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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Forge Books by Harold Robbins
Copyright
For Eugene Winick, who has been there for all of us
Acknowledgments
Books get published only because many people work to make it happen. This book made it into print with the help of Forge editors, Katharine Critchlow, Eric Raab, and Bob Gleason. I also want to thank the copy editor, Sabrina Roberts, who worked silently in the background to correct my rocky grammar and bad spelling.
Harold Robbins
left behind a rich heritage of novel ideas and works in progress when he passed away in 1997. Harold Robbins’ estate and his editor worked with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Harold Robbins’ ideas to create this novel, inspired by his storytelling brilliance, in a manner faithful to the Robbins style.
TOMB OF TUTANKHAMEN
Valley of the Kings
November 26, 1922
Howard Carter made a “tiny breach in the top left-hand corner” of the tomb’s doorway.
As he peered through the opening with the light of a candle, Lord Carnarvon, behind him, asked, “Do you see anything?”
“Yes,” Carter said, “I see wonderful things.”
1
New York
I was lying naked on a warm sandy beach, the soles of my feet teased by the gentle Caribbean waves, while a hunk with a golden tan and sculptured pecs whispered in my ear, his teasing fingers turning my sensitive pink spot blazing red, when a harsh call of my name sent me crashing out of bed.
I felt myself free-falling and then hit the floor hard.
What the hell?
I heard the irritating, raucous voice again.
“Madison Dupre!”
That’s my name, all right. But it wasn’t a friend summoning me because they would’ve called me Maddy. And I’m sure it wasn’t God calling me out of a wet dream—the way things have been going in my life it was more likely to be the devil and she was welcome to come on down, or up I guess would be more like it, and make a deal with me.
I was an art investigator with a specialty in antiques, but business stunk ever since the economy turned bad.
A deal with the devil couldn’t be any worse than letting my landlord take it out in trade because my rent was late.
I was so down-and-out and broke that I was considering making a type of oral contract with my landlord that was found in law books in the section for unnatural acts.
Any intimate contact with my landlord beyond a handshake would be considered bestiality. The guy gave new meaning to the expression “hairy ape.”
Morty, my cat, had been sleeping next to my feet, at the bottom of the bed. He lifted his head and glared at me with half-shut eyes as if I were to blame for disturbing his sleep.
I got up to go to the front door, thinking someone was yelling my name on the other side of it when the call came again … from the street.
“I know you’re up there!” the jarring voice outside yelled.
Who the hell was calling my name at this time in the morning?
I reversed direction and staggered toward the window, glancing at the clock by my bed as I did. Eight A.M. Early for me now that I had gotten into the habit of waking up in the middle of the night with money worries playing in my head like a bad movie on automatic replay, but early anytime for having my name shouted from the street below. My apartment was a third-floor walk-up studio.
I had the window open a few inches for air. I raised it higher and stuck my head out as the voice boomed again: “Madison Dupre!”
A man was standing just off the curb below with a bullhorn, a skinny runt with big black frame glasses and acne on his face. The bullhorn didn’t fit. Guys with bullhorns were hostage negotiators who tried to talk wackos with guns and hostages out of buildings. He looked more like a computer nerd.
“You are a deadbeat, Dupre!” he said when he saw me.
I recognized him and flinched back, hunching my shoulders, and cringing in pure horror and shame.
Oh, shit.
He was the geek from the computer place where I had bought my netbook. I’d seen the company’s ad in the paper advertising used and reconditioned computers for sale at very low prices. It sounded good at the time since I didn’t have the money to buy a new one.
The computer I bought was refurbished and was supposed to run like a charm, but it turned out to be a lemon. It froze up half of the time and didn’t boot up the other half.
My mentality definitely was BC when it came to computers, smartphones, and anything that came along after I finished high school. I was lucky to find the power button on some of the stuff kids found so easy to use. Worse, I didn’t have patience for the damn things.
Whether I was being heavy-handed on the keyboard, pressing too many keys or the wrong keys or whatever, me and computers just didn’t work well together. I’m sure the nerdy little bastard slandering me on the street probably stroked his own computer more than he did a woman.
