by Cherry Adair
Isis squeezed her eyes shut. “Do you remember leaving a small basket containing a carpet tassel at Beniti’s?”
“Why would I do that? A carpet tassel from where?”
Isis met Thorne’s eyes and pulled an expressive face. Her father believed he was in Egypt and about to start the dig. He still had no memory of the events leading up to his supposed discovery of the tomb. So if he’d met Dr. Najid, it must’ve been very close to the time of his attack. All his memories stopped and started around the time he’d come to Cairo on his last dig. The most crucial month was gone.
Thorne avoided hitting a gang of street urchins running between heavy traffic. Horns blared, but nobody slowed down. A glance in the rearview mirror showed a blue Mercedes E Class on his right, about ten cars back, and an ancient-looking tan Audi directly behind him, weaving between the other vehicles.
He pressed the gas, listening to the disjointed conversation with only one ear as he navigated the congested road and watched the tails.
“The tassel led us to the Minister of Water and Irrigation, Dr. Khalifa Najid,” Isis pushed, determined to get something out of the old man. Thorne wanted to tell her she was wasting her time. “Does his name ring any bells?”
“None. I don’t like it here, Isis,” he said petulantly. “When can I leave?”
“Aren’t you about to go on a dig?” Isis asked tentatively.
“I—I am? No, honey, I think we’re at Connie and Al’s place… Or maybe this is the Mihms’ house? Let me ask your mother.”
“I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.” Her voice broke, and Thorne watched her straighten her spine as she told her father bracingly, “Why don’t you wait for her on the bench by the front door where it’s nice and sunny?”
“It’s raining! I’m bored. I should be with you looking for her. Why don’t I come out for a bit and help you?”
Isis curled her fingers into her palms. Thorne laid his hand over hers, and she shot him a grateful look. “Daddy, you’re in Seattle, and you were hurt the last time you were in Cairo. You’re in a place I know you’ll be safe. Please be patient. I’m here in Cairo, and we’re looking for her. I’ll find her for you, I promise.”
Several moments of silence went by while the professor seemed to be trying to process the information. Isis had a shitload more patience than Thorne would’ve had in a similar position.
“You’re a good girl, honey. Call us and let us know how you’re doing. Your mother sends her love.”
“I will, and you call me if you remember anything. Even the smallest thing might help us. I love you, Daddy. Be good.”
“Find her for me, Isis. Just find her. I don’t know why, honey, but she’s in grave danger.”
She put up a hand even though Thorne wasn’t about to say anything. “Give me a minute, okay?” She put her phone back in her camera bag and sighed. “My mother died fifteen years ago. And Cleo in grave danger? She’s been in the same resting place since thirty BCE!”
Thorne took his hand off hers to rest on the gun lying beside his hip. He wasn’t sure if sympathy was what she needed right now. Hell, if it was, he wasn’t the man for the job. Her sadness was palpable, but she didn’t cry as he suspected she wanted to do. She held on to her emotions by a tenuous thread.
“It’s so unfair. As wacky as he can be, my father has a brilliant mind and a talent for archaeology. At one time he was the top Egyptologist in the world. It’s so damned unfair.”
“He’s being well taken care of.”
“Right,” Isis said briskly. “And we have a puzzle to solve. Clearly something is going on. Najid doesn’t know we can’t confirm him ever meeting with my father, so a lie was pretty risky—if that’s what it was.”
And maybe he did know the good professor was incapable of remembering, so he felt he could lie with impunity. “We don’t know that what he said isn’t the truth. But you know that people lie for any number of reasons. Deceptive gain, or to escape punishment—number-one reason: to cover their arses,” he said dryly. “How about we pay a visit to your father’s friend in the hospital and see if he can shed any light on a possible connection between your father and Najid?”
“Sure,” she said, biting her lip, something Thorne wanted desperately to do himself. “Keep heading this way; you’ll see the hospital off to the right. I hate to say it, but I’m not sure what to do next. I have no idea where my father might have hidden more clues, which means we’re at a dead end, right?”
