TWELVE
If the lakeside businesses had been open, Thorne would’ve checked into one of the hotels, grabbed a cold shower, and fallen into bed wrapped around a hot Isis. After the heavy workout the day before, his leg was stiffening up. All the hours behind the wheel today had made it throb like a son of a bitch. He should probably get in some of the exercises prescribed by his London physiotherapist. Running through the streets and hand-to-hand altercations weren’t part of her suggested therapies. Neither was a marathon bout of sex. On a sagging sofa, on the floor, against the wall, and finally in the shower… no, once more on the sagging furniture before they succumbed to exhaustion.
In fact, if he bothered to recall several conversations between himself, the therapist, and his surgeon, running and getting shot at were right there at the top of the Do Not Do list if he wanted to fully recover the use of his leg. They’d made no mention of sex.
He didn’t relish clambering around the rocks and sand in the valley searching for a tomb he didn’t give a rat’s ass about. But since it needed to be done, he wanted an early start, Husani’s well-armed, able-bodied men, and the correct supplies and equipment.
Tomorrow.
For today he’d take Isis where she wanted to go. Show her whatever, then get her on that plane.
The intense heat made a mirage shimmer on the road ahead, and he cranked up the air to blast musty-smelling, relatively cooler air into the interior of the vehicle. He smelled Isis: a turn-on combo of clean perspiration and sexy cinnamon.
The road from the dam project back into Cairo was deserted. A couple of vehicles—an electrician’s van, a flatbed truck with plastic irrigation piping, and several black, tinted-window sedans—had passed them, heading the way they’d come. But those had passed half an hour before. No one behind them. Thorne was driving an easy hundred miles per hour, which out here on the vast, undulating sands of desert felt like standing still. Nothing but dunes as far as the eye could see. Sand, pale sky, black-tarred road. Midafternoon and the dunes on either side of the road were bleached blindingly white by the sun glaring from the pale blue bowl of the sky. The air shimmered in undulating waves with both heat and moisture.
Isis rubbed her plastic bottle across her flushed cheek before chugging down the rest of the water. “Is there anything I can do for your leg?”
Thorne realized his fingers were clamped tightly around his upper thigh, and he withdrew his hand from the daggerlike pain. “I’m fine.”
“Then why are you massaging it? I can do that—”
He grabbed her wrist as she reached out to touch him. “I just need to stretch. We’ll be in the city in a couple of hours; it can wait.” She settled back in her seat.
“We passed a small village,” she said after a brief silence. “We can stop there. I’d be happy to walk around a bit, too. This heat is making me a little sick to my stomach. I’ll grab some cold water at the same time if they have it, and see if perhaps they have a cane or close facsimile.”
He didn’t like using a cane, he wasn’t incapacitated by the injury and didn’t want a bloody crutch, but he didn’t argue.
Although the oasis and small village were about ten miles ahead, near their turnoff to descend to the valley floor, he had no intention of stopping. The area was too isolated and he had an itch on the back of his neck. He scanned the surroundings. Sand. Road. Sun.
Several miles went by in silence. But Thorne bet Isis wouldn’t maintain the blessed quiet for long—the very air seemed to vibrate with her thoughts. He could feel the questions coming. Things he didn’t want to remember, let alone discuss.
“Will you tell me now what happened?”
“I fell down the stairs.”
She made a rude noise of disbelief. “No, you didn’t. If you tell me, will you have to kill me or something?”
He slid her a suggestive glance. “Or something.”
She smiled, shoving her glasses on top of her head and curling her legs under her, clearly settling in for a heart-to-heart. “No, really, what happened?”
Damn. She was more tenacious than he’d anticipated. But then, it was something that, under normal circumstances, he appreciated in her. She kept going no matter what the obstacles. And for that she deserved the truth. At least a sanitized version of it.
“A year ago, a very unpleasant man killed my two partners and had a crack at me.” Blood splatter, bits of body parts, and agonized screams superimposed themselves on the view of the road and the sound of the tires on the gritty pavement. “I’m in the extremely auspicious position of having rods and pins in my leg. My partners weren’t as fortunate.”
