by Kay Hooper
They were alike, and she recognized that now. She and Kane were very alike, cut from the same stubborn mold. Adventurous, humorous, reckless, tough when they had to be, independent. They both loved artifacts, and both were, conversely, capable of great honor and integrity as well as great deviousness.
Tyler pushed the realization violently away. Alike they may be, she thought grimly, but they were still enemies, rivals. Infusing her voice with a mildly speculative tone, she said, “That shooter. Who do you suppose he is?” They had hardly had time to discuss the matter before now, and she grasped the subject as something safe and relatively unthreatening.
“I didn’t get a good look at him.” Kane was paying attention to his meal. “Did you see him clearly?”
“I was too busy diving for cover.” He didn’t offer her a smile or make a sardonic comment, and Tyler sighed to herself. She didn’t like this minefield they were so warily crossing; at least in the past they’d been too busy snapping at each other and being sneaky to worry about mines beneath their feet.
“He’s after the cache,” Kane said.
“How can you be so sure of that?” she asked, even though she agreed with him.
“Because nothing else makes sense.” He took his plate to the stream and began cleaning it. Over his shoulder, he said, “I caught a glimpse of blond hair, so it’s doubtful he’s native to these parts. As far as I could find out, the only likely valuables in the area would be the cache Rolfe smuggled out of Germany during the war and hid—for Tomas to find more than forty years later. Maybe Tomas talked too freely back in Panama about his discovery. Odds are, our trigger-happy friend is after exactly what we’re after.”
Tyler ate the last of her breakfast as she thought about it. Like many of the valuables their employers sent them after, the chalice’s rightful ownership was a matter of speculation; it occupied a kind of legal no-man’s-land. During World War II, much of Europe had been looted of its valuables, and many items had simply vanished, never to be found.
During the final days of the war, a number of men had taken what they could and jumped Hitler’s sinking ship. Some of those men had hidden their treasures in various parts of the world, and for more than forty years items had surfaced from time to time, appearing on the black market or just changing hands privately. Interpol had traced many art objects and antiquities and returned them to their proper owners, but lists were incomplete and often contained inspired guesswork because too many records had been destroyed during the war.
The chalice that she and Kane were after now was one such homeless artifact. Ownership couldn’t be proven legally because of the gaps in various records and, indeed, Tyler knew very little about it except that her employer was hell-bent to get it in his hands. Its intrinsic value was hard to estimate; it was believed to have been in the possession of a very old church in Italy a hundred and fifty years before, but was reportedly lost long before the church itself was destroyed.
Then the war had happened, and somewhere along the way the chalice had ended up in a cache of valuables hidden in the wilderness of Colombia. And their slippery friend Tomas had discovered it while—he said—visiting his family in the area, and had left it there until he could find buyers. He hadn’t dared return for it himself, he’d told Tyler with a wide, artless smile. He hadn’t explained why, and Tyler had been in too much of a hurry to ask.
Absently Tyler said, “Sayers didn’t tell me how he’d heard about the chalice. Did your boss?” Kane’s boss was Joshua Phillips, who lived in London as did his enemy Sayers.
“No.”
She looked at him curiously as he returned and began packing his plate and fork away. “What do you know about it?”
“I know it’s supposed to be cursed,” Kane answered mildly.
Tyler didn’t react with scorn or disbelief. She knew enough history to be aware of the reality of curses. Not that she believed inanimate objects could contain a malevolent spirit, but she did believe that events were sometimes tied to objects, connected in a sense, and that because antiquities had such a long and colorful history unlucky events were certain to have occurred near them and to have been connected in one way or another.
“I haven’t heard of that,” she said now, getting up and going to the stream to clean her own plate. “Tell me.”
Somewhat surprisingly, Kane didn’t seem to be in a hurry. He waited until she returned to the fire, then focused his eyes on the flames and spoke slowly.
“Most of what I know is pretty much speculative. Ironically enough, I stumbled across a reference to the chalice and the legend in an unpublished private journal years ago. Never thought I’d have the chance to hold the thing in my hand.”
Tyler understood what he meant. One of the reasons she enjoyed this job so much was that it gave her the opportunity to see and touch objects whose existence was, in terms of history, almost mythical. She nodded now, and watched his profile as he gazed into the fire.
“It all started,” Kane said, “with Alexander.”
Tyler blinked. “Alexander the Great? But you’re going back more than two thousand years! The chalice can’t be that old.”
“There’s some confusion about that. Very little documentation has survived, what with various wars and all. There’s probably little hope that the chalice we’re after is the same one in this story. But you never know.” He glanced at her, something both quizzical and oddly intent in his green eyes. “Sure you want to hear it?”
She was a little puzzled, but curious. “Of course. All I know about the chalice is that it disappeared from the church in Florence about a hundred years ago. And that there were supposedly two of them originally. Your story sounds more interesting than that. So tell me. It started with Alexander?”
Kane was gazing into the fire again. “Alexander. You may remember that he was barely twenty when his father was assassinated, and that he rounded up a number of suspects whom he very quickly had executed. All of them had claims to the throne. He also gave his mother the honor of dispatching his father’s young wife and newborn son.”
