Читать книгу Night Of No Return - Eileen Wilks, Eileen Wilks - Страница 10

Alex had been right, Nora thought as they closed the distance to the quarry. She did have questions. Lots of them.

But it wasn’t professional matters she wanted to ask him about.

She wanted to know if his wound still troubled him, whether he had any brothers or sisters, and why a man with his background wasn’t working for the Cairo Museum or some similar, prestigious institution. She wondered if he preferred dawn or sunset, classical music or rock, and what he thought about before falling asleep at night.

Most of all, she wanted to know what he thought of her, and if he had really wanted to kiss her earlier. She was almost sure he had. But just because she’d helped save his life didn’t mean he owed her answers to the highly personal questions buzzing in her brain, so Nora let him steer the talk back to safer shores.

It was better this way. Nora knew how to handle herself professionally. She relaxed as they discussed the dig. The quarry they were headed for had supplied copper to one of the dawn kingdoms of the Bronze Age—Egypt’s Old Kingdom—over four thousand years ago. The period fascinated Nora, and was her particular specialty. In many ways, civilization had been invented then, with all its banes and blessings.

They weren’t here to excavate the quarry itself, however. That had been done long ago. Recently, a cave had been discovered after being blocked by a rockfall for many years, and preliminary investigation indicated that it had been used as temporary living quarters by the overseers and slaves sent to work the quarry. That cave was Nora’s objective.

Or it had been—until she found the second cave. And the tunnel leading off it.

“An unlooted burial,” she said now. “Think of it! Admittedly, it won’t be a rich find—the provincial governors were still being interred near the pharaoh at the time the tunnel was blocked, so whoever ended up here couldn’t be terribly important.”

“Are you sure it is a burial?” he asked. “I’ve never heard of a tomb so far from the central kingdom.”

“What else could it be? The tunnel started out as a natural one, but it’s been shaped. No mistake about that. The marks from the tools are easy to read. And the debris used to block it is typical of the fill used in burials for later Dynasties of the period.”

He grinned suddenly. “I hope you’re right. I’d love to be part of a dig that uncovers an unlooted burial, even if it does belong to some minor official. The puzzle of why anyone would have been entombed so far from the Nile is enough to get your blood pumping all by itself, isn’t it?”

“If only I could get Ibrahim’s blood pumping, too. Without his backing, the Ministry won’t approve bringing in more equipment or workers. We’re doing the best we can, but we’re damnably limited.”

They’d reached the quarry. It wasn’t deep at this end, and the side was sandy and sloping. Nora automatically started to take her usual headlong route down, stopping in mid-stride when she realized she ought to at least point out the easier path to Alex.

She looked back up at him. “Most everyone goes down over there.” She gestured at a more gradual slope, where the tramping of many feet had formed a discernible trail.

“You don’t, though.”

Something about the way he stood, with the morning sky behind him gathering brightness as the fleeting colors of dawn faded into day, made her breath catch.

He looked so very solid. Strong. It was hard to believe he’d nearly died—actually had died, for a few minutes—just a month ago. “I don’t see much point in taking the long way around if I don’t have to.” Oddly flustered, she turned away and took the slope in long, sliding strides.

He came down right behind her. “Are you impatient,” he said when he reached the bottom, “or just fond of taking the most difficult route to your goal?”

“I save my patience for when it matters—like over there.” She nodded at the other end of the small quarry, where scaffolding had been erected to make it easier to reach the cave she’d discovered last month. The cave’s entry was a narrow crevice nearly twenty feet above the floor of the quarry. “Do you want to go inside?”

“Definitely.” He started walking, and she fell in step beside him. “I don’t see how you spotted it. The entry is almost invisible from down here. Unless you’re a caver?” He gave her another of those charming smiles he seemed well-stocked with. A personal sort of smile that invited her to move closer, to share space and thoughts. “I have a friend who climbs, walks or crawls into every hole in the ground he can find. He considers it great fun.”

“Not me.” Small, dark spaces spooked her, they always had. There was no particular reason for it. Nora hadn’t mentioned her minor phobia to anyone on her crew, and didn’t intend to. As long as she had light and something to occupy her mind, she was okay. “But I think my brain was permanently warped towards spotting them the last time I was in the Sinai.”

“That must be when you learned to like goat cheese.”

She grinned. “As a matter of fact, it was.”

“What were you doing here?”

