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Barbara Silkstone - Wendy Darlin 03 - Cairo Caper

Page 13

by Barbara Silkstone


  Roger was the first out. He leaped to the edge of the pool and teetered there, staring into the water.

  I stumbled next to him. “How deep’s the water? Maybe we can scoop it out?”

  He shook his head. “Three thousand years ago this was an embalming pool used to dry bodies out. There’s no telling what that fluid is by now but it isn’t water. I’m sure it’s toxic, if not lethal. Don’t touch it. Don’t let it splash on you.”

  The ground thumped. Darcy trundled by and jumped into the water. “You’re a bunch of weenies,” she yelled. “And weenies never win.”

  She doggie paddled, gazing into the luminous liquid. “I’ll find that gadget and then Cleopatra’s tomb will be mine, all mine, all mine I say.”

  The only thing missing was a muahahaha. She was even nuttier than I thought. She made a victory fist then sank until her blonde hair floated on the surface. The fist changed to a desperate wave. A loud slurp came out of the pool. Darcy was sucked under.

  We stood speechless and motionless. After a few seconds the surface of the pool heaved. Had she survived her suicidal plunge or was her semi-synthetic body exploding to the top?

  The pool released a giant air bubble that sounded remarkably like a belch.

  “Oh shit!” Roger said. He squeezed my hand. The water slowly swirled giving off an inky, iridescent glimmer like a mirror in the dark. I thought I saw shadows down deep.

  I finally squeaked out, “What can we do? How do we save her?”

  He shook his head, his eyes never leaving the pool. “She’s not coming back.”

  I pulled my hand from his. “We have to try. There must be a way.” I knelt and leaned over the edge.

  He pulled me back and held me to his chest.

  Petri and Fiona stepped next to us. She buried her face in his chest. He patted her head.

  Darcy might have been mad as a hatter, but she didn’t deserve to die. “We have to find her body and bury her… if she’s down there.”

  “Perhaps in time when the temple has been explored and we understand this pool…” Roger said staring at the surface.

  I closed my eyes and willed a second belch, one that would throw her out of the pool. We had our differences, and it was her greed that drove her into the pool but… I pictured her at the bottom clutching the Multi-phasic Unidirectional Density Diviner and grinning.

  A stench wafted into the chamber. I opened my eyes. The pool had not bent to my will and returned Darcy. I peeked over my shoulder, seeking the source of the smell, and expecting the worst. I wasn’t disappointed.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The stench had a familiar face. And the stench itself was familiar. Dead flowers and toilet deodorizer. The eau de choice of my unfavorite conman Tickemoff, still wearing his home-brewed perfume. Toilet water had a different meaning in his line of fragrances.

  He dashed into the grotto tripping over his galabia and banging his mandals on the edge of the pool. His eyes twirled like pinwheels in a sandstorm.

  I punched Roger in the shoulder. “Seems like the tomb is about as secret as the medallion and the MUDD, Doctor Jolley.” I turned to the little hustler. “How did you find us?”

  “Transmitter in small lady’s pocket. No charge. I stay close because I know you need Tickemoff help soon. All tomb raiders need. Very pretty lady named Lara, Lara something, need my help last year, maybe year before. Hard to remember. All tombs run together after a while.”

  Fiona fumbled in her jacket and came up with a small compass. She passed it to Petri who used his pocketknife to remove the back, exposing a small electronic thingy about the size of a small square of chocolate.

  Tick smiled. “Latest technology. Transmits for nine or ten days, depending on barometric pressure. Working deal to sell to CIA.” His smile disappeared and he shook his hands nervously as if drying his nails. “You must leave now! Everyone is how you say… vacuuming? Many, many green locusts are coming. A giant cloud will bury temple!”

  That one had me stumped. I thought a couple more seconds. “You mean evacuating.”

  “Yes, yes, evacuuming. Must hurry.” A thin spray of spit flew from his lips.

