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He tried to find some way to quell the racing, helpless panic inside his chest. Adam was rather good in a fight, after all… but that might not hold when he had his hands tied behind his back. Ellie was extraordinarily clever… but there were only so many ways out of a sunbaked box when one was unarmed and outnumbered.
He grasped for even more desperate threads of hope.
The baddies might all succumb to sun stroke. Sayyid might turn out to have been hiding a knack for the martial arts. Perhaps Mr. Jacobs had a trick knee.
Neil thumped his head down onto the table, feeling queasy again.
He was fairly certain Mr. Jacobs did not have a trick knee.
Not that Neil could do anything to help them from where he sat, even though the room was reasonably comfortable for a prison. In addition to the Turkish carpets and the cozy armchairs, the study was furnished with a sturdy wooden work table and a window open to let in the breeze from the Nile. Beyond the rippling brown water, Neil could make out the sandstone columns of the Temple of Karnak, gilded by the afternoon sunlight.
Books were stacked on every surface. More of them spilled out of a pile of sturdy trunks. They did not appear to be very well organized, for all that there were a great many of them—archaeological treatises, Greek epics, and translations of the Book of the Dead mingled with bound copies of respectable academic journals.
Neil would normally be quite pleased to find himself in such a space—if he weren’t locked inside it wondering if the people he loved were still alive.
The only thing Neil had power over in this wretched situation lay on the table in front of him.
The clay tablet sat amid a mess of papers and books, taunting him with its tidy rows of cuneiform symbols. The object was over three thousand years old. It possibly held paradigm-shattering clues about the identity of the most mysterious pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
And Neil was fairly certain that he needed to smash it to pieces.
The secret of Neferneferuaten’s identity wasn’t what made the tablet so dangerous. It was the mention of a tomb at the Horizon of the Sun, Akhenaten’s ruined capital at Tell al-Amarna.
If the rest of the text contained specific clues as to where in the Amarna necropolis the tomb lay hidden, it could lead Julian Forster-Mowbray straight to the most important find in the history of Egyptology.
Neil couldn’t let that happen. The tomb of Neferneferuaten had escaped looting for the last three thousand years. The artifacts housed inside of it would offer priceless information about life in the New Kingdom and the late Eighteenth Dynasty—and reveal the true story of the fall of Akhenaten’s monotheistic experiment, a secret that had beckoned to Neil for years.
Julian would strip it bare and sell it all off to the highest bidders. All of that knowledge would be lost—permanently.
The notion was unconscionable… but was it worth dying for?
Neil was forced to ask himself the question… because if he did destroy the tablet, it would almost certainly cost him his life.
Of course, Neil couldn’t yet be certain that the tablet pointed the way to the tomb. If he destroyed it without being sure, he would lose his life—and turn a priceless three-thousand-year-old document into dust—for no good reason.
The conundrum of it twisted inside of him like a snake.
He was still wrangling painfully with the decision when the door thudded open behind him, and Professor Dawson came back into the room.
Neil thought he might have heard the man’s name before. A monograph on early Greek vase motifs came to mind, one that Neil had found both unoriginal and unconvincing. He didn’t have the foggiest notion why this lackluster academic should have been recruited into aiding Julian’s efforts. The fellow was clearly less than pleased to have Neil around, as though his presence was a personal affront to Dawson’s capabilities.
Dawson gave him an irritated look as he returned to his seat at the table. The clay tablet lay between them. On Dawson’s side, the table was covered in scribbled notes and several opened volumes on Akkadian cuneiform.
Neil had been astonished to discover that Dawson traveled with more thanonevolume on Akkadian cuneiform.
Neil’s half of the table was decidedly less cluttered. In fact, it held only a mostly blank page. He beheld it with a little twist of panic. He needed to at least appear to be making himself useful—or risk being tossed overboard like so much extra ballast.
Of course, he wasn’t the only one on the boat at risk of being tossed overboard. What had Constance been thinking, volunteering to go along with Julian?
Unless skipping into the arms of the enemy actually had been the more clever choice, when the alternative was perishing violently with Ellie, who might even now be lying in a ditch beside the mortal remains of Neil’s best friend and the kind-hearted, intelligent gentleman with whom he had worked closely and companionably for the last two years.
The thought made Neil want to collapse into a hysterical puddle.
At least Constance must havesomenotion of what she had gotten herself into. The now alarmingly grown-up danger gnome had proved herself both frighteningly clever and perfectly amenable to situations of mortal danger. Neil could still recall the sharp poke of her dagger at his kidney, evidence that she had no qualms about using violence when necessary to achieve her aims.
She was also desperately pretty.
Neil startled at that last thought, nearly dropping his pencil. Why was he thinking about how pretty Constance was? She had always been an absolute magnet for trouble, and Neil disliked trouble immensely. In fact, there was little he wanted more in the world than to wave goodbye to all the trouble that currently surrounded him and go back to the predictable, boring pattern that had been his life before Ellie dropped into his tomb.
