“Right.” He pulled himself through, glanced warily at the deserted cliff top, and reached back in to help her get out.
She was up on her right elbow with a puzzled look on her face, tugging awkwardly at the junk that lay over her extended left foot. “Ow. Damn.”
“Julie, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“No… I don’t think so. My ankle’s caught… Damn! There’s this stupid bar…”
“I’ll give you a hand.” He clambered back in, hauling himself to her side on his elbows.
“No, it’s not going to work,” she said, straining at her foot. “Damn!”
A glance made the problem clear. When the van had flipped, two of the three passenger seat rows had come loose, and one of them had fallen over Julie’s leg and been wedged firmly into the buckled ceiling. The steel reinforcing bar that ran along its base had come down across her ankle, pinning her hiking-booted foot to the crushed roof.
He tried to maneuver her foot out of its steel-rimmed trap without success-there wasn’t enough room to move it- then tugged fruitlessly at the bar.
“You’re lucky you didn’t lose your foot,” he said.
“That’s me,” she said grimly, “lucky Julie.”
He made her lie back, then managed to get both aims around the seat, pulling from his cramped position and putting all the strength of his legs and back into it. It didn’t budge, didn’t feel as if anything short of a crane could get it to budge.
He fell back. “Can you get your foot out of the boot?”
“I don’t know.” She fumbled at the laces, blocked by the mass of the seat. “No, it’s hard to get hold-”
“Here, let me-”
Her hand came down on his wrist. “Gideon, there’s no time! He could be here any minute. You go!”
“And leave you?” He laughed, but he felt as if something had punched him in the throat. “Forget it.” He went back to her boot laces.
Her fingers dug into his wrist. Her face was very close. “Gideon, go! It’s our only chance.”
“But-”
“I’ll be all right. We’ll be all right. I know you’ll think of something.”
“I-Julie, I-”
“Go, already!”
Chapter Twenty-four
I know you’ll think of something.
He had been unable to reply. He’d stroked her cheek, pulled himself back out of the car, and run for the cliff. And he had scrambled up the rocky wall with the mindless, pumping strength of a desert animal, seeming to throw himself from outcropping, to boulder, to crevice, to ridge, every second expecting to see Forrest appear on the rim above him, rifle in hand.
Forrest.
How could he not have realized it? He should have put it all together in Abydos, when TJ had told him about the ornaments missing from the el-Amarna Museum. But he hadn’t; not until they were practically in Forrest’s sights, not until Julie showed him what was in the ledger. “Head of young woman or girl, inscribed…” that is, of course, engraved. With hollows for the insertion of faience eyes, channels for eyebrows of gold, perforations for golden earrings, drilled holes for a wig of delicate golden strands…
Hadn’t Arlo stood right mere in the museum and flatly told him the damn things weren’t jewelry? Of course they weren’t jewelry. They were inlays; gold and faience inlays and decorations to adorn the head of an A mama statuette. And when everything was assembled-head, inlays, and body-whoever had them would have something that no one else in the world had. An intact, complete Amarna Period statuette. Museums and collectors had burned to own one for decades, but none had ever been recovered.
No wonder the head had been worth killing over. And no wonder Haddon had had to go. He’d seen the head. He could describe it accurately. And if he could describe it, then eventually, when it came on the market as it surely would, it could be traced back to Horizon House and to the people who were there at the time. So he had to be disposed of, and disposed of before returning to Luxor, where he was chafing to show it to everyone in sight.
It wouldn’t have been hard for Forrest to murder the old Egyptologist. Haddon liked his after-dinner drinks and after-dinner monologues; finding people to sit through them was his problem. Forrest could easily enough have gotten himself invited to Haddon’s stateroom. Once there, how difficult would it have been to use Haddon’s bathroom at some point and emerge with four or five crushed-up antidepressant pills? How difficult to find a way to slip them into Haddon’s brandy or Scotch?
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.