They were driving through another little town filled with quaint brick buildings covered with ivy, when a car rammed them.

  21

  OXFORDSHIRE

  The car was a Range Rover, black, with tinted windows. Abigail heard a scream—was it her own voice?—when it slammed into their car, ramming them off the road and into a tree. Glass from the impact peppered Abigail.

  Someone dragged Abigail out of the car. It was a strange man. No, it was Riley. His face was covered in blood, but she could still see those eyes—those staggering, fierce eyes. He was barking orders at her, but she couldn’t hear a thing. Her ears were ringing, and even though she might have been able to read his lips if these were calmer circumstances, she couldn’t now. Not with her eyes all blurry from the impact.

  Seemingly giving up communicating with her, Riley yanked Abigail to her feet and tossed her over his shoulder. He carried her out of the car and down an alleyway at speed, escaping for a moment the occupants in the Range Rover. How many had there been? Abigail couldn’t say. She’d not seen a single one of them. She’d only seen Riley.

  Riley finally set Abigail on her wobbly feet. She watched as he took a quick inventory of their surroundings. They were in the shadows of old buildings. In front of the buildings, intermittent traffic coursed along the road. On the other side, a quiet park saw families gathering for picnics and to walk their dogs.

  There was no shelter in the park, and walking along the busy road would be crazy. They would be sitting ducks. Abigail could not believe they had been attacked in broad daylight, in a public place. Maybe they could go back the way they came, and call Thatcher and Ellis for help.

  “Here.”

  Riley grabbed her elbow and heaved Abigail through a vaulted archway. They’d found themselves outside a museum. A man was busy arguing with a young woman.

  “I’m sorry, but we’re closed until next Tuesday,” the man said in weary tones.

  “But my daughters want to see inside,” the mother complained. “You’re here now. Can’t you allow them inside for just a moment? As the curator, you have the power.”

  “I’m not here to open the museum. I was just here momentarily because I’d forgotten my book.” He showed her a small paperback.

  The twin girls were running past the man, into the museum. The man took off after them, as did their mother.

  “Come on.” Riley took Abigail’s hand, and the two of them slipped upstairs, unseen.

  At the top of the steps was a storage section cordoned off with red velvet rope, and it was in this section that Riley decided they should hide. Who would come looking for them there? No one.

  Abigail fell back against the wall, grabbing her head and panting. Riley slipped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. “Are you all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be all right? It’s not like a car rammed us.” Abigail did her best to keep the tears at bay.

  “We need a place to hide for a few hours,” Riley whispered to her. “The Vortex agents will keep looking for us for a few hours. They won’t give up easily.”

  “Why don’t you call Ellis and Thatcher?”

  Riley shook his head and winced. “No, it’s best if we act independently of them for several hours. We’ll rendezvous with them at the airport.”

  They heard the woman’s voice at the front doors. She was yelling at her children.

  Riley guided Abigail to the wall. “We can hide behind these huge storage jars with octopi on them.”

  “It’s octopodes.”

  Riley’s mouth fell open. “Sorry?”

  Abigail hurried to explain. “Octopus is an ancient Greek word meaning ‘eight feet’. The plural of ‘foot’ in Greek is podes. People wrongly apply Latin plural rules to the word, and come up with the dreadfully wrong word octopi.” She shook her head sadly.

  His lips twitched. “Always the academic! Maybe you could explain it later. For now, we have to hide behind these jars with, um, sea creatures on them.”

  Abigail was embarrassed, despite the fact Riley appeared amused. They hid behind the jars, which had the added cover of a large display board sitting on the ground in front of them, seconds before they heard footsteps coming up the stairs.

  “It’s probably the curator,” Riley whispered.

  Abigail gulped. Yes. It was surely only the curator, but why had he returned?

