by Cherry Adair
“Everything I know you just told me,” Thorne said dryly. “They no longer work.” He walked cautiously and kept his eyes, ears—and now nose—open and looking for danger.
He carried his “torch” high while Isis kept hers low. For now the atmospheric red glow sufficed. The tunnel, running north to south, seemed to be dead straight.
“It’s strange that there are no paintings or mosaics in this section.” Isis lightly ran her fingers along the rough brick of the wall as she walked. Her soft voice echoed slightly on the hard surfaces. Clearly man-made, the completely bricked corridor was about five feet wide, nine or ten feet high, and disappeared into the darkness in front of them.
Every now and then they came across piles of limestone rubble with a broken potsherd and a few intact painted jars tossed in it like trash. “My father would be in his glory right now.”
Her father was probably playing bingo right then, but Thorne didn’t say so. “It’s an ancient landfill.”
“Here, but maybe deeper… Tomb workers were allowed to build their own ‘Houses of Eternity,’ ” Isis told him, her soft voice filling the space. It was fine if she wanted to play tour guide to dispel the darkness as they walked. Thorne let his mind wander to their determined kidnappers.
“And since they were highly skilled, they usually made their last resting places beautiful, too. It’s possible that this was the burial tomb for the workers, although they usually decorated them as well as the royal tomb they were working on. I’ve been in several, and they’re charming and not as formal as the ones they built for their king or queen. But this? Not a pretty thing in sight. Looters could’ve stripped it of anything valuable. People here have been robbing tombs since the first dynasty.”
The piece missing for Thorne was that he knew to what extremes Yermalof would go to stop someone. Thorne had received Lynn Maciej’s tongue, then later watched Yermalof flay the skin off her breasts with his small, chillingly effective knife. By then Ayers was dead, and Thorne secured so that he could helplessly watch every cruel, agonizing slice as he was left to bleed out on the floor, just feet away.
“It made sense from a purely economic point of view,” Thorne said absently, being damned careful where he walked. “The kings and queens buried in these tombs were interred with all their wealth, effectively keeping all that gold and silver and whatever the most valuable commodity of the time was out of circulation. Tomb robbers put that wealth back into circulation.”
“I never thought of it that way.” Isis laughed softly. “An ancient savings and loan? It makes a weird kind of sense. Even Husani turns a blind eye now and then when something is brought in by a robber. It’s hard to stop.” She paused, her steps slowing. “Do you think our kidnapping had something to do with your Russian bad guy?”
The floor started to slope, and he put a hand back to caution her. “If we’d been tortured and left to die slowly, yeah. But this whole thing was set up so that it looked like stupidity. An accident. Yermalof fences extremely high-end antiquities worth multimillions of dollars. Some priceless, which go for a hell of a lot more. Smells a little like him but doesn’t have the big impact he goes for. If he’s involved with the people who are looking for your Cleo, he’d want us alive, not dead. Unless he’s setting a trap—”
“He might not have to,” she reminded him practically.
“Yeah.” Thorne focused on what was ahead in the glow of their fire sticks. “He might not have to.”
But what could Yermalof gain by burying them in a hillside? It would get him out of the way for sure. But who, besides him, would benefit from that? For a moment Thorne contemplated his life. Being in the dark end of a tomb did that to a man.
Who else had he crossed, in an effort to win his father’s forgiveness over the years, and then for the military, that might want him dead and be willing to work with Yermalof to make it happen?
For several minutes they walked in silence. Relative silence. He heard her every breath and listened to her footfall with every step. Close enough to grab her if she fell, near enough to dispel any wildlife that might drop from the ceiling. Or one of the throat-height wires the ancients were so damned fond of for decapitating robbers and felling them in their tracks.
Deep down, Thorne’s gut sank further. No matter how sweet Isis’s delusions of hope were, there was little chance that this was the way out. He was afraid he wasn’t going to be able to keep his promise. They were going to die, buried like so many beneath the sands of this valley.