  “Give it a rest, Tick.” Roger said, wiping his face. “We’re not tomb raiding. We’re finding and protecting…”

  Roger’s voice trailed off. He stared at the hieroglyphics on the wall behind Tickemoff. He stepped around the peddler and held his torch closer to the writing.

  I had a bad feeling about Roger’s actions. I braced myself and asked, “What do you see?”

  “It’s just a myth.”

  I punched his shoulder. “Tell me!”

  “These hieroglyphics claim Cleopatra from the afterlife will summon a mighty plague of locusts if her tomb is threatened. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Nothing to worry about? After all the strange things that have happened and now this guy comes to warn us about a cloud of locusts and you think it’s nothing to worry about.”

  I nabbed Fiona’s pith helmet from her head and mock-swung it at Roger’s bean.

  He blocked my hand, took the pith helmet from me then said, “I’ve got this one,” and banged it off his head.

  Tickemoff shook his head. “All will be buried in the swarm. Many will die.”

  “Bull puppies,” Roger said.

  “If it’s so dangerous, why did you risk your life to come here?” I asked.

  Tick gave me a smarmy smile. “Two words. Friend. Ship.”

  I could think of two words also. Bull. Ship. He had an angle.

  “Those insects will not come underground,” Roger said with all the authority he could command.

  A giant metallic-green locust cruised in and landed on Roger’s head.

  Tickemoff flicked the disgusting insect off Roger, narrowly missing me. Of all the ways I’d imagined dying, being bugged to death was not one of them. My heart was doing the drum solo from Wipeout, my knees the cymbal accompaniment.

  “I can make you a good deal but we must run now!” Tickemoff said.

  A good deal. “What kind of good deal?”

  “Deluxe limousine guaranteed to get you out of locust swarm.”

  I only had to admire my red tennis shoe to remind me of how little I trusted the slippery conman, but death by locust was extremely unappealing.

  Roger looked from the Tick to the pool. We’d gotten this far but without the MUDD we were screwed as far as finding Cleo’s tomb went. But hanging around waiting for the MUDD to surface would only get us locusts, tons of disgusting locusts.

  He argued with himself. “Locusts carry a chemical on their bodies that can react with sunlight and cause a toxic reaction in humans, painful swelling and hallucinations. But if they flood the shaft we could smother. Locusts are cannibals. If we leave now, we can come back once they’ve eaten each other. Toxicity out there or smothering here?”

  Another locust buzzed by.

  I shuddered. “Roger, let’s get the hell out of here.” Then I remembered I’d gotten here via the rabbit hole. “Can you find this chamber again?”

  He threw his arms up. “I have no idea how I got here.”

  Petri looked at Fiona. She shook her head. He said, “We were too busy trying to keep up with Darcy to notice where we were going.”

  Tickemoff rubbed his chin. “I draw a map for you, for good price, for very good price.”

  The Tick’s face gave away his confusion. I was sure he sneaked down here, guided by the transmitter he planted on Fiona, without any real idea of where he was.

  I went down the rabbit hole, but if it paralleled the steps, I could get us out with my old maze trick. “I know the way,” I said with a lot more confidence than I felt, but how else were we going to get away from the repulsive locusts?

  “Lead us out of here,” Roger said.

  I put my right hand on the right wall and reversed our descending process, hoping no side tunnels like Habib’s would lead us astray. Several more locusts flew by. The advance guard was here.<
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  We had another problem. How could we find our way back? I pulled my Revlon Forty-Eight Hours Luminescent Lipstick from my purse and marked a dot every few feet along the wall.

  My old maze trick was slightly flawed. I had a few decisions to make as we climbed out. But the locusts showed us the way. They were coming in a sparse but steady flow. Whenever I was undecided about our path, I went upstream against the loathsome bugs. By the time we reached the main transversal passage, I felt like Daniel Boone and my lipstick was decimated.

  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.

 

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