Night Of No Return. Eileen Wilks

Plastic bottles of Gatorade had spilled from the box he’d been carrying, and were rolling merrily around on the dusty ground.

      Alex grinned. He suspected Tim had been trying so hard to keep an eye on him and Nora that he’d tripped.

      His grin slipped away after a second, though. Everything was falling into place perfectly. Tim was jealous…and Nora was fascinated. Everyone was going to think exactly what he wanted them to think.

      Pity it made him feel like such a heel.

      Alex took a mug of coffee with him as he and Nora walked along the dry wadi toward the quarry. Nora had brought a mug along, too, as well as a thick slice of the grainy native bread smeared with the soft cheese the Bedouin made from goat’s milk. Alex enjoyed the strongly flavored cheese himself, having eaten it innumerable times as a child, but most westerners considered it, at best, an acquired taste.

      There was a clarity about the desert that appealed to Alex, the raw virtue of extremes. The land was badly broken, the earth’s cracked bones thrusting up through its thin skin, their nakedness dusted in places with sand and spotted with the tough, bleached vegetation of the desert. Overhead, the sky was vast and cloudless. The dry air stirred against his cheeks in a baby breeze. Alex looked over the rugged landscape, and thought about death.

      It wasn’t his own death that preyed on his mind this time. It was the death that others—one man in particular—wanted to carry across the ocean to the U.S. The many deaths he was here to prevent, and the traitor he needed to catch, a man they knew only as Simon—a man determined to bring down Jonah and the entire SPEAR agency.

      Alex walked beside the woman he needed to charm in order to maintain his cover, sipping coffee as he considered means and ends, and when one justified the other. The coffee was exactly what she had claimed it would be—hot and strong. He glanced at Nora.

      Heat and strength there, too, he thought. The strength showed physically, in the lean lines of her body. Lord, about half of the woman was legs—long, honey-gold and gorgeous. But she wasn’t just physically strong. Not many people tested themselves against the desert every morning and called it fun.

      The heat didn’t show, but he sensed it. “You’re very quiet.”

      “I was taught not to speak with my mouth full.” She popped the last bite of bread into the mouth in question and dusted her hands without looking at him.

      In fact, she’d scarcely looked at him directly since the moment he’d turned around, seen her, and their gazes had locked. “I was expecting you to have more questions about why I’m here, what my qualifications are.”

      “Isn’t that what you’re here for? To ask questions?”

      “I’m here because you’ve found a burial chamber where there shouldn’t be a burial chamber. But that isn’t the only reason.”

      “No?”

      “Nora.” He stopped her with his hand on her arm. “Are you uncomfortable with me?”

      She sighed and, at last, faced him directly. “Yes. Yes, I guess I am, silly as that sounds. I never thought I’d see you again, you see. After our, ah, dramatic first encounter, you took on this larger-than-life quality in my mind. Not quite real. Now here you are, sent by Dr. Ibrahim to check us out. Real as can be.” Her mouth quirked up. “It’s disconcerting. Life is certainly full of coincidences, isn’t it?”

      Her honesty made things easy for him. Too damned easy. “My arrival isn’t entirely a coincidence.”

      “What do you mean?” A few wisps of hair had worked loose from her braid, and that breeze tossed them against her cheek.

      “Dr. Ibrahim did send me here, but it was at my request.” He turned away, running his hand over the top of his head. Reality and pretense were blurring in an uneasy alliance. “I’m at loose ends right now. I…the attack changed things. Once I recovered physically, I flew to Cairo to see my parents, and while I was there, they had Dr. Ibrahim to dinner. He mentioned your dig. I was interested professionally…and personally. I talked him into sending me instead of the man he’d had in mind. He wasn’t hard to persuade.” He grinned. “Like DeLaney and Lisa, I work cheap.”

      She looked at him steadily for a long moment. “I’ve heard of you. You have the reputation of being something of a dilettante.”

      “I’m lucky enough to have a private income, which lets me work when and where I choose. If that makes me a dilettante, or a dabbler—” He shrugged. “I suppose to some it does.”

      “I read your paper in the Archaeological Review. It wasn’t the work of a dabbler.”

      He felt a small, absurd warmth at her words. He’d been proud of that paper. For a moment, pretense and reality merged. “I love what I do.”

      She nodded, and he knew she was considering him, thinking over what he’d told her. He wished he could get inside her head and find out what those thoughts were.

      She started walking again. “Working on a dig is physically hard. You know that, of course. Are you fully recovered?”

      “The doctors think so.”

      “I never knew…I couldn’t find out anything about you. I knew you’d been airlifted to Tel Aviv, but when I went there the people at the hospital wouldn’t tell me anything except that you were alive and couldn’t have visitors. I guess I can’t blame them. I didn’t even know your name.”

      He hadn’t known she’d come to the hospital; it disconcerted him. “I was pretty much out of it. I’m told that they pumped me up with other people’s blood, operated, and then shipped me back to the States.”

      “You don’t remember?”

      “Only snatches.” Snatches of cold and pain and fear, no soft voice to anchor him, no one there at all…not even himself, after a while. “They tell me I died on the operating table.”

      “What?” She stopped and stared at him.

      “My heart stopped.” He didn’t know why he’d told her that. Too much truth. What’s wrong with me? He forced the grimness back behind a grin. “Death proved temporary, I’m happy to say. They got my heart started again, finished what they were doing, and sewed me back up. Not that I remember any of it.”

      “You actually died?” She shivered. “I’ve wondered so often…you’d lost a lot of blood by the time I found you, I couldn’t believe you were still alive. Then you opened your eyes.”

      He’d thought he’d heard someone calling him. It had been a hallucination, of course, created by a mind fooled by blood loss and shock. Nora hadn’t known his name, so she couldn’t have called him, could she?

      Yet he had heard it, or thought he had. Somehow he’d swum up from the murky place where the cold had driven him, and found that he wasn’t alone. She had been there, and she’d lain down with him, loaning him the heat of her body to hold the cold at bay. And talking to him. Her quiet voice had given him something to hold onto as he fought the sucking darkness.

      As always, those memories made him restless. He started walking again, intending to turn the conversation to the dig, to the thefts, to anything that would move him forward instead of back.

      Instead, he heard himself say, “I was a bloody mess when you found me.” He’d made it to within a handful of kilometers of the kibbutz, first staggering, then dragging himself onward. But he’d lost too much blood. By the time Nora had stumbled across him, he’d been going into shock. “Why did you stay instead of going for help?”

      “Fear,” she said wryly. “I was more afraid to leave you than to stay with you. I knew someone would come looking for me when I didn’t return from my run on time, and they’d be able to follow my tracks in the sand. What I didn’t know was how long I’d have to wait.” She shook her head. “I’d taken some first aid courses before I came out here, since I knew there wouldn’t be a doctor or a nurse