Sands of Time (Out of Time #6) (16 page)

He bent over to retrieve the others when he heard a sound again. Slowly, he stood back up and turned around.

An enormous man in black robes stood just feet from him. Simon’s heart raced and he clenched his fists. Where was Elizabeth? Had he found her first?

“Elizabeth?” Simon called out.

When there was no answer, Simon’s breath caught.

Beneath the man’s keffiyeh, his eyes began to wrinkle into a smile. He started to say something, but Simon didn’t let him finish. His fist collided with the man’s jaw.

The man grunted, but shook off the solid blow easily. Simon felt his heart sink at that. His best punch had almost no effect.

Simon looked for something to use as a weapon and his moment’s hesitation cost him. The other man lunged forward with shocking speed. One hand shot out like a striking snake and grabbed a fistful of Simon’s shirt. The other was a blur until it crashed into Simon’s face.

A spike of pain radiated through Simon’s temple and a vague sense of nausea choked his throat. Dazed, Simon stumbled back against a teetering pile of crates. The man held onto his shirt and punched him once, hard in the gut. Simon gasped for air. The blow seemed to have forced every last ounce out of him. The stinging panic of not being able to breathe sent a shot of adrenaline through Simon’s veins.

Almost casually, the man threw Simon to the ground. He struggled for breath as the man in black loomed over him. Small gulps of air took the edge off the panic that gripped him. He blinked against the red and black splotches that colored his vision and tried to think.

The bottom crate in the wobbly stack was to his right. As quickly as he could, Simon rolled over onto his back, braced himself with his arms and kicked. The bottom crate slid out from beneath and the stack toppled, crashing into the man. He stumbled in surprise, the weight of them pushing him aside.

Simon tried to stand, but he was too slow and the other man too quick. Before he could get to his feet, the man in black was on him again. With disturbing ease, the man flipped Simon over and leapt on top of him. It felt like a lead weight pressing down onto his chest. Simon swung wildly and earned a wicked backhand for his trouble.

Then, faster than any big man had a right to, the man’s hand shot out again and his fingers wrapped around Simon’s throat. Simon tried to throw him off, but the man had fifty pounds on him and arms like iron. Simon’s hands gripped the man’s wrists trying vainly to pry his hands away.

Simon coughed and gasped as the hands tightened over his throat, slowly squeezing the life out of him. The more he struggled, the weaker he felt. The world outside of his body became muffled as if someone had a laid a thick cloak over everything. All he could see now was the hulking black figure of the man above him.

Simon felt himself start to slip away and clawed for a handhold, but he was fading. “Eliza—” Simon said in a rasping whisper, but the word wouldn’t form. Simon closed his eyes and felt the dark begin to take him.

“Simon? Simon!”

Was it a dream? Was he dead?

“Simon!”

He opened his eyes and the black figure was gone. Standing in its place was Elizabeth.

“Thank God,” she said breathlessly.

Simon gasped for air and it took him a moment to regain his senses. Where had she come from?

As if reading his mind, she held up her right hand. A large silver candlestick clenched in her fist. She nodded down toward the man in black who was out cold. “It’s a little Clue, but…”

Simon blinked in confusion.

“Come on,” Elizabeth said, reaching out to him. “Before he comes to.”

Simon untangled his legs from the man’s and stood. He was shaky, but so damn relieved they were both alive. He swallowed a few times, trying to get his throat to work.

Elizabeth touched his cheek and frowned in worry. “Okay?”

He nodded and glanced back down at the man in black. Elizabeth put down her candlestick and gathered Mason’s books and they hurried out of the basement. They found hotel security and told them about what had happened. Somehow, Simon wasn’t surprised that the man was gone by the time they got there. At least, he thought, they’d escaped with their lives…and the books.

~ ~ ~

Simon set aside the sodden rag that had once been an icepack. His throat was sore, his body bruised, but he was otherwise damn lucky to be alive. He gazed across the table at his wife.

Elizabeth must have felt him staring at her and looked up from her book and pad of paper. “How do you feel?”

