can get there, can you put in a word for us? We need access to that site.”

“What?” Jada asked. “Egypt?”

But Sully was nodding, looking at Gretchen expectantly. “It’s the only way we’re going to find out who’s really behind this.”

Gretchen glanced at the corpse of Dr. Cheney. Then she nodded. “I’ll call him.”

“Good,” Sully said. “I’m sorry, but we’ve got to go. When this is all over, you’ll hear from me. We’ll make sure you get the truth.”

“Thank you,” she said, her expression crumbling as they walked away and she was forced to contend once more with the murder of a man she so obviously had admired and loved.

“Where do you think you’re going?” one of the security guards asked.

“The police are coming up, aren’t they?” Drake said in the most reasonable tone he could muster. “They’ll never find their way through all of this. We’re gonna meet them and guide them through.”

“Right,” the guard said. “Should’ve thought of that.”

“Hey, don’t sweat it,” Sully replied. “None of us is thinking straight right now. What a horrible day.”

“Exactly,” the guard said.

As soon as Drake, Jada, and Sully were through the crouching passage, they bolted along the twisting corridor to the Minotaur’s alcove. They could hear voices and the crackling of police radios coming their way as they slipped silently through the door at the back of the alcove and then hurried along the narrow “backstage” hallway to the staff exit.

“How the hell are we going to get to Egypt?” Sully asked Drake.

“We’ll figure it out.”

“We can’t go yet,” Jada said as they raced down the employee stairwell. “Not until after my father’s funeral.”

Sully stopped and turned to her, taking her by the hands. “Jada, listen. The way he died—it’s going to be days before the coroner releases his body for burial. If Henriksen is behind this, he’s been working on it for a while. Whatever secrets Luka discovered, Henriksen either knows them or he’s trying to crack them right now. If we’re gonna get to the bottom of it, we can’t let him beat us to them.”

Jada looked frustrated and confused. “What if they’re ready to release him and I’m not back?”

“We’ll leave word,” Drake promised. “We’ll make sure either someone is there to claim him or the coroner’s office holds on to his remains until you can do it yourself. But the other problem is that if your father’s killers really are looking for you, a funeral would put you out in public, make you vulnerable.”

Jada narrowed her eyes. “Once they find out you’re helping me, you guys will be targets, too.”

“Nah,” Drake said, smiling. “Who’d want to hurt a guy as charming as me?”

“Sometimes I do,” Sully said. “Come on.”

They hurried down to the first floor, took a moment to compose themselves, and opened the door. No one tried to stop them. Drake had considered security cameras, but he figured that if these staff doors were under video surveillance, either the killer had disabled them to avoid being seen—in which case they had nothing to worry about—or the cops would scan the video as far as the killer and stop there. He hoped.

They had to answer a few questions and be patted down by police officers as they were leaving the museum and provide their names. Then they were on the street again and walking back toward the apartment where Jada had been staying.

“We need to go to Luka’s place,” Drake said.

Sully shot him a look. “Not a good idea.”

“The cops will already have searched it,” Drake argued. “And they won’t be looking for the same things we’ll be looking for. If there are any notes or computer files about this stuff, we want them. We need all the information we can get on this. Until we find out what Henriksen is really after and get our hands on it—”

“And expose him,” Jada put in.

“—Jada will never be safe.”

“I don’t know,” Sully said. “Maybe we should talk to Olivia.”

Jada flipped her hair back and stared at him. “No way. That bitch is involved in this somehow. I know it. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“You can’t really know that,” Sully replied.

“But I do,” Jada insisted, reaching into her pocket and pulling out her slim red cell phone. She flipped it open and turned it on, waiting a moment while it powered up. “Huh, look at that. No messages. The cops had to have told her hours ago that they found her husband murdered and—” Her voice broke. “—and stuffed into an old trunk. But she hasn’t tried to get in touch with me? His daughter? Her stepdaughter?”

“You’re right,” Sully said, throwing up his hands. “I’ll buy it. We’ll go to Luka’s place. But we’ve gotta watch our asses. If it is Henriksen, he’s likely to have people watching the place.”

“We have to risk it,” Drake said. “And if they come after us, maybe we can grab one of them and confirm what we’re all thinking about Phoenix Innovations.”

In agreement, they walked in silence for more than a block before Sully flagged down a taxi, preparing themselves for whatever trouble awaited them at Luka Hzujak’s apartment.

