but now he can’t help but see neglect and conspiracies wherever he goes.”
Lopez rubbed her temples. “Why you tellin’ me this?”
“Keep an eye on him, okay? He’s a good detective, but he needs a balance.”
“I’m not his mother. If he decides to go after something, he’s not going to turn around and ask for my permission.”
“No, but he asks for your advice,” Powell countered. “Make sure you give it to him, but if he goes off the range, then you make damned sure you come back here and tell me.”
“You’re asking me to spy on him,” Lopez said. “He’s my partner.”
“I can’t afford to lose either of you right now, especially not on another one of Tyrell’s goddamn conspiracies. That clear?”
Lopez stood from the desk and turned to leave.
“That clear?” Powell repeated.
Lopez hesitated at the door and sighed. “Clear.”
WADI AL-JOZ
WEST BANK, OCCUPIED PALESTINE
The darkness changed shape.
From a deep and featureless blackness came distant textures, touching her skin and caressing her hair. Slowly, the fragments of her awareness began reassembling themselves one by one as they tumbled from the abyss.
She opened her eyes, but could see nothing. Her limbs and back ached and she tried to move, but she was bound firm. Her throat was parched, and for one terrible moment the belief that she had been buried alive injected panic into her synapses. She fought to free herself, and a gasp erupted from between her cracked lips as she squirmed.
A noise came from the darkness somewhere to her right, and she fell silent and still. She turned her head, the stiffened muscles in her neck protesting at the movement. Beside her a thin muslin sheet hung from a tall rail, like a hospital shroud. She could see that she was lying on a bed, her limbs tied down with canvas straps as though she were an incarcerated psychotic patient.
She looked down at her body and saw an intravenous line in her right arm, and from the dull ache she guessed that it had been there for some time. Where was she? What was happening to her?
Another noise, like two pieces of metal being tapped together, then a voice whispering softly in the darkness.
Through the muslin she could see a ghostly light. The orb was intermittently broken as a shadow passed back and forth before it, and she could hear the sound of soft footfalls and a rhythmic beeping.
Through her confusion and fear, the tiniest flame of hope flickered into life. This could be a hospital. But the darkness and the stale smell in her nostrils seemed out of place, even if this were Gaza or the West Bank. Where were the nurses? Could it be nighttime, hence the darkness? Gaza suffered regular blackouts due to the Israeli blockade. But then, why was she in Gaza?
Fragments of memory spiraled like falling stars through the field of her awareness, briefly illuminating the spaces in her mind before passing on into the darkness. The dig site. She remembered the magnificent specimen, her efforts to retrieve it before … before …
A flare of recall jolted her. The men who had burst into the site. Balaclavas, black clothes, rough and heavy hands. She recalled running, being tackled from behind, pulling a bowie knife from her shorts and plunging it into the leg of one of the intruders before she was overpowered. Then something being placed over her face, and then blackness. Christ, what have I got myself into?
“Pulse is steady.”
The voice sounded close, scaring her. Her breathing rasped and she could feel her heart trying to thump its way out of her chest.
“Temperature is rising, seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit.”
A figure moved past beside her, the muslin sheet rippling in the draft and parting slightly. Perhaps fifteen feet away was a metal gurney, upon which lay the naked form of a man.
Tubes protruded from his body and she could see his chest rising and falling in slow rhythm, but she could not quite make out his features. An intravenous line rose up to a saline bag suspended above his head, and a series of monitors were arranged behind him recording heartbeat and body temperature. Beside him stood a video recorder on a tripod, aimed at the gurney.
“Seventy-seven degrees.”
As she watched, she could see another intravenous line coiling out from the man’s left arm, an almost black fluid passing through it. The rhythmic beeping from the machines was slowly increasing in tempo and the body was showing vague signs of movement, crooked fingers twitching sporadically.