“IF THE RUSSIAN GUY is behind all this…” Isis skirted a pile of chipped and broken stones before squeezing sideways to get through a collapsed doorway. The strong smell of burning wood and dust tickled her nose. It was a good thing she wasn’t claustrophobic, because it felt as if the walls were closing in on them in the darkness beyond the red glow of their makeshift torches. “What would his purpose be?”
“Other than having his hands on a wealth of priceless antiquities?”
Every now and then she’d spread her arms wide to ensure that the walls were the same distance apart. “Well, yeah, there is that. No, I mean his purpose in trying to kill us?”
Using his torch, Thorne pulled aside a spiderweb drape at eye level. Isis’s meager fiery glow was shrinking, barely giving off any light at all. Hell, she was feeling her way through the tunnel more than seeing where they were going.
“The first thing I’ll ask when I catch up with him,” Thorne said dryly.
“Seriously. As you said, if your bad guy wanted us dead, we’d be dead. Which means he either made a mistake or there’s a reason he has us holed up in here. Or it’s not him at all. We seem to have a smorgasbord of bad guys after us, and we don’t have a clue who sent them.”
“Yermalof tends not to make mistakes,” Thorne told her, his words hardly reassuring. “And he’s had time to think this through.”
“Again. Not reassuring. This corridor seems to go on forever, so at least we’re not going to run out of oxygen anytime soon.” Sounding calm and practical was a strain, but panic was going to get them nowhere fast.
They’d been walking steadily downhill. The grade wasn’t steep, but down didn’t feel like out to her. This was possibly the worst idea in her life. But then, down meant there was more ahead. At least she remembered that much from her father’s work.
“And while I know we can go without food for a long time,” she continued a little desperately, “we can’t go without water.” She kept up the conversation because if not, her ears throbbed with the thick silence enveloping them. Talking kept the nerves at bay. “So eventually, if we don’t find a well-lit exit sign, we’re screwed. Right?”
God, she was babbling now, wasn’t she? Why didn’t he say something? Anything? She knew he was still ahead of her because of the regular intervals of his breath. Isis wished she’d been more engaged when her father had been on a dig. She’d learned about tombs by osmosis. She’d been far more interested in framing the next shot and in the angles of light and shadow than in Egyptology.
Thorne paused to hold his stick to hers, and the embers threw off pretty sparklers that illuminated the grim set of his mouth. Their shadows danced on the rough-cut walls. “Someone might have a contract out on me.” His voice was pretty damned matter-of-fact for the statement. But he’d been pretty matter-of-fact this whole time. At least he’d finally said something, which eased the growing knot between her shoulder blades. Of course, what he’d just said tightened her nerves up again.
“More than just the Russian?” she asked dryly. Very dryly because she was so parched her lips kept sticking together. She shifted the slick little button around in her mouth. It helped, but it wasn’t a tall, iced Diet Coke. “I thought you were one of the good guys!”
Thorne shrugged. “Boris Yermalof is one of, if not the, top seller of priceless black market antiquities in the world. As elusive as smoke, it took us, MI5, years to track him down and learn his name and then another year to learn his location. His retal
iation—and we were expecting it, mind you—was swift and brutal. His buyers think nothing of spending upwards of twenty mil on an original bust of Tutankhamen and hiding it in their basement where no one but themselves will ever see it.”
She gave an audible swallow.
“If those same buyers are in the know about a Cleopatra find, they’d draw straws to see who’d pay a hit man to keep everyone off Yermalof’s back while he brokered their deal. My returning to London might’ve been a tipoff that I was back in the game. The Russian couldn’t know I was on a medical leave of absence instead of out of the business for good. It’s been a while.”
“London was my fault—”
“No, it wasn’t. I had to go back at some point. I’m not the only MI5 operative looking for him. He killed two of our own; there are many people at Thames House wanting retaliation. They can’t go about killing everyone in Her Majesty’s Secret Service. If nothing else it would take several lifetimes.”