“It’s not fortunate that you got shot.” Isis’s clear brown eyes narrowed. Her skin looked silky soft and fine-grained in the sunlight streaming in the window, dewy with perspiration. Her soft mouth looked lush and inviting, and he wanted to pull over and kiss her into stopping the questions he not only didn’t want to answer, but didn’t want to think about, either.
Cradling the empty bottle in her lap, she twisted even more in her seat, so that her back was to the passenger door. He glanced over at the door locks to make sure they were engaged.
“What’s the prognosis, and what are your limitations?”
Pissed that she even had to ask if he had any bloody limitations, he cast a mocking glance her way. “Do you have a medical degree now, Dr. Magee?”
“No, Thorne,” she said with some asperity. “I don’t. However, someone is doing their damnedest to kill us, stop us, or… whatever us. We don’t know who, and we don’t know why. I can shoot them with my camera, but you are the man with the big gun and the bullets. You can shoot them more efficiently. And, as said gunman, you are all that stands between me and them. I need to know what your constraints are, realistically, without you minimizing them, so that I can make informed choices as we go on.” She paused. “You have no constraints in the lovemaking department, in case you’re asking.”
Foiled by logic. Damn. “I’ve kept you safe.” He glanced automatically in the rearview mirror. There was a vehicle of some sort in the distance behind them, but the shimmer on the road made identification impossible. He monitored the other car’s progress.
“For which I’m grateful. Spill.”
“The name of the man who captured and killed the members of my team was Boris Yermalof.”
“And what’s his claim to fame?”
“He shot me,” he said wryly. The surgery had taken eighteen hours, and he’d died on the table. There’d been shitloads of pain afterward, and they’d told him he’d probably never walk again, and just to be thankful he was alive. What they hadn’t told him was that numbers would be scrolling through his head. At first he’d thought he was hallucinating from the pain meds they dripped into his veins. But then Stark had told him about his own strange ability, and when they’d let him go from the hospital, he’d been drafted into service for Lodestone. What he felt now was a reminder that he’d almost died twice, and he was lucky to be alive. He had no bloody complaints.
“I have a rod in my leg that will set off airport metal detectors for the rest of my life, and assorted other hardware that enables me to do everything I always did. Like last night, for instance.”
“Yes, last night was amazing,” she told him, then without skipping a beat or changing inflection, pointed out, “You were limping more this morning than you were yesterday. Is the pain debilitating and you’re just being manly, or is it something an ice pack and some muscle relaxants will help?”
“I won’t take drugs, and an ice pack would probably help,” he said honestly. “But since we’re in the middle of the desert, both will have to wait.”
“Who’s this Boris guy? Why did he shoot you and your people?”
About to say it was on a need-to-know basis, Thorne then continued that mental conversation and decided he might as well cut to the chase, because since she’d been shot at, possibly by Boris or his men, because of him, she had a right to know. “We were tracking a man we knew was trafficking black market artifacts from the Middle East and North Africa.”
Her eyes widened. “Black market artifacts?” she demanded, pushing away from the door. “As in Egyptian black market artifacts?”
He nodded. “Many of them, yes.”
“And you didn’t think this was relevant? My God, Connor. Clearly it is relevant! Those men shooting at us are after you!”
“It’s possible, but not likely. Very few people know I’m back.” He flicked his gaze to the rearview mirror just to make sure that was true. No traffic had passed them in the last hour but back on the horizon there was still a smudge of dark keeping its distance. Was it a vehicle or merely the sand blowing across the road?
Isis’s fingers rubbed her temple in slow circles and her chest rose and fell as she took shallow, annoyed breaths. “Are you freaking insane? How many people know you’re back? Half a dozen at least! Maybe more.”
He kept his tone level. “None of them are involved or even know about Yermalof.”
She swallowed several times, and he wondered if she was going to be sick. He handed her his bottle with an inch of water left in it.
