AllFreeNovel
Share Us
No. This was a small reward to ease some of the horrors Diana had faced.
She hit the Stop button on the elevator and faced Chris, who opened his arms to her. She stepped into his embrace and burrowed her face into his neck. She liked that he didn’t question her actions. He just held her.
“I got you,” he whispered.
And he did. Every moment for the last ten days, he’d been there for her as she processed everything that had happened and why.
Money, naturally, was at the core of it.
The Gardners had betrayed their country over and over for profit.
Unique artifacts were more valuable to the Signature Line and sold for more than ten times what a foot-tall Venus de Milo statue would sell for.
It was just money.
Chris held her in the stalled elevator and didn’t ask when she’d be ready to rise again. Instead, he kissed her neck, then lifted his head. “I love you.”
His words were clear and firm and exactly what she needed to hear.
“I love you.” She spoke with the same easy conviction. This new foundation was a gift she desperately needed. Guilt, shame, and a thousand other conflicting emotions assailed her. But this thing with Chris was true. Fast, yes. But no less true.
“What are you afraid of in this moment?” he asked.
“What makes you think I’m afraid?”
He cocked his head and gave her a look.
She huffed out a breath. “Fine.” She tucked her head against his chest and breathed again. Finally, she lifted her head and met his gaze. “I know Fahd believed in the cause, but now that we’re here, I can’t help but wonder, what if he—and all the others—died for nothing? What if the tunnel is empty, looted before Rafiq ever learned of it, and so much history has been lost? I see Fahd in my dreams—nightmares—every night. Taking his cuts until he couldn’t any longer. He died before he would give up the one site that mattered. What if… What if it…wasn’t worth his sacrifice?”
Chris brushed his lips over hers. “Fahd died true to his convictions. It doesn’t matter if the tunnel is empty, because the tunnel itself matters. It’s two thousand years old, and it took more than a hundred years to carve by hand out of the earth. An aqueduct worthy of the Nabataeans and their waterworks. It doesn’t have to be Tut’s Tomb to be important.” He smiled and added, “Didn’t you say just yesterday that a site isn’t about the artifacts, it’s about what you learn from them? A lot can be learned from the tunnel. Fahd was protecting that site as much as he was protecting what might be hidden inside it.”
She kissed his collarbone. “You are wise.”
“This is true.”
She laughed. “Ready?”
“For anything.”
She hit the button to release the emergency stop, and they rose again.
Ian, his wife Cressida, Freya, Cal, Morgan, Pax, Amira, and Kira waited in the conference room. Rand was skiing in Aspen. He’d still get to watch what they all were about to see, just not live.
They all settled in after hugs and small talk and waited for the clock to tick down to the live stream. Diana felt a flutter in her chest when the feed from the Virginia Laboratory went live. The feeling was strangely like that of the first big drop on a roller-coaster ride.
Exhilarating. Scary.
Another countdown began, this one by the archaeologists embedded with special forces in the field. They gave the signal the mission was a go.
The capstone had been loosened, but still, it took several minutes for it to be moved. Once it was, a drone entered.
Diana squeezed Chris’s fingers and watched the feed as the drone descended into the two-thousand-year-old Roman aqueduct that was now a dry tunnel and the repository where a dozen archaeologists had agreed to hide all the portable artifacts they could gather in Syria, once it was clear that the Islamic State was targeting sites to fund terrorism.
In the last week, they’d learned that every archaeologist who’d signed on to this pact had died in the intervening years. Fahd had told Diana about the tunnel after yet another colleague had died. He’d known he’d be next.
She would have taken it to the grave herself, but she couldn’t protect it herself. Fahd had told her she and the Friday Morning Valkyries would know the right thing to do to protect the site. And FMV did know a group who could do just that: the new Monuments officers, officially the Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab, the Department of Defense’s reservist unit that monitored and protected archaeological sites. CHML had the technology to monitor the site from afar, and also affiliation with the Army to protect it physically if they saw signs it had been located.
CHML had managed to get a team into Syria with help from Delta Force operators to confirm what was there. They would monitor and protect the site, fulfilling the role Fahd and the others had all died for.
Now a drone navigated the ancient tunnel, and she saw on the screen artifacts—bowls, tablets, mosaic tiles, tools—that ranged in age from five hundred to eight thousand years old. She was reminded of the stories of the first time Howard Carter got a glimpse inside Tut’s Tomb.
As if on cue, Chris kissed her neck and said, “See anything good?”
She turned to him, smiled, and echoed Carter’s response. “Yes. Wonderful things.”
* * *
