SEVEN
Thorne and Husani both leveled their weapons toward the swinging curtain at the entrance to the inner sanctum as the driver pushed his way through the carpets hanging from the ceiling.
“Company,” he said quietly and succinctly, his eyes intense and focused. He too carried a very large black gun.
Who the hell was Connor Thorne?
“Back door?” Thorne demanded, addressing Husani.
“I know the way,” Isis told him, forcing the basket down so she could latch the camera bag. “Are you coming, Husani?”
“I will greet the visitors,” he said grimly, tucking his gun into the back of his loose pants. “Go, little bird!”
“Thank you! This way.” Isis pushed between hanging layers of fine kilim rugs. The stall backed up into Beniti’s small shop, which faced the alley in the next block. Thorne stayed on her heels and the driver brought up the rear.
“Get the lead out,” Thorne told her briskly as they moved from blankets, textiles, and plastic sphinxes to more expensive faux artifacts.
“We can go through here, and then through the next shop, and then out a side d—” Her words were cut off by the sound of a gunshot. She spun around, slamming into Thorne’s hard chest. Isis braced a hand over the steady beat of his heart. “Husani!”
He grabbed her upper arm. “Let’s go.” Twisting her around, he propelled her between crowded display cases, intricately inlaid tables where she’d played as a child, had haggled behind the counter as she got older, and stolen her first kiss as a teen. “Move!”
They emerged through a narrow side alley crowded with tourists. The noise was jarring. How would they know who was after them in the crush of humanity? In the teeming mass of people someone could come right up and shoot them, knife them—whatever them—without being observed until it was too late.
Sweat beaded her brow, and her heart raced erratically with the adrenaline surging through her. She stayed close to Thorne, slipping her hand into his, grateful when his strong fingers tightened around hers as they pushed through the shoppers and tourists.
As they walked, Isis scanned the faces of the people surging around them like waves around a rock. Suddenly, instead of a million bits of color and potential photographic vignettes, she saw a thousand different threats. Everyone was suspect. Everyone looked potentially dangerous. One-handed she adjusted her camera around her neck, making sure it was safe if she had to run again, glad that this time she wore tennis shoes instead of strappy sandals.
“Back to the car?” She raised her voice to be heard over the noise of people haggling, shouting over loud music, normal conversation at higher than normal volume. This circus atmosphere, the colors and smells, the sounds of Egypt—all the things she loved now presented a threat. Thorne’s fingers tightened over hers, and he gave a little tug. “Turn left.”
Isis pointed right. “But the car’s that way.” Or not. She had her father’s crappy sense of direction. She’d played in the labyrinth of the souk for years, but getting lost then had been an adventure that always led to pleasant discoveries and surprises—and a safe return to Beniti al-Atrash’s shop, escorted by other shopkeepers who knew her and her father.
“We have another vehicle parked on the other side. Yes,” he said to the driver, clearly in answer to something she hadn’t heard. The guy melted into the crowds surging around them. Thorne kept her moving, although it wasn’t a simple task to navigate the onslaught of shoppers and laughing, playing children filling the narrow streets.
Only someone intimately familiar with the souk could navigate the congested labyrinth with his certainty. If he’d studied a map of the area as he claimed, he must have a photographic memory, because his steps never faltered, and they were never obstructed by a dead end.
He walked quickly down what looked like a blind alley, but pushed through T-shirts hanging in wild disarray from the ceiling of a small stall. They emerged into one of the narrow car-lined side streets running alongside the bazaar. The vehicle, a filthy Jeep with tinted windows, was parked nose out. He activated the door lock from half a block away and popped the door, almost shoving her inside before rounding the front and getting in himself.
The car started with a deep throaty roar and they were off. He didn’t drive crazily, although doing so probably wouldn’t attract any more notice than did the rest of the drivers on the congested roads. He eased into traffic with aggressive confidence while she dug in her bag for a wad of tissue. Sweat ran down her temples and collected between her breasts.
