The Curse (28 page)

Having experienced what was supposed to have been a permanent relationship, I was ready for another, one that I hoped would last the rest of my life, but over the past decade that I'd been single, I had only met one man who felt like the right fit with me, and he had died in my arms.

In the back of my mind I still hoped to find my soul mate, the person who would make my life complete. I knew he had to be out there somewhere. Everyone needed a soul mate.

I liked Rafi, was definitely attracted to him sexually, and found pleasure in his arms. Maybe if he lived in New York I would have the sort of casual, sexual friendship I have with Michelangelo, that booty thing, but I didn't have that sense of everlasting affinity with either of them.

My rumination on men was cut short by the sound of a car pulling up outside the walled house.

I got up and opened the gate to see who had arrived so early in the morning.

It was Lana, arriving on the heels of a wind shear that swept across the desert, raising a cloud of dust in its wake.

An ill wind had arrived.

“Where's Rafi?” she snapped.

“Use that tone of voice on someone who cares,” I said.

She stormed by me, giving me the sort of stare that Medusa had used to turn people into stone.

Her glare at me was a reality slap reminding me that I wasn't just a prisoner in the desert … Egypt was going to be my personal supermax if I didn't get back my passport. And she could definitely sabotage it.

I followed her into the house to make sure I knew what was coming down.

In the living room, she confronted Rafi who was coming in from a hallway. He looked like he had just woken up.

“Your phone has been off!”

She made it an accusation.

“You could have turned it back on after
coming,
” she said, speaking in English to make sure I knew what she was complaining about.

They reverted to angry bursts in Arabic and I caught that it had something to do with Dalila.

Rafi reacted as if she had slapped him in the face.

Noor came into the room behind him and started wailing at whatever was being said.

I had picked up a little Arabic over the years during my travels in the Middle East, little more than telling a taxi driver where I wanted to go, but caught nothing of the rapid-fire exchange.

Rafi suddenly bolted back down the hallway with Noor running behind him, yelling something.

The room was suddenly quiet as Lana turned to me. Her features were cold.

“What's going on?” I asked. “Is Dalila okay?”

Lana gave me a long, appraising look, as if deciding whether to answer me or squash me like a bug.

I guess sleeping with the boss who she had a thing for didn't endear me to her.

“Kaseem has her.”

“He has Dalila? How—”

“Amir handed her over to him while Rafi was fucking his wife—and you.” She gave me a malicious grin. “That makes all of you responsible if anything happens to her.”

I had a sick feeling deep in the pit of my stomach.

“What does he want from Rafi?” I asked, dreading what she was about to say.

“The scarab, of course.” She gave me a smirk. “Not that piece of junk you saw at the Khan.”

62

The world around me disintegrated.

Rafi ran out of the house, checking his gun as he left and jumped into Lana's car.

He took off without her.

She gave him a grin full of spite and jealousy as he left and then turned her venom on Noor.

“It's your fault, you slut,” she said. “Did you think your husband was completely stupid?”

Noor slumped down in a chair and burst into tears. She didn't say anything.

I stepped in between them.

“Leave her alone. She has enough to worry about without you kicking her when she's down.”

For a moment I thought Lana was going to attack me, but her phone went off. She checked the number and gave me a sly look before she went off to answer the call in privacy.

She identified herself as Sphinx as she left the room, shooting a glance back at me as if to taunt me.

Good work,
I thought. With my usual ability to dig a deeper hole for myself, I had taken the side of a woman who could do absolutely nothing to help me and pissed off the one who could.

All part of my life plan to do what I think is right without giving a single rational thought about the consequences.

“It is my fault,” Noor said, sobbing “I've always loved Rafi. How could I help it? My sister loved him. Everything she felt, I felt, too. I should never have married Amir. He's a good man and I'm a bad woman. I hurt him, I hurt our children, and now I've put Dalila in danger.”

