No Rules (28 page)

“Holy shit,” Kyle murmured.

Everyone’s eyes flicked around the room, while keeping their guns pointed at Mahmood. Donovan glanced at Mitch. Still awed and a little nervous and still keeping his gun on Mahmood. He almost wished he’d try something and get it over with.

They passed through into yet another room. More treasures. The life-size gold statue of a pharaoh dominated the room, while the walls were lined with weapons and tools of war—daggers, bows, arrows, and spears. To one side was a throne, and next to it a square patch of floor that looked as if something that had sat there was gone. The canopic chest they’d seen at Mr. Atallah’s? It was the right size.

Mahmood stood awkwardly in the center of the room. “This is all. See, no woman.”

Apprehension slipped into his gut, twisting uncomfortably. She had to be here.
Think logically,
he told himself. Something was missing. “Where’s the sarcophagus?”

“Gone,” Mahmood said sadly. “Tomb robbers, long ago.”

“Relatives of yours?” Avery asked drily.

Mahmood didn’t appear to take offense. “Perhaps. It is probably in some museum in England or Germany. Maybe even America,” he said sternly, as though accusing them all. “That is where they all end up, you know. Egypt has been robbed of its culture, its treasures, for centuries. It is a crime. People come and plunder our heritage.”

Mahmood went on, expounding on the loss of Egyptian antiquities to foreign archeologists, conveniently neglecting the fact that he was there with the same goal.

Donovan tuned him out. Mahmood was wrong. Jess had told him many fascinating things about the tombs, and one of the surprising parts had been about what was taken when tombs were robbed. The Western world made a big deal over mummies and their coffins, but it was other things that were more valuable to tomb robbers. That was why explorers had found mummies in otherwise completely plundered tombs—no one bothered to move the heavy stone sarcophagi or even to lift out the layers of inner coffins to find a few articles of jewelry on a mummy when other treasures lay within easy grasp. Some mummies had been unwrapped and mutilated but many were not, while all their expensive unguents and golden statues had disappeared.

“No one took the sarcophagus,” he said. “It’s here.”

For a moment, everyone looked at him, but Donovan was distracted by a sound. Or had he imagined it? Mahmood began talking again, fast. “Obviously they did. You can see it is not here. The mummy is valuable and the jewelry inside—”

“Quiet,” he ordered.

“But you must believe me—”

Donovan extended his arm, pointing his gun at Mahmood’s head. “I said shut up.”

In the silence that followed, Mahmood shifted nervously and the Omega team shot quizzical glances at him.

From his right came a low sound, muffled but definite.

Heads turned toward the wall with the bows and spears—all except Mahmood’s, who appeared to have heard nothing. But he knew they hadn’t imagined the sound.

Donovan strode to the wall and pushed aside a large wooden table carved to look like a prowling jaguar on each side. The piece was heavy and scraped against the stone floor.

“No,” Mahmood cried, suddenly animated again. “You must not move things.”

He started toward Donovan, but Avery and Mitch raised guns to his chest. “Stay where you are,” Avery warned.

He did, with a devastated expression as Kyle tucked his gun into his belt and helped Donovan move the table. They swung it out ninety degrees, then moved the alabaster box that sat beneath it. Mahmood moaned and muttered something in Arabic that sounded like a prayer.

Low in the wall, a dark hole revealed a passage to another room.

“Jess,” Donovan yelled into the dark.

No answer. His voice echoed back, hollow and empty. He pointed his gun through the opening, letting the strong light below the barrel play over the dark room. Painted walls jumped out at him, farther away than he’d expected. A big room. In the center his light revealed a pedestal holding a huge block of gray stone. The sarcophagus of a king.

Another muffled sound and a frantic scrape made him lower the light to illuminate the floor in front of the sarcophagus. Three sets of eyes squinted back at him in the strong light. Three captives. His light swept over a young man and woman, sitting as still as if carved of stone themselves. The third person was tightly gagged, with hands and feet bound—Jess.

