Her Kind of Trouble (13 page)
His response was, "So who's Hani Rachid, and what's he doing with your phone?"
Chapter 8
Compared to the previous day, scuba diving in suspicious seawater thicker than a
London
fog seemed downright relaxing.
Really. All sarcasm aside.
At least
this
had something to do with
Isis
and my initial quest. Not to mention, I love diving. I love swimming in general…even when I'm completely protected from the aforementioned iffy water. The dry suit I wore was bulkier than a standard wet suit, with attached booties under my fins and a monster of a zipper up the back which had required a friend's help to zip.
Needless to say, that friend was not Catrina Dauvergne.
The suit also came with gloves and a hood, to complete my protection against the water. It was inflated slightly with a buoyancy compensator, requiring the use of weights on my ankles and waist. I really was dry—and yet I was
swimming
, submerged in almost thirty feet of murky water, trying to stay out of the way of the other divers as they clustered like hungry fish around a stone the size of a minivan which they meant to move.
With any luck, this block would turn out to be a pylon from the entrance to the
If this stone had guarded the
Since it looked like the harnessing procedure would take a while yet, and they'd done this sort of thing more than I, I remained in my role as observer. Against the echoing sound of my own breath, I turned my attention to the otherwise silent murkiness around me, the ruined remnants of palace and temple. Everything had a dim green light about it. Visibility was limited to maybe fifteen feet because of the bits of sand and algae floating in the water. But even so…
It was amazing. Like a fantasy world. Like…magic.
Not far from me lay a sphinx, submerged for almost two thousand years. She was pitted and encrusted and yet as enigmatic as when she'd first been carved. A flick of my fins sent me skimming past her to more treasures in the sand—a hawk sculpture that I assumed represented the god Horns, and a headless body in that stiff posture of so many Egyptian statues. And blocks—dozens of stone blocks, some with faint hieroglyphs still visible even after millennia of erosion.
Apparently that's what you end up with if you sink part of an ancient city with first an earthquake and then a tidal wave—the same thing you'd get if you knocked over a child's building blocks, but much bigger and much more historically important.
Cleopatra may have once walked here, I thought, awed, as I drifted through the wreckage. A cluster of ever present little fish, silver flashes of darting movement, flitted by me to add to the surrealism of the moment.
She may have invoked the goddess Isis
, right here,
and now
…
I turned to check on the salvage operation. When I saw that the cluster of divers had all but vanished in the hazy water, I guiltily swam back.
My partner, Rhys, waved with what looked like relief and mimed,
Stay there
. Aware that I'd broken a cardinal rule of diving—never leave your buddy—I nodded. He rejoined the others in fastening the harness that would lift the twelve-ton pylon to the surface. Some of them wore full dry suits like Rhys and I. More of them had grown nonchalant about the risk, after so much exposure, and left off the gloves, or the hood. Cat's honey hair writhed loose, Medusa-like, in the tide.
Catrina…
Remembering my conversation with Lex, the previous night, I smiled around my regulator. He'd taken so long to get over my edited story about our brush with Hani Rachid that I'd just about decided
not
to pay him back for the collect call. By the time he wound down, I'd almost forgotten to ask him about the tapestry.
Almost.
"Did you help the Cloisters purchase a tapestry that the
Cluny
was acquiring?" I then asked from my crouch, where I'd slid down the wall for heightened comfort during his tirade.
He said nothing, which worried me.
Don't lie, Lex. Please don't—
"You said it was the pet project of the woman who stole the Melusine Chalice from you."
"So you did what—bought it to avenge me?"
"That's… an extreme way of phrasing it."
"Damn it, Lex! Just because you have more money than should be legal… " But I was having an embarrassingly hard time with my moral outrage. I left it at a decidedly halfhearted, "Shame on you."
I heard the smile in his voice when he murmured, in a particularly sexy way, "Are you saying that I've been
bad
, Maggi?"
And I laughed.
Hell, as much as anyone could deserve that sort of setback, Catrina had. And it's not as if the tapestry had been destroyed. The Cloisters is an incredible museum.
"I'm not having phone sex with you in the lobby of an Arabic hotel," I whispered, after glancing both ways to make sure the desk clerk wasn't close enough to hear. "So don't even start."
