‘I’ll be fine,’ Macy protested, through a yawn.
The bodyguard was less certain. ‘It would be better if I went with her. A young woman on her own at night could attract bad attention — especially an American woman. But you have not finished your food yet, and I am supposed to stay with you…’
‘We’ll be all right,’ Nina assured him. ‘Take Macy to the hotel.’
‘You will wait for me here?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Eddie said with a nod. ‘Go on, Macy, we’ll see you tomorrow.’
With a mixture of reluctance and relief, Macy stood. Deyab accompanied her. ‘I will be back as fast as I can,’ he assured them.
‘Make sure you wake me up,’ Macy said over her shoulder. ‘Don’t let them open the tomb without me!’
‘I’m sure you’ll be there,’ Nina called out. She waited for the door to close, then added to Eddie: ‘I doubt I could get rid of her if I tried! Jeez, I couldn’t believe it when we got off the plane and she was waiting for us.’
‘She’s keen, I’ll give her that,’ Eddie replied. ‘Is that why you’re in a mood? Because Macy’s here?’
‘I’m not in a mood.’ She gulped down the forkful of lamb.
‘Yeah, you are. You got all stroppy just now. I didn’t want to say anything about it ’cause we had company.’
‘But now we’re on our own, it’s fine?’
‘See, you’re getting stroppy again. What’s up?’
‘Nothing’s up!’ Nina insisted. ‘I was just… Okay, I enjoyed getting to talk shop again. It was great to go down into the tomb, even if that kid Banna was a condescending little asshole. How old is he anyway? Twelve?’
‘Twenty-six,’ said Eddie. ‘I asked Assad.’
She was surprised. ‘Only twenty-six? Wow, he’s even younger than I was when I got my PhD. And they put him in charge of a dig this big already? There must be some nepotism there.’
‘Or maybe he’s just really smart as well as being a bell-end. I mean, you were only twenty-eight when you found Atlantis.’
‘Yeah, and now I’m thirty-four, and… and I’m probably not going to see thirty-five.’ She sighed, a deep expression of gloom. ‘This is the last archaeological dig I’ll ever be involved in. And I’ve missed it, Eddie. I miss the work. I miss the IHA, and the discovery — and I really miss being able to talk about it with people who actually care.’
She put more sharpness than she had intended into those last words, and Eddie bristled. ‘Just ’cause I’m not an archaeologist doesn’t mean I don’t care,’ he snapped. ‘I care about it because you care. But we agreed, Nina. We were going to do more with however much time you’ve got left than let you hide in some hole in the ground.’
‘I’m not hiding! It’s what I do, Eddie. It’s my passion — it’s my life.’
‘Your life is more than your bloody work, Nina!’ he said, loudly enough to draw the attention of other patrons. ‘I’m part of your life too, remember? And I want to spend the time we’ve still got together with you, not getting dragged back into working for the IHA or listening to you drone on about Callisthenics the Boring or whatever the fuck his name was.’
Nina stood, snapping her fingers to draw a waiter’s attention. ‘Cheque, please.’
‘Okay, bad choice of words, I didn’t mean “drone”,’ Eddie hurriedly backpedalled, but by now his wife was heading for the door. ‘Bollocks! Okay, how much was that?’ he asked the waiter, fumbling for his wallet and counting out Egyptian banknotes until the man nodded. He handed over the money and hurried after her. ‘Fuck’s sake, I could probably have bought an entire flock of sheep for that. Nina, wait!’
‘Not boring you, am I?’ she said frostily as he caught up outside.
‘No, but you’re worrying me. They gave us a bodyguard for a reason, remember?’ He surveyed the street. Nobody appeared to be paying the couple any untoward attention, but that didn’t mean they weren’t being watched. ‘We should have waited for Deyab.’
‘I wasn’t going to sit around in there until he got back. The atmosphere had suddenly gotten rather unpleasant.’
‘Okay, okay. I’m sorry, all right? That’s not what I meant.’ They walked on for some distance before he spoke again. ‘Look, you know I’m not exactly William Shakespeare when it comes to stringing words together — I could have phrased that better.’
‘No shit,’ Nina replied.
‘But still, you know what I meant. The whole point of us going away and seeing the world — the world now, not the one from thousands of years ago — was because we didn’t know how much longer we’d have together. And now…’ He looked mournfully down at her side, where the tumours were hidden beneath her clothing. ‘It might be less time than we’d thought. And I don’t want to waste any of it.’
‘That’s just it, though. I don’t think this is wasting it. I’m… I’m achieving something, Eddie,’ she said. ‘It’s important to me. Maybe I’m not going to go on any more expeditions, and I’m never going to make another find like Atlantis or the Garden of Eden or any of the others. But at least I’ll have helped protect someone else’s discovery — even if that person is a jerk like Banna.’ She stopped and faced him, tears glistening in her eyes. ‘We’ve been together for six years, Eddie; you must know me fairly well by now.’
‘I like to think so.’
‘Then you also know that yes, there is more to my life than my work — there’s you, for a start. You mean more to me than anything. But ever since my parents died, and even before then, archaeology has been what’s driven me. It’s… it’s defined me, Eddie. I can’t just give it up, any more than you could give up being British. You understand that, don’t you?’
He looked back at her, drawing a long breath before answering. ‘I can understand it, yeah. It doesn’t mean I like it or agree with it, though. I want the time we’ve got to be about us, not people who died centuries ago. You understand that, right?’
‘I do, Eddie. I do. But this… It’ll be over tomorrow, after they open the burial chamber. One more day, okay? Please? Let me see this last thing through.’
Eddie sighed, but reluctantly nodded. ‘Okay, yeah. One more day.’
‘Thank you, Eddie. Thank you. I really—’ She broke off, sensing a sudden change in his bearing. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘We should have waited for Deyab,’ he said quietly, taking hold of her arm. ‘Come on, we need to move.’
‘What is it?’ she asked, worried.
‘Someone’s following us.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Two blokes. They’re not Egyptians. I saw ’em when we came out of the restaurant — they started following us, then stopped when we did.’
Fear prickled through Nina’s body. ‘Who are they?’
‘Don’t know — one young guy, one older one.’ He looked through the pedestrians at the crawling traffic ahead. ‘Shit, no taxis. We need to get off this road.’
‘They wouldn’t try anything with so many people around, surely?’
‘They did in LA. This alley coming up on the right, we’re going down it.’
The side street was narrow, and dark. ‘Are you sure?’
‘If they’re going to try and kill us, they’ll do it wherever we are. At least down here there won’t be any civvies in the way.’
They turned to enter a trash-strewn warren of alleyways between run-down tenement buildings. The only light came from a few windows on higher floors. ‘Eddie, I don’t like this,’ said Nina, her fear deepening. ‘They’ll know we’ve seen them now — and we don’t even know if there’s a way out of here!’