The Curse (30 page)

Lana looked about the van as if she was searching for something.

I turned away, sure she was trying to remember what happened to the cattle prod. Hopefully she would think she had left it in the car, which was still back at the outpost.

The rough road and lack of a seat or restraints in the back of the van kept me in a constant state of swaying back and forth and being slammed over and over against the wall behind me.

The cuffs hurt my wrists, the cattle prod rubbed raw against my leg and felt as if it would slip off at any moment and roll down the van floor to Lana. My throat felt like a hot, dry road to hell, and I had a bad headache. I wished I could take off my head and shake out all the hurt.

At least the pain and discomfort reminded me that I was still alive.

From what I could make out through the dirty windows, we were on our way back to Abu Simbel, following the same route that Lana had taken us on the way over.

Why we were going back to the monuments was a mystery to me and a question I was dying to ask, but didn't.

“Two days,” Lana said.

The remark came out of the blue.

When she spoke, I had been dozing as best I could, my head bobbing back and forth, occasionally hitting the van wall I was leaning against.

I opened my eyes.

She was looking at me. Rafi and Dalila both appeared to be sleeping, though in his case, he was in a state of agitated unconsciousness and groaned from pain every so often.

“What did you say?”

She appeared surprised by my question.

Maybe the remark had dribbled out of her mind rather than having been directed at me. She had a weird look to her, a quiet madness, like a serial killer whose mind was controlled by a demon living in her head.

Maybe she was waiting for instructions from the thing in her head.

I wondered what she smoked, sniffed, or shot up that made her look like one of Charles Manson's flower child followers who had stabbed innocent people in a frenzy of drugs and bloodlust.

“Tomorrow,” she whispered so Kaseem wouldn't hear her.

“For what?” I asked. “Until you put an ad in a personal column? Something like ‘Crazy Bitch Seeking Nice People to Hurt'?”

There I went again, giving her a reason to cut out my velvet tongue.

“What about tomorrow?” I asked, hoping to divert her from my insult.

“The end of your world. The beginning of ours.”

“How's that going to happen? Are you planning to rub the scarab until a genie pops out?”

She leaned back, closing her eyes, rocking back and forth as the van sped over the rough road.

She had shut down, tuned me off, after dropping the cryptic remark. Maybe the thing in her head told her to close her trap.

Other than giving me some hope that I had another day to live—maybe—her answer told me little.

What was going to happen tomorrow?

I shut my own eyes, trying to keep the back of my head from banging against the van wall too much.

It took only a moment for me to make a connection with “tomorrow” and what I'd heard standing in the customs line at the Cairo airport after I'd arrived.

The president of the United States would be in Egypt, more precisely at Abu Simbel, to present his Egyptian counterpart with an antiquity being returned from the Smithsonian.

What did Rafi, me, and the Heart of Egypt have to do with two presidents and the end of the world?

The van finally came to a halt.

I leaned up to get a look out the front window and saw something strange.

Up ahead stood a door in what looked to be the side of a mountain that I at first thought was made of sand, but appeared to be hard-packed dirt. Recessed back a few feet, the door had a framework of concrete to keep it from being covered by sand.

Military guards wearing the same uniforms as the men in the convoy had established a guard post tent by the door.

My first impression was that the door led into a mine shaft, but I couldn't see enough of the mountain, mound, dune, or whatever it was to get a good context about the door, but something about that door definitely stirred a memory.

Then it struck me.

Abu Simbel was an artificial mountain. The site was a massive steel-framed, concrete structure that was covered with the same dirt and rock as the surrounding area to make it look like a real mountain, but it was mostly hollow inside.

The dome over the Great Temple measured about two hundred feet in diameter and was about seven stories high, making it at the time the largest man-made dome in the world.

It seemed like an eon ago, but it was just last night from a boat on the lake that I admired the colossal statues and temples that had been broken into over a thousand pieces and put back together on the face of the new mountain.

Now I was looking at the back door to the mountain, put there for maintenance reasons.

After our vans had pulled up to the tented outpost and the soldiers exited the vehicles, I heard a muted sound, almost like champagne corks popping. But the sound came from automatic weapons with silencers—the soldiers coming out of the outpost tent were being shot by Kaseem's men.

The massacre was over in seconds.

The bodies of the men who had jerked like punched dolls disappeared into one of the vans. Blood on the ground was covered with sand and Kaseem's uniformed soldiers took up the positions that the shot guards had held.

Images of the priest's body at Luxor made me gag and I fought throwing up.

The back door to our van opened and soldiers took Dalila out first, then Rafi was taken out and put on a stretcher. He woke up from the pain caused by the movement and let out a yelp.

Dalila tried to break loose to get to her father, but the soldier restrained her while a medic put a cloth over Rafi's face that was soaked in something that put him under again.

“Get out,” Lana snapped at me.

I scooted on my tush toward the back door, getting a kick from her to help me along.

Slipping off the edge of the van with my wrists still cuffed behind me, I felt the cattle prod coming loose.

There was nothing I could do to keep the prod in place. I sweated blood as I felt it slip down against the top of my shoe. I didn't dare look down to see if it was visible at the bottom of my pant leg.

“Bitch!”
Lana screamed.

That answered my question about whether the prod was visible.

She grabbed me by the hair and tripped me, throwing me to the ground, yanking the cattle prod out from where it had been hiding in my pant leg.

As she fumbled with getting ready to use it—in her excitement, she was all thumbs—I looked up at the top of the mountain.

The president of the United States and the president of Egypt were going to be meeting on the other side. It didn't take much imagination to figure out where the two of them would be standing during the ceremony for the return of the ancient falcon.

The bird would be returned to where it once stood in front of the Ramses colossus on the far left.

