carrying him into Forrest, or rather into Forrest’s rifle. At Gideon’s shout Forrest had spun to his feet and tried to bring the gun to bear on the howling thing falling out of the sky on him. But he hadn’t been fast enough. The barrel of the weapon, still being swung around, smacked Gideon hard in the ribs below his left arm. With a grunt he clamped his arm down on it, then got his other hand around it too, a few inches further up the barrel, butted up against Forrest’s left hand. He shifted to get a grip with both hands and pulled.
Forrest hung on, staggering momentarily before he set himself. They stood, straining and glaring at each other with their faces a couple of feet apart, like fencers with crossed swords. The tire iron clanged distantly on the rocks below. Forrest’s face was scarlet from the strain, his cheeks distended. The tendons in his neck were popping. Gideon supposed he looked about the same.
“This is crazy, Forrest,” he said through clenched jaws. “Don’t make it worse on yourself… let go.”
Forrest kicked him in the hip with a size-twelve, lug-soled desert boot. Gideon stumbled backward over a rock and went down onto the seat of his pants, clinging to the barrel with his left hand and twisting furiously to keep the muzzle pointed away from him.
Forrest kicked at him again, catching him under the arm and tugging on the rifle at the same time. Flinching with pain and dragged over the stones by the heavier Forrest, Gideon held grimly on, forcing the muzzle to the side. Letting go would be the end of everything, for him and for Julie. The bullet was in the chamber, the gun was cocked, and Forrest’s finger was on the trigger. A quick, simple squeeze was all it would take for Gideon’s death. Julie’s wouldn’t be long in following.
Somehow he managed to scramble to his feet again, helped inadvertently by Forrest’s hauling on the rifle. But although he got his other hand on the gun again, his grip had slipped down almost to the muzzle. If not for the metal tag of the front sight, digging agonizingly into the fleshy heel of his hand, he would have lost hold altogether. He was winded now; that last kick had taken something out of him, and Forrest’s greater weight was grinding him down as the larger man continued to wrench at the rifle. His arms had begun to tremble. His fingers were wooden.
Why, I might lose, he thought dully. This man might actually kill me, kill Julie.
Forrest was fresher. Forrest was heavier. And Forrest had hold of the right end of the gun.
Breathing hard, Forrest seemed to sense a weakening. “God… damn… you,” he croaked, his broad back arched with the strain, his nostrils flaring, “let-”
Gideon let go.
Forrest flew back like a man shot out of a cannon. There was no cry or curse, no futile scrambling for balance, no expression of horror. His eyes, fixed on Gideon’s, showed only a dawning surprise. His mouth remained as it was, formed for the “g” in “go.” Two quick, stumbling backward steps and over the edge he went.
Over the edge and down, not in the parabolic arc that Gideon anticipated but down, like a safe falling out of a window. A moment later, out of sight, the rifle went off, mercifully overriding the sound that Gideon was listening for but trying not to hear. On his knees he edged to the rim and looked over in time to see Forrest sliding limply to the sand from the inclined top of a ten-foot-high boulder. The lolling neck, the impossible position in which his head came to rest, made it amply clear that the craniospinal junction had been severed.
So it was over. About Forrest he felt nothing; no triumph, no misgivings about taking a life, no soul-searching over whether there might have been a better way. Already he wasn’t sure if he’d meant for Forrest to plummet over the edge when he let go or if he’d just been trying to gain the advantage.
Either way, he didn’t much care. It was done, that was all, and he was alive and Julie was alive. Wearily, he wiped his hands on his pants.
Twenty yards away from Forrest the white Panama hat with its red band spiraled gently to the canyon floor.
Chapter Twenty-five
“Fascinating,” opined Rupert Armstrong LeMoyne. “An incredible story, just fascinating.” He shook his head, staring into the softly crackling log blaze. To the side of the brick fireplace, beyond the windows of the faculty club’s cozy bar a few spatters of gray, early-January snow, probably the last of the winter, swirled dismally over a murky Lake Washington.
“But why in the world,” he continued after a reflective sip of white wine, “would this Forrest Freeman person want to kill you?”
“Obviously, that’s something nobody’s ever going to know for sure,” Gideon said. “My guess is that he heard about my offer of $40,000 and thought it was for real; that I was actually after that statuette. I suppose he thought I was bent. Like him.”
“Mm, yes, I see. That makes sense.”
As far as it went, Gideon thought. But what could Forrest have thought his motivation was? Gideon, after all, didn’t have the corresponding inlays or head, so why would he have been so ready to shell out $40,000 for a sandstone body that wasn’t much of anything in itself? But maybe Forrest hadn’t worried about motivation. From his point of view, the fact was that Gideon was doing it, whatever the reason, and that was enough.
“No,” Julie said, turning from her own contemplation of the fire, “I can’t imagine anybody seeing you as a crook. You’re too straight-arrow. I think that business with Hassan made Forrest realize that you were on to him, or about to be.”
“Yes, that makes sense too,” said the agreeable Rupert.
“Either way,” Julie said, “you obviously had to go. Unfortunately, since I was with you at the time, I had to go too.”
“Well, now, wait, Gideon,” Rupert said. “You were in disguise that night. Nobody knew your name. How did he find out it was you?”
Gideon laughed. “Come on, a mysterious American named John Smith? With a stick-on beard? In Phil Boyajian’s company? A story like that, with a few more details from Jalal or one of the others, wouldn’t have been too hard to crack.”
“Well, in any event,” Rupert said, “it all worked out in the end, and that’s what counts.”
So it had, thanks largely to Sergeant Gabra. The setup with Hassan had been executed perfectly, even without Gideon’s presence (Gabra had forbidden it after he and Julie had gotten back in the second Horizon van and given him an account of the events in the Western Valley). By the next morning, Gabra had all the pieces: the body, the head, and the box of inlays, the latter two thanks to Kermit Feiffer, who admitted to having been an on-again- off-again smuggling accomplice of Forrest’s over the years, but who expressed dubious shock at hearing that Haddon’s death had not been accidental. After a long session with Gabra and a night in the Luxor jail, Kermit had welcomed the opportunity to produce the objects, to tell everything, and to swear never again to set foot in Egypt, all in exchange for a promise of immunity from prosecution.
Forrest, Gabra confirmed, had been a conduit for the el-Hamids for years. He would offer them a little more than they could get anywhere else in Luxor and then smuggle it out of the country in his equipment cases to sell for ten or twenty times what he’d paid. According to Kermit, four years earlier, when he had been a cameraman on Forrest’s PBS documentary, they had approached the director with the sandstone body recently taken from WV-29, asking what was for them a preposterously high price. Forrest said no.
Ah, they explained, but this particular statuette was from a newly excavated portion of the same ancient sculptor’s studio that a certain Amarna head, now lying forgotten in a drawer at Horizon House, had come seventy years earlier- the now-aged Atef el-Hamid himself had been on Lambert’s dig as a boy-laborer-and they had good reason to believe that the two were parts of a single sculpture. Moreover, there was another branch of the family at the village of el-Till, near the ruined site of Akhetaten, with whom they were in periodic contact. Information from this branch had long ago led them to conclude that the inlays that had been made for this Amarna head were at the Tel el-Amarna Museum, unrecognized and unrecorded, having been excavated long ago from an ancient metalsmith’s studio in Akhetaten.
Surely, they said, a resourceful man such as Forrest, armed with this knowledge, could manage to get his hands on the head and the inlays. When added to the body that they were offering to sell him, he would have an art object of fantastic value, which was why they were asking such an admittedly extravagant price.