“Want a tissue?” She glanced over at him. He hadn’t even broken a sweat, and there was no sign of the gun. Unfazed and completely alert. She caught her breath. “I have some sanitizing towelettes as well if you—”
“Tell me about this fiancé.”
She wasn’t that vain, but she was damned if she’d wipe off her last vestiges of makeup if she didn’t have to. She blotted her forehead with a tissue, then opened the camera bag and pulled everything out to get to the small pack of hand wipes in the bottom. She meticulously repacked everything neatly before opening the package. The astringent smell of antiseptic filled the car. “Dylan isn’t, and never was, my fiancé.” She wiped her hands, then the back of her neck, enough to cool her for a few minutes until the air-conditioning kicked in.
The skin around his eyes warped into a network of fine lines as his eyes narrowed. “That’s not what your friend Husani seemed to think.”
She adjusted the vent to blow directly on her face. “He wasn’t even a boyfriend. He was my father’s assistant, and we dated off and on, and more because we were the only game in town than anything else.”
“And yet here he is, right where you happened to be.”
His tone, underlain with suspicion, made her skin prickle, and an unhappy swish curled through her stomach. Isis tried not to be an alarmist. Just because trigger-happy people had chased them—twice—didn’t mean Dylan was part of some nefarious plot. The men in the underpass the night before had beaten the crap out of Thorne, not her. Her reaction was just a knee-jerk reaction to what was going on.
“It’s not such a stretch,” she told him, trying to be reasonable instead of reactive. “This is where his work is, after all. He worked for my father for years, but he’s probably working for someone else now.”
“Let’s find out who.” He lifted his hip to remove his phone from his pocket.
He didn’t greet whoever answered the phone, merely gave his name, paused, and then said, “Give me a full report on a Dylan Brengard—who he’s working for, and when he arrived in Cairo. Give me dates. Any intel on my old friend?” Pause. “Yes,” his voice was curt. “I am. And I will.” He didn’t say goodbye, just shoved the phone back into his pocket.
“Who was that?” Isis demanded, resting her bent knee on the seat as she turned her whole body to face him. The time for his prevarication was over. Clearly Connor Thorne was not just some private eye. His connections went deeper than that, and his incredible fighting and defense skills screamed military. She wanted answers, and she damn well wanted them now. “What old friend?”
He blatantly ignored her question and fired off one of his own in return. “How many years did Dylan work for the professor?”
“Damn it, Thorne! Answer my questions first.”
“Your questions aren’t a matter of life and death.”
“You’re full of crap! You just don’t want to answer me. If you refuse to answer any of my perfectly reasonable—and, I might add, pertinent—questions, then how can I be the judge of that? For all I know you’re the bad guy and you’re doing all this to scare me into…” She had no idea what because she was so mad her mouth was going faster than her brain.
“. . . leading you to my father’s discovery.” She finished, knowing she was being illogical, and not giving a damn. He was infuriating.
He tore his eyes away from the road for one moment to glance at her. “You hired me, remember? I have no bloody interest in what two days ago I was pretty damn sure was your father’s pie in the sky. Answer my questions, and when I’m sure we’re safe, I’ll answer some of yours. How long did you date Dylan?”
“Off and on for two summers. I spent quite a bit of time with my father here because I was commissioned to do a coffee-table book. He was here. I was here. We went to dinner, the movies when we were in town. Normal dating stuff.” She glanced at him. “Now one of mine. Who are you and who do you really work for? Because you have skills you didn’t learn from a mental GPS tracker.”
He passed four cars at eighty miles per hour before answering. “I work for Lodestone.”
Then Lodestone was more than just a company that found people and things. “Is that who you just called?”
He hesitated, eyes locked on the road. “MI5.”
“MI5? What’s that? A branch of the IRS?” She frowned. And why would he have them on speed dial? No one wanted to talk to them.
“British Secret Service.”
“You’re a spy?”
