Lady of Heaven (31 page)

She pulled her
hand from his grip and turned to her own window, pretending she was adjusting
her sunglasses when what she was really doing was struggling not to cry. But
she couldn’t stop the tears; the more she would dab and wipe, the more they
would come.  As the Land Rover moved through the dusty, heated landscape, she
finally gave up the fight altogether and let them fall. 

Fox was watching
the scenery, lost in his own thoughts, when he caught sight of Morgan wiping at
her eyes. He knew she was crying, silent tears that she was struggling against,
but he had no idea why. Perhaps the confrontation shook her up more than she
had let on. He watched her a moment before speaking.

“What’s wrong?”
he asked softly.

She shook her
head, but the simple fact that he noticed her tears made her composure crumple
more.  She sniffled, wiping at her nose.

“It wasn’t like
I was hiding it from you,” she whispered.

“Hiding what?”

“My gun,” she
snapped, facing him. “I always carry it. I’m a cop; I’m supposed to.”

“I know.”

She just turned
away from him, softly weeping. Confused, he reached out to stroke her blond head.
“What’s eating you, love?”

She was wiping
furiously at her cheeks. “I can just see the disapproval in your eyes,” she
wept. “What was I suppose to do? Let them assault me and not fight back?”

He’d had enough;
he pulled her against him to comfort her.  Morgan resisted for a split second
before relenting, allowing him to hold her tightly.  He kissed her head
repeatedly, his soft voice in her ear.

“I’m sorry,” he
murmured. “It wasn’t what you think. I guess I was just a little stunned that
my sweet, beautiful wife shot a man with dead-eye accuracy in his hand before
she roughed him up.  I’ve just never seen that side of you before and when I
stopped to think about it, it really blew me away.
You
blew me away.”

She had stopped
sobbing openly, feeling comforted by his words but still confused. “Is that a
bad thing?”

“God, no,” he
murmured, kissing her ear. “I’m just seeing a new dimension to you. You’re
sweet and beautiful like a delicate little kitten but when cornered, you turn
into a lioness. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.  But you have to
give me credit; my first instinct was to run over there and beat that guy to a
pulp. But I saw you were in control and that you didn’t need my help. I was
smart enough, and I trusted you enough, to stay out of it.”

Her cheek was
against his chest, listening to his heartbeat steady and strong.  He was warm,
his muscular chest creating a gentle cushion for her head.   She snuggled
against him, calming with his gentle manner.

“I appreciate
that,” she said. “I know it must have been hard for you.”

“Hard, yes.
Terrifying, hell yes.”

She smiled in
spite of herself, listening to the tone of his voice; she had learned that he
could get loud, and his accent heavier, when emotional.

 “It’s my job,
Fox,” she muttered hoarsely. “I can’t be less than what I am. I can’t do less
than what my training and instincts tell me or we might all be in trouble.”

He held her head
against his chest, caressing her silky hair. “I know,” he whispered. “It scares
me to death and makes me overwhelmingly proud of you at the same time.  As
you’ve said many times, I’m just going to have to get used to it.”

She pulled her
head from his chest, gazing up at him with the wide brown eyes. “Still love
me?”

He smiled,
kissing her tenderly. “Madly and deeply.”

Morgan settled
in against him again, her head on his chest, listening to the steady beat of
his heart and thinking about the attempted robbery. She watched the road go by,
realizing that the rumor of dangers in third world countries was well-founded.
She’d heard of gunman and terrorists, of course, but to experience it herself
brought it to another level.  She suddenly sat up, putting herself between the
two front seats.

“Are there a lot
of outlaws in this area?” she asked. “Or was that an isolated incident?”

Jabeel spoke.
“It is not like it used to be,” he told her. “I take tourists out here all of
the time and I have hardly had any problems.  If there are too many problems,
then tourists will not come to Egypt and spend their money, so the government
is strict with those who rob and steal.”

Morgan watched
the road in the distance, the landscape as it shifted from dunes to sand and
jagged rocks.  Jabeel and Allahaba didn’t seem too worried about it, so she
settled back once more against Fox, feeling his arm go around her and
experiencing the sense of safety and contentment that it brought. Even so, she
hoped that Jabeel was right. She didn’t want to run into anymore ‘robbers’.

Next time, they
might not be so lucky.

November 28,
1923

            Louis
is not feeling well so we have remained in Luxor for the time being.  Mr. Sula
has explained so many fascinating aspects of Egyptian life – somethings haven’t
changed from century to century.  For example, they still use the old ways to
irrigate farm fields from the Nile with an odd contraption called a ‘shadoof’. 
Mr. Sula is wonderful conversation. I do wish that Louis was feeling better.

            ~ FS

CHAPTER NINETEEN

By
mid-afternoon, they had pulled off the main road and onto a dirt path that led
off to the south.  Fox had pulled out his satellite images and he and Allahaba
poured over them, looking for landmarks and counting the miles.  The road was
horribly bumpy and Morgan held on tightly so she wouldn’t be bounced right out
of the car as the landscape evolved into something eerie and otherworldly. 
Stark hills and vast sand plains surrounded them. It was as if they had pulled
off the main road and driven straight onto Mars.

Fox knew where
they were going and directed Jabeel off to the southwest.  He not only had
satellite imagery, but he also had geological images from a NASA website that
imaged the landscape in density.  It was from these geological images that his
best guess, and most interest, stemmed from.

