Easy Go: A Novel by Michael Crichton (Writing as John Lange)

Author:Michael Crichton (Writing as John Lange) [Crichton, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Crime, Thrillers
ISBN: 9781453299258
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-07-23T04:00:00+00:00

2. The Door

LORD GROVER LEFT AT noon the following day, in time to catch the plane from Luxor to Cairo. Sylvia went with him, and Pierce was relieved.

“Let me know,” Grover said, “if anything serious comes up.”

“Right,” Pierce said.

Grover turned to Lisa, who was the only other person awake in the camp. “Take care of yourself, my dear.”

“I will.”

“We’ll miss the plane,” Sylvia said.

“I’ll be in London for two weeks, and then back at Capri,” Lord Grover said. “I may go to Tangier for a few days—a wedding of a dear friend—but I’ll let you know.”

“Right,” Pierce said. He felt like hell. His eyes were bloodshot, and he had a miserable headache.

“Doesn’t he ever say anything else?” Sylvia said, looking with open distaste at Pierce.

Lisa seemed about to reply, then closed her mouth abruptly. In contrast to Sylvia, who wore a tight-fitting polka-dot dress, Lisa was dressed in dirty khakis. She looked better, too, Pierce thought.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” Lord Grover said. “If I got a telegram—” He broke off and shrugged. “Say, a cable requesting seven thousand, five hundred.”

“All right,” Pierce said. That would be the signal: a telegram requesting seventy-five hundred dollars. “Have a good trip.”

“I hope so.”

“Anything would be—” Sylvia began.

Lord Grover patted her shoulder. “Now, now, my dear. Let’s not get excited.”

She frowned, then bent her neck, and kissed his hand.

When they were alone, Pierce said, “Do you want to come with us tonight?”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

He accepted that, without knowing why.

“Was it very difficult?” she asked, taking his hand and running her fingers over the calluses.

“Pretty awful.” Now that the digging was finished, he could look back and see how nightmarish it had been. “But it’s over now.”

“I hope so.” She lit a cigarette, cupping her hand against the hot breeze. She did it competently, like a man. “What are you going to do with your money?”

“We haven’t got it yet. We may open that door and find that the inside passages are full of rubble—boulders, heavy stones, that sort of thing.” Barnaby had mentioned the possibility, which nobody wanted to think about.

“But if you do succeed, what will you do with the money?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t really thought about it.”

“You’re going to have millions.”

“I’ll go somewhere—South America, maybe. I think I’d like to live in Rio.”

“And do what?”

“I don’t know. Just live.”

“You’ll go mad from boredom,” she said.

Conway stayed behind that evening. Nikos, Barnaby, and Pierce returned to the cleft. Pierce and Barnaby went down together to work on the door.

Barnaby worked carefully, absorbed, feeling the mortar and seal, touching as delicately as a safecracker.

“Give me the chisel and the mallet—not the wooden one, the rubber one.”

Barnaby began to chip away at the upper border of the door, which was perhaps four feet square. As he hammered, he talked to himself: “Superb masonry…definitely 19th Dynasty craftsmanship…uniform mortar…nothing to waste…easy, now, easy…that’s a boy…all right, steady here…just a little more here, and there…”

He stopped, having cut away all four edges.

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