His pulse quickened.
He thought back to her pathetic tale of lost love and replayed her story in his mind. The man — Tom Webster, the name was branded onto his consciousness, not that he believed it to be his true name — had swooped in and out of her life with clinical efficiency. The discovery had led nowhere, or so he’d led her to believe. What had he really uncovered, what hadn’t he shared with her? He’d then pulled a disappearing act, leaving her with an unborn child and a numbing spiel about why he couldn’t be with her, for reasons he couldn’t share with her.
Déjà vu.
He’d heard — read, actually — something along those lines before.
Many years ago. Back home, in Italy.
In Naples.
It was part of what had triggered his journey.
Yes, of course, he knew it was something some men said. When they lost interest. When they wanted to move on to new conquests. Chapter one of the idiot’s guide to dating. A he’s-just-not-that-into-you kind of thing. Normally, his cynical, jaded view of humanity would have supported that take on it.
Not this time. This felt different.
It fit.
And the very idea that this Tom Webster could actually be part of something he wasn’t sure even existed, something he doggedly wanted to believe, against all rationale, was out there…He smiled inwardly.
This is real. Just as I always suspected.
The principe was right.
A wave of exhilaration coursed through him, coupled with an anger at the way fate dealt its hand. Evelyn had discovered the chamber in 1977 and left the country three years later. He’d arrived in Iraq a couple of years after that.
He cursed his misfortune.
If he’d been there at the time of the discovery of the chambers, he might have heard about it. He might have met this Tom Webster. And he might already possess what he was searching for.
Fate. Timing. The right place at the wrong time. But maybe this was a chance to make up for it.
He needed to find this Webster. The number Evelyn had for him was in her organizer, in her apartment. Omar and his men should have brought that back from the woman’s apartment, but that effort had been thwarted — he’d have to have a serious talk to someone about that. He knew he could easily find the number using the Internet, but he didn’t expect it to yield much. Webster probably didn’t want to be found. He’d surely covered his tracks.
The hakeem also needed to get his hands on that slippery antiques dealer. He had to get his hands on the book, which he knew could be the key to everything. But this woman and her story…she was, indeed, a godsend. Not that he actually believed in such inanities.
But there were complications he needed to better understand.
The woman’s daughter, for one. She’d risked her life by interrupting his men and allowed the dealer to escape. Then there was the issue of the man who was with her at the archaeologist’s apartment. The hakeem had dispatched Omar and his men to go over it and bring back anything of interest — and anything bearing the sign of the snake. Not only had her daughter been there too, but the man she was with was clearly a professional. A well-trained player who’d outgunned Omar — who wasn’t exactly a slouch when it came to that kind of wet work — and killed one of his men. From what Omar had told him, he was American. Who was he, and what was he doing there with her? Was he a new player in this game — another one? Was he also one of them? Was it all suddenly coming alive? Or was he there for other, more trivial reasons, without knowledge of what the game was really about?
The hakeem tried to rein in his exhilaration. He’d waited for so long, tried so hard. He had devoted his life to this pursuit. And now, he felt with growing certainty, it was all coming together.
Finally.
He had to know who these new players were.
But until then, he had to tread carefully.
He would use his contacts to check up on Webster, though he suspected the man would be difficult to trace. Omar would call his contacts in the Lebanese police and intelligence services. Find out what he could about the American. Most pressing, the hakeem had to find the antiques dealer. He couldn’t lose sight of that. He glumly realized that there were no guarantees that the man would be found. Omar had really screwed up on that front, though the hakeem knew his man would do everything necessary to make up for his mistake.
His spirits rose as a realization broke through the questions swamping his mind. If the archaeologist wasn’t just another deluded victim, if this Webster did really harbor strong feelings for her…The hakeem might just be able to use her to draw him out.
The lure of the damsel in distress.
It always worked in the movies.
He just had to make sure that her cry for help was loud enough.
Chapter 29
Mia pulled the shot closer.
The face belonged to a man who was standing aloofly, slightly apart from a group of sweaty, smiling workers. She concentrated, trying to marry it to the terror-stricken man who had been moments away from being stuffed into a car and carted off — along with her mother — to some unknown fate.
She held it up. “This guy here.” She handed it to Corben and pointed out the man she thought she recognized.
Corben examined it, then flipped it over. Names were written on the back of the photograph in pencil, in the same elegant hand as the notes in the file. He flipped it over again and back, assigning the names to the faces. “Looks like his name’s Farouk.”
“Just Farouk?”
“That’s it.” Corben pulled out his notebook and wrote it down. “No family name.”
Mia looked at him, deflated. “Is that enough?”
Corben put down his notebook. “It’s something.” He studied the face in the photograph, as if committing it to memory. “Go through the rest of them, will you? Maybe there’s another shot of him in there.”
She did so, without success. Still, at least they had a face and a name, which, presumably, Corben’s people could build on.
Mia set the photos down. Her thoughts kept getting drawn back to Evelyn. She’d been gone for almost twenty-four hours now. Mia had heard the cliché about the first forty-eight hours being the most critical in any missing person’s investigation — not from anyone actually in law enforcement, but from countless TV shows and movies. Still, it didn’t seem counterintuitive — clichés became clichés for a reason — and if it was true, half the window of opportunity to finding Evelyn was already shuttered.
“How are you going to find him?” she asked.
“I don’t know. We don’t have much to go on. There’s her organizer, although there’s nothing listed in this week’s diary entries. Now that we have a name, I need to go through it again, see if there are any contact details for him. We have her cell phone. We need to go through its log, see if any of the numbers on it are his. Same with her laptop, although it’s password-protected, so it could take a little while to break into.”
She nodded soberly and picked up Farouk’s picture again. She swept her eyes over it, frustrated and feeling helpless, then a conflicted thought blossomed in her mind.
“He saw me, I’m sure of it,” she said in a tentative voice, still looking through the picture, remembering that night. “He saw me when I got to that alley.”
Corben glanced at her uncertainly. He knew that already.
“He’ll recognize me. Which means he’ll trust me if he sees me again. Maybe we can use that. Maybe there’s some way we can lure him out.”