  Then a voice spoke, the tone disturbingly sing-song and menacing. “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

  Abigail grabbed Riley’s elbow. That voice didn’t sound like it would belong to the curator. Abigail had gotten a good look as they passed him by—he was old, with white hair and a pink face. This voice sounded young and vital, if also chilling.

  “I saw you come in here,” the voice said again. It took a moment for Abigail to place the location of the voice.

  Abigail momentarily froze. She caught a glimpse of a young man—younger than the curator, at least. His expression was troubling, a sinister smile and dead eyes. In a flash he raised his gun, but Riley was even faster. He tackled him to the ground with a crash, sending the display board flying.

  Abigail tried to stand, but pain shot through her ribs. She didn’t think anything was broken, but the bruising was enough to push her back against the wall with a grunt of pain. Riley and the man wrestled on the ground as the man reached for his gun, which Riley had knocked across the floor to a plaster imprint of a dinosaur’s foot. Abigail tried to grab it, but the man kicked out at her.

  “Stay back!” Riley called to her. The man shrugged him off and grabbed his gun, raising it at Abigail. Riley threw himself in front of her.

  A gunshot rang out.

  For an awful moment Abigail stared at Riley’s back, expecting him to crumple. But when the sound of a body impacting the polished floors echoed through the museum, Riley was still on his feet. Abigail looked beyond Riley’s shoulder. The man had shot the curator.

  It took Abigail several moments to process what had, in fact, happened. The figure was not the curator but a life-size mannequin of Winston Churchill. Riley was still on his feet and it was the Vortex agent who had been shot in the skirmish.

  Riley checked the man’s pulse and then looked over at Abigail. “He’s dead.”

  Abigail didn’t know whether to be relieved or upset. All she felt was panic.

  “Stay here and hide. I’m going to check the rest of the museum.”

  Before he left, Riley dragged the man into another room and left him there. Abigail was happy he was out of her sight, but she felt sick seeing the dead man. She stood and moved to the other side of the room, just to get away from all that death.

  Riley returned ten minutes later. “I found these frozen dinners in the kitchen. I microwaved them. We should eat where we can. We don’t know how long we’ll be holed up here.”

  Abigail didn’t want to eat when she had just seen a man die. The thought of it turned her stomach. What’s more, she was sick and sore. But when Riley opened one, revealing honey chicken, her stomach rumbled furiously. She accepted the meal from Riley and at once spooned some into her mouth. The food afforded her a measure of comfort.

  “Will there be more of them?”

  “Yes, but I have no idea when or if they’ll find us,” Riley said.

  “That’s not very comforting.”

  Abigail and Riley finished their dinner in silence. Riley pulled Abigail toward him and they both cuddled up together for warmth.

  She awoke slowly. A telephone was ringing somewhere in the museum—a shrill, angry ring. Abigail pushed Riley’s arm off her. She was dismayed to see a big, angry bruise on his forehead.

  She tiptoed through the museum, checking to see if anyone else was there. After she made sure she was alone, she followed the ringing downstairs.

  She meant to pull the phone cord out of the wall. She didn’t want the ringing to wake Riley, who clearly needed the rest. As she did so, a voice called, “I see you, Abigail.”

  Abigail snapped her head to the side. The entrance to the museum was a big glass door, and on the other side of the door, stood a man about the same age as the dead man upstairs. He knocked a gun twice against the glass and grinned.

  “Hello, Dr. Spencer. How is your boyfriend? Oh, don’t tell me; he’s dead?” The man’s voice was just as chilling as his associate’s. “The same fate does not have to await you.”

  “Why is that?” Abigail asked. She tried to keep the tension and fear out of her voice, but it cracked all the same.

  This made the man smile. “I can help you, you know. I don’t like killing women.”

  “How noble of you.”

  “Come on, we don’t want to kill you. We can use somebody with your translation skills. Open the door.”

  It wasn’t just a glass door that stood between Abigail and the man. There were bars too. Abigail turned and ran upstairs.

