to his question.
“You know, I didn’t even get what I was after,” Jack went on. “So, to be honest, I’m not sure why you’re concerned with me anyway. The staff is still back there.”
Even as he said it, he knew they wouldn’t take his word for it. They’d been looking in the wrong place, and the bullets had started flying before they could have gotten a good look at what he was doing. They wouldn’t let him go until they assured themselves that he didn’t have the artifact.
“I’m sure it is,” the Englishman said. “The problem is that I have a few friends with me who are not so trusting.”
“Are these the same friends who shoot before making proper introductions?”
“Sadly lacking in social skills,” the Englishman conceded. “And that might be why they’re discussing where to place the C-4 that will bring the entire cavern down on you.”
Jack didn’t reply to that. Instead he squatted in the dark, his gun at the ready, wondering if they could possibly have an explosive. He thought the odds were against it. As a general rule, things like C-4 seldom lent themselves to the discipline of archaeology. Too, if they were not content to let him go for fear that he had the artifact, he considered it unlikely they would bury him beneath several tons of rock.
As he considered that, he saw a flash of movement—something flying out from behind the wall and landing on the ground.
“That’s so you don’t think I’m making up the bit about the C-4,” the Englishman shouted. A few seconds later a beam of light emerged from the enemy cover to illuminate it. The object was gray and about the size and shape one would expect C-4 to look like. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”
Jack had to concede that if it was a bluff, it was a good one—one that left him with few options. Even so, it took almost a full minute before he pushed himself away from the wall, struggled to his feet, and after thumbing the safety in place, tossed the gun a few yards in front of him. The second the weapon left his hand, doubt washed over him and he wondered if he’d just made a terrible mistake. Yet he fought the urge to go after the gun.
“That was the sound of me tossing my gun away,” he said.
There was no immediate response, and Jack was about to make the announcement again when a lone figure stepped into view. Even with multiple lights in his face muddling his perspective he could see that the man was enormous. That impression was solidified when three other men joined the larger one, all of them dwarfed by the first. As the parties regarded each other, the previous feeling Jack had entertained—the one that told him he’d made a mistake—returned with a vengeance. While he was already late getting back to Caracas, he suspected his current circumstances would make him a good deal later—if he got there at all.
“I have a friend who’s going to be really upset about this,” Jack said, adopting a rueful smile.
At that, a man standing to the right of the giant took a step forward. Almost blind, Jack could make out nothing of the man’s features, though he suspected it was the Englishman.
“We all have friends who are angered by the choices we make, Dr. Hawthorne,” he said.
“You don’t understand,” Jack said with a headshake. “You’ve never seen Espy angry.”
The Englishman did not respond right away, but Jack could intuit the smile he wore.
“And you haven’t met Imolene,” the Englishman said.
Then the giant began to move toward Jack, who only in that moment thought to wonder how the Englishman knew his name.
3
As his captors marched Jack back along the route down which he’d fled, he decided that being forced to endure the indignity of retracing his steps bothered him almost as much as the pain of his minor bullet wound. Yet he couldn’t blame anyone but himself, as Mukhtar had warned him of these men before Jack left Al Bayda. Four men—three of them European, one Mukhtar had guessed was Egyptian. They’d slipped into and out of the city with a quietness that suggested a desire for secrecy, and when one required certain types of items, such items often had to pass through Mukhtar’s hands. And that suggested they were after the same thing Jack was. Even so, Jack had kept on task, intent on being the first to touch the