Before he could recover, Mako lunged at him. They went down hard. The scree to the side of the path gave way, and the pair tumbled down the hill. Mako had the element of surprise as well as the momentum from the attack. His useless right arm was a disadvantage and when they were stopped by a boulder, Beecher came out on top.
Mako blinked, trying to dislodge the sand from his eyes, and could barely see the butt of the gun coming for him. He shifted slightly and positioned his knee just below Beecher’s groin. There was no time for the windup necessary for a debilitating blow, but he was able to jam his knee into Beecher’s crotch.
The excavator gasped and rolled over before he was able to strike. Mako caught him in the back of the neck with a side chop from his left hand. He didn’t have much power behind it, but the blow stopped Beecher from dealing a countering blow. With both he and his adversary injured, Mako had one priority and that was the gun. But before he could locate it, he felt the barrel pressed against his abdomen.
His initial response was to pull back, but Mako knew that was the wrong move. Instead, he tightened his core and leaned into the weapon. His only hope was to push the barrel and slide back enough to remove the gun from battery.
Mako froze when he felt the gun jerk as Beecher pulled the trigger. The shot never came, and he leaned harder on the weapon, knowing that if he released pressure, the gun would automatically go back into battery. The two men were at a standoff. Mako could not afford to move, but he had Beecher pinned to the ground.
Clenching his abs tighter, Mako took a shallow breath into his chest. His tunnel vision suddenly cleared when he saw a shadow fall over him and in slow motion watched a rock descend on Beecher’s head. The man fell limp beneath him, but Mako was still worried about releasing pressure on the weapon. Even with Beecher unconscious, his finger was still on the trigger. Any move by Mako could cause a reaction that would possibly allow the weapon to fire.
The shadow returned and he looked up to see Gretchen and Adon hovering over him.
“Get back,” he told them.
Unsure of the danger, they hesitated. He did not want to waste words for fear of releasing the pressure on the barrel. Unable to determine Beecher’s condition, Mako had to trust his instincts. The man lay motionless beneath him.
Slowly he moved his left hand toward the gun. Being right-handed, Mako had to think about every movement, until finally his finger found the trigger guard. He moved his finger inside, but Beecher had a death grip on the gun. Mako paused to see if the man would react, but he couldn’t feel any movement. Slowly he pushed the barrel away from his chest and from Gretchen and Adon.
The shot was deafening, but that appeared to be the only damage. Mako glanced at Gretchen and the boy. They were shocked but otherwise appeared unhurt. Mako grabbed the pistol and crab-walked away from Beecher’s body. On a day when the Curse of the Pharaohs had come to life, he wasn’t taking any chances with Beecher.
“What do we do with him?” Gretchen asked.
Mako almost snapped. He needed to take several breaths before he was calm enough to speak. Rescuing Beecher had been a chance occurrence, not something she could have known about or prevented. The fact that she had hidden her personal relationship to the man and the mission bothered him. Mako glanced at her. “I guess we need to determine if he’s dead or not.”
Gretchen didn’t move. Her expression, as usual, was unreadable.
Mako performed a chamber check on the pistol to make sure another round had loaded and moved toward the man. Passing off the weapon to Gretchen for her to cover him would have been easier, but at the present time he felt better holding it. The problem was that he only had the use of his left hand.
“Would you mind?”
Gretchen seemed to snap out of the trance she was in and slid toward her father. She placed her fore- and middle fingers on his neck. “Alive.”
Though it would have been easier if Beecher were dead, Mako was glad it hadn’t been Gretchen who did it. Regardless of her feelings, killing her father would be devastating.
Mako turned toward Adon. “Can you run down and get help?” He placed the gun under his arm and dug in his pocket for a few bills, which he gave the boy. “You’ve done well.”
Adon nodded and took the money. He was about to take off when Mako stopped him. “Remember the guide, Alaa?”
The boy nodded and Mako reached back in his pocket. He handed the boy several more bills. “Tell him to meet us where the trail ends, okay?”
Adon was richer than he had ever dreamed. “Sure thing, mister.” He took off at a run back down the trail. A moment later he was out of sight.
“What do we do now? The authorities will think we did this,” Gretchen said.
Mako had no intention of sticking around. “Hold this.” He handed Gretchen the gun, leaned over, and searched Beecher’s pockets. His hand came out with a set of keys.
“What about Alaa?”
“Insurance.”
42
Key Largo, Florida
“What happened?” Alicia asked, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“Cave-in or something. Mako’s been unresponsive,” TJ said.
They had split the overnight hours into two watches in case Mako needed help or TJ’s algorithm finished running. Sam and Dave were asleep in the guest bedroom. They had proven to be helpful, but earning Alicia’s trust would take a lot more than one day, especially since the day before they had been mercenary hackers.
Alicia was already dressed, but took a minute in the bathroom to throw some water on her face and brush her teeth. Minutes after waking up, she was at her workstation.
TJ had once wanted to install a series of green, yellow, and red lights on the ceiling to indicate the threat level they were under, but Alicia had vetoed the idea. She didn’t need a lightbulb to tell her they were in the red zone.
