Aaron Elkins: Dead men’s hearts

“Yes, but-”

“I know what it is, I know what he was talking about!” He sobered. “My God, no wonder this thing was worth killing over. If-”

The van, which had been bobbing timidly along the sandy road the last time they’d noticed, suddenly rocked heavily to the right and went through a jolting series of bumps, throwing Julie against Gideon and knocking the notebook to the floor.

“Hey, take it easy,” Gideon called to the front, “we’re not in any hurry, we-”

Another tooth-rattling set of shocks bounced both of them two inches off the seat. The notebook jumped about on the floor. Everything else on the seats-Julie’s purse, their hats, somebody’s clipboard, somebody’s jacket, a couple of empty soda pop cans-was flung to the floor. In front of them Gawdat hung rigidly on to the wheel with his left hand, fighting to keep his turban from toppling off with his right.

“What is he doing?” Julie said anxiously. “This can’t be the way to the ferry.”

It wasn’t the way to anywhere. Two hundred yards in front of them, so bright it hurt to look at, was a squat, rugged cliff of weathered limestone eighty or a hundred feet high, blocking their way like a dam. On either side of the van, but much closer, similar stone walls closed in, craggy and forbidding.

A box canyon, Gideon thought. He’s driven us into a box canyon. What…

“Gawdat,” he said sharply. “Stop the van. Right now. Turn around and-”

The rest of the sentence was jarred out of his mouth as the van bucketed on. His teeth clicked painfully together. Gawdat turned panicky eyes on him for a moment-Gideon saw white all around the pupils, as in a frightened horse- and stepped on the gas, rigidly clutching the wheel with both hands now while his turban went flying. Julie and Gideon grabbed at whatever they could to keep from being tossed into the air. Limbs flopped, heads knocked against the padded roof.

“Damn it,” Gideon managed to get out, “you’re going to-”

They were thrown forward against the backs of the front seats as the car juddered to a standstill, so that Julie and Gideon wound up falling all over each other in the narrow space, like a pair of Keystone Kops, knees in ribs and elbows in eyes. When they floundered up unhurt, they were in time to see the turbanless Gawdat bolting back across the desert, with the skirts of his robe held high and his brown knees pumping, finally vanishing into a warren of boulders at the entrance to the canyon.

The springs of the van resettled themselves with a last, abused sigh, and then there was utter silence, unnerving after all the tumult. Around them, pale dust slowly settled back to earth and sifted in through the open windows and driver’s door. The odor of gasoline was thick in their nostrils-gasoline and the strange smell of the Egyptian desert; flinty-clean and fusty at the same time, redolent, so it seemed, of ancient tomb chambers, and camel dung, and Bedouin camps that had been set down and pulled up a thousand times over the ages.

“Well, that was certainly exciting,” Julie said, pushing her shirt into her jeans. “What now?”

Gideon considered. “If there was a phone booth we could use it to call the auto club,” he pointed out. “If there was an auto club.”

She gave him the look it deserved and slid to the right end of the seat to scan the barren, silent rock walls through her sunglasses.

He knew what was on her mind-the same thing that was on his: two days before, two English tourists had been shot to death by extremists in a remote canyon near the Valley of the Kings, only a few miles from where they were now. They had been in a hired van. The driver had mysteriously disappeared.

But there was something else on his mind too: a new thought, closer to home but no less nasty. Like Julie he searched the clefts and outcroppings, but without his sunglasses-they were back on the bureau at Horizon House, damn it-it was next to hopeless. The clefts were too many, the shadows too deep, the glare on the sun-bleached rock too blinding. He wiped a sheen of sweat from his forehead and pushed the fly-window open as far as it would go. The temperature had dropped to a seasonally normal eighty-five degrees, but under the desert sun the flat-roofed vehicle had begun to heat up the moment they had stopped, even with the driver’s door and all the workable windows wide open. Already he was imagining that his tongue had begun to thicken, the back of his throat to turn gluey.

“What we need,” Julie said, continuing to scan the cliffs methodically, side to side, down one face and up the next, “is a plan.”

He laughed. “My sentiments exactly. What do you say-”

“Look there.” She pointed upward and a little behind them. “On top, you see that formation like a-a long set of organ pipes?”

Gideon squeezed his way past her knees, crouched in the space next to the passenger door, and peered out, shielding his eyes against the blaze of sky and limestone. “Yes…”

“Just to the left of that and down a little, there’s a kind of hollow-”

Near his cheek something pulsed in the air, a vibration, a flutter, as of an invisible bird wing; a queer sensation he knew he’d never felt before. At the same time something thudded into the mess on the floor, and a fraction of a second later there was a crack from outside, followed by a diminishing grumble of echoes. Gideon had been half-expecting it, and still it took a blank, shocked moment to register. They were being shot at. Hurriedly, he pulled a similarly stunned Julie roughly away from the window, to the other side of the van.

“Are you all right?” he asked with his heart in his throat. “It didn’t-?”

She shook her head, her black eyes round. “No… I’m all right. ”I think it went between us.“

And without much room to spare, he thought shakily. Through the open window with about four inches on either side.

She was still staring at him. “I saw him,” she whispered. “I saw his face! I saw the gun-I couldn’t believe he was really going to shoot at us. Gideon, it’s-”

“I know. Forrest Freeman.”

“Yes! You saw him too?”

No, he hadn’t seen him, but he knew. It was Forrest who had the head, Forrest who had killed Haddon, Forrest who was up there now with a rifle-his trusty Anatolian boar-hunting rifle, no doubt-bent on killing them.

“You knew! she said with a flare of exasperation. ”How long have you-“

“About a minute and a half. Julie, I’d say this would be a good time to come up with that plan. We can’t just wait here for him to come and get us.”

“Agreed.”

Their eyes roved over the interior of the van. What they were looking for, Gideon hardly knew, but something -a decoy, a trap, a weapon… In the space behind the rear row of seats he found a jack, the handle of which was an angled tire iron about fifteen inches long. He pulled the iron out of the jack and hefted it. It would make a formidable club but how much help it was going to be against a rifleman shooting at them from behind a rock eighty feet above their heads was “I don’t believe it!” Julie exclaimed. “The key!”

He followed the line of her pointing finger and there- amazingly, wondrously-was the ignition key, trailing a six-inch piece of wood with a red enamel 2 painted on it, fixed firmly in the ignition slot. In his agitation Gawdat had either been unable to get it out or had forgotten about it altogether.

They looked at each other. They had a plan after all: they could drive out of the box canyon.

“Okay, then-” he said.

The small, unopenable window in the passenger door exploded, scattering glass shards. A thread of dust puffed from the seat, exactly where Julie had been sitting moments before. For a couple of seconds they sat wordlessly, not moving, anticipating another bullet, but none came; only the single, desultory shot, as if Forrest merely wanted to let them know that he hadn’t lost interest.