by Aaron Elkins
They let out their breath. "Well, the angle's the same," Julie observed coolly, looking from the shot-out window to the hole in the seat. "He's still in the same place."
Gideon nodded. "It overlooks the entrance to the canyon. He figures he can catch us if we make a run for it."
"Let's hope he can't."
"At fifty miles an hour, I doubt it."
The angle of the shots—which would be the same as the shooter's angle of vision—also made it clear that Forrest couldn't see them and wouldn't be able to see the driver's seat either. But all he had to do to change that was to climb down twenty or thirty feet. And that he would surely do, more likely sooner than later.
So it was time to go. He squeezed her hand and snaked between the front seats, sitting quietly for a moment to make sure he knew how the floor-mounted gear lever worked and just where the clutch and gas pedals were. He didn't expect to have much use for the brake. He thought about pulling shut the driver's door, left open by Gawdat, but decided he was better off not sticking his arm out into the open.
"Better get down, Julie. Get on the floor."
He pressed on the clutch pedal, shifted reasonably smoothly from third gear, where the fleeing Gawdat had left it, to neutral, turned the key in the ignition, and held his breath. The engine hesitated, chittered, and caught. He shifted into first and stepped on the gas pedal. The car pitched forward, stopped, pitched, stopped, pitched—
"The emergency brake!" Julie shouted.
"Where the hell is it?" he yelled back, bumping his head as they jerked along in a sort of automotive seizure, but before he could find it something beneath the floorboard gave way and the van sprang powerfully forward at last, gathering speed. He shifted to second.
"You okay?" he called over his shoulder.
"Oh, fine," came Julie's voice from the floor. "Having a wonderful time."
He thought he'd heard at least one shot over the start-up commotion but apparently the startled Forrest had missed, and now they were quickly putting distance between themselves and him.
That was the good part. There were several bad parts.
First, they were headed into the canyon, not out. To get out of it he was going to have to get the van turned around and come barreling back through the entrance, right under Forrest's nose. He didn't like it, but he didn't see that there was any choice.
Second, the promised fifty miles an hour was out of the question. They were going to have to do it at no more than twenty. The canyon floor wasn't made for anything less than a half-track, and he didn't dare shift above second gear for fear of getting stuck in the loose, rough terrain. And even if he chanced that and got away with it, he'd wind up breaking their necks or cracking their skulls at anything faster. Already they were bouncing crazily along again, the way they'd been when Gawdat had been driving. And they were tipped precariously to one side, hugging the sloping, rocky scree at the base of the cliffs; it was the only way to get enough room to turn the van around without having to slow down even more, or backing up.
The canyon, he knew by now, was keyhole-shaped, widening to a two-hundred-yard arc at the rear, and constricting to a narrow bottleneck at the entrance, over which Forrest held sway from his perch. Whatever else you said about him, Gideon thought, you had to admit he knew how to pick his canyons.
The plan, then, was to continue on this arc along the foot of the cliffs, until he had enough of a turning radius available to head back toward the entrance.
And through it, with any luck.
"Uh!" The sound was wrung from him as the right front wheel jounced over a pile of stones and dropped into a foot-deep hollow. The van tipped over so far that the open driver's door slammed shut on its own. Metal screeched against rock as the undercarriage bottomed, but somehow the van scrabbled its way out. Gideon tasted blood where he'd bitten the inside of his cheek.
But they were still moving.
"Get ready now," he called back, wrestling the wheel, "I've got enough room to make the turn. I'm just going to get it pointed toward the opening, step on the gas, and pray."
"Amen," Julie said.
They were about a hundred yards from the entrance; they would be in Forrest's sights the whole time, head-on, with Gideon himself in plain view. But what else was there to do? They couldn't stay in the canyon, and if they tried leaving the van and scaling the walls a leisurely Forrest could pick them off in the bright sunlight like moving targets in a carnival shooting gallery. Ping, they'd go, and fall over like growling bears or quacking ducks.
