The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor Page 6

  Alex threw down half the Coke, frowned at it when he realized what it was, then said, “Relax, Uncle Jon. The chance of Rick and Evy O’Connell coming down those stairs is a million-to-one shot. Even you couldn’t lose with those odds . . .”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “If you’ll excuse me?” Alex made a face as he put the Coke glass on the counter. Then he moved toward the brunette, who had been lingering on the sidelines. A moment after he got to her, she grabbed him by the arm and dragged him into the adjoining room.

  Jonathan sighed, then muttered to himself, “Boy’s going to be eaten alive . . . although Lord knows there are worse ways to go.”

  The proprietor of Imhotep’s sipped his martini and surveyed his kingdom languidly. The band was playing “Slow Boat to China,” couples out on the dance floor clinging to each other. His eyes moved to the stairs and he saw a handsome couple coming down, a tall, broad-shouldered fellow in tuxedo and black tie, and a gorgeous, dark-eyed, dark-haired wench in a gold lamé gown. Jonathan was straightening his tie, taking in the woman’s beauty, when the couple moved into the light and Jonathan thought, Crikey, it’s my sister!

  And the tall-broad shouldered fellow, of course, was his brother-in-law. Of all the gin joints in all the towns of the world, Jonathan thought, they walk into mine . . .

  He quickly turned his back to the newcomers.

  But behind him, his sister called out, “Jonathan! Yoo-hoo!”

  She’d spotted him. Yoo-hoo indeed.

  He turned slowly and did his best to hide his unease, and failing pitifully, thinking, I must have been a right bastard in my previous life, saying, “I swear on our parents’ graves I had no idea he was here!”

  O’Connell frowned. “Who was here?”

  A figure exploded out of the adjacent room—hurled from there in a blur of tuxedo and brown hair and indignation . . . specifically, the figure of Alex O’Connell.

  Jonathan hadn’t seen this, however, having turned his back, as if contemplating ordering another drink.

  Nor could he see Rick O’Connell dividing a look-to-kill between Alex, on the floor in a heap getting gaped at by customers, and Jonathan, who also didn’t see his sister, staring at him accusingly.

  She demanded of the back of him, “How long has Alex been in China?”

  Unaware he’d been busted, Jonathan said, “Alex, in China? I thought he was in America, studying. Are you sure he’s in China?”

  O’Connell said, “Pretty sure.”

  The couple moved away from Jonathan, just as he turned to see Evy helping Alex up from the nightclub floor. Jonathan closed his eyes, hoping it would all go away.

  O’Connell followed his wife over to their wandering boy, whom she was fussing over, brushing him off as Alex stood there frozen in shock at the sight of his parents, who had seemingly materialized before him.

  “Mom,” Alex said. “Dad. What are you doing here?”

  “Funny thing, kiddo,” O’Connell said. “We were just going to ask you the same thing.”

  From the other room bounded a big guy in a brown jacket and khaki trousers, fists balled, eyes narrowed, mouth a violent slash in the midst of several days’ growth of beard. The guy was clearly on the warpath, and zeroing in on Alex.

  In a voice more than slightly touched with Irish, the strapping brute called behind him to friends still in the side room. “Be right back, lads! I just need to finish the job I started . . .”

  He bore in on Alex, who bunched his shoulders and raised his fists, ready to give back as good as he got; but when the Irishman cocked his arm to pummel the boy, O’Connell caught the man’s fist.

  The Irishman spun around, ready to take on a second “job,” but when the two men were face-to-face, their features flashed with mutual recognition.

  “Maddog?” O’Connell asked tentatively. “Mad-dog Maguire?”

  Maguire frowned. “Ricochet? Ricochet Rick O’Connell?”

  “You got old.”

  “You didn’t get younger.”

  They seemed about to go at it, but instead fell into each other’s arms, hugging, clapping each other on the back, clearly long-lost friends.

  They separated, looking each other over, grinning.

  O’Connell said, “Will you look at you? You’re even uglier. How the hell’s that possible? How long has it been, anyway?”

  “Not so long, lad. Egypt. ’Twenty-three.”

