Serpent of Moses (5 page)

He leaned back against the wall, trying to take his mind off the discomfort. Just as he closed his eyes he heard a noise from somewhere beyond the door. His first thought was that he’d heard a door slam shut. Moments later, when he didn’t hear anything else and when no one entered the room to hit him again, he resettled himself. He was just entering that place where he could feel himself beginning to doze when the door slammed open.

Startled, Jack launched himself away from the wall, forgetting the bonds that yanked him back, stretching his arms in a direction they weren’t meant to go. With his attention pulled to the door, and to the man who stood there, wild eyes moving around the room, he was able to ignore the pain.

While the man was lit from behind, Jack recognized him as the one from the cavern, the Englishman who had called him by his name. The man who stood before him now, though, was a lot tenser than the one he’d spoken with beneath the earth.

Jack was about to ask him if he would let him use the bathroom when his captor began to rush forward in his direction. His speed and the way he looked back over his shoulder before kneeling in front of his prisoner told Jack that something had happened that had changed the balance of things.

“It looks like you’ve got a lot on your mind,” Jack said, “but I could really use a tour of your facilities.”

Even as Jack asked the question, the other man scooted to the side and reached for the ropes binding the archaeologist’s hands, his mind clearly somewhere else. But when Jack’s question worked its way through his other concerns he glanced up.

“Come again?” he asked.

Jack offered a half smile. “The bathroom,” he said.

His captor nodded and gave another tug, yet the bonds would not loosen. Then, with the look of someone just remembering something, he reached into the canvas bag he’d dropped in front of Jack and withdrew a large knife from one of its pockets.

Jack’s eyes widened as it passed in front of his face, close enough for him to see the red now drying to brown on the blade.

“On second thought, I can hold it,” he said.

The man ignored him and brought the knife around behind Jack, where he began to work on the portion holding the archaeologist to the overhead beam. Jack, who considered this an improvement of sorts to his present circumstances, kept his mouth shut while the man worked, and from the heavy breathing he could hear coming from his new liberator he suspected speed was of the essence. When at last the blade sliced through, the man leaned back and studied his handiwork. With a wry smile at Jack, he stood, took the still-bound man by the arm, and helped him to his feet. That accomplished, he retrieved his bag—which Jack noticed had a longer bundle secured on top of it—and then locked eyes with Jack.

“Shall we?” he said, gesturing toward the door.

“Absolutely,” Jack said, although his pleasure at finding himself mobile was tempered by the fact that his hands were still tied and that the Englishman, slight as he was, had a firm grip on his elbow.

When they stepped out into the hallway Jack could see into the other room and did a double take at what he saw. He was quickly shuffled down the hallway and the image was gone. He turned to look at his companion, asking the question with raised eyebrows.

The Englishman shrugged. “When you do what I do for a living, you learn to sleep in some unusual spots and with one eye open,” he offered by way of explanation.

Oddly enough Jack understood exactly what he meant, though the response created another question. “And just what exactly do you do?”

They’d reached the end of the hall, where Jack saw the door leading outside. To the right was an entryway into what looked like a room larger than any he’d yet seen in the house. Instead of ushering Jack out into the Libyan sun, the Englishman directed him into the room.

They didn’t spend more than thirty seconds there. Long enough for the Englishman to needlessly feel for pulses. When his captor bent down to do so, the temptation to flee came over Jack, but he resisted the urge, quickly calculating the slim odds of getting past the closed door, much less making a clean escape. The Englishman straightened and blew out a breath. He ran a hand through his disheveled hair, casting a tired eye around the room, then caught Jack’s eye as if seeing him for the first time.

“The handle’s a bit tricky,” he said. “You wouldn’t have made it.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Once again the Englishman stooped to retrieve his bag and then started for the door, this time without a hand on Jack’s arm.

“We should probably step it up a bit,” he called over his shoulder. “I don’t know how long it’ll be before he wakes up.”

It took Jack a beat to realize whom the Englishman meant.

“What do you mean ‘wakes up’?” he called after him.

“As in gets up off the bed and comes after us and tries to do to us what he did to Benton and Phillips.”

Jack, who had begun to follow the Englishman, looked back at who he could only assume were Benton and Phillips. With a small shudder he hurried after the other man.