“I wasn’t here, exactly. I was farther south, at Gebel Musa. That’s Mount Sinai—but you know that, of course.” She kept her attention on where they were going. It was easier than looking at him to see if he was smiling in that personal way again.

“How did working at Gebel Musa warp your brain?”

“I spent the summer before my senior year in college mapping and cataloging the tiny caves used as cells by religious hermits in the Byzantine period. One of my professors was keen on tying some theories of his about the period to the hermitage movement.”

“Students do make good cheap labor.”

“Exactly. Let me tell you, I got very good at spotting caves. Put me anywhere near a good-sized heap of rock and dirt, and I automatically look for caves.”

“What made you decide to investigate this one, once you spotted it? Especially if you aren’t into caving. It would have been a difficult climb.”

“A dream.” She laughed at the faint skepticism that crossed his face. “I’m not claiming psychic powers, but the unconscious mind does notice things the waking mind misses. See along here?”

They’d reached the scaffolding at the base of the cliff. She pointed up at the cave’s entrance. “There used to be a path along there, a ledge. It came down recently—maybe only two or three hundred years ago. You can see that the edges of the rock where it broke away aren’t worn, and there’s a lot of the rubble here at the base. I didn’t notice all of this consciously, but some corner of my mind did. I dreamed about finding a cave here, so naturally the next day I checked to see if my dream had any basis in reality.”

“Not everyone has such confidence in their dreams.”

She shrugged. “It made me curious, that’s all. We knew they’d used one cave as living quarters, so it seemed possible they might have used this one for something, too.”

“I should have known you’d be a dreamer.”

“What do you mean?”

“Aren’t all archaeologists dreamers?” His eyes were opaque now, the light blocked. It made them unreadable. “Caught in the romance of the past, more fascinated by the traces left by people who lived and died long ago than by the lives being lived around them in the present.”

“That sounds more like criticism than a compliment. I could have sworn you were an archaeologist yourself.”

“I don’t claim to be immune to the disease. Don’t look so worried,” he said, reaching out to tug lightly on her braid. “Archaeology may not be curable, but it’s seldom fatal. It just causes those of us afflicted to do strange things…like live in a tent in the Sinai during Al-kez.”

She grinned, recognizing the Bedouin name for the hottest of their five seasons: Al-kez, ‘the terrible summer.’ “Since you’re among the afflicted, you’re probably eager to have a look at my hole in the ground.”

She turned, grabbed the ladder that led to the top of the scaffold, and started up.

“I don’t see a generator.” His voice told her he was following, several rungs below her. “Is it inside the cave?”

“Yes. I thought it best to move it after the thefts started. It was a real pain getting it in there, too.” She was halfway up, moving automatically. “We had to—hey!”

With a quiet crack, one rung of the ladder gave way beneath her. Off balance, she tightened her grip on the rails and got that foot down onto the lower rung, where her other foot rested.

It broke, too.

She slid. The rough wood of the rails shredded her palms, slowing but not stopping her. Acting instinctively, she swung her feet up, connected with something solid—and pushed off. The world whistled by.

She landed hard.

Years ago, Nora had had the breath knocked out of her during her one and only attempt to ride a horse. She’d forgotten how terrifying it felt. She lay on her back, darkness fluttering at the edges of her vision, and tried desperately to breathe.

She couldn’t. Stunned muscles refused to work, her lungs refused to inflate, and panic flooded her, breaking the next few moments into disjointed impressions.

Alex’s grim face appeared over hers. He was speaking, but she couldn’t hear him for the roaring in her ears. The light was getting dim. Hands ran over her arms, her legs, her sides. At last, just as she was sure she had killed herself, that her body was broken too badly for breath, things started working again.

Her chest heaved. That first lungful of air tasted sweeter than any she’d ever had. She sucked it in gratefully, then gulped down another.

“Where do you hurt?” That was Alex’s voice.

Her own voice was more of a gasp. “Everywhere.”

Even as she spoke, the pain came flooding in—her chest, her shoulders, her back. But her legs moved easily enough when she shifted them slightly. “I don’t think anything is broken,” she managed to say, her voice rising all the way to a whisper. “But my chest hurts. And my hands.”

“You had the breath knocked out of you. No, stay flat.” His hands on her shoulders kept her from sitting up when she tried. “I didn’t feel any broken ribs,” he said, but he ran his hands along her sides again, then moved them to her front.

