Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,1

my jaw hurts from clenching.”

The girl glanced at his hands on the wheel. She must have noted the whiteness of his knuckles, because she went a shade paler than before.

“You going to tell me who you are?” Drake demanded.

“My father really didn’t send you?” she asked.

Her disappointment softened him as much as a guy driving through the jungle pursued by people trying to kill him could be softened. He saw the split-trunk tree he’d been watching for, the only kind of landmark that could be expected out here, and cut the wheel to the left, crashing the Jeep through a curtain of hanging vines and onto a trail that had been trodden by hooves but rarely by tires. The Jeep bucked like crazy; it felt like it would shake apart in his hands, leaving him sitting on the driver’s seat and holding the steering wheel with no car around him.

“Sorry, kid. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

She lifted her chin, trying too late to hide her withered hope. “My name is Alex Munoz. My father is mayor of Guayaquil. He’s been fighting a war against drugs in the city, and he can’t be bought.”

She said this proudly, and Drake didn’t blame her. For the mayor of a major South American city to take on the drug cartels, he had to be either courageous as hell or absolutely nuts. Alex didn’t have to tell him the rest of the story, either. Beautiful girl, no more than nineteen, bound and gagged in a drug lord’s bedroom? She had been a hostage, a negotiating tactic, and probably about to become the victim of something worse.

How do I get into these things? Drake thought.

But then, it wasn’t Alex Munoz’s fault that he was being shot at. Sure, untying her and getting her out of the compound had given him away and slowed him down, but it had been a risky plan to begin with, and in his experience risky plans almost always ended up in him being shot at—and sometimes actually shot.

“So if Papa didn’t send you, who are you?” Alex asked, her pouty look returning. “What are you going to do with me?”

Drake ignored the second question. If there was anything he’d learned over the years, it was that while running for his life with a woman at his side, it was best never to tell her you didn’t have a plan. “My name’s Drake. Nate Drake.”

If she got the James Bond reference in his delivery, she didn’t let on. “What is this?” Alex asked. “What did you do to make Valdez so angry?”

Drake gestured to the backseat. “See that?”

When Alex glanced into the back, Drake knew what she would see. The staff was wrapped in burlap kept tight by strips of duct tape. The burlap had come from the poppy farm on the other side of the compound from Valdez’s house. Drake had brought the duct tape himself. He’d managed to get the display case in Valdez’s study open without setting off any alarms, had bagged and tagged the staff, and had been making his exit when he glanced into the bedroom and saw the girl with the cinnamon skin. The rest was dumbass history.

“I see it,” Alex said.

“Have you heard of the Dawn Tavern?”

“Are you talking about a bar or Pacariqtambo? The place of origin? Or are you talking about the lost colony?”

“You know the story?” Drake said, glad he didn’t have to explain. Just the fact that they were having this conversation was absurd enough, but he figured it was better than her screaming at him not to let her die or him cursing himself out for coming down here in the first place.

“Of course,” Alex sniffed. “I go to university.”

Great, Drake thought. The only brat in the jungle, and she’s in my Jeep.

In Incan myth, Pacariqtambo was a cave from which the first people had emerged into the world. One of those brothers and sisters was a guy named Ayar Manco who carried a golden staff that was supposed to indicate where his people should build the first Incan city. Legend said that he’d changed his name and founded the city of Cuzco, that he and his sisters had built the first Incan homes with their bare hands. To many people in the region, the story was more history than legend, which meant that the discovery three years ago of the ruins of a lost colony—supposedly an offshoot of those original Incans, going all the way