No Rules (27 page)

Six hundred feet didn’t seem like much, but in the pitch-dark of an unfamiliar canyon it was a slow, tedious job. The base of the wadi was strewn with rock falls and the cliff faces gaped with vertical cracks and fault lines. They had to check every dark crevasse and move every rock that looked like it could be hiding a manhole-sized shaft. Jess stumbled over a rock in the dark, wrenching her ankle. She shook off Donovan’s hand, more out of pride than necessity, and limped the rest of the way on her own power.

When the two groups met at the back of the wadi, they exchanged grim looks of determination before crossing paths and working back up the opposite side. Forty minutes later they were back where they’d started.

“You’re sure he came from this end o
f the valley?”
Avery asked.

“Yes,” Donovan said. “Jess? You saw him, too. What do you think?”

“He came from this branch,” she agreed. “We didn’t see his light until he came around the bend, but it was definitely this arm of the wadi.”

“Well, fuck,” Kyle muttered. “The guy’s a ghost. Now what? Grab him and make the fucker talk?”

“He’d die first,” Jess said, certain it was true. Kyle looked disgusted but seemed to accept it.

Donovan touched his watch, illuminating the dial. She heard his impatient huff and felt his frustration. In everything she’d observed he was thorough and decisive, yet he’d been operating blind, running into walls and being forced to make spur-of-the-moment changes ever since this mission started. She wanted to help but didn’t know what to do.

“He’ll be back soon,” Donovan said. “Let’s take position farther up the main branch of the wadi and wait. If he takes a different turn, we’ll see it. And if he comes down here, it’s a dead end and we’ll be a hundred feet behind him.”

They’d barely found secure hiding places when the slide of footsteps on loose rock announced the courier’s presence. Jess saw only a dark shadow that moved, but heard the crunch of the man’s feet on rock as he took the turn into the dead-end wadi.

This time they’d all seen where he went. Donovan tapped shoulders and directed them to follow before their quarry got too far ahead. They slid out from behind the rock fissure that had concealed them, rounding the corner of the wadi with Donovan hanging back behind Mitch. Jess limped after them, but Donovan turned and took her arm stopping her. “Wait here,” he whispered next to her ear. “We won’t be far away. Take this.”

She didn’t see anything, but felt the molded plastic of a gun grip touch her hands. Her fingers closed around it automatically, then almost dropped it at the surprising weight. “I don’t know how to use it.”

His hands closed around hers. “Feel this?” he said, guiding her fingers. “Push it to unlock the trigger guard, like this. Then point and shoot. Easy.” He locked it again. “Just make sure you know what you’re aiming at.”

She wasn’t going to aim at anything, but if it made Donovan feel better to know she had it, she wouldn’t argue. She held the gun at her side, feeling awkward and uncomfortable.

The night closed in. Their footsteps died away, silent on the hard-packed sand and stone, and their light was dim, sometimes invisible as their bodies moved between her and the solitary flashlight they used. She strained for sounds of rocks being shifted as they found the tomb entrance, or a struggle as they captured the courier. Maybe she’d even hear yells or muffled gunfire if they entered the tomb and found the hostages.

She heard nothing.

The courier could not have gone far, not with the tall cliffs surrounding the end of the wadi. Would the tomb entrance be high in a cliff wall, something that required a rope ladder being lowered to gain entrance? Some tombs had been situated like that, especially once they discovered that the occasional flash floods that tore through the wadi could allow water into tombs or cover them with debris. In fact, that was why Tutankhamun’s tomb had escaped the robbers and gone undiscovered for so long—his unexpected death had caused the priests to appropriate an existing tomb in a less desirable location. KV-62 was in the valley floor where it was quickly covered with debris. The cliff walls remained dry, while the bottom of the wadi had occasionally turned into a river.

She froze. A river. She pivoted in the darkness, imagining the dark cliffs around her as she stood at the bottom of what was essentially a dry riverbed. A wadi. The Arabic word for a riverbed.

