Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,30
cigar, which Drake took to mean things were going well. Sully’s cigars were a form of communication all their own, and sometimes lighting up could be a sign of frustration, but not this time. Sully looked pleased.
“This is Chigaru,” he said, and the Egyptian gave a little bow of his head. “Chigaru, meet Jada Hzujak and Nathan Drake, the closest thing I’ve got to a family in this world. I take their health and well-being very personally.”
“Not to mention your own,” Chigaru said in British-accented English.
Sully laughed, and it turned into a short cough. He frowned and looked at his cigar. “Gotta give these damn things up.” Then he leveled his gaze at Chigaru. “Yeah, I take my well-being pretty personally, too.”
“Not to worry, Sully. You have friends in Egypt.”
At “friends,” Drake glanced at Jada and saw her raise her eyebrows at the word.
“The best friends money can buy,” Sully said.
Chigaru grinned and nodded sagely. “Absolutely.” He regarded the three of them, obviously taking note of their meager complement of luggage. “Shall we go?”
“It was a long flight,” Drake said. “And it’s a long ride to Fayoum. We were hoping for something to drink.”
Chigaru’s expression blossomed into a brilliant smile. “My friends, do you think me so poor a host? I have Coca-Cola, beer, and sparkling water on ice in the car. If you like, I will stop at a market and pick up some takeaway food before we leave Cairo.”
“That would be fantastic,” Jada said happily.
Drake couldn’t disagree. Chigaru might only be a connection, but at the moment Drake felt pretty friendly toward him. A meal and a cold Coke sounded like heaven.
Chigaru started to lead the way toward a Volvo station wagon with tinted windows parked between the hut and the cargo terminal. Just before they reached the car, Sully spoke in a low voice so that no one else would hear.
“What about the weapons we talked about?” Sully asked.
“Didn’t I tell you not to worry?” Chigaru said. “Our first stop is for guns.”
He opened the driver’s door and slid behind the wheel. Sully smiled at Drake and Jada like it was Christmas morning.
“That’s more like it. We run into any more trouble, I wanna be able to give some back,” he said before climbing into the passenger seat.
Drake opened the rear door and held it for Jada.
“Looks like we’ve got everything covered,” she said, strained amusement in her voice. The idea of guns and more shooting obviously did not appeal to her any more than it did to Drake.
“For the moment,” Drake agreed.
But even as he climbed into the back of the Volvo with her and heard the clink of ice as she drew a bottle of sparkling water from a cooler, he couldn’t suppress a shiver and the temptation to look back over his shoulder.
He’d just had the strangest feeling they were being watched. It was a sensation he’d had before, and far too often he’d been right.
The Auberge du Lac had been built as a hunting lodge for King Farouk, the last monarch of Egypt. Drake thought it looked more like the kind of place where Sinatra might have appeared in the early days of Las Vegas, with its whitewashed walls and palm trees. The hotel stood on the shore of a lake that was part of the Fayoum Oasis, not far from Fayoum City, which was modern and industrial by local standards.
An hour in any direction and the whole world changed. The Valley of the Whales was within that radius—quiet endless desert where the sand hid fossils of ancient sea life—but so were off-the-tourist-path pyramids, as well as the waterfalls that were a part of the Fayoum Oasis. Some of them had been part of an irrigation plan that went back as far as Ptolemy, diverting water from the Nile for agriculture, but others—the Wadi el Rayan—were part of a modern hydro project. The area had little tourism, but from what he’d learned, it had been growing.
And all of it, the whole damn area, was a part of what had once been called Crocodilopolis. The City of Crocodiles had taken its name from the reptiles that had been plentiful around the lakes in ancient times. Like Kom Ombo, which had come later, Crocodilopolis had been a center of worship for the Egyptian crocodile god, Sobek. The cult of Sobek had built an enormous temple where a single crocodile would be chosen to represent their god and encrusted with gold and gems.