Free Crescent Dawn by Clive; Dirk Cussler Cussler

a clear shot at the two of them.
    “Where to now?” Loren gasped, her heart pounding in fear.
    Pitt quickly surveyed an ancient weathered door that stood at the top of the steps.
    “A simple choice, I’d say,” he replied, nodding toward the door. “We go in.”

5
    T WO FIRM KICKS ON THE WOODEN DOOR WERE SUFFICIENT to dislodge the well-worn dead bolt from its housing and force an opening. Loren and Pitt quickly slithered into a plain, empty room, sided by a counter and cash register. At the back of the room was a wide, dimly lit stairwell that led to a lower level.
    From outside the door, they could hear the sound of running footsteps approach. Pitt turned and swung the door closed as he caught a glimpse of the woman in black sprinting around the back of the taxi. He missed seeing the muzzle flash from her pistol as she fired again, but he saw the slug bury itself into the door a few inches from his face.
    “I guess we go down,” he said, grabbing Loren’s hand and rushing to the stairs. They had hopped down a few of the carved stone steps when Loren yanked on his arm.
    “I can’t make it that far in heels,” she said, noticing that the stairwell descended a considerable distance below them. She quickly yanked off her pumps, then proceeded to scurry down the stairs.
    “Why does practicality never enter into the design of women’s shoes?” Pitt asked, catching up with her.
    “Only a man would have to ask,” she grumbled, breathing hard from their exertion.
    They continued plunging down the stairs, which descended over fifty steps. Their argument over footwear was lost to a sense of awe as their surroundings unfolded before them under sparse lighting.
    They had descended into a huge man-made subterranean cavern. It was a totally unexpected and somewhat bizarre structure to find in the middle of bustling Istanbul. The steps ended at a wooden platform, which overlooked the deep cavern. Pitt admired a forest of thirty-foot-high marble columns that stretched into the darkness by the dozen, their capitals supporting a towering multi-arched ceiling. A bank of red overhead lights lightly illuminated the space, lending it a mysterious, almost hellish appearance.
    “What is this place?” Loren asked, her voice echoing off the stone walls. “It’s breathtaking, in more ways than one.”
    “It’s an underground cistern. A huge one, by the looks of it. The Romans built hundreds of them under the streets of Istanbul in order to store water, which was transported in from the countryside via aqueducts.”
    They stood in what was actually the largest cistern in Istanbul, the Yerebatan Sarnici. Originally constructed by Emperor Constantine and later enlarged by Justinian, the structure stretched nearly five hundred feet in length. In its day, the cistern’s mortar-lined floor and walls were capable of holding 2.8 million cubic feet of water. Abandoned during the Ottoman reign, it became a forgotten, mud-filled bog until restored by the Turkish government in the twentieth century. As testament to Roman construction prowess, the floor of the cavern still stored a few feet of water for effect.
    The vast chamber was nearly silent but for the splattering of water that occasionally dripped from the ceiling. The silence was suddenly disrupted by the sound of footsteps overhead as the armed woman in black rushed through the office and started down the stone steps. Pitt and Loren immediately took off running, following a raised wooden ramp that led toward the far end of the chamber.
    The ramp ultimately split into a circular walkway that allowed tourists to view the myriad of carved columns that supported the cistern’s ceiling. Beneath it, the flat, shallow waters made a tranquil home to hundreds of colorful carp that never saw the light of day. Pitt and Loren had little time to admire the fish as they sprinted to the far end of the chamber.
    The wooden ramps were wet from the dripping ceiling, and Loren slipped repeatedly in