32. August 25–26, 2024
Steel
Steel took the cover position at the control panel, with Daleyza behind him, backed tight to the corner, and Demon in cover position opposite her.
When the doors opened, no shots rang into the elevator.
A quick look around the corner from both men showed no one nearby, but they could hear gunfire in the distance at the mission entrance, as well as missile fire.
Cerberus had brought some heavy-duty firecrackers.
Gloriosa. His fucking teammates. He must have said it out loud in the SUV after she’d popped through the roof and shot out their pursuers.
One barely breathed slip of the tongue, and they honored her.
And she had been glorious, without a doubt.
There was no one like her. Never had been. Never would be.
Seeing nothing, Demon signaled that the way was clear. Both men stepped out of the elevator, assuming a shoulder-to-shoulder position in a V shape to prevent anyone from getting a clear shot at her.
“The way to the church appears clear,” Midas advised.
“Copy that. Run, Daleyza. Get inside. Don’t stop.”
When he raised his shooting arm enough for her to pass underneath, she took off at high speed. He clapped Demon on the shoulder, then took off after her, Demon traveling slightly slower and backward to cover their exit.
Once Demon passed through the doors, Steel and Daleyza pushed the heavy panels shut, then he pulled the heavy bar down into the old-fashioned lock. If someone tried to come in after them, they’d need a battering ram or some C-4. The sturdy oak would withstand bullets for quite a while.
“Where’s the entrance?” Steel asked his wife.
“Through the gates up at the altar and to the left. The font is in an antechamber there.”
He backed up, his gun pointed up into the balcony across the way, with Demon moving forward, covering the balcony above him.
Safely through the arch at the rear of the church, they ran down the expanse of the building.
Steel vaulted the low wrought-iron fence.
Demon slung his rifle over his shoulder, grabbed Daleyza by the waist, and helped her into Steel’s outstretched hands.
“Go!” The medic motioned them to continue.
“What about you?” Daleyza asked.
“I’ve got homework. Go on! I’ll be right behind you.”
“Homework?”
“Insurance policy,” Steel informed her. “Come on.”
When they reached the antechamber, he stopped. “What the hell?”
The font looked more like a water feature you might see in front of an office building.
The stone floor had a square cut out of it, approximately three feet wide by four feet tall, and it looked to be two-and-a-half feet deep.
The walls and floor of the basin were neatly tiled with bright-blue rectangles and white grout in between.
Currently, it had no water in it, so stepping down into it by the three steps built next to a handrail took no effort.
“It’s the only piece of the church they’ve updated.
Maybe three or four years before we married, I think.
It was built because Rodrigo married a Protestant woman, and they forced her to convert before marriage.
There were also several bastard children who were brought to the house whose parents were…
liberated from this earthly plane. The children were then brought into the faith. ”
“Let me guess. All boys.”
She nodded. “I never thought twice about it, but yes.”
He grunted. “Further proof of their allegiance to the Salieri. However, the remodel does do one other thing.”
“It hides the entrance to the crypts,” she supplied.
She stepped down into the basin. The pool formed a square shape around a monolith that jutted out into the space. There was a thin lip around it, where candles could be placed, and a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary stood on a platform.
At the edge, she climbed up onto the lip with his help. “There’s a maintenance door here, or that’s what they’ve labeled it. It does house some of the cleaning mechanics for the feature, but there’s another door inside that goes to the crypts.”
She pulled on the door, but it was locked. Removing her gun from its holster, she cleared the safety, then shot at the knob. It blew apart, and she was able to open the door.
“Let me go first,” he told her. “Leave the door open. That way, it’s clear to Demon which way to go when he catches up.”
The door at the back of the maintenance room was an old wooden one they hadn’t bothered to replace. Everything in the room was neatly cleared around the door, suggesting that someone had moved through it recently. Steel pulled on it and found it unlocked.
Daleyza grabbed a large flashlight from a shelf at eye level next to the door. When she turned it on, the beam was strong and steady. “The door to the crypt is unlocked, and there’s lighting here that someone’s used recently.”