When he caught up with him, he was reaching for the door handle. Soon the two men were outside. After spending so much time in a darkened room, the sun blinded Jack for several seconds before he was able to blink away the glare. When his vision cleared he saw the jeep toward which they were headed, and with that understanding it occurred to him that he was following a man he didn’t know and who had, only minutes ago, been keeping him tied up and subject to beatings by a much bigger man who at any moment might burst from the house for another round of the same.

It was then that he noticed the number of people around him. It was midmorning and the street teemed with bodies, an undulating sea of humans following no noticeable traffic pattern. And not one of them paid the two foreigners a bit of attention, despite the fact that one of them had his hands bound behind him. Yet Jack had spent enough time in this part of the world to understand that this apparent obliviousness was nothing of the sort. Most of these people saw precisely what was happening, noticed every detail, but not once would they allow themselves to look in his direction.

Jack’s feet slowed as they neared the jeep. The Englishman, demonstrating yet again an uncanny ability to intuit Jack’s thoughts, had already grabbed the knot about Jack’s wrists. He’d also slung his travel bag over a shoulder, his free hand now holding the knife. He positioned it under Jack’s ribs. When Jack turned his head, the Englishman offered an apologetic smile.

Reaching the jeep, the Englishman used the point of the knife to urge Jack into the front passenger seat, where he used the dangling ends of the rope to secure his captive in position. That done he set the bag, longer bundle still secured on top, in the back. As he slid into the driver’s seat, Jack noticed he wore a satisfied smile. Neither man spoke as the Englishman turned the key, put his hand on the gearshift. Then, after glancing at his unwilling passenger, he leaned toward Jack, reached past him, and pulled the seat belt across. The buckle slid in with a click.

Righting himself in his seat, the Englishman aimed another smile at Jack.

“Can’t be too careful,” he said.

“No, I suppose not,” Jack agreed.

When the Englishman put the car in gear, Jack asked a question that he just had to have an answer to. “What’s your name?”

The man glanced at Jack, then returned his eyes to the road, carefully navigating the street’s foot traffic. He removed a hand from the wheel long enough to retrieve a pair of sunglasses from the center console. Only after he’d put them on did he respond with, “Martin Templeton.”

The name meant nothing to Jack, but as the jeep picked up speed along the dirt road, finding what seemed to be every rut, something beyond the identity of his polite captor started to surpass it in urgency. As if to emphasize his new area of focus, one of the jeep’s tires dipped into a hole deep enough to separate Jack from his seat. When he landed, and after a groan that pulled the Englishman’s eyes away from the road, Jack gave him a pained smile.

“About that bathroom?”

When the plane touched down at Heathrow, Esperanza, in the aisle seat, barely noticed. It wasn’t until the one sitting next to her—a businessman who had given up trying to establish a rapport within an hour of their flight leaving Caracas—indicated a desire to slip by her that she realized they’d landed. Somewhere over the ocean the lunacy of what she was doing had struck her and she’d spent much of the flight bouncing between passion and calculation. She’d come to the conclusion that she preferred the former state, even as she understood that the best decisions generally came while in the grip of the latter.

She wasn’t sure which one had brought her from South America to Europe, but she suspected it was some combination of the two—a need to act tempered by solid reasoning behind those acts. When she and Jack had renewed their relationship, when he’d brought her on as a linguist in the treasure hunt that had almost killed them both, it was the passion that carried her through that time. Even then, though, there were hints of the burgeoning maturity that now caused her to consider things with an eye focused past the immediate. And that, to her, was the problem as far as Jack was concerned; he lived in the immediate. Despite what they had gone through together, that was something that had not changed. And the reason she was in London, pulling her carryon from the overhead bin, was she was no longer content with the status quo.

Once in the terminal, she took a few moments to get her bearings before heading for the car-rental area. Fifteen minutes later, she was traveling east on the M4. It had been years since her last visit to London, so as she drove deeper into the city she viewed everything through the eyes of a tourist, filling the time between Heathrow and Apsley House by taking in the feel of the bustling city.

When she’d deplaned, she’d intended to check into her hotel before heading to the museum, but somewhere between baggage claim and sliding the key into the rental’s ignition, the order of those events had changed.

