No Living Soul

by Julie Moffett

  After a minute, a tiny movement caught my eye. Gwen moved partially out from behind the chariot. She had the staff in her gloved hands.

  I started to stand, but Slash held my arm, keeping me down. He murmured against my ear, “Tell Elvis we need a distraction in the one of the rooms on the back east side.”

  I slipped the phone out of my pocket and texted Elvis.

  A few seconds later the message came back. Stand by.

  We waited until we heard someone shout and the sound of running feet toward the back of the museum. Gwen held out the staff with shaking hands to Slash who motioned to me to take it. Presumably he wanted to keep his hands free to handle any potential confrontation. I handed Gwen the burner phone and motioned for her to keep an eye on the text response from Elvis.

  She nodded while I crouched there next to Slash, holding the Rod of God in both hands with extreme nervousness. Given my tendency to clumsiness, I wasn’t the best person in the world to hold one of the most significant artifacts of all time, but we didn’t have time to debate the wisdom of the placement. I wasn’t sure how to hold it. Did I put my hands together in the middle with my wrists facing each other or did I spread them apart and hold I like it was a hotel railing? What would Moses do?

  I was debating this and working hard not drop the rod from my trembling hands when Gwen bumped my shoulder and angled the phone toward me so I could see Elvis’s text.

  Sprinklers.

  It was a clever distraction on Elvis’s part. Sprinklers meant the fire department would arrive, which meant a lot of people coming and going. Great cover for us, if we could pull this off and get out of here undiscovered.

  I leaned over toward Slash and murmured, “Sprinklers.”

  He nodded and stood, stepping across the rope held by the stanchions, motioning us to follow. Gwen and I didn’t waste any time and followed closely on his heels. I held the rod gingerly in my hands, being careful not to bump or knock into anything. It was an almost a head taller that I was.

  Calculating the height of the average man in Moses’s time by using a backward regression from today’s average height and the standard growth rate, I determined that Egyptian men probably averaged about 5’3” in height. That meant Moses must have been a tall man.

  Turning with the staff almost vertical, I still narrowly missed the post upon which an ancient priceless jar sat. Oh, jeez, it would not be good if I knocked over a half dozen priceless exhibits before we left the museum.

  After Slash made sure the immediate wing was empty, we darted into the entrance hall and crouched behind a statue. This one wasn’t wide enough for three of us, so Gwen hid behind an adjacent display. I rested the staff vertically against the statue beside me to better hide it, my back pressed up against the stone, trying to make myself as small as possible.

  Slash peered out to check if the coast was clear, when footsteps abruptly headed our way.

  Holy pharaoh! Had we been spotted?

  Slash crouched back down, his gaze meeting mine. He seemed remarkably calm given the fact that it sounded like at least one guard was coming right toward our position. My stomach flipped. Why had I ever thought this was a good idea?

  Slash didn’t seem to be having any doubts. Instead, he seemed to ready himself for a potential confrontation. The footsteps walked right up to the statue where we were hiding. At the last second, Slash tugged on my arm, pulling us both around the other side of the statue and out of the guard’s view.

  He looked at my hands and his eyes widened. I realized I’d inadvertently left the rod standing up against the statue when he unexpectedly pulled me to the other side. I lifted my hands in a silent oops, and he rolled his eyes in exasperation.

  Thankfully, the guard’s footsteps went past us without slowing. That had been way too close. Since no alarm had been raised, I assumed Gwen had done the same thing on her side. She had to be terrified and yet she’d kept her head.

  I scuttled back around the statue to retrieve the staff. Unfortunately, my hands weren’t as nimble in the gloves. I fumbled it. My mouth opened in a silent gasp as it toppled toward the ground. Slash caught it with one hand when it was about a half inch from the floor.

  I closed my eyes in relief. I needed to calm the heck down or I’d expose us all.

