Janni swayed into the line of fire, then flopped on his knees. I fired over him, cranking the trigger as fast as I could, wanting Jehangir to flinch from the flash…

His mouth opened wide and he sat down backwards with a silent thud. The gun tumbled loose.

I'd fired – three times, was it? I counted the echoes in my head. They weren't loud, in that noise. Three it had been. I walked around Janni, picked up the other gun, looked down at Jehangir.

Two had hit him. One high on his left arm, the other somewhere below his heart. His mouth said things I couldn't hear.

Janni got painfully to his feet, hating me. I waved the guns and gestured him to get Jehangir. He hated me a moment longer, then hobbled over to help.

The pilot suddenly stepped down beside me and nearly got the two-gun treatment. His hands jerked high.

'Get them on board!' I shouted. 'And get took off!'

The pilot stared at Jehangir, now on his feet but bent over clutching the bloody patch on his shirt. 'But he may be dying! '

'In his trade he's always been dying. If he does, dump him in the sea. Dump the boxes anyway: Beirut's getting a phone call.'

He went wide-eyed. 'This could lose my licence.'

'Don'tcome that brother-birdman act with me! You knew what was happening.'

Janni had Jehangir in his arms, carrying him like a baby and still with breath enough to yell at the pilot. Who turned back to me: 'He wants to get a doctor now.'

I shrugged. Tell him his boss goes now or we all stick around for fifteen years minus good behaviour.'

He must have said something like that; they all got on board. I stuffed both pistols in my briefcase and walked away. I heard the second engine start behind me. By the time I reached the Queen Air, the Piper was moving.

Suddenly I didn't feel like climbing the steps, so I sat on them and began to shiver. But not with regret. And it didn't last.

24

We got airborne just about on time, estimating Ben Gurion airport at four-ten, given a helping wind. Ken's flight would land about half an hour ahead. I'd just reported joining Blue 17 at 9,000 as we reached the coast, set up the engines for cruise power and was fiddling with the mixture levers when Mitzi leaned tentatively in over my shoulder.

I waved her into the right-hand seat. 'Just don't hang your handbag on any knobs.' She smiled, eased cautiously into the seat, and sat looking puzzled at the instrument panel.

'How do you not get muddled with all the clocks like this?'

'You don't look at all of 'em all the time. Like a reference library. You don't need to keep staring at your outside air temperature or fuel state; only when you want to know.'

The loudspeaker crackled: 'Whiskey Zulu, change to Nicosia Control, 126.3.'

'Whiskey Zulu, over to 126.3. Thank you.' I changed both comm sets.

Mitzi asked: 'What is that about?'

'Just changing to a different controller. This one listens in case I report both wings have fallen off over the sea.'

Then can he do anything?' She looked serious.

'Sure: he lights as many candles as I've got passengers.'

She stared for a moment longer, then smiled.

I checked in with 126.3, then switched in the autopilot. Given luck, now I didn't need to touch anything except the radio and navigation knobs until we reached Israel.

After a while, I asked: 'Did you have much to do with your father's work?'

'Ah yes. I also have a degree in archaeology. Before I married I worked much with my father. And when my marriage ended, I was going back with him – but then he was put in prison.'

I made sympathetic clicking noises.

'It was a very bad time, that year. It was so difficult for me to get money from my father, and there is no work for archaeologists who are not teachers. I washed floors, watching outwith children, work like that. Then my father is out of prison and it is going to be all right and…' she shook her head slowly.

'His first time, was it? In prison?' Tactful question.

'Pardon?' She frowned and blinked her sharp eyes.

Well… he did have a reputation for not always reporting his finds.'

'Perhaps…' She nodded reluctantly. 'But who should own what is lost a thousand years and nobody knows it existed even? King Richard did not give in his will the sword to Israel. Israel was not clever enough to find it. My father was.'

'He was good.' Trying to make amends.

'Oh yes. They do not let him dig if he is just a… a bulldozer. He was like Schliemann: he walked on a site and could say: "Here they put the wagons, that was the wine Keller, on the corner is the most profit-making shop in the town." I think it is like a man who plans towns except backwards.'

And once she'd said it, I could see the Professor as a mediaeval merchant prince – with the silk robe, the neat beard, the air of fastidious toughness. Fingering a bale of cloth here, sniffing a handful of spice there, clinking the gold coins in his satchel…

If the gold had been there. 'Straight archaeology isn't a sort of high-paid business, then?'

She flicked her hand sharply. 'If you are writing the big picture books that nobody is reading, or making television programmes for people who sleep with open eyes – yes, there is money. But if you wish to do only the real work, to dig, you are only famous.'

'Pure knowledge spreads pretty thin on bread.'

She thought this out. 'Yes, that is right.'

One radio-compass needle was pointing firmly at what it thought was Tel Aviv's beacon, but we were at too much of an angle to the coastline for me to trust it. I tried switching the VORaround to get a bearing on Ben Gurion airport itself, but we were too far and too low for a very-high-frequency gadget.

'What is that?' Mitzi leant across to look.

'A mixed affair. Combined Visual Omni-Range and Instrument Landing System. Reads on to the same dial. The VORnavigates you – points at a radio station – then when you get there the ILS, both needles together, give you height and courseto fly so you come down a glidepath on to the runway. Bad weather and night.'

'You can land without seeing?'

'No, you've still got to see the runway at the last moment. But on ILS I'd bring an aeroplane like this down to 300 feet in cloud.'

'And if then you could not see?'

'Then I'd go away and land somewhere else.'

Time buzzed gently by, a calm sea crawled away below. I took out a pre-prepared pipe and added to the collection of matches on the floor.

Finally I said: 'Your father can't have found many million-dollar swords. I mean, when you've found one the pressure must ease up a bit.'

'You must not say "million-dollar sword",' she said impatiently. 'That is museum talk. Do you think my father first thought that when he saw it?'

No, I didn't. Allowing for inflation in the last eighteen months, he probably said: "There's an $800,000 sword.' But that was wrong, too – or incomplete. It must have meant something else as well – knowledge, truth, beauty – for him to be good at his job at all. Some well-engineered aircraft mean more than money to me. No sword'sintrinsically more beautiful than the original 049 Connie.

I nodded. 'But what are you going to do when you've got it?'

'I must sell. I would want to give it to a museum in Vienna in the memory of my father, but… I have to live also. But even in New York I can make sure my father's finding of it is known.'

Professor-Doktor-convict Bruno Spohr's last round-up? But I didn't say that. Soon after, she went back to the main cabin.

My estimated time of arrival turned out just about right, and just before the coast I remembered to open the little quarter-light window at my side and shove out the two guns. Jehangir's silenced job turned out to be an old Smith amp; Wesson 'Victory'.38, one of the few models actually made with a screw thread for a silencer. Probably quite a valuable antique in its own right by now.