Simon put down his pen. “Damn lucky.”

Elizabeth quirked an eyebrow and smiled. “Might have been more than luck.”

“I meant having you.”

A charming blush blossomed across her cheeks. He adored that she still did that with him.

It had been more than luck, he thought. And not just because she’d come to his rescue, but that he’d been alive for her to rescue at all. The man he’d fought could have killed him. Easily, if Simon were honest with himself, but he hadn’t. Simon had thought it when they’d fought, but it was even clearer now. The man had simply been toying with him. But why?

Elizabeth sighed and tore off the sheet of paper she’d been working on. “I wish we’d get lucky with this.”

Putting aside his thoughts about the man in the basement, Simon refocused on the code. Jack had explained the basics of book ciphers to them, and Simon and Elizabeth had started work with the four books to start trying to decode the message. It was tedious work. Assuming it was indeed a book cipher, they still had no idea which number in the sequence identified the page, word or letter, or if there were dummy numbers mixed in. The code could have used multiple books in multiple variations.

They’d been at it for several hours so far, trying to find patterns that created something resembling a sentence. So far, with no luck whatsoever.

Simon gently probed his neck and with one last thought to his good fortune, redoubled his efforts. It wasn’t until sometime after lunch that the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place.

Simon had moved on from
Anna Karenina
to Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa
. They’d formulated a strategy, moving from the simplest cipher—page number, line number, word on each line—to those that became progressively more convoluted.

Simon’s heart beat faster as the first two words fell into place.
Now is
. He’d been down that path before though, only to be tripped up by the third word. It was no different this time.
Having
.
Now is having
…He sighed and moved on to the fourth word, hoping the third was a decoy.
The
. That had promise.
Now is having the.

He felt the tingle of anticipation as he ran his finger down the next page in sequence.
The. Now is having the the.
That couldn’t be right. He moved onto the next.

Winter
.
Now is having the the winter
. He moved on to the next word and the pattern became clear. The third word, then the second, then the first should be skipped. That left him with…
Now is the winter.

He hurried on, the heady feeling of knowing what was coming, making his pulse race.

“Now is the winter of our discontent,” Simon read aloud.

Elizabeth looked up from her work, her expression confused. “Wait. What?” she said. “You’ve got it?”

“I think so,” Simon said.

Elizabeth moved her chair next to his. The rest of the sentence came easily. He knew it by heart.

Elizabeth leaned forward and read it out loud. “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun.” She straightened. “Shakespeare.”

“Richard the Third,” Simon said. “But, what does it mean?”

Elizabeth leaned back heavily in her chair. “Crud.”

Simon chuckled.

She shrugged. “I know. I was just hoping for a big flashing pointy finger. The watch is here!”

Simon put down his pen. He was disappointed, too. “It’s hardly that, is it?”

“No, but we solved it,” Elizabeth said raising her hand in the air. “Yay us!”

Simon sighed. He was pleased that they’d managed to solve the cipher, but what good had it done? They were no closer to the watch and had nearly been killed in the bargain. Worse yet, maybe it had nothing to do with the watch at all.

“One thing at a time,” she said, throwing back the words of wisdom he’d dispensed when she grew impatient earlier. “I think we’ve had a pretty good day. Super secret code? Ass kicked.”

“Need I remind you—Simon Cross. Ass also kicked.”

Elizabeth grew serious and shook her head somberly. “No, you don’t have to remind me.”

He nodded. Neither of them needed a reminder of how dangerous their situation was.

He pulled her toward him and she leaned into his side.

She was right. They were one step closer. But Simon could not shake the feeling that they may be closer to something they’d wish they hadn’t found.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Simon turned down the offer of champagne and watched with some trepidation as Elizabeth accepted a glass from the in-car steward. It was, after all, barely past one in the afternoon.