  The wail of sirens was right outside now. Guards were rushing to the front door to let the firemen in. Slash tugged on my arm motioning toward a side entrance between the west and southwest wings. Since Elvis had disabled the alarms, we should be able to slip out of there unnoticed with all the action at the front of the museum. But we couldn’t leave without Gwen.

  I came to a half crouch and looked around the statue myself. No sign of her.

  Slash tugged on my arm again, motioning toward the exit. I vigorously shook my head and mouthed Gwen.

  We couldn’t leave Gwen. I wouldn’t leave Gwen.

  Slash leaned over and murmured in my ear. “We have to get the staff out. I’ll come back for Gwen.”

  I looked down at the Rod of God, wondering if it truly held an antidote to the plague. If it did, Slash was right, we had to get it out.

  Reluctantly, I nodded and followed him.

  The scream of the sirens was deafening. The front doors of the museum had been thrown open and the sound echoed in the great chamber. I imagined Elvis had his hands full, monitoring all the entrances, exits, cameras and alarms. I was glad he had Angel to help.

  Slash and I dashed across the floor in a half crouch, darting between displays. We were almost to the side door when Slash skidded to a halt. He opened a display case and picked up a small gilded statue of the god Majdet, according to the sign below it. He slipped the statue into a collapsible bag that he pulled out from beneath his jacket while I watched openmouthed.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  “I have an idea.”

  “That involves stealing the Egyptian God of Justice?” If karma existed, it wasn’t going to be on our side.

  He didn’t answer and instead put a hand on the door and pushed it open without hesitation. No alarm went off. No one stood on the other side with a gun pointed at us. No guard yelled at us from behind.

  We just stepped out of the museum without incident—me, Slash, the Rod of God and a pilfered Egyptian God of Justice.

  Yep, that’s the way we felons roll.

  “Walk calmly,” Slash murmured to me. The door closed behind us as we took several hurried steps before colliding with a figure stepping out of the dark.

  Gasping, we stepped back. A shard of moonlight shone down as we looked right into the surprised face of Zizi Wahgdi.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “You!” Zizi exclaimed in astonishment. Her eyes first fell on the staff I was holding and then between Slash and me.

  Slash didn’t waste time with explanations. “Gwen is still trapped in there. Undiscovered so far, I think.”

  “What were you thinking?” she hissed.

  I held up the staff. “This. We’ve got it. But Slash has to go back for Gwen.”

  “What about the security cameras?” Zizi asked.

  “Not filming,” Slash said. “Can you help us?”

  Zizi let out a breath and stared at Slash for a long moment. Despite her initial shock, she seemed to come quickly to a decision. “Where was the last place you saw her?”

  “Entrance hall. Third tomb, left side.”

  Zizi nodded. “Where do I bring her?”

  “Gwen knows the spot,” Slash said. “Hurry.”

  “Fine. Get out of here.” Zizi gave us a final look and swept past us.

  Slash took my elbow, guiding me down the empty sidewalk before taking a hard left into an alley. He moved us away from the entrance of the museum and Tahrir Square.

  After we’d gone a l
ittle way, I turned on him, forcing him to stop. “How can you just trust Zizi like that? She could turn Gwen in. She could turn us in.”

  “Si, she could. But I think she understands what’s at stake. I don’t believe she will. Since she has the best chance of getting Gwen out unnoticed, I made the decision to trust her to handle it.”

  “How can you be so sure that’s the right decision? What is she doing out here at this hour anyway? She’s probably furious at us. We stole her card. She could betray us.”

  “She could. It was a calculated risk and one I had to take given the circumstances. Let’s trust it will work out for the best.” He took my arm, pulling me into movement again.

  I sure hoped he knew what he was doing. No matter which way I looked at it, the odds were low for this playing out in our favor. Honestly, I felt sick about leaving Gwen and even sicker we’d left her fate up to Zizi. But I had to trust Slash and his instincts. It wasn’t like we had a lot of choices at this point.