“No. I’m a Lodestone agent here to help you find a tomb.”
Isis didn’t know what to believe.
Traffic came to a sudden crawl. An accident involving three cars and a herd of camels blocked most of the road. While the men and the camel owners argued loudly and gestured with swinging arms and waving hands at one another, all the cars pressed into one narrow channel, bumpers kissing as they wound around the melee. An errant camel swung its back end into the roadway, nearly blocking their progress. Thorne stomped on the brakes, forcing Isis to brace herself against the cracked vinyl dashboard.
“A spy?! Seriously? So all this running, chasing, shooting, beating people to a pulp is child’s play to you?”
He cursed under his breath and locked gazes with her for a moment. The intensity stole the air from her lungs.
“It’s never child’s play, and I’m not here in that capacity.”
“Well, actually, you are,” she pointed out—reasonably, she thought—“since we’ve done little else besides running and shooting since we got here. Is that how you hurt your leg?”
“Do you ever stop asking questions?”
“As soon as I get answers. That usually shuts me up for a while.”
“Describe Dylan.” His tone was curt, short, all business.
A spy, for God’s sake. It was hard to wrap her brain around that. “He’s about five eight. Shoulder-length caramel-colored hair, he favors ponytails—says it’s sexy—has light brown eyes—”
“What the hell kind of color is ‘caramel’?” he demanded, easing onto the verge and navigating past the stalled cars, animals, and wandering people by driving off the road and onto the sand.
“A warm brownish blond. I have a picture if you—”
He held out an imperious hand. He didn’t snap his fingers. That was implied. With a sigh Isis got her phone out of her bag,
She scrolled through the images, then placed the phone in his hand.
“I saw this guy twice,” he said. “Yesterday at the airport, and today as we were walking to your friend’s shop.”
“You think he followed us.” It wasn’t a question. If Thorne had seen the car, it had followed them. She was just giving herself time to assimilate all the information.
Thorne’s grip on the wheel turned white-knuckled, as if it were that or throw a punch at someone. His gaze flicked up to the rearview mirror and he frowned. “I don’t think it. Does he know about these cryptic clues of your father’s?”
“I shouldn’t think so. My father was really paranoid someone would beat him to the punch. He trusted Dylan more than he did most people, but much as I love my father, he’s a pretty selfish guy. I don’t think he would’ve told even Dylan about the clues.”
“Why wasn’t the professor’s assistant with him when he discovered the tomb?” Thorne navigated a small herd of goats and a woman standing on the roadside watching the cars inch by. A seven-minute trip had so far taken twenty.
The heat made her back sweat, and her shirt stuck to the hot vinyl seats. The cheap cotton T-shirt was probably staining her sweaty skin Halloween orange by now. She didn’t know how Thorne normally got answers out of people, but she had the distinct feeling he was grilling her. “How do you know he wasn’t?”
The hard, piercing gaze was back, reaching in, stripping her down to her bare bones. The look said he wanted answers and he’d wring them out of her one way or the other. “You said your father was the only one left alive.”
“Dylan had food poisoning bad enough to be hospitalized. My father started the dig without him.”
Thorne veered off the main road, taking them deeper into narrow streets. “When was that?”
“A few days before the dig.” She saw the two enormous stone lions flanking the entrance to the Kasr Al Nile Bridge, which connected downtown Cairo to Gesira Island and the affluent Zamalek district. “Where are we going?” She doubted it was to the Egyptian Opera House or the Cultural Center.
He ignored her question, which nonresponse was getting more and more damned annoying. “Here or stateside?”
“Here.” She needed him, and wanted him, but his shitty attitude about not answering any of her questions had to freaking stop. “Thorne, this is a partnership, remember? I don’t like being dragged from pillar to post without explana—”
He held up a finger, cutting her off as he used the phone again, requesting confirmation of Dylan’s hospital stay. “Hospital?” he asked her.
