Relentless (32 page)

Thorne paused to hold his stick to hers, and the embers threw off pretty sparklers that illuminated the grim set of his mouth. Their shadows danced on the rough-cut walls. “Someone might have a contract out on me.” His voice was pretty damned matter-of-fact for the statement. But he’d been pretty matter-of-fact this whole time. At least he’d finally said something, which eased the growing knot between her shoulder blades. Of course, what he’d just said tightened her nerves up again.

“More than just the Russian?” she asked dryly. Very dryly because she was so parched her lips kept sticking together. She shifted the slick little button around in her mouth. It helped, but it wasn’t a tall, iced Diet Coke. “I thought you were one of the good guys!”

Thorne shrugged. “Boris Yermalof is one of, if not
the
, top seller of priceless black market antiquities in the world. As elusive as smoke, it took us, MI5, years to track him down and learn his name and then another year to learn his location. His retaliation—and we were expecting it, mind you—was swift and brutal. His buyers think nothing of spending upwards of twenty mil on an original bust of Tutankhamen and hiding it in their basement where no one but themselves will ever see it.”

She gave an audible swallow.

“If those same buyers are in the know about a Cleopatra find, they’d draw straws to see who’d pay a hit man to keep everyone off Yermalof’s back while he brokered
their deal. My returning to London might’ve been a tipoff that I was back in the game. The Russian couldn’t know I was on a medical leave of absence instead of out of the business for good. It’s been a while.”

“London was my fault—”

“No, it wasn’t. I had to go back at some point. I’m not the only MI5 operative looking for him. He killed two of our own; there are many people at Thames House wanting retaliation. They can’t go about killing everyone in Her Majesty’s Secret Service. If nothing else it would take several lifetimes.”

“Funny. Maybe Yermalof has a boss? Someone higher up the food chain whom he reports to?”

“If he does, it’s a well-kept secret. We’ve never heard even a hint that he doesn’t work alone.”

“Stop!” Isis grabbed his arm as he almost walked into a partially fallen beam as he’d turned his head to talk to her. She held her torch up. The small flame flickered with the movement, casting oddly shaped shadows, but illuminated the stone… lintel? “I think this means we’re entering a chamber. Maybe it has a back door.” They ducked and passed through the V beneath the thick strut where it had wedged against one wall. The room was disappointingly empty. Reliefs had been scribed on the sandstone walls from ceiling to floor, but not painted, and she couldn’t see them well enough to try to decipher their meanings even if she knew how to read hieroglyphics. Couldn’t begin to know the room’s original purpose.

And damn it, she was so thirsty! All she could think
of was a vat of sparkling Diet Coke filled with bobbing ice cubes. She’d swim in it for a week.

They passed through the empty room to another, slightly larger chamber. Here the walls were covered in crude pictures of daily life. She raised her torch as she walked. Even in the dimness, the colors of barges and blue herons, beaked gods, and women washing clothes were still as pure and beautiful as the day they’d been painted.

She automatically reached for her camera case on her hip, then dropped her hand. She could spend all day documenting her find for her father. But now wasn’t the time.

“Isis?” Thorne called from the shadowy doorway across the dusty space where he stood waiting for her.

“Coming.” She closed the gap between them. “Okay, so our first suspect is Yermalof. Who
else
wants to kill you?”

Thorne smiled. “Surprisingly few people want to off me, actually. Let’s look at the professor for a moment.”

“You think my
father
wants you dead?” She shot him a teasing glance as they walked into another corridor. Here the floor was marble, smooth under a drift of coarse, gritty sand. Their shoes crunched as they walked.

This
corridor was beautifully painted with soldiers going into battle.
Mark Antony?
Her heartbeat sounded loud in her ears. “
He
doesn’t know what you’ve done to his sweet baby girl, so I don’t think so. Not yet anyway.”

Could she believe what her eyes were trying to tell her, or was she starting to add two and eleven to make ninety-three?

“No, I know your father didn’t put out a hit on me. But consider for a moment what would be at stake if he truly
did
find Queen Cleopatra’s tomb.”

“He’d be vindicated.”

“He’d go down in the history books. He’d be feted, asked to travel the world lecturing about his discovery. There’d be endorsements, and sponsorships—”

“Thorne, even if that was all true—my father can’t take advantage of or enjoy
any
of that. He has Alzheimer’s. If—
when
we find Cleo’s tomb, it will give him justification for all his claims.” The scenes of war changed to hunting scenes. Pretty brutal, Isis observed absently as the lights passed from one group of images to the next. “But as for him enjoying that vindication—he’s not capable of doing so anymore.”

“He isn’t. But that doesn’t mean someone on his team wouldn’t be itching to take the glory for themselves at your father’s expense.”

“Dylan…”

“Possibly. He’s also got motive. Let’s take the bits and pieces you know, and let’s say they’re gospel. Tell me again what happened.”

She exhaled, telling Thorne again what she knew by heart. “He found Cleo’s tomb in the late afternoon of May seventeenth. The crew had camped at an oasis about a mile away. While dinner was cooking he went back to the tomb. Knowing my father, he went back to touch the rocks at the entrance. Immerse himself before the dig started. It was a little ritual he had.”

