Читать книгу Night Of No Return - Eileen Wilks, Eileen Wilks - Страница 8

Southern California, U.S.A., September 7

He didn’t want to die.

It was a disconcerting thing for a man like Alex to learn at the age of thirty-four. He sat at one of the wrought-iron tables on the western terrace, dripping with sweat as he watched the southern California sky turn gaudy with sunset over the darkening Pacific Ocean. If the air could have held one dram more of that eye-burning orange, he thought, he’d be able to pluck it like a guitar string.

Color. Life. He drank them both in, relishing the way the muscles in his thighs jumped and the burn in his calves. His heartbeat pleased him. It was almost back to normal, though he’d just finished a five-mile run in the scrubby mountains surrounding the resort. If he wasn’t quite at the peak of conditioning yet, he was well enough. His body had done everything he’d asked of it. He was fit again, ready for assignment.

And alive. He was so damned glad to be alive. The depth of his gratitude troubled him because it was rooted in fear, the same fear that shredded his sleep all too often.

He was the only guest on the large flagstone terrace at this hour. The heat was keeping most people inside, or in the pool. A waiter had brought him a glass and a pitcher of ice water when he’d first reached the terrace. The staff here at Condor Mountain Resort and Spa knew him; he’d stayed here before, though never for as long as he’d been here this time.

Too damned long, he thought. He needed to get back into action. Once he did, his fear would lessen. It had to. He couldn’t stand to live a timid life.

The glass of ice water he picked up was as sweaty as he was. He held it to his forehead, enjoying the shock of cold. The air was dry, smelling of dust and creosote…yet he could have sworn he smelled lilacs.

That was her fragrance. He frowned.

“Brooding again, Alex?”

The voice belonged to another woman—not the one he associated with lilacs. Alex looked over his shoulder and smiled, pleased with the company. He was a man who enjoyed people. Companionship, like sex, came easily to him. If there was a part of him that remained sealed off, untouchable no matter whom he was with, he’d lived with that too long to take much notice of it.

He especially enjoyed tall, slim-hipped women who wore shorts that showed off their legs. That the woman crossing the patio to him now was a fellow agent added to the pleasure of her company. “Hey, I don’t brood. I’m enjoying the sunset.”

“You do look like you’re having a good time melting. You actually like this heat, don’t you?”

“Heat is good. Come sit down and we’ll talk about it. There’s body heat, for example…”

Alicia Kirby pulled out the chair across from him. She was twenty-four, brilliant, and looked, he thought, like a forward on a high school basketball team, with her long, elegant bones and that boyish cap of auburn hair. When she shook her head, that pretty hair bounced with the motion.

Pretty, yes, but it wasn’t a long, rippling fall of hair as black as the desert sky, and smelling like lilacs…. Dammit. He had to stop thinking about a woman he’d never see again.

“Life must be painfully dull,” Alicia said, “if you have to flirt with me to add a hint of danger to your humdrum existence. No more than a hint, of course. East doesn’t take you any more seriously than I do.”

He put his hand over his heart. “I live for danger, but flirting with a beautiful woman is a different sort of spice.”

The edges of her high cheekbones took on a faint pink tinge, which pleased him. Alicia might not take him seriously—hell, he didn’t want her to, she was married to a man he considered a friend—but she enjoyed a compliment as much as the next woman. He had a feeling she hadn’t heard enough of them.

“Beautiful?” She managed to look skeptical despite her pink cheeks. “That’s laying it on pretty thick. I feel like roadkill.”

He straightened, alarmed. “Maybe you should go back inside. In your condition, this heat—”

“Not you, too! What is it about pregnancy that turns halfway sensible men into nervous idiots?”

“The fact that we can’t do it, I guess. Is East making a pest of himself again?” He liked the idea that the legendary East Kirby—legendary in some circles, anyway—had been reduced to a nervous wreck by his new wife’s pregnancy.

“Why do you think I came out here? I’m escaping.” She tilted her head. “Just like you.”

“Uh-uh. I might like to escape, but I’m stuck here until I hear from our mutual friend. Not that there’s anything wrong with your hospitality,” he added. Alicia and East ran Condor Mountain Resort and Spa for fun, profit, and the benefit of the occasional SPEAR agent in need of rest and rehab. Like Alex.

Though SPEAR had been founded by Abraham Lincoln, its existence had always been shrouded in such secrecy that few people knew it existed, even at the upper levels of government. Technically, SPEAR stood for Stealth, Perseverance, Endeavor, Attack and Rescue. In a deeper sense, the organization stood for much more. Honor, above all. Sacrifice. Service. Values that a confused, cynical world didn’t always recognize, but which the men and women of SPEAR understood and were willing to live for.

