Tales of the Red Panda: Pyramid of Peril

by Gregg Taylor

  After ten harrowing minutes of bobbing and weaving around buildings and over rooftops, she could see a long, dark stretch coming up ahead, and knew that if the car did not change its course, it would soon leave the lights of town behind and plunge into that unknown blackness. If only there were some way of activating the nightvision setting in her flight goggles without folding her gliders and losing both speed and altitude. She almost never used it when she was gliding, as it felt unnatural to her and made her question what she was seeing while making split-second decisions, but she had to admit that they would make a long flight through pitch darkness less disconcerting. Still, there was nothing for it now.

  The Flying Squirrel pushed for every iota of speed and felt the wind whipping past her as she closed the distance between herself and the fleeing car. She knew that in an instant she would have only the headlights of the car she was following, not only to track her quarry’s progress, but to judge her own distance from the ground and to define the road itself, as the space immediately above it would be the only known obstacle-free path through the darkness.

  Just moments before they left the lights behind, she actually began to overtake the automobile, and she noticed with surprise that the car’s rumble seat was open. She was fighting a tailwind for control, but she couldn’t help a curious glance down, where she saw in amazement that there was a man’s shape lying prone on the open seat. It took her an instant to realize that it was the Red Panda, lying comfortably as the car raced ahead to its destination. He smiled and waved his hand at her slightly, keeping it below the level of the car’s rear window. She began to mouth an epithet at him, but at that moment the car was swallowed up in blackness, and the Flying Squirrel with it.

  The journey through the almost-utter darkness was not more than another six minutes, though to Kit Baxter it felt like a harrowing eternity. She was determined not to fall behind. In the end, the car stopped so suddenly that Kit had to veer off hard to the right to avoid sailing clean over it and landing neatly in the headlights. She was already low by this point but still moving fast, and there was little time for her to repel herself with the Static Shoes to soften her landing. She rolled as she landed and the dry scrub rustled as she passed through it before throwing herself flat against the hard earth.

  The three men paused as they stepped from the car, and Kit could see them considering the space where the slight sound had come from for a moment before dismissing it and heading for their destination – a run-down but still stately home far from any neighbours and surrounded by a stone wall. It looked like the sort of building that was sometimes built by British officials far from home. Clearly some money had gone into its construction, but it felt out of place here, and when its original masters had left it, it appeared no one had wanted it. Until now. There were lights in the windows of the lower levels, and the men were making for the door with urgency but with the ease of familiarity. Jackpot.

  She tapped the side of her goggles quickly to activate the nightvision setting. Better late than never, she supposed, if only just. But she was more or less in one piece, and she would have won the race if the Red Panda hadn’t cheated. The lenses flashed to life illuminating the world around her in shades of grey. The surrounding landscape looked deserted for miles. Where was the Red Panda?

  One look at the car through the grainy imaging of the nightvision goggles confirmed that the rumble seat was now stowed, which meant that he had safely left his perch before the car’s occupants had opened their doors. She tapped the goggles again and the settings changed to infra-red. It was only then that she could see him, already almost up to the darkened second story of the old house.

  She raced across the empty road and through the dusty front yard and was at his side in moments. He did not turn, but held his right hand up at his side as if to instruct her to slow down and be silent. She had any number of quips to make about his method of travel, not least of which were some unsubtle suggestions that the next time he stretched out in a rumble seat, he ought to let her squeeze in with him. She particularly longed to watch his ears turn red when she said squeeze, but it seemed like it would have to wait. A moment later he had jimmied a window and they were standing in a darkened room on the building’s second floor.

  He touched the side of his mask and the blank white eye-lenses flashed with a faint glow, just for an instant. She knew that he had switched to nightvision, and she adjusted her goggles to match. The room was empty of furnishings but appeared to have once been a sizable study. There were a number of bedrolls on the floor and it seemed as if it were now in use as a barracks of sorts.

  He nodded to her and opened the door, exposing a length of blackened hallway with some spill of light from a staircase at the far end. They moved out into the hall and could hear an angry voice berating the men who had just returned. The words were indistinct, but the meaning was clear, as was the identity of the speaker. Kit reached out and touched the Red Panda’s arm and he turned and nodded to indicate that he had heard. It was their old friend, El-Nemr.

  There were four more doors on the upper level, all of them between the searchers and the stairs. They moved to each in turn and scanned the darkness within for signs of Maxwell Falconi. One room held several more bedrolls, more privacy than the first chamber to be sure, but not that much. Another was a bathroom which had the general appearance of having been shared by a large group of men for a number of days. The other two were set up for single occupancy, and each contained an actual bed. Hardly the Ritz, but comparatively speaking it wasn’t hard to guess that these chambers belonged to Pavli and Thatcher, if two such people actually existed. The masked heroes searched each room quickly, but found them devoid of any papers or possible clues.

  The stream of angry words from downstairs was relentless, switching furiously back and forth between English and Arabic. At last another voice called out, in a tone that seemed to rattle the windows like thunder:

  “Enough!”

