Barbara Silkstone - Wendy Darlin 03 - Cairo Caper (17 page)

When we passed the first burial shaft, where we had encountered Sloane Ranger, there was no sign of him or the Special World Archaeology Group technicians.

We trudged on to the ladder and climbed it without incident. Normally, I would have experienced relief re-entering the real world, even a hot sandy one, after being confined in the black recesses of something like the temple. But I felt no relief. The stream of locusts had thickened and the huge black cloud on the horizon, promised a plague of biblical proportions.

Chapter Thirty

The sight of the massive deadly swarm bearing down on us shot an electric fear through my body and a shameful thought through my brain. I had wronged Tickemoff. He wasn’t running a con. He had risked his life to come for us. Sure there were some small con opportunities mixed in, that was his nature. But they didn’t come close to balancing the danger in which he’d placed himself. It
was
a gesture of friendship or nobility or something. We owed him, big time.

“This way,” Tickemoff said ducking his head and plowing forward.

I pulled my robe closed, covered my head with my hood, and put my sunglasses on. I held my breath as we ran across the boulder-strewn football field. I lost count of how many times I twisted my high-heeled ankle. The peep-toe shoe operated like a scoop collecting sand and painful pebbles.

A veil of fluttering insects dropped down from the sky. I felt like a bit character in an Alfred Hitchcock flick, the one earmarked to die.

The locusts flew at my face. It was a million times worse than a Florida palmetto bug encounter. I beat them away holding my lips tight. One bug made it under my hood. I crushed it through the fabric until it was immobile and then inched it out of my hair by pinching it through the cloth. So gross.

We scrambled up the slope to the spot where we’d left the camels. The five Ishtar servants and the spare camels were well on their way to the horizon in a panicked gallop. Sheen of the Camapoo Ishtars was a hundred yards away but his brother Fronc was mounting his camel. He swung his whip and hut, hutted. The camel box fell from Fronc’s saddle. I dived just in time to catch it.

Afraid of sucking in a bug, I closed my mouth. “Youph Camapooos!” I marfed to Fronc through sealed lips. No way he could hear me and if he could, he wasn’t going to come back. He went into a flat-out gallop to catch his brother.

I opened the camel box. The Camapoos were breathing but had x’s for eyeballs. I suspected stress had caused the nervous critters to pass out. I very gently closed the box and tucked it into my purse leaving it unzipped so the little guys wouldn’t smother, and ran like hell.

We chased after Tickemoff who was waving us toward his deluxe limousine, an ancient Volkswagen van adorned in giant daisies painted in garish day glow colors. It resembled a Partridge Family reject. The locusts were attacking it with a vengeance, possibly pissed that the daisies weren’t edible.

The swarm filled the sky. The insects landed on the sleeves of my robe. Inch-long, metallic-green, black, and yellow disgusting bugs were cannibalizing each other.

Petri opened the side door, and Fiona and I dove in. Roger got behind the wheel and Tickemoff took shotgun. The locusts hit the windows with a steady splat, splat, splat. Bugs guts. Gorgeous.

Roger turned the key. The van made an angry sound and conked out. “I thought there was a government freeze on petrol. Where’d you get the gas?”

“I convert to run on, how you say, alternate fuel.”

“Alternate fuel?”

“Dung beetle juice. I make myself. Very good fuel. No, how you say, hydrocarbon emissions. I try to work deal for secret method with the CIA.” He tapped the gauge. “Is full, you see.”

Roger wrung his face. He hit the starter again and again. The battery got weaker and weaker. On what had to be the last electron of charge left, the engine caught. He revved it and we all cheered. Except for Tick.

I took a closer look at him. Sweat poured down his ashen face. His lips quivered. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Are you okay?”

He gave me a weak smile. “Is okay. I have little photo about locusts.” He held his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart.

I worked on
photo
for a second. “Phobia?”

“That’s it, photia.”

That hit me in the heart. I felt even worse about having doubted him. He put himself in danger and had to face his phobia to do it.

Roger revved the engine again and said, “We better give it a go before we’re buried in locusts.”

Windshield visibility was zero. He flipped on the wiper. It clogged with bug bodies in one swipe. “Damn, I can’t see squat.”