And Forrest would get the prize.
Gideon swung hard toward the right, put just a little more pressure on the gas pedal, and clutched the jerking wheel to keep the van headed straight for the opening. With all the rolling, lurching, and jolting that was going on without any help from him, he didn't see any need to worry about evasive tactics.
The first shot was fired as he came full around, facing the entrance. There was an inconsequential snick from the front of the vehicle just below the window and a seemingly simultaneous thud as the bullet struck the floor on the passenger side, about three feet from Gideon's right leg.
Why, those things can go right through metal, Gideon thought indignantly. Like butter. What the hell, it hardly seemed fair. On the other hand, that was the fourth shot Forrest had taken at them now, and they were still in one piece. Crack, there was another; he saw the dust spatter twenty feet in front of the van. Was Forrest panicking, getting less accurate rather than more? He hunched down lower on the seat and pressed as hard as he dared on the pedal. Seventy yards to go... sixty-five... He began to let himself think about Life After the Canyon.
He never heard the next shot strike, didn't really see it strike. One second he was trying to decide whether or not he could risk taking the van over the rocks rearing up in their path. The next second the windshield was honeycombed by a thousand glittering little fissures that turned the landscape into a kaleidoscope. Immediately the steering wheel fought him harder, pulling at his arms as if it knew that he was blind, that it had the upper hand now.
"Hang on!" he yelled or tried to yell, pawing with his foot for the brake, but a scrunching shock sent him helplessly up in the air still clinging to the wheel, like a kid bounced off a seesaw and hanging on to the handle for dear life. Then, for a breath-stopping moment the entire van was airborne, coming down heavily on its rear wheels and careening on, slowed now but tilted wildly to the right, on two wheels; so much so that Gideon, flung like a bundle of laundry into the passenger seat corner, saw only sky through the driver's window on the other side.
We're tipping over, he thought. "Brace yourself!" he called. "We're—"
And over they went, the van falling sluggishly onto its right side and then, slowly, surprisingly, continuing to roll, as if someone were pushing it down a hill. For an impossibly long moment it hung, balanced and seemingly struggling, before it tumbled onto its top with a terminal, metal-crumping whomp that smashed the remaining windows, popped the crackled windshield out of its mounting, and crumpled the left rear half of the roof like so much tinfoil.
Gideon ended up on his back on the ceiling along with everything else that was loose, including Julie, who was sprawled beside him under a welter of seat cushions, clothes and other junk.
He reached instinctively for her with his hand. "Julie, are you okay?" Years of dirt and sand that had been tramped into the van fell onto their faces like dry rain.
"Ugh. Yes. Phooey." She was spitting dust. "Nothing that a few weeks in traction won't fix. What about you?"
"Yes, fine."
Well, pretty much. The van had tipped slowly enough to let him prop himself against the roof and the back of the front seat before it had turned completely over, but the tire iron—he'd brought it up front with him—had gouged him in the thigh, which had hurt a little, and somewhere along the way he had bitten his cheek again in the same spot, which had hurt like hell but wasn't anything serious. He realized abruptly that the engine was
still running and quickly reached down—reached up, rather—to switch off the ignition, then cautiously peeked through a corner of the space where the windshield had been to check their bearings.
They were in a kind of nook or cul-de-sac, a mini—box canyon off the main box canyon. Apparently the van had swerved into it, then flipped when it rode up onto the sloping talus at the foot of the cliffs, rolling into the troughlike center of the little bay. A good thing too; only twenty or thirty feet ahead of them—all around them, in fact—were truck-sized boulders that had fallen from above, a collision with any one of which would surely have resulted in more to complain about than a bitten cheek.
There was another good thing: the hollow from which Forrest had been firing was out of sight around a spur of rock, and if they couldn't see where he was, then he couldn't see where they were either. That, Gideon assured himself, was what the laws of geometrical optics said, and who was he to question the laws of geometrical optics?