By the time they got there, the whole building was in flames.


Before someone had decapitated and mutilated him and put most of his pieces in an old steamer trunk that smelled of low tide and mothballs, Professor Luka Hzujak had lived in a four-story brick building on 12th Street, just west of Abingdon Square Park, in the West Village. Slender trees grew from slots in the narrow sidewalk. With the stone lintels above the windows, the dormers on top, and the small smokestacks on the roof, the building might have looked like something out of Oliver Twist if not for the fact that it was on fire.

Drake spotted the smoke out the window of the taxi from several blocks away. A few seconds later, Sully frowned, sniffing the air. The smell of a fire that large never presaged anything positive.

“Pull over here,” Drake said.

The cabbie obliged, and Sully and Jada climbed out while Drake paid the man, including a generous tip mostly because he didn’t have time to wait for his change. He slammed the door and shoved his hands in his pockets as he hurried along the sidewalk after Sully and Jada. None of them had said anything as yet, but he felt sure they all knew which building was on fire.

When they reached the corner of West 12th Street, there were no surprises awaiting them, but Jada looked like she had been punched in the gut. She hugged herself tightly and took a step back from the sight of her father’s burning apartment building.

Sirens wailed, and a police car pulled up at the other end of the street. The firemen were already at work, hoses twisting along the pavement and over the curb. An old woman sat on a gurney behind an ambulance, staring at the building in shock as an EMT put an oxygen mask over her face. Several other people—apparently residents—stood across from the building in various stages of undress, most of them at the very least shoeless, while a pair of police officers questioned them.

Drake wondered how long Luka had lived there and if there were remnants of his life stored anywhere else. Otherwise, Jada had lost not only her father but all of his papers and photographs, all of the mementos of his life. He watched her cover her mouth with shaking hands, and his heart broke for her. She looked like she wanted to scream or run or hit someone, but she didn’t know what to do next.

“This is all happening damn fast,” Drake whispered to Sully.

Sully narrowed his eyes and nodded in agreement, then went to Jada and slipped an arm around her.

“Listen, kid,” Sully rasped, “we’re not going to get anything useful here. We stick around and we’re just asking for trouble, especially if whoever did this is on the lookout for you.”

Jada spun on him, curtains of magenta hair flying across her face. “We know who did this!” she shouted. “And I’m not going to hide anymore.”

Thanks to streetlights and New York traffic, the taxi that had just left them off hadn’t gotten very far. As the cabbie accelerated across the intersection, bending to glance at the burning building and all the emergency vehicles, Jada rushed into the street and flagged him down.

“You don’t think—” Sully began.

“Phoenix Innovations,” Drake said.

Sully swore. “This is a really bad idea,” he said as he ran after Jada.

“Yeah,” Drake agreed. “But are you gonna stop her?”

Sully ignored the question, but they both knew the answer. With the kind of pain Jada was in, they didn’t blame her for wanting to confront the man she suspected was responsible for killing her father or the stepmother she thought had betrayed him. But that didn’t make it a good idea. Drake doubted they would have been able to talk her out of going to Tyr Henriksen’s office, which meant the best thing they could do was protect her.

“Fifty-ninth Street and Broadway,” Jada said, practically hurling herself into the backseat of the taxi.

“I just dropped you off,” the cabbie said, mystified.

“Yeah,” Sully growled. “Change of plans.”

Sully paused before getting into the cab and looked back at Drake.

“Whatever goes on, it’s gotta be as public as possible,” he said. “Make sure security cameras pick us up, that people see us going to Henriksen’s office. It goes against every rule we’ve ever had—”

“No, you’re right,” Drake said. “If we’re going in there, we have to make sure Jada gets noticed. No matter how much they want to silence her, they’re not going to kill her in the office if a hundred people saw her go in.”

Glass shattered behind them, and they turned to see black smoke and bright fire billowing out of the exploding upper-story windows. The building was going to be a total loss, and you didn’t get that hungry a fire without some kind of accelerant. The investigators would know right off it had been arson, but that didn’t matter if they couldn’t figure out the identity of the arsonist.

Sully climbed in beside Jada. Drake glanced at the baffled-looking cabbie, but the man seemed focused on the spectacle of the firefighters at work. Then an ambulance rolled up behind them and gave a blast of its siren, urging them out of the way, and the cabbie looked irritated and motioned for Drake to get in.

As Drake ducked his head to get into the backseat, the window of the open door exploded in a shower of glass shards.