Unscrewing the top, Isis demanded, “Were you here? In Egypt with this man?” She drank the water and pulled a face because it was warm.
A long pause stretched out before them. The invisible weight on his shoulders increased as the truth pressed in. “We followed him into Israel.”
“Oh, my God, Connor! That’s a hop, skip, and a damned jump away from where we are right now!”
No shit. “We worked closely with the Israeli Mossad. They’re the ones who supplied us with this vehicle, as well as the one we banged up yesterday. He’d stolen artifacts there as well. He had the world hot on his arse.”
“Lovely.” She twisted her unruly, sexy-as-hell hair up off her neck and held it on top of her head as she adjusted the air vents to her new position and fanned herself with her other hand. “Are they just lending us cars, or are they looking for your friend Boris?”
“As far as I know, just doing me a favor.” In the spy business it was good to dispense and accept favors. The Jerusalem op had turned to shit, but it was Mossad agents who’d hauled his bleeding butt out of the barn where Yermalof and his men had introduced them to Hell. Only the fact that he was bleeding out and unconscious had gotten him out of there without trying to save Maciej and Ayers.
“Well, I think we need to pause and rewind and see what they know that they haven’t told us. Because we should at least know who it is that’s after us, don’t you think?”
“This whole trip has been a cock-up.” Thorne hadn’t realized how pissed off he was until he heard the anger in his own voice. Most of that anger was directed at himself. “It’s high time I took you to the airport and put you on a plane back to Seattle.”
“You should have thought of that yesterday when those men tried to shoot our car!”
No shit. It might be late in the game, but he prayed it wasn’t too late in the game to get her gone. “You’re right. I should have. You’ll be wheels up in three hours.”
“And you think I’ll leave and let Dylan stake a claim to Cleopatra? After all this?” she scoffed. “Think again.”
“I have a gimp leg. I’m a piss-poor bodyguard for you. Whoever’s gunning for us is going to pick us off like fish in a barrel.”
“You’re an excellent bodyguard. But just out of curiosity, if I went home, where would you be?”
“Here. Getting to the bottom of things. When the dust settles I’ll bring you back. Bring your father. Have a f*cking party.” His palms tightened around the steering wheel and his damn leg ached like f*cking hell, making it hard to keep a steady pressure on the gas pedal.
A glance at Isis showed she was pale despite the bright heat splotches on her cheeks. He wasn’t feeling so hot, either, now that he thought about it. It wasn’t uncommon for local shops to sell tap water in commercial water bottles. All he needed right now was Montezuma’s revenge from the drinking water. Bloody hell.
“No one shot at us, or even tried to run us off the road today. Maybe they lost interest.”
Big f*cking deal. “The day is young yet. And I doubt if these people have ‘lost interest.’ More likely they’re scouring the streets looking for us.”
Isis’s eyes narrowed. “How will they find us? We have a different car today, and you said no one saw us leave the bazaar. You said the Israelis were helping us out.”
“Let me put it this way,” Thorne observed dryly. “What we don’t know can, and probably will, hurt us. If these people are determined, they’ll eventually be hot on our tails again. When that happens I’d like there not to be an us. There will only be me. This isn’t personal. Got it?”
Turning to look straight ahead at the long ribbon of road where the first car they’d seen in forty miles approached at breakneck speed, Thorne edged the car over. Isis chewed her lip. “I don’t want to leave. Finding Cleo is so close, I can feel it…”
“Are you willing to die for someone else’s dream? Certainly he’s your father. But the reality is, he doesn’t care anymore because he doesn’t remember.”
She glared at him. “That’s a lousy thing to say.”
God, he didn’t want to do this. But he had to. The sooner he got her out of here, the less danger she’d be in. He should have manned up from the beginning and told Stark to go to hell. He wasn’t taking any woman on any op anywhere at any time, no matter what Lodestone paid. He drew a breath in through his nose, laced with the scent of her, and pushed the words out, making them as cold and brutal as he could. “It’s the truth, though, isn’t it? You’d die here, and he won’t even remember he had a daughter.”
