Dead Men's Hearts (30 page)

They were in a kind of nook or cul-de-sac, a mini-box canyon off the main box canyon. Apparently the van had swerved into it, then flipped when it rode up onto the sloping talus at the foot of the cliffs, rolling into the troughlike center of the little bay. A good thing too; only twenty or thirty feet ahead of them—all around them, in fact—were truck-sized boulders that had fallen from above, a collision with any one of which would surely have resulted in more to complain about than a bitten cheek.

There was another good thing: the hollow from which Forrest had been firing was out of sight around a spur of rock, and if they couldn’t see where he was, then he couldn’t see where they were either. That, Gideon assured himself, was what the laws of geometrical optics said, and who was he to question the laws of geometrical optics?

Not only that, but geography was cooperating too. They were on the same side that Forrest was on; behind him, so to speak. The perpendicular spur that thrust out from the cliff to create their little bay was a promontory of the same massive organ-pipe formation in one of whose upper hollows Forrest had been crouching to fire. But that was at the other end of it, and to get from there to here, to a place where he could see them again, Forrest would have to go the long way around,
behind
the sinuous outcropping, because on the canyon side it reared up, sheer and columnar, with no visible path or ledge around it.

The problem for Forrest would be that he had no way of knowing that the van had turned over, since he couldn’t see the bay. As far as he knew, it could come rattling back out at any moment, spewing nuts and bolts like a cartoon car and heading full-tilt for the entrance again. And if he was stuck behind the outcropping when it did, there would be nothing to stop their getting through. On the other hand, he could hardly keep his position at the canyon’s mouth because Gideon and Julie might already be scrambling up the bay’s back wall and out of his grasp.

In other words, Forrest Freeman had himself a predicament. And if Forrest Freeman’s past behavior was any indication, what he would do would be to worry for a while before doing anything else. That meant that they ought to have seven or eight minutes before he showed up above them with his rifle; five minutes while he dithered and another two or three while he worked his way around the promontory, if that was what he decided to do.

Gideon turned back to Julie. “Let’s get out of this thing. We’ll stand a lot better chance out there—there are caves and outcroppings all over the place—than we will waiting in here for him to come pick us off.”

“I won’t argue with that,” she said. “I think the front window’s the easiest way out. Go ahead, I’ll follow you.”

“Right.” He pulled himself through, glanced warily at the deserted cliff top, and reached back in to help her get out.

She was up on her right elbow with a puzzled look on her face, tugging awkwardly at the junk that lay over her extended left foot. “Ow. Damn.”

“Julie, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

“No… I don’t think so. My ankle’s caught…
Damn!
There’s this stupid bar…”

“I’ll give you a hand.” He clambered back in, hauling himself to her side on his elbows.

“No, it’s not going to work,” she said, straining at her foot. “Damn!”

A glance made the problem clear. When the van had flipped, two of the three passenger seat rows had come loose, and one of them had fallen over Julie’s leg and been wedged firmly into the buckled ceiling. The steel reinforcing bar that ran along its base had come down across her ankle, pinning her hiking-booted foot to the crushed roof.

He tried to maneuver her foot out of its steel-rimmed trap without success—there wasn’t enough room to move it— then tugged fruitlessly at the bar.

“You’re lucky you didn’t lose your foot,” he said.

“That’s me,” she said grimly, “lucky Julie.”

He made her lie back, then managed to get both aims around the seat, pulling from his cramped position and putting all the strength of his legs and back into it. It didn’t budge, didn’t feel as if anything short of a crane could get it to budge.

He fell back. “Can you get your foot out of the boot?”

“I don’t know.” She fumbled at the laces, blocked by the mass of the seat. “No, it’s hard to get hold—”

“Here, let me—”

Her hand came down on his wrist. “Gideon, there’s no
time!
He could be here any minute. You go!”

“And leave you?” He laughed, but he felt as if something had punched him in the throat. “Forget it.” He went back to her boot laces.

Her fingers dug into his wrist. Her face was very close. “Gideon, go! It’s our only chance.”

“But—”

“I’ll be all right.
We’ll
be all right. I know you’ll think of something.”

“I—Julie, I—”

“Go, already!”