Tickemoff’s hands started shaking violently. “I get out and scrape.” He reached for the door handle.

“No,” I yelled, slid my door open, and jumped out. I couldn’t let Tick do it, regardless of how much the insects repulsed me. At least I didn’t have a phobia.

The van looked like a loaf of bread covered in shredded green coconut. I pulled off my sneaker. With my scarf over my mouth and my shoe as a scraper I cleaned the carcasses from the wiper’s path, hoping it would last till we were clear of the swarm.

I popped back in the van, picked off the giant grasshoppers, and mashed them on the floorboard. Three locusts had taken up residence in my sneaker. They regretted it. I shuddered and swallowed hard to keep from throwing up. Fortunately I did not have a phobia.

Roger dropped the van into gear and turned on the wiper. He eased forward about ten feet before the windshield became opaque and the wiper jammed. Five more feet of driving blind. Boink. We hit something solid. My guess was the Rock of Gibraltar but I could have been off by a few degrees of longitude and latitude. Or just off.

I said some things a lady should never say as I thought about having to go into the locust storm again. At this rate we’d drive through the plague in the same amount of time it took to build the Great Pyramid.

Tick held up his hand. “Not to worry. I install back-up camera.”

He flipped the sun visor down, pressed a button on the side of it, and a screen appeared. The bottom edge of the rear bumper filled the top of the picture. The rest was the sand behind us. Tick said, “Gift from CIA.”

I had an inspiration, one that didn’t require me getting out of the van into the mandibles of those disgusting creatures. “Roger, can you turn this van around and drive using the back-up camera?”

“It’s worth a try.”

He did a bunch of little back and forths until he had us going tail forward. He eased forward, or rearward depending on how you wanted to look at it, around the rock that had stymied us. Twenty feet later we banged into another one. A smiling locust filled the screen.

Roger slammed his hand on the steering wheel. “We’re stuck here until the locusts leave, die, or consume each other.”

I pulled my hood down over my eyes, leaned back, and pretended I was in the facial chair at the Elizabeth Arden Salon on Miami Beach instead of the midst of a locust attack in Egypt. I dozed off immediately.

The sound of a diesel engine woke me.

Chapter Thirty-one

The Harrods-green double-decker bus stopped ten feet away from the flower-power van. A canopy began extending much like an airport jetway. It kept coming until it mated to the van at the sliding door.

Harrods. Had I died and gone to shopping heaven?

“It’s the Brit!” Roger said. “We’re saved!”

I opened the door and we clambered over each other like lobsters in a tank into a tube that reminded me of a clothes dryer vent but a heck of a lot bigger. Roger, Fiona, Petri, and Tickemoff gathered around me and we moved
en masse
through the bug-tight passageway. I felt like Dorothy landing in Oz. But where was Auntie Em?

Near the other end of the tube, a stunner with long glossy brunette hair, perfect porcelain skin, high cheekbones, chocolate brown eyes, and vampire red lips said, “Welcome to a bus called
Wanda.
I am Tatiana. I will be your hostess,” with a slight Russian accent. Since we entered the country, I’d run into more Russians than Egyptians.

She wore a black mini-skirt, with a short black suit jacket over a neon-pink cami, and
matching
four-inch heels. She was definitely guy-drool material. I put my hand on Roger’s arm. “Put your eyeballs back in your head, mister.”

Tatiana looked down her nose at my red pump and red sneaker. At least they were the same color. She stared at me as if I were crazy. I resisted the temptation to say it was the latest thing in the States.

She flicked a locust wing from the tip of Roger’s nose and licked her lips. With a tiny silver brush from her jacket pocket, she whisked us clean, wrinkling her nose when she got to Tickemoff’s grubby robes.

Once we were debugged she said, “Follow me,” and sashayed toward the three rubber-treaded steps leading into the bus. I wedged in between Petri and Fiona to block Roger’s view of her. How did she make her butt flex like that?

Roger put his hand on my waist. If he asked me to move he was dead meat. He said, “This looks like a red double-decker bus straight from Knightsbridge, except it’s green and it comes with Tatiana.”

“Who?” I snarked.

She put her foot on the first step and addressed us over her shoulder, “You are the guests of Mister Sloane Ranger. I will see to your comfort.” I was sure her eyes focused on Roger when she uttered that last sentence.

