7

Lara peered into the darkness as a cloud passed in front of the moon.

“What time is it?” she asked.

Mason squinted at the phosphorescent hands on his watch. “About half past three. The Amenhotep should be arriving any minute.”

She frowned. “It had better be. I feel very exposed in this dinky little boat.”

“They could be awhile,” cautioned Mason. “They’re not just letting criminals off; they’re probably taking some new ones on, as well. And the captain may have to slip some money to the local officials.” He looked north through the darkness. “Ah! Here it comes already.”

“That’s not the Amenhotep,” said Lara. “The lights are too low.”

The craft slowly approached them, and soon they could make out its outline.

“That’s one hell of a cabin cruiser,” said Mason admiringly. “I wish I had the money someone shelled out for it. It was probably built for an oil-rich sheikh.”

“What’s it doing here?” said Lara. “Ninety-eight percent of all the boat traffic is north of the High Dam.”

“Maybe the fishing’s better,” suggested Mason. “Or maybe he lives here. There are worse sights to wake up to each morning than Lake Nasser.”

“Maybe,” she said dubiously.

The cabin cruiser came closer still, and suddenly its spotlight hit the small motorboat.

“Duck!” cried Lara, instinctively hurling herself to the floor of the boat as a hail of bullets thudded into the side of the boat and splashed into the water around them.

“Damn!” muttered Mason.

“Are you hit?”

“No,” he said. “I cracked my head against the side of the boat.”

“Let’s hope that’ll be the extent of your injuries,” she said, pulling out her pistols.

“I don’t know how you can see anyone to shoot at,” said Mason, peeking over the edge of the boat. “That light is blinding!”

“Let’s even the odds,” she said, blinking her eyes and waiting for her vision to return. Then she took aim and fired a single shot. The spotlight seemed to explode, and the men aboard the cabin cruiser began firing again.

“Give me one of your guns,” said Mason.

“I told you—they read my palm print. They won’t fire for anyone else.” She peered into the darkness. “How many can you make out?”

“Three, I think,” he said, squinting at the cabin cruiser.

“I agree. One by the burnt-out light, one to his right, and one near the controls.”

They exchanged another burst of fire with no discernible effect.

“So what do we do now?” asked Mason. “They’re higher out of the water than we are, and that damned solid railing’s protecting them.”

She stared at the cabin cruiser, which was only about fifty feet distant now, then at Mason.

“Dive into the water,” she whispered.

“Are you crazy?” he shot back. “I’ll be a sitting duck!”

“Their spotlight’s gone. They’ll have to lean over the railing to see where you are, and then I’ll have a clear shot at them in the moonlight.”

He looked doubtful. “How good a shot are you with that thing?”

“I hit what I aim at.”

“I hope you’re right.”

He crawled to the front of the boat, then crouched low, ready to dive over the edge.

“Don’t miss!” he said, and then he was in the water.

All three men on the cabin cruiser heard the splash, and as she had expected, they raced to the side of their vessel and leaned over, searching for a sign of him, their silhouettes clear in the moonlight. Before they could spot Mason and riddle him with their bullets, Lara fired half a dozen quick shots. Each man screamed in turn and plunged into Lake Nasser.

“Kevin, get back here!” she yelled.

Mason reached the boat a few seconds later. “Are they dead?” he asked as he pulled himself out of the water.

“Wounded, I think.” Cries of pain and fury came to their ears. “Wounded, definitely.”

“Then let’s get the hell out of here!” said Mason. “We can meet the Amenhotep twenty miles upstream!”

“In a minute,” she said, firing a few shots just above the water.

“What was that about?”

“Watch,” said Lara, pointing. All three men began racing to shore as fast as they could force their wounded bodies to swim. She turned back to him. “Now start the motor and get us next to the cabin cruiser.”

“We can’t take their boat!” protested Mason. “The second they get to shore they’re going to tell whoever they report to that we’re on it!”

“We’re not taking it,” replied Lara. “Just do what I tell you.”

He started the motor, and a moment later they were next to the cabin cruiser.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, climbing out of the motorboat and onto the larger vessel.

“What are you going to do?”

“Empty its fuel tanks,” answered Lara. “Why make it easy for their confederates to follow us?”

