His benefactor’s mellifluous voice came on the phone immediately.
“I’ve been waiting for your call, Adriano,” he said.
“Sorry for the delay, sir. There were unexpected difficulties.”
Adriano described every detail of his encounter with Ali. His benefactor would know if he were lying or shading the truth.
“I’m very disappointed, Adriano.”
“I know, sir. I was under orders not to let the
Adriano breathed a sigh of relief. He had been trained not to feel pain or fear, but he was well aware of the fate of those who displeased his benefactor. “Do you want me to try to track it down?”
“No. I’ll try to go through international channels once more. It’s becoming too dangerous there for you.”
“I’ve made arrangements to leave the country through Syria.”
“Good.” There was a pause at the other end of the line. “This woman, Carina Mechadi, may prove useful.”
“In what way, sir?”
“We shall see, Adriano. We shall see.”
The line went dead.
He grabbed his bag and closed the hotel-room door behind him. He planned to meet an oil smuggler who had promised to get him out of Iraq. In accordance with his standing orders to leave no trace of his passing, he would, of course, dispatch the man to Allah once he was safe across the border.
He smiled as he savored the prospect.
As a brilliant designer of undersea craft for the National Underwater and Marine Agency, Zavala ordinarily carried nothing more lethal than a laptop computer. But his years working for NUMA’s Special Assignments Team had taught him the wisdom of the Boy Scout adage to be prepared. Zavala reached under the car seat, his fingers closed on a quick-release holster, and his hand came out with a Walther PPK handgun.
He got out of the car and made his way around the boathouse, moving with the stealth of a deer hunter. Pressing his back to the exterior wall, he edged his way to the corner and popped out into the open, gun extended with both hands and ready to find a target.
A broad-shouldered man dressed in tan shorts and white T-shirt was standing on the riverbank with his back to Zavala. The man held a pistol down by his thigh and was inspecting a paper bull’s-eye pinned to a tree. A cloud of purple smoke hung in the air. The man slipped a pair of ear protectors off his head just as Zavala stepped on a twig. He turned at the snapping sound and saw Zavala creeping around the corner with the gun clutched in his hands.
Kurt Austin, Zavala’s boss on NUMA’s Special Assignments Team, grinned and said, “Going on a turkey shoot, Joe?”
Zavala lowered the gun and walked over to the tree to inspect the hole that had been punched slightly off the center ring of the target.
“
Zavala tucked the gun into his belt. “You didn’t tell me you’d turned your expensive riverfront property into a shooting gallery.”
Austin blew the smoke away from the pistol barrel like a gun-fighter who’d beaten his opponent to the draw.
“I couldn’t wait to try out my new toy at a shooting range.”
He handed the flintlock dueling pistol to Zavala, who inspected the walnut stock and the engraved octagonal barrel.
“Nice balance,” he said, hefting the weapon. “How old is it?”
“It was made in 1785 by Robert Wogdon, a London gunsmith. He fashioned some of the most accurate dueling pistols of his day. You test a dueling pistol by dangling it down at arm’s length. Then you bring it up quickly and hold it just long enough to check the sights and squeeze off a shot. It should be right on target.”
Zavala aimed for another tree and clicked his tongue to simulate gunfire.
“Bull’s-eye,” Austin said.
Zavala handed the pistol back. “Didn’t you tell me your pistol collection was complete?”
“Blame it on Rudi,” Austin said with a shrug. Rudi Gunn was the assistant director of NUMA.
“All he said was to decompress after our last assignment,” Zavala said.
“You make my case. Idle time is a dangerous thing in the hands of a collector.” Austin ripped the target off the tree and tucked it into his pocket. “What brings you to Virginia? Run out of women to date in Washington?”
Zavala’s quiet-spoken charm and dark good looks made him much in demand on the Washington dating scene. The corners of his mouth turned up slightly in his trademark smile.
“I won’t say I’ve been living a monk’s life because you’d never believe me. I stopped by to show you a project I started months ago.”
“Project S? You can fill me in while we work on a couple of beers,” Austin said.
He put the shooting gear in a bag, wrapped the pistol in a soft cloth, and led the way up a staircase to a wide deck that overlooked the river.
Austin had bought the boathouse near Langley when he was with a clandestine undersea unit of the CIA. The purchase was beyond his budget, but the panoramic view of the river had closed the deal, and he got the price down because the boathouse was a wreck. He had spent thousands of dollars and countless hours transforming it from a run-down repository for boats to a comfortable retreat from the demands of his job as director of the Special Assignments Team.
Austin got couple of cold Tecate beers from the refrigerator, went out to the deck and handed one to Zavala. They clinked bottles and took a swig of the Mexican brew. Zavala took a sheet of computer paper from his pocket, placed it on a table, and smoothed out the folds with his hand.
“What do you think of my new wet submersible?”
In a wet submersible, the pilot and passenger wore scuba gear and sat on the outside of the vehicle rather than inside an enclosed cockpit. Wet submersibles commonly echoed the shape of their dry counterparts, with propellers at one end of a torpedo-shaped vehicle, the pilot at the other end.
The vehicle that Zavala had designed had a long, sloping hood, tapering trunk, and a wraparound windshield. It had dual headlights, white, so-called cove panels on the side, and a two-toned interior. The submersible had four thrusters instead of wheels.
Austin cleared his throat. “If I didn’t know this was a submersible, I’d swear it looked like a 1961 Corvette.
“She looks fast,” Austin said appraisingly.
“My car can do zero to sixty in about six seconds. This is a little slower. But she’ll move out on or under the water and handles the curves as if they weren’t there. She’ll do everything a car can do except peel rubber.”
“Why the departure from more, uh, conventional submersible models, like the saucer, torpedo, or bulbous shape?”
