The Amulet of Power - Mike Resnick [20]
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?” he responded. “They were trying to kill us!”
“I don’t like killing, Kevin. It’s my least-preferred solution. Those men won’t bother us again, and besides, it’s not as if killing them would have solved my problems.” She took a deep breath and released it slowly. “I wonder if there’s anyone in this whole country who’s not out to kill me.”
“Probably that ugly little waiter on the Amenhotep,” he laughed.
“He’ll likely be the one to do it, too,” she replied. Suddenly she became serious again. “Still, it would be nice if someone would convince the Mahdists that I don’t have the Amulet.”
“They’ll never believe it, especially since you’ve proven so adept at eluding them and protecting yourself,” said Mason with absolute conviction. “And since you’re an infidel, they’ll assume the Amulet won’t make you totally invulnerable.”
“You certainly know how to cheer a girl up.”
He stared at her for a long moment, as if making up his mind about something. Finally he spoke.
“I feel responsible to some degree for your situation,” he began.
“Don’t be silly, Kevin. If you hadn’t dug me out of that tomb and taken me to the Cairo hospital, I’d be dead by now.”
“Hear me out,” he said. “I knew people have been looking for the Amulet of Mareish for more than a century. Hell, I was looking for it myself. I knew the dangers involved—but I was so anxious to get you taken care of that I didn’t make any attempt to hide your identity when I brought you to hospital.” He shook his head self-deprecatingly. “I wasn’t thinking, and now you’re paying the price.”
“I repeat,” said Lara firmly, “if it hadn’t been for you, I’d be dead. I have no problems with what you did.”
“Well, I have a problem with it,” said Kevin. “So I propose an alliance.”
“An alliance?”
“I think we both know that the only way to end these attacks is to actually find the Amulet. If it wasn’t in the Temple of Horus, then the journalist was wrong all those years ago—either the man he saw wasn’t Colonel Stewart, or it was Stewart but General Gordon had sent him to Egypt for some other reason.” He paused. “And if the Amulet wasn’t in Egypt, then it’s still in the Sudan.”
“How can you be sure it’s not in the Temple of Horus?” asked Lara. “I wasn’t looking for it.”
“The Mahdists have turned that place inside out for months, and I’m not the only archaeologist to hunt for it there,” answered Mason. “No, I’m convinced that if it was hidden there, it would have been found already. I was within a day of giving up when I found you.”
“All right,” said Lara. “Let’s say it’s still in the Sudan. So what?”
“So two experts are twice as likely to find it as one,” continued Mason. “All my other work can wait. I’ll come to the Sudan with you and stay there until we either find the Amulet or become convinced that it no longer exists—or at least that it’s no longer there.”
“Think about what you’re saying, Kevin,” replied Lara. “They’re not after you. You can say good-bye to me when I board the Amenhotep in a few minutes and nobody will be trying to kill you tomorrow.”
“It’s not that simple. Right now they think you’ve got it—but once they know you don’t, they’ll decide that you gave it to me sometime in the past forty-eight hours—or perhaps even that I found it when I was rescuing you from the tomb.” He grimaced. “In truth, I’m probably not a hell of a lot safer than you are.”
“Then why did you go out of your way to convince me you were?” demanded Lara.
He spent a little too long trying to formulate an answer.
“Get it through your head that I’m not a frail flower,” she said, trying to hide her annoyance. “If you withhold any information from me, it just makes it that much harder to solve the problem—and this problem’s hard enough without some additional if well-meaning sexism.”
“You’re right,” he admitted. “It won’t happen again.”
“See to it,” said Lara. “It’s not enough that we merely search for the Amulet. We’re actually in a race; we’ve got to find it before they find us. Or, as the old pulp magazines would say, we’re in a race against death.