She walked to the back of the boat, found the tanks, opened them, and jettisoned their precious mixture into the water. She was walking back to where she’d climbed on when a body raced out of the darkness and hurled itself at her.

Even as she fell she was pummeling her attacker, trying every trick she knew to disable him quickly: a thumb in the eye, a heel in the groin, the flat of her hand pushing up against his nose. Nothing seemed to work. He flinched, but he wouldn’t let go of her, and now she saw that he had a knife in his right hand.

As it plunged down toward her, she rolled away from it. It missed her throat by inches, and was delivered with such force that it stuck in the wooden deck. As her opponent tried to pull it out, she got to her feet.

“Who are you?” she asked—or tried to. But when she opened her mouth, no sound came out.

The man gave another yank, and the blade came free. He stood up to face her, and approached silently. He smiled, his mouth opening grotesquely wide, and she saw that his tongue was gone.

She pulled her guns.

The man’s hand moved in a blur, releasing the knife toward her heart.

Lara’s pistols fired in unison. One bullet deflected the dagger. The other struck the man between the eyes.

A moment later, she was back in the motorboat.

“I heard your guns,” said Kevin. “What happened?”

“Another one of our silent friends,” she said grimly. As before, her voice had returned with the death of the silent assassin. “Let’s go a few miles upstream. There’s no sense being stationary targets.”

Mason turned the motorboat around, heading to the south. “By the way,” he said, “I saw all three men make it to shore.”

“You sound disapproving.”

“You should have killed them.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” he responded. “They were trying to kill us!”

“I don’t like killing, Kevin. It’s my least-preferred solution. Those men won’t bother us again, and besides, it’s not as if killing them would have solved my problems.” She took a deep breath and released it slowly. “I wonder if there’s anyone in this whole country who’s not out to kill me.”

“Probably that ugly little waiter on the Amenhotep,” he laughed.

“He’ll likely be the one to do it, too,” she replied. Suddenly she became serious again. “Still, it would be nice if someone would convince the Mahdists that I don’t have the Amulet.”

“They’ll never believe it, especially since you’ve proven so adept at eluding them and protecting yourself,” said Mason with absolute conviction. “And since you’re an infidel, they’ll assume the Amulet won’t make you totally invulnerable.”

“You certainly know how to cheer a girl up.”

He stared at her for a long moment, as if making up his mind about something. Finally he spoke.

“I feel responsible to some degree for your situation,” he began.

“Don’t be silly, Kevin. If you hadn’t dug me out of that tomb and taken me to the Cairo hospital, I’d be dead by now.”

“Hear me out,” he said. “I knew people have been looking for the Amulet of Mareish for more than a century. Hell, I was looking for it myself. I knew the dangers involved—but I was so anxious to get you taken care of that I didn’t make any attempt to hide your identity when I brought you to hospital.” He shook his head self-deprecatingly. “I wasn’t thinking, and now you’re paying the price.”

“I repeat,” said Lara firmly, “if it hadn’t been for you, I’d be dead. I have no problems with what you did.”

“Well, I have a problem with it,” said Kevin. “So I propose an alliance.”

“An alliance?”

“I think we both know that the only way to end these attacks is to actually find the Amulet. If it wasn’t in the Temple of Horus, then the journalist was wrong all those years ago—either the man he saw wasn’t Colonel Stewart, or it was Stewart but General Gordon had sent him to Egypt for some other reason.” He paused. “And if the Amulet wasn’t in Egypt, then it’s still in the Sudan.”

“How can you be sure it’s not in the Temple of Horus?” asked Lara. “I wasn’t looking for it.”

“The Mahdists have turned that place inside out for months, and I’m not the only archaeologist to hunt for it there,” answered Mason. “No, I’m convinced that if it was hidden there, it would have been found already. I was within a day of giving up when I found you.”

“All right,” said Lara. “Let’s say it’s still in the Sudan. So what?”

“So two experts are twice as likely to find it as one,” continued Mason. “All my other work can wait. I’ll come to the Sudan with you and stay there until we either find the Amulet or become convinced that it no longer exists—or at least that it’s no longer there.”

“Think about what you’re saying, Kevin,” replied Lara. “They’re not after you. You can say good-bye to me when I board the Amenhotep in a few minutes and nobody will be trying to kill you tomorrow.”