“I have no idea.” Nor did she care. Dylan wasn’t relevant. “But it was one in Cairo.”
Thorne relayed the information. He put the phone away. Isis glanced beyond the frenetic cars, all of which wanted supremacy of the road. They’d reached the outskirts of the city. “Where are we going?”
“I got a read off that tassel. The basket was bought from the souk, but the silk tassel comes from one of these houses.”
“I hope you can be more specific,” Isis observed dryly. “I can’t imagine my father knowing anyone who might live in this neighborhood. This is pretty high-end. Princes, diplomats, wealthy expats.”
“Sponsors?”
Isis looked at the shady, tree-lined streets, upscale restaurants, and expensive art galleries they passed. “I know the names of some, but not all. He talked about some of them, I met a few at fund-raisers—I don’t recall anyone from this elite neck of the desert.” But then her father occasionally took money under the table for “special projects,” something they’d argued about when she’d first discovered the practice. For a large donation, priceless antiquities found their way into private collections. He’d stopped telling her after she’d challenged him on the illegal practice. She loved her father, but he wasn’t smart enough to be a crook and get away with it. She’d been terrified he’d be caught and jailed. He’d promised he’d never do it again—but she couldn’t swear he hadn’t.
“How the hell does your father expect you to follow such vague clues?”
“The clues weren’t left for me to follow; he had them to jog his own memory.” Isis sighed, exasperated. “Maybe he knew his mind was going…”
Thorne tapped the steering wheel. “This is it.” He turned off the palm-tree-lined street onto a narrower road lined with tall oleander trees covered with white flowers, underplanted with bright red and deep purple petunias behind strips of meticulously maintained emerald-green grass. It wasn’t until they came to the tall, black wrought-iron gates of a villa that Isis realized they were on a private road.
Sunlight glinted on the gate’s gold embellishments and the high fences she could glimpse behind thick shrubbery. But it wasn’t all the gilding Isis took note of; it was the red eyes of all the cameras trained overtly on their vehicle as they drove slowly through the entrance. She bet there were plenty more surveillance cameras she couldn’t see.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” she murmured. “How are we going to gain entry? We don’t know who lives here, or how they might be connected. Dad hated to be out of his element, so I can’t picture him coming to a place like this.” Or ripping a tassel off some multigazillionaire’s prized carpet undetected.
“He had a lot of quirks for a guy needing investor backing.”
“I know.” She let a small laugh escape. “You should’ve seen him, though, once they showed up at the dig. He’d stand with his feet planted, wearing that ridiculous hat, and insist they feel the grains of sand fall through their fingers as he painted a picture of life here thousands of years ago.”
“A salesman.”
“Be it a hole in the ground, or a tomb, he has—he had—a way with painting a picture that investors loved.” At least at first. Then they’d pretty much gotten sick and tired of his bullshit, and the money had dried up.
“That tassel came from this location. So either your father visited here, or someone from here gave it to him. Either way, this is the clue we’re following because it’s the only lead we have.” Thorne opened the window and put his arm out to press the buzzer. Four cameras situated along the fence narrowed their lens apertures, zooming in on them.
“What is your business with Dr. Najid?” The polite male voice sounded as though the guy was sitting in the backseat. Isis glanced over her shoulder to make sure he wasn’t. She had no idea, since the sun shone through the windows, why she felt as though a cloud had just passed overhead. A glance at Thorne showed he was oblivious.
He answered smoothly, “Tell him Professor Magee’s daughter, Isis, would like a few moments of his time.”
There was an infinitesimal pause before the man responded unctuously. “I will inquire. Please wait.”
“Ever heard of him?” he asked quietly.
Isis shook her head. “I did most of my father’s paperwork for years. If he was an investor, I’d have heard of him.”
Thorne, looking perfectly at ease, rested his elbow on the open window. Isis noticed that he had the gearshift in reverse, ready to back up at the first sign of trouble. She rubbed both damp palms on her thighs and wondered whose life she was suddenly living.