The Amulet of Power - Mike Resnick [102]
She stood there, almost motionless, guns trained on the open door for the better part of ten minutes. Then, finally, she holstered her pistols and went back to work on the heavy stone at the end of the altar.
She never heard the bearded man sneak up behind her. By the time she sensed his presence and turned to face him, his knife was already plunging down toward her.
“Thank you for leading us to the Amulet,” said the man. “Now prepare to—” A single shot rang out, the knife fell from the man’s hand, and he flew backward as if kicked by a mule.
“I was almost too late,” said Kevin Mason, standing in the doorway, a smoking pistol in his hand.
“Thank you, Kevin.”
“I couldn’t very well let him rob you of the Amulet,” replied Mason.
“You can put the gun away now,” said Lara.
“You didn’t let me finish,” said Mason, keeping his gun trained on her. “I couldn’t let him rob you of the Amulet, because that’s my job. Please remove your guns very carefully, and then lay them on the floor.”
She withdrew her pistols and did as he ordered.
“Now kick them under one of the pews.”
She shoved them under a pew with her foot.
“You don’t seem very surprised, Lara,” commented Mason.
“I’m not.”
“Why don’t you just stand by that wall over there, where you won’t be tempted to dive for your guns? I’ll finish extracting the Amulet myself.”
Lara walked to the far wall of the church as Mason, never taking his gun off her, approached the altar.
“May I ask a question?” said Lara.
“Certainly. I owe you that much.”
“Is there really a Kevin Mason Junior?”
“Not anymore. I killed him in Cairo after I brought you to hospital. That’s what I was doing when I left you for a few hours to get a room at the Mena House.”
“Why?”
“I knew that if you were going to lead me to the Amulet, I’d have to be someone you trusted. Mason’s son was actually an engineer who specialized in building bridges. I figured you’d never heard of him. If you don’t mind telling me, where did I slip up?”
“It was a bunch of little things,” said Lara. “At the time I wrote it off to you being under pressure from all the ‘hugger-mugger’ you kept complaining about. Then Malcolm Oliver said something on the flight from Kenya to Mahé that brought it all home to me.” He looked at her expectantly. “He said that he might be ignorant of art and science and history and culture, but if there was one thing he knew, it was his business.”
“There’s nothing profound about that.”
“No, but it got me to thinking. You said that you examined four churches, but only two survived from Gordon’s era. You didn’t know that a dhow is a felluca in Egypt. You had theoretically made North Africa your life’s work, and you didn’t know that the Sudan became independent in 1956. You studied Sudanese history, and you never heard of Siwar, one of the great historians. You’ve been to Khartoum a number of times, and you didn’t know where the museum that housed your father’s collection was. Any one could be excused; add them up, and it’s clear that you’re an impostor.” She paused. “And there was something else. You said your sources told you the men who attacked us in the truck were Mahdists. Omar found out they weren’t. That means you didn’t have any sources in Khartoum.”
“Oh, but I do have sources in Khartoum,” he said. “I just couldn’t reveal their existence.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Khaled Ahmed Mohammed el-Shakir. But you can keep calling me Kevin, if you like—or, in just another minute or two, Mahdi.”
“You’re no Arab.”
“I’m a Circassian,” he said. “Surely you know of us.”
“The fair-skinned Arabs.”
He nodded. “My parents immigrated to England when I was three. I grew up there, had all my schooling there, even took an English name, though of course it wasn’t Kevin, but I always knew that my destiny, a great destiny, lay elsewhere. I first heard of the Amulet of Mareish almost sixteen years ago. That’s when I