  Riley awoke as soon as she reached him. He grabbed Abigail by the shoulders and pulled her toward him. “Are you okay?” he asked urgently.

  “They’ve found us. There’s another man downstairs.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “He spoke to me,” Abigail said as she helped Riley stand.

  “What? How?”

  “The phone was ringing. It woke me up.” Abigail felt stupid telling Riley this. She should have just let the phone ring out. “I pulled it out of the wall.”

  “Why?”

  “I was afraid it would wake you. I thought you might have a concussion. A man spoke to me. Then I looked over to the door and he was standing there. Riley, he has a gun.”

  “Yeah,” Riley said. “So do we. Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “To the airport. Come on.” Riley walked over to the window and pushed it open. It took a little bit of rattling, but it opened in the end. Riley helped Abigail onto the museum’s rooftop.

  They scrambled over to the edge of the rooftop and glanced down. The neighboring building wasn’t too far down, and it was connected to the museum. Riley helped Abigail down and then he lowered himself after her.

  With adrenaline once more pumping through her veins, it was impossible for Abigail to know how hurt she was. Her ribs pinched a little, but that didn’t stop her from crossing the rooftop and clambering onto another.

  On the third rooftop, Riley let Abigail take a quick break. She peeked over the edge and saw two Range Rovers in the street below. Her friend at the door had no doubt made the call to his associates. They knew they were in the area, so they needed to move fast. “I’m fine now.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Look.”

  Riley glanced over the ledge and saw the Range Rovers. “Yep, you’re fine,” he said, hustling her once more along the rooftops. They managed to get down to the ground through an apartment building, slipping into a bedroom through the open window and then slipping out the front door.

  Riley managed to hail a cab as soon as they hit the street.

  The driver didn’t ask any questions about their rumpled and bloodied appearances, because he in all likelihood didn’t care, and because he was on the phone to his wife yelling about credit card charges. Closer to London, they stopped at a public bathroom to clean up.

  “They’ll think we’re still at the museum,” Riley said as they finally arrived at Manchester airport. He paid the driver and then hurried Abigail inside.

  It took them about fifteen minutes to rendezvous with Thatcher and Ellis, who were eating donuts and drinking coffee.

  “What happened?” Thatcher said. “I’ve got medical supplies. You look like you both need patching up.”

  “A car hit us pretty hard,” Riley told then. “Did you have any trouble?”

  “We were tailed by several Vortex agents for a while. Where did you two go?”

  “To a museum,” Abigail said.

  “We thought we needed the culture,” Riley added.

  Ellis snorted. “Yeah, well, next time stick to kombucha. Let’s go.”

  22

  SARDIS: MODERN DAY SART

  Abigail didn’t remember much, if anything, about the plane ride to Izmir, or for that matter, the short journey from the Izmir airport to the ancient site of Sardis. Her ribs were sore and her head hurt. The one major plus was that the flight from Manchester to Izmir was direct, and only four hours. She had drifted in and out of sleep all the way to Izmir, and fell back to sleep in the hire car, waking only when she heard the word ‘Sardis’.

  She looked out the window at the sheer cliffs of the acropolis and gasped at their magnificence.

  Riley tapped Ellis on the shoulder. “Head north from the village and turn east to the ancient site.”

  “I know you have to pay separately to enter the Temple of Artemis and the gymnasium,” Abigail told Riley, shaking herself awake.

  “We’re not here for sightseeing,” Ellis snapped.

  Abigail sighed. “I wasn’t suggesting we were. I thought we should avoid those areas.” She wished she could stay and explore the ruins of Sardis, but she would have to come back another time. If she got out of here alive, she reminded herself.

  “I’ll drive from here,” Riley said. “Abigail, guide me to the cliff face with the tunnels.”

  Ellis stopped the car and the two men swapped places. Abigail didn’t like sitting next to Ellis, but at least it wouldn’t be for long. She realized Riley was driving as close as he could get to the tunnel’s entrance and intended to give Ellis and Thatcher as little warning as possible.

