The Amulet of Power - Mike Resnick [70]
She smiled triumphantly.
“Until tonight!”
24
The sun was just rising when Lara, who had been awake all night, picked up the phone and called down to the desk.
“May I help you?” asked the clerk on duty.
“I need to speak to Ismail,” she said.
“Hold on a moment, and I’ll get him.”
She looked out at Khartoum through the French doors. With any luck, this would be the last morning she’d see the city—at least for a while.
“This is Ismail,” said a familiar voice. “What can I do for you, Miss Croft?”
“I need a favor,” said Lara. “A very important one.”
“If it’s within my power . . .”
“It is,” she said. “I need to speak to Omar, and I need to speak to him alone, in my suite. He may be asleep, he may be awake, I have no idea. But he’s sharing a room with Dr. Mason, and it’s essential that Dr. Mason doesn’t know he is meeting with me. I don’t care what excuse he makes—he can say he’s buying information from an informant, or visiting his girlfriend, or anything else—but he has to understand: It is absolutely vital that I speak to him, and that no one else knows about it.”
“I will take care of it,” promised Ismail.
“Good. Tell him my door is unlocked.”
“Trust me, Miss Croft.”
“I do,” she replied. “That is why I am asking you to do this.”
She hung up the phone and paced the room restlessly for the next ten minutes. Finally the handle on her door turned, and Omar silently let himself in. He closed and locked the door behind him, then turned to face her.
“You know where it is,” he said. It was a statement, not a question.
“What makes you think so?”
“You are practically jumping in place, and I have never seen such a smile on your face.”
“I know where it is,” she confirmed.
“And you did not when last I saw you, of that I am certain,” said Omar. “What has happened since then?”
“I finished doing my homework.”
“Explain, please.”
“The answer has been in your library for one hundred years, right there for anybody to find.”
“I still don’t know what you are talking about,” replied Omar.
“General Gordon and Sir Richard Burton discussed their religious beliefs, as well as their various adventures, in a series of letters to each other. One page was missing, but Gordon mentioned in a later letter that he had written and sold an article based on whatever it was he mentioned in that letter.” She picked up a century-old biography and opened it. “I found the article.”
“What is in it?” he asked eagerly.
“The answer,” said Lara triumphantly. “The title is Eden and Its Two Sacramental Trees.”
Omar frowned. “Eden?” he repeated. “The Biblical Eden? How can that possibly tell you where Gordon hid the Amulet of Mareish?”
“Listen,” she said, and began reading aloud. “ ‘The following are the reasons for the theory that the Garden of Eden is at or near Seychelles. I could even put it at Praslin, a small island twenty miles south of Mahé. . . .’ “
Omar frowned. “The Seychelles Islands?”
“Yes!” she said excitedly. “He believed there was once a land mass between the East Coast of Africa and India, and that the Seychelles were all that remained of it. I won’t go into his reasoning, because some of it is pretty strange, but he believed that Praslin Island was the site of the Garden of Eden.”
“And you think—?”
“I know it!” said Lara. “Remember I said that given his religious beliefs and his conviction that the Mahdi represented the devil, he would likely hide the Amulet in a Christian church? That was before I read this article. Given a chance, he’d hide it in the Christian Garden of Eden, a land where he was sure God would not allow the Mahdi to even set foot, let alone search for it.”
Omar considered this revelation. “It makes sense,” he admitted at last.
“Gordon couldn’t take it there himself,” she continued. “But”—she thumbed through the pages and held the book up—“he even drew maps of Praslin! All he had to do was show one of his loyal Sudanese lieutenants where to hide it, and he could rest secure that the Mahdi would never find it.”
“You sound like a believer.”
“I’m just trying to see things through Gordon’s eyes,”