The Curse by Harold Robbins

Author:Harold Robbins
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

30

I dutifully shut the door behind me and walked up the street with questions, facts, and theories bumping into one another in my head like jalopies at a demolition derby.

Quintin was gone. He obviously made duplicates of the pictures. He’d made a copy of the heart for a woman. And Fuad might have sent her.

The question burning in my mind, though, was why the mystery woman wanted a copy of the scarab.

Was she one of the thieves, planning to tender the copy rather than the original when a deal was cut? For what purpose? No one was going to pay a second ransom if the thieves reneged on the promise to hand it over.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that passing off the copy might work in some scenarios.

There were two very interested buyers for the heart—Kaseem and the Egyptian government. While the government would pay a hefty amount for the scarab, it wouldn’t match the millions that Kaseem was willing to pay.

Still, picking up another million from the government for the gang of thieves or herself would be clever. It could be done by offering the scarab to both Kaseem and the government at the same time. And collecting from both, passing one as the copy and the other the original.

If the mystery woman was in fact in with the thieves, she might even have planned a double cross with the copy: switch it for the original and collect the ransom herself.

My gut and paranoia were churning with conspiracy theories, but there were too many possibilities to nail one down.

I needed to find out who this mysterious woman was and why she wanted a copy of the scarab made.

I called the Radcliff manor house and asked to speak to the curator.

“Fuad, why did you tell me only one copy of the scarab was made?”

I took his stunned silence as an admission of guilt.

“I can’t talk right now,” he said in a hushed tone. “But believe me, please, I—I—”

“I know you would never do anything to hurt Fatima or keep the scarab from being returned. Who is the woman who had the copy made?”

“I can’t talk now,” he said in a barely audible tone.

“Fuad, I need to—”

“Tomorrow night, eight o’clock, at the fair.”

He hung up before I could say any more.

What was that all about? I wondered. What had he gotten himself mixed up in?

Quintin Rees was my next objective. If I found him, I knew I could get all the information I needed because he had a habit and I had the money for his next fix.

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