He was feeling the front of her rib cage now—right below her breasts. She wanted to protest, but something about his expression stopped her. Or maybe it was his lack of expression. His face was hard. His eyes were…strange. Dark. Focused. Empty. “I’m okay.”

If he heard her, he ignored it. His hands continued their businesslike exploration, moving now to her collarbone and shoulder. He pressed here and there, then manipulated her arm. “I don’t think you’ve dislocated anything, but you shouldn’t move. Your back—”

“I really am all right.” She summoned the energy to push his hands away and tried again to sit up. This time he helped, sliding an arm behind her back. The position left his face very close to hers.

His gaze flickered to her mouth, but his expression didn’t change. Her heart was beating hard—which was only natural, she told herself. Under the circumstances.

“What in the hell,” he said in a low, controlled voice, “did you think you were doing? Why did you shove off into thin air like that?”

Her eyebrows went up. “In case you didn’t notice, the ladder broke.”

“So you pushed yourself backward.” Now there was something in his eyes. Anger. It made them lighter, the color of dark honey.

Her tongue came out to lick her lips nervously. “I didn’t want to slam into you and knock you off, too.”

“Hell.” He pulled away. “Stay there. Don’t move.”

She didn’t much feel like moving yet, so she didn’t argue. She watched as he went up the ladder quickly. “Be careful. If any of the other rungs are loose—”

“Shut up.”

Her eyebrows went up again. The man had an annoying way of reacting to an accident.

Alex stopped just below the broken rungs. After a quick inspection, he came back down just as fast as he’d gone up. “The rungs weren’t loose,” he said tersely. “They were cut.”

On the third morning after Alex’s arrival, Nora woke up much as she had on the first two. Aching. Restless. With the edges of a dream slipping away the moment her eyes opened, and the evidence of that dream still throbbing in her body.

Alex had been naked in her dream. So had she. That much she remembered.

No point in trying to recall the details, she thought as she blinked at the darkness in the tent. Her subconscious couldn’t conjure up more for her in the way of experience than she’d actually had.

She glanced at the luminous dial of the battery-operated clock on the folding table near her cot. Thank goodness. It would be light enough to run in another fifteen minutes or so. She threw back her covers and sat up, sliding her feet onto the canvas floor. Various bruises protested, but not as severely as they had for the last two mornings.

She would stretch out thoroughly, she decided. But by damn, she’d have her morning run. She needed it.

Nora hadn’t been able to run since her fall. She’d missed it. Sexual frustration, she reflected wryly, was an excellent reason to enjoy running. And a woman who was still a virgin at twenty-nine years, eleven months and twenty-eight days of age might not know a lot about sex, but she knew a great deal about sexual frustration.

She stretched, yawned, and lit the small oil lamp next to the clock. The main tent had electricity, but none of the others did.

Her bare arms and legs were chilly. Though the temperature didn’t dip much below seventy at night at this time of year, that was a drop of forty degrees or so from the daytime temperature. To Nora’s heat-adjusted body, anything under seventy degrees felt pretty nippy.

And to a body whose systems were faltering due to loss of blood, sixty-some degrees could be cold enough to kill. Alex’s skin had been cold to the touch when she had found him in the Negev. He’d been suffering from exposure, and blood loss had driven his body into shock.

She shivered, pulled off her T-shirt and kicked off the baggy boxer shorts she wore with it. Her clean things were already set out, waiting. She grabbed the panties first.

Alex. Blast the man. He’d invaded her thoughts as well as her dreams, and she couldn’t decide what to do about it. Or even if she should do something.

Last night after supper she’d offered oh-so-casually to walk back to the quarry with him. He’d pitched his tent there rather than in camp, saying he wanted to discourage further vandalism. He’d turned her down flat, and lectured her on safety.

Nora uncapped the large plastic bottle that held the lilac-scented lotion she loved, and that the dry climate demanded. It was just as well he’d turned her down. She didn’t have any business encouraging him. She remembered what Myrna had told her about Alex and their brief affair all too well.

Perfect for a fling, Myrna had said. According to her, Alex was a wonderful lover—charming, fun, and sexy enough to melt a woman’s bones with a glance.

And temporary. He’d made that clear to Myrna. Apparently, Alex was one of those commitment-shy males who preferred quantity to quality in his relationships. It was an attitude Nora despised. How many men with the same attitude had she seen waltz through her mother’s life?