Or to die for.

Alicia had a skeptical look on her face. “So all that running you do is purely for the sake of fitness? Not because you’re trying like crazy to get away from something?”

Alex fought off a frown. Behind that youthful face of Alicia’s was an irritatingly observant woman. He took another drink of water. “Running is a great way to get back in shape. I’ve been using the gym, too.”

“Yes, but you’ve been running in the afternoons. In temperatures of ninety degrees or better. That seems like an odd thing for a man who nearly died in the desert to do.”

But it wasn’t heat he feared. It was darkness. Death was dark. That thick and sticky darkness clung to him still, clogging his dreams…sending him running through the sun-soaked hills. He saluted her with his glass. “Hey, I can take the heat. After all, I grew up in a part of the world that makes southern California seem air-conditioned.”

“You nearly died there, too.”

She was definitely beginning to get on his nerves. “It was a knife that nearly did me in, not the desert. Have you heard from Jeff lately?”

For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to accept the change of subject, but after favoring him with another thoughtful look, she spoke of the young man who was East’s adopted son. Jeff was Alicia’s age, a decade younger than East or Alex, and he’d recently been through an ordeal much worse than what Alex had endured. Not that Alex knew the details—SPEAR agents might discuss an operation among themselves in a general way, but specifics were shared only on a need-to-know basis. Apparently Jeff had come out of it okay.

The resilience of youth. Alex wanted to think that was why Jeff had rebounded from his experience so quickly. But maybe Jeff was just the better man. Stronger. Not given to waking up in the middle of the night with the icy sweat of terror drying on his skin.

Alex drank his water as he listened to Alicia talk about her new stepson. Jeff was in Los Angeles after spending some R & R time at another SPEAR operation in Arizona. His experience had propelled him to enlist in SPEAR, which was now covering the last of his med school. He’d just started his residency in the ER of a busy Los Angeles hospital.

“I don’t expect we’ll hear much from him for a while,” Alicia said. “He plans on specializing in trauma medicine with an emphasis on on-site treatment.” She smiled. “When he isn’t working, he’ll be sleeping.”

“You’re probably right.” Alex heard the door to the resort open and glanced that way.

A tall man with shaggy brown hair stood in the doorway, one eyebrow raised. “Trying to make time with my wife again, Alex?”

“I do my best,” he said cheerfully. “Go away, East. I can’t get anywhere with you breathing down my neck.”

“You go away.” East walked over and pulled out a chair. “I just talked to Jonah. You’re to call him.”

At last. Alex was on his feet instantly. “I’ll let you take over with the flirting, then. Be sure to mention her gorgeous legs. I hadn’t gotten around to them yet.”

“Fickle.” Alicia shook her head. “Sadly fickle.”

“Come back down after you’ve talked with him,” East said. “I’m supposed to brief you on some background details.”

“Will do.” Alex was already at the door.

The shock of cold air from the air-conditioning hit him the moment he stepped inside the expensively rustic lobby. He passed the regular elevator, stopping at one that the other guests at the resort couldn’t use, and inserted the key required to operate it. His heart was pumping with excitement.

A call from Jonah could mean only one thing—an assignment. He was ready for it physically, and if he still had a way to go emotionally…well, he’d shake down just fine once he got into action again.

Contrary to what his parents believed, Alex had never had a death wish. Nor was he an excitement junky—not anymore, at least. He’d outgrown that years ago. He liked edges, though. A man never felt more alive than when he was challenging his limits. He’d teetered on the slipperiest edge of all more than once while on assignment, but until a month ago he’d never gone over. But when he’d been left for dead in the Negev desert, he’d skidded down that dark slope…until she found him. His lady of the lilacs.

It had changed him. For the last month he had been trying to come to terms with that change while strength eased back into his body. He’d hiked or run through the dry mountains that cradled the resort so he could enjoy the slide and flex of thigh muscles, the bunch and release in his calves. Life was good.

Alex’s suite was on the top floor. The view was breath-taking—rugged hills falling in sage and dust-colored humps into the vast blue of the ocean. The bed was king-size and comfortable, and the walls were reinforced with steel and an inner layer of sand. They would stand up to anything but a direct hit from a bomb. The steel had the additional property of making it difficult for anyone nearby to pick up the signal from the cell phone he grabbed as soon as the door closed behind him.

This phone, too, had special properties. The signal was digitized and encoded, so that even if someone did manage to intercept part of the transmission it wouldn’t do them any good. It wasn’t dependent on normal cells, either, but used a system established by orbiting satellites, rendering calls completely untraceable. With this phone, Alex could talk to anyone anywhere on the planet.