At one point,
they stopped the car so Jabeel could pour a quart of oil into the engine and
Morgan had her first taste of raw desert camping; she needed to relieve herself
very badly after too much Diet Coke, but there was very little by way of
private spot.  The area they had stopped in was at least a five-mile stretch of
sand with rocky hills on all sides, like a valley, and there were probably two
puny bushes in all that space. Realizing this, Morgan put her hands on her hips
as she faced her husband.

“All right,
bright boy,” she cocked a well-shaped eyebrow. “Where am I supposed to do the
deed?”

He fought off a
grin, looking around. “Anywhere. Just hurry up.”

She lost her
humor. “Anywhere?” she repeated, outraged. “Seriously?
Anywhere
?”

He could see she
was growing agitated but it didn’t help his case of giggles.  He took her by
the shoulders and turned her around towards the rear of the car.

“Find a spot
over there somewhere and we’ll stay at the front of the car with our backs
turned,” he told her. “Hurry up; we need to go.”

Frustrated,
Morgan shrugged her shoulders and dug in the back of the car for the toilet
paper.  Finding a very scratchy roll, she scooted off to the rear of the car
while Fox, still snorting, moved to the front of the car and told Allahaba and
Jabeel to face away from the car.  They did so, properly, waiting a few minutes
while Morgan finished her business.  When she was done, she jumped back into
the car, the three men climbed back in, and they sped away.

As they cleared
the valley, they descended into a vast, open plain that stretched almost as far
as the eye could see.  There were colors of gold and browns in the sands and
rocks, but mostly, it was complete desolation of a non-descript color. The warm
wind blew as Fox called a halt just on the rise overlooking the valley
depression.

He had his
images out, looking between a pair of them.  Finally, he looked up and studied
the landscape.  Then he went back to his notes and read them carefully. 

“All right,” he
looked up again and pointed to the southwest. “Over there exactly four
kilometers to where those small foothills rise from the valley floor. See
them?”

Jabeel nodded,
threw the old car into gear, and drove carefully down the sloping hill into the
vast valley below.  The wind was kicking up, blowing rocks and sand into their
faces as they finally hit the valley floor and began heading in the direction
Fox had indicated.  He was reading his images, looking around to orient
himself, as Morgan sat in the back seat and cracked another can of diet cola.

“You may want to
ration that,” he told her, not looking up from his images. “We’ve no way of
knowing how long we’ll be out here and if you run out, I’m not driving all the
way back into Edfu to buy you more.”

Frowning, and
feeling singled out, Morgan flopped back against the seat rest and sipped at
her precious cola.

“Don’t bring
your robe, Morgan,” she mocked angrily, more to herself than to him. “Don’t
drink your diet soda. Go pee on the sand.  Don’t do this, don’t do that. Get
with the program, missy.”

“I never said
that,” Fox said steadily, still looking at his images. “Well, not all of that,
anyway.”

Morgan crossed
her arms angrily but kept her mouth shut, watching the desert landscape go by. Fox
finally lifted his head, directing Jabeel to a very small range of hills about
two kilometers off, before turning to his wife.

“I’m sorry if
you think I’m riding you,” he told her. “I don’t mean to. Would you rather me
just not say anything at all and when you run out of your soda tomorrow,
realize it’s not a simple thing to restock?”

She wasn’t sure
how she felt.  He was right but she didn’t like feeling that he was picking on
her. So she stuck her tongue out at him and resumed watching the landscape go
by. Fighting off a grin, Fox faced forward now that the area he was interested
in was coming closer.

Jabeel covered
the two kilometers across the valley floor, leaving clouds of dust in his
wake.  It was a truly dry and desolate wasteland, much like the vast Mojave
Desert in Southern California, where miles and miles of rocks and sand covered
the earth. This land, the Manjam Hamsh wilderness of the Arabian Desert, was as
bleak and dry as anywhere on earth. 

The old Land
Rover came to a halt less than fifty yards from the gently sloping group of
foothills.  Fox climbed out with his images in his hand and began to walk
around. He headed towards the west, pointing towards a series of rocky hills.

“The river ran
through those hills there,” he said. “You can see on the images that a fossil
river clearly ran from the Nile, coming through those hills and into this
valley.  You can see where the water carved away the sides of the hills and
eroded a waterway. Also, about seven or eight miles to the west is the ancient
Roman fortress of Samut. Maybe the river was still flowing at the time the fort
was built; maybe it was just a trickle at that point. Either way, there’s a
spring there that supported the fort.”

Morgan, having
forgotten her pout, walked up behind him, trying very hard to see what he was
describing. The wind whipped her blond ponytail around as she tried to imagine
it.

“So…,” she
turned around and looked at the valley. “Where did the river go?”

He turned around
also. “Through here, right where we’re standing,” he told her. “Although the
imagery isn’t clear on where the river ended, I can only guess that it must
have gone all the way to the Red Sea and dumped out.”

“And you think
Ranthor was here?”

His handsome
face was intense, the black eyes distant as he pictured what the valley might
have looked like five thousand years before. He just stared, his eyes drinking
in their surroundings, trying to put his thoughts into words. Morgan looked at
him when the silence grew excessive, his enormous presence outlined against the
brilliant blue sky.

“Dr. Henredon?”
she prompted softly.

He looked at her
when she addressed him formally, smiling at her lovely face.  He reached out,
pulling her against him and kissing her on the top of the head. Morgan wrapped
her arms around his waist and took in the landscape with him.

“I see a river
running through this valley,” he began to verbalize his ideas. “I see it
cutting to the south because that’s what the imagery indicates.  And this….”

He let go of
Morgan and held up one of the images in his hand, looking at the small group of
foothills to his right. “… this looks like hills but the geologic imagery
suggests otherwise.  There are stone formations that I don’t see being natural
here.”