  The Red Panda and the Flying Squirrel quickly exchanged a look and broke back toward the hallway to hear as much of what followed as they could.

  “It was you, my dear Captain, who bungled this operation,” the voice said, dripping with menace. “It was you who failed to subdue this mysterious stranger, bested by a mere girl-”

  “But, Thatcher-effendi,” El-Nemr’s voice protested to no effect.

  “You who failed even to learn his real name, who failed to take his woman hostage,” the voice continued. “You told him of the Eye of Anubis-”

  “Effendi, he must have already known-”

  “You took him to the Old Man, the one solid lead we might have had,” Thatcher berated.

  “The Old Man would never have talked to us, effendi. Master Pavli knows that,” El-Nemr protested.

  “And this man might have followed the clues the Old Man gave him and led us right to the Eye, or to Falconi, which would be the next best thing,” another voice said. It was calmer than the voice identified as Thatcher, and bore a slight accent that was not Egyptian but might have been Greek. This could be Pavli. “He might have done, Captain, had you not failed so completely.”

  “And now, when your incompetence has been so far indulged,” Thatcher broke in again, “you have the gall to berate your men for losing him tonight? You are overmatched, Captain. You have been beaten, and we cannot afford that kind of failure.”

  “My Lord Thatcher,” El-Nemr’s voice called out in fear, “I beg of you, do not!”

  There was a crackle of otherworldly energy that rang throughout the building, and El-Nemr cried out in anguish. Kit stepped forward as if to throw herself over the banister and into the fray on impulse, but the Red Panda grabbed her arm and motioned back the way they had come in.

  “The Eye of Anubis is a mighty prize,” a voice boomed in anger, “and Maxwell Falconi is the key. If we lose either of them due to your bungling, Captain, you will suffer as no man before ever has!”

  The unearthly light flashed again an
d the tortured cries of El-Nemr rang out through the house. But the upper levels were empty except for the silent darkness of the night.

  Thirteen

  It was the sound that made Kit Baxter open her eyes. It was a small sound to be sure, but it was repetitive and her first thought was that she wished it would stop.

  Her second thought was that there was bright sunlight creeping in around the edges of the thick, dark curtains in the hotel room, which meant that he had let her sleep until morning.

  She sat bolt upright in indignation and discovered that the small sound she had been hearing was the Red Panda on the floor doing push-ups. He had clearly been at it for a while, as his breathing had become audible, and this had been the very small noise that she had heard in her sleep.

  “I knew it!” she said crossly.

  “Good morning, Kit,” he said, as much as possible as if he had not broken a promise to wake her after three hours to take the second shift. They had been quite some time making it back to their hotel, as neither of the transportation options they had used in getting there were really available to them for the return journey. Absent a significant height to throw herself off of, the Flying Squirrel couldn’t hope to pull off a glide like the one that had brought her there. And while stealing one of the cars at the old house would have been child’s play, it also would have tipped off their rivals to their presence. If one was very good with the controls for their Static Shoes, one could adapt the system that they used when running over rooftops to land travel, alternating attraction and repulsion with the powerful field generators in the shoes. The result was a strange loping stride with a pretty impressive top speed, but the trip back to the hotel had still taken a long time.

  It was clear that their enemies knew where they were, and that for safety’s sake they would have to spend what was left of the night in the same room. This had happened on a few prior occasions, though usually one of them was unconscious at the time. And any situation dangerous enough to merit shared quarters meant that one of them would have to stay awake and watch. Given that each of them had senses honed by practise and heightened by danger, this was probably unnecessary, but even Kit Baxter would never have joked that he ought to curl up next to her. She was certain she could never get the words out without tripping over her own tongue in excitement, and then it wouldn’t exactly be a joke, just horrifically awkward. So she had behaved herself and lay down to sleep while he kept guard. It actually felt like a fairly cozy arrangement, and about as domestic as they got, and Kit Baxter’s last, contented thought before falling asleep was that there had to be something really wrong with them.

  But that was then and this was now. Now she was not contented, she was angry.

  “I knew, I knew, I knew it!” she said.

  He did not stop what he was doing. If anything, his push-ups got a little faster.

  “Sorry if I woke you,” he said.

  “You were supposed to wake me,” she said. “You were supposed to wake me hours ago so I could take the second shift! Not let me have a lie-in and watch me sleep all night.”

  He stopped quite suddenly, and his knees dropped to the floor.

  “All right,” he said, raising one hand in protest. “First of all, there’s a difference between keeping watch and watching you sleep.”

  She threw a pillow at his head. He blinked in surprise.

  “I’m supposed to be your partner,” she said, her eyebrows furrowed. “What part of don’t forget to wake me didn’t you understand?”

  “In my defence,” he said, standing, “you’re kind of a crab when you don’t get enough sleep.”

  “Don’t you even,” she said with a warning wave of her finger. “You need sleep too, you know.”

  He shrugged. “I spent some time on a meditation style I learned in India,” he said. “I feel quite refreshed. I think we should have breakfast out, rather than have room service send up an assassin, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Red Panda-,” she said, not letting go of her indignation at being treated like the delicate half of the equation.

