The Jericho Deception: A Novel (43 page)

He scanned his surroundings for something he could use as a weapon. He wasn’t sure how he was going to confront the huge man, but he had to protect Rachel. Then he saw it.

He left the British tour group and hurried toward a pile of rubble twenty yards to his right. He kept the baseball cap pulled low over his eyes in case Axe turned around. The moment Wolfe’s man disappeared behind a column, Ethan sprinted. When he reached the rubble, he grabbed one of the waist-high metal rods attached to a rope that cordoned off the rubble from the tourists. He jerked upward, praying that it wasn’t set in concrete. It pulled free of the sand. He worked frantically at the knot on the end. He only had seconds. When it came free, he spun on his heels and ran toward the columns. He could no longer see Axe or his friends.

Wolfe’s head of security was well trained. He’d kidnapped Rachel and killed Elijah and Chris. What were Ethan’s chances against a man like that? He tried to calm his rapid breathing, but his limbic system was on its own.

Fight or flight
, he thought.
This time I’m going to fight
.

Axe ducked behind a column to his left as the girl stepped into an opening three rows ahead.

His only regret in taking her out was that he’d never have his way with her. The memory of her naked body quivering in fear the night he’d kidnapped her sent a wave of heat through his loins. He flexed and released his quads. When his mission was complete, he’d head into Cairo for a night of R&R. He’d always had good luck with the Eastern European prostitutes there. They had no one to go to if he was too rough.

When they passed in front of the next set of columns, he moved up two more rows.
This is too easy,
he thought.

“I’m taking them down now,” he whispered into his mic. Dawkins had been shocked when he’d relayed the news of their sudden fortune.

“Roger. Get out quickly.”

He glanced behind him. The tour group he’d passed outside hadn’t entered the temple yet. He was alone with his targets.

He crept to the next column. Their voices came from the row ahead. He peeked around the edge of the stone. Their backs were to him. Both were gazing up at a section of roof still in place, a giant slab of stone seventy feet over their heads. The Muslim doctor was pointing out the remnants of the blue, red, and gold paint that remained, three thousand years later, on the underside of the ceiling.

The Arab had the greatest potential to put up a fight. Axe would dispatch him first. He flipped the knife in his hand, pointing the blade down. He would strike the kidney, a blow that would seize the man’s body with pain. Then, with his prey unable to resist, he would draw the knife across the man’s windpipe and carotid artery. The sight of blood spurting from his throat would paralyze the girl with fear and shock for a few seconds. He would be on her before she realized she needed to run.

He relaxed his grip on the knife and released his breath, just as he’d been trained. Then he attacked.

Often when Ethan was engrossed in his research, hours would pass without him even noticing. His focus would narrow so that he never heard the traffic on the street or the chatter of the students in the hallway. As he dashed from
column to column, mirroring the path Axe took, he felt the same narrow focus. He was no longer aware of the tourists behind him, the heat from the desert sun, or the ancient artifacts around him. His senses were telescoped on the man a single row in front of him.

Axe paused and lifted his wrist to his mouth, radioing to Wolfe’s other men. He couldn’t hear Axe’s words, but his friends’ voices were clear.

What do I do now?

He was separated from the killer by only a few yards, but then that same distance separated Axe from his friends. If he yelled out, he’d lose the one advantage he had over the trained fighter: surprise.

He gripped the rough iron rod in his hand. For the first time, he noticed its weight. He began to doubt his initial plan of hurling it at Axe’s head. He’d only get one shot. Should he throw it like a spear or fling it end over end? The truth was, his eye-hand coordination was abysmal. He wasn’t at all confident he could hit Axe in the head, even from this short distance.

He had only one viable option. He readied himself to attack the muscular security man directly.

Suddenly Axe stepped from behind the column that blocked him from Rachel and Mousa. He didn’t run, but somehow he moved much faster than Ethan expected.

He’s starting his attack!

The realization sent Ethan’s adrenal glands into hyperdrive. He broke into a sprint. But in his gut he had the empty feeling he would be too late.

A
xe rounded the column. His targets had their backs to him. The Jordanian was pointing at some carvings in the base of a column in front of them.

“—and the scarab here symbolizes rebirth and eternal life because—”

Just as he closed in on the final steps, a sensation unlike anything he’d ever experienced stopped him. His spine began to seize up. The image of a snake made of ice emerging from his skull and coiling itself around his vertebrae flashed through his mind. A black fear gripped him, just as it had on the helicopter ride over the desert.

