The Curse

by Harold Robbins

  I unlocked my door and got one foot out and my head above the door frame and yelled, “It’s a trap. She’s on Kaseem’s side!”

  Rafi turned toward Lana as she fired her gun. He staggered backwards and went down. As he lay on the ground, Kaseem stepped on Rafi’s wrist and took the gun out of his hand.

  Lana spun back around to me.

  I gawked as she raised the gun and fired.

  I was already falling backward as my door window shattered and sprayed me with flying glass.

  66

  I was still lying on the ground when Kaseem came to the car and stood over me. I figured it was the safest place to be.

  “You have antagonized Lana to the point that she has a bloodlust to kill you. She’s like a jackal that’s tasted blood.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Just stay where you are until I am ready for you. There’s nowhere for you to run. Besides, you would just give Lana an excuse to put a bullet in the back of your head.”

  While I sat by the car and watched as events I knew little about unfolded, Dalila sat beside her father as he lay on the ground, pressing a handkerchief against the wound to his left shoulder.

  Kaseem snapped an order to Lana. She disappeared into the hut with him and came out with a first-aid kit and knelt beside Rafi to tend to his wound.

  I had no idea how badly he was hurt or why they were bothering to give him first aid rather than kill him, but I figured it had to do with something Lana had said to me—I was being kept alive because Kaseem had plans for me.

  Apparently, Rafi was also in the category of necessity for whatever was about to come down.

  Two more Egyptian army vans arrived and Kaseem now came out of the hut wearing an officer’s uniform.

  Sitting in the dirt, handcuffed and clueless, I wondered if Kaseem planned a revolt or a coup. But it struck me that half a dozen soldiers in a couple of vans were hardly the stuff of revolution.

  When everyone was busy doing something or busy with each other, I leaned up inside the car and reached across the seat and grabbed the cattle prod Lana had left behind. Sitting back down in the dirt, I kept the weapon hidden against the side of my body.

  The cattle prod was about the length of my leg from ankle to knee. I slipped it up my pants figuring that would be a good hiding place, but I needed something to hold it there. Tape or a shoelace would have worked nicely, but my shoes were laceless and no roll of duct tape jumped out at me.

  In the side storage pocket of the car door I found a long, thick rubber band that looked like something Lana would use to hold back her hair. Trying to look like I wasn’t hiding a stun weapon, I stealthily slipped the cattle prod inside the bottom of my pants and pulled the hair band over my ankle and the prod, doubled.

  I just hoped the prod wasn’t going to embarrass me by slipping down from where I had it secured to my leg. And that Lana wouldn’t notice that her favorite toy was missing.

  What good the weapon would be against people with guns wasn’t something I wanted to think about as I sat in the dirt and wondered when the next shoe would drop, but at least I had some sort of self-defense.

  After the soldiers loaded Rafi into a van, with Dalila in tow behind him, Kaseem walked toward me carrying a small, black box.

  He carried the object as if he had been entrusted with a sacred duty and in his mind he no doubt had been.

  “Get up,” he told me.

  Easier said than done when you’re handcuffed and hiding a cattle prod in your pants, but I managed it, though with little grace.

  Kaseem set the box on the hood of Lana’s car and carefully opened it, revealing a red velvet pouch. He uncuffed me.

  With the deliberation of a surgeon cutting flesh, he opened the velvet sack and drew out a scarab. He spread the pouch on the car’s hood and delicately put the artifact on it.

  “Where’s your loupe?” he asked.

  “I don’t need it. It’s the Heart of Egypt.”

  “Don’t play games with me—you haven’t examined it.”

  “I don’t need to examine it.”

  I took the heart-sized scarab in my hands, feeling the object against the skin of my palms, then brought it up to my face to sniff it.

  Resting beneath a mummy’s wrappings and against the chest of a boy king for three thousand years, I could smell the musty dust of antiquity on the scarab, sense the long-dead hands that lovingly shaped it.

  “Don’t try to appease me. I have to know.”

  He drew his gun, although pointing it away from me.

  “It’s the heart,” I said. “I’ve examined two incredibly good fakes and I know what I have in my hands is real because of the way it looks and feels, smells, and most of all … because it speaks to me.”

  I didn’t know what was going on in his head, but I was pretty well convinced that Kaseem believed the scarab had magical powers. And now he had it in his hands.

  Fear rose in me, grabbing my breath and jerking it away as I realized that I had fulfilled the task that Kaseem had laid out for me.

  I carefully set the scarab back down on its velvet bed and met Kaseem’s eye.

  “I did what you asked me to do. Now I suppose my reward is a bullet in the head.”

  He said nothing for a moment, his mind still locked in whatever thoughts and passions about the Heart of Egypt dominated him.

  The gun in his hand came up at me and wavered for a moment, then he slipped it back in its holster.

  “You still have a role to play,” he said. “Cuff her.”

  67

  Lana pulled me with a grip on my hair to the van that Rafi had been loaded into. The cattle prod banged and slipped on my ankle but wasn’t exposed.

  Rafi lay lengthwise on one side of the van, his left shoulder and chest area bandaged enough to stop the bleeding. When they had put him in the van, his left arm hung limp from the wound in his shoulder and now it lay at an odd angle.

  His face had lost color and his eyes were closed, but his chest rose and fell in a normal breathing pattern.

  Dalila knelt beside him, holding on as if he was a life raft.

  I smiled at her. I wanted to give her a hug and comfort her, but I was warned not to speak or move.

  “It’ll be okay, Dalila,” I whispered.

  I didn’t honestly believe that and I don’t think she did, either. She gave me a look full of fright.

  When we hit a big bump, Rafi let out an exclamation of pain.

  Lana snapped an order to a soldier in back with us and he scooted over to Rafi. Dalila tried to push him away and Lana lashed out at her in rapid Arabic that caused the little girl to back off in fear.

  “More painkillers to keep him quiet when we go through checkpoints,” Lana told me. “When I shoot you, you won’t get any drugs. I want you to feel the pain.” She gave me an evil grin.

  “You know why you can’t keep a man?” I said. “The ugliness inside of you oozes out all over so everyone can see it.”

  She started for me and stopped as Kaseem snapped something at her from the front passenger seat.

  “Keep your mouth shut,” he said to me, “or next time I’ll let her cut out your tongue.”

  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 coul
d 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.