She’d never met Sturdivant in person. In fact, the day before had been the first time she’d ever spoken with him. Before that, all of her knowledge had come from secondhand accounts of others’ dealings with him, namely Jack and Romero—whose professions had them running in similar circles. She’d found him pleasant enough in a stuffy sort of way, and as he was the curator for several of London’s museums, she wouldn’t have expected anything else.

The M4 transitioned to the A4, and before long Hyde Park opened up on her left. While Sturdivant executed his role for a variety of museums, he spent most of his time at Apsley House, and within minutes Esperanza was bringing the car to a stop in front of the sixteenth-century structure. On most other occasions she would have enjoyed studying the building as well as the extensive collection of artwork and cultural icons it contained, but the purpose of her visit excluded such casual enjoyment.

Once inside, she located the administrative wing in short order, and Sturdivant’s office not long after that. The director was inside, an open file on his desk and a phone to his ear. Esperanza could not get a feel for the height of the man sitting behind the large desk, though she suspected he was quite tall—the height accentuated by a rail-thin physique. He looked up when Esperanza appeared in the doorway, but she might as well have been invisible for the way his eyes seemed to pass right through her. Then they were back on the desk, moving over the open file.

Esperanza took the lack of acknowledgment as tacit approval to enter and she did just that, stepping in and claiming a seat across from his desk. When he looked up again, she engaged her best smile, the one she knew was manipulative but that seldom failed to get her what she wanted. The problem, which she sensed immediately, was that Milo Sturdivant had no use for her charms. Still, the fact that she had invaded his personal space prompted him to finish his call, although he did not look at his guest again until he had gathered the contents of the file, meticulously replaced them, and slipped the file into a desk drawer.

“Can I help you?” he asked her, looking over his glasses and using a voice that let Esperanza know he would have rather done anything else.

“I’m Dr. Esperanza Habilla,” she answered, determined to ignore his demeanor. “We spoke on the phone yesterday.”

Sturdivant did not answer right away, but he did meet Esperanza’s eyes for the first time.

“You’re Romero Habilla’s sister, aren’t you?” he asked after a time, and she couldn’t tell by the tone if confirming the relationship would help or hinder her efforts.

“I am,” she admitted.

The museum director pursed his lips and nodded.

“I’ve purchased a few things from him,” he said. “His items are generally a bit higher priced than I believe is warranted, but I’ve found him to be fair.”

“He’ll be happy to hear that,” Esperanza said, pleased to have found some common ground but also beginning to believe that the man only dipped into his emotional well when perusing a painting by a dead master or an artifact from a vanished civilization—a theory granted weight by the speed with which he moved on to other matters.

“What can I do for you, Dr. Habilla?”

“As I said, we spoke yesterday—”

“You asked me about Jack Hawthorne.”

“The last time I spoke with him, he said he was planning to pay you a visit.”

“We had a meeting set for three days ago, and while I’m used to Dr. Hawthorne arriving in his own good time, he’s testing the limits of my patience.”

“Believe me, I understand,” she said.

“While I’ve allocated money for what he said he would be able to procure, I can’t hold on to it indefinitely. In fact, there’s an extraordinary display of Celtic weaponry I would love to have here in Apsley House and I’m considering redirecting the money meant for Dr. Hawthorne.”

“What is he supposed to be bringing you?” Esperanza asked, but Sturdivant’s head was shaking before she finished the question.

“I’m sorry. I’m afraid I can’t reveal that,” he said, although Esperanza doubted he was sorry at all. Still, she offered a smile meant to convey understanding. “To be perfectly frank, Dr. Habilla, the only reason I haven’t yet reallocated the money is because of Dr. Hawthorne’s reputation. But that reputation does not entitle him to operate as if Apsley House is his personal trading post.”

“I’m sure that’s not how he looks at it,” she said, even as she suspected that was exactly how Jack viewed it. Esperanza saw Sturdivant’s eyebrows come together in thought.

“Forgive me, Dr. Habilla, but I’m still unclear about the reason for this visit.”

“It’s simple really. Jack is going to show up in London soon with an artifact that he wants to sell you, and I want to be here when he arrives at Apsley House to make the exchange.”

If her explanation did nothing else, it served to change the way Sturdivant looked at her. Rather than an entirely dismissive expression, the new one also contained a hint of puzzlement and a dash of worry.

“Why?”