Not only that, but geography was cooperating too. They were on the same side that Forrest was on; behind him, so to speak. The perpendicular spur that thrust out from the cliff to create their little bay was a promontory of the same massive organ-pipe formation in one of whose upper hollows Forrest had been crouching to fire. But that was at the other end of it, and to get from there to here, to a place where he could see them again, Forrest would have to go the long way around, behind the sinuous outcropping, because on the canyon side it reared up, sheer and columnar, with no visible path or ledge around it.
The problem for Forrest would be that he had no way of knowing that the van had turned over, since he couldn't see the bay. As far as he knew, it could come rattling back out at any moment, spewing nuts and bolts like a cartoon car and heading full-tilt for the entrance again. And if he was stuck behind the outcropping when it did, there would be nothing to stop their getting through. On the other hand, he could hardly keep his position at the canyon's mouth because Gideon and Julie might already be scrambling up the bay's back wall and out of his grasp.
In other words, Forrest Freeman had himself a predicament. And if Forrest Freeman's past behavior was any indication, what he would do would be to worry for a while before doing anything else. That meant that they ought to have seven or eight minutes before he showed up above them with his rifle; five minutes while he dithered and another two or three while he worked his way around the promontory, if that was what he decided to do.
Gideon turned back to Julie. "Let's get out of this thing. We'll stand a lot better chance out there—there are caves and outcroppings all over the place—than we will waiting in here for him to come pick us off."
"I won't argue with that," she said. "I think the front window's the easiest way out. Go ahead, I'll follow you."
"Right." He pulled himself through, glanced warily at the deserted cliff top, and reached back in to help her get out.
She was up on her right elbow with a puzzled look on her face, tugging awkwardly at the junk that lay over her extended left foot. "Ow. Damn."
"Julie, what's wrong? Are you hurt?"
"No... I don't think so. My ankle's caught... . Damn! There's this stupid bar ..."
"I'll give you a hand." He clambered back in, hauling himself to her side on his elbows.
"No, it's not going to work," she said, straining at her foot. "Damn!"
A glance made the problem clear. When the van had flipped, two of the three passenger seat rows had come loose, and one of them had fallen over Julie's leg and been wedged firmly into the buckled ceiling. The steel reinforcing bar that ran along its base had come down across her ankle, pinning her hiking-booted foot to the crushed roof.
He tried to maneuver her foot out of its steel-rimmed trap without success—there wasn't enough room to move it—then tugged fruitlessly at the bar.
"You're lucky you didn't lose your foot," he said.
"That's me," she said grimly, "lucky Julie."
He made her lie back, then managed to get both arms around the seat, pulling from his cramped position and putting all the strength of his legs and back into it. It didn't budge, didn't feel as if anything short of a crane could get it to budge.
He fell back. "Can you get your foot out of the boot?"
"I don't know." She fumbled at the laces, blocked by the mass of the seat. "No, it's hard to get hold—"
"Here, let me—"
Her hand came down on his wrist. "Gideon, there's no time! He could be here any minute. You go!"
"And leave you?" He laughed, but he felt as if something had punched him in the throat. "Forget it." He went back to her boot laces.
Her fingers dug into his wrist. Her face was very close. "Gideon, go! It's our only chance."
"But—"
"I'll be all right. We'll be all right. I know you'll think of something."
"I—Julie, I—"
"Go, already!"
Chapter Twenty-Four
I know you'll think of something.
He had been unable to reply. He'd stroked her cheek, pulled himself back out of the car, and run for the cliff. And he had scrambled up the rocky wall with the mindless, pumping strength of a desert animal, seeming to throw himself from outcropping, to boulder, to crevice, to ridge, every second expecting to see Forrest appear on the rim above him, rifle in hand.
Forrest.
