“And so have I.”
Gideon gathered himself to retort, but to his surprise nothing came to mind. She was right. “So you’re going to report back to Eli?”
“Of course.”
“What are you going to say?”
“That we found nothing.”
“Really? And why is that? Why agree to this mission, risk your life, if you weren’t going to see it through to the end?”
“I’d always planned to see it through to the end. But after all that’s happened…well, I just can’t rat you out like that.” She looked out toward the far bank. “Don’t think it’s easy for me. I know Eli and his ways even better than you do, but he was still a kind of surrogate father. At least, he tried to be.”
“I can imagine.”
She flared up. “He was very kind to me, and he did his best.”
“So what will you tell him about Manuel? About the treasure chamber—and the tablet?”
“Oh, I’ll make sure Eli has enough closure to content himself with. I’ll inform him, through our private back channel, that Manuel died and was buried in the desert; that the expedition was a total bust; and that you went off, disappointed, to your cabin to…” Her voice trailed off as she seemed to catch herself.
“To what?”
She did not answer right away. “Eli also told me about your terminal condition.”
“Of course he would.” He could see her eyes fill up.
“Look. The more I got to know you two—especially after we reached the village—the more I realized I wanted to come down on your side, not Eli’s. I wanted to be on your side particularly, Gideon, because…” She stopped, as if to consider her words carefully. “Anyway, I can’t count the times I wanted to tell you all this, but I never seemed to find the right moment. I’m sorry.”
Gideon shook his head. It was all too much. Losing the treasure, losing Manuel, and now this confession. Eli Glinn. A sect who believed in a mysterious and apparently frightening Eleventh Commandment. There’s so little time. Of course she didn’t want to fall in love with a dying man. None of it seemed real.
“The best thing,” said Imogen in a firmer voice, “is for us to get our stories straight and make sure no one ever, ever finds out about that chamber. You understand? Nobody must know.”
“As you said, I’m going back to my cabin. To die.”
She flinched, as if in pain. She hesitated for a moment. And then—whether on impulse or premeditation he could not tell—she flung the notebook into the Nile, where it bobbed for a moment before sinking into the murky water.
“When the world is ready,” she said, “the chamber will be opened. And the truth—if we choose to believe it—will be known.”
Epilogue
THE SUN WAS hanging low in the sky when Gideon drove along the rutted road to his cabin, pulled up beside the shabby lean-to stacked with firewood, and killed the engine. He glanced out briefly at the surrounding scenery, gauging it with an appraising eye: summer would be early this year. Then he got out, whistling tunelessly under his breath and pulling a sheaf of mail and a small sack of groceries from the passenger seat as he did so. A long, narrow pain d’epi stuck up from the sack like a flagpole; while he considered himself a gourmet chef, the art of bread baking was a skill that had always eluded him. Besides, there was a place in Santa Fe that made the best French bread he’d tasted this side of the Rive Gauche.
He stepped up onto the porch, kicked open the screen door—this far up in the mountains and away from civilization, he never bothered to lock anything—and walked through the timbered living room into the kitchen alcove, where he dumped everything on the counter. Still whistling—the tuneless ditty had now morphed into Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation”—he pushed the mail aside and plucked the groceries out of the bag: bread, cheese, arugula, half a pound of Culatello di Zibello, and a few other delicacies, which he stored in their proper places. He rinsed his hands in the sink, dried them on a dish towel, then looked around. Was there anything he’d forgotten to do?
No. There was nothing.
The cabin was very quiet, with only the sigh of a breeze in the great ponderosa pines outside. As he listened to the whispering of the trees he realized what a strange feeling it was: to have done everything necessary. Not just paid his property taxes or finished that E. M. Forster novel on the bedside table or patched that elusive leak in the roof—but everything. He glanced around the cabin, his gaze falling on one treasured possession after another. It had taken him years to find them, collect them, even steal them—but he had taken only days to determine their ultimate fates. The paintings he owned would all go to the New Mexico Museum of Art. His treasured cookware—the copper pans and French rolling pins and the lovingly cured iron skillet he’d inherited from his grandmother—would go to a friend and fellow chef he knew in Los Alamos. And his pride and joy—an antique third-phase Red Mesa Navajo blanket that lay across his bed—would go to Alida Blaine…if she’d accept it. As for the rest, cabin included—it would remain unlocked and available to anyone who wanted to use it…until it was reclaimed by time and decay, which eventually took everything.
Gideon was well aware that, in the two weeks since he’d returned from Egypt, these periods of reflection had grown more persistent. While on the expedition, and especially while living with—and escaping from—the tribe, he’d been too busy to think much about his terminal situation. Now that he was home, however, and having—thankfully—heard nothing from Eli Glinn, the quietness and solitude had allowed him to dwell on just how short a time he had left.
The strange thing was, he felt fine. His health seemed to be excellent. The various ordeals in southern Egypt had left him physically unscarred. If anything, he was as fit now as he’d ever been in his life. What a supreme irony, then, that Glinn’s words—words the man had uttered the very first time Gideon met him—came to mind now: The end typically comes very fast, with little or no warning. You will live a normal life for about a year—and then you will die very, very quickly.
About a year. There was a chance, small but definitely quantifiable, that he might last longer. The future was inherently unknowable, and miracles did happen. And who knew if the strange “lotus” he had ingested on the Lost Island, which had so benefited Glinn’s own health, might somehow mitigate his condition? But it seemed unlikely, given what the neurosurgeon had said when he’d examined Gideon’s latest cranial MRI: The progress of the AVM has been textbook, unfortunately. So yes, I would say two months is a likely time frame.
And that had been just over two months ago.
Gideon’s whistling died away. Pulling his phone out of his pocket, he paired it with a Bose portable speaker, dialed up Spotify, and selected one of his jazz playlists: Charlie Parker could do a much better job with “Confirmation” than he could. The sounds of a tenor saxophone filled the cabin, and Gideon put down the phone; he marveled that gigabit broadband Internet could now reach even so remote an outpost as this. Even in his relatively short lifetime, the world had changed—and so fast.
Moving more purposefully now, energized by Bird’s bebop riffs, he placed the pain d’epi on his Boos cutting board, pulled off two of its crusty ends and, cutting each in half lengthwise, quickly fashioned sandwiches from the cured ham, arugula, and ripe Camembert, topping the ingredients with a smear of the truffle aioli he’d whipped up the day before. A thin drizzle of DOP balsamic vinegar was the finishing touch. He moved the two small sandwiches from the cutting board to a plate, tucked the mail under one arm, grabbed a bottle of Lagavulin and an empty glass, and then—balancing everything precariously—kicked the screen door open again, walked out onto the porch, and took a seat in one of two weather-beaten Adirondack chairs that were placed there.