Chapter Twenty-four

I know you’ll think of something.

He had been unable to reply. He’d stroked her cheek, pulled himself back out of the car, and run for the cliff. And he had scrambled up the rocky wall with the mindless, pumping strength of a desert animal, seeming to throw himself from outcropping, to boulder, to crevice, to ridge, every second expecting to see Forrest appear on the rim above him, rifle in hand.

Forrest.

How could he not have realized it? He should have put it all together in Abydos, when TJ had told him about the ornaments missing from the el-Amarna Museum. But he hadn’t; not until they were practically in Forrest’s sights, not until Julie showed him what was in the ledger. “Head of young woman or girl, inscribed…” that is, of course,
engraved.
With hollows for the insertion of faience eyes, channels for eyebrows of gold, perforations for golden earrings, drilled holes for a wig of delicate golden strands…

Hadn’t Arlo stood right mere in the museum and flatly told him the damn things weren’t jewelry? Of course they weren’t jewelry. They were
inlays;
gold and faience inlays and decorations to adorn the head of an A mama statuette. And when everything was assembled—head, inlays, and body—whoever had them would have something that no one else in the world had. An intact, complete Amarna Period statuette. Museums and collectors had burned to own one for decades, but none had ever been recovered.

No wonder the head had been worth killing over. And no wonder Haddon had had to go. He’d seen the head. He could describe it accurately. And if he could describe it, then eventually, when it came on the market as it surely would, it could be traced back to Horizon House and to the people who were there at the time. So he had to be disposed of, and disposed of before returning to Luxor, where he was chafing to show it to everyone in sight.

It wouldn’t have been hard for Forrest to murder the old Egyptologist. Haddon liked his after-dinner drinks and after-dinner monologues; finding people to sit through them was his problem. Forrest could easily enough have gotten himself invited to Haddon’s stateroom. Once there, how difficult would it have been to use Haddon’s bathroom at some point and emerge with four or five crushed-up antidepressant pills? How difficult to find a way to slip them into Haddon’s brandy or Scotch?

A little later he had probably taken a midnight turn around the deck with the notoriously insomniac Haddon. Groggy and stumbling by now, Haddon must have collapsed, hitting his face on the grating. The burly Forrest had lifted him over the railing, and it had been over. Or it would have been over but for that unseen little platform.

So many things should have given him away. It was Forrest, not Haddon or Bruno or anyone else, who had insisted on going all the way downriver to Amarna despite the press of time. Why, except that he knew that the inlays were there? And then there had been the disappearance of the head from the drawer between the time Haddon saw it and the time TJ called Horizon House to ask about it. Who had removed it? It might have been anyone back in Luxor, of course, but surely the likelihood was that it was someone closely connected to whoever had killed Haddon and was therefore on the
Menshiya.
TJ’s student Stacey Tolliver was possible but farfetched. That left Kermit Feiffer, Forrest’s assistant director.

Forrest and Kermit were in it together then, and maybe the rest of the crew too. And take it a step further: maybe they’d been in the antiquities-smuggling business on the side for years, acting as conduits for the el-Hamids’ loot, profiting from their absurdly low prices. Hiding small objects in with the taping paraphernalia would have been child’s play.

And there was something else, now that he thought about it: why would someone who hated Egypt as much as Forrest did keep coming back?

Well, it wasn’t an airtight case, but everything added up.

Not that he was in need of an airtight case at this point. It was Forrest Freeman who’d been trying his damndest to blow them apart for the last fifteen minutes, and that, he rather thought, made the rest of it moot.

He pulled himself the last few feet onto the rim of the cliff—no sign of Forrest—and rolled quickly behind the scant cover of a few scattered boulders. The adrenaline that had propelled him up the wall had drained away, leaving him spent and trembling, hardly able to catch his breath, his pulse pounding in his ears. Flat on his stomach he sucked in air while sweat ran from his face onto the sandy gravel. He had scraped both knees coming up, and the palms of both hands. One of his fingernails had been ripped half-off. He didn’t remember any of it happening. And his hip had been bruised by the tire iron he couldn’t remember sticking in the back of his belt. He adjusted it, muttering, thinking it was doing him more damage than it was Forrest.