“Funny. Maybe Yermalof has a boss? Someone higher up the food chain whom he reports to?”
“If he does, it’s a well-kept secret. We’ve never heard even a hint that he doesn’t work alone.”
“Stop!” Isis grabbed his arm as he almost walked into a partially fallen beam as he’d turned his head to talk to her. She held her torch up. The small flame flickered with the movement, casting oddly shaped shadows, but illuminated the stone… lintel? “I think this means we’re entering a chamber. Maybe it has a back door.” They ducked and passed through the V beneath the thick strut where it had wedged against one wall. The room was disappointingly empty. Reliefs had been scribed on the sandstone walls from ceiling to floor, but not painted, and she couldn’t see them well enough to try to decipher their meanings even if she knew how to read hieroglyphics. Couldn’t begin to know the room’s original purpose.
And damn it, she was so thirsty! All she could think of was a vat of sparkling Diet Coke filled with bobbing ice cubes. She’d swim in it for a week.
They passed through the empty room to another, slightly larger chamber. Here the walls were covered in crude pictures of daily life. She raised her torch as she walked. Even in the dimness, the colors of barges and blue herons, beaked gods, and women washing clothes were still as pure and beautiful as the day they’d been painted.
She automatically reached for her camera case on her hip, then dropped her hand. She could spend all day documenting her find for her father. But now wasn’t the time.
“Isis?” Thorne called from the shadowy doorway across the dusty space where he stood waiting for her.
“Coming.” She closed the gap between them. “Okay, so our first suspect is Yermalof. Who else wants to kill you?”
Thorne smiled. “Surprisingly few people want to off me, actually. Let’s look at the professor for a moment.”
“You think my father wants you dead?” She shot him a teasing glance as they walked into another corridor. Here the floor was marble, smooth under a drift of coarse, gritty sand. Their shoes crunched as they walked.
This corridor was beautifully painted with soldiers going into battle. Mark Antony? Her heartbeat sounded loud in her ears. “He doesn’t know what you’ve done to his sweet baby girl, so I don’t think so. Not yet anyway.”
Could she believe what her eyes were trying to tell her, or was she starting to add two and eleven to make ninety-three?
“No, I know your father didn’t put out a hit on me. But consider for a moment what would be at stake if he truly did find Queen Cleopatra’s tomb.”
“He’d be vindicated.”
“He’d go down in the history books. He’d be feted, asked to travel the world lecturing about his discovery. There’d be endorsements, and sponsorships—”
“Thorne, even if that was all true—my father can’t take advantage of or enjoy any of that. He has Alzheimer’s. If—when we find Cleo’s tomb, it will give him justification for all his claims.” The scenes of war changed to hunting scenes. Pretty brutal, Isis observed absently as the lights passed from one group of images to the next. “But as for him enjoying that vindication—he’s not capable of doing so anymore.”
“He isn’t. But that doesn’t mean someone on his team wouldn’t be itching to take the glory for themselves at your father’s expense.”
“Dylan…”
“Possibly. He’s also got motive. Let’s take the bits and pieces you know, and let’s say they’re gospel. Tell me again what happened.”
She exhaled, telling Thorne again what she knew by heart. “He found Cleo’s tomb in the late afternoon of May seventeenth. The crew had camped at an oasis about a mile away. While dinner was cooking he went back to the tomb. Knowing my father, he went back to touch the rocks at the entrance. Immerse himself before the dig started. It was a little ritual he had.”
One of the images snagged her attention, and her steps slowed. The green-skinned man, with a pharaoh’s beard and partially mummy-wrapped legs, wore the distinctive crown of two long ostrich feathers. Osiris? Isis’s heart leapt. Oh, my God. Was it possible…?
Osiris, she knew, was the god of the afterlife and the dead. It made sense that he’d be in every tomb…
“All this artwork leaving you a little breathless?”