  “Relax, cara.” He patted my shoulder. “I fully expect to see them both at the rendezvous spot.”

  I wished I shared his optimism, but I didn’t. “Elvis is going to be freaking out, especially now he can’t reach us. Gwen has the burner phone.”

  Slash stopped and looked at me. “She does? That’s an unexpected variable.”

  “Well, when you handed me the staff, I handed her the phone. Given my proclivity to awkwardness, I figured I had better hold the staff with two hands. Gwen had to check for Elvis’s texts.” I glanced down at my gloved hands where they held the rod in a death grip.

  Slash thought it over and shrugged. “It’s okay. The phone is untraceable if she’s caught. And Elvis is good. Very good. He’ll hold it together.”

  “I hope you’re right. That might not be true if Gwen gets caught. He might lose it.”

  “I’ll handle it if Gwen gets caught. I promise she’ll be okay. Let’s just focus on what’s within our control at this moment, okay?”

  He was right. There were so many variations of what could go wrong, I would drive myself crazy trying to calculating the odds. Better to stay on task and do the best we could with those circumstances under our control.

  I tried to regulate my breathing. No sense in passing out from stress. “Okay. What next?”

  “We have seventeen minutes until the rendezvous. We need a quiet place to examine the staff.”

  We headed down the sidewalk, Slash making sure to vary our route, when we stepped into an alley. A huge guy stepped out in front of us, blocking our way. His biceps were the size of tree trunks, his torso three sizes bigger than mine. He had to be nearly six foot six.

  Slash stepped in front of me as the guy smiled, showing a row of broken and rotted teeth. “I take that,” he said in broken English. He pointed to beneath Slash’s jacket where a small piece of the golden Majdet statue was visible from the bag.

  Crap. I knew karma was going to bite us for that.

  “I don’t think so,” Slash said calmly.

  “Yes. You give me. See.” The guy reached behind his back and withdrew a big, honking scimitar, a sword with a curved blade, from a sheath strapped to his back.

  Oh. My. God. What kind of guy carried around an enormous sword on his back?

  “Give it to him, Slash,” I said in a low voice, stepping back against the wall.

  Instead of being afraid of being carved up like a fish, Slash sighed. “We don’t have time for this.”

  He reached at the small of his back where he usually had a gun but this time he didn’t have one. Instead, he smiled at the guy, murmured something in Italian and set the bag with the statue on the ground at my feet.

  I looked at him incredulously. “What are you doing?” I hoped I didn’t sound as panicked as I felt, but I was pretty darned stressed at the moment.

  “I’m taking care of this so we don’t miss the rendezvous.”

  “In case you didn’t notice, he’s got a sword. A really big one. And you’ve got...your fists.”

  “Even odds, cara.”

  Before I could provide a statistical analysis of the odds of winning a fight against a hulk with a ginormous sword, Slash engaged the guy. I pressed a hand to my mouth as the big guy swung the blade and Slash barely danced out of the way.

  After my initial terror passed, I began to watch them a bit more carefully. Although I’m not an expert at fighting by any stretch of the imagination, the guy with the sword didn’t really seem to have any skill other than sheer brute force and strength. Not that he needed anything else. Slash was dancing in and out around him, staying largely out of reach, until I realized he was trying to get a feel for what kind of skills the guy had.

  The guy sliced again at Slash. It missed him by a hair’s breadth. I swallowed a yelp. This was intolerable. I had to figure some way to help.

  The good news was the guy readily assumed I was a helpless female. So, he had no problem turning his back on me. I gripped the staff in my hand and waited until the next time he turned around. When he did, I took a couple of steps forward and swung the rod like a baseball bat.

  Boom.

  The staff connected with the guy’s head with a hard crack. The force of the hit vibrated all the way down the staff to my arms and body, causing my teeth to chatter. I had only hoped to distract him long enough for Slash to get a couple of hits in, but to my utter shock, the guy dropped like a stone. He hit the street face-first, the sword clattering out of his hand and sliding across the asphalt, clanging against a trash can.

