“Oh, yeah?” the man with the wine stain said, sitting up a little. This was the most interesting thing that had happened since the big guy had left. “You want me to, I don’t know, rough her up a bit? Put a little scare into her?”
He looked over at the Bushmaster propped against the wall. The .45 was in its holster. Not that he’d need that kind of firepower to scare an old lady. He could knock her around a little bit, hold the knife under her nose, make a big show out of it.
“No, we don’t want you making contact until it’s necessary. She might try to run if she knows she’s being watched. Or she might attract more law enforcement attention.”
“Okay.”
“At this point, we just need some more pictures,” Alpha said. “In case Dr. McRae gets more ideas.”
“You sure that’s all?” he asked. “I could mark her up a bit and then take pictures. You know, two birds with one stone and all that.”
Alpha paused like he was considering this. “No,” he said, eventually. “Just pictures for now.”
“All right,” the man with the wine stain said. “I’ll upload some more in a bit. She don’t lower her blinds at night. I can shoot some of her eating supper. When I get the angle right, there’s this calendar in the background that shows the date.”
“Perfect. Talk to you soon.”
The man with the wine stain put his phone back in his pocket, lifted the 300-millimeter lens, and went to work.
CHAPTER 25
WEST OF LUXOR, Egypt
T
he helicopter came to get Strike an hour later. Its pilot was thoughtful enough to land just outside camp, so the sand stirred up by the rotors didn’t lash into everyone. There was nothing he or anyone else could do to save Storm from the emotional whipping he felt as he watched Strike go.
This was how it went for them, he knew. For as close as they seemed that night at the hotel in Luxor, for as much as he yearned to be with her, for as strong as his feelings for her were, there was always another cataclysm waiting to ruin it all.
Someday there would be a reunion. Perhaps. And Storm would always be wondering whether it was fueled by personal feelings or professional necessity.
Storm watched the helicopter lift away. As it grew small in the distance, he was aware that Katie Comely was approaching behind him. Lightly, she put a hand on his back.
“You okay?” she asked.
He turned to face her. The heat of the day was upon them—it was at least 120 degrees—but her blue eyes had a coolness about them he found inviting. There was a hesitant smile on her freckled cheeks.
“Yeah. Perfect,” he said.
All around them, parts of the camp were breaking up. Word had gone out that the professor had taken off. The workers had done the math and figured out they were no longer going to get paid. They were departing with due haste. The academics were mostly just moping around, gossiping in small groups, bemoaning their fate, worrying about what would happen now that their funding was gone.
“This is none of my business, of course, but are you two together?” she asked, shifting her eyes in the direction of the helicopter. “I thought you were just colleagues when you first arrived, but then the way she responded to me earlier was, well, I think it’s safe to say there were some feelings there. A woman doesn’t usually call another woman a ‘piece of ass’ unless, you know.”
“Yeah, that was just…actually, I don’t know exactly how to describe that. And I’m not sure how to answer your question, either. We have been together in the past. I guess that’s obvious. We are also pretty obviously not together right now.”
“And the future?”
“Got me,” Storm said quite honestly.
“Well, you’re welcome to stay here as long as you like. It doesn’t look like anyone is going to be using Professor Raynes’s tent. And we could certainly use someone like you around.”
“We?” Storm said.
She took a step closer and said, “Well, maybe just me.”
Storm inhaled deeply, then expelled the breath slowly. “That is a wonderful, wonderful offer, Dr. Comely. And under different circumstances, I would be happy to take you up on it.”
“But?” she said, the freckled smile dimming just a little.
“But I came here to do a job, and it’s not done yet.”
“I understand. I really do, but…” she looked down at the sand for a second, then looked back up at him and blurted, “Would you like to come back to my tent with me right now?”
She seemed so surprised the words had come out of her mouth, she hastened to add: “I mean, I don’t want you to think I’m a…This isn’t something I normally do. I just…Having that gun point at my head and…I don’t know.”
Storm leaned down and kissed her. On the cheek. “That is also a wonderful offer,” he said.
“But?” she said shyly.
“Yeah. But.”
“Okay. I understand.”
Storm stepped back, but Katie walked toward him, rose up on her tiptoes, and kissed him. On the lips.
Psychologists have done double-blind, controlled experiments that have proven, scientifically, that in the immediate aftermath of surviving a traumatic event, feelings of passion are heightened. Storm didn’t need to read any of the research. He was experiencing all the confirmation he needed.
“Thank you,” she said, when it was done.
“Thank you,” he said. “And now I’m going to have to go, because it’s getting more difficult to do the right thing with each passing second.”
It took every ounce of his self-control to walk away.
STORM PURPOSEFULLY AVOIDED any prolonged good-byes on his way out of camp. He simply got Antony fed and watered, loaded him with what he hoped would be a sufficient amount of supplies, and hopped on.
“Wait! Where are you going?” Katie asked when she saw Storm heading out.
“Due east,” he said.