Anyway, my old computer crashed and burned, so when I saw the ad for reconditioned compute
rs and a low-financing rate, I jumped on it.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t bothered to read the fine print. Who reads that stuff anyway? The warranty lasted only as far as the store’s front door and the free interest rates hadn’t lasted much longer. And neither did the computer.
Now it was judgment day for another mistake I’d made in my life. To get to the third floor and my bed, the sound had to carry a long ways, making me a deadbeat from SoHo to Little Italy and down to Chinatown.
“It’s a piece of junk,” I yelled down.
“Give it back—no pay, no play, Dupre, no pay, no play, Dupre…”
He kept singing it, doing a little jig.
Violent reds, purples, and blacks erupted in my head like thermonuclear explosions. I now knew why people went on a rampage and killed other people in a heat of mindless anger.
I grabbed the little netbook off the side table by my couch and threw it at the window opening.
Oh, hell.
The computer slipped out of my hand and went through the window, blowing a big hole in it, sending glass flying.
I ran to the window and stared out the shattered opening and down to the street below. The geek had backed into the street to avoid the computer and flying glass and I watched dumbstruck as a yellow cab came at him.
The cab swerved and nearly slammed head-on into an oncoming truck that careened to avoid a collision.
The geek didn’t even appear to notice how close he had come to being turned into roadkill.
He stepped over to the computer and stared down at it and then knelt beside it. He touched it, gingerly caressing the casing for a moment before he looked up at me.
“You broke it.”
He sounded like I had broken his heart.
“It was junk!” I screamed down. “You sold me a piece of junk.”
“You broke it,” he said again.
“Junk! Junk! Junk! It never worked. No work, no pay, no work, no pay!” I chanted, doing a little jig that he couldn’t see from three stories below.
He bent down and picked up something and then looked back up at me. Grinning.
Oh my God! My sixteen-gigabit flash drive.
My entire life was on that little storage device that was not even longer than a cigarette. Because the damn computer was constantly crashing, I worked off the flash drive rather than the hard drive. On it was a list of contacts, art gallery owners, and museum curators who might throw business my way, along with every art collector I had dealt with or wished I could deal with.
The only backup for that information was the flash drive and the computer that lay shattered at the computer nerd’s feet.
“That’s mine!” I yelled down.
His grin grew wider.
He put the flash drive’s metal end that plugs into the computer between his teeth and bit it off.
Allah! Torment my enemies with a mighty curse!
—THE KORAN
2
Fatima Sari watched the man with the bullhorn and the woman on the third floor yelling as she approached the outside steps to the apartment building.
She recognized the woman’s name being shouted and wondered if there really was a man on the street booming out the name or if her mind was playing tricks on her.
She was confused as she approached the building. She always seemed to be bewildered lately; a feeling of being dazed and even remote from her own body, as if she had left her physical body and was observing herself moving through the world from someplace above.
Despite that feeling of separation, Fatima’s whole body itched and nothing relieved the sensation. The itch had been there for days, ever since she had lost the artifact. Ever since her thinking no longer seemed clear.
Sometimes she imagined that bugs were crawling all over her and had to resist the urge to take off her clothes and shake them out.
Fatima finally decided that the cause of the impulse to scratch herself until she drew blood in a dozen places was part of her punishment, torment inflicted upon her.
Fear suddenly gripped her, and she turned looking back down the street to see if she was being followed.
She recognized no one behind her but still had a constant sense of being stalked, of being hunted like a wounded animal. But she kept on the move, driven by a sense of sacred duty that overrode her fears and her deep sense of morality.
She had come to New York to kill the woman whose name was being shouted by the man in the street.
Fatima knew the woman had to die, but she couldn’t have given anyone an explanation as to why because she wasn’t sure herself why the woman had to be killed.
What she did know was that something had been taken from her besides the artifact—a piece of her mind had been stolen.
That was how she thought of it, that part of her mental faculties had been taken. It made her thinking foggy, but she knew clearly who she was and that she had to kill the woman. But the reason for her actions was more akin to the instincts of a wounded animal than a rational human being.
Fatima’s thinking had not always been twisted and shadowy. She was an educated woman with a worldly sophistication far beyond the vast majority of women of her country and religion. Her parents had both been educated teachers and saw to it that she received a university education.