"Which leads us back to why you don't have your own phone."
"Not your problem, Lex."
"It is if we can't have phone sex."
"Goodbye, Lex."
"Be safe," he'd pleaded. "Please? Surprises like speed-dialing you and getting someone named Hani have me thinking I'll jump a plane to the Land of the Pharaohs."
"Don't even think about it."
But once we hung up, I'd been glad I hadn't mentioned the sword fight.
Even if I'd forgotten, also, to complain about the ring.
Activity around the submerged pylon drew me from my reverie and back to the present. It looked like they were ready to raise it. They were using a procedure that involved connecting the harness, which had taken all morning to attach, to some underwater balloons which would then be inflated. The buoyancy of them would draw all twelve tons of the fallen stone upward, where they could then tow it to shore and examine it more closely.
D'Alencon, whom I recognized from his white hair, waved everyone back, then signaled upward. Rhys floated to my side as we watched, hovering there in the unnatural silence of submersion. Our first sign that it was working was a stiffening of the slinglike harness straps around the stone, then a billowing wisp of sand from beneath it, and then—
Then whole clouds of sand obscured the pylon as it lifted from its watery grave toward a sun it hadn't seen in millennia. If it told us the secret we hoped for, then the Temple of Isis—and presumably her grail—weren't far behind.
As I craned my neck upward, watching the pylon's ascent, my throat tightened with awe.
Then I realized it wasn't just awe.
Danger!
Heeding the instinct that had sharpened ever since my discovery of the Melusine Chalice, I kicked my swim fins and shot forward, only recognizing my goal as it—she—loomed ahead of me. Everyone else seemed to be watching the pylon. I not only saw what they saw—the rock starting to list sideways—I also saw one of the cables, which had been attached to the harness, whip through the water, scattering sand and fish in its wake…
Before impacting with Catrina's unprotected head.
Her mask veered away from her, and she rolled backward with a limpness that could only indicate lost consciousness.
And over her, the tilting pylon slipped out of its remaining sling and plummeted downward, all twelve tons.
Straight at her.
Kicking harder, I reached her first, catching her slack body and pushing her with all the strength I could manage in near-weightlessness. The sandy floor beneath me darkened in the shadow of the descending stone. I kicked again—
And something hard and heavy bumped past my swim fin as I swept Catrina clear of the worst danger.
Holy crap.
Remembering to breathe—an easy thing to forget while on a regulator, but dangerous—I kicked for the surface with my load. Other divers clustered around me, hands reaching, pulling, and in a moment we broke into the sunlight, into the harbor waves.
The real world. But considering the danger we'd just faced, Cleopatra's Palace and the Temple of Isis were also real, no matter how magical they'd momentarily seemed. Real—and dangerous.
"We need a neck brace," I shouted, as soon as I lost the regulator. "She hit her head, hurry.
Vile
!"
We bobbed in the water, Rhys and I trying to support her head, until a second speedboat could rush some first-aid supplies from the cabin cruiser. Catrina looked so…unlike herself. Helpless. Pale. I held a hand under her nose, then felt her wrist. She was breathing, anyway. She had a pulse. She also had a huge, bleeding lump on her head. Only once the curved plastic brace was fastened with Velcro did the team risk hoisting her limp form into the first Zodiac, the one from which we'd dived.
The first-aid box had smelling salts. I dug out a packet while we sped toward shore where, according to d'Alencon on the two-way, an ambulance would meet us. When I waved the packet under Catrina's nose, she startled, then coughed—then scowled at me, the first face she saw.
"Is this your fault?" she demanded blearily, and I knew she would be all right. I was even foolishly glad for it.
The bitch.
D'Alencon arrived on shore in time to join Catrina in the ambulance. Before they left, he canceled all diving for the rest of the afternoon, until he better understood what happened.
Isis would have to wait—and I had to find some other way to occupy the rest of my day.
Luckily, I had a few ideas.
"You do not have to do this," insisted Rhys an hour later, riding the old yellow trolley car with me as far as the train station. The tram rocked slightly on its tracks and, not surprisingly, shot out sparks from the overhead wires at intersections—but the roof protected us. "She has no right to blackmail you."