She looked confused for a moment; then Storm saw understanding reach her face. “Good luck,” she said.
“Could you do me two favors?”
“Anything.”
“First, could you please contact the Supreme Council of Antiquities? They need to know what’s been happening so they can take the appropriate steps, put a warrant out for Raynes’s arrest. They might even be able to help you with Bouchard.”
“That’s a good idea. What’s the second favor?”
“Strange question, but: how much does a camel cost?”
She again looked confused. “I don’t know. Maybe, gosh, ten thousand gineih?”
“Okay.” Storm reached into his wallet and took double that amount in American greenbacks, a currency still very much in favor in Egypt. He held it out for Katie. “Could you please see this gets to a local camel renter named Massri? I somehow suspect I won’t be able to return his camels to him and I hate to leave him in the lurch.”
“Will do,” she said, accepting the money and smiling again.
Storm blew her a kiss, then urged Antony forward. He rode on without looking back. He had come to the desert to find the source of the promethium, and he wasn’t going to leave until he did.
In some ways, his task had gotten slightly easier. He at least knew what he was looking for now: some kind of opening into an underground limestone cave.
But in other ways, it was just as daunting. The opening did not need to be any larger than what one man could crawl into. And he was looking for it in a desert that had gotten no less vast.
Storm was missing the air-conditioning—and was getting even more wistful about passing on the offer Katie had made—before he even got out of sight of the camp. The heat was searing, and Storm could feel himself losing water by the liter: anything he sweated out seemed to evaporate instantly.
Still, in a strange way, the sun was
his friend. He needed it to have any chance of finding this cave. He would not have the luxury of working at night, like the archaeologists did.
As he rode, he occupied his mind with math. Katie said Professor Raynes would disappear for two hours every other day. That meant he was likely walking for a little less than one hour out to the cave, digging out as much promethium as he could carry—which probably didn’t take too long—then walking back.
Moving at a brisk pace, someone with long legs and in decent shape, like Raynes, could cover four miles in an hour. But that was on asphalt. Sand would slow him down a bit. Climbing up and down dunes would slow him further.
So Storm decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that three miles felt like about the right distance. Walk three miles in fifty minutes. Spend twenty minutes collecting promethium. Walk three miles back. It made sense.
Antony was in no special hurry, but he still covered the three miles in far less time than a human could. When Storm’s GPS told him they had traveled due east three miles, he stopped and looked around.
They were now back within the target zone that the nerds had originally given Storm, but it was looking no less bleak and empty. Sand dunes stretched in every direction. Other than a few scrubby plants, there was no sign of life.
Storm decided to form a mile-square search grid with his current position as the center. In his mind, he cut the grid into two-hundred-foot strips, which meant he would pass within one hundred feet of every inch of this one square mile of desert. He just hoped that would bring him close enough to spot what might be a fairly small entrance.
Really, it was Antony who was doing the hard work. Slicing a 5,280-foot wide grid into 26.4 mile-long lines meant Antony would have to travel 27.4 miles to cover it all. But camels were bred for such things, and Antony was no more or less disagreeable than usual, doing the usual amount of bellowing but plowing onward all the same.
They were ten miles into their back-and-forth journey when Storm hit pay dirt. It was a rocky outcropping that Storm had already passed two or three times. Each time, he had wanted to break off his route to explore it more closely, but he forced himself to stay disciplined.
Finally, on his closest pass, he saw something that didn’t belong. It was a sheet of plywood, attached to the sheer side of the outcropping. The plywood was roughly the same tan color as the rock around it. It was crude but effective camouflage. Certainly, it couldn’t be seen from satellite, owing to the angle as much as anything.
Storm dismounted from Antony and looked for something to use as a camel hitch. There was nothing, at least nothing that would stop Antony from doing as he pleased if he got it in his camel brain to run off.
“Stay,” Storm said.
Antony belched at him.
“Good boy,” Storm said.
He approached the plywood slowly. There were three hinges at the top of the sheet that had been bolted into the rock. He pulled at the bottom of the wood. It came up perhaps an inch, then stopped.
Storm frowned at it for a second, then saw the reason: it was secured in place by a bolt that slid into a hole that had been bored into the rock. The bolt had been painted the color of sand, as was the padlock that secured it.
It was a security system that might thwart a desert nomad, but not a man with Storm’s skills. The lock was a cheap, mass-produced brand. Storm considered shooting it off—two bullets would have done it—but opted for the more elegant approach.
He lowered his ear to the lock and slowly turned the dial until he heard the first pin drop into place. On a more expensive lock, the sound is dampened to prevent exactly what Storm was doing. On this brand, it sounded like thunder. After he got the third number, he quickly spun the entire combination.
The lock opened easily. Storm swung the door upward, revealing a hole in the rock.
Storm walked back toward Antony and retrieved a flashlight from his pack. Properly armed, he returned to the plywood and lifted it again. He aimed the flashlight beam into the darkness underneath.
