“I got what I can get, Little Yeats,” Zawas replied, waving out his match and taking a smug puff of his cigar. “Let’s see just how much Daddy wants you back in the States.”
Conrad looked at Hank, who was still smiling, but whose eyes told him to play along. “Your dad found out about your, uh, situation here and relayed it to Montgomery, who sent me, even though it’s been a few years since we last saw each other.”
“Really?” asked Zawas. “My informants, the ones I have looking out for my no-good brother, tell me they saw the both of you in the Cape Verde islands not long ago. I also understand you’ve been to the Congo recently.”
That wiped the smile off Hank’s face. He cocked his ear. “You hear something?”
Conrad and Zawas looked at each other as Hank took out his phone as if it had rung, looked at it for a moment and then handed it to Zawas.
“It’s for you, Colonel.”
Curious but wary, Zawas took the phone and held it up to his ear. “I don’t hear anything.”
“That’s because it’s talking to you from up there,” Hank said, putting on his sunglasses and pointing up at the sky.
Conrad followed the colonel’s gaze to a bright flash way up high, like a mirror reflecting the sun in their faces. It was a drone aircraft of some kind, probably armed with a couple of hellfire missiles. Just then it tipped its wing.
Zawas shielded his eyes and shoved the phone back at Hank. “The U.S. won’t always have the edge in technology,” he fumed, then turned to Conrad. “American, go home.”
Hank coughed and pocketed the phone inside his linen suit, then smiled. “The United States wants to thank you for your partnership, Colonel Zawas. Always a pleasure doing business with you.”
“Until next time,” Zawas replied, not breaking his gaze with Conrad. “Give my regards to Generals Yeats and Montgomery.”
“And I’ll give my regards to your brother and tell him you have the money I owe him,” Conrad shot back, and turned to walk out with Hank close behind.
Conrad and Hank passed two guards inside and started down a grand stairway curving down into an even grander salon with a spectacular black-and-red mosaic floor.
“What the hell was that?” Conrad demanded when they reached the bottom. “I’m getting the crap kicked out of me in some cellar, and you’re having drinks with Zawas and smoking Cubans.”
“Got here as fast as I could after your distress call, Conrad, but I had to work through official channels.”
Conrad said, “So that b.s. up there about my dad wanting me back in the States is true?”
“Yeah. They say they need you for some big deal in D.C.”
A black Range Rover was parked in the circular drive next to a fountain. Conrad climbed into the shotgun seat while Hank slid behind the wheel and started the engine.The iron gates of the palace slowly opened as two Alsatians on chains at the guard station began barking angrily.
“It took me years to get away from D.C., Hank,” Conrad said as they turned out onto the long drive lined with palm trees, which seemed to be nodding them goodbye in the hot wind. “No way I’m going back.”
“I know that, but Zawas doesn’t. I didn’t want to tip our hand about our private venture. What did you tell him?”
“Nothing he didn’t already know about Meroe.”
“So you found her?”
“Her tomb, anyway. And a medallion made of some black ore.”
“Black?” Hank asked, suddenly very interested. “You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. Had some jewels and an inscription: Ada the Queen of Sheba.”
“Ada?” Hank repeated, like this was too good to be true. “That’s the acronym for the computer algorithm we talk to all day long at Niantic. ADA will be happy to know that she’s a demon.”
“That’s her name,” Conrad said. “At least that’s what Serena Serghetti said before she stole the medallion along with a military chopper.”
“Mother Earth was there too? She’s everywhere!” Hank shook his head. “So did you get anything out of Zawas during your stay at the villa?”
“Yep, but Zawas has probably already figured out it’s missing, so you better floor it,” Conrad told him, and then removed from inside his shirt an old leather journal. “It’s got a map of the entrance to the Queen of Sheba’s mines.”
Hank did a double-take and almost drove them off the road before he recovered the wheel. “You sure you want to do this, Conrad?”
“What are you talking about? I already did it.”
“I mean go to wherever that map takes us. Because if what I think is there is there, you won’t come back the same.”
Conrad wasn’t exactly sure what Hank was getting at. “Do we ever come back from any adventure the same?”
Hank shook his head. “This one’s different, Conrad. I promise you. I’m warning you. This isn’t your regular neolithic smash-and-grab. There will be forces arrayed against us.”
“Aren’t there always?”
“Yeah. But when you’re lying on the ground in some God-forsaken hole in the universe I want you to be able to say, ‘Hank warned me.’”
“I’m all in, Hank,” Conrad assured him. “Where else am I going to go? Back to whatever my father has in store for me in D.C.? Forget it. Back to Zawas’s brother Abdil? No way. Onward and downward. No regrets, no retreats. And I won’t say you didn’t warn me.”
“OK then,” Hank said. “Just wanted to discharge my responsibilities.”
Conrad looked Hank dead in the eye. “You done?”
Hank held his gaze. “Yeah, I’m done.”
“Then stop wasting our time,” Conrad told him. “Floor it. Before Zawas figures out I stole the journal and comes after us.”
“Oh, he’s going to come after us,” Hank said, looking at the speedometer. “Can’t push her any faster. I’m going to have to call in some bird dropping to slow Zawas down.”
After seeing off Yeats and Johnson, Colonel Zawas immediately went to his private library where Omar was examining one of the gold bricks Johnson had delivered.
“Well?” he demanded.
“It’s been refined to 18 karats, and we can further refine it to a pure 24 karats,” Omar told him excitedly. “But this gold didn’t come from Fort Knox or the Federal Reserve. It was created.”
“Created?” Zawas repeated.
“By some ancient alchemy,” Omar explained. “I suspect from the same black minerals that the Scottish Mason described in his journal here.”
Omar glanced at the leather journal on the ancient Egyptian funerary table beside him.
Zawas said, “Then for your sake I hope that tracking chemical you pumped into Yeats’ bloodstream works, and that he doesn’t simply lead us to Washington, D.C.”
“Yeats won’t return to his father,” Omar promised. “He and Johnson will lead us straight to the mines your family has been searching for ever since your forefathers accompanied James Bruce on his digs.”
Zawas, who was as secular as they came in modern Egypt, picked up Bruce’s journal with the same reverence he would tender the Koran if he were a religious man. The worn leather felt rich in his hands, but something about its weight was different. He took a closer look and suddenly realized it wasn’t the journal of James Bruce after all but a selection of verses from the Book of the Dead taken from the open slot he now saw on his bookshelves.
“Yeats!” he cried out as a hellfire missile hit the villa, collapsing the side of the library by the windows and scattering papyrus and scrolls to the desert wind.
Omar dove for cover over his gold brick as shattered glass and dust rained down. But Zawas ran straight toward the blown-out window, the white drapes twisting in the breeze, and looked out in time to see the glint of the American drone soar away. He could hear the villa’s alarms blaring and the rumble of his two antiaircraft batteries on the roof shooting fire into the empty skies.