The middle four screens showed the newsfeed from the Valley of the Kings. The status of the renderings and Mako’s last known position were relegated to the perimeter. It was one of Alicia’s rules: Focus on the important stuff. Many operators and analysts got caught in the web of urgency and forgot what was important.
What they were watching on the screens was both urgent and important.
The door cracked open. Alicia turned toward the light as Sam entered the room. The girl moved silently to her workstation. Alicia nodded, but her attention was focused on the screens.
Unfortunately, the feed was from an Egyptian network. Both the audio and text scrolling on the bottom of the screen were in Arabic. Neither was necessary. The scene on the monitors was self-explanatory.
Chaos was the only word to describe the drama unfolding before them. It was clear there had been a catastrophic event. The camera panned over to the rockfall. Yellow pipes, all that remained of the scaffolding, were sticking out at odd angles. What looked like a hundred ants scurrying over the debris showed the scale of the event.
“When was the last contact?” Alicia asked.
“Lost him right after it happened. I was monitoring a webcam set up to observe the site and saw the thing live.”
Alicia turned away. She would deal with the past soon enough. “Mako, do you read me?” She tried several times before giving up.
One of the screens flickered and changed to a fixed view of the site. “That’s the feed.”
Alicia noticed Sam behind her.
“Sam, see what you can do about the resolution.”
Over the next few minutes the screens became sharper. “I can zoom in and start searching, but I don’t know what he looks like.”
“You’ll know.” Alicia really believed that, but put a picture up on an adjacent screen just in case.
She turned to TJ. “Can you rewind the webcam to the event and show Mako’s position when it happened? A few minutes later, all three watched as the cliff crumbled.
“Where was Mako?” Alicia asked.
TJ zoomed in on a dot on the map. “Here. He should be okay.�
�
The screen showed a transparent image of the map layered over the webcam feed. The dot was in a tent, which appeared undamaged by the rock slide.
“Okay, so that’s where he was. Where was the last contact?” Alicia asked.
TJ transformed the periodic locations sent by Mako’s phone into an animated sequence. It showed him moving around the backside of the site and suddenly stopping. “Here. No idea why.”
“Sam. Find a camera that has a view of that tent and see who he’s with when he leaves.” Alicia turned back to her own workstation. For a long second she paused, feeling powerless to help or control the situation. “John. Where is he?”
TJ changed the search parameters from Mako to John. A few seconds later the map centered on a blue dot. John had left almost an entire day ago, but after fourteen hours of flights and the time change, he hadn’t checked in.
His phone’s location GPS showed him in Luxor.
Alicia looked around for her lost phone, then realized she had made the same mistake twice, a very rare occurrence. She knew there must be a Freudian explanation, but she let that go until later. With a few keystrokes, she had her phone’s interface on one of the screens. Scrolling to John’s number, she pressed connect.
“We lost Mako,” she said when he answered.
“Goddamned mess here. What happened?”
Alicia explained what she knew and sent John an image of Mako’s last known location.
“Nothing I can do here. I’ll have a look.”
Alicia relaxed slightly, knowing John was there. She hadn’t forgotten their fight, but for now their priorities were aligned.
“Got something,” Sam called out.
An image appeared on one of the screens. It showed Mako and Gretchen leaving the area with a boy. Their direction of travel jibed with Mako’s last known location.
“What are they doing?” she asked. Her focus shifted to the center screens, where TJ had created a slow-motion time lapse of the event from the webcam. With the events slowed to a crawl, the rock slides appeared as individual events, rather than one large one. It looked much like a video of a building being demolished. That didn’t rule out a fault line deciding to shift at the exact time cameras were due to be inserted and the interior of the tomb revealed, but made it improbable.
“This was rigged. Not with explosives, though,” TJ said.
The loop replayed again. Each time she saw it, Alicia became more confident that it was no natural occurrence. She needed to warn John, but his phone went to voicemail. Glancing back at the live feed, Alicia noticed several survivors being dropped from the ledge in slings.
Rashida Mustafa’s Wikipedia page was still open on another tab. Alicia studied her picture, then shifted to the video.
“That’s Mustafa.”
Identifying her was one thing. Making contact was another, but that was phase two. First, they needed to find Mako, and there was little she could do without the ability to communicate.
“Can you tell if the cell network is down there?” she asked.
“Checking,” Sam said.
A long second later she confirmed Alicia’s thought. Someone had shut down the network.
She sat back and watched the time loop of the destruction, finally admitting to herself that John might have been right about Ahmed. There was no one else powerful enough to have done this. The realization enraged her. That anger flowed to her fingertips.
43
The Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt
John stuck the phone in his pocket and skirted the crowd around the rockfall. With everyone focused on the destruction and rescue attempt, he thought he saw Mako and slipped easily past the crowd. He walked the quarter mile to the end of the cliff and turned to the right, where it doubled back on itself.
