by Fritz Galt
Soon, they would be alone.
She tried to pad over to him, but caught the tip of a flipper on the deck and began to stumble.
Hani was there to catch her.
“Careful, miss. Flippers are not for walking.”
She could see that.
Dean sat on the edge of the boat, his back to the water. Didn’t he recognize her? Maybe he was concentrating on the dive. Or maybe it was the mask that covered her entire face.
Then in an instant, he leaned backward and plunged into the sea.
She looked at Hani. “How about we just swim around?”
Hani thrust the regulator into her mouth. “Breathe,” he ordered, and walked her off the end of the boat.
“Hey!” Was he trying to drown her?
She didn’t sink as she thought she might. Instead, she bobbed up to the surface. But the water that splattered into her mask stung her eyes.
“Breathe!” Hani shouted, and he dragged her down.
Her ears filled with water, and then she heard nothing.
She took a tentative suck on the mouthpiece. Air flowed into her cheeks. She was breathing underwater!
It didn’t take long for her attention to turn to the beauty of the undersea world. What an intricate, yet harmonious place. No wonder people went diving.
She reached forward and pushed the water behind her. She didn’t move as far as she had expected. It was probably due to the tank on her back.
So she kicked. With a few elegant movements of her legs, she was off and gliding toward Dean.
She was vaguely aware of other divers. She could hear the bubbles of their regulators and see their shadows on the ocean floor. There were also the larger shadows, those of the boats on the surface. She looked up. She didn’t want to bump her head on some other boat.
Suddenly, something gripped her by the hand. She recoiled and jerked away. Was it an overfriendly fish?
But the dark, human form suspended beside her was no fish. It was Hani attempting to guide her.
She took a deep breath and tried to relax. Okay, she would let him lead her. After all, everyone seemed to be heading in the same direction.
She held onto his hand and, kicking in unison, they drifted a mere meter above the reef. She could see the beauty of the coral, the fun formations and changes of color, but she could also see the danger. It was jagged and as sharp as a razor.
Hani turned toward her and she saw wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He was her Aladdin and they were flying on a magic carpet over his kingdom.
But Dean was nowhere in sight.
She paused and tried to get her bearings. Had he changed direction? Returned to the surface?
Then she saw that the reef ended. The drop-off took her breath away. Several divers disappeared into the dark waters.
Hani was pointing at his wrist.
She checked her depth gauge. She was at twenty feet. Hani held up a finger for her to pay attention, then together, they descended into the colder water.
As they glided downward, the wavy sunlight that had been playing on their skin became blurred and finally disappeared. It seemed like shark territory to her.
Dean was zeroing in on a small group of divers near the bottom of the sea. Then she saw why. A sunken ship lay there, covered with a thin layer of sand.
There was something strange about the ship’s deck. It was patterned with three-dimensional suction cups. It looked like the underside of a tentacle.
She checked her depth gauge. Forty feet.
The closer they came to the curious vessel, the more details she could make out. It looked like a hundred porcelain teacups, each attached to a rectangular tank.
Dean turned away from the group of divers and headed for the far side of the sunken ship. She aimed in that direction. Hani still gripped her hand, but allowed her to take the lead.
She felt like a space explorer plunging headlong into the unknown. Her arms drifted behind her, with Hani’s fingers trailing alongside her thigh.
Once she was level with the ship’s deck, she gave it another look. Could those be…? She was drifting past a ship of sunken commodes. And the lids were all open!
That thought was still troubling her when she saw Dean’s form stiffen and float to a stop on the dark side of the ship. He lifted his spear gun as if to shoot.
Was there a shark about to attack?
She held her breath and watched with puzzled fascination as the spear shot out in a puff of air. But it didn’t hit a predator of the deep. Instead, it landed in the leg of an Arab diver.
That must hurt.
Was Dean such a bad shot? Or was it intentional?
Judging from the calm and rapid way in which he coiled the spear’s rope back up and retrieved the weapon, she could tell he had meant to hit the man.
She had just witnessed the CIA doing its dirty work.
She reversed her orientation and headed for the surface as fast as she could go. But something was holding her back. She gulped air in panic. She was being dragged back under.
Then she saw why. Hani was holding her back and showing her his wrist. Not that again.
She checked her depth gauge. She was at fifty feet. She had to avoid ascending too quickly. She would have to pause again at twenty feet. This was excruciating.
Dean had turned and was heading her way.
She reached out a hand to wave at him, but he seemed so determined to reach the surface that he didn’t seem to notice her. How come he didn’t get the bends?
Or maybe he didn’t know what he was doing. Certainly shooting a fellow diver in the leg wasn’t the mark of an expert.
She looked at the man holding his leg that bled a red cloud into the sea. Wouldn’t it attract sharks? His fellow divers were trying to drag him up to the surface. After a few seconds, his jerking and flailing ceased and his body became as stiff as a mummy.
Had she just watched a man die?
Shame on Dean. Maybe the diver was a bad guy, but was killing him necessary?
