In the square were a dozen stone slabs marking simpler burial plots. A cooking fire burned on one of them, a pot hanging by a metal hook above the embers. Finn ran forward into the middle of the empty courtyard, jumped up on the slab, and spun toward the fire.
Half turning, she grabbed the steaming pot by the handle and swung it backward, kicking through the hot coals and spreading them all over the slab. The iron pot of kohary splashed across the big man’s face, momentarily blinding him in a mess of boiling-hot slushy rice and lentils.
He yelled and pawed at his face with his free hand and jumped onto the stone slab as Finn slipped, then fell, rolling into the dirt. The man raised the machete and stepped forward, the skin of his bare feet treading on a spray of white coals. He howled and jerked back, falling sideways into the remains of the fire. Finn regained her feet and kept on running, not daring to look back to see what damage she had done.
She threw herself into a narrow crack between two of the mausoleums and came out into a small alley. Directly in front of her she saw an open doorway, a cool dark haven from the man behind her. She ran into the modest death house. Laid out on the bare earth floor, only half covered by dust and dirt, were three skeletons in a neat row, feet all pointing in one direction, probably the east, although Finn no longer had any idea which way was which.
It looked as though someone had been to the simple grave site recently. There were spade marks in the dirt, as though someone had been excavating. There was no archaeology going on here though; if the skeletons had been disinterred it was because the living wanted to move into the rough shelter of the simple one-room building.
There was a second opening on the other side of the room, and stepping over the skeletons in the dirt, Finn exited into a broad enclosure of two or three dozen graves out in the open with rows of smaller chambers on either side and the high wall of what Finn took to be a mosque at the far end. There were picks and sledgehammers lying around and piles of broken marble and granite slabs: grave robbers stealing the actual graves themselves, the descendants of Saladin’s builders who stripped the pyramids of their smooth outer facings to raise the city.
She stopped just outside the death house and listened, trying to slow her breathing and the rattletrap beating of her heart. As far as she could tell the man with the machete and no tongue was no longer after her. Either that or he was being a lot quieter about it. The real question of course was why he had been after her in the first place. She was a woman in a strange place, and alone at that, but unless the lunatic sword wielder simply wandered around the City of the Dead looking for damsels in distress, he was after her for a reason.
For the life of her though she couldn’t figure out what possible reason there could be. Her recent exploits in the shady world of looted art, old conspiracies, and Vatican politics didn’t have anything at all to do with Egypt; the works of art she’d managed to unearth, literally, from beneath the streets of New York hadn’t included any Rosetta Stones or pharaohs’ treasures. And even if they had, who would want to kill her now? That part of her life was over.
Or was it?
If she was right the man with the machete had been waiting for her like a hunter waiting to stalk his prey. That meant he had to have known she was coming to the City of the Dead today, and the only person who knew that other than herself was Hilts-a man who had introduced himself to her on an airplane, a man who had said he was part of the expedition but who had only offered his name to Achmed the driver. And who, for that matter, was Achmed, except a young man holding a sign that said “Adamson”?
She had taken it all on faith. As her friend Michael Valentine would have told her, the essence of any good confidence trick was just that, a trick of confidence, depending on the victim’s faith that what he or she was seeing was true because it was what was expected. Hilts knowing who she was, her background, her father’s name and reputation, Michael’s background… all of it was readily available in the archives of any major newspaper that had carried the story a year ago, or on the Internet. She’d fallen for it hook, line and sinker, believed it because she wanted to, because Hilts was a good-looking, intelligent man with a ready smile and an interesting patter.
Finn swore under her breath. She’d gotten herself into this mess; now she had to get herself out. She quickly looked around the narrow enclosed area once again. A rough ladder made from old lumber leaned up against the right-hand death house. Height. Maybe she could figure out where she was if she got high enough. It was worth a try.
She ran across the enclosure, threading her way between the graves, and climbed the ladder. She reached the top of the mud-and-plaster building and went to the far edge. Stretching out in all directions was a mazelike sea of buildings just like the one she stood on, split by alleys and paths. Some were so close they shared walls, others were separated like the enclosure behind her. The lower buildings were punctuated here and there with larger ones, some two stories high or even three, with taller, more ornate mosques rising out of the crumbling sea of brick and stone.
In the far distance she could see the palacelike bulk of the Citadel, built on a spur of limestone that dominated the city a thousand years ago as the Dome of the Winds by Sultan Hatim Ibn Hartama, then brutally fortified by Saladin two hundred years later as a royal seat and fortress for himself and future Abbasid rulers. Between the Citadel and where she now stood she could see a raised highway that seemed to cut directly across the City of the Dead. She could also see something else: just to the right, two hundred yards away, was a small round mosque with windows cut like teardrops. Beside it, in stark contrast to the mosque’s beauty, was a squalid hovel built of chicken wire and lumber scraps. It was the mosque she’d seen getting off the motorcycle. Somewhere in the shadows and the bleak, mustard-and-ash haze below it was Baqir and his horde of child bandits. No match for the machete-swinging thug behind her, but better than nothing. She turned and went back to the ladder.
She stooped, ducking low. Her nightmarish adversary was now directly below her, scanning the little enclosure. There were several ways she could have gone, but for the moment he hadn’t thought of looking up. His robe was charred along one edge and he was limping. It looked as though she had slowed him a little. He was making soft, animal noises, head slowly turning as he examined the area. Finn edged back, trying to get out of his potential line of sight should he suddenly look upward. Her foot sagged into a soft spot in the roof and a chunk of mortar or brick dropped down noisily into the room below. Instantly the man’s eyes flashed up. Finn didn’t wait. She turned and ran, heading for the far edge of the roof as the man with the machete began to climb the ladder, bellowing with rage or pain or both.
Finn reached the far side of the small building, paused, lurched then launched herself across the five-foot gap, landing hard on the next roof, the gravelly surface tearing at the palms of her hands and shredding the knees of her linen pants. She rolled upright and saw the son of a bitch with the sword in his hand stumbling across the far roof, one foot dragging. She looked ahead and to the sides. The next roof was closer, so she ran toward it and jumped the narrower gap easily, trying to keep herself lined up with the round mosque.
She leapt over a low parapet between two adjoining death houses and kept on going, feeling her breath hot and desperate pumping from her burning lungs. She turned for an instant and gasped out loud. Somehow the swordsman had managed to drastically shorten the distance between them, limp and all. Reaching the edge of the roof she stopped, horrified. It was twenty feet across open air to the next roof and fifteen feet to the ground. Below her was a bare patch of earth and several crumbling gravestones. Someone had arranged a scrap of cloth between poles to create a makeshift awning. She had no choice. She jumped, aiming for the sagging cloth.