“Apart from the challenge, I wanted something I could use on NUMA assignments that would be fun to drive.”
“Will this thing work?”
“Field trials have gone well. I’ve designed a complete vehicle transport, launch, and recovery system too. The prototype is on its way to Turkey. I’m going over in a week to help out with an underwater archaeological dig of an old port they found in Istanbul.”
“A week should give us plenty of time.”
“Time for
“How would you like to join me on a cruise to Iceberg Alley?”
Zavala scanned the magazine article.
“I don’t know, Kurt. Sounds mighty cold. Cabo might be more appealing to my warm-blooded Mexican American nature.”
Austin gave Zavala a look of disgust. “C’mon, Joe. What would you be doing in Cabo? Lying on the beach sipping margaritas. Watching the sun set with your arm around a beautiful senorita. Same old same old. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Actually, my friend, I was thinking of watching the sun come
as I sang my senorita love songs.”
“You’d be pressing your luck,” Austin said with a snort. “Don’t forget, I’ve
Austin picked up the magazine. “I don’t want to push you into this, Joe.”
Zavala knew from past experience that his colleague didn’t push; he
“Where are you going?”
Zavala headed for the door.
“
Anthony Saxon got down on his hands and knees and peered into the hole. He pushed aside thoughts of poisonous snakes and spiders, unwound his turban, and pulled off his beige desert robe to reveal long pants and a shirt. He flicked on a flashlight, probed the darkness with its beam, and took a deep breath.
“Down the rabbit hole I go,” he said with a carefree jauntiness.
Saxon dove into the opening, wriggling his lanky six-foot frame like a salamander, and disappeared from sight. The passageway sloped downward like a coal chute. Saxon experienced a claustrophobic moment of panic when the chute narrowed and he pictured himself stuck, but he shimmied his way through the tight squeeze with the use of creative finger-toe coordination.
To his relief, the passageway widened again. After crawling for about twenty feet, he popped out of the chute into the open. Mindful not to bump his head on a low ceiling, he slowly stood erect and explored his surroundings with the flashlight.
The bull’s-eye of light fell on the mortared-stone-block wall of a rectangular space about as big as a two-car garage. There was an opening with a corbeled arch about five feet high on the opposite wall. He ducked through the breach and followed a passageway for around fifty feet until he came to a rectangular room about half the square footage of the first.
The dust that covered every surface started him on a coughing fit. When he recovered, he saw that the room was bare except for a wooden sarcophagus that was tipped on its side. The lid lay a few feet away. A vaguely human form swathed in bandages from head to toe was half tumbled out of the ancient casket. Saxon cursed under his breath. He had arrived centuries too late. Grave robbers had stripped the tomb of any valuables hundreds of years before he was born.
The sarcophagus lid was decorated with a painting of a young girl, probably in her late teens. She had dark, oversized eyes, a full mouth, and black hair tied back from her face. She looked vibrant and full of life. With gentle hands, he rolled the mummy back into the case. The dissected corpse felt like a dried bag of sticks. He righted the sarcophagus and slid the lid back on.
He ran the flashlight beam around the walls of the tomb and read the letters carved into the stone. The words they formed were in epigraphic Arabic of the first century A.D. Off by a thousand years.
he muttered.
Saxon patted the sarcophagus cover. “Sleep well, sweetheart. Sorry to disturb you.”
With a last, sad glance around the tomb, he followed the corridor back to the chute opening. He grunted his way through the tight spot and pulled his dust-covered body out of the hole into the hundred-degree heat. His pants were ripped, and his knees and elbows were scraped and bleeding.
The Bedouin had an expectant expression on his dark face.
Bilked,
A car horn beeped at the bottom of the hill. A man standing next to a beat-up old Land Rover had one hand in the car and the other waving in the air. Saxon waved back, slipped into his desert robe and turban, and led the way down the slope. The man blowing the horn in the sandblasted vehicle was an aristocratic-looking Arab whose upper lip was hidden under a luxuriant mustache.
“What’s up, Mohammed?” Saxon said.
“Time to go,” the Arab said. “Bad people come.”
He brandished the barrel of the Kalashnikov automatic rifle toward a point about a half mile distance. An oncoming vehicle was kicking up a dust cloud.
“How do you know they’re bad people?” Saxon asked.
“They
Saxon had learned to respect Mohammed’s skill at keeping him alive in the Wild West atmosphere of Yemen’s backcountry. Every chieftain in the area seemed to have his own private army of brig-ands, and larceny and murder in his heart.
He slid onto the passenger seat. The Bedouin piled into the back. Mohammed mashed the accelerator. The Land Rover kicked up dirt and sand. As the driver ground through the gears, he managed somehow to steer and hold on to his weapon as well.
Mohammed kept checking his rearview mirror. After several minutes, he patted the dashboard as if it were the neck of a trusty steed.
“We’re okay,” he said with a wide grin. “You find your queen?”
Saxon told him about the sarcophagus and the mummy of the young girl.
Mohammed jerked his thumb at the Bedouin in the backseat. “I told you. This son of a camel and his village are all crooks.”
Thinking that he was being praised, the Bedouin displayed a toothless grin.
Saxon sighed and shifted his gaze to the barren countryside. The locale changed, but the scene was always the same. A native con man would tell him in excited tones that the queen he was looking for was literally beneath his nose. Saxon would make a hair-raising crawl into the middle of an ancient necropolis that the con man’s forebears had looted hundreds of years before. He couldn’t count the number of mummies he had encountered. He had met a lot of nice people along the way. Too bad they were all dead.
Saxon dug a few riales out of his shorts pocket. He handed the coins to the delighted Bedouin and declined the man’s offer to show him another dead queen.