“It could be another tour group,” Konrad noted.
Perhaps. But caution was the word for this day. “Let’s go slow and make sure it’s not a problem.” He stared at Ivan. “You said Malone was in the vicinity.”
“I never received report on what happened,” Ivan breathed out. “You think he’s here.”
“I don’t know what to think. But we need to be careful.”
The Russian broke into a toothy grin. “Good advice, comrade. I agree. We be careful.”
“How much farther?” Eli asked Konrad.
“Around the next two bends and we’re there.”
“Lead way,” Ivan said to Konrad, who began heading off into the darkness.
Ivan unzipped his jumpsuit, removed a gun, and kept it down at his side, finger on the trigger but shielded from view by the big man’s thigh.
The Russian headed off.
Eli turned back to Munoz, who’d done the same thing with his weapon. His acolyte nodded.
Ready.
* * *
Cotton stepped into the chapel. Simple and austere, everything stained white by humidity. Graffiti decorated the roof bars that had been inserted along the rear wall for strength. Random words and letters. Initials. Numbers. Dates. A layer of crushed salt lay across the floor like sand.
“What’s with all the writing on the wood?” he asked.
“From the miners, over the centuries. We don’t eliminate what they left.”
“What exactly are we looking for?” Stephanie asked him.
“One hundred and forty-seven pages of documents. So it should be about that thick.”
His index finger and thumb showed three-quarters of an inch or so of space.
He stepped over to St. Bobola and saw that, like the crucifix, the distorted sculpture was not a separate piece. Instead it, and the niche itself, had been chipped from the wall in bas-relief. No way anything was either behind or under. The same was true with the other images.
Everything pointed to here.
But where?
Think.
* * *
Eli heard the voices at the same time everyone else did, and they all stopped. Ivan motioned and they extinguished their lights, Konrad the last to catch on to what was happening and follow suit.
They stood in absolute darkness.
“Is our destination just ahead?” he whispered.
“Around the next bend,” Konrad breathed out.
“Somebody already there,” Ivan said.
Both Ivan and Munoz were armed, the darkness now concealing that fact from Konrad. Eli knew what had to be done.
“Konrad, stay here,” he said to the blackness. “We have to investigate.”
“We go ahead with one light, pointed to floor,” Ivan added.
“Agreed.”
* * *
Cotton narrowed the choices and decided there could only be one solution.
The wooden pew.
It was the only thing not built of salt in the makeshift chapel.
Crude and simple in construction, fashioned from rough-cut one-by-six and one-by-eight planks nailed together. About four feet wide. With a bench for sitting and an angled platform for resting hands or a hymnal while kneeling.
He stepped over and lifted the structure, setting it to one side. Beneath, the salt floor was solid and undisturbed. He brushed it with his shoe. Little to no give was returned. Like concrete. He looked at Stephanie. Who nodded. They were thinking the same thing. Nothing buried.
He tipped the makeshift pew over.
Nothing.
Its base was composed of one-by-eight boards fashioned into rectangles. One was set at the rear beneath the bench where a penitent could sit, while the other formed a kneeler. They were tacked together with headless nails.
“There’s a compartment formed in both of those,” he said.
The trick was opening them.
He threw his weight and gave two swift kicks with his boot. The thin wood split and parted from the frame. He pushed through the splinters and saw he was right. There was a compartment. But it was empty. He turned his attention to the other base support and pounded it, too.
Inside, taped to the boards, was a vacuum-sealed plastic pouch. Now the machine he’d spotted back at the castle made sense. It contained a manila envelope, similar to the one in which he’d found the book back at the castle.
He wrenched it free. “This is it.”
And a gun fired.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
Czajkowski sat at a long wooden table inside a spacious hall adorned with salt chandeliers, the room available to rent for large cultural and business events. He’d once attended a concert here—the Wrocław Philharmonic, if he recalled right, with a wonderful cello concerto—a treat at 125 meters underground, the acoustics near perfect. Adjacent to the hall was the miners’ tavern, hacked from more gray salt, which served an excellent array of Polish food. Two years ago he hosted a dinner here for participants in a European energy summit. He especially recalled the chocolate tart served that day. What a delight. Nobody was in the hall, or the café, at the moment, as business was clearly winding down early thanks to the mine manager.
Incredibly, there was cell phone service courtesy of hard lines from the surface and repeaters stationed throughout the tourist levels. Which made it possible for him to speak with his wife, who’d called.
“I just left Jasna Góra,” she said to him through the phone. “Brother Hacia and I had a lovely chat.”
He could only imagine. “Is he still refusing to cooperate?”
He kept his voice low and a hand up, covering his mouth.
“Once he knew that I knew the truth, his attitude changed. Of course, he berated you for telling me and simply denied everything. What he didn’t know is that while we were chatting, I had the BOR search his room.”
He smiled. Nothing about her was subtle or sublime. “Find anything?”
“A thick file.”
He was shocked. “You have it?’
“I do. And by the way, you two are a lot alike. But I assume you already realized that fact.”
Long ago, in fact. He was perhaps one of the few people in Poland who could call the Owl a friend. But that had seemed to count for little.
He decided to keep to himself what was happening in the mine. There was nothing she could do about any of it. But if things went wrong here, having a record of the Warsaw Protocol could prove helpful.
“You did good,” he told her. “I appreciate it.”
“Just doing my part.”
And she ended the call.
He stared around at the hall and its stage at the far end. What an amazing place. A huge cavity, carved entirely from salt. A hole in the earth, which reminded him of Bolesław the Brave and the legend of the sleeping kings. Every schoolchild knew the tale. Once a year, at midnight on Christmas Eve, the mighty Sigismund bell rung, and the Polish kings woke from their eternal sleep and gathered in a grand underground hall. A place with plenty of light, like a cathedral. Some say it lay beneath Wawel Castle, but others said it was much farther south, in the Tatra Mountains. Or maybe it was here, in Wieliczka?
Who knew?
They came dressed in their coronation robes, sitting before a round table, discussing the fate of the country. Bolesław himself presided, holding the famous Szczerbiec, Poland’s coronation sword.