  A pang of misgivings hit Abigail. If anyone was following them, they were leading them straight to the treasure. Still, all she could do was follow Riley’s lead, and she trusted that he knew what he was doing.

  Abigail looked longingly at the ancient site and the reconstructed bath-gymnasium complex dominating the landscape as she directed Riley to swing the car down a dirt road. In ancient times, the gymnasium stood over five acres. From here, she could see the ruins of the synagogue, built around two hundred years after the Book of Revelation. It was one of the largest ancient synagogues ever found, and was in the center of the city rather than where most synagogues were, namely, on the edge of a city. She was awe-struck.

  Sardis possessed a long and significant history. It had been the capital of the great Lydian Empire before the Persians defeated Cyrus, and then it had become an important Persian city, standing at the end of the Royal Road. Darius the Great of Persia built the Royal Road which started at the Persian capital, Susa, and ended in Sardis.

  The distance between Susa and Sardis was 1,677 miles, yet the royal mounted messengers regularly covered the distance in nine days.

  Abigail knew that Herodotus’s comment on these couriers of two and a half thousand years earlier,

  “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,”

  was inscribed on the James Farley Post Office in New York City and is acknowledged as the informal motto of the United States Postal Service.

  Abigail nodded to herself. She always liked to point out modern connections to her students.

  Sardis was then conquered in turn by the Greeks, by the Macedonian Alexander the Great, and then by the Romans, under whose rule the population grew to 120,000.

  If only she had time to take photos for her Biblical history students. The Book of Revelation states that Sardis had few worthy inhabitants. As for the others, Revelation says they have the reputation of being alive but are dead. It utters them a dire warning. At the date Revelation was written, Sardis was still a wealthy city. It had been destroyed by an earthquake fifty years earlier but had been rebuilt by the Roman emperor Tiberius.

  Ellis’s words brought Abigail back to the present. “I don’t like the look of that.”

  She followed his gaze to see a scattering of tourists already at the site, taking photos in the early morning light.

  The bumpy dirt road ended at a clump of rocks. Riley got out and stared at the photos, holding them up and comparing them against the landscape before him.

  Abigail looked up at the massive rock face looming above her. How on earth did the Persians take the acropolis? Had a Lydian traitor let the Persians in through an access tunnel? No one had ever discovered the reason, and most likely never would, she mused.

  “What are we doing?” Ellis said. “You’re going to have to tell us, Riley.”

  “We’re leaving the car here and going on foot,” Riley said. “We’ll need the night vision goggles and the chem lights.”

  Soon the men were donning backpacks. Riley handed Abigail some night vision goggles. She turned them over in her hands, concerned that they were so bulky.

  “You’ll get used to them,” he said.

  The sun beat down on them, reflecting off the rocky landscape. Abigail was afraid of what lay ahead.

  “Care to brief us now?” Ellis asked.

  “Sure,” Riley said. “There should be a tunnel somewhere here and it possibly leads to a subterranean Temple of Artemis.”

  “To the treasure?” Ellis asked, rather too eagerly for Abigail’s liking.

  “It’s likely,” Riley said.

  “It’s possible an earthquake blocked the entrance,” Abigail told them. “There was a massive earthquake at Sardis in 17 AD, so it is an earthquake region.”

  She wondered what they would do if they found the tunnel impassable, but she figured Riley would call for backup. Really, she had no idea. She still wondered why they hadn’t had altercations with Vortex agents since arriving in Turkey. And worse still, she didn’t want to go into an underground passage. It crossed her mind to ask if she could wait outside but figured that would be too cowardly. Besides, they would need her if the place was booby-trapped.

  Abigail hadn’t heard of any Greek temples being booby-trapped, but then thousands of inscriptions were discovered every year, many of them at Ephesus. These inscriptions often provided new information about ancient times. She couldn’t take any chances.