“—the dung beetle, which is what the scarab is, hatches from an egg as larvae but stays in the ground until it emerges as a fully-formed beetle.” Mousa moved to the left as he continued to explain the carving, his back still facing the immobile Axe. “So the seemingly miraculous emergence of a live beetle from the desert sand was seen as symbolic of the process of mummification and eternal life that would come to the pharaoh.”

In seconds, he knew, he would be spotted. He willed his body to move, but the blackness threatened to overwhelm him. Then his training took over. His legs began to inch forward, and the strange vision and the cold dissipated. He reached the unarmed man in a few strides. The Jordanian would be dead in seconds.

Axe snaked his left hand out and around Mousa’s head, clamping down on his mouth and jerking backward. But his gut told him that something was
wrong with the tactical situation. An uncharacteristic hesitation of doubt entered his mind. Was his mind messing with him again? He shoved away the feeling and thrust his right hand, the one holding the knife, forward—toward the kidney.

As the knife sunk in to the hilt, a thunderclap went off inside his head.

The rod reverberated in Ethan’s hand as it crunched against Axe’s skull. The large man dropped to the ground as if the power had been cut from his body. But Ethan had been a second too late, even with the strange hesitation that had slowed Axe a moment before the attack. He’d seen the knife plunge into Mousa’s back. The doctor collapsed on top of his attacker.

Please, let him be okay
.

“What—” Rachel turned toward the men. When her eyes fell on Mousa lying on top of Axe, she screamed.

As much as he wanted to run to her, Ethan had to triage the knife wound first and then get his friends to safety. “He’s been stabbed!”

“God, no!”

He dropped to his knees and glanced at the plastic hilt of the knife. The best course of action was to keep Mousa still, but he didn’t know how much time they had before Wolfe’s other men arrived.

“My back!” the Jordanian moaned.

“Mousa, we have to move you.” In spite of the pounding in his chest, Ethan tried to use his best hospital tone. “This is going to hurt.”

He grasped Mousa’s forearm and his shoulder. “Rachel, his other arm!” Her eyes were wide and her hands shook, but she knelt and took Mousa’s hand. Together they lifted him. He groaned as he stood on shaky legs.

They helped him walk several yards away from Axe, who lay unmoving on the dusty stone floor. “Can you support his weight for a minute?” Ethan asked her, placing Mousa’s arm on her shoulder.

“Okay.” Her voice quivered, but she widened her stance. “You can lean on me.”

Ethan inspected the doctor’s back. “The hilt of a small knife is protruding from your lower lumbar region.” He touched the skin underneath the blue
shirt just below the wound. His fingers became damp with blood. “It’s embedded in the psoas major muscle, but it looks like it just missed your kidney.” A wave of relief passed through him.

“Yes, that’s what it feels like.” A half-smile masked the grimace on Mousa’s face.

Hearing that the Jordanian hadn’t lost his macabre physician’s humor encouraged Ethan. The wound would hurt like hell, but Mousa would live.

A quick look at Axe confirmed that he was unconscious. Ethan wondered if he would have brain damage. “Axe was stalking you. I got here a second too late.”

“You were quick enough,” Mousa said. “Thank you.”

Rachel’s eyes darted to Axe. “We’ve got to find the police.” The panic in her voice was barely veiled.

Ethan glanced around the Hypostyle Hall. The columns hid them from the scores of other tourists, as well as the Egyptian police. “Axe was speaking on his radio; we should move somewhere more public.”

“Surely you’re going to pull that out?” Rachel pointed to the knife.

Mousa shook his head. “Extracting it might cause more damage—it will worsen the bleeding, too.”

“I concur. They’ll remove it at the hospital.”

She stared at them with an incredulous expression as they calmly discussed the knife protruding from Mousa’s back. Then a guttural groan escaped Axe’s lips.

He’s coming to already?
The man was even stronger than he looked, which Ethan hadn’t thought possible. Then he had an idea. He stepped over to Axe, kneeled, and grabbed a forearm the thickness and weight of a heavy tree branch. Clipped to his cuff was a black microphone. He dropped the arm and patted around a waist disproportionately small for the mass of muscle carried above it. Feeling a bulge, he jerked up Axe’s shirt and pulled out a radio the size of a cell phone. He unplugged two wires from the radio, pocketed it, and stood.

Rachel stared at him with raised eyebrows when he returned to Mousa’s side. “Saw him speaking into his sleeve. Now he can’t call for backup when he wakes.” He draped Mousa’s arm over his shoulder. “Can you walk?”

“Not sure.” The Jordanian exhaled sharply. “But I have to.”