That meant the two presidents would be standing in front of a statue that was nearly as tall as a seven-story building, not to mention that the front façade of the temple the colossus stood against was even higher.

A ridiculous thought occurred to me as I waited to get zapped from Lana.

Abu Simbel had been featured in many movies, including a James Bond film where one of the caverns in the partially hollow dome was the field office and secret laboratory of the British secret service.

But it was an Agatha Christie movie whose title insanely titillated me as Lana bent down to give me my comeuppance.

Death on the Nile.

68

With my right hand cuffed to a steel post, I couldn't lie completely down or sit up straight. I leaned sideways against the pole, my back to the wall, sick to my stomach, and so dehydrated that my bones ached and my eyeballs felt as if they had been brushed with sandpaper and were ready to pop out of their sockets.

When I got my senses back, I learned from Dalila that I was inside a chamber somewhere in the guts of the man-made mountain.

The area had rough concrete floors and walls and steel beams that had been sprayed with a stucco-looking insulation material to keep them from rusting. With my luck, the insulation was asbestos.

Canvas had been draped overhead for a ceiling and to partition off the area being used. My guess was that the tent material was used to keep noise and light from being detected if anyone ventured into the unfinished portions of the artificial mountain.

Low lit with battery-operated lights that left shadowy areas, had it not been for the symmetrical lines of walls, ceiling, and beams, I would have thought that I was in a cave.

Rafi, with Dalila by his side, sat against the wall opposite from me. His wrist was also cuffed to a post, but it struck me as a waste of handcuffs because I doubted he'd be able to run very far, less more put up a fight, because of his injury.

Dalila wasn't restrained but she obviously wasn't about to go anywhere but by her father's side.

“How long was I out?” I asked.

“All night,” Rafi said when I struggled awake and had enough aches to confirm that I was still alive.

“Lana gave you an extra dose,” he said. “She hates you almost as much as she does me.”

I was lucky she hadn't fried my brains permanently, but wasn't certain she hadn't tried. Or succeeded.

“What level are we on in the mountain?”

“High up,” Rafi told me. “Dalila said we were brought up many flights of steps.”

He had looked as bad as I felt when he was taken out of the van on a stretcher, but could sit up now and had a little color to his face.

While I was under, his field first-aid bandages had been removed and replaced with ones that looked like they had been put on by a doctor. That assumption proved correct when a man wearing an army officer's uniform appeared to treat him.

For reasons I couldn't fathom, Rafi was getting professional medical treatment.
Fattening the calf,
I thought. Kaseem has a reason to want him back on his feet.

And plans for me, too.

I wasn't being kept alive out of Kaseem's gratitude for me chasing the scarab halfway around the world. He wasn't finished with me, but that meant I wasn't finished, either, not yet, not until Lana got the okay to put a bullet between my eyes or killed me slowly and painfully by frying my brains with that cattle prod she used as lovingly as if it were her vibrator.

Keeping my fear and fright from turning into pure panic was tough. I was scared, but I had no outlet for panic except a good scream and that would only bring more pain from evil Lana.

I wanted to ask Rafi if he knew what Kaseem's plans were for him—and me—but hadn't gotten the opportunity yet because Lana told us to shut up when she caught us whispering.

Lana, Kaseem, and the military personnel stayed mostly in the adjoining section where tables were laid out with communication equipment and TV monitors on them.

From what I could see, the monitors showed the back of the mountain, including the door leading into the mountain, along with the front of the great Abu Simbel colossi complex and the smaller temple complex of Hathor and Nefertari.

I had a good view on the big television monitor of the tented pavilion set up for the presidential meeting in front of the Ramses colossi center stage.

No wall separated us prisoners from Kaseem's command center, but other than an occasional look shot our way, they tended to their monitors and communications equipment and ignored us.

The only thing I got out of watching the interplay was that Kaseem was in charge. I couldn't understand what was being said, but it was obvious he was the one cracking the orders.

The fact that a large area was being monitored by cameras his conspiracy had set up made it evident that the soldiers I saw were probably just part of his contingent, maybe even just a small part.

I felt as if I had been beat up—punched and kicked until I had a generalized feeling of burning raw agony all over my body rather than a particular point of pain.

“Besides being high up, where exactly are we at in the mountain?” I whispered when Lana was busy listening to Kaseem.

Rafi nodded his head toward a large schematic map on the wall across from me.

“That's an engineering plan drawn up when the mountain was being built forty years ago. We're near the top of the Ramses statue that is farthest to the left of the temple entrance.”

That was the Ramses statue where the stone falcon would be returned.

I asked what Kaseem's plans were for us.

Instead of answering me, Rafi turned his head away.

Dalila asked him to answer my question and he told her to be quiet and hugged her with his free arm.

It gave me another rush of panic.

That bad, huh.

I looked at the television set on the table where Kaseem had created his headquarters.

I couldn't understand the words, but the pictures were easy to decipher—the U.S. president was coming to Abu Simbel. Scenes of soldiers in armored personnel carriers at the airport and in positions in front of the temples told me that security was tight.

But obviously not tight enough since Kaseem's cohorts were able to sneak a clandestine group in under the very nose of Egyptian security. To kill Anwar Sadat, Egypt's Nobel Peace Prize–winning president, the assassins simply stopped their military truck in front of the grandstand, stepped out, and opened fire.

Kaseem had literally created a command center in close proximity to where the presidents would meet. It was obvious that he had something more complex in mind than a hit-and-run assassination.

How he managed to create his headquarters in the middle of the security perimeter the Egyptians would have established to protect the meeting of the heads of state was incredible. He could not have pulled it off without the support of high-ranking Egyptian military officers.