Demon burst through the door from the fountain. “We’ve got twenty minutes to get him and get out of here.”
The crypt was little more than a ten-foot-wide passage with a dirt floor, brick walls, and a ceiling.
Both walls had three recessed hollows, like bunks built into the wall, and on the shelves lay shrouded skeletons.
Between each of the hollows, between the foot of one and the head of the next, sat raised sarcophagi, with religious reliefs carved into the sides and lids.
“Feels like I’m in an Indiana Jones movie,” Demon commented.
“As long as there are no spiders or snakes, we’re good. We’ve already got rats.” Steel flashed the light to his right, where a large one had been sitting on top of one of the skeletons, and they watched it scurry away when exposed.
“Any clue what I can expect for our prisoners?” the medic asked.
“As to what happened before being imprisoned, no. Other than cutting the trackers out. If one is near the spine, I don’t know how they would remove it.
” Her gaze at him was pained. “My father had a surgeon on his payroll, but the man was a complete hack. Lost his license due to his drug addiction. Made him a perfect target. Low wages but all the drugs he could want in exchange for his services.”
Steel told him, “Since it was one of my brothers who picked him up, chances are it was Hector’s surgeon who pulled the trackers, and Leeza’s family is merely the jailor.
His odds for being able to walk out of here are better, if that’s the case, but imprisonment in one of these oubliettes will make that challenging even for someone going in healthy. ”
“Meaning?” Demon asked.
“At the most basic level, his injuries will include the common captivity factors. The trackers would have been the first things they looked for. They have medical scanners, so that’s probably how they located them.
Hopefully, they haven’t damaged his spine removing that one.
Closing the wound? They won’t give a shit about infection, so he’ll probably have that to contend with, as well.
“Beatings are a no-brainer. That would just be for fun, with no real expectation of information or cooperation. Aside from cuts and bruises from fists, he’ll likely have injuries to his ribs and kidneys.
When they’re ready to get down to business, knives will be part of their first real attempts to intimidate him. ”
Demon grunted, his eyes surveying their surroundings as they continued through the crypts. “They won’t get far with him through physical torture. He lasts longer at that than ‘the quiet game’ with TB.”
“Given his experience in Cairo, I would tend to agree. Beyond that, your biggest concern will be whatever drugs they’ve used to break him. They’ll use repetitive dosing and maximum strengths.”
“Dangerous. They could kill him that way.”
“If this puppeteer wants to play with him, that gamble would be half the fun. They’ll deliberately try to overdose him, then Narcan him back.
Redose him once he’s sober. Over and over and over.
They’ll get him hooked, and hooked fast. If it were me”—he grimaced because at one time it had been him—“when that happened, I’d put him in a cell, or in this case, the oubliette, for a few days to let him detox without supervision. ”
“And if he still doesn’t give anything up?”
“Then the messier stuff. Broken bones. Removing teeth. Amputating extremities. Blowtorch burns. And that will just be the start. It’s doubtful they’ve gotten to that stage yet. He hasn’t been missing long enough for that.”
Demon stopped where he was, a few steps behind them. He flashed his light back the way they’d come from. “Shouldn’t there have been at least one guard down here? Or if not here, at the maintenance door?”
“Not necessarily,” Steel said. “Remember, the three stooges up there just took out the security towers with grenade launchers. It’s all hands on deck up there right now.
Besides that, there’d be no need to guard the oubliette itself.
Even if he were in one hundred percent prime shape, he would have a difficult time getting out.
An oubliette is basically a jail cell in the ground.
It will be deep, with no way out unless a ladder is extended down.
Between the open wounds and the dank conditions, infection will set in quickly, so that would slow him down, and that will be another issue that will affect his mobility. ”
Daleyza added, “Not to mention that the cells are narrow. The cells are purposefully constructed so there’s no way to lie down, or sometimes even sit. He’ll be stiff, and it won’t be easy for him to move.”
They’d come to a portion of the crypt that began to look less like an underground tomb and more like a primitively roughed-out cave. They also began to catch the faint hint of human excrement, urine, blood, and decay. If Waters and Ka-Bar weren’t here, someone had been.