He punched in a number he knew well, hung up and waited. A few minutes later, the phone rang, then a cool, dry voice said, “Are you ready to go back to work, Alex?”

Ten minutes later he disconnected. He stood in his air-conditioned room and stared out the reinforced glass of the window, and he tasted the hot, dusty wind of the desert.

No surprise that he was going back to the Middle East. That was where his expertise lay. Among other skills, Alex spoke Arabic and Greek fluently and could make himself understood in Hebrew. He knew smugglers in five countries, and scientists in three. He’d be going in as an archaeologist—a cover he’d used often, since it dovetailed so neatly with reality. Nor was his assignment a surprise; the people who had left him for dead a month ago had ties to the terrorist organization whose base he would be hunting.

No, none of that was unexpected. But the dig he’d be participating in as part of his cover, and the person in charge of that dig—oh, yes, that had surprised him.

The scent of lilacs drifted across his memory again, and Alex smiled slowly. Never say never, he thought, his spirits rising. Not only was he going to have a chance to exorcise the fear that clung to him like a bad smell, he would get to work another distracting memory out of his system.

A memory named Nora.

Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, September 9

There were no songbirds in the Sinai. Not in this part of it, not at this time of year. To the north, the land rose in stony leaps to the barren height of the Tie Plateau before slipping down in sandy drifts to the dunes that met the Mediterranean. To the south, ragged mountains heaved themselves high again, bunching up into the gaunt peaks of the Sinai Massif, the range surrounding Gebel Musa— Mount Sinai. Here, in the Dividing Valleys, the land dipped lower. The rare rains of the desert had spent millennia wearing away granite and sandstone, limestone and dolomite, to leave a jumbled confusion of rock cut by canyons and wadis. Here there might be the sound of the occasional caw of a raven or the cooing of quail, but even that was unlikely this early. At this hour, the soft percussion of Nora’s footfalls in the sand and gravel was the only sound.

The vague light of dawn canted in steeply from the east, leaving the bottom of the wadi in shadow. It was cool there, cool enough that she’d barely broken a sweat, though she’d been running for ten minutes. The rough terrain kept her from running very fast, but the wadi’s course was downward; it would take her ten more minutes to reach the convergence of this wadi with the next, where she’d veer back uphill, toward camp.

Then she could expect to sweat. But now she ran easily, enjoying the flow of cool air over warm muscles, and she dreamed of another run she’d taken. Another desert. And the man she’d found there.

When Nora thought of him, she thought of darkness. The near-dark of the time when she’d found him. Dark, sun-bronzed skin. Hair as black as her own. And the darkness that men create, the darkness of violence and death.

Not that she’d seen the evidence of violence at first. The bloody trail he’d left as he’d staggered across the desert had been hidden by the scrubby growth nearby, and his clothes had been the color of the sand where he’d lain, curled into himself for warmth.

From a distance she’d thought him a heap of sand. As she’d loped closer, he’d looked like a bundle of rags.

Then she’d thought she’d found a corpse.

The blood that had covered his chest and shoulder had heightened that impression. But he’d been alive, alive and conscious…as she’d discovered when she’d touched her fingers to his throat, seeking a pulse.

Again, almost as strong in memory as when it had happened, she felt the shock that had gone through her when he opened his eyes. Amber eyes. She could think of no other word to describe them. Like the petrified resin that people the world over have prized for millennia as a jewel, they had seemed to hold trapped sunlight inside them.

“Hey, Nora!”

She stopped, one foot planted on a tilted granite slab, the other in a drift of sand between rocks, her mind shutting off her reverie as abruptly as her body obeyed her order to stop.

What had gone wrong now?

She looked up at the edge of the wadi, where a man stood—Tim, judging by the gangly outline he made against the pale pewter sky. “What is it this time? I haven’t finished my run.”

“I can see that. But you’d better head back to camp. Mahmoud just radioed that his truck is fixed and he’s nearly here. Looks like you didn’t have to send me to the oasis for drinking water yesterday, after all.”

“But I didn’t know that yesterday. Look, Tim, it’s nice to get good news for a change, but it could have waited until I got back to camp. I’ll only be another twenty minutes, and if Mahmoud beats me there, you can start unloading without me.”

“But he’s got something that wasn’t on your list. Someone, actually—some muckety-muck from the Cairo Museum who wants to look at the cave.”

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “So soon? Providence and the mills of funding organizations usually grind slower than that.” The regret she felt about abandoning her run was quickly swallowed by a surge of excitement. Dr. Ibrahim must have been more interested than she’d realized when she’d reported their cave to him last month.