“Not necessarily.” Thorne kept an eye on the two vehicles tailing them. An innocent man didn’t follow the daughter of a man he claimed not to know. “Beniti al-Atrash might have more insight than his son.”
Thorne changed lanes, speeding up. The Jeep might look like half the other vehicles on the road, but the engine was souped up and could outrun anything chasing them. Thorne didn’t want to put that to the test. He hoped the men following them were there merely for surveillance. He didn’t want a shoot-out with Isis in the car.
The vehicles kept pace. Local plates, tinted windows. He punched in the license plates one-fingered on his phone, then added a question mark. Let London ID them.
“Fingers crossed.”
Thorne didn’t believe in crossed fingers or lucky rabbits’ feet. His good-luck charm was an automatic weapon. His Glock tended to even the playing field.
It didn’t take long to reach the hospital on El Kasr El Aini Street in Garden City, and they found al-Atrash’s room on the second floor without incident.
Christ. He hated hospitals. The smell of antiseptic curled through Thorne’s nervous system and settled like an oil slick in his gut. The sight of a wheelchair, shoved against the wall, made him remember…
“Are you all right?” Isis asked, laying her hand lightly on his arm. He felt a sizzling arc of electricity resonate through his bones. Static electricity, nothing more.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” His voice was curt. He hadn’t set foot in a hospital in months, but his body reacted to the stimuli as if he were once again in a hospital bed, where even a morphine drip hadn’t been enough to mask the pain.
“Because you’re limping more, and gritting your teeth. Your leg hurts from all that damned running around, doesn’t it? Maybe we should have it looked at while we’re here?”
“I’m fine.” He’d had enough fucking doctors poking and prodding him for a lifetime. “This is the room.”
“Let me go in and see if he’s up to visitors first.”
Thorne motioned for her to go ahead. He leaned against the wall outside the door and surveyed the people milling about. Doctors, orderlies, a couple of women sitting outside a room wringing their hands and talking quietly. Normal hospital activity. His mother had visited him. Once. She couldn’t handle his “infirmity.” Better that way. In those months it had taken everything in him not to chuck it all in and wave the white flag for Boris Yermalof to fucking come and finish him off. It had taken a little too fucking long for the anger to become stronger than the pain. Once that happened, he did everything in his power to get the hell out of there and start living.
He still had an itch on the back of his neck. One of the cars following them had turned off with him, parking seven cars over in the lot. Thorne went over to the window and looked down. Two shadowy figures were all he made out through the tinted windows. Thorne figured he had multiple choices of just who’d sent them.
At any other time, Yermalof would’ve been at the top of his hit parade. God only knew, the son of a bitch was mean enough, angry enough, determined enough to track him down to the ends of the earth in retaliation for what Thorne had done to him.
The losers who’d attacked him in the underpass, the guys who’d chased them earlier that day, Dr. Khalifa Najid… hell, he’d even add Husani the Kiss Whisperer, and Dylan Brengard, the casual ex-boyfriend.
The list was growing, and they’d barely been in Cairo forty-eight hours.
The door opened and Isis popped her head out. “He’s doin
g much better. Come in. I told him you were my boyfriend to keep things simple.”
Whatever Thorne was feeling right then, simple it was not. This wasn’t a mere case of finding a long-lost tomb and restoring Magee’s dubious reputation. The professor had enemies. More than one if Thorne was the judge of the situation. And the man’s daughter tied him in knots.
He followed her inside.
The second bed was empty, the curtain pulled back. Just the three of them in the room with the door closed. Beniti al-Atrash was in his late sixties. He looked like he’d done a couple of rounds with middleweight champion Carl “the Cobra” Froch. His arm was in a cast, supported by a sling; one eye was swollen shut; the four-inch gash to his cheek was black and blue and stitched like Frankenstein’s monster. That must’ve hurt like a son of a bitch. Thorne approached the bed as Isis introduced them.