Ohmygod.
She was such an idiot. Her father’s story replayed in her mind. The beaver family’s lodge was in the middle of a river. Wally hadn’t been wrong after all. It all fit.

It must be right here in the flat center of the wadi. Probably right beneath her feet.

The team was far down the wadi. Following the courier? No, she’d bet anything they’d lost him as soon as he turned into the dead-end wadi, because he’d uncovered the tomb entrance and disappeared underground.

But she couldn’t reveal the team’s presence, couldn’t shout out for them to come back. As much as possible, they would need the element of surprise. They would be back soon, and when they were, she would be able to point out the tomb entrance.

Where could it be? Donovan had left her with a gun, as if that might be useful. What she needed was a flashlight.

The quarter moon would soon disappear behind the cliffs, but in the cloudless sky it still gave off enough light to see the shadows of rocks on the wadi floor. She walked carefully to the first rock she saw about twenty feet away and crouched down, setting the gun on the sandy ground at her side. Using both hands, she pulled hard on the rock. It moved about six inches. She tugged again, grunting, and exposed another six or eight inches of desert sand. She felt the ground where it had sat, scraping with her fingernails. No hole, no trap door.

She rose, wiping her hands on her pants as she surveyed the area. Two stones sat together about ten feet away. She repeated her efforts, shifting one, then the other. Nothing.

Undaunted, she looked for the next possibilities. There were several, including a large monolith that would have made a great marker but was impossible to move. Her eyes zeroed in on a flat slab of limestone, a bare three inches high. It even looked somewhat like a lid. With a purposeful stride, she walked to it, slipped her fingers beneath the edge, and lifted.

It moved easily. Even in the near pitch-black of the wadi, she could see the darker crescent of a hole beneath the rock. Gingerly she stuck her fingers in the sliver of blackness. They disappeared into emptiness.

This had to be it! Heart racing, she pulled hard on the stone. It scraped softly on sand, revealing a square-cut opening in the ground barely more than two feet across. Almost certainly the entrance to a tomb.

She leaned closer and inhaled a dusty scent that reminded her of old books. Her imagination stirred as she wondered how much of the old air had escaped, air that carried the scent of dried papyrus scrolls and the powdery remains of scented oils and, perhaps, foodstuffs. And a corpse.

She shivered at the thought of what lay beyond. A sarcophagus surely, and the personal possessions of a king. Walls filled with drawings depicting scenes from his life. Ramesses VIII, a royal son of Ramesses III, ignored in the line of inheritance as the throne went to an older brother, then a nephew, then another brother, then another nephew, until finally coming to the son named Usermare Akhenamun.

She could only imagine the surprise of Usermare Akhenamun, long passed over in the line of succession, as he inherited the name Ramesses VIII. Or had he, with sinister intent, arranged for all those brothers and nephews before him to have such brief reigns? The title of pharaoh might have been too tempting to resist. Or had someone else done it, perhaps someone who also made sure that Usermare Akhenamun had a brief, one-year reign as pharaoh? There was so much to learn, right here beneath her feet.

And so many treasures to discover.

Her father had been here. Had he entered the tomb? She hoped so. It would have meant so much to him. For such a passionate Egyptologist, an expert in the dead language of hieroglyphics, it would have been the thrill of a lifetime. As he’d said, a secret worth dying to protect.

She understood. He’d shared enough of his passion for ancient Egypt that she felt the lure of the dark hole in the ground. Of what she’d find inside.

She shouldn’t go in, not yet. The courier was in there, and probably others. But would Donovan let her go in once the hostages had been freed? Or would they be fleeing the valley in a mad rush after shooting it out with the robbers, turning over all they knew to the Egyptian Ministry of State for Antiquities? She would lose the chance of a lifetime.

Her father had sent her here, knowing she’d find this lost treasure. For both their sakes, she wanted to be able to say she’d stood inside the tomb of Ramesses VIII.

