Night Of No Return

“I do my best,” he said cheerfully. “Go away, East. I can’t get anywhere with you breathing down my neck.”

“You go away.” East walked over and pulled out a chair. “I just talked to Jonah. You’re to call him.”

At last. Alex was on his feet instantly. “I’ll let you take over with the flirting, then. Be sure to mention her gorgeous legs. I hadn’t gotten around to them yet.”

“Fickle.” Alicia shook her head. “Sadly fickle.”

“Come back down after you’ve talked with him,” East said. “I’m supposed to brief you on some background details.”

“Will do.” Alex was already at the door.

The shock of cold air from the air-conditioning hit him the moment he stepped inside the expensively rustic lobby. He passed the regular elevator, stopping at one that the other guests at the resort couldn’t use, and inserted the key required to operate it. His heart was pumping with excitement.

A call from Jonah could mean only one thing—an assignment. He was ready for it physically, and if he still had a way to go emotionally…well, he’d shake down just fine once he got into action again.

Contrary to what his parents believed, Alex had never had a death wish. Nor was he an excitement junky—not anymore, at least. He’d outgrown that years ago. He liked edges, though. A man never felt more alive than when he was challenging his limits. He’d teetered on the slipperiest edge of all more than once while on assignment, but until a month ago he’d never gone over. But when he’d been left for dead in the Negev desert, he’d skidded down that dark slope…until she found him. His lady of the lilacs.

It had changed him. For the last month he had been trying to come to terms with that change while strength eased back into his body. He’d hiked or run through the dry mountains that cradled the resort so he could enjoy the slide and flex of thigh muscles, the bunch and release in his calves. Life was good.

Alex’s suite was on the top floor. The view was breath-taking—rugged hills falling in sage and dust-colored humps into the vast blue of the ocean. The bed was king-size and comfortable, and the walls were reinforced with steel and an inner layer of sand. They would stand up to anything but a direct hit from a bomb. The steel had the additional property of making it difficult for anyone nearby to pick up the signal from the cell phone he grabbed as soon as the door closed behind him.

This phone, too, had special properties. The signal was digitized and encoded, so that even if someone did manage to intercept part of the transmission it wouldn’t do them any good. It wasn’t dependent on normal cells, either, but used a system established by orbiting satellites, rendering calls completely untraceable. With this phone, Alex could talk to anyone anywhere on the planet.

He punched in a number he knew well, hung up and waited. A few minutes later, the phone rang, then a cool, dry voice said, “Are you ready to go back to work, Alex?”

Ten minutes later he disconnected. He stood in his air-conditioned room and stared out the reinforced glass of the window, and he tasted the hot, dusty wind of the desert.

No surprise that he was going back to the Middle East. That was where his expertise lay. Among other skills, Alex spoke Arabic and Greek fluently and could make himself understood in Hebrew. He knew smugglers in five countries, and scientists in three. He’d be going in as an archaeologist—a cover he’d used often, since it dovetailed so neatly with reality. Nor was his assignment a surprise; the people who had left him for dead a month ago had ties to the terrorist organization whose base he would be hunting.

No, none of that was unexpected. But the dig he’d be participating in as part of his cover, and the person in charge of that dig—oh, yes, that had surprised him.

The scent of lilacs drifted across his memory again, and Alex smiled slowly. Never say never, he thought, his spirits rising. Not only was he going to have a chance to exorcise the fear that clung to him like a bad smell, he would get to work another distracting memory out of his system.

A memory named Nora.

Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, September 9

There were no songbirds in the Sinai. Not in this part of it, not at this time of year. To the north, the land rose in stony leaps to the barren height of the Tie Plateau before slipping down in sandy drifts to the dunes that met the Mediterranean. To the south, ragged mountains heaved themselves high again, bunching up into the gaunt peaks of the Sinai Massif, the range surrounding Gebel Musa— Mount Sinai. Here, in the Dividing Valleys, the land dipped lower. The rare rains of the desert had spent millennia wearing away granite and sandstone, limestone and dolomite, to leave a jumbled confusion of rock cut by canyons and wadis. Here there might be the sound of the occasional caw of a raven or the cooing of quail, but even that was unlikely this early. At this hour, the soft percussion of Nora’s footfalls in the sand and gravel was the only sound.

The vague light of dawn canted in steeply from the east, leaving the bottom of the wadi in shadow. It was cool there, cool enough that she’d barely broken a sweat, though she’d been running for ten minutes. The rough terrain kept her from running very fast, but the wadi’s course was downward; it would take her ten more minutes to reach the convergence of this wadi with the next, where she’d veer back uphill, toward camp.

Then she could expect to sweat. But now she ran easily, enjoying the flow of cool air over warm muscles, and she dreamed of another run she’d taken. Another desert. And the man she’d found there.

