“But Muslims don’t eat . . . Oh, I get it.”
“If that one generation of servants kept quiet about the entombed ship, then I’m pretty sure it’s still buried out there.”
“Not where we’ve been looking.” In the moonlight, her eyes dimmed. “Are we going to be able to rescue Greg Chaffee?”
He looked at her. “I’m not going to BS you. My team and I have another priority that trumps his rescue. I’m sorry. As soon as we’re done, I will go back. That I can promise.”
“You’re searching for Fiona Katamora’s plane, aren’t you?” She took Juan’s silence as confirmation. “We saw it going down. That’s why Greg, Mike, and I crossed the border into Libya. We were looking for it, too.”
“That explains why you were taken prisoner.”
“A patrol found us. They . . . they killed Mike Duncan. Shot him dead for trying to come to my aid.”
He could see tears glinting on her cheeks in the moonlight. Juan knew some women would want him to take them in his arms and comfort them, but there remained a defiant lift to Alana Shepard’s chin. She didn’t need his sympathy, only his help. His respect for her went up another notch.
“There’s an important peace conference coming up,” he said softly. “Her presence there would have pretty much guaranteed success.”
“I know. It was the State Department that hired me to find Al-Jama’s ship in the first place. They believed that some writing he left behind would help her during the meeting.”
“So this isn’t just about archaeology?” She shook her head. “Tell me everything from the beginning.”
It took only a few minutes for her to lay out the story, from her summons to Christie Valero’s office at the State Department to meeting with her and St. Julian Perlmutter to her capture by what she thought had been a routine border patrol.
“I know Perlmutter by reputation,” Juan mentioned when she finished. “He’s perhaps the best maritime researcher in the world, and if he’s convinced the
“I don’t know. I’d never heard of him before. I did get the impression that because of the diplomatic angle he thought the State Department should handle it.”
“Still, should have been NUMA,” Juan said, thinking back to the professionalism he’d encountered with that Agency over the years. “I’ve been meaning to ask, do you have any idea who the other detainees were back at the labor camp?”
“No,” Alana admitted. “Greg might have. He speaks Arabic. Other than mealtimes, I was kept away from the men, and none of the women I tried to speak with understood English or the little bit of Spanish I know.”
“Another mystery for another time,” he mused. “Now it’s time to call in the cavalry.”
Cabrillo unbuckled his belt and lowered his pants to expose his upper thighs. He had been such an enigma to Alana since first rescuing her that nothing he did surprised her. There was an inch-long red scar on the thickest point of his quadriceps.
Without so much as a calming breath, Juan sliced open the scar with the throwing knife. Dark blood welled from the open lips of the wound.
“What are you doing?” she asked, now suddenly alarmed.
“There’s a tracking device in my leg,” he replied. “I can use it to signal my people to come get us.”
He plunged two fingers into the gash, fishing around, his mouth tight and set against the pain. A moment later, he withdrew the device, a black plastic object the size and shape of a cheap digital watch. He wiped its underside against his uniform shirt, waited silently for about thirty seconds to elapse, and then pressed it into the blood trickling out of his leg. He repeated what he’d just done, and then started moving quicker, dabbing and wiping so his hands were in constant motion.
“U . . . P . . . H . . . U . . . X,” he said, transmitting each letter.
Like a desert djinn rising up from the ground, a spectral figure leapt over the rock parapet sheltering Juan and Alana. It crashed into Juan, the impact sending the slippery transmitter skittering off into the dark. Bony fingers clawed for his neck, the sharp nails digging into his flesh.
With an oozing wound in his leg and his pants pulled down to his knees, Cabrillo was at a complete disadvantage. The filthy creature made a guttural screech as it tried to ram its knees into Juan’s chest while its feet raked across his legs like a cat trying to eviscerate its prey. Nails as tough as horn ripped out trenches of Juan’s skin.
The Kel-Tec pistol was buried inside the pocket of his bunched-up pants, and the knife was out of reach. Juan reared his head back as far as he could and smashed it into his attacker’s nose. He didn’t have the leverage to break bone, so he had to find satisfaction in the spurts of blood that began to patter across his face and the howl of pain his blow elicited.
He twisted onto his stomach under the figure, gathered his legs under him, and thrust upward with everything he had. The creature was thrown from his back, sailing across the bowl and smashing into the far side. Cabrillo had already crouched and rolled to grab the knife, and he had it in his hand and cocked by the time the monstrosity crumpled into an untidy heap.
His knife arm came down, the blade glinting, and it would have flown true had two things not occurred to Cabrillo at the last instant. His attacker had been unbelievably light, and the man was dressed in the same rags he’d seen the prisoners wearing. It was too late to stop the throw, but he managed to angle it ever so slightly. The blade embedded itself into the sandstone an inch from the man’s head.
Five seconds had passed since Juan was first attacked. In that time, Alana had managed to raise her hands to her mouth in alarm and nothing more.
Juan blew out a breath.
