Bette blew out a few calming breaths, as she leaned on a wall, and then kicked on the man until he was facing up. She trained her torch on him.  Not the man staring at her on the sidewalk this morning. Could this man be half of the two-man team Tom said was likely tracking her?  Could that other man be close behind? 

She felt around for the man’s phone, and found it in one of his backpockets. She scrolled through his texts.  There was only one number that he’d been texting.  And the last one had come in ten minutes ago, which had apparently asked this man to text back in an hour about what he’d found in the woods that this man was wandering around in. 

Bette blew out a shaky breath with relief. The text likely meant the other man was not in the tunnels, perhaps not even in the area.

So did this man just stumble into an entrance to this tunnel?

Bette checked her watch. The man’s partner would be expecting a text in about 45-50 minutes. No time to waste.

She stepped around the man after checking again whether he was still out. He was.  Out cold.

She took a series of calming breaths to refocus her mind on her original purpose, and still her wildly beating heart. Her pulse was still pounding from the adrenaline rush of fighting off the attack.

When she felt calmer, she went further into the tunnel she was walking into before she’d been attacked. She found the door and used the key Jancis gave her earlier that day, to open it.  As she’d expected, it had been difficult to open initially but adrenaline was flowing up and down her body now and with an extra burst of energy she managed to knock the door open.

A pile of gold bars greeted her as she staggered in, stacked neatly in several pyramids in the center of the small room.

She painted the small room with her torch. It looked fairly secure, and the only way into the room was through the door she’d just unlocked.  Each gold bar that she could see was imprinted with numbers, letters, and figures.  She sought to remember the various sequences that she’d been studying for most of the past month, and figured these came from the “1924 stash,” or the gold bullion meant for “the Trust” in Bolshevik Russia.