Elizabeth sensed his concern and shrugged. “Half a glass.” She gestured to the rest of the first class tram car filled with wealthy tourists doing what they do best, indulging themselves. The Everetts were already on their second glass. “When in Rome, or Cairo…”

Simon sighed and took her glass. She frowned at him until he took a sip and handed it back. Smiling, she leaned back into her seat and gazed across the car at the Whitesides.

“Poor thing.”

Christina gazed wistfully out the window of their little electric tramcar as Cairo passed by. “Perhaps a day out at Giza will do her good?”

“Maybe,” Elizabeth said half-heartedly. “But nothing heals a broken heart except time.”

“She’s young,” he said. “She has plenty of that.”

Elizabeth hmm’d in reply and took another sip of champagne. “I wish we could find that papyrus.”

Simon looked down at her confused by the apparent non-sequitur.

“Well, obviously, we need to find it to understand what Mason wanted with it, but it would also go a long way to cheering up Arthur.”

It would, although at this point, Simon was wondering if it even still existed. Granted, they’d only been searching for a few days, but there was a very real possibility the other half had long been destroyed.

That morning, they’d asked Hassan if he knew of any traders in ancient papyrus and to no one’s surprise, he knew several and was more than happy to escort them. They’d only had time to visit two before they had to depart for Whiteside’s Giza afternoon adventure. Both had come up empty.

Jack and Diana had promised to see about the others, but Simon didn’t hold out much hope. Whiteside had acquired his half barely a week before they’d arrived. Even with such a fresh trail to follow, they’d turned up no trace of the other half. The provenance was vague and tracing it back to its sister had proven fruitless so far. The decoded letter had left them with nothing. Without the other half of the papyrus, they had no leads to follow to find the watch.

Elizabeth nudged him in the side and held out her glass. “You look like you could use another sip.”

Simon smiled and shook his head. There was no point in worrying about all that right now, nothing to be done for it today. Not to mention that they were off to see something wonderful, and it was just appearing in the distance. Simon nodded his head toward the window and Elizabeth turned to look.

Emerging from the haze were the peaks of the great pyramids. Their tram crossed another canal and turned toward them. On the left side of the tram a broad avenue lined with tall sycamores was busy with cars and carriages and foot traffic as an endless parade of people made their way to and from the pyramids. Their little two car tram trundled along the tracks, marshy water from the canals to the right and the ancient past just ahead on the horizon.

The tram terminus was at a grand hotel called Mena House. It had once been the hunting lodge of the Khedive, the ruler of Egypt under the Turks in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Like so much of Egypt it was purchased by an English couple and eventually turned into a hotel. Enormous and elaborate, the hotel complex included tennis courts, croquet lawns, a large swimming pool and a golf course that expanded out into the arid desert.

Whiteside had made all of the arrangements. He retrieved their tickets from a small office and led them to where their transportation to the pyramids awaited.

An all too familiar odor wafted its way toward him and Simon sighed. “Camels.”

Undaunted, Elizabeth climbed atop hers with a grin and confidently gave it the command to stand. Simon was secretly and peevishly pleased when it ignored her and only moved when its master ordered it to.

Their little group cut their way through the ubiquitous beggars and vendors of dubious antiquities and lumbered off toward the pyramids as Whiteside began his running commentary on all points of interest, great and small.

Simon grunted in assent or asked the occasional question, but his focus was on the massive pyramids looming before him. Whether Petrie or Herodotus was right about the methods of construction faded away in the face of the sheer magnificence of them.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu towered 450 feet above the plateau. Only small sections of the polished white limestone casing that had covered and smoothed the now-jagged sides remained. As amazing as it was now, seeing it gleaming white in the sun, smooth to the touch, would have been breathtaking.

“The whole thing covers about thirteen acres,” Whiteside said. “Over two million individual stones each weighing over two and half tons. Some ten times that. Can you imagine?”

He could not. The Bedouin guides brought the camels to a stop. Thank God. And they all dismounted.

“Now,” Whiteside said, holding out small ticket stubs. “You can ascend if you’d like. It’s all paid for. Quite the view if you can see around those scoundrel vendors lying in wait.”