No Rules(101)

And quite likely, more bad guys.

Shit, did tombs have back doors or escape hatches? He’d never thought to ask.

“Who else is here?” he asked.

“No one.”

“Bullshit. I heard you talking.”

“I talk to myself. Sometimes I sing. It’s lonely down here. Sometimes I think I am going a little crazy from the loneliness.”

He didn’t believe him. The man wasn’t crazy, just nervous as hell. “Frisk him,” he told Kyle. As Kyle patted him down and cleared him, Donovan asked, “What’s your name?”

“Mahmood.”

“Okay, Mahmood. Where’s the young woman who came in here?”

“No one comes in here,” Mahmood said, shaking his head vigorously.

A cold spot of anxiety grew in his stomach. The man was lying. He had to be. “We know she did,” he barked, his voice disappointingly muffled in the cluttered, low-ceilinged room. “We’re going to look, so save us the time and tell us.”

“No woman,” Mahmood insisted. Almost simultaneously, a scraping sound came from far away.

Mitch’s gun jerked toward the door. Mahmood saw it and told him, “Scorpions. They come in from the wadi. Big ones.”

Donovan uttered a harsh laugh, not because it was a stupid lie, but because claiming it was the mummy of Ramesses VIII would have been a far more effective one if he wanted to scare his team. He motioned with his gun. “Let’s go see these scorpions. You lead the way.”

Mahmood turned as if accepting the inevitable and walked into the next room. It was another treasure trove. He noted vases and statues made of wood, alabaster, and gold. Brilliant colors behind them revealed a story in pictures on the walls.

“Holy shit,” Kyle murmured.

Everyone’s eyes flicked around the room, while keeping their guns pointed at Mahmood. Donovan glanced at Mitch. Still awed and a little nervous and still keeping his gun on Mahmood. He almost wished he’d try something and get it over with.

They passed through into yet another room. More treasures. The life-size gold statue of a pharaoh dominated the room, while the walls were lined with weapons and tools of war—daggers, bows, arrows, and spears. To one side was a throne, and next to it a square patch of floor that looked as if something that had sat there was gone. The canopic chest they’d seen at Mr. Atallah’s? It was the right size.

Mahmood stood awkwardly in the center of the room. “This is all. See, no woman.”

Apprehension slipped into his gut, twisting uncomfortably. She had to be here. Think logically, he told himself. Something was missing. “Where’s the sarcophagus?”

“Gone,” Mahmood said sadly. “Tomb robbers, long ago.”

“Relatives of yours?” Avery asked drily.

Mahmood didn’t appear to take offense. “Perhaps. It is probably in some museum in England or Germany. Maybe even America,” he said sternly, as though accusing them all. “That is where they all end up, you know. Egypt has been robbed of its culture, its treasures, for centuries. It is a crime. People come and plunder our heritage.”

Mahmood went on, expounding on the loss of Egyptian antiquities to foreign archeologists, conveniently neglecting the fact that he was there with the same goal.

Donovan tuned him out. Mahmood was wrong. Jess had told him many fascinating things about the tombs, and one of the surprising parts had been about what was taken when tombs were robbed. The Western world made a big deal over mummies and their coffins, but it was other things that were more valuable to tomb robbers. That was why explorers had found mummies in otherwise completely plundered tombs—no one bothered to move the heavy stone sarcophagi or even to lift out the layers of inner coffins to find a few articles of jewelry on a mummy when other treasures lay within easy grasp. Some mummies had been unwrapped and mutilated but many were not, while all their expensive unguents and golden statues had disappeared.

“No one took the sarcophagus,” he said. “It’s here.”

For a moment, everyone looked at him, but Donovan was distracted by a sound. Or had he imagined it? Mahmood began talking again, fast. “Obviously they did. You can see it is not here. The mummy is valuable and the jewelry inside—”

“Quiet,” he ordered.

“But you must believe me—”

Donovan extended his arm, pointing his gun at Mahmood’s head. “I said shut up.”

In the silence that followed, Mahmood shifted nervously and the Omega team shot quizzical glances at him.

From his right came a low sound, muffled but definite.

Heads turned toward the wall with the bows and spears—all except Mahmood’s, who appeared to have heard nothing. But he knew they hadn’t imagined the sound.