His heart gave a leap of joy that was stronger than he would have thought possible. “Jess.” He crawled through, keeping his gun pointed at her because it was the only source of light. The terrified-looking man and woman were obviously the American archeology students they had come to rescue. He hadn’t even thought to wonder why they had let Jess remained bound and gagged instead of freeing her until he got to his feet, prepared to do it himself. She made urgent grunting noises in her throat and nodded her head sharply to her right.

Puzzled, he pointed his light in that direction. More brilliant paintings flared to life as his light hit the walls, pictures of gods and goddesses, a pharaoh and his queen, chariots and hunting scenes, filling the tomb from floor to ceiling. And a motion in the shadows. He moved the light farther to his left.

Standing on the side of the room was a man with a gun. The gun was pointed at the three scared people sitting with their backs to the sarcophagus of Ramesses VIII, but the man’s eyes were on Donovan.

“Hello,” the man said in careful, Arabic-accented English. “I am sorry to make your acquaintance. Drop your weapon, please. And tell your friends to do the same.”

His friends—the man knew he hadn’t come alone. He looked to see if there were more weapons or people, but saw no one. Only the gunman who, he noted now, had a cast on his other arm. “I believe we’ve met before,” Donovan said with satisfaction.

From behind him, Kyle said sharply, “Donovan? Who’s there?”

He didn’t move, keeping his gun trained on the robber as he answered. “Jess and the hostages. And a man with a broken arm and a gun. Stay where you are.”

“Tell your friend to give his gun to Mahmood,” the man instructed. “And toss yours over here.”

“I don’t think so.” He met the man’s tense stare, curious to see what he’d do. “See, I have two priorities. The first one is saving that woman right there—and by the way, I don’t like the way you’ve treated her. The second is to rescue those two students. I don’t see how giving up my gun will make either of those things happen. Perhaps you’d like to drop yours, since we have you outnumbered.”

“You are the only one in the room,” he pointed out. “If anyone else comes in, I shoot them. I believe I have the advantage.”

The man was not flustered. Not fast-talking him in an attempt to distract him. Not worried about being in a standoff with loaded weapons. Donovan didn’t like it. A cool opponent was the most dangerous kind.

Aiming his gun at the armed man had left Jess in the shadows at the far end of the sarcophagus, but from the corner of his eye he saw a light hit her, spotlighting her and casting faint light on the two students. He realized Kyle must be lying on his stomach in the doorway with his light trained on Jess, ready to back him up. He moved aside to make sure he didn’t block Kyle’s view. A second light hit the two students; either Avery or Mitch had joined Kyle, inching into the low doorway in a belly crawl until they could see the gunman.

This was not good. Maybe he should have told someone else about his suspicions, because he couldn’t watch Mitch and the armed kidnapper at the same time. Telling them now would confuse everyone. But at least his team was still acting like one unit, working toward the same goal. He grabbed onto the faint hope that it would stay like that a bit longer, just long enough to ensure Jess’s safety. Then if Mitch wanted to kill his coconspirators before they gave him away, he wouldn’t care.

“You left something out,” the armed man said, continuing their conversation. “I have three people you want to save.”

One far more than the others
, Donovan thought. He glanced at Jess, trying not to show the sharp pang of anger that gripped him at seeing her like that. Her bindings looked painfully tight with her arms pulled behind her back and the rag that silenced her pulling at her mouth like a bit on a runaway horse.

“Drop your weapons, or I begin shooting, starting with the woman on the end.”

Jess. He steeled himself against the panic that surged in his chest, not wanting the man to see how much she meant to him. Still, he was staggered by the fear, the sense of loss, at the idea of Jess being killed. He might not be the right man for her, but he would die before letting this man harm her.

He drew on an icy calm he didn’t feel. “If your finger twitches, you’re a dead man. I guarantee it.”

From the corner of his eyes he saw Jess shake her head frantically, about the only motion she could make. Urgent, muffled screams came from her throat. Her obvious distress tore at his heart, but he couldn’t let it show. He’d put her in this situation, and he’d damn sure get her out.

The woman hostage suddenly jumped to her feet, trembling visibly. “Please, don’t let him shoot us. He will! He’s horribly cruel. Please do as he says.”