  “We were in the French Foreign Legion together,” O’Connell said, turning with a smile to his wife and son. “This damn maniac could land a plane on a postage stamp.”

  “They had planes back in those days, Dad?” Alex asked, openly sarcastic. “What, like in King Kong?”

  Maguire tossed a thumb at Alex. “This scrapper’s your kid, Rick?”

  O’Connell nodded, then glanced over at the entry to the adjacent room, from which had emerged a group of men who were likely rough-and-tumble pilot pals of Maguire’s, clearly wondering why Alex hadn’t been pureed by now.

  “As much as I’d like to let you and your boys teach Alex here a valuable lesson,” O’Connell said, “it might tend to—”

  “Upset his mother,” Evy said. “Very much.”

  And she began brushing the boy off again, to his displeasure.

  “Mom, seriously,” Alex said, pulling away. “You’re embarrassing me in front of my new friends.”

  That made O’Connell smile, and Maguire, too.

  The pilot said, “Just tell your young laddie-buck here to keep his sweaty paws off my lass.”

  Alex gestured to himself. “To be strictly fair about it, your ‘lass’ had her hands all over this laddie-buck.”

  Evy frowned. “Alex!”

  Maguire’s upper lip drew back and a growl rumbled in his throat, but O’Connell slipped an arm around his old pal.

  “Why don’t you,” O’Connell said chummily, “and your boys of course, head over to the bar.”

  “Why should we?”

  “Because you’re the lucky one-thousandth customer here at Imhotep’s. You’ve just won you and your compadres a night of drinks on the house.”

  Jonathan, who had been keeping his distance over at the bar, perked up and came quickly over. “On the what? Who’s counting bloody customers?”

  Evy gave her brother a sharp elbow and a sharper look.

  Jonathan’s face blossomed in a smile. “Yes, of course! Anything for my loving little family.”

  Maguire broke out in a grin and held his hand out to O’Connell, who shook it. “Welcome to the Orient, Ricochet me lad.”

  “It’s been fun so far.”

  Maguire and his boys, in rowdy good cheer, assembled at the bar and Jonathan closed his eyes in painful contemplation of dollars not going into his cash register.

  O’Connell, no longer smiling, turned to face his son. “I’m not here five minutes and already I’m pulling your fanny out of the fire!”

  “How hard was that?” Alex said with a shrug. “All you had to do was play the French Foreign Legion card.”

  O’Connell returned the shrug. “Well, like they say, ‘Once a legionnaire, always a legionnaire.’ ”

  “When was it they said that? The twenties? Right after they said twenty-three skidoo?”

  O’Connell frowned at his son, wondering for a moment why he’d bothered rescuing him from Maguire and the other mad dogs. Maybe it was the boy’s teeth, which had been straightened at some expense, and having them flung all over the nightclub floor would have been a pity, and a wasted investment.

  But before any more sparks, or worse, could fly, Evy came over and stepped between father and son.

  “Enough, you two!” To Rick she said, “You back down.” To her brother she said, “You get us some drinks.” To her son she said, “You have a lot of explaining to do, young man.”

  Jonathan remained at the bar while the O’Connell family reunion moved to a booth where they ignored a lavish Egypt Meets Hollywood floor show, and caught up on more impo
rtant things.

  O’Connell, after getting filled in by his son, frowned and said, “I thought we had a firm no-more-digging-up-mummies rule in this family.”

  Alex’s eyebrows rose. “That’s your rule, Dad. Anyway . . . I’m not planning to raise this one from the dead.”

  Keenly interested, Evy asked Alex, “Where is the late Emperor, at the moment?”

  “The Shanghai Museum. We’re waiting for official verification of the discovery. Really just a formality, Roger says.”

  “Roger,” O’Connell said. “So Roger Wilson hired you?”

  Alex nodded. “Roger was a visiting lecturer at Harvard. He looked me up, because he was friends with you and Mom. Said he’d talked to my instructors and was pleased by what he’d heard.”

  O’Connell’s eyes flared. “So impressed he encouraged you to drop out of school?”

  “Roger says he’ll get me credit. It’s what they call ‘work study,’ these days.”