When Nora thought of him, she thought of darkness. The near-dark of the time when she’d found him. Dark, sun-bronzed skin. Hair as black as her own. And the darkness that men create, the darkness of violence and death.

Not that she’d seen the evidence of violence at first. The bloody trail he’d left as he’d staggered across the desert had been hidden by the scrubby growth nearby, and his clothes had been the color of the sand where he’d lain, curled into himself for warmth.

From a distance she’d thought him a heap of sand. As she’d loped closer, he’d looked like a bundle of rags.

Then she’d thought she’d found a corpse.

The blood that had covered his chest and shoulder had heightened that impression. But he’d been alive, alive and conscious…as she’d discovered when she’d touched her fingers to his throat, seeking a pulse.

Again, almost as strong in memory as when it had happened, she felt the shock that had gone through her when he opened his eyes. Amber eyes. She could think of no other word to describe them. Like the petrified resin that people the world over have prized for millennia as a jewel, they had seemed to hold trapped sunlight inside them.

“Hey, Nora!”

She stopped, one foot planted on a tilted granite slab, the other in a drift of sand between rocks, her mind shutting off her reverie as abruptly as her body obeyed her order to stop.

What had gone wrong now?

She looked up at the edge of the wadi, where a man stood—Tim, judging by the gangly outline he made against the pale pewter sky. “What is it this time? I haven’t finished my run.”

“I can see that. But you’d better head back to camp. Mahmoud just radioed that his truck is fixed and he’s nearly here. Looks like you didn’t have to send me to the oasis for drinking water yesterday, after all.”

“But I didn’t know that yesterday. Look, Tim, it’s nice to get good news for a change, but it could have waited until I got back to camp. I’ll only be another twenty minutes, and if Mahmoud beats me there, you can start unloading without me.”

“But he’s got something that wasn’t on your list. Someone, actually—some muckety-muck from the Cairo Museum who wants to look at the cave.”

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “So soon? Providence and the mills of funding organizations usually grind slower than that.” The regret she felt about abandoning her run was quickly swallowed by a surge of excitement. Dr. Ibrahim must have been more interested than she’d realized when she’d reported their cave to him last month.

Or maybe he was hedging his bets. If what they’d found so far turned out to be as important as Nora hoped, he might try to have someone else put in charge of the dig. Someone with one of those dandy Y chromosomes. Damn.

“I’d better be in camp to welcome our colleague when he arrives, then, hadn’t I? Be right up.”

Typically, Nora didn’t bother to look for the easiest path up the side of the wadi, but headed straight up from where she stood. She was a long, leggy woman who moved with the awkward energy of a colt, all sudden starts and stops, yet there was a certain grace to her climb, the ease of a woman comfortable with her body. She reached the top only slightly breathless, and paused to unhook the small water jug on her belt, then downed half the contents in a few greedy gulps.

“Did Mahmoud say who our visitor is?” she asked as she moved past Tim. The path, what there was of it, wound through the knobby outcroppings of rock that made up the sizable hill that lay between them and the camp.

He grimaced. Tim had one of those elastic faces that turn every expression into comical exaggeration. “Probably. I didn’t catch it, though. I was concentrating too hard on trying to figure whether he said he’d be here in fifteen minutes, or that his cat was pregnant. Of course, if he’d asked me where the baggage claim was, I would have understood just fine.”

“Or the men’s room?” She grinned. Her assistant’s smattering of Arabic came almost entirely from a phrase book. “I’ll never understand how a student of language who’s been in Egypt for two years can know so little Arabic.”

“Everyone knows we Brits can’t cook or remember all those peculiar words some people use instead of a proper language.”

“You’ve managed to learn quite a few peculiar words. At least, Ibrahim seems to think so, or he wouldn’t have kept you around.”

“Hieroglyphics are different. I don’t have to speak them.”

Tim was totally absorbed by his specialty—the evolution of written language as evinced by the study of hieroglyphics. He was smart, funny and completely lacking in ambition, a trait more foreign to her than any language could be. “Where are Ahmed and Gamal? One of them could have translated for you.”

“Praying, I think,” he said, vague as usual about anything that didn’t interest him. “Do you think we’re going to be descended upon by a horde of eager Egyptologists?”

“One person doesn’t constitute a horde. Although, if we can impress him with the potential here….” She shrugged, impatient with her own eagerness. “Or her, I should say, though that doesn’t seem likely, given Ibrahim’s prejudices. I’m surprised he sent anyone at all. I didn’t think he was even listening when I talked to him last month.”

Nora had tried not to get her hopes up when she’d made the trip to Cairo to present her report in person, but her reception by the director of the museum had been chilly enough to depress Pollyanna. She’d received permission to follow up on her find, but none of the funding or support personnel she required to do the job properly.

Needing advice, she’d made a second stop before returning to the dig—a short trip across the border into Israel, where an old professor of hers lived on a kibbutz in the Negev.