The Adventures Of Indiana Jones by Campbell & Kahn Black Page A

positive intuition, that the great prize was somewhere nearby. He could feel it, sense its power, he could hear the whisper of the thing that would soon become a roar. He took his hands from his pockets and stared at the medallion that lay in the center of his palm. And what he understood as he stared at it was a curious obsession—and a fear that he might yield to it in the end. You lust after a thing long enough, as he had lusted after the Ark, and you start to feel the edge of some madness that is almost . . . almost what?
    Divine.
    Maybe it was the madness of the saints and the zealots.
    A sense of a vision so awesome that all reality simply faded.
    An awareness of a power so inexpressible, so cosmic, that the thin fabric of what you assumed to be the real world parted, disintegrated, and you were left with an understanding that, like God’s, surpassed all things.
    Perhaps. He smiled to himself.
    He moved around the edge of the excavations, skirting past the trucks and the bulldozers. He clutched the medallion tight in his hand. And then he thought about how those thugs dispatched by Dietrich to Nepal had botched the whole business. He experienced disgust.
    Those morons, though, had brought back something which served his purposes.
    It was the whimpering Toht who had shown Belloq his palm, asking for sympathy, Belloq supposed. Not realizing he had, seared into his flesh, a perfect copy of the very thing he had failed to retrieve.
    It had been amusing to see Toht sitting restlessly for hours, days, while he, Belloq, painstakingly fashioned a perfect copy. He’d worked meticulously, trying to recreate the original. But it wasn’t the real thing, the historic thing. It was accurate enough for his calculations concerning the map room and the Well of the Souls, but he had wanted the original badly.
    Belloq put the medallion back inside his pocket and walked over to where Dietrich was standing. For a long time he said nothing, pleased by the feeling that his presence gave the German some discomfort. Eventually Dietrich said, “It’s going well, don’t you think?”
    Belloq nodded, shielding his eyes again. He was thinking of something else now, something that disturbed him. It was the piece of information that had been brought back, by one of Dietrich’s lackeys, from Nepal. Indiana Jones.
    Of course, he should have known that Jones would appear on the scene sooner or later. Jones was troublesome, even if the rivalry between them always ended in his defeat. He didn’t have, Belloq thought, the cunning. The instinct. The killing edge.
    But now he had been seen in Cairo with the girl who was Ravenwood’s daughter.
    Dietrich turned to him and said, “Have you come to a decision about that other matter we discussed?”
    “I think so,” Belloq said.
    “I assume it is the decision I imagined you would reach?”
    “Assumptions are often arrogant, my friend.”
    Dietrich looked at the other man silently.
    Belloq smiled. “In this case, though, you are probably correct.”
    “You wish me to attend to it?”
    Belloq nodded. “I trust I can leave the details to you.”
    “Naturally,” Dietrich said.

SEVEN

Cairo
    T HE DARK WAS warm and still, the air like a vacuum. It was dry, hard to breathe, as if all moisture had evaporated in the heat of the day. Indy sat with Marion in a coffeehouse, rarely taking his eyes from the door. For hours now, they had been moving through back streets and alleys, staying away from the central thoroughfares—and yet he’d had the feeling all the time that he was being watched. Marion looked exhausted, drained, her long hair damp from sweat. And it was clear to Indy that she was becoming more and more impatient with him: now she was staring at him over the rim of her coffee cup in an accusing fashion. He watched the door, scrutinized the patrons that came and went, and sometimes turned his face upward to catch the thin passage of air that blew from the creaking overhead fan.
    “You might