Aaron Elkins: Dead men’s hearts

A little later he had probably taken a midnight turn around the deck with the notoriously insomniac Haddon. Groggy and stumbling by now, Haddon must have collapsed, hitting his face on the grating. The burly Forrest had lifted him over the railing, and it had been over. Or it would have been over but for that unseen little platform.

So many things should have given him away. It was Forrest, not Haddon or Bruno or anyone else, who had insisted on going all the way downriver to Amarna despite the press of time. Why, except that he knew that the inlays were there? And then there had been the disappearance of the head from the drawer between the time Haddon saw it and the time TJ called Horizon House to ask about it. Who had removed it? It might have been anyone back in Luxor, of course, but surely the likelihood was that it was someone closely connected to whoever had killed Haddon and was therefore on the Menshiya. TJ’s student Stacey Tolliver was possible but farfetched. That left Kermit Feiffer, Forrest’s assistant director.

Forrest and Kermit were in it together then, and maybe the rest of the crew too. And take it a step further: maybe they’d been in the antiquities-smuggling business on the side for years, acting as conduits for the el-Hamids’ loot, profiting from their absurdly low prices. Hiding small objects in with the taping paraphernalia would have been child’s play.

And there was something else, now that he thought about it: why would someone who hated Egypt as much as Forrest did keep coming back?

Well, it wasn’t an airtight case, but everything added up.

Not that he was in need of an airtight case at this point. It was Forrest Freeman who’d been trying his damndest to blow them apart for the last fifteen minutes, and that, he rather thought, made the rest of it moot.

He pulled himself the last few feet onto the rim of the cliff-no sign of Forrest-and rolled quickly behind the scant cover of a few scattered boulders. The adrenaline that had propelled him up the wall had drained away, leaving him spent and trembling, hardly able to catch his breath, his pulse pounding in his ears. Flat on his stomach he sucked in air while sweat ran from his face onto the sandy gravel. He had scraped both knees coming up, and the palms of both hands. One of his fingernails had been ripped half-off. He didn’t remember any of it happening. And his hip had been bruised by the tire iron he couldn’t remember sticking in the back of his belt. He adjusted it, muttering, thinking it was doing him more damage than it was Forrest.

He pulled in a last, long breath through his mouth and got cautiously to his hands and knees, his strength seeping slowly back. He could see the van eighty feet below him, as pathetic as a beetle with its legs in the air. The thought of Julie in there, caught by the foot, defenseless…

He jerked his head. It was Forrest he had to worry about. Once he had taken care of Forrest Julie would be all right. What “taken care of” meant, he had yet to figure out, but something would come to him.

I know you’ll think of something. He hoped so.

Staying low, he scrambled for better cover about thirty feet further on: a column of limestone that had collapsed and fractured into a jumble of massive slabs. From between two of them, he scanned the pale, eroded plateau in Forrest’s presumed direction, squinting in the needle-sharp light. To his surprise a white Horizon van stood about two hundred yards away, and directly beyond it, no more than a mile off, was the familiar, humpbacked Monkey’s Spine that marked the location of WV-29. Between the two he could make out, for much of the way, a portion of a “desert freeway,” one of the sandy tracks used by night-driving truck drivers who had their own reasons for keeping far from the main roads.

That explained how Forrest had gotten here first. When Gawdat had started off on the roundabout route that would bring them to the entrance to the sunken canyon-it had taken a good twenty minutes-Forrest had simply hopped into the other van and driven straight to the cliffside, only a mile He ducked. There had been a flash of white about fifty yards in front of him, along the back of the organ-pipe formation. White and red. Forrest’s broad-brimmed Panama hat. Gideon dropped onto his belly and peered through a heap of crumbled limestone. Forrest was coming toward him, rounding the edge of a rocky column and scooting sideways down a sandy incline, one hand steadying himself against the rock, the other holding the rifle.

Crablike, Gideon backed further into the three-foot space between the tilted slabs. He didn’t think he’d been seen; Forrest’s face had been down, his eyes on his footing, and the brim of his hat had probably blocked his vision.

Probably.

He could hear him now, big desert boots scrunching on the gritty soil. Forrest had no choice but to come this way to get to a spot where he could overlook the van; on this part of the cliffs the organ-pipe formation at Gideon’s back sidled up almost to the rim, leaving only a six-foot-wide space for passage. Right in front of Gideon.

And when he came, Gideon would be coiled and ready, his eyes fixed on the place where Forrest’s legs would appear. The instant he saw him he would spring, bowling him over, going for the rifle with both hands and wresting it out of the startled Forrest’s grasp. He would take Forrest to the van he’d come in, lay him down in the back and lash him to something, and find the road that led down into the canyon.

In an hour he and Julie would be on a patio in Luxor sipping something cool, and Forrest would be learning firsthand about the Egyptian system of justice administration.

Assuming that all went well.

He got into position on fingertips and toes, a sprinter’s crouch. With his eyes on the pathway and his muscles so tense they vibrated he waited. And waited.

Two minutes passed. His neck began to ache. His shoulders and back were stiffening; he had probably taken more of a mauling in the van than he’d realized. He adjusted his position, easing the strain on his neck and hands. Forrest didn’t come. Another minute went by. No Forrest.

Sweat dripped from the end of his nose. Had he been seen after all? Had he boxed himself in? Was it Forrest who was doing the waiting-out, sitting at his ease His ears pricked. He’d heard something; the chink of metal against stone. Not coming toward him, but already past, toward the canyon rim. Somehow Forrest had gotten by. But how could… a frightening image of him out there, taking his time, drawing a bead on Julie through one of the van’s windows, brought him swiftly out from behind the rocks with the tire iron in his hand.

It took him a few seconds to find Forrest. He wasn’t on the rim with Gideon, but about fifteen feet below it, on a projection that Gideon hadn’t noticed before even though he had to have climbed over it on the way up; a slanting shelf about a hundred feet long that ran from the cliff top, well behind where Gideon was standing, to peter out about seventy feet above the canyon floor. Forrest was hunkered down behind some boulders near the lower end of it with his back to Gideon, methodically surveying the area below. The rifle was held beside him, propped on its butt. Clearly, he was concerned that they might have gotten out of the van; equally clearly, the idea that Gideon might already have gotten up the steep walls and be behind him had never crossed his mind.

Frankly, it seemed improbable to Gideon too. He didn’t have a particularly good head for heights, and looking at that fissured, near-vertical cliff face now was enough to make his legs watery. God bless the autonomic nervous system, he thought; always ready to kick in when you needed it. He hoped it was getting ready again.

He began to edge quietly forward, crouching low, placing his feet with care to avoid any friction. He had about fifteen feet of downward-sloping limestone to go to the rim of the cliff. Then a sheer six-foot drop to Forrest’s level and another ten or twelve feet-the width of the shelf-to Forrest himself. It was the last dozen feet that were going to be the hard part. Assuming he made it without being seen to the edge of the cliff, what then? If he hurled himself down at Forrest, could he possibly reach him? He didn’t think so. Well, on a bounce maybe, but that wasn’t going to do the trick.