‘I know. We’ve done more than enough of that over the years!’ She quickly changed her clothes, then came back into the lounge. ‘Okay, I’m going. So you’ll be gone by the time I get back?’
‘Probably. If you hang on a minute, I’ll check her flight.’
‘No, I need to go. I’ve already left it longer than I should have.’ She diverted to the sofa to kiss him. ‘See you when you get back.’
‘If they can tell if it’s a boy or a girl,’ he called after her as she went to the door, ‘I don’t want to know!’
Smiling, Nina left the apartment. She took the elevator to the ground floor and emerged on East 78th Street, hailing a cab.
Across the road from her building, a tall, burly blond man watched her taxi pull away, his eyes narrowing with malevolence. He had found his target… and would soon have his revenge.
Eddie finished reading the article about the airship, and was about to check the status of Natalia’s flight before deciding it would be much quicker to type in its details on a keyboard than laboriously thumb them in on a small touchscreen. He went into the study and opened the laptop, quickly carrying out the search.
‘Bollocks,’ he muttered on seeing the result. The flight from Hamburg had been delayed by bad weather. It was now over the Atlantic on its way to New York, but did not look likely to make up much lost time en route. ‘Good job I checked.’ There was no point leaving for JFK for at least another hour.
He was about to close the machine when a text document behind the browser caught his eye: Nina’s manuscript. A moment’s hesitation, then he clicked on it. ‘Well, it is about me…’
The Yorkshireman tried to resist the temptation to play critic — his tastes in literature generally extended little further than thrillers with covers featuring silhouetted running men and/or expensive fast-moving vehicles, sometimes on fire — but it wasn’t long before he caught himself frowning. It wasn’t so much at his wife’s prose style, which admittedly was on the dry side, as at what she was saying. Or rather, as he kept reading, what she wasn’t. It wasn’t inaccurate, but… incomplete.
‘Why’s she written it like that?’ He whispered as he continued through the document, his expression gradually darkening.
Nina returned from the obstetrician feeling buoyant. Her greatest concern about the pregnancy had been as much her own health as the baby’s; several months earlier, she had been infected by a highly toxic substance that seemed likely to kill her sooner rather than later. The toxin had apparently been neutralised during her discovery of the Spring of Immortality, a legendary source of healing water sought by none other than Alexander the Great over two thousand years earlier. It was something of a misnomer, since actual immortality was not one of its benefits, but it did slow the ageing process — and even cure certain diseases.
Proof of that had come from a deeply unpleasant source. Prior to Nina’s discovery of the spring, its only beneficiaries had been a group of escaped Nazi war criminals led by an SS commander named Erich Kroll, who had been using a small supply of its water looted from a shrine to Alexander in Greece. The Nazis, who were all in their nineties but physically appeared fifty years younger, had been plotting the rise of a new Reich from a remote enclave in the wilds of Argentina.
All were now dead, and she and those few companions who had survived the expedition had pledged to keep the spring’s location hidden to prevent further bloodshed. The water’s effect on her was no secret, however. The tumours that had begun to infect her body quickly went into remission, shrivelling to nothing. Her doctors were at a loss to explain how, and she had not been willing to share the truth. What mattered to her was that she was now apparently back to full health… and her baby appeared to be suffering no ill effects.
As she entered the apartment, she saw Eddie’s battered leather jacket hanging by the door; he hadn’t yet left for the airport. ‘I’m home!’ she called, expecting him to greet her. When there was no answer after a few seconds, she said again: ‘Hello? Eddie, you here?’
‘Yeah, in the study,’ was the reply.
He still did not appear, so she hung up her own jacket and went to find him. ‘What’s up?’ she asked as she entered the study — to find her laptop open with the manuscript on the screen.
‘I’ve been reading,’ he said.
His tone was level, but she immediately picked out a disapproving undertone that she knew from experience would soon escalate into an argument, even if she hadn’t already been about to start one. ‘Is that my book? Eddie, you know I didn’t want anyone to read it until it was finished!’
‘You didn’t want anyone to be able to say what you’d got wrong until it was already in print, you mean?’
She stiffened. ‘There’s nothing “wrong” with it. Everything I’ve written is exactly what happened — the only things I’ve left out are because of security issues.’
‘You’ve left out more than that.’ He pointed at the screen. ‘This bit here, you’re talking about how you discovered the Pyramid of Osiris.’
‘Yes, what about it?’
‘How you discovered the Pyramid of Osiris. What about Macy?’
Nina felt cold guilt. ‘What about her?’ she replied with a snap, trying to force the feeling away — only to realise too late that she had said exactly the wrong thing.
‘What about her?’ Eddie exploded, standing. ‘For fuck’s sake, Nina! You would never have found the bloody thing if it wasn’t for her — you wouldn’t even have got your job back at the IHA without Macy! She had a total case of hero-worship, you were the whole reason she got into archaeology in the first place, and she did just as much as you, maybe even more, to find the pyramid, but you hardly even mention her!’ He stabbed a finger at one particular paragraph. ‘This bit here: “With the help of American archaeology student Macy Sharif, I found the symbol within the Osireon that pointed to the site of the pyramid.” That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say about her?’
‘It’s only the first draft!’ Nina protested. ‘And the book’s supposed to be about what I discovered, not how I discovered it.’
‘There — you’ve done it again. You said how I discovered it, not how we discovered it. You left Macy out again!’
She realised with a flash of shame that he was right, and she hadn’t even been aware of doing so. ‘I–I can put in more about her when I start editing it…’
His expression was now not so much angry as disappointed, which somehow hurt all the more. ‘I stuck up for you in Cairo when Ubayy Banna said you took credit for other people’s work, but… I don’t know, maybe he was right.’ He shook his head. ‘Why would you do that? Macy was our friend! Writing her out of your book, it’s… it’s disrespectful. She’s dead, but that doesn’t mean she never existed. I would never forget a friend. Never.’ He glanced into the living room, where photos of fallen friends and comrades proved his point.
‘I haven’t forgotten her,’ Nina insisted. ‘I…’ She was on the verge of telling him about her recurring nightmare, how much she feared sleep because she knew it would bring something she wished she could forget, but something stopped her.
Her hesitation allowed Eddie to continue his tirade. ‘If you haven’t forgotten her, then why are you trying to paint her out of the picture? And she’s not the only one — you didn’t mention people like Hugo or Jim Baillard in the chapter about Atlantis. It’s like…’ Now it was his turn to pause as a thought struck him. ‘Like you’re in denial. Is that it? You can’t cope, so you’re pretending it never happened?’ It was instantly clear from his expression as his mind caught up with his mouth that he knew he should have phrased the accusation more tactfully, but by then it was too late.