“What the—” Sully began.

A bullet punched through the roof and lodged in the seat behind Jada’s head.

“Down!” Drake shouted as another shot plinked the outside of the cab.

With a loud roar, a black SUV sped past the ambulance and slid to a shuddering halt beside the taxi. Its glass was tinted, but the passenger window started to glide down, and Drake knew that one way or another they were dead. If the sniper on the roof across the street didn’t kill them—only that would explain the angle of the first shots—these bastards in the SUV would make their deaths look like a gangster drive-by.

“Drive!” he screamed to the cabbie.

The guy behind the wheel of the ambulance smartened up, putting the vehicle in reverse, and it sped backward in retreat. Down West 12th Street people had started to tear their attention from the fire, hearing the gunshots.

“Damn it, drive the car!” Drake shouted, banging the partition to get the terrified cabbie’s attention.

The man had ducked down, hiding behind the dashboard. Something—Drake’s command or his own sense of self-preservation—made him realize that if they just sat there, they were dead, and he sat up and threw the cab into gear.

A sniper’s bullet punched through the windshield and took him in the chest. He jerked against the seat and then started to slide sideways, his hands twitching on the wheel.

“Son of a bitch!” Sully snapped. “I need a gun, Nate!”

But they didn’t have any guns. Not yet. They were damn well going to get them, but for now, running was the only choice. Drake popped the rear passenger door, staying low as he yanked open the one in front. The cab had started to roll but hadn’t picked up any speed.

He spotted a gun jutting from the open window of the SUV as he threw himself into the front seat. With both hands, he grabbed the cabbie and hauled the man toward him, then started climbing over him.

Bullets punched the side of the cab, shattering front and back windows and plinking through the metal doors. One caught the driver in the thigh. Drake had time enough to think that what he was doing was insane, that it was suicide to put himself in the way of the bullets. But he knew that doing nothing would also be suicide.

He got his hands on the wheel, kept his head to the side, and was about to hit the gas when a loud, crunching impact filled the air. He risked looking up and saw that the ambulance driver had purposely rammed the back of the SUV.

“Crazy bastard!” Sully whooped appreciatively.

“Bought us a couple of seconds,” Drake said.

Jada cried out as another bullet punched a hole in the roof, a new attack from the sniper, letting daylight in.

Drake gritted his teeth. They had to get away from both attacks, the sniper and the SUV, and there was only one direction open to them that he knew would accomplish that. He slammed it into reverse, backed the taxi up thirty feet, then put it back in drive, cranked the steering wheel to the right, and skidded into a turn down West 12th Street.

“Are you nuts?” Sully shouted.

“You’re going to hit the fire truck!” Jada warned.

Knuckles white on the wheel, Drake drove straight for the closest fire truck. Firefighters shouted and tried to wave him off. Survivors of the burning building scurried out of the way. The two cops on the sidewalk pulled their guns, but not fast enough, as Drake shot the taxi through the gap between fire truck and ambulance and careened down the street toward the police cars waiting there.

Gunfire punched the air, echoing off the buildings, but he didn’t slow down.

“Jada, are they following?” Drake asked.

She spun in the backseat and looked out the rear window. “Yes!”

“Are you kidding?” Sully said. “Who the hell are these guys?”

“We’ll be out of range of the sniper as soon as we turn the corner,” Drake told them.

“What about these nutjobs in the SUV?” Sully barked.

Drake smiled. He gunned the taxi past the two police cars parked diagonally at the curb, grazing a parked Mercedes, tearing off the taxi’s sideview mirror, and then accelerated even more. At the intersection, he hit the brake, turned into the skid, and slung the taxi into a right turn, driving the wrong way up Washington Street. Car horns blared, and a white box truck swerved to avoid a head-on collision.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw one of the two police cars pulling out to block the road. Two officers on the street had their guns drawn and were rushing up to the SUV as it skidded to a halt.

“We’re clear!” Sully said.

“For how long?” Jada asked, leaning forward, looking at Drake in the mirror. “They’ll have cops crawling all over us in a minute.”

Drake hung a quick left on Jane Street, no longer heading into oncoming traffic. He glanced over his shoulder at Sully.

“What do you think? Chelsea Piers?” he asked.

“No choice,” Sully agreed.

“What’s at Chelsea Piers?” Jada said.

Drake smiled, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. “Same thing you generally find at piers. Boats.”