Tall Man smirked at him and replied in Arabic. “Nice try. Money talks and the past pays very well.”
As if to punctuate that his captors weren’t going to turn on Tall Man and help Max, the bastard with the gun hit him on the head again. It wasn’t as hard as the first time, though.
“Ow, fucker,” Max whined, rubbing his tender scalp.
An oily smile spread across Mr. Chatty’s lips at Max’s pain. He switched into his smoother-sounding English. “We tried to make this an opportunity for you. A chance to benefit.”
Max rolled his eyes that time. His benefit was being allowed to continue to breathe, supposedly.
“Where’s the scarab?”
Yeah, he’d been expecting this. It was the entire reason he had gotten rid of it. They could hand the artifact to any number of crooked Egyptologists for them to decipher the writing on the belly of the bug. It might take them longer, but the ancient relic was necessary for finding the tomb. Of course, if they also got their hot hands on his notes, the process would go even faster.
But the point was that they didn’t need him alive if they had the scarab.
“You know, I must have dropped it or misplaced it,” Max said, making a show of patting his chest and down to his jeans pockets as though he were searching for his wallet but just happened to leave it in his other pants.
Tall Man’s upper lip curled in disgust and he barked at the man behind Max. “Did you search him before you got on the plane? Did he leave it in Athens?” he demanded in Arabic.
“We couldn’t check him completely. The airport was crowded. The police were everywhere,” he replied.
“We checked him on the plane, but we didn’t find it on him.”
Max made a kissy face at the big man across the room and winked at him. “Yeah, you checked me real good on the plane.” He turned his attention to Tall Man and whispered loudly, “He has talented hands.”
“He could have stashed it here in the city,” the man behind him quickly interjected, while Big Guy looked as if he were going to strangle Max with those hands. “We have no proof that he took it with him to Greece. He could have left it here intending to return for it later when he thought it was safe.”
Not a bad idea except for the fact that he didn’t want the scarab anywhere in Egypt right now. England was a much better option. Yeah, needle meet haystack.
Well, so long as they didn’t know about Dr. Janet Jones.
Max grinned up at Tall Man. “I guess I lost it. I can be so forgetful sometimes.”
Tall Man smiled at him for a second before returning to his spot against the wall, his hands shoved into his linen slacks. “That’s okay. I think I’ve got a good idea of how we can jog your memory.”
As he spoke, Big Guy stepped closer, his meaty hands balled into fists. Behind him, the asshole with the gun cracked his knuckles.
Shit.
This was gonna hurt.
3
EDISON WALKER
“Ed, man, you gotta stop glaring at everyone. You’re scaring the shit out of the pedestrians, and someone will call the cops,” West grumbled.
A breath left Ed in more of a huff than a sigh, but he couldn’t reconfigure his expression to be less irritated. This was not going well at all, and it wasn’t about dinner.
More than a week had passed since their encounter with Dr. Max Sutton in the Athens airport, and Kairo had failed to find even a whisper of the man. There had been a bit of security footage of him being loaded onto a plane for Cairo and a snippet of him being offloaded from the same plane in Cairo. But after that, it was as if he’d disappeared from the face of the planet. No shots of him being moved in a vehicle. Not even any security footage of the fuckers who could be seen traveling with Max.
Of course, one of the enormous problems was the general lack of security cameras around Cairo. The airport had them, naturally, but that was about it. Unless they’d taken Max somewhere, such as a bank or some other secure location, Kairo wasn’t going to be able to use facial recognition.
After arriving in Cairo, they’d been forced to do it the old-fashioned way—on foot, knocking on doors, talking to people face-to-face. Janet had provided a couple of names for local archeologists and a crew overseer that Max usually worked with, but not one of them had heard from him or seen him in close to a month. They all assumed he’d returned to the United States after the finish of the dig season.
But Ed refused to give up. Every time he closed his eyes at night, those sharp green eyes haunted him. He had to find Max. Make sure he was safe.