The Staff of Moses (Oliver Lucas Adventures)

by Andrew Linke

  He waited for Diana to nod her head, then used the serrated edge to quickly saw through the thick plastic bands that held her feet together.

  “Frank, you out there?” Kyle shouted.

  An unfamiliar voice called back, “Frank went down the the chopper, Commander.”

  Kyle shook his head and muttered a curse, then called back, “Alright. The girl is coming out. Waverly, take her to the chopper and pull up some satellite maps of the region for her to look over. Make sure she doesn’t have a comlink.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kyle grabbed the front of Diana’s shirt and hauled her to her feet. She stumbled and almost fell against him, but managed to catch her balance. Kyle pointed towards the doorway and Diana began walking towards it, stepping gingerly around the pool of blood that now surrounded Rais’s body.

  Once she was gone, Kyle crouched down beside Oliver and asked, “Are you still working for that damn Senator?”

  That caught Oliver off guard, even as it confirmed a theory he’d been working out. Not even Rais had known that he was working directly for Senator Wheeler, so this Kyle character must have some additional source of information.

  “No. I left his employment after Mr. Karim over there told me that you wanted half a million for the scroll. Senator Wheeler told me he couldn’t swing that sort of cash, so we went our separate ways.”

  “And you decided to go after the staff yourself anyway.”

  “He seemed satisfied with my explanation. I don’t like the man, so I saw it as an opportunity to break free.”

  Kyle chuckled and shook his head slowly. “Well, Oliver, I wish I could get away that easy. Let’s get down to the chopper.”

  With that Kyle swiped his blade through the plastic strips binding Oliver’s ankles and pulled him roughly to his feet. Oliver leaned against the wall for a moment, working first one leg, then the other, until he felt steady enough to walk again. Standing there, watching Kyle gather his and Diana’s bags in one hand and look around to see if anything else of importance remained, Oliver decided to try and get a bit more information out of him.

  “Tell me to shut up if this question makes you want to shoot me too, but how did you and Rais Karim end up working together? That old bastard hated foreigners touching Egyptian relics.”

  Kyle ignored Oliver’s question and gestured for him to turn around. He cut the plastic restraints off of Oliver’s wrists, then thrust the backpacks into Oliver’s newly freed hands. “Carry your own crap. Walk ahead of me and don’t try to run.”

  Oliver complied. They left Rias’s body in the inner sanctum and walked through the short passage into the main chapel chamber. There Oliver saw a lone guard leaning against the altar smoking a cigarette as he waited for them to emerge. Kyle waved for him to follow them and he stubbed out the cigarette on the altar and slung his submachine gun up onto his back. The three of them walked in silence out of the chapel and around the outside wall of the house, backtracking the steps that Oliver and Diana had taken a few hours before.

  They reached the front of the house and Oliver looked up the canyon to where he and Diana had parked their Range Rover. The vehicle still sat in the shadow of the high canyon wall, but Oliver’s view of it was now obscured by a large helicopter that had set down on the flat canyon floor between the car and the crumbling walls of Sephor’s estate. The helicopter was painted in a mottled pattern of dull beige and tan colors that succeeded in camouflaging it well enough that Oliver had difficulty picking out the exact edges of the aircraft. As he watched, Oliver saw Diana and her guard emerging beyond the wall and plodding towards the helicopter.

  “Plenty of room for us all.” Kyle said. “Don’t ever believe someone who says that war doesn’t pay well, Oliver. That baby is a top of the line desert transport. Even the engines are designed for hellholes like this. See, you’ve got to minimize the sand getting in through the crank shaft so it doesn’t gum things up, then there’s the issue of filtering the air intake.”

  Oliver nodded in acknowledgement of Kyle’s obvious enthusiasm, but didn’t say anything. He had ridden in helicopters before, but always civilian models that he chartered for getting quickly in and out of remote sites that would otherwise have taken days, or weeks, of harsh backpacking and climbing to access.