  Slash ran to my side. “Are you okay, cara?”

  “I’m fine. What about you?”

  “I’m untouched. What did you do?”

  “I brained him with the staff.”

  Slash’s face was incredulous. “You did what?”

  “I took him down. You’re welcome.”

  “You used the staff?” He snatched the staff from me and started examining it. “What if you’d broken it?”

  “I was trying to save your life. But technically, isn’t it supposed to indestructible?”

  He looked at me, the staff and the guy lying in the alley as if he couldn’t believe it. “There’s not even a mark on the staff. But he’s out cold. How hard did you hit him?”

  “As hard as I could. I imagined his head being a baseball and me the one girl who’d never hit a home run.”

  After a moment, he shook his head and handed me back the staff. He knelt down next to the guy, feeling his pulse. “Definitely unconscious.”

  Straightening, he jogged over to the trash can, picked up the guy’s sword and dropped it down a street drain. I heard it clatter as it hit the bottom.

  “Come on, we’ve got to go,” he said returning to me and picking up the bag with the statue. “We’ve ten minutes until rendezvous time.”

  Slash grabbed my hand and we started walking. His eyes never stopped scouring our immediate environment. How he managed to take in and process so much information at once was truly mystifying. His posture remained tense and coiled as if ready to engage in battle at any moment. He was in full survival mode. Dangerous and primed for a fight.

  We exited the alley onto another sidewalk. There was no one around, but it felt awkward holding the staff. I felt self-conscious, like I was wearing a neon sign that flashed Thief of Ancient Artifact.

  “What are you going to say if someone asks us what this is?” I held up the staff. “I mean, who walks around with a six-foot staff in the middle of the night?”

  “If we run into anyone brave enough to ask, I’ll tell them it’s a bō.”

  “A what?”

  “A bō. It’s a martial arts staff. It’s used in bojutsu—a Japanese martial art. It’s a fairly popular sport in Cairo. I’ve used a bō before, so I can handle one, at least on a rudimentary level. It takes
a pretty specialized skill to use it properly. I had a fight once with Haruto Muiro that did not end well for me. Thankfully, he hurt my pride a lot more than my body. But he could have done real damage if we weren’t on the same side.”

  “The same side as what?”

  Slash smiled, but didn’t answer. “However, if we encounter any more unsavory characters, I’m just going to step back and let you wield that thing yourself. To hell with my bojutsu skills. Just remind me never to anger you while you’re holding a sharp or heavy object.”

  “Okay, I’ll keep it in mind.” I smiled a little to myself. Who was the alpha girl now? Of course, I’d had the Rod of God on my side, so that had helped. But still. I took care of business.

  Slash detoured into a tiny park with a couple of benches and a few trees. “Let’s sit here. I want to examine the rod for a few minutes.” He sat on the bench, taking the staff from me and placing it horizontally on his lap.

  “What if a policeman walks by? It’s the dead of the night.”

  “I’ll tell him I’m sitting here in the dark talking with my girlfriend. If he asks about the staff, I’ll tell him it’s from my martial arts class. It’s dark and it’s possible he’d buy it.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Then I’ll take care of it.” He sat and patted the bench next to him. “Let’s not play the what-if game, cara. Relax. Stay on the operational need of the moment. We need to take a good look at the staff, so let’s do it.”

  Relax. Easy for him to say. I wasn’t nearly as calm about what had just happened, but his refusal to get ruffled did have a soothing effect. The extreme adrenaline rush that had surged through my body at the museum had started to subside just a little.

  Slash took a flashlight from his pocket and handed it to me. I turned it on and angled the light so it landed on the middle of the staff.

  “Can you aim it at this end?” he asked.

  I adjusted the angle to the spot he wanted. It appeared to be the top of the staff with a rounded knob and some intricate carvings.