Well traveled, with an advanced degree in Egyptology, she had left her native Egypt and taken a position as assistant curator to one of the great private collections of Egyptian antiquities.
She had embraced the Age of the Pharaohs with a passion bordering on political and religious fanaticism.
No other ancient civilization radiated as much mystery as Egypt of the mighty god-king pharaohs and the dark magic of its priests, who commanded their Nile gods to curse their enemies, and incurred the wrath of Jehovah who hurtled plagues at their Nile land.
The Old Testament recounted the struggles between the powers given the favorites of the god of the Israelites and the magicians of the pharaohs, while the Egyptian Book of the Dead recounted the incantations of the dark side.
Fatima had embraced the wondrous history and ancient mysteries of her land, and believed that while her body was in the modern world, her heart and soul belonged to the past.
She took the job in England because it permitted her to become the keeper of a sacred treasure.
She failed in that responsibility and now was cursed and damned for her failure.
But it wasn’t just the dark magic from the time of the pharaohs that she believed cursed her, but her own faith. She felt as if someone had called down a curse of Allah upon her, punishing her for the failure to her profession and to her people.
The only way she could redeem her soul was to kill the woman.
3
The woman whose code name was Sphinx hung back as Fatima Sari stepped up to the front entrance of the apartment building and paused by the tenants’ mailboxes.
It hadn’t been that difficult to avoid being seen by Fatima. Fatima was in a mental haze. The hard part was keeping Fatima going in the right direction. Even that objective proved challenging as Fatima frequently stopped and looked behind her, paranoid that she was being followed and looking confused at the same time.
Sphinx couldn’t suppress her excitement. She almost laughed out loud as the haggard woman studied the mailboxes. Even at a distance, Sphinx could see the struggle that the woman was going through as she tried to focus on the name she was looking for.
The name was Madison Dupre and it was on the mailbox for apartment 305. Sphinx had made sure of it before she maneuvered the Sari woman to the building.
Sphinx was about the same age as Fatima and was from the same country, but she had no sympathy for the bewildered woman. Like most modern political movements, the one Sphinx obeyed considered people who got harmed because they were used or got in the way as collateral damage.
She had helped warp Fatima’s mind with drugs, fears, and superstition, making her easy to manipulate, so confused and subject to s
uggestion that she could be led to do something Fatima would have considered reprehensive had her thinking been clearer.
Overwhelmed by narcotics, Fatima would be easy to kill when the time came to dispose of her.
Sphinx’s phone vibrated and she received a text message. The missive started with SX, for Sphinx, identifying it as genuine.
The message was from Fatima, waiting for her confirmation on where she was and what to do.
You know what you have to do, Sphinx messaged back. There is no other way.
Sphinx liked her code name.
Often portrayed as having the body of a lioness, the head of a woman, the wings of an eagle, and a tail tipped with a serpent’s head, to her own people a sphinx was a frightening beast, with the Great Sphinx at Gaza capable of rising from its mound to kill the enemies of the pharaohs.
The ancient Egyptians venerated the lioness as one of their war gods. The word “sphinx” was not Egyptian, but a Greek word derived from the Egyptian word “strangler,” as it was used to describe the way fierce lionesses attacked the animal they hunted.
Lionesses, the most savage hunters in a pride, killed their prey by strangulation—sinking their teeth into the throat and holding an animal down until it died.
The strangulation gave rise to the riddle of the Sphinx in which the goddess accosted strangers on the road to Thebes and asked them to answer a riddle, strangling them when they could not.
More than the preternatural violence of the sphinx, the woman who operated under the code name identified with the name’s enigmatic nature, the inscrutable and mysterious qualities that people had imbued to it over the eons.
Sphinx lived behind a mask. The world never saw her real features, never knew her capability for greatness.
Now she had an opportunity to act as she saw herself, to possess the most significant power a person can wield: the power of life or death over another human being.
As Fatima Sari disappeared into the apartment building, Sphinx resisted sending a text message to her controller explaining what she was doing.
She was out of bounds; off the reservation was how modern spy networks described an agent who was not following orders.
The Curse Page 1