“Because I have something very important I want to say to him,” she explained, using the voice that would have made most any man willing to accept something purely nonsensical. However, as she had already ascertained, Milo Sturdivant was not most men.

“And this something can’t be said over the phone?”

“Sadly, no,” Esperanza said, feeling the first hints of irritation—annoyance that grew as Sturdivant did not follow the Venezuelan’s response with one of his own. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and regarded her as one would a puzzle. After several seconds, he leaned forward and placed his elbows on the desk, making a steeple of his fingers.

“Just so I’m clear,” he said. “You flew here from Venezuela to track down a man you could just call—a man who, to be honest, may not show at all?”

Esperanza could not begrudge the man his questions. After all, hadn’t she asked some of the same ones during her long flight? However, hearing those questions come from a man who had spent the last several minutes robbing her of many of the tools she customarily used to get what she wanted brought the irritation to genuine anger and in less time than was normally the case.

After letting the director’s question hang there for a moment, she too leaned into the desk, closing the distance between them. “I’m here because I’m going to say some things to an absentee archaeologist that just might make his ears bleed,” she answered, her accent thick with frustration.

She waited a beat to make sure she had Sturdivant’s attention. Seeing that she did, she continued, “I swear to you, if he shows up here and you don’t call me to let me know, I will show up at your office door again. And I promise you that that visit will not go as swimmingly as this one has.”

She’d said every word with a calmness that would have been appropriate for a discussion of traffic patterns around Hyde Park, yet there was no mistaking the genuine threat in each syllable. She suspected that Milo Sturdivant knew she wasn’t bluffing.

Which was why he did something for the first time in her presence: he smiled.

“I can certainly do that,” he said, the barest hint of apology in his tone. “As soon as I hear from Dr. Hawthorne—
if
I hear from him—I will call you and let you know.”

In that instant, the menace that had taken over Esperanza’s whole being vanished, replaced by the smile with which she’d entered the room.

“That would be wonderful,” she said, sliding her card across the desk. Then, to further reward his acquiescence, she rose and started for the door. She had just reached it when a thought struck her. “By the way, how much are you set to pay Jack for whatever it is he’s bringing to you?”

When Milo Sturdivant provided the answer, Esperanza felt everything shift. Less than sixty seconds later she was in the hallway calling Jack.

The Egyptian resisted the urge to run a hand over the back of his head, as he had a number of times since waking. He knew the wound had clotted and his hand would not return blood, which meant that, for now at least, it was not a concern.

He’d pulled what he could from the pockets of Benton and Phillips, which wasn’t much, but he had a tidy sum of his own—enough to track Martin Templeton to the ends of the earth if need be.

The heat had cleared the streets of most of its traffic, which allowed Imolene to make good progress toward the area of town with the few shops that offered him a chance of renting a car that would take him to Al Bayda.

The dirt road ran into a stone wall twenty yards ahead, with an adjoining road following the length of the wall in both directions. He took the path leading to the left and followed the cut-through until it emptied into a busier thoroughfare. Here, the Egyptian stopped to collect himself and to readjust the heavy pack slung over his shoulder.

He could see all three of the businesses on his list and selected one based on the fact that it was the only one with a car parked out front. Resettling his pack, he started toward the store, pausing when he reached the car—a Yugo that seemed held together by rust. Grunting, he gave some thought as to how he would fit his large frame into it. In the end he decided that necessity outweighed comfort.

The interior of the shop was dark and smelled vaguely of garlic. The Egyptian took a position behind another man who had arrived before him and exchanged a look with the proprietor, a middle-aged Libyan with thinning hair and a faded but vicious-looking scar that began below his right ear and traveled down his neck, disappearing beneath his shirt.

“I only have the one vehicle,” the man said to the other customer.

“That car will not get me to Tiblisi,” the customer said.

“It’s a good car,” the owner said. “It will take you across the desert and back if you let it.”

“Is the Yugo the only car you have available?” the Egyptian asked, leaning past his competition.

“It’s the only car,” the shopkeeper said. “The first car I’ve had in two weeks.”

He assumed an apologetic smile before dismissing Imolene.

The first customer had pulled a billfold out of his pocket and peeled off several dinars, placing them down on the counter.

“You can have the car for two hundred,” the owner said. He gestured at the sixty dinars the man had offered. “This will not even fill the tank of the next car that comes.”