  “Good ol’ Roger arranged this with your instructors, then? You’re on a kind of leave of absence?”

  “Well . . . not exactly.”

  O’Connell sighed. Closed his eyes tight. “You did drop out.”

  Alex leaned forward. “Listen, the professor believed in me all the way—staked his reputation on it.”

  O’Connell said drily, “Well, we’ll be sure to thank him.”

  But Evy was beaming with pride. “You do realize,” she said to her son, “that with a discovery of this magnitude, the Bembridge Scholars will be knocking down your door.”

  The boy shook his head. “No, Mom. That’s not my dream, working at a museum. Yours maybe . . . not mine.”

  That deflated and hurt her, though her son didn’t notice. O’Connell did, however, and said, “So, then . . . what’s your dream? What’s your big plan?”

  Alex shrugged. “I’d be lying if I said I had one. Look, I like to play it by ear, a little on the fast and loose side. I’m thinking maybe I’ll just travel the world and seek my fortune . . . like you did.”

  “Those were different times,” his father said. “And I was in a position where there was no choice but to make my own way. Son, the world is considerably more dangerous today than when I was your age.”

  Another shrug. “I’ll take my chances.”

  Evy sat forward; her tone was sweet, not at all critical. “Dear, we were rather hoping you might go back to Harvard, and finish up. Maybe Roger can pave the way, as he said . . . ?”

  Alex smiled, but more to himself than to his parents. He shook his head. “Who told you I dropped out? Did the college contact you? How did you think this was going to work? You two would just show up and talk me out of it? Crash my adventure . . .”

  O’Connell said, “We didn’t know you were here.”

  “Dad . . . come on . . .”

  “Son, we weren’t expecting to find you at all, considering we thought you were in school in Massachusetts.”

  With a suspicious glance at Jonathan over at the bar, Alex said, “Well, Uncle Jon knew, in case there was a problem or emergency or something.”

  Evy seemed hurt again. “You felt you could confide in your uncle, and not your parents? We have to trust each other, Alex—we can’t keep hurtful secrets. This is not how a proper family behaves.”

  Alex’s eyes widened; he grinned mirthlessly. “Proper family? We may be related, but we haven’t been any kind of family, in a long, long time, much less a ‘proper’ one.”

  He shook his head and quickly climbed out of the booth.

  From his vantage point at the bar, Jonathan saw this and followed Alex up the stairs and out past the doormen and onto the street, a world crammed with steaming food carts, rickshaws, pimps, beggars, and club hounds. The boy moved through the exotic bustle and his uncle clambered after him.

  “Alex! Wait . . .”

  Alex turned slowly and faced his uncle.

  “You need to give your folks a chance, my boy. You’ve thrown them quite a curve . . .”

  The boy shook his head, waved his arms. “They never change, Uncle Jon! You know what sort of discovery I’ve just made, and how do they react? They still treat me the same—like I’m ten years old!”

  “Be fair—you caught them by surprise. And you weren’t exactly supposed to be here now, were you?”

  Alex sighed. “What the hell are they doing in Shanghai? Don’t you think it’s a little strange that they show up, just as I’m about to make my mark?”

  Jonathan put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “I understand. Your parents do throw a long shadow . . .”

  “Are you kidding? More like a total eclipse . . .”

  Jonathan squeezed his nephew’s shoulder. “Come back inside, my boy. I’ve got some champagne on ice—to hell with Coca-Cola. Have a couple of glasses of the bubbly, and trust your old uncle—you will feel better.”

  But Alex only shook his head. “Sorry, Uncle Jon. Not tonight. Rain check.”

  And he turned and stalked off and was soon swallowed in the late-night throng.

  Moments later, Evelyn and Rick O’Connell burst from the club onto the neon-drenched street.

  O’Connell was right behind his wife, who was livid.

  “This is all your fault!”

  “My fault?” O’Connell shook his head in disbelief. “You’re the one who constantly smothered that boy—couldn’t leave him alone for five minutes without wiping his nose.”

  She wheeled and got in her husband’s face. “Maybe I was overcompensating for the fact you never took any real interest in your son’s life.”