Not all the way inside. Simply beyond the entrance would be fine. And it wasn’t as stupid as it might sound. A pharaoh’s tomb could be huge, extending hundreds of feet into the ground and containing dozens of rooms. Some ended in a space as small as Tutankhamun’s three rooms and an antechamber. But all had a long, sloping entrance, sometimes with stairs, with one or more doors between the entrance and the tomb itself. Chances were no one inside would hear what went on at the tunnel opening.

She hung her feet over the edge of the hole, letting them dangle into nothingness. The floor couldn’t be far below. She probed with her toes. There. A step, dropping away to her right as it dove beneath the wadi. Gingerly, she inched forward until she stood on the step, half her body inside the hole.

The entrance to the tomb. Chills of excitement rippled through her and she soaked in the thrill of standing where, before this year, the last people to walk these steps had been in the funeral procession for a dead king.

For you Daddy
, she thought, quelling any fears that her action was foolhardy. Putting her feet on these steps had been necessary in a way she couldn’t explain and couldn’t have anticipated. Perhaps her father hadn’t gotten this far, but he’d deserved to. Perhaps he’d know somehow that the quest was finished. She sighed with satisfaction.

She wouldn’t go any farther. Reluctantly, she lifted a knee, prepared to hoist herself out. With a sudden wrench, her other leg slipped out from under her—No. It was
pulled
out from under her. Her mind registered the tight grip on her ankle at the same time she felt her back scrape through the hole. Her head hit the edge of the opening a split second before she landed on her tailbone on the stone step. Like a flipped turtle, she lay on her back with her feet curled above her. She uttered a startled cry, flinging her arms out for balance. Her right arm whacked the edge of a higher step while the other flopped onto a lower step. Before she could attempt to sit up, a bright circle of light hit her face and she squeezed her eyes shut. A hand covered her mouth and nose, pressing her down on the stair and mashing her lips against her teeth.

She cried out, this time in pain.

“Shut up,” a man said gruffly. Enforcing it, he smacked her mouth, knocking her head back against the stone stair. A starburst of pain flared behind her eyes. “Who are you? Who brought you here?” he demanded.

She blinked hard, trying both to alleviate the stabbing pain of the flashlight in her eyes and to focus on the situation, to give an answer that he’d believe without tipping him off about the rescue mission. “My name is Suzanne Hassan. No one brought me, I came alone—do you think someone would leave me alone in the middle of a wadi at night? I followed you from Mr. Atallah’s store.”

She assumed he was the courier they’d followed, but couldn’t be sure. The man who’d stabbed Donovan and fled with a broken arm had been an Egyptian, but this man sounded like an American.

“Why?”

She stuck her chin up, defiant. “Because I bought the first vase. I know there’s more treasure, and I want it.”

Whoever the man was, he laughed. “The whole world wants it, sweetheart. That’s the beauty of it.” He grabbed her upper arm and yanked her to her feet. “You’ll never get it now. But come meet the late, great Ramesses VIII. You can see what you’re missing out on before we kill you. It turns out a tomb is a great place to hide a body for a long, long time.”

Chapter Seventeen

“Jess.” Donovan’s harsh whisper blew away on the night breeze, but sounded too loud to his ears. Still, she didn’t answer.

“Goddammit,” he muttered, choosing to give in to the irritation rather than the sick feeling of panic that gnawed at his gut.

“I don’t like this,” Avery said.

The sentence belonged with an ominous B-movie musical score. He blocked the thought, but his frustration rose along with the fear that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He shone his flashlight on the ground, certain this was the spot where he’d left her. The light shone dully on sand and stone. He moved it in ever-widening circles as four pairs of eyes followed its path. Rock, pebbles, rock, rock…

Gun. Avery’s indrawn breath coincided with the jolt that shot through his chest, hitting his heart like a clenched fist. He moved the yellow circle of light back a few inches, spotlighting the black plastic grip and metal barrel. He picked up the gun he’d given her as the invisible fist squeezed tightly around his heart, making him catch his breath.

“Shit,” Kyle muttered, echoing his mood.

