The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (5 page)

These last two attempts, unlike the dozen or so crumpled sheets in her overflowing wastebasket, did not even make it onto paper. And this sheet soon joined the other wadded-up ones in (and around) the basket.

The problem was, whether the Nile was red or blue or purple wasn’t the point. The point was, she had no story, and no experiences from which to create or even embellish one. The only decent idea she had involved the work she and Rick had done for the intelligence people during the war, exciting stuff, rivaling anything from the Imhotep days, or darn near.

Only that was classified, all of it.

That left her with only her imagination, and when it came to being imaginative, Evelyn Carnahan O’Connell was about as imaginative as your average scholar or museum curator, both of which she was.

She glanced up, hoping for inspiration, and her eyes landed on the Carnahan family shield on the wall—she had positioned this, with its two crossed swords, as another means of sparking her creativity. She stood and plucked a sword from its perch, savored its grip, then sliced the air with enthusiasm and skill.

Soon she was capering around the room like Tyrone Power in
The Mark of Zorro,
grinning as she parried an invisible foe across the wood-paneled library, her face flushed with excitement. Inspired, finally inspired, she leaped across a table, swung off a curtain, and decapitated a candle off the chandelier, yelling, “Take
that!”

A cough behind her brought her down to earth, or at least to the parquet floor, and she tucked the sword behind her back, too late, because Jameson had obviously been standing in the doorway for a while now.

He said, “If there isn’t anything else, madam, I should like to retire for the evening.”

“Of course,” a blushing Evelyn said. “Good night, Jameson. Sweet dreams.”

“And you, madam.”

She put things right, then returned to the desk and, rather than make another attempt, she straightened up her work area and took her leave of the library.

Upstairs, in her bathroom, she bathed and powdered herself and spritzed perfume in all the right places, and when she entered their bedroom in her sexiest robe, she was ready to be inspired.

But her husband wasn’t in bed.

She slipped into the hallway and padded on bare feet to the staircase. From there she could see down into the study, where he sat in his favorite chair, its back to her as he faced the windows onto the garden. She tiptoed down and came up behind him and said, “Rick . . . is that offer still good? For a little inspiration?”

She dropped the robe and it pooled at her feet. She had bought the now-revealed sheer, silk negligee at Harrods and it had cost a small fortune; she’d been saving it for their anniversary, but some things just couldn’t wait . . .

She edged alongside the big comfy leather chair and touched his shoulder, rubbed his neck where it was always sore. “That time the mummy had me tied down, about to plunge his dagger into me . . . my heart was pounding. It’s pounding like that now. Want to
feel . . . ?”

His answer was a loud, abrupt, snort of a snore.

The great adventurer was asleep in his chair, his mouth open, a trickle of drool at one corner, the latest issue of a magazine devoted to guns and ammunition on his lap.

Guns could kill anything,
she thought.
Even a mood.

And she left him there.

The next afternoon, after a morning phone call requested a short-notice visit, the O’Connells received a valued colleague of the recent past in their sitting room. Jameson finished the tea service, and the couple, seated on a sofa, made small talk with their guest, who lounged across from them in a comfortable chair. Still, there was an air of near formality, Rick O’Connell in a gray suit and dark tie, Evelyn in a lavender dress with a gold Egyptian symbol on a necklace.

Benjamin Fry—a lanky dark-haired man with sharp, almost hawkish features, and a palpable air of danger despite his three-piece-suit—sat with a small square mahogany box in his lap.
Were they to be presented a medal?
O’Connell wondered.

“The Foreign Office,” Fry said, “appreciates all that the two of you did during the war . . . especially that nasty business in Luxor. But I’ve been sent to offer you, shall we say, one last assignment.”

The couple, sitting close together, exchanged glances.

Then Evelyn shook her head, the brunette tresses bouncing on her shoulders, and said, “I’m afraid we’ve retired from the adventure business . . .
and
the espionage game.” She smiled at her husband. “Haven’t we, dear?”

O’Connell nodded assertively. “Absolutely! We are totally, completely, utterly retired.” He swallowed. Sat forward just a little. “But out of respect to you, Benjamin, and since you made the trip out here . . . and, you know, just out of curiosity, maybe you could lay out the shape of the thing—not violating any state secrets, of course.”

“Of course,” Fry said. “Is that all right with you, Evelyn?”

“Certainly.” She shrugged. “I can’t see any harm in hearing why you asked for this meeting.”

“It’s a fairly straightforward job,” he said. “Courier duty.” He pointed to the mahogany box. “We would like you to deliver this to Shanghai . . .”

O’Connell’s eyebrows rose. “That?”

So did Evelyn’s. “That box? What’s in it?”

Fry, smiling just a little, perhaps already knowing he had them hooked, flipped the lid and light winked off the gem within in a thousand directions, a magnificent blue diamond gripped by a lattice of golden snakes rising from an oval plaque, nestled in velvet. The cut of the stone made myriad shades of blue: dark, light, the sea, the sky . . .

“The blue hue, of course,” Fry said, “results from trace amounts of boron in the stone’s crystalline structure.”

“Of course,” O’Connell said. “However it got made, that’s a nice slice of ice. Which Vanderbilt’s engagement ring is that?”

The “slice of ice” had frozen Evy—not by the romance of such a stone or even its potential value; nor was this the reaction of the female of the species to a lovely jewel, rather that of a scholar, staggered, stunned, in awestruck recognition.