One of the images snagged her attention, and her
steps slowed. The green-skinned man, with a pharaoh’s beard and partially mummy-wrapped legs, wore the distinctive crown of two long ostrich feathers. Osiris? Isis’s heart leapt. Oh, my God. Was it possible…?

Osiris, she knew, was the god of the afterlife and the dead. It made sense that he’d be in every tomb…

“All this artwork leaving you a little breathless?”

“I’m fine,” she said automatically, her words monotone because her brain was suddenly going a thousand miles an hour. Catching up with Thorne, she blew on the end of her torch to encourage the small red glow so she could look at the eight-foot-tall people depicted along the walls. Before she took a wild leap, she had to be sure…

“Isis? Your father’s ritual?”

“Sorry. He took a picture of himself at the entrance—the one he sent to me—then was struck on the head,” she reminded him, although why he needed reminding she had no idea. He knew the sequence of events as well as she did by now. “He thought he was in the Valley of the Scorpions, but instead he was found at Dafarfa Oasis.”

“Concussion. No memory of what had happened.”

“Right. Something like us being in a car going one way, and ending up
camping
somewhere miles away in the desert. Put those two events together and there certainly seems to be a similarity, don’t you think?”

“I do.”

Frustratingly, Isis couldn’t identify any of the other ancient Egyptians depicted on the walls. She thought
one might be Horus when she passed a bird-headed man wearing a red and white crown. But what did she know? She’d always just admired the style and color of the images, never learned their meanings.
Sorry, Dad.

“He didn’t even remember leaving Seattle to
come
on this dig.”

“What if it isn’t Alzheimer’s? What if the blow to the head caused memory loss, either permanent or temporary?”

“I never considered it wasn’t Alzheimer’s—nor did the doctors. But of course, given everything we now know, the blow to the head absolutely could’ve caused his memory loss. And of course people would want to be the first—the first to get the glory and accolades of a monumental discovery, or in the case of your nefarious Yermalof, the first to grave-rob and sell off everything before anyone discovers he’s done so.”

A woman wearing a headdress shaped like a throne, elegant wings spread wide—

Her namesake.
Isis
. This image she knew. Oh, dear God.

Her brain went blank for a moment as Isis tried, without freaking herself out or misleading Thorne, to assimilate the people painted along the walls.

Isis and Osiris, husband and wife. Even she knew
that
much.

SIXTEEN

I
f her father were here, he could analyze the archaeological and architectural evidence of the tomb. He’d know when it was built and for whom. He’d understand the significance of the mythology in the painting—Isis had seen him identify iconographical and other evidence based on less.

Did what she was seeing embody the symbolism of divinity and religious ritual of Cleopatra?
Could
this be Cleopatra and Mark Antony’s tomb? Maybe? No. Probably not. It seemed too plain to convey Cleopatra’s incredible personal legacy. But—damn it. She didn’t know. It would help if they had more light—and a detailed guidebook with pictures. Which of course didn’t exist, because no one had found the tomb yet.

Back to square one. Isis sighed. “A dig like that would take months and months—hell, years.”

“Not if they were doing a smash-and-grab. Taking the most valuable pieces and leaving the rest. And not if they didn’t give a shit whether anything left was preserved or documented.” Thorne’s torch flickered and swayed.

Isis closed the gap between them and curled her fingers
in the back of his belt. If that thing went out she wanted to know exactly where he was at all times. “That’s terrible. Wait—What? You’re saying
Yermalof
was the one who left my father for dead and killed his crew?”

“It’s starting to make sense, don’t you think?”

It did. But she didn’t want it to. “Your Russian guy and my father?” Dear God, had her father brought all this down on his own head when he’d dabbled in the buying and selling of black market antiquities all those years ago?
Stealing
and selling. “You think my father didn’t stop selling artifacts on the black market, and got himself in over his head with this guy?”

“Occam’s razor.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the law of succinctness. The principle stating that among competing hypotheses, the one that makes the fewest assumptions should be selected. It has to be considered.”

“Well, I don’t
want
to consider it,” Isis said tightly. But she did. God help her,
this
scenario made sense. She pressed a hand to her roiling stomach. “He promised me that it was a onetime thing, and that he’d stop.”

“And then his funding started drying up…”

“And then his funding
stopped
.” She repeated the truth bleakly. “But he always seemed to have a bit more money to dig.”

Thorne stopped and wrapped his arm around her, pulling her close. His chest was broad and solid, and he smelled achingly familiar, his natural musk coupled with the smoky odor of burning wood. Holding her tightly,
he brushed his mouth over the crown of her head. “It’s just a theory at this point, okay? We don’t know anything for sure. Not yet. Let’s reserve judgment until we have all the facts.” After giving her another one-armed hug, he let her go.

“There’s nothing to be gained by you fretting over this here,” he told her briskly before turning his back to continue walking.

“I’ve never fretted in my life,” Isis told him pertly.

Thorne laughed, and they continued walking in silence.

Cleopatra had portrayed herself as the human representation of the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris. Isis tried to pull in stray details from memory, bits of conversations, her heart racing. Mark Antony, Cleo’s lover, was often considered the human form of the god Osiris.

Isis struggled with her nebulous hypothesis while trying to maintain a logical conversation. She didn’t have to consider the possibility of Thorne’s theory too hard. Things were falling into place like tumblers in a safe, unlocking current and ancient secrets that had been secreted for centuries.