“She wouldn’t leave,” he told them. Which meant someone had taken her by force. But where? Would she go without protest, without making a sound? They hadn’t been that far away and had heard nothing.

“She couldn’t just vanish,” Avery said, echoing his thoughts. “Shine that light down here again.”

“Where? What did you see?”

Impatiently, she grabbed the flashlight from his hand and pointed it at the ground. “Look. This rock has been moved.”

He saw the scrape marks. “Son of a bitch.”

Kyle and Mitch squatted and saw them, too. “Why?” Kyle asked. “You think she was looking for the entrance of the tomb?”

“I think maybe she found it.”

“She didn’t even have a flashlight,” Mitch said. “You think our scared little rabbit would go inside a pitch-black tomb?”

Was he trying to discourage them from looking? It wouldn’t work. Donovan considered the question of whether Wally’s daughter would enter the never-before-seen tomb of a pharaoh, and swore under his breath. “Yes.”

He shone the light around the wadi, no longer concerned with someone seeing it. Finding Jess was more important, and he was convinced that if anyone was in this wadi, they were beneath the surface, in the tomb of Ramesses VIII. Spotlighting more rocks, he marched over to the nearest ones. Sure enough, they’d been moved. “Look,” he called. But he was already moving on to the next rock. They caught up with him as his light found the fresh marks around two large rocks. “Damn,” Mitch said. “You’re right.”

Kyle knelt and shifted the rock, revealing nothing.

He didn’t say anything, but moved on to a large, upright rock. It hadn’t been moved, and looked too large to budge in any case. But the next one did. As he shone the light on it, Kyle moved the slab of limestone. The corner of a hole yawned black and deep before them. Kyle gently moved the rock back over it, covering the hole.

“What are you doing?” Avery asked in a strident whisper. “That’s it.”

“You want them to know we’re here?” Kyle said. “Assuming they don’t already.”

“Crap,” she muttered. “How do we get inside without being ambushed? We should have brought tear gas. Or flashbangs. Something to incapacitate the kidnappers.”

She was right; they needed a plan that wouldn’t jeopardize the hostages. But Donovan’s mind went to Wally, the only other person to find the tomb robbers. When he discovered their secret, they’d tortured and killed him. He couldn’t expect they’d do any differently with Jess.

“No time for that now. We use the lights on the guns. Don’t fire unless absolutely necessary, and then you damn well better hit a bad guy and not some priceless antiquity. Jess said the tombs have long entrance tunnels sealed on both ends, so it’s possible they’re so far inside they haven’t heard us. We may take them by surprise.” It seemed improbable and he wouldn’t count on it, but it was about time they got a lucky break. “Ready?”

In reply he heard several clicks as bullet cartridges and light mounts were double-checked, followed by three curt affirmatives. “First me, then Avery, then Mitch. Kyle at the rear.” He wanted to be first, to have control of the situation, but also wanted Mitch under someone’s eyes at all times. He nodded at Kyle to move the limestone slab again, and flicked his Glock’s light on as he aimed the barrel into the dark.

The light hit a roughly excavated wall. He leaned in, gun first, illuminating the narrow staircase that descended below the wadi. No one shot at him, which was mildly encouraging. Avery reached into the hole, adding her light to his as he ducked inside.

He heard the others slip in behind him as he carefully descended the stairs.

The robbers had not excavated more than they’d had to—even at the bottom the ceiling was low and they had to remain in a crouch, single file. The stairs ended after twenty feet at a crudely made wooden door. An obvious twenty-first-century addition. The door was no more than three feet high, made of two-by-six boards nailed onto a square frame and hinged to supporting timbers. Crawling on hands and knees was not the best way to make an entrance when taking someone by surprise. At least the door looked sturdy enough that it might have blocked the low-pitched scrape of stone on stone from the outside when Kyle had opened the entrance shaft.

He pressed his ear to the boards. From far away he heard raised voices, indistinct and impossible to recognize. They sounded male, which meant nothing. Jess could still be there.

