After donning night vision goggles, Queen led the team inside. The tunnel, lit in shades of green, was unremarkable at first. The occasional spider was their only company. The staircase turned one hundred eighty degrees, like a mountain trail switchback. The walls on the next flight down bore huge relief murals carved into massive stones. Fluid scenes of human sacrifice, executioners, and angry gods covered the walls.

As the stairs continued deeper, the images became more violent, taking the viewer through a story line that involved ritual preparation, ceremony, bloodletting, and death. Several different acts of killing were displayed—decapitation, organ removal, burning.

As her nerves tensed Queen realized that those being led down this staircase would understand the images as the horrors they would soon endure. It must have been enough to paralyze them with fear. Queen, on the other hand, had the opposite reaction. Anger filled her veins, pumping adrenaline into her system and boosting her senses.

The staircase ended at a gently sloping, curved tunnel that Queen guessed lined up with the base of the pyramid. Everything from here on would take them underground.

As she took a step forward into the curved tunnel she felt the stone beneath her foot drop almost imperceptibly. She froze.

She held her hand up, stopping the others. She pointed at her foot and they understood at once.

A trap.

She listened for the telltale signs of a trap, shifting weights, grinding gears, but heard nothing. She chanced a whisper. “Maybe it’s too old? Rotted?”

A clunk overhead proved her wrong.

Queen looked up in time to see a shower of long, sharp darts fall from the ceiling, falling at her like a hundred miniature spears.

Chapter Fifty-One

FIFTY

Wiltshire, England

THE SMALL FLASHLIGHTS they carried did little to light the deep craggy tunnel, but King and Alexander moved quickly despite the low light. If Richard Ridley was at the end of the tunnel, they wanted to catch him by surprise. If they didn’t it might mean battling one of his golems or oversized sandfish.

Or several.

Their best bet was to knock him unconscious and shut his mouth before he knew they were there. Not knowing what waited for them at the end of the tunnel made King apprehensive, but he fought against the feeling with the knowledge that he had beat Ridley before, and the man beside him had killed the legendary Hydra on his own—a creature that took the entire Chess Team and Alexander’s aid to defeat in the present day. Having his handgun at the ready eased his nerves, too. Upon seeing Ridley, who could not die, he didn’t need to sneak up and knock the man unconscious; shooting him in the head until his mouth was bound would work just as well and provide some catharsis.