The Amulet of Power (6 page)

Mason waded out a few feet, then clambered into the boat and sat by the motor.

“Get in yourself,” he said, “and I’ll start the engine.”

“No!” she said quickly. “We’ll drift downstream and
then
start it. Why let whoever’s in the building know we’re stealing his boat?”

“He’ll hear it when we go past the island.”

“Boats go past the island all night,” said Lara. “We just don’t want him to hear us starting the motor right here.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mason, looking embarrassed, “As I told you, I’m not used to thinking along these lines.”

“Stop apologizing.”

“I’m . . .” He caught himself. “Right.”

They floated downstream in silence for almost a mile. Then she nodded, he started the engine, and soon they were speeding past the island. In another five minutes they reached Aswan.

“We’ll reach the First Cataract any minute now,” said Lara, “and even if we get past it, we still have to negotiate those channels west of the Old Dam and behind the High Dam.”

“I don’t like it,” said Mason. “There are too many people near the dams. We’ll have Mahdists looking for you, and if the guy back on the island didn’t want to sell, or thinks you didn’t leave enough cash, we’ll also have officials, and maybe even the military, looking for the boat.”

“I agree. That means we’ll have to portage.”

“We can’t carry the damned boat,” protested Mason, looking at her like she was crazy. “The motor alone weighs one hundred and fifty pounds, and the dams are four miles apart.”

“I know that,” said Lara. She paused. “It’s about twelve-thirty
A.M.
That gives us six hours to find someone with a truck who wants to make some money and isn’t too fussy about the finer points of the law.”

“I suppose that’s really the only viable alternative,” agreed Mason. “Which shore do you prefer?”

“Most of the city’s off to the east. Let’s land on the starboard side.”

He steered the boat to the right, spotted a large all-night gas station, and pulled the boat onto the shore a few hundred yards north of it.

“Well, if we’re going to find what we need, that’s the place to look,” said Mason, heading off.

“I’ll go,” said Lara. “You make sure no one steals the boat.”

“
I’ll
go. You stay here.” She seemed about to object, and he held up a hand to silence her. “If you walk into that station with your pistols in the middle of the night, they’ll shoot you or call the police. And this is Egypt, not England: If a lone woman walks in there without any weapons, she’ll probably never be seen again.”

“I’m tougher than you think.”

“Don’t be so sure,” said Mason. “I already think you’re plenty tough. But this isn’t about who’s toughest. And I’m not patronizing you. It simply makes more sense for you to stay here and protect the boat while I go arrange our transportation.”

She saw the logic of his argument and agreed to remain with the boat. He spent almost half an hour in the station, chatting with the attendant, feeling out the various truckers who had stopped for gas. Finally he found one he thought he could trust, made him an offer, haggled for another ten minutes, and returned to Lara.

“Did you get what we needed?” she asked.

“It’s perfect,” replied Mason. “He’s hauling a tractor on a flatbed. He’ll pull it off, leave it at the station, and come get us. With a little luck, we’ll be back on the Nile, south of the High Dam, in less than an hour.”

When the truck pulled up, it took all three of them to load the boat onto the flatbed. Then they climbed into the truck’s cab, and true to Mason’s prediction, they were back in the water, eight miles to the south of Aswan on the man-made Lake Nasser, an hour later.

“Well, we made it,” said Mason with a sigh of relief.

“So far,” replied Lara. “Now all we have to do is spot the
Amenhotep
before the Mahdists spot
us
.”

7

Lara peered into the darkness as a cloud passed in front of the moon.

“What time is it?” she asked.

Mason squinted at the phosphorescent hands on his watch. “About half past three. The
Amenhotep
should be arriving any minute.”

She frowned. “It had better be. I feel very exposed in this dinky little boat.”

“They could be awhile,” cautioned Mason. “They’re not just letting criminals off; they’re probably taking some new ones on, as well. And the captain may have to slip some money to the local officials.” He looked north through the darkness. “Ah! Here it comes already.”

“That’s not the
Amenhotep
,” said Lara. “The lights are too low.”

The craft slowly approached them, and soon they could make out its outline.

“That’s one hell of a cabin cruiser,” said Mason admiringly. “I wish I had the money someone shelled out for it. It was probably built for an oil-rich sheikh.”

“What’s it doing here?” said Lara. “Ninety-eight percent of all the boat traffic is north of the High Dam.”

“Maybe the fishing’s better,” suggested Mason. “Or maybe he lives here. There are worse sights to wake up to each morning than Lake Nasser.”

“Maybe,” she said dubiously.

The cabin cruiser came closer still, and suddenly its spotlight hit the small motorboat.

“Duck!” cried Lara, instinctively hurling herself to the floor of the boat as a hail of bullets thudded into the side of the boat and splashed into the water around them.

“Damn!” muttered Mason.

“Are you hit?”

“No,” he said. “I cracked my head against the side of the boat.”

“Let’s hope that’ll be the extent of your injuries,” she said, pulling out her pistols.