Hani pointed upwards and they drifted to the twenty-foot depth. There they lingered and watched the Arabs throw caution to the wind and ascend directly to the surface. Dean was long gone.
The undersea kingdom had become a tragic place. And the thought of sharks and unsanitary toilets worked against her. She wanted to be out of the water.
Hani’s attention to the depth of the water and the time on their watches probably spared her a painful case of the bends, but she would rather risk all that just to be out of the water.
They popped up to the surface right beside the white hull of a boat. That was convenient. Hani was far smarter than she gave him credit.
She pulled her flippers off and threw them onto the deck. Her mask and tank came next. Soon she lay like a blubbery whale gasping for air on the deck of the dive boat.
Passengers milled about and watched her. She shielded her eyes against the sun. She didn’t recognize the faces. A couple of nice German boys helped her scoot over to a bench. The horizon seemed to roll up and down.
Couldn’t the boat just go?
Across the water, the Arabs scrambled onto another boat.
The boat operators shouted back and forth.
“What are they saying?” she asked.
“A diver is paralyzed,” Hani translated.
Not dead? That was good news.
“Probably stung by a stonefish.”
She knew better. And as she raised her eyes to the shadow of a man hulking over her, she sensed that it was Dean. And he could read her thoughts.
The tight, intimate smile on his lips told her not to give him away. It was their little secret.
“We’ll talk about this later,” she told him, unable to hide a censuring look.
His smile turned into a grin. “Of course we will.”
The rolling started getting to her, especially in the pit of her stomach.
Hani called up to the captain, and the engine came to life. Soon the boat turned
back to the hotels.
Carla spent the rest of the trip staring at the deck and willing the croissant to stay down. The only thing that kept her from blacking out was the thought of letting Dean get away.
She had reached him at last.
She had to warn him about his arrest warrant in the U.S. But the fact that he was there and holding her hand was enough for the moment.
Chapter 59
Rachel Levy awoke early the morning after her arrival at Sharm el-Sheikh and took a shower in her hotel bathroom. She let the water gently awaken every pore of her body. For the first time, the wounds she had sustained in the car bomb did not sting.
She had done her homework. According to the travel office, Dean Wells was staying in that same Hilton hotel in Sharm el-Sheikh.
Upon entering her room the previous evening and locking the door, she had peeked inside the portfolio and looked over the codex pages. No new cracks or creases had formed during the flight. But where could she safely keep the pages until she found Dean and turned them over to him?
The codex pages were priceless and important to Dean. Someone might want to steal them for their monetary value, and others might want to prevent Dean from getting hold of them.
She had been aware that the hotel offered safekeeping of valuables at the reception desk. But she had refused to let anyone else touch the pages or keep them in their possession. She then decided to hide them somewhere in her room.
She had studied the safe in the closet. Its dimensions were too small to hold the codex pages without bending them.
She had checked out the air vent above the bed. It was too small. Under the mattress. Too obvious. Hanging inside the robe in the bathroom. Too exposed.
At last, she had found the perfect hiding place. The ironing board in the closet was sheathed in a heat-retardant cover. She then checked underneath and saw that she could untie the cover.
At that point, she had removed the five pages from the portfolio and had slid them under the cover of the ironing board. Then she had set the portfolio beside the desk and gone promptly to bed.
She rinsed the soap off her body. She would find Dean that day and get rid of the codex.
She turned off the shower and dried off. Too bad she hadn’t had time to pack clothes for the trip. The only thing to wear was the wrinkled blue suit that she had worn on the plane.
She could iron that and get another day’s use out of it. But she didn’t want to take out the ancient codex pages that were tucked under the ironing board and handle them more than she had to.
She would have to purchase a new wardrobe. The hotel’s resort wear shop was open, so she spent an hour selecting just the right blouse and dress combinations to last the next few days. While she was at it, she purchased a two-piece swimsuit that was efficient and comfortable enough for swimming laps in the pool.
Finally, wearing a straw sun hat, dressed in a yellow flowered blouse and shorts outfit, and carrying a sleek shopping bag, she entered the Wadi Restaurant. A breakfast buffet was set up with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto a terrace and the sea beyond.
The bins of pastries made her think of Carla Martino. She should have invited her to come to Egypt. Nobody appreciated food as much as Carla did.
A South Asian chef was whipping up omelets and gave her a friendly grin. He was making a Western omelet for a good-looking hunk in line, and the aroma almost convinced her to order one, too.
The blond ponytail of the young man in line swished around. “G’day,” he addressed her. Ninety percent chance Aussie, she thought. Ten percent chance Kiwi. She needed more words to narrow down the accent.
“Shall I add onions?” the chef asked.
“No. I’m good,” the man came back.
That threw her. She hadn’t studied Australian vocabulary, but she was familiar with the accent. She knew about the pronunciation of “no” down under. Usually it came out sounding more like “nigh.” The flat accent sounded wrong.
She edged away from the omelet table.
In the end, she opted for a whole grain muffin with a fresh orange on the side.
