The Amulet of Power - Mike Resnick [69]
“If I start killing my enemies, I could very quickly turn this megalopolis into the smallest village you ever saw,” said Lara.
“No harm is going to come to you,” said Mason. “I didn’t let it happen in Egypt, and I’m not going to let it happen here in the Sudan.”
“I wasn’t able to defend myself in Cairo,” replied Lara. “Anyone who attacks me now will know he’s been in a fight.”
“I’m sure he will,” said Mason. “It seems a shame, though. . . .”
“What does?”
“Attacking you.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It was,” said Mason.
“Thank you.”
He stared at her for a moment. “If I may say so,” he began, “I find you—”
“Stop,” she interrupted him, holding up a hand. “One compliment a day is all I can handle when people are plotting to kill me.”
He laughed. “All right. But when this is over, I think I just might show you how romantic an archaeologist can be.”
“When this is over, I might be interested in finding out,” replied Lara.
There was an awkward silence, and then Mason spoke up. “So what were you reading that kept you up all night?”
“There was a series of letters from Gordon to Sir Richard Burton.”
“The explorer?”
“And the man who translated the Arabian Nights,” she said. “Anyway, Gordon later referred to one of the letters and mentioned that whatever he’d said had got him to thinking, and he’d even written an article about it. I was hoping it might be something about his favorite location in Khartoum, something that could lead us to the Amulet.”
“But it wasn’t?”
She shook her head. “As far as I can tell it was just a religious tract, nothing about Khartoum at all. I’m still hunting for it—but these are thick books. This one”—she held up the volume she’d stolen—“is thirteen hundred pages, and two of the others don’t even have indices.”
“If it’s just a religious tract, why bother?”
Because the Amulet told me to. But if I say that aloud, the believers will kill me and the nonbelievers will lock me away at the funny farm.
They spoke for a few more minutes, discussing what research they planned to do next, what parts of the city to search. Mason mentioned once again that he planned to visit the Bureau of Information and try to get a list of all Khartoum’s pre-1885 structures.
“It would be all but impossible to come up with such a list in most Third World cities,” he said. “But 1885 was the most important year in Khartoum’s history, so there just might be a record somewhere.”
“I would guess from what Omar has told me that he thinks 1956 is the most important year,” suggested Lara.
“Why 1956?” asked Mason.
“Independence.”
“Oh, of course.” Mason got to his feet. “Well, if I’m going to get that list, I might as well get started.”
He walked to the door, and then turned. “Dinner?”
“I’ll be too busy reading.”
He looked his disappointment. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” he said, leaving the suite.
Lara picked up the book again, and spent a few more hours reading and rereading the Gordon-Burton correspondence, never noticing that she had not only slept through breakfast and lunch but that dinnertime had come and gone as well. For perhaps the fiftieth time since she returned from her nocturnal visit to the library she read the letter of June 3, 1883.
I don’t understand, she thought in frustration. There’s nothing to it! He’s just talking about religion. There’s not a word about Khartoum, and not a word about you.
And the answer came on the wind, through the open French doors: Think, Lara Croft. Use your brain and think.
She picked up the book again, and read the letter once more. But this time as she read, she blinked her eyes several times, frowned, looked away, then read it again—and suddenly she picked up the other books and began thumbing through them until she found what she was looking for.
“Well, how about that?” she muttered when she had finished reading it. “You sly devil, Gordon! There it is in black-and-white where anyone who read it could figure out where you hid it, and no one ever did.