“I don’t know how you can see anyone to shoot at,” said Mason, peeking over the edge of the boat. “That light is blinding!”

“Let’s even the odds,” she said, blinking her eyes and waiting for her vision to return. Then she took aim and fired a single shot. The spotlight seemed to explode, and the men aboard the cabin cruiser began firing again.

“Give me one of your guns,” said Mason.

“I told you—they read my palm print. They won’t fire for anyone else.” She peered into the darkness. “How many can you make out?”

“Three, I think,” he said, squinting at the cabin cruiser.

“I agree. One by the burnt-out light, one to his right, and one near the controls.”

They exchanged another burst of fire with no discernible effect.

“So what do we do now?” asked Mason. “They’re higher out of the water than we are, and that damned solid railing’s protecting them.”

She stared at the cabin cruiser, which was only about fifty feet distant now, then at Mason.

“Dive into the water,” she whispered.

“Are you crazy?” he shot back. “I’ll be a sitting duck!”

“Their spotlight’s gone. They’ll have to lean over the railing to see where you are, and then I’ll have a clear shot at them in the moonlight.”

He looked doubtful. “How good a shot are you with that thing?”

“I hit what I aim at.”

“I hope you’re right.”

He crawled to the front of the boat, then crouched low, ready to dive over the edge.

“Don’t miss!” he said, and then he was in the water.

All three men on the cabin cruiser heard the splash, and as she had expected, they raced to the side of their vessel and leaned over, searching for a sign of him, their silhouettes clear in the moonlight. Before they could spot Mason and riddle him with their bullets, Lara fired half a dozen quick shots. Each man screamed in turn and plunged into Lake Nasser.

“Kevin, get back here!” she yelled.

Mason reached the boat a few seconds later. “Are they dead?” he asked as he pulled himself out of the water.

“Wounded, I think.” Cries of pain and fury came to their ears. “Wounded, definitely.”

“Then let’s get the hell out of here!” said Mason. “We can meet the
Amenhotep
twenty miles upstream!”

“In a minute,” she said, firing a few shots just above the water.

“What was that about?”

“Watch,” said Lara, pointing. All three men began racing to shore as fast as they could force their wounded bodies to swim. She turned back to him. “Now start the motor and get us next to the cabin cruiser.”

“We can’t take their boat!” protested Mason. “The second they get to shore they’re going to tell whoever they report to that we’re on it!”

“We’re not taking it,” replied Lara. “Just do what I tell you.”

He started the motor, and a moment later they were next to the cabin cruiser.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” she said, climbing out of the motorboat and onto the larger vessel.

“What are you going to do?”

“Empty its fuel tanks,” answered Lara. “Why make it easy for their confederates to follow us?”

She walked to the back of the boat, found the tanks, opened them, and jettisoned their precious mixture into the water. She was walking back to where she’d climbed on when a body raced out of the darkness and hurled itself at her.

Even as she fell she was pummeling her attacker, trying every trick she knew to disable him quickly: a thumb in the eye, a heel in the groin, the flat of her hand pushing up against his nose. Nothing seemed to work. He flinched, but he wouldn’t let go of her, and now she saw that he had a knife in his right hand.

As it plunged down toward her, she rolled away from it. It missed her throat by inches, and was delivered with such force that it stuck in the wooden deck. As her opponent tried to pull it out, she got to her feet.

“Who are you?” she asked—or tried to. But when she opened her mouth, no sound came out.

The man gave another yank, and the blade came free. He stood up to face her, and approached silently. He smiled, his mouth opening grotesquely wide, and she saw that his tongue was gone.

She pulled her guns.

The man’s hand moved in a blur, releasing the knife toward her heart.

Lara’s pistols fired in unison. One bullet deflected the dagger. The other struck the man between the eyes.

A moment later, she was back in the motorboat.

“I heard your guns,” said Kevin. “What happened?”

“Another one of our silent friends,” she said grimly. As before, her voice had returned with the death of the silent assassin. “Let’s go a few miles upstream. There’s no sense being stationary targets.”

Mason turned the motorboat around, heading to the south. “By the way,” he said, “I saw all three men make it to shore.”

“You sound disapproving.”

“You should have killed them.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” he responded. “They were trying to kill
us
!”

“I don’t like killing, Kevin. It’s my least-preferred solution. Those men won’t bother us again, and besides, it’s not as if killing them would have solved my problems.” She took a deep breath and released it slowly. “I wonder if there’s anyone in this whole country who’s not out to kill me.”

“Probably that ugly little waiter on the
Amenhotep
,” he laughed.

“He’ll likely be the one to do it, too,” she replied. Suddenly she became serious again. “Still, it would be nice if
someone
would convince the Mahdists that I don’t have the Amulet.”

“They’ll never believe it, especially since you’ve proven so adept at eluding them and protecting yourself,” said Mason with absolute conviction. “And since you’re an infidel, they’ll assume the Amulet won’t make you totally invulnerable.”

“You certainly know how to cheer a girl up.”