How could he not have realized it? He should have put it all together in Abydos, when TJ had told him about the ornaments missing from the el-Amarna Museum. But he hadn't; not until they were practically in Forrest's sights, not until Julie showed him what was in the ledger. "Head of young woman or girl, inscribed ..." that is, of course, engraved. With hollows for the insertion of faience eyes, channels for eyebrows of gold, perforations for golden earrings, drilled holes for a wig of delicate golden strands...
Hadn't Arlo stood right there in the museum and flatly told him the damn things weren't jewelry? Of course they weren't jewelry. They were inlays; gold and faience inlays and decorations to adorn the head of an Amarna statuette. And when everything was assembled—head, inlays, and body—whoever had them would have something that no one else in the world had. An intact, complete Amarna Period statuette. Museums and collectors had burned to own one for decades, but none had ever been recovered.
No wonder the head had been worth killing over. And no wonder Haddon had had to go. He'd seen the head. He could describe it accurately. And if he could describe it, then eventually, when it came on the market as it surely would, it could be traced back to Horizon House and to the people who were there at the time. So he had to be disposed of, and disposed of before returning to Luxor, where he was chafing to show it to everyone in sight.
It wouldn't have been hard for Forrest to murder the old Egyptologist. Haddon liked his after-dinner drinks and after-dinner monologues; finding people to sit through them was his problem. Forrest could easily enough have gotten himself invited to Haddon's stateroom. Once there, how difficult would it have been to use Haddon's bathroom at some point and emerge with four or five crushed-up antidepressant pills? How difficult to find a way to slip them into Haddon's brandy or Scotch?
A little later he had probably taken a midnight turn around the deck with the notoriously insomniac Haddon. Groggy and stumbling by now, Haddon must have collapsed, hitting his face on the grating. The burly Forrest had lifted him over the railing, and it had been over. Or it would have been over but for that unseen little platform.
So many things should have given him away. It was Forrest, not Haddon or Bruno or anyone else, who had insisted on going all the way downriver to Amarna despite the press of time. Why, except that he knew that the inlays were there? And then there had been the disappearance of the head from the drawer between the time Haddon saw it and the time TJ called Horizon House to ask about it. Who had removed it? It might have been anyone back in Luxor, of course, but surely the likelihood was that it was someone closely connected to whoever had killed Haddon and was therefore on the M
enshiya. TJ's student Stacey Tolliver was possible but farfetched. That left Kermit Feiffer, Forrest's assistant director.
Forrest and Kermit were in it together then, and maybe the rest of the crew too. And take it a step further: maybe they'd been in the antiquities-smuggling business on the side for years, acting as conduits for the el-Hamids' loot, profiting from their absurdly low prices. Hiding small objects in with the taping paraphernalia would have been child's play.
And there was something else, now that he thought about it: why would someone who hated Egypt as much as Forrest did keep coming back?
Well, it wasn't an airtight case, but everything added up.
Not that he was in need of an airtight case at this point. It was Forrest Freeman who'd been trying his damndest to blow them apart for the last fifteen minutes, and that, he rather thought, made the rest of it moot.
He pulled himself the last few feet onto the rim of the cliff—no sign of Forrest—and rolled quickly behind the scant cover of a few scattered boulders. The adrenaline that had propelled him up the wall had drained away, leaving him spent and trembling, hardly able to catch his breath, his pulse pounding in his ears. Flat on his stomach he sucked in air while sweat ran from his face onto the sandy gravel. He had scraped both knees coming up, and the palms of both hands. One of his fingernails had been ripped half-off. He didn't remember any of it happening. And his hip had been bruised by the tire iron he couldn't remember sticking in the back of his belt. He adjusted it, muttering, thinking it was doing him more damage than it was Forrest.
He pulled in a last, long breath through his mouth and got cautiously to his hands and knees, his strength seeping slowly back. He could see the van eighty feet below him, as pathetic as a beetle with its legs in the air. The thought of Julie in there, caught by the foot, defenseless...