  Kyle looked over at him and laughed, then clapped Oliver hard on the shoulder. “What do you say, man? Ever give a thought to making your living as a soldier of fortune?”

  “Can’t say I have. My interests tend more towards avoiding dead things than making more of them.”

  “You’re serious about that thing in the temple being, what, some sort of zombie?”

  “Not a zombie, no. But it was certainly an animated corpse.”

  “And it attacked you?”

  Oliver nodded.

  Kyle motioned for them to keep walking. As they reached the bottom of the wide front steps and began crossing the courtyard he said, “You asked about Karim. Well, I’ll tell you the basics. Your senator tracked down our employers and applied some pressure. Let me tell you, Oliver, if there’s one thing that my bosses don’t like it’s bad news from Washington. Well, the shit rolled downhill like it always does and now I need to get that staff and ship it back the the States ASAP, or my team and I are out on the streets.”

  “I guess they’re less likely to overlook a little private enterprise when it comes back to bite them.”

  Kyle chuckled at that. “You got that right.”

  “How did you manage to get Rais Karim to work with you?”

  “That’s where you are completely lost, kid. That old bastard has been in on the deal since the beginning.”

  Oliver stopped in his tracks, nearly dropping the bags he was carrying. Of course, that was the missing piece. Now Oliver understood why Rais had been willing to put him in contact with the dealers, and why he had simply been making noise, rather than mercilessly hunting them down and murdering them.

  “Weren’t expecting that one, were you?”

  “No. Not at all. But I suppose it makes sense.”

  “Of course it does. You think that man felt any loyalty to Egypt after he was booted out of office? Where did you think we learned about the secret vault?”

  They reached the helicopter and found Diana sitting on a camp stool just outside the door of the helicopter, already engrossed with pinching and swiping her way through satellite enhanced maps of the surrounding desert on the screen of a tablet computer encased in a heavy rubberized case. A guard stood five feet behind her, smoking a cigarette with an expression of utter boredom written clearly on his face. Kyle left Oliver with Diana and climbed into the helicopter to check on Frank, leaving instructions with the guard that she and Oliver were not to go anywhere until he returned.

  Once Kyle was gone, Diana looked up and gave Oliver a half smile, then returned to her work. Oliver stood behind her and put a hand on her shoulder, then leaned down to look at the screen on her lap. Keeping his voice level, he asked whether she had made any progress on finding the tomb.

  “A few possibilities, but nothing that jumps out and bites me.”

  “Need any help?”

  Diana shrugged and waved at the screen in her hand. “If they’ve got another one, maybe you could look too, but for now...” She sighed deeply and allowed a brief look of frustration to cross her face. “I’m trying to find a hidden temple in thousands of square miles of desert, based on a description that is thousands of years old.”

  “Don’t forget that the author of that description was an undead warrior, driven mad by thousands of years of solitude.” Oliver said with a wink, squeezing her shoulder.

  Diana didn’t laugh, but she did manage a tired smile. “Thanks, Oliver.”

  “I’ve got to be useful somehow. Don’t want our hosts to think I’m worthless and kill me too.” He flashed a cheesy grin at the mercenary standing a few feet away, but if the man had heard the remark he didn’t give any sign. He gazed blankly back at Oliver for a full
half minute before Oliver broke eye contact and looked back to Diana.

  “They know who we are and why I came to Egypt. Seems that Senator Wheeler decided to take matters into his own hands and apply pressure from above. Kyle and Frank must have led the museum raid using unauthorized company resources to score a little extra cash on the side. Now they have to deliver what the Senator wants or they’re out in the cold.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “Exactly. We already knew Frank was jumpy from his little performance at the book shop, but now Kyle’s under a lot of stress. I think that’s the only reason he even told me what’s going on.”

  “What do we do if we manage to find the staff? Do you really think they’ll let us go?”