The entrance was only slightly smaller than the sheet of plywood. He could see where footprints—presumably Raynes’s—had been left in the sand.
Storm followed those impressions as the tunnel quickly narrowed down to a diameter that was a fairly tight squeeze for a man of his size. Raynes was tall, like Storm, but a lot thinner. Before long, Storm had to turn sideways.
The tunnel began to slope gradually downward and widen. Storm could tell, simply from the way that the echoes from his footfalls were coming back at him, that there was a large, open space somewhere ahead of him. He shifted his flashlight beam in that direction.
For a while, the beam was reflecting back from the sides of the tunnel. Then, suddenly, it was disappearing into the darkness. Storm quickened his pace and was soon shining the flashlight beam into a large, irregularly shaped cavern, perhaps twenty-five feet at its highest point and eighty feet at its widest.
Storm inspected the limestone walls. Whereas the tunnel had been chiseled by whatever instrument Raynes had used, these walls were different. They were smooth, like they had been carved by water many epochs long ago, when global climate was different and the Sahara received far more rainfall.
A thin layer of dust and sand covered the flatter parts of the floor. In some places, it was undisturbed. In others, it was a patchwork of scuffs and scrapes. Storm could easily make out the path that Raynes had repeatedly walked and continued following it.
It led him to the far side of the chamber and a wall that was unlike anything Storm had ever seen. It was pure white and stretched fifteen feet at a seventy-five-degree angle until it disappeared into the ceiling above it. Storm had heard miners talk about finding veins or lodes of minerals and how they ran in jagged layers through other types of rock. He realized he was seeing such a vein.
And this one happened to be made of pure promethium. The substance, which was some kind of promethium salt, was almost chalky in consistency. There were flakes of it lying in piles at the base of the wall. Storm realized the promethium he had seen had already been ground up, perhaps because it made it easier for transporting.
He reached out with his finger and touched the wall. It was hard, although if he dug his fingernails into some of the looser parts, he could break pieces off with his hands. Raynes had likely used a small pick. It wouldn’t take very long to break off, say, fifty pounds of the stuff, which was probably about as much as Raynes could comfortably carry in a backpack across three miles of desert.
Still, going on the one-thousand-dollars-an-ounce estimate, that was a roughly eight-hundred-thousand-dollar walk.
And there was a lot more where that came from. Storm could see one spot where Raynes had worked through the entire thickness of the vein. Behind it was a substance with a subtly different consistency. That must have been whatever substance promethium degraded into. Or perhaps it was the substance that was the precursor to promethium.
Whatever the case, the wall was an incredibly rare—perhaps unique—geological oddity: naturally occurring promethium. It was something McRae and other researches thought didn’t exist. Turns out they just hadn’t been patient enough. Or lucky enough. Or perhaps unlucky enough. Nevertheless, there it was, this brief moment in this ore’s life span when it happened to take the form of promethium.
Bearing in mind that the substance was mildly radioactive, Storm stepped away from it. He shined his flashlight on it one last time, then retraced his steps out of the cave.
Once back in the hot sun, which was blinding after having been under the earth, Storm buttoned the door back up. He made sure to note his precise location on his GPS. He imprinted the coordinates in his head.
Before long, he was back atop Antony, heading for the highway.
He had some terrorists to track down. And if his phone was still where he had wedged it, Professor Raynes was going to lead him right to them.
&nbs
p; CHAPTER 26
SOMEWHERE IN THE MIDDLE EAST
H
e didn’t have the address. He didn’t have a map. He was more or less groping his way there on feel, telling himself with each turn that his route still looked familiar.
The only things going for Professor Raynes were that the cargo truck had been fully gassed up and that he had been to Ahmed’s place twice before.
The gas was good, because already his credit card wasn’t working. It told him the Egyptian authorities were on to him and were taking steps to make his movements more difficult.
And his faint recognition of his route was good because he couldn’t waste time reaching Ahmed. Raynes had concluded that the man who had let him run off—Talbot, or whatever his name was—was actually quite correct. The promethium in back was a fine retirement plan. He would cash it in and disappear to somewhere no one would be looking for him. Maybe somewhere in the Mediterranean. Like Elba. If it was good enough for Napoleon, it was good enough for Professor Raynes.
He could feel his desperation growing as the time clicked on and he still hadn’t arrived. He was sure he was lost at least twice, then he would recognize another landmark, telling him he was on the right track.
Then, finally, as the sun began to set and the lights of the suburban neighborhood he was crawling around started to come on, he found it: the narrow road that led to the walled compound where Ahmed conducted his business.
He saw the familiar sign—AHMED TRADES METAL, it said in Arabic—outside the gated entrance, which had a guard shack next to it. He was greeted by a man with an AK-47 hanging from a strap in front of him.
Raynes announced himself, and said he was there to talk to Ahmed. The man then spoke into a two-way radio. Raynes could hear angry words pouring out of it. The name Stanford Raynes had become an unpopular one in this place.
But eventually the man with the rifle said, “Okay. Come on.”
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