The air stilled. A sheen of unshed tears glistened in her eyes. Isis turned away from him and faced out toward the road in front. “You really are a bastard, aren’t you?” Her voice was thick with emotion.
“Unfortunately for me, my parental units claim otherwise.” He should have packed her off yesterday, and he cursed himself for being a sentimental fool. “We don’t know how far these people will go. If they’re Cleopatra people who don’t want you back because they think you might know something they don’t—will they kill you for information? Are they trying to scare you off? We have no idea what the answer is, do we? How far are you willing to go to prove your father’s point? With bugger-all to go on but a tassel from a carpet and a gold amulet?”
She fisted her hands in her lap. “You said the amulet was from the Valley of the Scorpions—”
“Yes. But that doesn’t mean it had anything to do with Cleopatra. It could’ve been from one of the gift shops nearby. All I get is the location, love, not the provenance.” It wasn’t from any of the gift shops. His sixth sense, as odd as it was, was pinpoint accurate to the last foot. The amulet had once been deep inside the valley. Sure, someone could’ve been at the location and dropped it there, but his gut said that wasn’t the case. No coincidences in his line of work.
Thorne knew exactly where he was going to look. As soon as he escorted her to her gate and watched her plane take off.
He shot a look at her. Her jaw was tight, her hands fisted in her lap. She had the look of a woman about to argue. She wasn’t staying and he wasn’t willing or interested in hearing her rebuttals. It wasn’t safe here, and until he made sure that some arsehole wasn’t trying to kill her, she’d be safer in Seattle, where he’d have his people meet her plane and sit on her until they got word from him.
“Go home, Isis. We’ll go down so you can have a look. But if Dylan has found Cleopatra’s tomb there’s nothing you can do about it. If the tomb is in the Valley of the Scorpions as I suspect, I’ll do everything in my power—pull what strings I can—to have them hold off on filling the lake until the tomb can be authenticated and the authorities decide what has to be done to preserve it.”
“By yourself? In a week?”
He shrugged. “I can only promise I’ll do my best. I still have resources—”
She shook her head. “I think I’ll—”
“Look, I don’t want to scare you any more than any sensible woman would be scared right now. But Yermalof didn’t want to be found, and he didn’t like us nosing into his business. He kidnapped an experienced MI5 agent from her hotel room, took her without anyone seeing him, cut off her”—tongue?—“finger, and had the package delivered to us with our breakfast the next morning.”
“Is that true?”
“True and whitewashed. He was willing to trade Maciej for Ayers and myself. We knew it was a trap and went anyway. He killed them both. They died hard and they died bloody, and, Isis, they died slowly. If there’s even a minus one percent chance that any of this is tied into anything Yermalof, I don’t want you on the same continent.”
“Okay.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Okay?”
“Okay, I’ll go home.” Her voice slowed and became thick. “And… trust… you’ll call m—”
His gut curled uncomfortably. He wanted to believe her. Wanted to think she could be persuaded by logic, and could be kept safe, but somehow his gut told him this was far from over. He waited for her to finish what she was saying, and glanced over to find her slumped in her seat, her head on her chest, out cold.
Thorne smiled.
She looked cute sprawled out across the seat, cute but damn uncomfortable. He considered straightening her body out so she could sleep, then decided to leave her so as not to wake her. They’d be in the valley in about twenty minutes, Cairo in less than an hour after that; she could sleep all she wanted on the flight back to Seattle. He was still a little shocked she’d agreed to go home.
He felt lethargic from the heat himself and looked forward to finding an out-of-the-way hotel… But a few minutes later his lids felt weighted, and the lethargy was interfering with his concentration. What the hell? He’d gone seventy-two hours or more without a break on ops, and he’d never fallen asleep on the job.