Or maybe he was hedging his bets. If what they’d found so far turned out to be as important as Nora hoped, he might try to have someone else put in charge of the dig. Someone with one of those dandy Y chromosomes. Damn.

“I’d better be in camp to welcome our colleague when he arrives, then, hadn’t I? Be right up.”

Typically, Nora didn’t bother to look for the easiest path up the side of the wadi, but headed straight up from where she stood. She was a long, leggy woman who moved with the awkward energy of a colt, all sudden starts and stops, yet there was a certain grace to her climb, the ease of a woman comfortable with her body. She reached the top only slightly breathless, and paused to unhook the small water jug on her belt, then downed half the contents in a few greedy gulps.

“Did Mahmoud say who our visitor is?” she asked as she moved past Tim. The path, what there was of it, wound through the knobby outcroppings of rock that made up the sizable hill that lay between them and the camp.

He grimaced. Tim had one of those elastic faces that turn every expression into comical exaggeration. “Probably. I didn’t catch it, though. I was concentrating too hard on trying to figure whether he said he’d be here in fifteen minutes, or that his cat was pregnant. Of course, if he’d asked me where the baggage claim was, I would have understood just fine.”

“Or the men’s room?” She grinned. Her assistant’s smattering of Arabic came almost entirely from a phrase book. “I’ll never understand how a student of language who’s been in Egypt for two years can know so little Arabic.”

“Everyone knows we Brits can’t cook or remember all those peculiar words some people use instead of a proper language.”

“You’ve managed to learn quite a few peculiar words. At least, Ibrahim seems to think so, or he wouldn’t have kept you around.”

“Hieroglyphics are different. I don’t have to speak them.”

Tim was totally absorbed by his specialty—the evolution of written language as evinced by the study of hieroglyphics. He was smart, funny and completely lacking in ambition, a trait more foreign to her than any language could be. “Where are Ahmed and Gamal? One of them could have translated for you.”

“Praying, I think,” he said, vague as usual about anything that didn’t interest him. “Do you think we’re going to be descended upon by a horde of eager Egyptologists?”

“One person doesn’t constitute a horde. Although, if we can impress him with the potential here….” She shrugged, impatient with her own eagerness. “Or her, I should say, though that doesn’t seem likely, given Ibrahim’s prejudices. I’m surprised he sent anyone at all. I didn’t think he was even listening when I talked to him last month.”

Nora had tried not to get her hopes up when she’d made the trip to Cairo to present her report in person, but her reception by the director of the museum had been chilly enough to depress Pollyanna. She’d received permission to follow up on her find, but none of the funding or support personnel she required to do the job properly.

Needing advice, she’d made a second stop before returning to the dig—a short trip across the border into Israel, where an old professor of hers lived on a kibbutz in the Negev.

Deep inside, something tugged at her, a feeling sharp and insistent, clearer than memory but less easy to name. Enough, already, she told herself. She’d known the man for no more than an hour—oh, it was ridiculous even to say she’d known him. She’d found him, that was all, and she’d done what she could to keep him alive. She didn’t even know his name. If she still felt somehow connected to a man she didn’t know, that wasn’t surprising, was it? Under the circumstances…?

She remembered the shock of his eyes opening and meeting hers, the sense that the world had just tilted, sending her life spinning off in an unplanned direction. Romantic foolishness, but not surprising, really. Under the circumstances.

When Tim sighed she glanced back at him, ready to be distracted. “Wishing for that horde, are you?”

“With hordes, come funding. Another generator would be nice. We could get a new air conditioner. Hey, isn’t the path thataway?”

“This way is shorter.” The path Tim had indicated was a fairly easy track that went around the rocky hill. Nora preferred a more direct route, up the hill and through a narrow notch between thrusting boulders. “You’ve been in Egypt long enough for your blue blood to have adjusted to the heat. We already have an air conditioner.”

“No, we don’t. We have a noisemaker you turn on for a few hours that occasionally coughs up a little cool air.”

“It’s better than nothing.” Which summed up most of their equipment. Theirs was a shoestring operation, and with all the small disasters that had beset them lately, those strings were getting frayed. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she said, addressing herself as much as Tim as she eased out of the vee-shaped cleft and back onto more nearly horizontal ground. “Even if this fellow gives Ibrahim a good report, we’re not going to get any substantial increase in funding. Not unless we make a major find.” She started up the hill.

Tim followed slowly. “We’d have a much better chance of that if we had the people and equipment to do the job right.”

Didn’t she know it. “I could have sworn I gave you my speech about ‘paying our dues’ when you signed on, but if you need to hear it again—”

“I know, I know. This is my opportunity to get out of my ivory tower and learn the basics of fieldwork. The problem is, I like my ivory tower. It’s air-conditioned, and there are no bugs.”

