spread her arms wide to ensure that the walls were the same distance apart. “Well, yeah, there is that. No, I mean his purpose in trying to kill us?”
Using his torch, Thorne pulled aside a spiderweb drape at eye level. Isis’s meager fiery glow was shrinking, barely giving off any light at all. Hell, she was feeling her way through the tunnel more than seeing where they were going.
“The first thing I’ll ask when I catch up with him,” Thorne said dryly.
“Seriously. As you said, if your bad guy wanted us dead, we’d be dead. Which means he either made a mistake or there’s a reason he has us holed up in here. Or it’s not him at all. We seem to have a smorgasbord of bad guys after us, and we don’t have a clue who sent them.”
“Yermalof tends not to make mistakes,” Thorne told her, his words hardly reassuring. “And he’s had time to think this through.”
“Again. Not reassuring. This corridor seems to go on forever, so at least we’re not going to run out of oxygen anytime soon.” Sounding calm and practical was a strain, but panic was going to get them nowhere fast.
They’d been walking steadily downhill. The grade wasn’t steep, but down didn’t feel like out to her. This was possibly the worst idea in her life. But then, down meant there was more ahead. At least she remembered that much from her father’s work.
“And while I know we can go without food for a long time,” she continued a little desperately, “we can’t go without water.” She kept up the conversation because if not, her ears throbbed with the thick silence enveloping them. Talking kept the nerves at bay. “So eventually, if we don’t find a well-lit exit sign, we’re screwed. Right?”
God, she was babbling now, wasn’t she? Why didn’t he say something? Anything? She knew he was still ahead of her because of the regular intervals of his breath. Isis wished she’d been more engaged when her father had been on a dig. She’d learned about tombs by osmosis. She’d been far more interested in framing the next shot and in the angles of light and shadow than in Egyptology.
Thorne paused to hold his stick to hers, and the embers threw off pretty sparklers that illuminated the grim set of his mouth. Their shadows danced on the rough-cut walls. “Someone might have a contract out on me.” His voice was pretty damned matter-of-fact for the statement. But he’d been pretty matter-of-fact this whole time. At least he’d finally said something, which eased the growing knot between her shoulder blades. Of course, what he’d just said tightened her nerves up again.
“More than just the Russian?” she asked dryly. Very dryly because she was so parched her lips kept sticking together. She shifted the slick little button around in her mouth. It helped, but it wasn’t a tall, iced Diet Coke. “I thought you were one of the good guys!”
Thorne shrugged. “Boris Yermalof is one of, if not the, top seller of priceless black market antiquities in the world. As elusive as smoke, it took us, MI5, years to track him down and learn his name and then another year to learn his location. His retaliation—and we were expecting it, mind you—was swift and brutal. His buyers think nothing of spending upwards of twenty mil on an original bust of Tutankhamen and hiding it in their basement where no one but themselves will ever see it.”
She gave an audible swallow.
“If those same buyers are in the know about a Cleopatra find, they’d draw straws to see who’d pay a hit man to keep everyone off Yermalof’s back while he brokered their deal. My returning to London might’ve been a tipoff that I was back in the game. The Russian couldn’t know I was on a medical leave of absence instead of out of the business for good. It’s been a while.”
“London was my fault—”
“No, it wasn’t. I had to go back at some point. I’m not the only MI5 operative looking for him. He killed two of our own; there are many people at Thames House wanting retaliation. They can’t go about killing everyone in Her Majesty’s Secret Service. If nothing else it would take several lifetimes.”
“Funny. Maybe Yermalof has a boss? Someone higher up the food chain whom he reports to?”
“If he does, it’s a well-kept secret. We’ve never heard even a hint that he doesn’t work alone.”