He felt a sizzling arc of electricity resonate through his bones. Static electricity, nothing more.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” His voice was curt. He hadn’t set foot in a hospital in months, but his body reacted to the stimuli as if he were once again in a hospital bed, where even a morphine drip hadn’t been enough to mask the pain.
“Because you’re limping more, and gritting your teeth. Your leg hurts from all that damned running around, doesn’t it? Maybe we should have it looked at while we’re here?”
“I’m fine.” He’d had enough fucking doctors poking and prodding him for a lifetime. “This is the room.”
“Let me go in and see if he’s up to visitors first.”
Thorne motioned for her to go ahead. He leaned against the wall outside the door and surveyed the people milling about. Doctors, orderlies, a couple of women sitting outside a room wringing their hands and talking quietly. Normal hospital activity. His mother had visited him. Once. She couldn’t handle his “infirmity.” Better that way. In those months it had taken everything in him not to chuck it all in and wave the white flag for Boris Yermalof to fucking come and finish him off. It had taken a little too fucking long for the anger to become stronger than the pain. Once that happened, he did everything in his power to get the hell out of there and start living.
He still had an itch on the back of his neck. One of the cars following them had turned off with him, parking seven cars over in the lot. Thorne went over to the window and looked down. Two shadowy figures were all he made out through the tinted windows. Thorne figured he had multiple choices of just who’d sent them.
At any other time, Yermalof would’ve been at the top of his hit parade. God only knew, the son of a bitch was mean enough, angry enough, determined enough to track him down to the ends of the earth in retaliation for what Thorne had done to him.
The losers who’d attacked him in the underpass, the guys who’d chased them earlier that day, Dr. Khalifa Najid… hell, he’d even add Husani the Kiss Whisperer, and Dylan Brengard, the casual ex-boyfriend.
The list was growing, and they’d barely been in Cairo forty-eight hours.
The door opened and Isis popped her head out. “He’s doing much better. Come in. I told him you were my boyfriend to keep things simple.”
Whatever Thorne was feeling right then, simple it was not. This wasn’t a mere case of finding a long-lost tomb and restoring Magee’s dubious reputation. The professor had enemies. More than one if Thorne was the judge of the situation. And the man’s daughter tied him in knots.
He followed her inside.
The second bed was empty, the curtain pulled back. Just the three of them in the room with the door closed. Beniti al-Atrash was in his late sixties. He looked like he’d done a couple of rounds with middleweight champion Carl “the Cobra” Froch. His arm was in a cast, supported by a sling; one eye was swollen shut; the four-inch gash to his cheek was black and blue and stitched like Frankenstein’s monster. That must’ve hurt like a son of a bitch. Thorne approached the bed as Isis introduced them.
“Isis has explained some of the circumstances surrounding August’s discovery of the tomb of Cleopatra.” Al-Atrash cut to the chase as he tried to straighten against the pillows Isis was mounding behind him. When she was done fussing, he brought his palm to her cheek and smiled at her before addressing Thorne.
“Do you concur with little bird’s theory that my attacker, and the two attempts on your lives, are a direct result of whatever it was my friend unearthed when he was here three months ago?”
Thorne sat on the empty bed, and after a moment Isis came and sat beside him. She slipped her much smaller hand into his, clasping his fingers where his hand rested on his knee. “It’s very likely, sir. This many violent confrontations in such a short space of time after our arrival, coupled with the unprecedented visits to your shop and stall, would indicate that everything is tied in to Professor Magee’s find. Can you tell me anything about your attackers?”
“I had closed the stall first, then gone through to close the shop. The three men were inside when I came through the back. One man demanded, ‘Where is it?’ Since I had no frame of