  Oliver had been pondering exactly those questions for the last half hour and he still didn’t have an answer. He gave Diana a crooked smile and shrugged. “We’ll just have to play this by ear. If we make it to the temple alive, I think we’ll be able to work something out.” He didn’t tell her that it was their only choice for the moment. If they refused to help the mercenaries, or gave obviously false advice, they would certainly be killed. Oliver was secretly harboring a hope that they would find the temple intact and that whatever guards had chased away the French soldiers would distract the mercenaries long enough for him and Diana to escape.

  Diana nodded solemnly and looked out across the canyon towards the estate while she took a few slow, deep breaths. Then she blinked, shook her head, and turned her attention back to the tablet perched on her lap.

  Oliver patted her on the shoulder again, then straightened and stepped toward their guard. The man stiffened and slipped his right hand from the butt of his assault rifle to the handgrip. Oliver waved genially and announced, “I need to take a leak. I can do it on your shoes or over behind the Range Rover, your choice.”

  The guard narrowed his eyes and said nothing, so Oliver reached to unzip his pants.

  “Alright.” The guard growled, nodding towards the car. “Make it quick and keep where I can see your head.” He patted the side of his weapon significantly.

  Oliver got the point, nodded and strode towards the car. He moved slowly, not wanting anyone to think he was trying to make a run for it, keeping his stride casual, as if he frequently went for a walk in the sights of an assault rifle. Once he reached the far side of the car, he placed both arms in front of him and used one hand to take care of his business while he slipped the other up to the front zipper pocket of his vest. He worked the zipper as fast as he could without moving his arm too much. The entire operation took only seconds, but it felt like an eternity passed before his fingers felt the warm glass corner of his phone nestled in the zipper.

  He had felt the bulge of it in his vest as he lay on the floor of the inner sanctum, curled up in a ball from Rais kicking him in the gut. He hadn’t dared to believe at the time that they would leave his phone on him, but when the opportunity arose, he couldn’t resist checking. The mercenaries had taken Oliver’s gun and presumedly searched him for more weapons while he lay unconscious in the chapel, but if they had noticed the narrow bulge of his phone they hadn’t considered it worth removing. Of course, they might have been distracted by Diana shooting Frank as he blundered through the doorway into the inner sanctum.

  Ducking his head to see what he was doing, Oliver saw that he had a single bar of signal. Not much, but it would be enough for his purposes. He used the thumb of one hand to launch his Twitter app and tap out a quick message:

  Blown. Leonidas security did it on senator’s orders.

  He tapped the send button and slipped the phone back into his pocket. He zipped up his pants and made a show of stretching his arms and back, then quickly zipped up his vest pocket again as he turned. He hoped that the action of concealing his phone and zipping the vest had been lost in all the motion of his stretching, and was relieved to see that the guard by the helicopter was only watching him out of one eye.

  Oliver returned to the helicopter and sat beside Diana. He spent the next three hours trying not to think about his message. Amber might see his message right away if she was at her computer or had her phone nearby, but if she was asleep or busy it might be hours before she saw his cryptic little message. Even if she did read it immediately, there wasn’t much that she could do. Oliver’s Twitter accounts were intended primarily as a means of keeping his closest friends and family appraised of his general location in the event he disappeared for days on end, and as a high speed low bandwidth secure communications network to share updates with clients. The best he could hope for was that Amber would forward the message to his father, who might be able to get the Senator to back off.

  The more Oliver thought about it, he considered that sending the tweet might have put them in deeper danger. Even if his father managed to contact Senator Wheeler and convince him to stop applying pressure to Leonidas Security, they might decide to cut their losses by ordering Kyle and Frank to kill him and Diana. Even if the company didn’t give the order, it was clear now that Kyle and his team had been working for themselves for a while.

  But there was no point in fretting over the situation. Oliver had sent the message and at the least, Amber would know who to go after if she got the urge to avenge his death.