“You didn't do half the wrongs you think you did,” I said. “You don't choose who you love; you just get victimized when it doesn't work out.”

She collapsed in tears and I tried to comfort her, but she was too distraught.

I could understand her wrong turns and bad choices—I had a long list of mistakes in my own life that I wished I hadn't made.

Sitting down beside her, I stroked her hair as she cried while wondering what the hell was going to happen.

My mind swirled with questions.

Why did that bastard Kaseem take Dalila? To get Rafi off his back? Did Rafi really have the scarab as Lana intimated?

More important than Kaseem and Rafi, what was going to happen to Dalila? Had anyone called the police? Would that even do any good?

The more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

Amir turning a sick child over to Kaseem because he couldn't keep his wife in his own bed?

Kaseem laying claim to being a man of destiny but kidnapping a child to use as bait?

Rafi giving up an organ for his daughter, but letting her be pulled into this mess?

What kind of games were these people playing?

I'd call the damn police myself if I spoke the language and thought anyone would listen to me. Or believed that they weren't all in Kaseem's pocket.

I was getting ready to hike to Abu Simbel and get a taxi to the airport when Lana offered to drive me in Noor's car. She didn't bother asking Noor's permission to use the car.

If Lana was feeling sorry for Rafi and worried about Dalila, she hid her emotions well. She seemed to take pleasure knowing that the man who slighted her affections was suffering.

I still wanted to know Rafi's full involvement.

In the car, I probed her willingness to give me the lowdown on the extent of Rafi's machinations to get the money to save his daughter.

“Noor told me Rafi was desperate to get money for Dalila. That he needed a lot of it,” I said.

“You want to know if that's why he took the scarab, don't you? And how he did it, too.”

“Yes, I'd like to know.”

Lana kept her eyes on the road as she talked.

“She probably told you about the kidney and the liver. The liver thing would have killed him or left him incapacitated, so he decided to steal the scarab when we got word that it was being returned.”

That confirmed my suspicion as to why Kaseem grabbed Dalila. He wanted to swap the girl for the scarab.

“How did Rafi find out it was being returned? Kaseem told me it was being brought back in secret.”

“Fatima Sari liked to talk. And she was all caught up with the thrill of being a great heroine of Egypt, of being the one who brought the heart back to us. She told a friend who had been a classmate of hers when she studied Egyptology. The friend knew Rafi was the head of the Supreme Council's recovery team and she told him.”

“So Rafi decided to intercept the scarab? To steal it from Fatima before she got on the plane to Cairo?”

She shook her head. “Rafi knew she would never make it to the plane, that Kaseem had no intention of letting Fatima bring the scarab back.”

“Because Kaseem wanted to return it himself and be a hero.”

“With a bang.” She laughed harshly. “He wanted to return the scarab in a way that showed the greatness that Egypt would be able to achieve again.”

“So Kaseem intended to take the scarab from Fatima all along. From the beginning he was never going to let Fatima bring it back.”

“Exactly. He got that crazy British woman to agree to have it returned by bribing that ridiculous mentor of hers who calls himself Ramses, but once the scarab was out of the vault, Kaseem planned to grab it. He set Fatima up because she was easy to manipulate.”

“What went wrong?”

She shrugged. “Both Rafi and Kaseem had the same idea of getting the scarab without causing a lot of noise.”

“Drugging Fatima?” An overdose would explain why she had seemed so dazed to me.

“Yes, drugging her. Kaseem put a dose in the bottle of water she had by her hotel room bed without knowing that Rafi had bribed a hotel maid to deliver tea laced with sleeping medicine. She drank both.”

It sounded like the Keystone Cops with a woman's thinking process at stake.

“It affected her mind, especially when she realized she had lost the great treasure she was supposed to deliver.”

She gave me a narrow look. “I was not part of it, you understand? I stayed in Egypt. Rafi told me what happened.”

That didn't ring true to me.

I suspected that Lana was something more than an innocent bystander, but it didn't matter. If I started making accusations, I knew she would clam up.