He slipped, grabbing awkwardly at the rock, swore, and finally managed to clamber out and stand beside her. “And there aren’t a lot of mountains to cross to get to my office at the museum, either. Look at this.” He held out his hand, displaying a scraped palm. “I’m damned if I know why you have to play mountain goat just so you can find a place to run. Don’t you get enough exercise on the dig?”

A smile tugged at her mouth as she turned back to head down the hill. Camp lay below them. “You like air-conditioning. I like to run.”

“Well, aside from being a blasted nuisance and hard on my epidermis, your runs aren’t safe. Especially with everything that’s been happening lately.”

“A few petty thefts don’t make it unsafe here—as safe as you can be in the desert, anyway.”

“If we stay in camp. But you keep wandering off by yourself.”

Out of consideration for Tim’s scraped hand, she chose the easiest way down, circling around a large sandstone outcropping that wind and weather had sculpted into a shape she could only call phallic. “There’s a lot of poverty among the tribes. Not that I mean to accuse the Bedouin, but they’re the only people out here other than us.”

“Just them, us, and the occasional terrorist.”

“Are you still harping on that theory? Terrorists blow up things. They don’t steal a couple of cases of canned food for the glory of the cause.”

“What about our first generator?”

“We don’t know that it was tampered with.”

“The mechanic said—”

“I know what he said. I wish he’d kept his dire mutterings to himself, since you seem to have taken them so much to heart. He also said it could have been damaged in transport.”

“Mahmoud’s gas tank didn’t get sugar in it by accident.”

“Mahmoud isn’t exactly Mr. Congeniality. The man collects enemies the way dogs collect fleas. Look, Tim, there are times when I appreciate your stubbornness—”

“You ought to. You could teach a camel the meaning of the word. Hey!” he said as they rounded the outcropping. “Looks like our timing is right on the money.”

They had come out on a rise just above the camp, which was located in one of the larger wadis—a much wider channel than the one where she liked to run. A cloud of dust was moving slowly along the dry watercourse, nearly obscuring the truck that caused it.

“If we hurry, we can get there about the same time as Mahmoud,” she said, picking up the pace.

“About your morning run—”

“Tim,” she said warningly.

“Nora, even if terrorists aren’t lurking nearby, it isn’t safe for you to go running alone. You could turn an ankle or get bitten by something nasty.”

“That’s why I always run in the same place. If I’m late getting back, you’ll know where to come looking for me.”

“I don’t want to have to come looking for you. Why can’t you exercise in camp?”

“Aside from the fact that I enjoy running?”

“Yeah, aside from that.”

She shrugged. Her reasons were too private to speak aloud. Wildness calls to wildness, she thought. When she was running along a twisting wadi, away from everyone, she could allow herself to dream. Weren’t dreams as important to life as safety? Yet maybe…maybe she’d been dreaming too much lately. Dreaming about one thing, the same thing, over and over. The man. The one she would never see again.

The truck pulled up in a cloud of dust just as Nora reached level ground, and every member of her small crew descended upon it. The small crowd wasn’t enough to block her view, but the truck itself kept her from seeing who climbed out of the passenger side. She lengthened her stride, as curious as the others were about their visitor.

Mahmoud headed straight for the cookstove in front of the main tent, where a pot of coffee was perfuming the air. Nora greeted him briefly.

Their guest was speaking to Gamal in fluent Arabic, his back to her, when she rounded the front of the truck. He’s Egyptian, then, she thought. Not surprising, if he came from the museum. His clothing, however, spoke of the West—khaki shorts much like her own, a plain pullover shirt and Nikes. A lot of Egyptians did wear western clothing, though the more devout would have disapproved of his shorts.

He wore no hat, which made her frown, but she would hold off on the lecture until she saw if he was foolish enough to do that in the heat of the day. His short hair was as black as her own, and his body told her he was younger than she’d expected—young and attractive, with a lean, muscular body.

The sight of those masculine shoulders, slim hips and strong legs made her hormones kick in with a pleasant little rush, but Nora didn’t doubt her ability to keep any tickle of desire under control. She’d been doing it for years.

DeLaney, however, was another story. The youthful college student might start mooning after their guest instead of Tim.

Of course, Tim would probably be relieved if she did. Nora was smiling when she spoke. “Welcome to the dig. I’m Dr. Nora Lowe.”

“Yes,” he said, in a low, pleasant voice as he turned to face her. “I know.”

His eyes met hers. Amber eyes. Clear as sunlight trapped in time, smiling down at her.