Countdown - Iris Johansen [30]
“Jane. Wake up.”
She had to get away from Antonio. Had to get past Julius at the end of the tunnel.
“Jane, dammit.” She was being shaken. “Open your eyes.”
“Julius . . .”
Her lids lifted sluggishly.
Trevor.
“I thought you didn’t dream about Cira anymore,” he said grimly. “That was one hell of a nightmare.”
Her gaze wandered around the jet as she tried to get her bearings. That’s right. Trevor. Mike was dead and they were on their way to Scotland. She shook her head to clear it. What had Trevor said? Something about Cira . . . She sat up straighter in the chair. “I haven’t dreamed about Cira for more than four years.”
“Well, this one must have been a doozy. You were scared to death.”
“I wasn’t scared.” It was Cira who had been frightened and angry. Cira who thought she had been betrayed. Cripes, stop thinking like that. It had been Jane’s dream, and any emotion generated was her own, not some long-dead actress’s. “How do you know I was dreaming of Cira? Did I call her name?”
“No, Julius’s. And since Julius Precebio was the villain of the piece, it had to be a Cira dream.”
“Very logical.” She took a deep breath. “I suppose it was perfectly natural for me to dream of Cira. You brought it all back with your talk of the scrolls and her gold she’d hidden away.”
“I didn’t have to bring it back from very far,” he said dryly. “She must have always been with you if you went to the trouble of going on those archaeological excavations.” He got to his feet. “I’ll get you a cup of coffee. You look like you need it.”
She did need it, she thought as she watched him head toward the galley at the back of the plane. As usual, the dream of Cira had been vividly lifelike and it was difficult to bring herself back to reality. She felt a desperate need to dive back, finish what Cira had started.
Crazy. Get a grip. It was a dream.
“Black, right?” Trevor was beside her, handing her a Styrofoam cup. “It’s been a long time since I made you a cup of coffee.”
But he’d remembered the way she took it. There wasn’t much that Trevor didn’t remember. As Eve had said, he was totally brilliant, with an IQ off the charts, and that amazing memory went with the territory. “Yes, black.” She sipped the coffee. “How much longer before we land?”
“Another hour or so.”
“I slept longer than I thought.”
“You needed it. It’s been a hell of a day for you.” He sat down beside her again. “Too bad you couldn’t have pleasant dreams. But the Cira dreams are never pleasant, are they?”
“I wouldn’t say that. You told me once that you dreamed of Cira after you first read the scrolls, and your dreams were disgustingly pleasant.”
He chuckled. “What the hell? I’m a man. What do you expect?”
“A little respect for a woman who did the best she could in a time when she should have been ground into the dirt by the system.”
“I respect her. But those scrolls written about her by Julius were as erotic as the Kama Sutra. You’ll see when you read them.” He lifted his cup to his lips. “You never did tell me about your dreams.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Not much. She’s in a cave or a tunnel running, it’s hot and she can’t breathe. The night Vesuvius erupted?”
“Probably. It seemed as if the conditions would have been the same.” She looked down at her coffee. “And if the dreams were triggered by something I read somewhere, then the eruption might have figured in them. It was the most famous event that happened in that era.”
“But you’ve never been able to track down any reference to Cira in any history book or other source?”
“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I was a bookworm from the time I was a toddler. It could have been just a line or two that stuck in my mind and later—”
“Whoa. I’m not arguing with you. There are too many bizarre happenings in this world for me to question anything. Your explanation sounds as good as any to me.”
She had sounded defensive, she realized, and she didn’t have to defend herself to Trevor. “If you can think of a better one, I’m open. I’ve been searching for a logical answer for four years and I haven’t found one. That