The Sacred Vault

ears. I just need to stay away from loud noises.’ A rueful look. ‘It’s funny - the doctor asked me if I’d been near anything loud in the past few years. I was thinking, Christ, where do I start? Underneath a jet while it was taking off, running out of an exploding power station, having a stealth bomber drop bunker-busters on me . . .’

Nina patted his shoulder. ‘Y’know, I’m more than happy for us to have a quiet life.’

‘I suppose . . .’

She snorted. ‘Oh, Jesus - you really do miss the action, don’t you?’

‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘Well, a little bit. I mean, it’s sort of what I do, innit?’

‘Perhaps, but I wish it didn’t go to such extremes. Exotic travel, amazing historical discoveries - that’s the kind of excitement I’d be happy with. No need to add tanks and bombs and machine guns as well!’ She kissed his cheek. ‘You looked after me during everything we’ve been through in the last four years. You can take things easy from now. You deserve it.’

‘Aye, well . . .’ He returned the kiss. ‘Just so long as things don’t get boring.’

‘I’ll try to find a happy medium.’ She kissed him again, and stood. ‘Come on, let’s go to bed. I’m sure we can find something exciting to do there.’

‘I’ve got some ideas, but you always call me a pervert when I suggest ’em!’ He had started to follow her across the room when his phone rang. ‘God, who’s this?’ he muttered, fishing it from his pocket. ‘Hello? Oh, Nan, hi. I thought you’d gone to bed?’ He listened, tapping a foot with mild impatience as his grandmother ambled towards her conversational destination. ‘What? No, Nan, you have to pay extra for the movie channels. That’s why you can’t see them. And trust me, you won’t like any of Grant’s films anyway.’

‘I’ll be in here,’ said Nina, smiling as she entered the bedroom.

Eddie gave her a resigned shrug. ‘No, Nan, no - you definitely don’t want to watch those channels! Just go to bed, okay? Yeah, yeah, we’ll see you tomorrow. Okay, Nan, night. Night-night. Bye.’ He ended the call. ‘Bloody hell. Can’t even get any time to ourselves in our own home.’

‘Only a couple more days and we’ll finally be able to have a nice, relaxing break,’ she assured him.

As Nina had gloomily predicted, a large part of her next day was spent on the phone. The Treasures of Atlantis exhibition, displaying a plethora of ancient artefacts the International Heritage Agency had recovered from the sunken ruins of Atlantis, was about to begin its four-month tour of sixteen cities in fourteen countries. Even delegating much of the organisation to Rowan Sharpe and others, the IHA’s director was finding it a major - and draining - addition to her workload.

‘Oh, God,’ she sighed, rubbing her eyes at the conclusion of one especially long call. ‘Next time I have to work with the Secret Service, please just phone them anonymously and tell them I’m a communist or something, so they’ll blacklist me and I’ll never have to deal with them again.’

‘Clearance hassles?’ asked Eddie, who had been sitting with his feet up on her desk, waiting for her to finish.

‘You’re not kidding. Interpol suggested that the UN ought to beef up the exhibition’s security because everyone’s paranoid after Michelangelo’s David got stolen, but now the Frisco city council’s complaining because they don’t want to pay their half of the extra costs, and the Secret Service threw a fit because they have to vet the extra staff. Plus, the mayor’s office keeps adding to the VIP list because obviously everybody wants to meet the President, and the Men in Black need to clear all the new guests too. And for some reason, they’ve decided it’s all my fault.’

‘It’s tough at the top.’

‘Damn right. And get your feet off my desk.’ Nina glowered at the offending extremities until they returned to the floor. ‘Is everything ready?’

He nodded. ‘The flights and hotel are all confirmed, and Lola’s going to bring those Egyptian reports you needed to check. Oh, she says she needs higher clearance to get them, though. The Egyptian government wants some stuff kept classified. They’re down in secure storage.’

She made a sour face. ‘The only way that’ll get approved before we fly out tomorrow is if I go and stand on the security supervisor’s desk until he signs it off. She can just use my clearance, she’s got the code.’

‘Christ, you don’t even let me use your security code.’

‘She’s my PA, not my husband. It’s a whole different degree of trust.’ She smiled at his exaggeratedly offended expression. Her phone rang; she picked it up. ‘Hi, Rowan! Back in San Francisco, then? Are you wearing flowers in your hair?’

Eddie watched her face fall as her old friend spoke. ‘I’ll wait,’ he said, putting his feet back on the desk.

Nina flapped an irate hand to shoo them off. ‘Okay, I’ll talk to them,’ she said, exasperated, after some time. ‘I’ll see you there tomorrow. Bye.’ She hung up and buried her face in her hands. ‘Ugh.’

‘Problems?’

‘Of course. The mayor’s changed the VIP list again. Which means the Secret Service will be calling to yell at me in about five minutes.’

‘You want me to tell ’em you’re a communist?’

‘Don’t tempt me.’

‘Still,’ Eddie said reassuringly, ‘after tomorrow it’s out of your hands and you can stop worrying about it. You just have to fly to Frisco, show off all the stuff from Atlantis, meet the President . . . then you can finally get back to what you really love. Digging bits of old junk out of the ground.’

It was her turn to look offended. ‘Ha ha. Although it will be good to get back to some real archaeological work.’ She glanced at a display case in one corner. ‘Maybe I’ll finally figure out where Prince came from.’

Eddie grinned, going to the case. ‘Prince. That still makes me laugh.’ He peered at the small purple figure within. The statuette, crudely carved from an oddly coloured stone, had been discovered inside the Pyramid of Osiris, but it bore no resemblance to any known artefact from ancient Egypt, and even after five months of analysis nobody at the IHA was any nearer to identifying its origins. ‘Tell you what, give me a hammer drill and ten minutes alone with him, and I’ll find out everything he knows.’

‘I don’t think that approach would get through the peer-review process,’ Nina joked, then she became pensive.

‘What’s up?’

‘Just thinking about the President,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to expect. I mean, the guy was Dalton’s vice-president. He might not be too happy that we forced his boss to resign.’

‘Are you kidding?’ said Eddie. ‘He became the most powerful man in the world because of us. We ought to be on his bloody Christmas card list. Anyway, I thought him and Dalton couldn’t stand each other.’

‘It was something of a party-unity ticket, I suppose. I’m still worried, though.’

‘If he had any problems with us, the Secret Service wouldn’t let us within a mile of him.’

‘You’ve got a point. But I’ll be glad when it’s all over.’

Eddie rounded the desk, leaning over the back of her chair to give her a shoulder massage. ‘You just need to chill out, that’s all. Think of it as getting a free trip to San Francisco. How bad can it be?’

Nina tipped her head back to look up at him. ‘Isn’t that normally what one of us says just before something explodes?’

Eddie laughed. ‘Come on. What are the odds of that?’

3

San Francisco

The Halliwell Exhibition Hall in the city’s Civic Center district was wreathed in fog, streetlights beyond the glass facade reduced to indistinct UFO-like glows. San Francisco’s notoriously changeable weather had gone from clear, if cold, to completely smothered in barely an hour.

In some ways, Nina wished the fog had descended earlier. That way, Air Force One’s landing might have been delayed, forcing President Leo Cole to change his itinerary. The official opening of the Treasures of Atlantis exhibition was, she was sure, the least important of his three engagements of the night before he embarked on a