He turned to Avery, who was so close to his back she was touching him. Beams of light from their guns bounced off the tunnel walls, revealing Mitch and Kyle behind her. Avery and Kyle looked ready to go, but a thin film of nervous perspiration slicked Mitch’s forehead.

Mitch was the youngest of the group, but he was experienced in assaults and had always been unflappable. Seeing him nervous made Donovan nervous, too. “Something wrong?” he asked in a low whisper.

Avery shifted in the cramped quarters to stare back at him. Mitch looked uncomfortable. “No, nothing.”

They waited. A nervous team member could be a death sentence.

“Okay. I was just thinking…what if there’s a curse? You know, for entering the tomb.”

“There’s no such thing,” Donovan said.

“Yeah,” Avery added with a malicious smile. “Just a mummy whose body was prepared by the priests in a secret method to be resurrected as a god in the afterlife. And who might be a tad annoyed at finding foreigners violating his tomb.”

Mitch flipped her off, and she grinned.

“It’s not so crazy,” Kyle said, his low whisper sounding rational in the claustrophobic passage. “I read that a bunch of people died in weird, unexplained ways after opening King Tut’s tomb.”

“No they didn’t,” Donovan told them. “Lord Carnarvon, who financed the expedition, had already been sick and weak when he picked up the infection that killed him. And Carter, the actual guy who discovered the tomb and opened it, the one who would have been cursed if there had really been such a thing? He lived for many more years, finished the excavation, and died peacefully at home in England.”

“You just happen to know that?” Kyle said drily.

“Obviously, Jess told me. We talked about a lot of stuff while we were waiting for you guys to call.” Most of it while they were naked in bed, and much of that hadn’t involved talking, but he was grateful for the part that had and wasn’t going to allow Mitch to make excuses to fall back. “Look, it’s all a myth, but if you’re gonna get spooky and weirded out, you can wait outside.”

He didn’t want him where he couldn’t see him, but needed to see if he’d take the opportunity to separate from the team, maybe seal the entrance with them inside it.

Mitch’s mouth pulled into a thin line. “I’m fine.”

“Good. I’m going to try the door.”

There was no knob or latch. He pushed and felt a small amount of give, then a sharp stop and a metallic rattle. He tried again with the same result.

“There’s a lock on the other side,” Avery guessed.

“Damn it,” he muttered. “I’ll have to shoot it, and there’s no way they won’t know we’re coming. Get ready to move in as fast as you can.”

He used two hands to steady his gun, then shot into the wood. The blast was deafening in the enclosed tunnel, sending splinters of wood flying. On the other side metal zinged. A two-inch hole appeared in the door. He shouldered the door quickly, pushing past a small amount of resistance as the door swung inward. Ahead of him, a slightly larger tunnel sloped downward. Another door stood at the end.

“Let’s go,” he ordered. It was a raid now. They did a hunched-over shuffling run to the next door, and this time he didn’t stop to finesse it open. He shot the hinges. Kyle slammed the door so it fell inward and they stepped in over it.

They burst into brightness. Donovan straightened, standing with a few inches to spare between his head and the ceiling. He blinked at the small room, registering impressions in the flash of a second.

Clutter. Hiding places. And one man holding a gun.

Four Glocks raised, pointing at the man standing in the center of the room. The Egyptian man looked startled and unsure about facing so many armed intruders, his gun trembling as it wavered from one person to another.

“Drop it,” Donovan ordered, wanting him disarmed before Mitch had an excuse to shoot him, silencing a potential witness. The man obeyed, letting the gun fall as if from suddenly numb fingers. His wide eyes stared at each of them in turn, obviously wondering who would shoot him first. If he recognized Mitch, Donovan couldn’t tell.

“Where is she?” he demanded.

“Who?” the man asked, eyes rolling nervously from gun to gun.

He imagined the man could play dumb all night. “Cover him, Avery. Kyle, Mitch…” He jerked his pistol at the pile of junk to his right. “Check it out. I’ll take this side.”