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, Kit,” he said, slightly exasperated. “I couldn’t do it, all right? I went to wake you, but you looked so… contented, I suppose. Like a big, dangerous baby. I couldn’t do it. So I didn’t.”

  She blinked at him from where she was still crouched on the bed. “You let me sleep because I looked too cute to wake?” she deadpanned.

  He paused a moment, as if trying to decide if she were about to throw another pillow at him. “You looked very peaceful,” he corrected.

  “How did you know how cute I looked if you weren’t watching me sleep?” she said, a grin creeping across her face.

  He shook his head and raised his hands in mock surrender. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said.

  “You want me to stand guard?” she quipped without thinking. “I bet you’d look real cute.”

  His eyes popped open wide and Kit felt her face grow hot and beet-red.

  “Kit Baxter, behave yourself?” she offered meekly.

  He nodded his slightly dumbfounded agreement, but did not look entirely displeased. She noted that his ears were almost painfully red, so at least she had given as well as she had gotten. Time to dial it back a bit.

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked. “Aside from washing and eating.”

  He shrugged. “That’s about as far as I had gotten, really,” he said.

  “Boss-,” she protested.

  “I mean it,” he said. “We’ve been operating to a degree on the assumption that Max had fallen into the hands of his enemies, in many ways because it was a worst-case scenario and this is kind of what we do.”

  “But they don’t know where he is either,” she said, picking up the thread.

  “Right,” he nodded.

  “But we’ve also been operating under the assumption that if we looked for the Eye of Anubis, we would find the Stranger,” she said. “And aside from driving to Luxor, where there is not actually a pyramid of any kind… we don’t really know how to do that.”

  “Right,” he agreed.

  “So?” she demanded, standing at last.

  “Maxwell Falconi has been a mystery man since 1890 at least,” Fenwick said. “He got us from Toronto to Egypt with a penny postcard. So he must have had a plan for contacting us.”

  “That’s gonna be tough to do,” she said, “with Heckle and Jeckle watching us like hawks.”

  “Yes it is,” he agreed brightly, “unless we get out in the bright sunshine and lose ourselves in the crowds. The temples really are quite stunning, I’m rather excited to show you.”

  She blinked at this. “You’re saying that the best way we can help is to go play tourist?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Get out and see the sights,” she continued.

  “And have breakfast, yes.”

  “Like a pair of human targets,” she grimaced.

  “Now you’re on the trolley,” he said.

  There was a small pause.

  “That one was more Jolson than Cagney,” she said gently.

  “Well, they can’t all be winners,” he shrugged.

  Fourteen

  The day felt like a whirlwind to Kit Baxter. There were other travellers seeing the sights of Luxor, of course. Most of the people in the crowds were either there to see the wonders or to sell something to the people seeing the wonders, but Kit didn’t really notice any of them. She was awestruck at the enormity of her surroundings, at the fact that people had made such things with their own hands, and at how very long ago they had done so. She felt like she was on an alien world somewhere, and for a time she allowed herself to be entirely distracted.

  The Red Panda was clearly enjoying himself, playing guide. In his supposedly misspent youth he had travelled the world, but all that time he had been gathering the training he needed to start his crime-fighting career. Kit had no idea that he’d even been to Egypt, but he plainly had, as he waved h
is hands about speaking of history and architecture and hieroglyphs and all sorts of other things that flew past Kit in a blur. She watched him talking as they walked down the narrow street. He was in a white linen suit in deference to the heat, with a white panama hat upon his head. August Fenwick usually wore browns or blacks, if only to stay away from his alter ego’s all-grey color scheme. But today he not only looked different, he was different. Thousands of miles away from home, he felt no need to put on the wealthy, foolish prat attitude that served as his best disguise. He was calm and in good spirits and slightly in love with the sound of his own voice, which was fine because so was she. Kit wondered if this was what August Fenwick was actually like, and if she would ever know for sure.

  She sensed movement in a stand of palm trees beside them as they passed, and leaned in slightly toward him, not wanting to break the spell.

  “Boss,” she said, “in the trees-”

  “Not now,” he smiled. “I’ve been saving this one all morning.”

  They rounded the corner past the palm trees and she suddenly saw what he had been talking about. It was a row of sphinxes – there had to be thirty or forty of them at least, all guarding the path that led past crumbled walls to the left toward an enormous temple. There were two seated statues, one on either side of the gap in the great wall of the temple building itself, and while they were still too far away to tell, it seemed to Kit that they had to be at least fifty feet tall.

  He was already talking about the enormous obelisk in front of the temple and what is was made of and what it signified, and she supposed she ought to be listening, but she only had eyes for the sphinxes. She had seen pictures of the enormous one on the Giza plain and these were much smaller, but there were so many of them, and they seemed to stretch down the road beyond. It made them seem somehow more real. Some were broken, of course, and where faces and details had been replaced by crumbling sandstone the illusion was broken, but if she did not look too closely, she could imagine them to be a pack of fantastic animals descending upon them.