“I remember.” Tyler grimaced faintly. “They sort of glossed over that part when I was in school, but my father told me what the books left out.”
“Your father?”
“He was an archaeologist. Go on with the story.” She felt a little disturbed at having made a personal reference; she and Kane never did that. The past they shared had begun three years ago after a confrontation in North Africa, and neither had ever looked further back than that.
Kane half nodded. “So Alexander became king, and an arrogant one at that. He got busy conquering the world. He also made two marriages, both political, to Asian princesses. One of those wives was the daughter of the king of Persia.”
“King Darius. I remember,” Tyler said.
“You may also remember that Alexander conquered Persia, and that Darius was killed, supposedly by one of his own generals.”
“Yes.”
“What his daughter felt about that is a matter for speculation, since it was more or less Alexander’s fault.” Kane shook his head. “But in any case, it’s likely she found out that being politically married to a king who was continually off conquering the world wasn’t much fun.”
“I can imagine,” Tyler murmured.
“Her name was Statira,” Kane said. “And whatever she felt for her husband, she seems to have kept to herself. However, somewhere around 323 B.C. Statira and Alexander’s other political wife jointly commissioned a pair of golden cups—chalices—to be fashioned in his honor. They sent the chalices to him, together in one package, with a message assuring him of their loyalty. He was busy making preparations to invade Arabia at the time.”
“And?” Tyler prompted when he fell silent.
“And he was at the palace in Babylon when the package arrived. There was a celebration of sorts going on, lots of drinking and partying. Alexander opened the package and promptly used one of the cups to toast his loyal wives. He h
anded the second cup to his closest general, who also made a toast.”
Tyler half winced. “Poison?”
“According to history,” Kane said, “it was likely malaria. In any case, within a few hours of drinking from the chalice, Alexander fell ill. He was dead within three days. The general who had drunk from the second cup was fine. There was much talk, according to the legend, about which of the two wives had tried to poison Alexander. But the chalices vanished, and with Alexander’s empire coming apart nobody bothered to try to find out if he had indeed been poisoned.”
“But the chalices were believed to be cursed?”
“Not just because of that. In 1478, Giuliano de’ Medici was stabbed to death during mass by the Pazzi family. He was drinking from a gold chalice when he was stabbed; according to descriptions, it exactly matched one of the pair given to Alexander. And in 1791, when Louis XVI was captured at Varennes, two chalices were found in his coach—again, matching the description of Alexander’s gold cups.”
Tyler was frowning a little. “There are some big gaps in time in your legend. Where were the chalices?”
Kane shrugged. “There are just vague mentions of bad luck following the chalices, always connected in some way to betrayal and death.”
“Is there a more recent history?”
“Just what you’ve heard. That one chalice was in the possession of a church in Florence around a hundred years ago and then vanished; there’s no mention in existing records of the second one after about 1800.”
After a moment Tyler said slowly, “The chalice we’re after is just a piece of the loot Hitler collected; there’s no record of where it was taken from, or any information about its history. What makes you think it’s one of Alexander’s?”
Kane shrugged again. “The description. According to what my boss gave me, the chalice we’re after is the spitting image of Alexander’s.” A bit dryly, he added, “And Joshua Phillips, at least, is so excited about it that he was almost stuttering when he sent me after it. The bonus, assuming I bring it back, is nothing short of staggering.”
Tyler stared at him. She couldn’t read his expression, but all her doubts about her ability to trust him were uppermost in her mind. The stakes this time were high. “My boss promised me a—staggering bonus,” she confessed somewhat warily.
Kane suddenly rose and began making preparations to leave, pouring the last of the coffee in the fire and packing up everything. Casually he said, “Obviously neither of us was told all our employers know about the chalice; I think they both believe it was Alexander’s. Or else why the secrecy? We’ve both known exactly what we were after before. Didn’t you wonder why you weren’t told more this time?”
Tyler had automatically followed suit in getting ready to leave, and stood, absently adjusting the strap of a canteen over her shoulder as she gazed at Kane. “Maybe I was blinded by dollar signs,” she suggested. If she had meant it to be a pointed reference—and she wasn’t sure about that—Kane either missed it or ignored it.
He slung the backpack over one shoulder, picked up the rifle and studied her deliberately. “No. You like the money, but that isn’t the reason you do this. You do it for kicks, Ty. You do it because you love antiquities. And you do it because, for some reason I haven’t figured out yet, you’re driven to put yourself in danger.”
She stood staring at him, conscious of her heart pounding suddenly, of confusion clouding her mind. How could he have guessed that? How? And why did she abruptly feel vulnerable as she never had before? With an effort she curved her lips in a sardonic smile. “You don’t say.” It wasn’t much as comebacks go, but Tyler knew him too well to arouse his hunting instincts by going overboard on the side of denial.
His smile was every bit as sardonic as hers. “Don’t you ever get tired of it?”
“Tired of what?”
“Holding your guard up with me?”