“Isis has explained some of the circumstances surrounding August’s discovery of the tomb of Cleopatra.” Al-Atrash cut to the chase as he tried to straighten against the pillows Isis was mounding behind him. When she was done fussing, he brought his palm to her cheek and smiled at her before addressing Thorne.
“Do you concur with little bird’s theory that my attacker, and the two attempts on your lives, are a direct result of whatever it was my friend unearthed when he was here three months ago?”
Thorne sat on the empty bed, and after a moment Isis came and sat beside him. She slipped her much smaller hand into his, clasping his fingers where his hand rested on his knee. “It’s very likely, sir. This many violent confrontations in such a short space of time after our arrival, coupled with the unprecedented visits to your shop and stall, would indicate that everything is tied in to Professor Magee’s find. Can you tell me anything about your attackers?”
“I had closed the stall first, then gone through to close the shop. The three men were inside when I came through the back. One man demanded, ‘Where is it?’ Since I had no frame of reference, I presumed he wanted the cash box, which I gave him with all haste. He took the money, stuffed it into his pockets, and swore at me, then asked again.
“I asked what the ‘it’ was he referred to. One of the other men hit me with his gun.” The older man touched his left eye with his fingertips. His hand shook. Isis tightened her fingers between Thorne’s and he squeezed back.
“The third punched me in the stomach. I don’t remember much after that. Husani found me when he brought the goods inside from the street.”
“Did any of them mention my father by name, or say Cleopatra?” Isis asked.
“Not that I recall, little bird. I am deeply sorry.”
“God!” she said achingly, as her eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry this happened to you.” She turned to Thorne. “Is there even a remote chance that this has nothing to do with my father?”
“I don’t believe so. This is all too premeditated to be unrelated. And the only thing everyone seems to have in common is your father.” The only person who didn’t fit was the Russian, although Thorne didn’t rule him out entirely.
“You were with him just before he flew home in April,” he said to al-Atrash. “Do you believe he really did find Cleopatra’s tomb at last?”
For several minutes Thorne thought the man had fallen asleep. But eventually he opened his eyes. “They called me from this very hospital to say he’d been found by a group of tourists out on the sand. He was disoriented. Extremely confused. I wanted to believe him, but to be frank? I don’t know if he found the tomb and was moved away to deflect curiosity while someone else plundered it, or if he became confused and was set upon by bandits.”
“But all his companions were killed.”
“Seven men who had been on various digs with him before, yes.”
“The police considered it a gang-related crime,” Thorne mused. “All the valuables were stripped from the men, and anything of value was removed from their camp.” He rubbed his thigh absently, then abruptly stopped when Isis gave him a sympathetic and worried look. “Is there anything else you remember between the time you came here to see the professor and when you put him on the plane back to Seattle?”
“August searched for Cleopatra’s tomb for almost twenty-five years. Do I think he was desperate enough to prevaricate one last time? Perhaps. But the day after he was brought to the hospital he seemed quite lucid, and he assured me that he had indeed found it.”
“That’s when he called me and told me to arrange a press conference,” Isis said quietly. “After the last time, I refused. Unless he could show me irrefutable proof. He claimed he had it and he’d show me when he got home. But by the time I picked him up at Sea-Tac the following day, he didn’t even remember that he’d returned to Egypt, let alone that he’d found the tomb.” She rubbed a hand over her eyes.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore. Did he leave anything else with you for safekeeping? You know how he loved to leave himself clues to jog his memory at times.”
“No. Nothing. I believe he donated all his notes and artifacts from his digs to the London Natural History Museum to preserve his legacy before he came here last.”
“He did, and we came from there after going through as much of his work as possible. They’re in the process of mounting his exhibit now. It’ll be open next month. I’m hoping he’s well enough to attend.”
“Insha Allah.”
“Na’am,” Isis said softly. “God willing. Have you noticed any unusual antiquity activity in the last few months?”