“It’s the Eye of Shambhala,” she said in hushed reverence. “Popularly known as the Eye of Shangri-la. My God . . .”

O’Connell, a hand on his wife’s arm, frowned at her and said, “Stay-young-forever Shangri-la?”

She smiled at him, but her eyes were in some distant place. “Is there any other kind? If you believe the legend, that gem points the way to the Pool of Eternal Life.”

“Which is, naturally,” Fry said lightly, “Oriental poppycock. But I realize, Mrs. O’Connell, that such myths, such legends of magic, are of historical interest to you.”

O’Connell nodded at the sparkling stone. “I have a historical interest, too. Like where did you get that hunk of junk?”

Evy frowned at him for this disrespect.

Fry took it in stride, however, and said, “The Eye was smuggled out of China in 1940—relatively recent history. Now, in these turbulent postwar times, we have a rare opportunity to show good faith to the Chinese government, who would very much like to see this artifact returned to their Shanghai Museum.” To both of them, he said, “An old friend of yours is director there. Roger Wilson?”

O’Connell smirked. “No kidding? Leave it to ol’ Roger to land on his feet again.”

“Given your expertise in the field,” Fry said, eyes first to O’Connell, then to Evy, “we naturally thought of you.”

Evy shrugged. “But really, we’d just be a glorified delivery service. My training wouldn’t enter in at all. Not that we aren’t
flattered
. . . but Rick and I made a promise to each other that after the war we’d settle down.”

Fry heaved a sigh. “Well . . . I must confess I’m disappointed. Postwar China is a dangerous, unpredictable place. With the Eye’s unfathomable value on the black market, any number of factions could attempt to steal it, for political purposes, out of religious fanaticism . . . or frankly, just plain greed.”

O’Connell shifted on the sofa.

So did Evelyn.

Fry said, “In lesser hands, the Eye could be lost forever.”

“Well,” Evelyn said, “we would hate for that to happen.”

O’Connell began tapping a foot.

Fry said nothing.

Evelyn sneaked a look at her husband.

Finally O’Connell stuck in a toe: “Well, uh, you know Evy’s brother, Jonathan,
does
live in Shanghai. Haven’t seen him in some time. Could check up on him.”

Fry smiled and nodded. “Yes, yes—he owns a nightclub, if I’m not mistaken.”

Evelyn gestured with open hands. “And we
have
been meaning to visit Jonathan. Maybe we could surprise him.”

O’Connell was nodding. “It would make a perfect cover story.”

Evelyn was nodding, too. “My thought exactly.”

Fry twitched a smile. “Then I trust that means we can count on the O’Connells, one last time?”

After Fry had filled them in on the particulars, the couple showed him to the door and watched him drive off in a sleek black government limo.

“Do you hear that, Evy?”

“Hear what, Rick?”

Her hand was in his and he squeezed it. “That’s adventure calling.”

 
2
 

Colossal Beauty

Ningxia Province, China

T
he landscape could not have been less remarkable, a scrubby wasteland, a rolling near-desert plain in the middle of nowhere, with one notable exception—exposed from the sandy, barren expanse, the slightly tilted head of a Sphinx-size giant appeared to peek above the surface as if the earth were water and he a swimmer.

But had this been water, not earth, this “swimmer” would have sunk like the stone he was, a brown, ancient representation, on a massive scale, of an ancient ruler from 200
B.C.
This colossus had once been the symbol of Emperor Er Shi Huangdi’s absolute power, a man about whom history had little kind to say.

The excavation site was still in its early stages, a handful of tents and wooden pulleys and other fundamental mechanisms there to help two crews of a dozen or so Chinese diggers each in what promised to be one of the major archaeological finds of the twentieth century. The man responsible was named O’Connell, but his first name was not Richard.

Alex O’Connell, twenty, and a fugitive from his education, stood atop a mound of moved earth to survey what had been done so far, dwarfed by the partially excavated bust of the onetime Emperor of China.
Had the real man’s eyes been so cold,
Alex wondered,
under the peak of that battle helmet?

Alex, a handsome, husky youth with his mother’s heart-shaped face and his father’s steel-blue eyes (and unruly brown hair), did not look like a Harvard sophomore, although he did allow himself a Boston Red Sox baseball cap, to shade him from an unforgiving sun.

He looked like Rick O’Connell, a quarter century before, in dusty apparel suited to an explorer—brown leather jacket over green shirt and khaki trousers with boots and, of course, a satchel of tools on a shoulder strap, a Browning nine-millimeter automatic on his hip. Right now he had a ragged five-day growth of beard that gave him more authority than most collegians playing hooky.

From time to time, he would refer to pages in a large, battered, leather-bound journal. He was supervising one of the crews of Chinese diggers. The other crew had uncovered a pair of stone stairways that indicated a structure was down under the still mostly concealed colossus. They had cleared both stairways and, with the judicious use of dynamite, had carved quite a hole at the base of the Emperor’s bust.

He yelled down, in perfect Mandarin,
“Chu Wah, you find the door to that tomb yet?”

The digger—as youthful as Alex himself—looked up and called, also in Mandarin,
“No boss! Still looking!”

From behind him echoed a distant voice: “Alex O’Connell . . . !”

He turned and gazed out at the endless nothingness until a pack train of mules revealed itself in the heat shimmer.

Good,
Alex thought with a smile.
Wilson’s back!

He called down in Mandarin to the workers, in the valley they had made:
“The professor will give one hundred U.S. dollars to the man who discovers the entrance!”