Before she could stop herself, her gaze flickered toward the wobbly lean-to. Without waiting for him to comment on that tiny betrayal, she said sweetly, “It’s just a matter of common sense, Kane. You should always carry a whip and chair when you walk into a lion’s cage. And you should never turn your back to that breed of cat.”
“Even one raised in captivity?” he asked in a light tone.
“Especially that one.” She could hear the stony note of absolute certainty in her voice. “He knows how to purr. He even knows how to jump through a hoop when he has to. But he never forgets where the cage door is.”
Kane looked at her for a long moment, then nodded almost imperceptibly. Softly he said, “But you won’t stay out of the cage, Tyler. Think about that. Nobody forced you to step into it. You just won’t stay out of the cage.”
She followed as he left the camp, her movements automatic. That strange, disturbing feeling of suspension was with her again, and the curiously stark analogy of lion and cage clung to her mind stubbornly. Kane was right; she couldn’t stay out of the cage, even though nobody forced her to go in. Even knowing the danger of the lion.
The slight sounds they made as they went on covered her soft gasp, and she was grateful that he hadn’t heard the evidence of her own shock.
Danger. Danger. Was that why she was so violently attracted to Kane, why she relished their rivalry? He was the strongest, most dangerous man she had ever known, and when she was with him the encounters demanded every ounce of her own strength and will. She had to push herself beyond her self-defined limits in his company, physically, mentally—and emotionally.
Could it be that simple?
Did some part of her fiercely enjoy their rivalry because he was the lion she needed to tame, the danger she needed to face and attempt to control? Three years before, she had accepted Robert Sayers’s job offer out of boredom and curiosity, but on encountering Kane a couple of months later her determination to best him had been instant and implacable, and that ambition had never since wavered. And on each succeeding assignment, she had looked eagerly for him.
Tyler followed along behind Kane in silence as the hours passed, wrapped up in her own disturbing thoughts. When he finally called a halt in the late afternoon, she put the canteen aside and gazed around in vague surprise.
They had been circumventing the swamp for some hours, but she was only now aware of the rich, ripe scents and eerie sounds of the marshlands.
“We’ll start back inland in another hour or so,” Kane said, and tossed her a packet of trail mix. “We should make higher ground before dark.”
She nodded, eating because she should and not because she was hungry. Her mind started ahead to the coming night, and she frowned at her own chaotic thoughts. She felt hot and sticky, and decidedly unnerved by the uncertainty she felt regarding the motives behind Kane’s earlier desire for her.
Kane watched her, very aware of her silence and of the troubled frown on her delicate face. He had shocked her, he knew, by observing that she fought him by choice; he had been more than a little surprised himself at the realization. He thought he was beginning to understand her, at least more than ever before, and with that tentative knowledge had come something he had hardly been prepared for.
Want was such a mild word, or always had been, but now it was something alive and clawing at him. All day, he had been starkly conscious of her almost silent movements behind him, and he had glanced back often to see her bright hair and preoccupied face. And every glance had sharpened the ache of desire that was centered deeper than his loins, somewhere in his very bones.
He wanted her with a strength he had never felt before.
And not just physically. He wanted to understand her. Always before, he had observed the enigma of her with interest and vague curiosity, with little time granted to him for probing. But this time he had caught several glimpses of what lay beneath her guard, either because of her own words or because he was looking harder. And what he had seen fascinated him.
He knew she mistrusted him, mistrusted even his desire for her. Maybe especially
his desire. She suspected a trick, an attempt to get beneath her guard. He understood that; it was a reasonable suspicion given their past encounters. But what he was beginning to see was that Tyler herself was unconvinced by her own suspicions. She was wavering, looking at him one moment as an enemy and the next with puzzled uneasiness.
The question was, did her uncertainty argue well for a change in their relationship?
“We should reach the cave by tomorrow,” he said now, casually, as he watched her. She looked at him almost blindly for a moment, but then her eyes focused and there was something in those amber depths he’d seen once before in the eyes of a doe, something wary and perplexed.
“Good,” she responded in a taut voice.
“Assuming the cache is where it’s supposed to be, we should be on our way right after that. We can head northeast to Bogotá and find transport out of the country. And since we have to get the cache to Tomas in Panama, our best chance of getting back to Europe is probably by ship from there. Agreed?”
Getting in and out of various countries with antiquities whose rightful ownership couldn’t be determined wasn’t exactly illegal, but both Tyler and Kane had learned not to call undue attention to themselves in the process; both were usually pressed for time, and also wished to avoid possible thieves and other interested parties. So they tended to bypass airports with their terrorist-spawned and highly efficient security in favor of land or water transportation, where their accommodations were generally several notches below tourist class.
Tyler had often found it ironic that she traveled with an unlimited expense account and could also draw from banks in any major city in the world, and yet usually went from place to place in rickety buses or the cargo holds of leaky ships. Still, she was seeing the world from a unique perspective in this jet age, and wouldn’t have traded even her most uncomfortable experiences for first-class travel all the way.
But she was thinking about that now, thinking of a long sea voyage in Kane’s company. Presumably they would have the chalice in their possession. At least one of them would. There was still no solution for the problem of dividing one old, golden chalice for two separate employers.