Yet, for some reason, she didn’t despise Alex.

He puzzled her. His reaction to her casual suggestion that she walk back to his tent with him had been weird. You’d think she had offered to go strolling through Central Park with him at midnight. If he thought walking to the quarry at night was that dangerous, he shouldn’t be there.

Nora frowned as she pulled on her running shorts. She didn’t like the idea of his being out there alone every night. She didn’t know why anyone would have wanted to sabotage the ladder, but the act had been intended to cause harm. That was disquieting.

She didn’t like having her authority undermined, either. He hadn’t asked for permission to pitch his tent there. He’d just done it. Admittedly, Alex wasn’t exactly her subordinate. He’d been sent by Ibrahim. But she was in charge at this dig, and she didn’t like the way he forgot that when it was convenient.

He had come in handy, though. With Nora stiff and sore from her fall, Alex’s strong back had been as welcome as his expertise. He’d repaired the ladder and had spent hours digging into the hard-packed fill in the tunnel, and they were making real progress.

Professionally, they were making progress. Personally, they were stuck in a dance where he called the steps—and he was making some very mixed moves. He seemed interested in her, giving her those special smiles, sitting with her at meals, talking. He had a way of getting her to talk about herself, but he didn’t say that much about himself.

And he didn’t do anything. Like try to get her alone. Or let her get him alone.

Or kiss her. Her mind veered to that thought and got stuck. She wondered what his kiss would be like. Not gentle, she thought, though she wasn’t sure why. He acted perfectly civilized.

Yet he didn’t look civilized. Maybe it was those hard, sharp cheekbones, maybe the odd color of his eyes, but she had the sense that there was something wild about him. Power, she decided, dragging a brush through her hair. He felt like leashed power.

He came from money, she knew. Not on any grand scale, but his parents had private incomes, long pedigrees and two permanent homes, one in Cairo and one in New England. Perhaps she was simply picking up on the confidence that came from growing up wealthy and assured of his place in the world.

It was a type of confidence she’d never know. But real self-worth came from actions, not heritage, she assured herself as she fastened a band at the end of her braid. She knew she could take care of herself, that she wasn’t dependent on the whim of a man or the grinding, inadequate charity of the system. That was what counted.

Whatever the basis for the impression Alex gave of being a wild thing that had somehow wandered into camp, he behaved well enough. In fact, he was so darned pleasant and polite she couldn’t tell if he shared any of the feelings that assaulted her around him—shivery, excited feelings that were part physical need, part something else. Maybe imagination. Heaven knew she had plenty of that.

She sat on the cot to tug on her socks. She picked up a pair of athletic shoes and thunked the heels against the ground to dislodge any creepy crawlies that might have curled up inside for a snooze overnight.

It was entirely possible that she’d fantasized about him so much before he showed up that she now imagined some sort of connection between them that didn’t really exist. She was a romantic. Nora admitted that, made no bones about it. And she’d been waiting a long time for the one man, the special man, to come along. The man she could give her heart and her body to.

Maybe she had persuaded herself there was something special about Alex just because she wanted him so badly.

In the dune-rippled Negev desert, dawn is a sudden arrival. Not so in the broken land of the southern Sinai. Although the tumbled hills Alex walked now were every bit as much a desert as the one that had soaked up his blood last month, here dawn seeped in more gradually, announcing itself in graying skies before the sun peeked over the crags that had hidden its first appearance at the rim of the world.

The dim light now blending night into day told Alex he’d stayed out too long and would have to hurry to get back to camp before he was missed.

Distances and directions were hard to gauge in such rough country. He had a map, of course. It had been built by combining the twenty-first century digital wizardry of computers and satellite and reconnaissance photographs with the only detailed on-ground survey of the Sinai’s interior in existence—the maps drawn by Professor Edward Henry Potter of the British Ordnance Survey Expedition to the Sinai in 1868.

Alex knew that the terrorist base was close to the dig. He knew it was underground. That much he’d managed to learn before someone took exception to his questions and left him for dead in the Negev. But that was all he knew. Using the map, he’d selected the likeliest locations and had begun a methodical search, heading out in a different direction every night once the moon was up.

He hadn’t found the base, but last night he’d found evidence that someone had been camped on a bluff overlooking the camp. A watcher, he thought, which might mean that El Hawy didn’t have anyone planted with Nora’s crew, after all.