He stared at her for a long moment, as if making up his mind about something. Finally he spoke.

“I feel responsible to some degree for your situation,” he began.

“Don’t be silly, Kevin. If you hadn’t dug me out of that tomb and taken me to the Cairo hospital, I’d be dead by now.”

“Hear me out,” he said. “I knew people have been looking for the Amulet of Mareish for more than a century. Hell, I was looking for it myself. I knew the dangers involved—but I was so anxious to get you taken care of that I didn’t make any attempt to hide your identity when I brought you to hospital.” He shook his head self-deprecatingly. “I wasn’t thinking, and now you’re paying the price.”

“I repeat,” said Lara firmly, “if it hadn’t been for you, I’d be dead. I have no problems with what you did.”

“Well,
I
have a problem with it,” said Kevin. “So I propose an alliance.”

“An alliance?”

“I think we both know that the only way to end these attacks is to actually
find
the Amulet. If it wasn’t in the Temple of Horus, then the journalist was wrong all those years ago—either the man he saw wasn’t Colonel Stewart, or it was Stewart but General Gordon had sent him to Egypt for some other reason.” He paused. “And if the Amulet wasn’t in Egypt, then it’s still in the Sudan.”

“How can you be sure it’s not in the Temple of Horus?” asked Lara. “
I
wasn’t looking for it.”

“The Mahdists have turned that place inside out for months, and I’m not the only archaeologist to hunt for it there,” answered Mason. “No, I’m convinced that if it was hidden there, it would have been found already. I was within a day of giving up when I found you.”

“All right,” said Lara. “Let’s say it’s still in the Sudan. So what?”

“So two experts are twice as likely to find it as one,” continued Mason. “All my other work can wait. I’ll come to the Sudan with you and stay there until we either find the Amulet or become convinced that it no longer exists—or at least that it’s no longer there.”

“Think about what you’re saying, Kevin,” replied Lara. “They’re not after
you
. You can say good-bye to me when I board the
Amenhotep
in a few minutes and nobody will be trying to kill you tomorrow.”

“It’s not that simple. Right now they think you’ve got it—but once they know you don’t, they’ll decide that you gave it to me sometime in the past forty-eight hours—or perhaps even that I found it when I was rescuing you from the tomb.” He grimaced. “In truth, I’m probably not a hell of a lot safer than you are.”

“Then why did you go out of your way to convince me you were?” demanded Lara.

He spent a little too long trying to formulate an answer.

“Get it through your head that I’m not a frail flower,” she said, trying to hide her annoyance. “If you withhold any information from me, it just makes it that much harder to solve the problem—and this problem’s hard enough without some additional if well-meaning sexism.”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “It won’t happen again.”

“See to it,” said Lara. “It’s not enough that we merely search for the Amulet. We’re actually in a race; we’ve got to find it before they find us. Or, as the old pulp magazines would say, we’re in a race against death.”

“Maybe not,” said Mason. “As long as we’re running
from
them in Egypt, they’re going to assume one of us has the Amulet. But once we show up in the Sudan, rather than going to England, they’ll know we’re still looking for it.”

“Why?” asked Lara. “Maybe they’ll think I found it and plan to rule the Sudan as the new Mahdi.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” said Kevin. “You have to be a true believer to be the Expected One, and you and I are both infidels. They know neither of us can become the Mahdi, and that means they know neither of us will be invulnerable even if we’ve got possession of the Amulet. That being the case, we’d have to be idiots to go to the Mahdist’s stronghold if we had the Amulet. No, the only reason for us to go to the Sudan is because we
don’t
have it. Because we are still searching for it. That’s the truth, and more important, the Mahdists will accept it as the truth.” He paused. “Oh, a few of them may think our going to Khartoum is a ruse and keep trying to kill us, but I think most of them will be content to watch us and let us find the Amulet for them.”

“How will they know we’ve found it . . . assuming we do?”

He shrugged. “I’m sure they have their methods.”

“They think I’ve got it now, and I don’t, so they must not have very reliable methods.”

He shrugged again.

“And what do we do with it if we
do
find it?” Lara continued. “If everyone knows why we’re there, the government won’t want us to take it out of the country, and I don’t know that I trust any government enough to hand that kind of power over to them, even if there’s no magic to it at all, but only the power of fanatical belief.”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” admitted Mason. “I suppose we’ll try to hunt up a truly worthy man, and give it to him.”

“There you go again,” said Lara. “Aren’t there any truly worthy
women
in the world?”

“Point taken,” he said sheepishly.

“And what if—assuming it’s a man, after all—he’s a Lincoln rather than a Sadat?”

“I don’t follow you.”

“What if the best person we can find, the one truly worthy person, is an unbeliever, an infidel?”

“Then he or she won’t be invulnerable or immortal,” answered Mason. “But they’ll still possess a source of enormous power. Unlike pulp magazine heroes, they won’t have the power to cloud men’s minds, but they’ll certainly have the power to influence them for good.”