He took a cautious look at the pile of objects on his left that occupied a quarter of the room, floor to ceiling. It looked like Ramesses VIII had been planning a yard sale, clearing out every piece of crap that had collected around the palace since the days of Ramesses I. Wooden boxes were still stacked neatly, but some perishable items, perhaps clothing or baskets, had not made it through the millennia. Their remains lay crumbled beneath the collapsed piles of boxes and chairs that had lain atop them.

Five more armed men could be hiding in that mess, for all he knew. He ducked around a couple wooden oars and the cracked wooden wheels and strips of leather from what had once been a chariot, and reached out to lift a mat of crumbling fibers that were draped over boxes.

“Don’t touch that!” The man gasped it, his hands reaching out with an imploring gesture and his face contorted with agony. Donovan froze. Kyle and Mitch stopped too, watching the suddenly distraught man with suspicion.

“Why?” Donovan asked. His hand hovered as he looked for wires that might indicate explosives. Across the room Mitch looked too tense. Kyle wasn’t much better, and Donovan hoped to God there were no rats to dart out and startle him into shooting at imagined walking mummies.

“Nothing must be moved,” the man cried. “Not until it has all been cataloged and photographed. It is history. Priceless. Please.” Sudden tears gleamed in the man’s eyes, nearly overflowing.

“A tomb robber with a conscience, huh?” But he moved his hand away. He had no doubt the man’s distress was real, which made it far less likely that the junk pile concealed more bad guys. He peered closely at the boxes and caught the shine of gold plating beneath the layer of dust along the sides of one box. Then on another. Yet another had hammered sheets of gold with raised figures of ancient Egyptian gods striding across it. He looked closer and saw gold rings on the dried wood of the oars and a golden ankh-shaped clasp on a box. The history here might be priceless, but he’d bet many items were pricey even without the history.

Also, a closer inspection showed boxes stacked too closely to allow for hiding spaces. Years of hide-and-seek in his grandmother’s attic had taught him the impossibility of scooting into corners this cluttered without toppling the whole thing over.

He nodded to Mitch and Kyle, a wordless order to stand down from the search. But that only eliminated this room, and Jess had told him to expect several. His eyes followed the bare lightbulbs strung along a wire overhead to where they disappeared under the lintel of a low doorway to an adjoining room. This time no door covered the opening, although Ramesses VIII’s royal collection of clutter covered part of the opening. There must be a battery that powered them elsewhere in the tomb. Also elsewhere in the tomb would be Jess and, hopefully, the hostages.

And quite likely, more bad guys.

Shit, did tombs have back doors or escape hatches? He’d never thought to ask.

“Who else is here?” he asked.

“No one.”

“Bullshit. I heard you talking.”

“I talk to myself. Sometimes I sing. It’s lonely down here. Sometimes I think I am going a little crazy from the loneliness.”

He didn’t believe him. The man wasn’t crazy, just nervous as hell. “Frisk him,” he told Kyle. As Kyle patted him down and cleared him, Donovan asked, “What’s your name?”

“Mahmood.”

“Okay, Mahmood. Where’s the young woman who came in here?”

“No one comes in here,” Mahmood said, shaking his head vigorously.

A cold spot of anxiety grew in his stomach. The man was lying. He had to be. “We know she did,” he barked, his voice disappointingly muffled in the cluttered, low-ceilinged room. “We’re going to look, so save us the time and tell us.”

“No woman,” Mahmood insisted. Almost simultaneously, a scraping sound came from far away.

Mitch’s gun jerked toward the door. Mahmood saw it and told him, “Scorpions. They come in from the wadi. Big ones.”

Donovan uttered a harsh laugh, not because it was a stupid lie, but because claiming it was the mummy of Ramesses VIII would have been a far more effective one if he wanted to scare his team. He motioned with his gun. “Let’s go see these scorpions. You lead the way.”

Mahmood turned as if accepting the inevitable and walked into the next room. It was another treasure trove. He noted vases and statues made of wood, alabaster, and gold. Brilliant colors behind them revealed a story in pictures on the walls.