She cried out, this time in pain.
“Shut up,” a man said gruffly. Enforcing it, he smacked her mouth, knocking her head back against the stone stair. A starburst of pain flared behind her eyes. “Who are you? Who brought you here?” he demanded.
She blinked hard, trying both to alleviate the stabbing pain of the flashlight in her eyes and to focus on the situation, to give an answer that he’d believe without tipping him off about the rescue mission. “My name is Suzanne Hassan. No one brought me, I came alone—do you think someone would leave me alone in the middle of a wadi at night? I followed you from Mr. Atallah’s store.”
She assumed he was the courier they’d followed, but couldn’t be sure. The man who’d stabbed Donovan and fled with a broken arm had been an Egyptian, but this man sounded like an American.
“Why?”
She stuck her chin up, defiant. “Because I bought the first vase. I know there’s more treasure, and I want it.”
Whoever the man was, he laughed. “The whole world wants it, sweetheart. That’s the beauty of it.” He grabbed her upper arm and yanked her to her feet. “You’ll never get it now. But come meet the late, great Ramesses VIII. You can see what you’re missing out on before we kill you. It turns out a tomb is a great place to hide a body for a long, long time.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Jess.” Donovan’s harsh whisper blew away on the night breeze, but sounded too loud to his ears. Still, she didn’t answer.
“Goddammit,” he muttered, choosing to give in to the irritation rather than the sick feeling of panic that gnawed at his gut.
“I don’t like this,” Avery said.
The sentence belonged with an ominous B-movie musical score. He blocked the thought, but his frustration rose along with the fear that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. He shone his flashlight on the ground, certain this was the spot where he’d left her. The light shone dully on sand and stone. He moved it in ever-widening circles as four pairs of eyes followed its path. Rock, pebbles, rock, rock…
Gun. Avery’s indrawn breath coincided with the jolt that shot through his chest, hitting his heart like a clenched fist. He moved the yellow circle of light back a few inches, spotlighting the black plastic grip and metal barrel. He picked up the gun he’d given her as the invisible fist squeezed tightly around his heart, making him catch his breath.
“Shit,” Kyle muttered, echoing his mood.
“She wouldn’t leave,” he told them. Which meant someone had taken her by force. But where? Would she go without protest, without making a sound? They hadn’t been that far away and had heard nothing.
“She couldn’t just vanish,” Avery said, echoing his thoughts. “Shine that light down here again.”
“Where? What did you see?”
Impatiently, she grabbed the flashlight from his hand and pointed it at the ground. “Look. This rock has been moved.”
He saw the scrape marks. “Son of a bitch.”
Kyle and Mitch squatted and saw them, too. “Why?” Kyle asked. “You think she was looking for the entrance of the tomb?”
“I think maybe she found it.”
“She didn’t even have a flashlight,” Mitch said. “You think our scared little rabbit would go inside a pitch-black tomb?”
Was he trying to discourage them from looking? It wouldn’t work. Donovan considered the question of whether Wally’s daughter would enter the never-before-seen tomb of a pharaoh, and swore under his breath. “Yes.”
He shone the light around the wadi, no longer concerned with someone seeing it. Finding Jess was more important, and he was convinced that if anyone was in this wadi, they were beneath the surface, in the tomb of Ramesses VIII. Spotlighting more rocks, he marched over to the nearest ones. Sure enough, they’d been moved. “Look,” he called. But he was already moving on to the next rock. They caught up with him as his light found the fresh marks around two large rocks. “Damn,” Mitch said. “You’re right.”
Kyle knelt and shifted the rock, revealing nothing.
He didn’t say anything, but moved on to a large, upright rock. It hadn’t been moved, and looked too large to budge in any case. But the next one did. As he shone the light on it, Kyle moved the slab of limestone. The corner of a hole yawned black and deep before them. Kyle gently moved the rock back over it, covering the hole.
“What are you doing?” Avery asked in a strident whisper. “That’s it.”
“You want them to know we’re here?” Kyle said. “Assuming they don’t already.”