Alex wasn’t depending entirely on his own wanderings to find the base. He’d left word in Feiron Oasis for a man he’d worked with before to come here to the dig. Farid Ibn Kareem was a smuggler, a businessman, a thief—a canny scoundrel with an unrivaled information network, and good reason to hate El Hawy.

In the meantime, Alex would search, and he would keep track of the comings and goings of the others at the dig. Just in case. Alex hoped there was a plant. He or she would have to make contact with El Hawy at some point. Following one of the terrorists to their base would be the easiest way to locate it.

He had more than one reason now to find the base quickly.

Apparently, the mild discouragement of petty thefts was no longer enough. The damaged ladder was meant to cause an accident—an accident that, added to the other misfortunes, might cause the nosy foreigners to pack up and leave. It wouldn’t matter to the terrorists if someone died or was badly hurt—not if it accomplished their goal.

It hadn’t, of course. Nora had no intention of leaving her tunnel unexcavated.

Alex paused at the crest of a ridge, scowling at the burning sliver of sun nudging itself above a knobby hill to the west. He was not in a good mood.

He should have been. Though he hadn’t found the base, he was in a good position to search for it. With the moon nearly full, he had had decent light for his search, and his biggest problem had been solved the day he arrived. The vandalized ladder had given him a reason to pitch his tent in the quarry. He could come and go at night without anyone knowing.

From a professional standpoint, the sabotage had been a stroke of good luck. From a personal standpoint… He had no business having a personal standpoint.

He paused. That narrow slice of sun told him he’d better hurry. He had been following one of the smaller wadis, using it as a guide to get back to the quarry, but moving alongside it rather than at the bottom. He briefly considered moving to the bottom of the wadi, where he could make much better time, but the idea made the nape of his neck prickle. This particular wadi was too narrow and too exposed. A perfect place for an ambush.

He continued along the top of the wadi, his thoughts much darker than the gradually brightening air around him.

Nora was in danger. She didn’t realize that there were people who didn’t want her here routinely used mutilation or death to express their opinions. The thefts that worried Nora had reassured Alex. They had indicated that El Hawy hadn’t wanted to draw attention with anything as overt as murder.

But the open act of sabotage was a warning. The terrorists were getting nervous. The arms were on their way, and the buyer of those arms—the traitor named Simon—would be arriving once they did. El Hawy didn’t want outsiders nearby.

It was not healthy to be camped near a bunch of nervous terrorists.

The worst of it was that he couldn’t tell Nora she was in danger. He couldn’t even mention the watcher, much less tell her what was going on. He couldn’t afford for her to become too frightened or discouraged, because he needed her to continue to work the dig. He had to have a reason to be here, where few outsiders came.

Tourists didn’t venture into the Sinai’s interior. Religious pilgrims visited Mount Sinai and St. Catherine’s Monastery, while pleasure seekers stayed at resorts scattered along the coasts. Foreigners weren’t even allowed to leave the few main roads without special permits.

No, he couldn’t say anything, couldn’t even—

Alex’s thoughts stopped as suddenly as his body. He froze, head up, listening. Footfalls, coming this way down the wadi. Fast.

He moved quickly behind a boulder that overhung the dry waterbed. A perfect spot for an ambush, yes. Which was fine—as long as he was doing the ambushing.

Nora had finally managed to run her mind blank, free of all the problems that had beset the dig—and free of the man who kept invading her dreams. Her whole being was focused on the challenge and exhilaration of moving swiftly over rough terrain, in spite of the aches that still plagued her from her fall.

She was breathing hard and sweating lightly. A tight curve loomed ahead where the wadi narrowed drastically, banked by a huge boulder on one side and crumbling rock on the other.

The ground was littered with gravel and loose stones. She slowed, not wanting the complication of a turned ankle.

Something hit the ground, hard, right behind her.

She stopped dead.

A hard voice demanded, “Why the hell didn’t you keep running?”

She spun around.

Alex. He stood four feet from her. There was no mistaking him now for civilized. From the savage readiness of his stance to the beard stubble on his cheeks to the glittering anger in his eyes, he was everything wild and unpredictable.

Her hand went to her throat. “Good grief! Where did you come from?”

“You’re a fool, you know. I could have slit your throat before you turned around. You would have been dead before you hit the ground.”