“No more than usual. I have procured some very good pieces that are genuine, and many more that are not. Are these pieces from the tomb of Cleopatra? I can’t say. There was nothing that I saw that would identify them as such.”
“So we’re back to square one. Do you still have any of these pieces?”
“We still have three coins and a necklace with exquisite workmanship indicating royalty. See Husani; he will show you. They might give you the clue you seek. Are you an antiquities dealer, Mr. Thorne?”
“No, I’m a banker. I’m merely here to lend support to Isis while she’s here. What can you tell us about Dr. Khalifa Najid?” Thorne changed the subject to safer ground.
“The Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation?” Al-Atrash glanced from Thorne to Isis and back again with a puzzled frown. “I don’t understand. Surely you are not suggesting that he has anything to do with these attacks?”
“We believe my father visited him around the time he found the tomb. The basket you were keeping for Dad contained the tassel from a carpet. Dr. Najid’s carpet. We think my father left it as a clue for himself, but we can’t figure out what their connection was. As for the broken stick—” She shrugged. “Do you have any idea why he’d want that? The minister denies knowing or ever meeting my father.”
“There would be no reason for their paths to ever cross. Dr. Najid has held that prestigious position for more than three decades. He is considered a big hero for bringing water to the desert with the new dam in the Valley of the Scorpions. He’s well liked and well respected in the community. He’s known as a connoisseur of Egyptian artifacts, and has a well-documented and well-publicized collection. But as far as I know he doesn’t sponsor digs, at least not that I’ve ever heard.”
Isis’s palm was damp, but Thorne kept his fingers twined with hers. He didn’t remember when he’d ever done something as simple as hold a woman’s hand. It felt oddly… right. “Would their paths have crossed socially?”
The older man smiled. “Socializing in that rarefied environment would make August supremely uncomfortable. And while I consider him my brother, and mean no disrespect, he does not enjoy feeling inferior socially. His milieu is the area in or around his precious tombs. That was where he always took prospective sponsors. Out to whatever dig he was showcasing, where he was in control and, how do you say it—the star of the show. Not to detract from my old friend, but he was a showman. And he knew what pleased the moneymen.”
He shook his head. “
No. I cannot see August attending afternoon tea, or a soirée in Dr. Najid’s social circles. This would be highly unlikely.”
Thorne saw that the older man was tiring, and got to his feet, tugging Isis with him.
“We’ll go now,” Isis said, then walked over to wrap her arms gently around the older man’s shoulders. She rested her check against his for a few moments, then kissed him and stepped back. She slid her hand back into Thorne’s. “If you need anything, Husani will contact us.”
NINE
They got back in the car. Isis didn’t ask where they were going. Right then she didn’t give a damn. She was hot and sweaty and scared. Turning up the AC to high, she directed the vent on her chest.
“I’d rather these people get what they so desperately want,” she said bitterly as cold air hit her damp shirt. “What’s their agenda? They left my father for dead; they almost killed Beniti. God—they almost killed you.”
“What are you saying?” Thorne asked, starting the Jeep and pulling into the street. He seemed distracted, and even more curt than usual, his eyes flicking to the rearview mirrors now and then. Isis knew a car was following them. She’d seen it in her side mirror as they crossed the bridge. She knew he knew it was there. There didn’t seem to be any point discussing it. His gun had been in the seat between them the whole time.
The knots in her shoulders had knots.
He cut in front of a flatbed truck carrying metal pipes, then wove between five cars in quick succession. She liked the look of his large hand on the steering wheel; it looked competent and strong. Neither of which she felt right then. The bright sunlight accented the thin, shiny white scars across his fingers.
“You want to find Cleopatra and hand her over to thieves and murderers?”
“Yes. No.” She took off her glasses to rub her eyes. “Of course not.” She put her glasses back on. “But if doing so will stop this insane cat-and-mouse chase, then maybe that would be the wisest course of action.” It would literally kill her father to know someone else would get credit for the discovery of the century.