Namid's mind whirled, calculating how he could convince his superiors that there was nothing he could have done to forestall the American's act of insane vandalism. He jumped when the mummy case opened.
The lid moved, slowly at first, then faster, hinges softly squeaking. Suddenly the lid was flung open wide.
Inside the sarcophagus stood a man. Not a mummy, but a tall Arab, all long limbs and protruding knobby joints. He must have had a devil of a time fitting his long form into the case. Carter thought.
His dead hand still clutched a machine pistol. His chest was shattered by the Killmaster's three slugs. They were so closely spaced that the hole in his chest seemed one single wound. His shirt front was soaked a dark, glistening red.
He finished falling, tumbling free from the sarcophagus to slam facedown on the floor.
"What… how… who…" Major Namid sputtered.
"This is the one they call the Camel," Carter said. "He's one of Reguiba's top guns. Or, at least, he was."
"But… but how did you know he was in there?"
"When we came through here before, both cases were open," Carter explained. "That put me on my guard when I saw it was closed. And when I saw the lid starting to move, I moved first. Of course" — he smiled — "if it had just been a practical joker, I guess I'd be in real trouble."
Khamsina was unsteady on her feet. Carter's free arm, the one not holding Wilhelmina, circled the professor's slim waist, steadying her.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"Yes… no. I don't know," she said. "I don't care about him, but I'm so upset about the damage to the sarcophagus!"
Carter grunted. "I suggest we get a move on, Major. Reguiba doesn't do things by halves. There may be more like him."
Finally waking up, Namid pulled a snazzy Beretta, the little gun looking like a water pistol in his big hand.
"You are right — there may be more," he said. "I will go first to make sure the way is clear. You follow with the professor. We dare not risk her."
"All right," Carter said.
"I'll signal if all is well."
Before going down the stairs, Namid climbed up to the next floor, making sure no lurkers waited there. None did.
He was very upset. The joint mission was off to a terrible start. How could he have missed the detail of the closed mummy case? The agent was a smooth operator. A fast draw, too. The major had to get some of his own back, or suffer a serious loss of face. That was why he volunteered to pave the way.
He went back down the stairs, passing Carter and the professor. The American still had his arm around her waist. She looked distraught. Her head now rested on his shoulder, though she pulled it off when the major passed by.
The Yankee spy was a smooth operator, all right.
Major Namid's shoes slapped their soles on the treads of the stairs. He paused to step out of them. He had his gun in one hand, his shoes in the other. He went down the stairs in his stocking feet.
Another floor came into view, complete with landing, doorway, and darkened gallery beyond. He didn't like the look of it. Was that a furtive rustle of sound he heard, or was it only his imagination?
Nonsense. It was his proud boast that he was not an imaginative man. If he thought he heard something, then he had heard something. Listening hard at the top of the stairs for a moment, ears pitched to keenest alertness, he heard nothing.
He moved from the wall to the balustrade running along the stairwell, leaned over it, and tossed his shoes on the next flight below the landing, where they made a sudden clatter.
Two men ran out of the darkened hall, thinking to surprise him on the lower flight. They weren't his men, they had guns, and he didn't like the looks of them. That was all he needed to know.
One of them was trigger-happy and started shooting down the stairs before even looking to see what was there. His partner glimpsed Major Namid out of the corner of his eye, one instant before Namid drilled a hole right through that eye, into his brain.
The trigger-happy character had even less of a chance. Namid didn't wait for him to turn around, but punctuated his back with two snap shots along the spine.
The shooter lurched forward, hit the edge of the rail, folded, and dropped headfirst down the stairwell, making a hell of a racket. But he didn't yell, because he was dead when he went over.
Namid prowled the front of the dark gallery. It seemed empty, purged of all potential ambushers.
Further investigation failed to detect menace. He called up the stairs, "You can come down now!"
Carter and Khamsina descended. The Killmaster was holding her hand. His other hand held Wilhelmina. His eyebrows lifted when he saw the corpse. "Nice shooting."
"The other one went over the rail," Namid said.
"Very nice."
Major Namid felt good. He had won his own back, restoring his lost face. It was, after all, quite unthinkable that he be bested by a foreigner here in his own bailiwick.
"The way is clear," he said. Already he was cooking up a cover story to explain the damaged mummy case. He could hang it on the Camel. That would head off trouble, eliminate paperwork, and satisfy his superiors in case the museum trustees made an issue of it.
They reached the parking lot without further incident.
Namid's driver, another Bureau man, sat behind the wheel, cigarette dangling from his lip as he read a tabloid by the car's dome light, totally oblivious of the gunplay that had gone down inside Egypt's most celebrated museum.
"Where have you been?" Namid demanded.
"Why… right here, sir."
"Didn't you hear anything?"
"No, sir. Did… did something happen?"
Namid could have cuffed his subordinate, but the presence of outsiders exercised an inhibiting effect.
Fifteen
Which was worse, the desert heat of Al Khobaiq on Arabia's east coast, or this inferno of Egypt's Western Desert, located just a hair south of the Tropic of Cancer? A moot point, thought Carter. As far as he was concerned, both sandy hells were equally unpleasant. At least in the emirate he was transported in long, luxurious, air-conditioned stretch limos. Here, 600 miles south of Cairo and 125 miles southwest of Aswan, he suffered and sweltered in a reconstructed mini-bus stocked with sweating soldiers, Major Namid of the State Security Bureau, Lieutenant Osmanli of the Army, and a Nefrazi brigand named Zarak.
Carter barely had enough energy to flirt with Khamsina.
"Is it true the Nefrazi are descended from a lost clan of New Kingdom Egyptians?" he asked.
"Where did you read that?"
"In one of your monographs," he said. "I have to admit, I'm no expert. I just skimmed the high points."
"Why don't you ask Zarak?" she said. "He's a Nefrazi."
Carter glanced at Zarak, scowling on the other side of the bus. "He doesn't seem too sociable. It's amazing that you get along with him so well."
"I told you, I was initiated into the tribe on my last field trip out here five years ago. The ceremony made me blood kin to all the tribe. To him, I am a sister."
Zarak looked like the kind of character who'd murder his own mother, but Carter kept the thought to himself. If ever a man looked born to be a brigand, Zarak did.
He knew Major Namid felt the same way about the Gray Raider. Namid came from a police background. Zarak was an outlaw. From the moment they had pulled strings to release Zarak from a Kalabsha jail, Namid and Zarak had taken an instant dislike to each other.
Khamsina said, "To answer your question, there are some strong suggestions that the tribe descends from the ancient, Pharaohnic Egyptians. Their name comes from the root word nafr, an old Arabic word that means 'hidden. Much of their culture is virtually identical to that of the Bedouins, but the Bedouins themselves hold the Nefrazi to be idolators posing as good Moslems."