He pressed the button for the tinted side window and it slid down. Gritty, furnace-hot wind blew into his face, stinging his cheeks. The heavy car slewed as his fingers went numb and he lost his grip on the steering wheel. His foot, leaden and uncooperative, dropped off the gas pedal. The car veered onto the sand alongside the tarred road, and slowed as the tires sank. Darkness closed like a camera aperture, leaving the sunlight a bright pinpoint in his vision. His body, limp and unresponsive, slid sideways down the seat back until his head fell on Isis’s hip.
Thorne fought the darkness and the lassitude with everything in him. But they sucked him under like black quicksand.
ISIS WOKE TO PITCH darkness and lay still, trying to figure out where she was. Something hard dug into her side, and she felt around until her fingers encountered the familiar size and shape of her camera bag, still slung across her body. She shifted it aside.
Typical, Thorne hauling her all over God’s creation and then leaving her who knows where. She certainly wasn’t on a plane, so he hadn’t tossed her on board and left her there. She presumed she’d fallen asleep as they were driving. Not that she remembered one way or the other, but she didn’t feel rested. The darkness was disorienting, and not having any idea where she was or how she’d gotten there was also discombobulating.
Sitting up, she felt around, trying to figure out what she was lying on. Something firm… sand? A sleeping bag? She still wore the cotton pants and T-shirt she’d had on this morning.
“Thorne?” she called softly. It was odd that there wasn’t a scrap of light. “Connor?” Isis called more loudly, starting to feel a heavy sense of foreboding when she didn’t hear anything.
She stuck her arms straight out in front of her and started feeling around. Canvas? What the hell? Had Thorne decided to set up camp in the desert and wait for morning to take her to the tomb? She was definitely in a tent. Rolling onto her knees she felt for the opening, and after fumbling around, found a heavy zipper and pulled it up.
Not pitch darkness after all, she saw as she crawled outside into the balmy night air. The temperatures had dropped dramatically, but it certainly wasn’t cold, probably in the low seventies. The sky was black but filled with millions of pinpricks of white light. No moon. The stars showed a black and white desert landscape of nothing but rippled sand and mountainous dunes.
The tent was a good size, and would sleep two. A camp was set up, with assorted supplies piled haphazardly nearby. “Thorne?!”
No response. The only sound was the susurrus of grains of sand drifting in the breeze. “Pretty damned odd, if you ask me.”
Before she looked at any supplies, she wanted to check her precious Canon. Dropping to her knees in the sand, she snapped open the bag. Everything was there. Carefully she removed the camera, holding it this way and that to inspect it in the starlight. It looked okay. Thank God. Removing the lens cap, she took a few shots of the tent.
A quick look showed her it was working like normal. Returning the lens cap, she stuck it back in the bag and hooked the strap over her shoulder again. Even out here she didn’t trust that she wouldn’t be parted from it. And since it now appeared to be the only thing she owned, she was hanging on to it.
“Hey, Thorne? Where are you?” Isis raised her voice as she walked over to see what the supplies consisted of so she could gauge just how long he expected them to be out there—wherever “there” was. She was parched and rummaged in a pack to find a bottle of water. “Eureka!” Opening it, she chugged it as she looked around.
A crude-looking campfire had been built in a scooped-out depression in the sand, but it hadn’t been lit. Beyond the cold fire was a long lump—probably a duffel bag, or more supplies. Isis wandered over to inspect it, hoping she’d find something interesting to eat; her stomach was growling.
Nothing to eat, and not a duffel. Connor Thorne, fast asleep, curled on his side, half his face smooshed in the sand as if it were a feather pillow. Isis plopped herself down in the still-hot sand beside him. “You’d’ve been more comfortable in the tent with me, Double-O Seven.” She rubbed her bare arms as the breeze chilled her skin and made small whirlwinds of sand particles.
“Why are you sleeping outside, and I was in the tent? And why we’re the middle of apparently nowhere is a mystery. Do you hear me?” She looked around, starting to feel uneasy in the vast silence. “Where’s the car anyway? Wake up and give me a clue, Thorne. Where did the tent and supplies come from? Was all this camping gear in the car your buddies lent you?”
