“I’ll handle it.”
Another familiar voice. This time she recognized the voice. Her knowledge was reaffirmed when he crouched down reaching for the flashlight to flick it off. It was David Caldwell. He wore night vision goggles that were now resting on his forehead. Immediately Dallas knew who the other voice was: Malcolm Land.
“No. We light the torches now.”
“Good idea,” someone else said. Familiar voice that she couldn’t identify immediately but that caused a chill to run down her spine.
“Yes, sir.” Land answered. Oh, my God. The two archeologists were behind everything. All the deaths. The snakes. Everything. But who was the third man?
Clearly, their boss.
From the subservient tone they took with him, he was in charge. The room filled with light.
Hands grabbed her from under her armpits and Dallas was yanked to a sitting position. Several torches were scattered around the room, lighting it up.
Dallas pulled herself to a sitting position, wincing in pain as a lightning bolt of pain shot through her shoulder. That’s when she recognized who stood before her. Calvin Train.
His scarred face looked sinister in the lantern light. Dallas vaguely wondered if he paid journalists to Photoshop his skin to perfection.
“Nice to see you again,” he said. He smiled. The warmth of the smile didn’t reach his eyes.
“Not really,” Dallas said.
“Your theory appears to be correct, Miss Jones,” he said, nodding his head toward the entrance guarded by the two statues. “But the discovery will be ours. Don’t worry, you will be given credit for it. In fact, you can take comfort that your name will be in all the history books as the brave young archeologists who came up with the theory of where Cleopatra’s Tomb was located. And how you tragically died during the discovery because when the ground caved in and you fell, you suffered a fatal blow to the head. We found you that way. Already dead.”
“What are you going to say you were doing?” Dallas asked, lifting an eyebrow. “Hunting for magic mushrooms.”
Train cocked his head, his teeth working his lip as he appraised her.
“You’re a little mouthy, are you?”
“You haven’t seen nothing yet,” Dallas said, pulling back her shoulders. It was hard to seem tough when you were cowering on the ground before a six-foot-something mammoth.
As he said this, Dallas noticed that Caldwell was lightly hitting a wrench into his palm.
He saw her gaze and smiled.
“I do feel a little bad about it,” he said. “I know that like me, you’ve waited your whole life for this moment, so I’ve decided to keep you alive until we open the tomb. That way your last moments won’t be so bad. You will die happy.”
Dallas glared at him. She would never admit that it had been exactly what she was thinking: What a shame to die before she saw Cleopatra’s tomb.
But she also refused to believe she was going to die.
One thing she noticed, the two other men couldn’t keep their eyes off the treasure. All the gold. They were distracted by it. This was good. She eyed the passage behind her. This must have been where the men came from. That meant there was a way out. That’s all she needed to know.
“Stand up,” Caldwell said. “I need you to stand back while we open the tomb door.”
She was sitting in the middle of the room.
“I can’t,” she said. “I think I broke my leg.” She grimaced in pain. But the pain was in her shoulder, not her legs. Her legs felt just fine.
He nodded at the two men and a third that Dallas didn’t recognize. The three men came over and two of them lifted her up by the armpits, pulling her back toward the doorway. Perfect, Dallas thought. She held her breath, hoping they wouldn’t snatch the camera from where it still was attached to the head strap. Her only hope was if by some dumb fluke, it was still filming and Colton saw what was going on and was coming to help. But she knew that was next to impossible. What was he going to do? Squeeze down that tiny hole and then drop down where the floor had collapsed? Hardly.
They set her down on the ground near the doorway. Train called them over. As soon as they were across the room, she whispered into the camera’s microphone. “If you can hear me, there has to be another way in. These guys came from a deeper level than I did. If you can find it, you can find me and stop them before they get the book.”
After she spoke, she realized they all probably thought she was crazy. She’d never told any of them about the book. She’d never even told Colton about what Safra had said about the group trying to gain control of the book to take over the world and cause chaos.
“Here and here,” Malcolm Land said. “It looks like if we put pressure on these two points we can pry the door open.”
They’d discarded any archeological practices of being careful and preservation, Dallas thought. They wanted to find the tomb so they could have the book. She knew it.
With all four men focused on the door, Dallas started to scoot over toward the opposite door leading back into the circular room. Soon, she was at the edge of the doorway. Nobody noticed.
She could make a break for it.
But she was frozen in place. It might mean her life, but she had to see what was behind that door.
Just then Train glanced back at her, his eyes bright, and he smiled. For a second, their eyes met and something was exchanged, some energy, some electricity. It was sickening to realize, but Dallas had to admit that they shared a moment. They were on the verge of possibly the most exciting archeological discovery in nearly a hundred years and they both were filled with exhilaration. It was something nobody else in the world could possibly understand
