“Could you do me two favors?”
“Anything.”
“First, could you please contact the Supreme Council of Antiquities? They need to know what’s been happening so they can take the appropriate steps, put a warrant out for Raynes’s arrest. They might even be able to help you with Bouchard.”
“That’s a good idea. What’s the second favor?”
“Strange question, but: how much does a camel cost?”
She again looked confused. “I don’t know. Maybe, gosh, ten thousand gineih?”
“Okay.” Storm reached into his wallet and took double that amount in American greenbacks, a currency still very much in favor in Egypt. He held it out for Katie. “Could you please see this gets to a local camel renter named Massri? I somehow suspect I won’t be able to return his camels to him and I hate to leave him in the lurch.”
“Will do,” she said, accepting the money and smiling again.
Storm blew her a kiss, then urged Antony forward. He rode on without looking back. He had come to the desert to find the source of the promethium, and he wasn’t going to leave until he did.
In some ways, his task had gotten slightly easier. He at least knew what he was looking for now: some kind of opening into an underground limestone cave.
But in other ways, it was just as daunting. The opening did not need to be any larger than what one man could crawl into. And he was looking for it in a desert that had gotten no less vast.
Storm was missing the air-conditioning — and was getting even more wistful about passing on the offer Katie had made — before he even got out of sight of the camp. The heat was searing, and Storm could feel himself losing water by the liter: anything he sweated out seemed to evaporate instantly.
Still, in a strange way, the sun was his friend. He needed it to have any chance of finding this cave. He would not have the luxury of working at night, like the archaeologists did.
As he rode, he occupied his mind with math. Katie said Professor Raynes would disappear for two hours every other day. That meant he was likely walking for a little less than one hour out to the cave, digging out as much promethium as he could carry — which probably didn’t take too long — then walking back.
Moving at a brisk pace, someone with long legs and in decent shape, like Raynes, could cover four miles in an hour. But that was on asphalt. Sand would slow him down a bit. Climbing up and down dunes would slow him further.
So Storm decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that three miles felt like about the right distance. Walk three miles in fifty minutes. Spend twenty minutes collecting promethium. Walk three miles back. It made sense.
Antony was in no special hurry, but he still covered the three miles in far less time than a human could. When Storm’s GPS told him they had traveled due east three miles, he stopped and looked around.
They were now back within the target zone that the nerds had originally given Storm, but it was looking no less bleak and empty. Sand dunes stretched in every direction. Other than a few scrubby plants, there was no sign of life.
Storm decided to form a mile-square search grid with his current position as the center. In his mind, he cut the grid into two-hundred-foot strips, which meant he would pass within one hundred feet of every inch of this one square mile of desert. He just hoped that would bring him close enough to spot what might be a fairly small entrance.
Really, it was Antony who was doing the hard work. Slicing a 5,280-foot wide grid into 26.4 mile-long lines meant Antony would have to travel 27.4 miles to cover it all. But camels were bred for such things, and Antony was no more or less disagreeable than usual, doing the usual amount of bellowing but plowing onward all the same.
They were ten miles into their back-and-forth journey when Storm hit pay dirt. It was a rocky outcropping that Storm had already passed two or three times. Each time, he had wanted to break off his route to explore it more closely, but he forced himself to stay disciplined.
Finally, on his closest pass, he saw something that didn’t belong. It was a sheet of plywood, attached to the sheer side of the outcropping. The plywood was roughly the same tan color as the rock around it. It was crude but effective camouflage. Certainly, it couldn’t be seen from satellite, owing to the angle as much as anything.
Storm dismounted from Antony and looked for something to use as a camel hitch. There was nothing, at least nothing that would stop Antony from doing as he pleased if he got it in his camel brain to run off.
“Stay,” Storm said.
Antony belched at him.
“Good boy,” Storm said.
He approached the plywood slowly. There were three hinges at the top of the sheet that had been bolted into the rock. He pulled at the bottom of the wood. It came up perhaps an inch, then stopped.
Storm frowned at it for a second, then saw the reason: it was secured in place by a bolt that slid into a hole that had been bored into the rock. The bolt had been painted the color of sand, as was the padlock that secured it.
It was a security system that might thwart a desert nomad, but not a man with Storm’s skills. The lock was a cheap, mass-produced brand. Storm considered shooting it off — two bullets would have done it — but opted for the more elegant approach.
He lowered his ear to the lock and slowly turned the dial until he heard the first pin drop into place. On a more expensive lock, the sound is dampened to prevent exactly what Storm was doing. On this brand, it sounded like thunder. After he got the third number, he quickly spun the entire combination.
The lock opened easily. Storm swung the door upward, revealing a hole in the rock.
Storm walked back toward Antony and retrieved a flashlight from his pack. Properly armed, he returned to the plywood and lifted it again. He aimed the flashlight beam into the darkness underneath.
The entrance was only slightly smaller than the sheet of plywood. He could see where footprints — presumably Raynes’s — had been left in the sand.
Storm followed those impressions as the tunnel quickly narrowed down to a diameter that was a fairly tight squeeze for a man of his size. Raynes was tall, like Storm, but a lot thinner. Before long, Storm had to turn sideways.
The tunnel began to slope gradually downward and widen. Storm could tell, simply from the way that the echoes from his footfalls were coming back at him, that there was a large, open space somewhere ahead of him. He shifted his flashlight beam in that direction.
For a while, the beam was reflecting back from the sides of the tunnel. Then, suddenly, it was disappearing into the darkness. Storm quickened his pace and was soon shining the flashlight beam into a large, irregularly shaped cavern, perhaps twenty-five feet at its highest point and eighty feet at its widest.
Storm inspected the limestone walls. Whereas the tunnel had been chiseled by whatever instrument Raynes had used, these walls were different. They were smooth, like they had been carved by water many epochs long ago, when global climate was different and the Sahara received far more rainfall.
A thin layer of dust and sand covered the flatter parts of the floor. In some places, it was undisturbed. In others, it was a patchwork of scuffs and scrapes. Storm could easily make out the path that Raynes had repeatedly walked and continued following it.
It led him to the far side of the chamber and a wall that was unlike anything Storm had ever seen. It was pure white and stretched fifteen feet at a seventy-five-degree angle until it disappeared into the ceiling above it. Storm had heard miners talk about finding veins or lodes of minerals and how they ran in jagged layers through other types of rock. He realized he was seeing such a vein.
And this one happened to be made of pure promethium. The substance, which was some kind of promethium salt, was almost chalky in consistency. There were flakes of it lying in piles at the base of the wall. Storm realized the promethium he had seen had already been ground up, perhaps because it made it easier for transporting.