She chose a table behind a giant fern. It was near enough to keep an eye on the Australian, but not close enough to hear him talking to a bloke in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses. The two men had turned their backs to the room and they huddled over their food, lost in conversation. From behind, the man in the Hawaiian shirt looked suspiciously like Dean.
She set her napkin down and was about to approach their table when another man walked swiftly across the room and joined the pair.
It looked like a bad time to intrude.
She studied the third man carefully. He was broad chested and balding. His martial manner competed with his slight paunch to form a kind of protective, teddy bear quality.
If only she could overhear their conversation.
Dean had phoned her to bring the codex pages to him in Sharm el-Sheikh. There she was, and there he was. Why didn’t she just walk over and announce that she was there?
Maybe she had worked at the CIA too long, but it was better to play it safe. She’d wait for the right moment to approach Dean and give him the codex pages. She didn’t want to jeopardize whatever operation was underway.
The muffin felt heavy going down. The fruit was healthier. She slipped out of the breakfast area unnoticed.
She would try a subtler approach. The concierge was kind enough to lend her a pen and piece of paper. She glanced around the lobby, then wrote a note for Dean. “I’m in room 235. –R.”
She handed the note to a woman at the receptionist’s desk. “Could you make sure that a guest named Dean Wells gets this?”
“Certainly, madam.” The woman put the note in an envelope and sealed it shut.
“Thank you.” Rachel headed for the elevator lobby.
She was eager to meet up with Dean and get rid of the codex pages. But she had been attacked once and had to remain cautious. It was up to Dean to act on the note. In the meantime, she would go about playing the part of a normal hotel guest.
The hotel had a fully equipped fitness center and four swimming pools. She would work out once the muffin had settled in her stomach. She was drawn to voices outside. What did Sharm el-Sheikh have to offer?
Guests walked through the palm-studded gardens with towels and sun lotion. She would wash up and then check out the promenade along the sea.
Back upstairs, she checked that the codex was where she had hidden it, and prepared for a stroll.
She grabbed her sunglasses and tucked her hair under the sun hat that she had just purchased. Then she locked the door and left.
The sun had already turned the sand hot. People sat facing the sea under hotel umbrellas. The water was clear, the waves gentle. Children snorkeled within view of their parents.
Why had Dean chosen to go there? Perhaps because Sharm el-Sheikh was idyllic and away from the cares of the world. A good spook could blend in.
But all was not peaceful.
Ahead of her, a siren pierced the tranquility. People were running toward a pier about a hundred yards down the beach.
Medics carried a man off a boat to the ambulance. The handsome man’s long, dark limbs flopped lifelessly off the sides of the stretcher.
Arab men walked past her shaking their heads. She caught a few words of their conversation. “Bad luck…. Stung by a fish…. He’ll survive.”
She stopped and watched small waves break over coral formations. The sea was beautiful, yet dangerous. It had nearly claimed a life that morning.
Suddenly, she felt intense anxiety in the pit of her stomach. She had been similarly incapacitated ever since the car bomb.
She was in a strange land on a dangerous mission to deliver a valuable document to a spy. She was losing all control of her life.
She hurried back to the hotel.
In the lobby, guests lined up to check out. She wished she were one of them. Beyond the revolving glass door, two men in business suits w
ere hailing an airport taxi. One carried a case that reminded her of her portfolio.
She was heading to her room when a thought struck her. The two men leaving the hotel looked similar to the two men at the Silver Diner in Tyson’s Corner.
They were the ones sitting in the booth behind her. They were the ones who ducked just before her car bomb went off.
Had they taken her portfolio? She ran up to her room. There was no need to use the key. The door was wide open and hanging off its hinges.
An angry, twisting horror gripped her. The covers of the bed were strewn on the floor. Pictures hung crooked on the walls. Her closet stood wide open. She looked at the desk. The portfolio was missing.
She reached into the closet and felt around. The ironing board was still there. She pulled it out and set it upside down in the middle of the room.
She peeled back the cover and felt underneath. The codex pages were no longer there!
She couldn’t stop a sudden burst of tears. They came out like a downpour in Maryland.
It felt worse to know that she was losing all self-control, yet it felt better. As the tears streamed down her cheeks, she was changing into a different person.
But she didn’t want to be different. She liked being the trim, tidy, self-reliant person she had always been. Somehow that wasn’t working. How often had she butted heads with the world? Something about her had to give, and she was giving it up in her tears.
She wiped at her eyes and snuffled back the dripping from her nose. She was an absolute wreck.
Until a pair of hands reached around from behind her. They clamped over her mouth and held it shut.
She couldn’t breathe.
She kicked out for leverage against her assailant. But the more she struggled, the more she realized her efforts were futile.
Chapter 60
Greg Ferguson didn’t know why Dean Wells was on the road, but he did know where Wells was going. Greg had learned from José Gomez that Wells was heading to Sharm el-Sheikh.
Greg had informed the FBI who alerted the Egyptians that Wells was going there, but hours had passed and there was still no news from Egypt. Wells had yet to be found. Maybe he was traveling under an alias.
