A large smile spread across Dex’s face. “I found it.”
I blinked. “Ye what?”
He glanced at me, beaming. “He did steal that mummy and everything in the tomb. And I think I found where he stashed it.”
“How do ye know that?”
“I figured it out,” Dex said. “It doesn’t matter how. You wouldn’t understand, anyway.”
I narrowed my eyes. “So now I’m the eejit?” I asked him in a low, flat voice.
Dex winced slightly. “No. Sorry, that’s not what I meant.”
“It’s what ye said.”
“It’s not like that, though,” he insisted, his tone apologetic. “It took me months to figure it out and I’m not sure even I have all the answers yet.”
He glanced at me side-long. I studied his face in the shadows of the car. I wondered what game he was playing. “If ye don’t have it figured out yet, what the hell are we doing here?”
“It had to do with a passage from Howard Carter’s biography,” he explained. “He’s the one who found King Tut’s tomb. When he looked into the crypt through a hole in the wall, one of his assistants asked him what he could see inside. He replied, ‘Wonderful things.’ Key phrases on that page were underlined. It was a cryptogram. I took the phrases and cross-referenced it with other books, even the ones about the supposed curses-”
I raised my hand. “Leave it. So you found his little pet mummy. So what?”
Dex’s eyes widened. “So what? Sean, do you know what a mummy is worth?”
“Not a pile of shite.”
He shook his head. “No, no, no. It’s worth millions.”
“No, it’s not,” I corrected him. “It’s worth what ye can sell it for. And there’s no way ye can sell a mummy. Not in today’s world. It’s like trying to sell a Picasso or a Rembrandt. Too high profile. All the museums are on alert. All ye’d get is grabbed up and tossed in some English jail. Or worse, an Egyptian one.”
“If you stole a mummy today and then tried to sell it, you’re right.” Dex signaled and turned off the main road onto Hunt Lane. “But no one is looking for this consort. Ahwere is almost forgotten to history. The Egyptians gave up looking seventy years ago. There’s no scrutiny.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“And,” he added, “there’s always a private collector out there who’d be willing to buy a mummy.”
I thought about it. He was right. The goddamn Yank was right.
“Where did ye hide it?” I asked him.
His face fell. “Well, I don’t exactly have it yet.”
“What?”
“It’s okay. I know where it is. At least, I’m pretty sure.”
I punched his arm. Hard.
He yelped. “What was that for?”
“Ye woke me up in the middle of the night to go on a wild goose chase?”
He pulled the car up to Hunt Manor and parked near the servants’ entrance. “It’s not a wild goose chase,” he said petulantly, rubbing his arm where I’d hit him. “And I woke you up because I need your help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Help digging,” he said. “And probably some help carrying things out to the car.”
“Ye needed some manual labor, is all?”
He shook his head. “No, it’s more than that. I was hoping that you could help me find a buyer.”
I stared at the bespectacled Yank. “You’re the bleedin’ scholar, lad. I’d think ye’d be able to locate someone interested.”
He squirmed in the driver’s seat. “I thought that maybe with your connections-”
“What connections?”
“With Sinn Fein,” he said.
I resisted the desire to slap him. “Do ye realize that ye can get a fella in a lot of trouble by saying something like that? It’s a fine lucky thing that there’s just the two of us in the car here.”
He swallowed. “I didn’t think you’d mind me mentioning it. I mean, you whisper about it sometimes when we’re at the pub having a drink.”
“Jaysus, lad!” I shook my head in wonder. “The pub’s a safe place. Only patriots there.”
“Oh.”
“And those connections aren’t criminal,” I said. “It’s not the Mafia that ye’ve got there in America. We’re a political cause, lad. We’re patriots and freedom fighters, not criminals. We’re underground to avoid persecution at the hands of the English, not to sell drugs or steal things.”
“Sorry.” He hung his head. “Like I said, you’re the only one I could trust.”
I sighed. “Ah, don’t be little baby about it. I’ll help. But it’ll have to be an even split.”
“Of course.” He smiled, delighted. “Half and half.”
I shook my head. “No. Three ways.”
“Three?”
I nodded. “Aye, three. Ye. Me. And the cause.”
He pursed his lips, apparently doing the math. “Okay,” he finally agreed. “Fair enough.”
I clapped him on the arm. He winced.
“Let’s go get a mummy, then,” I said.
“One more thing,” Dex said quietly.
“What?”
“There’s supposed to be a curse.”
“Ah, of course. Always a curse.” I shook my head, focused on what I would do with my share of the money. What me boys would do. We might reverse Michael Collins’ folly and take back the whole of Ireland with that kind of money! “Look, ye’re not going to frighten me with some scary talk about curses.”
“It probably is just talk. But there’s been a startling amount of coincidence regarding unexplained death where Ahwere’s grave robbers are concerned.”
I sighed. “Lay it on me, then. Who died?”
“All of them.”
“Come again?”
He nodded. “Everyone on the expedition died within three years.”
“How?”
“A variety of ways,” Dex said with a shrug. “One was murdered. One committed suicide. Three died of disease. Another went missing.”
I waved my hand. “Bah. Coincidence. Like ye said.”
“Randal was the last to go. He had a terrible bout of pneumonia.”
“Nothing frightening about that.”
“In July?”
My eyebrows shot up. “All right, that’s a little strange. But this was seventy years ago. People weren’t as healthy.”
“I agree.”
“So ye don’t think there’s a curse?”
He shook his head. “I don’t believe in curses.”
I rolled my eyes in exasperation. “Then why are we even having this conversation?”
“It’s part of the history of the whole thing. I thought you should know.”
I muttered a curse in Old Irish.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I said now I know. Can we go get the mummy now?”
“Sure.”
We got out of the car. Dex led me to an outbuilding, where he used his key to enter. “Grab that,” he said, pointing to a pick.
I did as he asked. “Don’t ye want a spade as well? I thought we were digging a hole.”
He shrugged. “I don’t think it’s buried. I think it’s behind a wall.”
Now I knew why he called me. It wasn’t just my connection to the resistance. Dex would struggle to carry the pick for any distance, much less swing it. He needed my muscle, plain and simple. Under normal circumstances, that’d likely piss me off, but tonight I shrugged it off. A pile of mummy money and a free Ireland were more important.
“What is everyone going to think when they see us walking around carrying a pick?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” he answered. “Most of the family lives in the main estate outside London. This is more of a summer home for them.”
“What about servants?”
He shook his head, leading me out and closing the door behind us. “All contracted out, except for a couple of house staff. Both are old and both go to bed early. Besides, we’ll be working clear on the other side of the manor from them.”
“Ye’ve got this all worked out.”
“I’ve been thinking it through for weeks. Ever since I figured out the cryptogram and where Randal hid Ahwere.”
“Weeks? How’d ye sit on it for that long, lad?”
He smiled. “I had no choice. I had to wait for Penny to leave and head back to school and for all the maintenance crews to finish with the repairs around the manor and the landscaping.”