“It’s not that simple. Right now they think you’ve got it—but once they know you don’t, they’ll decide that you gave it to me sometime in the past forty-eight hours—or perhaps even that I found it when I was rescuing you from the tomb.” He grimaced. “In truth, I’m probably not a hell of a lot safer than you are.”

“Then why did you go out of your way to convince me you were?” demanded Lara.

He spent a little too long trying to formulate an answer.

“Get it through your head that I’m not a frail flower,” she said, trying to hide her annoyance. “If you withhold any information from me, it just makes it that much harder to solve the problem—and this problem’s hard enough without some additional if well-meaning sexism.”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “It won’t happen again.”

“See to it,” said Lara. “It’s not enough that we merely search for the Amulet. We’re actually in a race; we’ve got to find it before they find us. Or, as the old pulp magazines would say, we’re in a race against death.”

“Maybe not,” said Mason. “As long as we’re running from them in Egypt, they’re going to assume one of us has the Amulet. But once we show up in the Sudan, rather than going to England, they’ll know we’re still looking for it.”

“Why?” asked Lara. “Maybe they’ll think I found it and plan to rule the Sudan as the new Mahdi.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” said Kevin. “You have to be a true believer to be the Expected One, and you and I are both infidels. They know neither of us can become the Mahdi, and that means they know neither of us will be invulnerable even if we’ve got possession of the Amulet. That being the case, we’d have to be idiots to go to the Mahdist’s stronghold if we had the Amulet. No, the only reason for us to go to the Sudan is because we don’t have it. Because we are still searching for it. That’s the truth, and more important, the Mahdists will accept it as the truth.” He paused. “Oh, a few of them may think our going to Khartoum is a ruse and keep trying to kill us, but I think most of them will be content to watch us and let us find the Amulet for them.”

“How will they know we’ve found it . . . assuming we do?”

He shrugged. “I’m sure they have their methods.”

“They think I’ve got it now, and I don’t, so they must not have very reliable methods.”

He shrugged again.

“And what do we do with it if we do find it?” Lara continued. “If everyone knows why we’re there, the government won’t want us to take it out of the country, and I don’t know that I trust any government enough to hand that kind of power over to them, even if there’s no magic to it at all, but only the power of fanatical belief.”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” admitted Mason. “I suppose we’ll try to hunt up a truly worthy man, and give it to him.”

“There you go again,” said Lara. “Aren’t there any truly worthy women in the world?”

“Point taken,” he said sheepishly.

“And what if—assuming it’s a man, after all—he’s a Lincoln rather than a Sadat?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“What if the best person we can find, the one truly worthy person, is an unbeliever, an infidel?”

“Then he or she won’t be invulnerable or immortal,” answered Mason. “But they’ll still possess a source of enormous power. Unlike pulp magazine heroes, they won’t have the power to cloud men’s minds, but they’ll certainly have the power to influence them for good.”

“I don’t know,” she said dubiously.

“What’s the problem?”

“If absolute power corrupts absolutely, then almost-absolute power corrupts almost absolutely.”

“Let’s assume whoever we find will be able to resist the corruption.”

“Gordon was a devout man, and he knew better,” Lara pointed out. “How do you destroy the thing, anyway?”

“Destroy the Amulet of Mareish?” he repeated, shocked at the thought. “I’ve spent half my life looking for it!”

“If it’s half what you say it is, it’d be better if no one ever found it—but since I don’t seem to be able to walk away without getting shot at anyway, I’d like to know how to rid the world of it once I find it.”

“I won’t even consider it,” said Mason. “We’ll simply give it to the best person we can find.”

“What if we can’t find someone we trust?”

“That’s a very cynical thing to suggest,” remarked Mason. “Surely you’ve met trustworthy people before.”

“Not many.”

“Then we’ll keep it under lock and key until the day we can find one.”

“I’ve spent my whole life taking things that were under lock and key—and worse,” said Lara.

“Let’s worry about that when we come to it,” said Mason. “The main thing is that by the mere act of openly searching for the Amulet in the Sudan, we’ll put an end to most of these crazed attacks. Besides,” he added, “as an archaeologist, I think it’s the most exciting challenge of my career.” He stared at her for a moment. “Do we have a deal?”

“I think you’re risking your life rather foolishly,” she said. “But if you want to come to the Sudan, I can’t stop you.”

“Then we’re partners,” said Mason.