people meet her plane and sit on her until they got word from him.
“Go home, Isis. We’ll go down so you can have a look. But if Dylan has found Cleopatra’s tomb there’s nothing you can do about it. If the tomb is in the Valley of the Scorpions as I suspect, I’ll do everything in my power—pull what strings I can—to have them hold off on filling the lake until the tomb can be authenticated and the authorities decide what has to be done to preserve it.”
“By yourself? In a week?”
He shrugged. “I can only promise I’ll do my best. I still have resources—”
She shook her head. “I think I’ll—”
“Look, I don’t want to scare you any more than any sensible woman would be scared right now. But Yermalof didn’t want to be found, and he didn’t like us nosing into his business. He kidnapped an experienced MI5 agent from her hotel room, took her without anyone seeing him, cut off her”—tongue?—“finger, and had the package delivered to us with our breakfast the next morning.”
“Is that true?”
“True and whitewashed. He was willing to trade Maciej for Ayers and myself. We knew it was a trap and went anyway. He killed them both. They died hard and they died bloody, and, Isis, they died slowly. If there’s even a minus one percent chance that any of this is tied into anything Yermalof, I don’t want you on the same continent.”
“Okay.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Okay?”
“Okay, I’ll go home.” Her voice slowed and became thick. “And… trust… you’ll call m—”
His gut curled uncomfortably. He wanted to believe her. Wanted to think she could be persuaded by logic, and could be kept safe, but somehow his gut told him this was far from over. He waited for her to finish what she was saying, and glanced over to find her slumped in her seat, her head on her chest, out cold.
Thorne smiled.
She looked cute sprawled out across the seat, cute but damn uncomfortable. He considered straightening her body out so she could sleep, then decided to leave her so as not to wake her. They’d be in the valley in about twenty minutes, Cairo in less than an hour after that; she could sleep all she wanted on the flight back to Seattle. He was still a little shocked she’d agreed to go home.
He felt lethargic from the heat himself and looked forward to finding an out-of-the-way hotel… But a few minutes later his lids felt weighted, and the lethargy was interfering with his concentration. What the hell? He’d gone seventy-two hours or more without a break on ops, and he’d never fallen asleep on the job.
He pressed the button for the tinted side window and it slid down. Gritty, furnace-hot wind blew into his face, stinging his cheeks. The heavy car slewed as his fingers went numb and he lost his grip on the steering wheel. His foot, leaden and uncooperative, dropped off the gas pedal. The car veered onto the sand alongside the tarred road, and slowed as the tires sank. Darkness closed like a camera aperture, leaving the sunlight a bright pinpoint in his vision. His body, limp and unresponsive, slid sideways down the seat back until his head fell on Isis’s hip.
Thorne fought the darkness and the lassitude with everything in him. But they sucked him under like black quicksand.
ISIS WOKE TO PITCH darkness and lay still, trying to figure out where she was. Something hard dug into her side, and she felt around until her fingers encountered the familiar size and shape of her camera bag, still slung across her body. She shifted it aside.
Typical, Thorne hauling her all over God’s creation and then leaving her who knows where. She certainly wasn’t on a plane, so he hadn’t tossed her on board and left her there. She presumed she’d fallen asleep as they were driving. Not that she remembered one way or the other, but she didn’t feel rested. The darkness was disorienting, and not having any idea where she was or how she’d gotten there was also discombobulating.
Sitting up, she felt around, trying to figure out what she was lying on. Something firm… sand? A sleeping bag? She still wore the cotton pants and T-shirt she’d had on this morning.
“Thorne?” she called softly. It was odd that there wasn’t a scrap of light. “Connor?” Isis called more loudly, starting to feel a heavy sense of foreboding when she didn’t hear anything.