  O’Connell’s eyes popped. “Are you kidding? His life has always been my top priority. Do you have any idea how many times I stopped him from breaking his damn-fool neck?”

  She put her fists on her hips. “Perhaps with a little warmth and encouragement, he might not have felt the need to show off for you. A little fatherly support would have gone a long way.”

  “Well . . . it was implied.”

  They said nothing for several long moments, just standing facing each other, mutually flummoxed, with the Chinese doormen as mute observers.

  Finally Evy, shaking her head, said, “We’ve spent the better part of our lives finding priceless artifacts, you and I . . . and now the one thing that’s most precious to us, we’ve lost.”

  O’Connell could say nothing to that.

  Evy sighed. “We should never have sent him away to Australia.”

  Shrugging, O’Connell said, “He was fourteen! How were we supposed to keep him safe, with bombs blitzing London, and Nazis swarming Cairo? What other choice did we have?”

  She considered that, then asked, “Is that really true?”

  “Well, of course it is.”

  “Or is that just what we tell ourselves, to make it all right that we went off adventuring again?” She shook her head again, determination mingling with frustration edged with sadness. “I will not allow Alex to become some stranger in framed pictures on our mantel.”

  O’Connell drew in a deep breath, and then let it out. “Okay. So how do we fix this?”

  “Frankly . . . I am not really sure. But I do know one thing.”

  “What, Evy?”

  Her eyes met his and they were alone on the bustling street of neon-streaked Shanghai.

  She said, “We need to do it together.”

  He swallowed and nodded and slipped an arm around her, and led her back inside the nightclub.

  Neither of them was aware that from the shadows of the alley across the street, a tall, formidable-looking Chinese woman in her thirties in a slit-up-the-side silk dress—her lovely face marred by a scar—had been watching them with much more than casual interest.

  4

  Eye Opening

  China—General Yang’s Training Camp

  Under a high, hot sun, an orderly arrangement of yurt-style tents encircled the sprawling ruins of an ancient Ming temple; carts of ammunition and weapons and other military gear were neatly stacked
at various key points.

  Nearby, platoons of Chinese mercenaries in gray uniforms representing no modern nation—bearing the insignia of Emperor Er Shi Huangdi’s three-headed dragon—were engaged in a variety of training exercises, including target practice and close-order drill, displaying a precision that indicated these endeavors had been going on for quite some time now.

  Through the training field rumbled a chauffeured jeep with a general in back, who received salutes from officers as the vehicle passed. This was General Yang, who also represented no nation, other than that of his own ambitions, his rank self-bestowed. A tall, slender yet round-faced man with thinning dark hair and a trim goatee, Yang had the intensity and intelligence of a real general, and the hard cold eyes of a genuine sociopath.

  Half an hour later, Yang was studying a map at his desk in the strategy room he’d had equipped within the crumbling Ming temple, a large banner with the three-dragon emblem draped behind him. Through a ruined doorway, an officer entered, but not just any officer: a beautiful woman, who made the crisp gray uniform, black-leather-trimmed cap and black leather boots seem fashionable.

  And not just any beautiful woman, either, but Choi, the scar-faced beauty who had positioned herself in a dark alley across from the Imhotep’s nightclub to gather intelligence on Alex, Rick and Evelyn O’Connell.

  She was here to report on her spy duties, standing before the desk and giving a razor-sharp salute before saying in Mandarin, “The O’Connells are indeed in Shanghai.”

  “The parents and the boy?”

  “Yes, General. They assembled at the club owned by the O’Connell woman’s brother, a fool named Jonathan Carnahan.”

  He gave her the cold, blank stare that was his response to good news, bad news and everything in between. “Do they have the Eye?”

  “They do, General.”

  This news brought a remarkable response from the stone-faced general: a tiny, curt smile.

  “Then our hour is at hand,” he said. “Call the troops to order.”

  In minutes, General Yang was standing on the steps outside the crumbling temple to address his seventy-five mercenaries-turned-zealots, in perfect formation and supervised by the lovely woman with the scarred face, Colonel Choi.