We followed Ms. Tight Skirt up the stairs. I grabbed the entrance or exit pole depending on your point of view and stayed between her and Roger all the way.

Wanda’s
floors were polished teak, the handrails and trim-work chrome, and the walls soft yellow. Huge panoramic windows on both sides of the bus were covered with a nausea-inducing green paste, the result of thousands of insects committing hari-kari. Conversation groupings of clear Lucite chairs were staged throughout the front section. All in all, the bus was a sumptuous rescue vehicle. I could enjoy this.

But there was a downside. Tatiana.

She continued her guided tour without mentioning the bug goop on the glass. An oak and chrome bar took up the rear end of the bus. Mirrors behind the bar reflected everything from rare French Bordeaux to Glenfiddich Scotch. A dumbwaiter was lodged in the wall behind the bar, its chrome door gleamed in the reflected light.

Our hostess continued doing everything but demonstrate the airbags, which I assumed fell from the ceiling in the event of the loss of cabin pressure. “For your safety
Wanda
is air-tight and the windows are bullet proof. She can withstand high impact collisions, and can float for as long as twenty-four hours, if necessary. The dining room is on the second level. We can seat twenty-two for dinner. The toilets are just behind the bar.” She indicated with a nod of her head.

Tatiana motioned toward the bar with her red nailed hand. “Please use care when sitting on the barstools. They are replicas of those on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht and are upholstered in whale foreskin.”

I was not impressed with her bar stools. They were quite common in Miami. However the rest of the rolling emporium was pure class if you didn’t dwell on the locust juice and carcasses dripping from the windows, which was pretty hard to ignore. I cut my eyes to Tick. He seemed fine. His phobia must not have included mashed locusts.

Another wave of nausea washed over me. Was it the bug-guts or was I coming down with something? I grabbed Roger’s arm to steady myself and flopped into one of the transparent chairs.

The bruiser who’d been in the bus when we beat on the door earlier in the day positioned himself next to Tatiana. He’d changed to a suit and tie but there was no hiding those muscles.

“This is Tyson, he will be your bouncer, pardon, butler. Please make yourselves comfortable.”

Tyson flexed, straining the sleeves of his jacket. “I ain’t just window dressing. I’m the chauffeur.” He motioned to the driver’s seat.

“How can you see where you’re going with the all squashed bugs?” I asked trying to sound at ease and chatty, the exact opposite of what I felt.

He pulled what looked like a fancy iPod from his pocket. “Watch this.” He pressed a button and
Wanda’s
windows swirled with an oily film from top to bottom. Wiper blades descended and scraped the windows clean.

“That’s amazing. What is that stuff?”
“A little trick I learned in Florida. It’s called
PAM
.”

“Thank you,” Tatiana cut him off and reassumed control of our tour. “At this time we request you remain in the area as your host wishes to introduce you to his special guest after which we will be serving dinner.”

Feeling queasy, I broke free from the group and dashed to the loo where I promptly lost everything I’d ever eaten. I splashed cool sink water on my tired face. Being sick while far from home was something I always feared. Had I caught some ancient incurable disease?

Tired
and
nauseous? Hmmm.

I pulled back my robe and checked my profile in the mirror. If anything I looked emaciated. I was sure I’d picked up a bug not a baby. I never thought of myself as the motherly type. I can’t grow an indoor plant let alone a child. However, Roger
would
make a cute daddy. My mind was waffling between being pleased and panicked. I
could
learn to take care of little… Yikes! The Camapoos!

I’d forgotten all about them. I opened my purse praying my neglect hadn’t killed them. The camel box appeared undamaged. I slowly opened it.

The critters sat in traditional camel-sitting poses but their eyes were closed.

“Hey, guys,” I whispered.

Two sets of baggy eyelids opened slowly. I palmed some tap water and held my hand within their reach. They staggered to their feet and slurped. I reloaded my palm and repeated. They drank three handfuls.

“Wendy, you okay in there?” Roger said.

“Be right out.” No time to unsaddle the little guys. I carefully placed the camel box back in my purse. I checked my face for signs of pregnancy, shrugged, and left the bathroom.