“I’m fine,” she said automatically, her words monotone because her brain was suddenly going a thousand miles an hour. Catching up with Thorne, she blew on the end of her torch to encourage the small red glow so she could look at the eight-foot-tall people depicted along the walls. Before she took a wild leap, she had to be sure…
“Isis? Your father’s ritual?”
“Sorry. He took a picture of himself at the entrance—the one he sent to me—then was struck on the head,” she reminded him, although why he needed reminding she had no idea. He knew the sequence of events as well as she did by now. “He thought he was in the Valley of the Scorpions, but instead he was found at Dafarfa Oasis.”
“Concussion. No memory of what had happened.”
“Right. Something like us being in a car going one way, and ending up camping somewhere miles away in the desert. Put those two events together and there certainly seems to be a similarity, don’t you think?”
“I do.”
Frustratingly, Isis couldn’t identify any of the other ancient Egyptians depicted on the walls. She thought one might be Horus when she passed a bird-headed man wearing a red and white crown. But what did she know? She’d always just admired the style and color of the images, never learned their meanings. Sorry, Dad.
“He didn’t even remember leaving Seattle to come on this dig.”
“What if it isn’t Alzheimer’s? What if the blow to the head caused memory loss, either permanent or temporary?”
“I never considered it wasn’t Alzheimer’s—nor did the doctors. But of course, given everything we now know, the blow to the head absolutely could’ve caused his memory loss. And of course people would want to be the first—the first to get the glory and accolades of a monumental discovery, or in the case of your nefarious Yermalof, the first to grave-rob and sell off everything before anyone discovers he’s done so.”
A woman wearing a headdress shaped like a throne, elegant wings spread wide—
Her namesake. Isis. This image she knew. Oh, dear God.
Her brain went blank for a moment as Isis tried, without freaking herself out or misleading Thorne, to assimilate the people painted along the walls.
Isis and Osiris, husband and wife. Even she knew that much.
SIXTEEN
If her father were here, he could analyze the archaeological and architectural evidence of the tomb. He’d know when it was built and for whom. He’d understand the significance of the mythology in the painting—Isis had seen him identify iconographical and other evidence based on less.
Did what she was seeing embody the symbolism of divinity and religious ritual of Cleopatra? Could this be Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s tomb? Maybe? No. Probably not. It seemed too plain to convey
Cleopatra’s incredible personal legacy. But—damn it. She didn’t know. It would help if they had more light—and a detailed guidebook with pictures. Which of course didn’t exist, because no one had found the tomb yet.
Back to square one. Isis sighed. “A dig like that would take months and months—hell, years.”
“Not if they were doing a smash-and-grab. Taking the most valuable pieces and leaving the rest. And not if they didn’t give a shit whether anything left was preserved or documented.” Thorne’s torch flickered and swayed.
Isis closed the gap between them and curled her fingers in the back of his belt. If that thing went out she wanted to know exactly where he was at all times. “That’s terrible. Wait—What? You’re saying Yermalof was the one who left my father for dead and killed his crew?”
“It’s starting to make sense, don’t you think?”
It did. But she didn’t want it to. “Your Russian guy and my father?” Dear God, had her father brought all this down on his own head when he’d dabbled in the buying and selling of black market antiquities all those years ago? Stealing and selling. “You think my father didn’t stop selling artifacts on the black market, and got himself in over his head with this guy?”
“Occam’s razor.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s the law of succinctness. The principle stating that among competing hypotheses, the one that makes the fewest assumptions should be selected. It has to be considered.”
“Well, I don’t want to consider it,” Isis said tightly. But she did. God help her, this scenario made sense. She pressed a hand to her roiling stomach. “He promised me that it was a onetime thing, and that he’d stop.”
“And then his funding started drying up…”
“And then his funding stopped.” She repeated the truth bleakly. “But he always seemed to have a bit more money to dig.”