None of this made any sense at all, and the fact that he slept through her monologue was disturbing as well. He never slept this deeply—at least from what she’d observed. “Why am I here with you, when this afternoon you were determined to send me packing?”
She sipped the water, watching his chest rise and fall with the regular slow rhythm of deep sleep. He looked much younger asleep than he did awake with all his shields up. His sleeping this deeply felt… wrong. He was a soldier. He’d told her he was a light sleeper, but right now he slept like the dead. And if she hadn’t watched his chest moving, she’d think maybe that was the case.
With a frown, getting more scared by the minute, she reached out to brush the sand off his face, wishing he’d wake up and tell her why the hell he’d brought her way out here.
Isis barely touched his cheek and he erupted into action, throwing her on her back, his forearm a steel band across her throat, his fist raised to strike. “Connor!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, grabbing his arm to keep him from choking her. “Stop, it’s me, Isis!”
His fist dropped out of sight and he eased his arm from her throat. Dropping his forehead to hers, he rasped, “Bloody hell.”
“It’s okay.” She slid her fingers into the soft pelt of his hair, holding his head against hers as they both fought for breath. Her heartbeat sounded like a rock band in her ears. “I’m sorry I startled you.”
Thorne lifted his head, eyes glittering in the meager light. “It’s not all right. I almost killed you.”
“Well, fortunately you didn’t. Would you mind letting go? I’m getting sand in my hair.”
Still crouched over her, he kissed her gently, then helped her up, brushing the sand off her back and shoulders. “Sure I didn’t hurt you?”
“Positive.”
He looked around. “Are we alone?”
“Why? Were you expecting dinner guests?”
“How long have you been awake?”
“A few minutes. Thorne, you’re scaring me. Why are we out here? I thought you—” He put his finger over her mouth and uncoiled to get to his feet, then staggered in the sand before catching his footing. He held up a hand, cautioning her to stay where she was.
For such a large man, and with an injured leg, he moved with surprising speed once he got going. Isis watched as he searched around the tent, then looked inside. He motioned her to remain still, and made his way up the dune nearby. His cautious, careful movements ratcheted up her fear, and by the time he came back to her, she was on her feet, heart pounding painfully.
The breeze brushed chilly fingers over the film of nervous perspiration on her skin. She put a hand on his forearm. “What’s going on?”
“We were drugged in the car. Isoflurane or some other inhalation anesthetic. I smelled a musty odor, but attributed it to the air-conditioning. F*ck it.”
Isis frowned. What he was saying made no sense at all. “Someone put an anesthetic in the car?” Repeating the words didn’t compute, either. Who did something like that outside of a movie?
“It caused profound respiratory depression, and decreased our blood pressure. They put us to sleep. F*ck,” he said again.
“And then built us a campsite?” Isis asked incredulously. “Why? So we’d be comfortable until they come back to kill us?”
“I suspect we’re miles from civilization.” His voice was grim. “I don’t believe they have any plans to return for us.”
“Okay… Why then?”
“I think the idea is to make this look as though we came on a dig looking for your Cleo’s tomb—there’s a rough stone entrance on the other side of this dune—and succumbed to the heat, or ran out of supplies, or our vehicle was stolen. Or all of the above. Whatever the plan is, it’s a good one. Because we clearly are miles from anywhere. If those duffels are any indication, they’re filled with empty cans and wrappers so it looks like we ate and drank the contents. Check out the tire tracks—one car in, one car out. I’d bet our vehicle will be presumed stolen while we slept.”
“So they want us to die.”
His eyes were hard and cold. “They want it to look like we f*cked up and died of stupidity. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sit well with me.”
A flush of heat washed over her skin. There was no way in hell she was letting Dylan make her death look like a stupid accident any college freshman on a dig would have had the sense to avoid. “So how do we beat them?”
“Instead of conveniently dying, we find what we came here to find.”