The damage was considerably less on this side, and he studied the rockfall for any sign of Mako. He was just about to pick his way to the top when he heard a man call out. At first he assumed the shout had come from above, but as it continued, he determined it originated from a narrow path along a ridge across from him.
The area was several hundred yards away. From his observations of the damage to the front and also backside of the cliff, the area the voice came from was likely unaffected.
The voice called out again.
John picked his way back down to the desert floor and crossed the narrow valley. With a round chambered and his H&K at the low-ready position, he started up the trail.
Stalking an injured animal is often more dangerous than hunting healthy prey. John Storm knew it was the same with humans. The sound continued as he moved up the trail. The numerous switchbacks made it impossible to see more than a dozen feet ahead. John took each one with a measured caution and slowly approached the sound.
Rounding the last switchback before the ridge, he saw a man. Before he could identify him a boulder came at his face. John had come to Egypt with several objectives. Finding Mako and the cache topped his list; stopping Ahmed was next. Also, he was not planning to leave until he found and killed Denton Beecher.
John and Gretchen had discovered they shared a common goal just a few weeks ago. He only wished Gretchen could be here to witness her father’s demise, because there was only one option and that was to kill him.
A rumor that the CIA was looking for Hoover’s files relating to Egypt was the bait that had caught John’s attention. An off-the-cuff remark from an old colleague that the Minister of Tourism had reached out to the Agency for help had rekindled his interest. John had once sought out these same files and concluded that they didn’t exist.
His search had started in Germany right after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. There was never a question that the East Germans had been hoarding antiquities, but where were they hidden? The fall of the Wall put those secret caches in jeopardy. Tasked with a mission similar to that of the Monument Men in World War II, John was tasked to find and return what he could. In the process, he had met a museum curator who happened to be Gretchen’s mother. She was as obsessed with the return of the antiquities as John.
They had some minor success with their search, but seemed to be thwarted at every turn. John left the relic hunting to Gretchen’s mother and turned his attention to a problem that turned out to be the woman’s husband. Beecher had escaped back to Egypt before John could apprehend him, but before escaping he had murdered his wife to conceal his identity and cover his tracks.
The daughter, Gretchen, had gone to live with family. John had stayed in touch, providing assistance where he could over the years. More than a decade had passed since he’d last heard her name when she reached out to him. Having followed in her mother’s footsteps, Gretchen had graduated college with a degree in archeology, but instead of going into academia she had taken a job with an auction house.
Rumors are hardwired into the art world. When Gretchen heard about the CIA’s search for the lost files, she reached out to the one man she knew from the Agency: John Storm. He was immediately interested in both helping Gretchen and finding her father. Once he heard that Alicia’s group had been contracted to find them also, his interest grew and he found himself sucked into an old vortex of mystery.
The boulder seemed to advance in slow motion, but quickly picked up momentum as it bounced toward him. John bailed off the trail, landing in a thicket of thorny cactus-like plants. The boulder passed by. He rose to one knee and raised the pistol, scanning the trail above for Beecher. Too late, he saw the man’s head drop below the other side of the ridge.
Seconds later John was on his feet and following, but with Beecher in defilade he was cautious in his approach. He reached the ridgeline and lowered his body so only his eyes were exposed. Beecher was ahead of him, moving in a loping run toward the central area of the Valley of the Kings.
Seeing he was in no immediate danger, John raised himself onto his forearms to brace himself for the shot. Just as he took aim, Beecher disappeared into a group of workers.
John cursed
under his breath and followed.
44
The Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt
Mako and Gretchen crossed the ridgeline and found themselves staring down at the foundation of an old city. Rectangular in shape, the layout of the ancient workers’ village was clear. Mako could easily imagine several hundred people having lived here. Several graves were visible on the side of a cliff, which formed a natural barrier. The other sides abutted the surrounding hills. Despite the seclusion, there had clearly been a wall around the city. A shiver ran down Mako’s spine when he realized the wall was less for protection than to keep the workers in.
The narrow path widened when they reached the valley floor. From there it was a straight shot to a parking lot. Mako scanned the area looking for any threats, but there were only a few tourists and the usual men huddled in the shade of the small metal roofs by the entrance to some of the tombs, ready to offer their assistance as guides for a few bills.
Fortunately, the parking lot was empty as well. The Valley of the Workers was not as popular as the graves of the kings and queens. It was usually the last stop of the day for the diehard tourists, most of whom went back to the comforts of their hotel rooms after the Valley of the Kings.
Mako pulled the keys from his pocket. There was no fob, but the logo was for a Range Rover. Parked toward the edge of the lot was an older, heavily oxidized vehicle. Mako headed directly toward it. He knew from the tools in the back that it was Beecher’s vehicle.
The door opened on well-greased hinges. The key slid into the lock and turned easily. The truck might look like a beater, but it was desert-maintained. Sand was the enemy of most things mechanical, making the desert a brutal environment for equipment.
“What about Alaa?”
Mako had forgotten he had sent the boy with a message for their guide to meet them here. He was already in the driver’s seat and started the vehicle. “Might as well wait in the AC.” He motioned for Gretchen to get in.
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