“So while Fatima was under, Rafi took the scarab and was going to bring it back to Cairo?” I asked.

“Yes. He slipped into her room and got on the next flight to Cairo. It was easy for him to bring it back undetected. As an antiquities officer, he was not examined at customs.”

“How does the scarab replica fit into all this?”

“He had a duplicate made to delude Kaseem. Fool that Rafi is, he didn't want Kaseem to get his hands on the scarab. Rafi thought he could get money from Kaseem for the fake and in the end, turn the scarab over to the museum in Cairo.”

The counterfeiter told me a woman had approached him and his assistant to have a fake made. I was certain Rafi sent Lana to have it done, but again I kept my mouth shut.

Larceny, fraud, deception—and desperation for his daughter. Maybe even murder. An all-around bad combination, especially for a basically honest man like Rafi to handle.

She eyed me as she drove. “You realized it was a fake when you examined it in the Khan, didn't you? Rafi was sure that the reproduction was good enough to make you think that it was real, especially in the poor light. How did you know?”

“Experience? I don't know. Maybe just instinct. The reproduction for Isis was duplicated from the real scarab. The second one was done from pictures because the employee who made the fake got paid to do it on the side. Both looked exactly like the original … but no matter how much they look alike, there is a difference that's hard to quantify.

“It's like reproductions of the master painters. Modern painters copy them exactly, but most of the time an expert can tell which one is the imitation.”

I waited a moment before I asked, “Why did Fatima try to kill me?”

She shrugged, but I could see the smirk on her face. She really enjoyed feeding me information … but just enough to whet my appetite. With Lana, there was always going to be another shoe that dropped. And it might just hit me on the head.

I was still puzzled by her role. She seemed to know what both Rafi and Kaseem were up to, yet stated that she wasn't involved.

“Who knows?” she said. “Her mind was mixed up by drugs and guilt. When Kaseem was angry with her after Rafi stole the scarab, she got it into her head that Kaseem had been the one who stole it. She got away from him but came back like a ghost, watching him.”

Although she kept up the pretense that she wasn't a participant in what had happened, she sure had all the answers.

“So she started stalking him and he led her to me?” I asked.

“Your name had come up earlier with Kaseem, before the theft. He actually was going to have you examine the scarab taken from Fatima to make sure that he hadn't been given a reproduction by that fraud of a mentor who controls that Radcliff woman.”

“No honor among thieves.”

My phone went off with a message from Michelangelo that said
subway tape
with an attachment. What lousy timing Michelangelo had. Just like in bed.

I hit the link and waited for the connection.

“Rafi?” Lana asked.

I shook my head. “No. A cop friend in New York has sent me the security camera tape of Fatima running in front of the train.”

“Why?”

“Because I have bad karma, I guess. Or shitty luck. Fatima tries to puncture me with a letter opener and jumps in front of a train and I suddenly find myself the chief suspect in her death.”

I got a nod of agreement out of Lana—whatever that meant.

The picture was tiny and fuzzy on the smartphone screen. The camera view was wide-angle, taking in most of the small subway station. As I'd been told, the camera had been mounted behind Fatima, facing me, so my expression was visible and not hers. More importantly, her body blocked a view of my arm, making it impossible to see that my gesture was a defensive one, rather than striking out at her.

Watching the video, I remembered something had frightened Fatima, causing her to veer off toward the tracks like a startled doe. I didn't see anything obvious but the tape was only a few seconds long and I replayed it, looking at the people it captured in the crowded station as Lana pulled over to the side of the road.

I ran it three times before I recognized someone.

My blood froze and my heart jumped into my throat.

I turned to Lana, to that evil smirk she had plastered on her face.

“I guess you didn't stay in Egypt.”

There she was, in a starring role in the subway video.

Lana was the one who Fatima had recognized—and the mere sight of the woman threw Fatima into a such a panic that she ran in front of the train.