The man with her rose to his knees, cowering from the gunman as he gingerly got to his feet with his fellow hostage. He kept his weight off one leg as if he were lame. “She’s right,” he said. “He beat us and killed the man who worked with us, a man who posed no threat. Don’t let him kill again.”

He understood now why the two students weren’t tied—there was no need. They were completely submissive, too scared of their captor to be a danger. “Alicia,” he said, deliberately using her name so she’d understand that he knew who they were. “My team is here to free you and Jeffery. You’re going to be okay.”

She cowered a mere four feet from the gunman, well within his line of sight. He watched to see if she relaxed when an incongruous sound distracted him—Jess sneezed violently. It was high-pitched and wheezy with her mouth gagged, coming only from her nose, but it startled him. The student hostages must have disturbed the dust of eons when they stood. Seated on the floor, Jess couldn’t escape inhaling it.

No one else seemed to notice it. Rather than calming down, Alicia was becoming more agitated by the second. She took a step toward him. “Please, whoever you are. I don’t care why you’re here. Don’t get us all killed. Drop the gun before he kills us. He’ll do it.”

Donovan didn’t think he would. He hadn’t killed them in over two weeks. He obviously had a use for two archeology students. But not for their rescuers—they’d be killed in an instant, just as he’d apparently killed a man who’d been with the students when they found the tomb. The poor, unlucky guy hadn’t even been reported missing. But Donovan didn’t intend to join him and his Egyptian ancestors in a lost grave in the wadi. He wouldn’t let Jess die, either.

The woman made him nervous, though. She was too frightened, and he worried about what she’d do next. “Calm down, Alicia, he’s not going to hurt you. We’ll get you out of here.”

Another violent sneeze came from Jess. Then two more.

A horrible possibility occurred to him—could there be something especially nasty in the dust of the tomb? Maybe an ancient bacteria for which modern people had no immunity? It would even give credence to a mummy’s curse. He spared Jess a worried glance, half expecting to see her lying on the floor gasping for breath.

She wasn’t. She sat stiffly, staring at him. She sneezed again as he watched, never taking her eyes off his.

He frowned. It had looked deliberate, almost like communication.

The instant he thought it, he remembered: Omega headquarters. That first night when they’d questioned her long past midnight, nerves frazzled, sleep long overdue. They’d tried to explain that Wally might have communicated to her in code and asked her to remember every little thing he’d done, like scratch his ear or drop his napkin. Or sneeze. He’d used that as an example, telling her a sneeze would indicate that his words were not to be believed, that things weren’t as they seemed. That they were, in fact, the opposite.

Jess knew that. And in the light that Kyle had trained on her, he saw no dust in the air. She was fine. But she wanted him to know there was danger here he wasn’t aware of.

His gaze darted back to Alicia, who had taken another step toward him, pleading and babbling. Her words blurred into a meaningless noise that he tuned out. Jeffery’s nervous voice joined hers, whining about the danger they were in. The gunman tried to watch them all, seeming a bit confused but still confident that he and his gun were in control of the standoff.

Jess began sneezing violently, emphatically, but he no longer looked at her, concentrating on rearranging the pieces of the puzzle in his mind.

Two hostages, neither one restrained. A man with a gun. Things were the opposite of what they seemed. The hostages were in charge? They were the tomb robbers?

In a rush, the pieces fell into place, creating a clear picture. It was a perfect cover. Discover an unimaginable treasure, the find of a lifetime, and pretend to be held hostage while you sell it off for a sizable fortune. A pharaoh’s fortune. Then manage to “free” yourself and enjoy a life of wealth and luxury.

It took a mere second to see it. Jess still sneezed frantically. Alicia pleaded, crying and jabbering as she moved between Donovan and the gunman. Blocking his view, and his shot.

But not Avery’s or Mitch’s, whichever one of them had that second light. As Alicia came closer, the light left her and focused on the gunman’s torso. He might not even realize it. He was in their sights. Kyle and the others might have figured out Jess’s signal, but even if they hadn’t, he trusted them to know what to do when he gave the signal. They would shoot whatever or whoever he told them to.