Raiders Of the Lost Ark

'For starters, this,' and she held the medallion to­ward him. 'I'm your partner, mister. Because this little gismo is still my property.'

'Partner?' he said.

'Damn right.'

They watched the fire a little longer, neither of them noticing Arnold Toht slinking away through the alleys that ran from the main street-slinking like a rat head­ing through a maze.

In the car Marion said, 'What next?'

Indy was silent for a moment before he answered, 'Egypt.'

'Egypt?' Marion looked at him as the car moved through the dark. 'You take me to the most exotic places.'

The silhouettes of mountains appeared; a pale moon broke the night sky. Indy watched clouds disperse. He wondered why he felt a sudden apprehension, a feeling that passed when he heard Marion laugh.

'What's the joke?'

'You,' she said. 'You and that bullwhip.'

'Don't mock it, kid. It saved your life.'

'I couldn't believe it when I saw you. I'd forgotten about that ratty old whip. I remember how you used to practice with it every day. Those old bottles on the wall and you standing there with the whip.' And she laughed again.

A memory, Indy thought. He recalled the odd fas­cination he'd had with the bullwhip ever since he'd seen a whip act in a traveling circus as a seven-year-old kid. Wide-eyed in wonder, watching the whip artist defy all logic. And then the hours of practice, a devo­tion that nobody, himself included, could truly explain.

'Do you ever go anywhere without it?' she asked.

'I never take it to class when 1 have to teach,' he said.

'I bet you sleep with it, huh?'

'Now, that all depends,' he said.

She was silent, staring out into the Himalayan night. Then she said, 'Depends on what?'

'Work it out for yourself,' Jones said.

'I think I get the picture.'

He glanced at her once, then returned his eyes to the pocked road ahead.

6: The Tanis Digs, Egypt

A hot sun scorched the sand, burning on the wasteland that stretched from one horizon to the other. In such a place as this, Belloq thought, you might imagine the whole world a scalded waste, a planet without vegeta­tion, without buildings, without people. Without people. Something in this thought pleased him. He had al­ways found treachery the most common currency among human beings-consequently, he had trafficked in that currency himself. And if it wasn't treach­ery people understood best, then its alternative was violence. He shaded his eyes against the sun and moved forward, watching the dig that was taking place. An elaborate dig-but then, that was how the Germans liked things. Elaborate, with needless circumstance and pomp. He stuck his hands in his pockets, watching the trucks and the bulldozers, the Arab excavators, the German supervisors. And the silly Dietrich, who seemed to fancy himself overlord of all, barking orders, rushing around as if pursued by a whirlwind.

He paused, watching but not watching now, an ab­sent look in his eyes. He was remembering the meeting with the Fuhrer, recalling how embarrassingly fulsome the little man had been. You are the world's expert in

this matter, I understand, and I want the best. Fulsome and ignorant. False compliments yielding to some de­ranged Teutonic rhetoric, the thousand-year Reich, the grandiose historic scheme that could only have been dreamed up by a lunatic. Belloq had simply stopped listening, staring at the Fuhrer in wonderment, amazed that the destiny of any country should fall into such clumsy hands. I want the Ark, of course. The Ark be­longs in the Reich. Something of such antiquity belongs in Germany.

Belloq closed his eyes against the harsh sun. He tuned out the noises of the excavations, the shouts of the Germans, the occasional sounds of the Arabs. The Ark, he thought. It doesn't belong to any one man, any one place, any single time. But its secrets are mine, if there are secrets to be had. He opened his eyes again and stared at the dig, the huge craters hacked out of sand, and he felt a certain vibration, a positive intuition, that the great prize was somewhere nearby. He could feel it, sense its power, he could hear the whisper of the thing that would soon become a roar. He took his hands from his pockets and stared at the medallion that lay in the center of his palm. And what he understood as he stared at it was a curious obsession-and a fear that he might yield to it in the end. You lust after a thing long enough, as he had lusted after the Ark, and you start to feel the edge of some madness that is almost... almost what?

Divine.

Maybe it was the madness of the saints and the zeal­ots.

A sense of a vision so awesome that all reality sim­ply faded.

An awareness of a power so inexpressible, so cos­mic, that the thin fabric of what you assumed to be the real world parted, disintegrated, and you were left with an understanding that, like God's, surpassed all things.

Perhaps. He smiled to himself.

He moved around the edge of the excavations, skirt­ing past the trucks and the bulldozers. He clutched the medallion tight in his hand. And then he thought about how those thugs dispatched by Dietrich to Nepal had botched the whole business. He experienced disgust.

Those morons, though, had brought back something which served his purposes.

It was the whimpering Toht who had shown Belloq his palm, asking for sympathy, Belloq supposed. Not realizing he had, seared into his flesh, a perfect copy of the very thing he had failed to retrieve.

It had been amusing to see Toht sitting restlessly for hours, days, while he, Belloq, painstakingly fashioned a perfect copy. He'd worked meticulously, trying to recreate the original. But it wasn't the real thing, the historic thing. It was accurate enough for his calcula­tions concerning the map room and the Well of the Souls, but he had wanted the original badly.

Belloq put the medallion back inside his pocket and walked over to where Dietrich was standing. For a long time he said nothing, pleased by the feeling that his presence gave the German some discomfort. Eventually Dietrich said, 'It's going well, don't you think?'

Belloq nodded, shielding his eyes again. He was thinking of something else now, something that dis­turbed him. It was the piece of information that had been brought back, by one of Dietrich's lackeys, from Nepal. Indiana Jones.

Of course, he should have known that Jones would appear on the scene sooner or later. Jones was troublesome, even if the rivalry between them always ended in his defeat. He didn't have, Belloq thought, the cunning. The instinct. The killing edge.

But now he had been seen in Cairo with the girl who was Ravenwood's daughter.

Dietrich turned to him and said, 'Have you come to a decision about that other matter we discussed?'

'I think so,' Belloq said.

'I assume it is the decision I imagined you would reach?'

'Assumptions are often arrogant, my friend.'

Dietrich looked at the other man silently.

Belloq smiled. 'In this case, though, you are prob­ably correct.'

'You wish me to attend to it?'

Belloq nodded. 'I trust I can leave the details to you.'

'Naturally,' Dietrich said.

7: Cairo

The dark was warm and still, the air like a vacuum. It was dry, hard to breathe, as if all moisture had evaporated in the heat of the day. Indy sat with Mar­ion in a coffeehouse, rarely taking his eyes from the door. For hours now, they had been moving through back streets and alleys, staying away from the central thoroughfares-and