  Over the next three hours, Oliver and Diana managed to identify seventeen possible locations for the temple. The tablet was running a mapping application containing high resolution satellite imagery of the entire country, which could be overlaid with a detailed topographical map to verify the contours of the desert. Diana estimated that the “three day journey” could be anywhere between thirty and one hundred fifty miles, depending on whether the directions assumed traveling on foot, by camel, or in a chariot. Given the accuracy of ancient desert navigation techniques, she also suggested searching north and south of the indicated path in a widening search pattern. The upshot of this was that they ended up swiping the tablet map slowly north, then a little west, then south and a little west, and then north again across an ever expanding triangle of desert that encompassed over seven thousand square miles. They took turns swiping at the screen and gazing over each other’s shoulders, stopping occasionally to blink and gaze out at the shifting shadows of the canyon walls. Kyle stopped by now and then to berate them for not producing results fast enough, but for the most part he stayed with Frank, who sat sullenly in the padded copilot seat of the helicopter, smoking cigarettes and badgering the medic to administer more morphine.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “You’re telling me that we need to check seventeen different locations?” Kyle exclaimed, as Diana pointed to the various possible temple sites marked on the map. “Do you have any idea how much it costs to fly this chopper? How difficult it is to keep out of the sights of Egyptian radar systems?”

  Diana shrugged and gestured at the canyon surrounding them. “Just look around you. Thousands of years ago this was a lush valley with a stream flowing through it. There would have been fields of grain bordering the stream. That sandy plaza surrounding the chapel would have been a garden filled with trees and flowers, probably with a few pools of fresh water stocked with fish. The rooms of the house were filled with dozens of living people.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “My point is that a lot can change in over three thousand years. The message describes the temple sitting in the center of a lake far out in the desert, but there are no lakes west of here for over a thousand miles, so Oliver and I had to look for geological formations that could have been that lake long ago. Let me tell you Kyle, it’s not easy to find a lake that is not there.”

  Diana had managed to keep her voice level for most of the explanation, but by the end, she began to enunciate each word with a sharp clarity that Oliver knew she only used when truly angry. He couldn’t blame her.

  Oliver put a hand on Diana’s shoulder to calm her, then said, “You asked us to find the temple. Our best guess is one of these locations. Some might be nothing more than sh
allow valleys with rock formations at the center, but if one is the temple...” He waited, hoping that Kyle would get the point.

  Kyle glowered over the tablet for a few minutes, ignoring Oliver, Diana, and his own men, who had begun to cluster around. There were seven in all, including Kyle, Frank, and the medic. They were of varying heights and skin tones, but all shared the muscular build and cold expression of their leader. Oliver had developed the impression in the last few hours that each and every one of Kyle’s men would have gladly shot him in the back on command, but was otherwise content to ignore him. Every man, except Frank, who had repeatedly expressed his desire to kill Diana, and Oliver also, in revenge for her shooting him in the shoulder.

  Finally Kyle nodded to himself and tapped an icon on the screen that activated a navigation mode in the mapping program. A line appeared on the screen, tracing a path through the air between their current location and the nearest marked waypoint.

  “Alright. Load up. We’ll head to the nearest spot now. It should only take about twenty minutes to reach the first waypoint. Depending on how long it takes to inspect each site we should be able to get through half of these waypoints before nightfall.”

  Frank made a disgusted rumbling noise at the back of his throat and flicked his cigarette at Diana. He reached up with his left arm, grasped a strap hanging from the roof of the helicopter, and hauled himself up out of the seat. He was shirtless but wore a tan camouflage jacket over his shoulders to keep off the sun. His right arm was in a sling and Oliver could just see a large bandage wrapped around his upper chest, with thick layers of gauze packing the right side of his body.

  “Excuse me for asking, but why are these two even alive?”

  “We need their help.” Kyle replied, glancing over his shoulder at Frank.

  “No, we don’t.

  Kyle ignored Frank’s comment and waved for his men to board the helicopter. One of them stepped up behind Oliver and pushed him towards the open door of the helicopter. Diana moved past him, climbing up into the helicopter and moving to the end farthest from the cockpit, where Frank still stood glowering. She sat on the bench seat and pulled the webbed belt across her chest and lap. Oliver hopped up and was about to follow Diana to the back when he heard heavy boots clanging on the metal grid of the floor.