Her father was probably playing bingo right then, but Thorne didn’t say so. “It’s an ancient landfill.”
“Here, but maybe deeper… Tomb workers were allowed to build their own ‘Houses of Eternity,’ ” Isis told him, her soft voice filling the space. It was fine if she wanted to play tour guide to dispel the darkness as they walked. Thorne let his mind wander to their determined kidnappers.
“And since they were highly skilled, they usually made their last resting places beautiful, too. It’s possible that this was the burial tomb for the workers, although they usually decorated them as well as the royal tomb they were working on. I’ve been in several, and they’re charming and not as formal as the ones they built for their king or queen. But this? Not a pretty thing in sight. Looters could’ve stripped it of anything valuable. People here have been robbing tombs since the first dynasty.”
The piece missing for Thorne was that he knew to what extremes Yermalof would go to stop someone. Thorne had received Lynn Maciej’s tongue, then later watched Yermalof flay the skin off her breasts with his small, chillingly effective knife. By then Ayers was dead, and Thorne secured so that he could helplessly watch every cruel, agonizing slice as he was left to bleed out on the floor, just feet away.
“It made sense from a purely economic point of view,” Thorne said absently, being damned careful where he walked. “The kings and queens buried in these tombs were interred with all their wealth, effectively keeping all that gold and silver and whatever the most valuable commodity of the time was out of circulation. Tomb robbers put that wealth back into circulation.”
“I never thought of it that way.” Isis laughed softly. “An ancient savings and loan? It makes a weird kind of sense. Even Husani turns a blind eye now and then when something is brought in by a robber. It’s hard to stop.” She paused, her steps slowing. “Do you think our kidnapping had something to do with your Russian bad guy?”
The floor started to slope, and he put a hand back to caution her. “If we’d been tortured and left to die slowly, yeah. But this whole thing was set up so that it looked like stupidity. An accident. Yermalof fences extremely high-end antiquities worth multimillions of dollars. Some priceless, which go for a hell of a lot more. Smells a little like him but doesn’t have the big impact he goes for. If he’s involved with the people who are looking for your Cleo, he’d want us alive, not dead. Unless he’s setting a trap—”
“He might not have to,” she reminded him practically.
“Yeah.” Thorne focused on what was ahead in the glow of their fire sticks. “He might not have to.”
But what could Yermalof gain by burying them in a hillside? It would get him out of the way for sure. But who, besides him, would benefit from that? For a moment Thorne contemplated his life. Being in the dark end of a tomb did that to a man.
Who else had he crossed, in an effort to win his father’s forgiveness over the years, and then for the military, that might want him dead and be willing to work with Yermalof to make it happen?
For several minutes they walked in silence. Relative silence. He heard her every breath and listened to her footfall with every step. Close enough to grab her if she fell, near enough to dispel any wildlife that might drop from the ceiling. Or one of the throat-height wires the ancients were so damned fond of for decapitating robbers and felling them in their tracks.
Deep down, Thorne’s gut sank further. No matter how sweet Isis’s delusions of hope were, there was little chance that this was the way out. He was afraid he wasn’t going to be able to keep his promise. They were going to die, buried like so many beneath the sands of this valley.
“IF THE RUSSIAN GUY is behind all this…” Isis skirted a pile of chipped and broken stones before squeezing sideways to get through a collapsed doorway. The strong smell of burning wood and dust tickled her nose. It was a good thing she wasn’t claustrophobic, because it felt as if the walls were closing in on them in the darkness beyond the red glow of their makeshift torches. “What would his purpose be?”
“Other than having his hands on a wealth of priceless antiquities?”