He pulled in a last, long breath through his mouth and got cautiously to his hands and knees, his strength seeping slowly back. He could see the van eighty feet below him, as pathetic as a beetle with its legs in the air. The thought of Julie in there, caught by the foot, defenseless…

He jerked his head. It was Forrest he had to worry about. Once he had taken care of Forrest Julie would be all right. What “taken care of” meant, he had yet to figure out, but something would come to him.

I know you’ll think of something.
He hoped so.

Staying low, he scrambled for better cover about thirty feet further on: a column of limestone that had collapsed and fractured into a jumble of massive slabs. From between two of them, he scanned the pale, eroded plateau in Forrest’s presumed direction, squinting in the needle-sharp light. To his surprise a white Horizon van stood about two hundred yards away, and directly beyond it, no more than a mile off, was the familiar, humpbacked Monkey’s Spine that marked the location of WV-29. Between the two he could make out, for much of the way, a portion of a “desert freeway,” one of the sandy tracks used by night-driving truck drivers who had their own reasons for keeping far from the main roads.

That explained how Forrest had gotten here first. When Gawdat had started off on the roundabout route that would bring them to the entrance to the sunken canyon—it had taken a good twenty minutes—Forrest had simply hopped into the other van and driven straight to the cliffside, only a mile—

He ducked. There had been a flash of white about fifty yards in front of him, along the back of the organ-pipe formation. White and red. Forrest’s broad-brimmed Panama hat. Gideon dropped onto his belly and peered through a heap of crumbled limestone. Forrest was coming toward him, rounding the edge of a rocky column and scooting sideways down a sandy incline, one hand steadying himself against the rock, the other holding the rifle.

Crablike, Gideon backed further into the three-foot space between the tilted slabs. He didn’t think he’d been seen; Forrest’s face had been down, his eyes on his footing, and the brim of his hat had probably blocked his vision.

Probably.

He could hear him now, big desert boots scrunching on the gritty soil. Forrest had no choice but to come this way to get to a spot where he could overlook the van; on this part of the cliffs the organ-pipe formation at Gideon’s back sidled up almost to the rim, leaving only a six-foot-wide space for passage. Right in front of Gideon.

And when he came, Gideon would be coiled and ready, his eyes fixed on the place where Forrest’s legs would appear. The instant he saw him he would spring, bowling him over, going for the rifle with both hands and wresting it out of the startled Forrest’s grasp. He would take Forrest to the van he’d come in, lay him down in the back and lash him to something, and find the road that led down into the canyon.

In an hour he and Julie would be on a patio in Luxor sipping something cool, and Forrest would be learning firsthand about the Egyptian system of justice administration.

Assuming that all went well.

He got into position on fingertips and toes, a sprinter’s crouch. With his eyes on the pathway and his muscles so tense they vibrated he waited. And waited.

Two minutes passed. His neck began to ache. His shoulders and back were stiffening; he had probably taken more of a mauling in the van than he’d realized. He adjusted his position, easing the strain on his neck and hands. Forrest didn’t come. Another minute went by. No Forrest.

Sweat dripped from the end of his nose. Had he been seen after all? Had he boxed himself in? Was it Forrest who was doing the waiting-out, sitting at his ease—

His ears pricked. He’d heard something; the
chink
of metal against stone. Not coming toward him, but already past, toward the canyon rim. Somehow Forrest had gotten by. But how could… a frightening image of him out there, taking his time, drawing a bead on Julie through one of the van’s windows, brought him swiftly out from behind the rocks with the tire iron in his hand.

It took him a few seconds to find Forrest. He wasn’t on the rim with Gideon, but about fifteen feet below it, on a projection that Gideon hadn’t noticed before even though he had to have climbed over it on the way up; a slanting shelf about a hundred feet long that ran from the cliff top, well behind where Gideon was standing, to peter out about seventy feet above the canyon floor. Forrest was hunkered down behind some boulders near the lower end of it with his back to Gideon, methodically surveying the area below. The rifle was held beside him, propped on its butt. Clearly, he was concerned that they might have gotten out of the van; equally clearly, the idea that Gideon might already have gotten up the steep walls and be behind him had never crossed his mind.