Her Kind of Trouble (33 page)

That's when I noticed that the women in the background
weren't
smiling, not even their eyes. I braked again.

Something was up.

I reached into another of my cargo pockets and pulled out a ten-dollar bill, then pressed it against the glass of my window.
Now
I had their attention.

"Who asked you to divert the tourists tonight?" I asked the boy. "Who said to tell us the road is closed?"

He eyed the money. Then he glanced at me, then back to the money—and shook his head.

"
Fifty
," he challenged. "Fifty American dollar."

The scamp didn't realize that he'd given all the answer I needed—that someone had, in fact, bribed them.

"
Shukran
," I said as thanks, and passed him out the ten.

He looked decidedly disappointed—but at least the ladies in the background were smiling. Let's hear it for not getting pushed around by the suits.

The boys chased our car for a few yards as I pulled carefully away.

Because of that little encounter I was less than surprised, as the track dead-ended at the edge of the desert, to see no less than a dozen cars already parked there.

Expensive cars.

Not far beyond them stood more
fellahin
with, of all things, camels.

"Comitatus?" guessed Rhys—correctly, I think.

"So much for secrecy," I murmured, braking before we reached them. And yet the belligerence I'd felt toward Hani's men apparently wasn't a one-shot instance. "But I'm not turning back. Not on your… "

Oh. Except it
could
very easily be on his life, and Catrina's, too. I said, "If you'd like to drop me off and head out to a safe distance… "

"'Not on your life," echoed Rhys. "Unless Catrina—"

"Oh, we can trust
Catrina
not to strand us."

"Not to strand the chalice, in any case," she said from the back seat. "The priest, he says that these are the men who destroyed the tapestries at Fontevrault, yes?"

"Not the exact same men, probably," I hedged. "But the same organization."

"Then I do not intend to stay behind."

So, feeling unnervingly exposed, I drove us the rest of the way to the end of the track and pulled the Chevy Metro to an incongruous stop beside a silver Aston Martin.

"What is it about you and tapestries?" I asked, under my breath.

"They are one of the few forms of legitimate woman's art from the Middle Ages," she snapped back, with a strong note of
duh
in her voice.

I was confused by a fleeting moment in which I actually approved of her—but I got past it.

Two of the men had begun to lead their camels in our direction, but they stopped to confer with each other when they saw Cat and me get out of the car. Clearly we were not the gender they were expecting this evening. But at least nobody was attacking us. Yet.

I glanced across the desert, past some odd little hills and toward the three distant pyramids of
Giza
.

The same pyramids I'd gazed at, from a different angle, while Lex was…

I closed my eyes to a rush of sensuous warmth at the memory, and the tug beneath my heart grew more powerful. More desperate.

"It's this way," I said, hurrying toward the camel drivers. "I don't know where we are, but Lex—"

"AbuSir," said Rhys and Catrina, in unison.

"—is definitely this way, and what's Abusir?"

"It's a pyramid complex," said Rhys.

"Fifth Dynasty," added Catrina.

I'd been
sure
those pyramids were the ones at
Giza
!

Then I realized what was up. They were talking not about the pyramids in the distance, which was
Giza
, but the odd, rounded hills. "
Those are pyramids
?"

"They are," agreed Rhys, keeping up with his long stride. "Only a few remain out of the original… fourteen, I believe?"

"Fourteen," agreed Catrina. "And several temples."

Camels groaned and gargled as we got closer, and I hailed the nearest driver. "How much for a ride to the, uh… pyramids?" I tried to remember the appropriate phrase from the bazaar for
how much? "Bekam
?"

The man shook his head and motioned for us to go away.

I looked at the second man. "
Bekam
?"

He took a few steps toward us but, before he could coax his camels into following, his fellow drivers stopped him with hands on his shoulders and shaking heads.

Damned Comitatus. "They're scared to anger the men who already paid them."

"Er, Maggi," said Rhys.

"Just throw money at them," suggested Catrina. "Isn't that how Americans solve everything?"

"
Bekam
?" I called, to the third and last driver. He made a rude gesture and shouted something that sounded both dismissive and familiar. Like from jail.

"That or big guns," Catrina continued.

I closed my eyes and reached for Lex. He was so close!

"
Maggi
," insisted Rhys. A chill of foreboding shuddered over me at the sympathetic look on his face. "It may mean nothing… "

"
What
may mean nothing?"

"The name AbuSir once meant 'House of Osiris.' I doubt the Comitatus chose this place for that reason, but… "

But on the chance that Lex and I were following some sort of Osiris-and-Isis script, the coincidence wasn't encouraging.

I felt Lex's presence amid the pyramic complex, as surely as I might have felt sunlight on my face or wind in my hair.
Isis
had given me this gift—the same gift with which she'd found the ambushed Osiris—but it was up to me how to use it.

"Okay," I murmured, eyeing the men and their camels with narrowing eyes. "Time for Plan B."

This time, when I approached the camel drivers, I was wearing my
Isis
face: my eyes darkly outlined, and an ankh drawn on my forehead similarly to how Hani Rachid sported a protective Eye of Horus. Then I shadowed the whole effect—for the moment—with the head scarf. Though I've never been a big New Ager, praising ley lines or pyramid power, the energy in this place was significant. If the Comitatus had any sensitivity at all,
that
was why they chose AbuSir for whatever ritual was underway.

Might as well take advantage of it.

Not to mention,
I
felt more powerful this way.

Even the man who tried to leave at my approach wasn't fast enough to avoid me; his camel balked and groaned and shook its head, clearly in a foul mood. That seemed par for the course, with camels. The other two men watched, one wary, the other hopeful.

"
Bekam
," I demanded, instead of asking, and pointed at the camels. I also held up a twenty-dollar bill.

The older man shook his head, though he seemed pained to have to. The younger hesitated.

"Er, Maggi," said Rhys—a phrase I was starting to dread from him. "Someone's coming."

"More details, please," I murmured, maintaining my look of royal privilege. I drew a second twenty out of my cargo pocket and held it up.

"There's dust coming along the track from the village."

Crap
. Probably one of the Comitatus types, late for his ritual. The two
fellahin
still hadn't made up their minds—so it was time to do it for them.

I swept back the head scarf, so that he could get full view of my lined eyes, my protective ankh, my pendant.

"You," I said firmly, pointing at the younger man. Whether he spoke English or not, I meant to make him understand. "Give us rides to where the other men went,
now
, or risk angering forces beyond your comprehension!"

Eyes widening, the younger
fellahin
urged his two camels forward and, barely daring to look at me, took the money. He pointed at himself, still ducking his head.

"Selim," he said. His name.

I pointed to myself without hesitation. "
Isis
."

Maybe he understood, maybe not. Either way, he shouted commands to his beasts and tugged on their lead ropes. Their stubbornly slow response gave me a chance to glance over my shoulder at the track behind the rocky car park.

A wisp of brown floated up from over a ridge. I asked, "Are you sure that's enough dust for a car?"

"They've stopped," noted Rhys. "They are probably being told that the road is closed?"

Normally, I would have protested Selim whacking his camels on the legs as he made them kneel. But the animals, despite their huge eyes and long lashes and split front lips, seemed a lot tougher than the stick he was using. And they did at least kneel. They smelled horrible.

The cloud of dust thickened on the horizon. Damn!

I scrambled up onto the rug-covered saddle like some Middle-Eastern trick rider, though not a very good one. The camel made an awful, groaning noise in protest, half belch and half gag, and its breath smelled even worse than the rest of it.

Catrina climbed on behind me. Rhys and Selim mounted the other camel.

The cloud of dust grew larger. Closer.

Selim shouted some more, whacking his camel with his stick. Both animals stood—

Hind legs first.

"
Merde
," grunted Catrina, her arms tightening around my waist as we pitched forward, practically over the beast's head.

"Try to take the chalice," I muttered, grasping my fanny pack with the hand that wasn't holding on to the camel's saddle for dear life, "and I'll push you off."

Then the camel straightened its front legs, throwing me back into her.

"You will try," warned Catrina.

As soon as we stopped tipping, I looked over my shoulder. Through the approaching dust, I thought I detected a flash of maroon.

"How can it be the Vectra?" I demanded. "We lost them."

"Unless they used another tracking device," sug-gested Rhys, from behind Selim, as the camels swayed into motion. Good goddess. Just walking, they pitched worse than the boat had on choppy water this afternoon. "Not on us, perhaps, but the car… ?"

"We've got to hurry," I urged Selim. "Fast.
Vite
!"

Since it's what I would have done on a horse, I leaned forward—heavens, but the rocky ground was a long way down—and smacked the camel on its furry hump. No way could I have reached its head.

It turned and gave me a long-lashed look of pure disgust.

Luckily, Selim got the idea. He shouted something in Arabic and began swinging his stick between our camel and his.

Protesting loudly, the camels broke into a heavy, lurching run across the rocky, twilit desert. Ahead of us, the moon was rising.

All I could do was hang on—and sense Lex's nearness increasing.

His nearness and, to judge by the ache in my throat, his danger.

Chapter 20