the vibrant reality, however. The dust, the heat, the biting flies, the omnipresent and tenacious souvenir sellers … none of them could dampen her soaring spirits.
“Will you take my picture when I climb aboard?” Still dubious but willing to oblige, Mrs. Grimes accepted the digital camera Jaci fished out of her canvas tote. The silver-haired teacher snapped several pictures while the driver boosted his rider into the saddle. Once Jaci had settled herself comfortably, she grinned and waved at the camera.
Then her camel pushed up on its hind legs.
“Yikes!”
She grabbed the pommel just in time to stop herself from catapulting forward, right over the animal’s head. Her smelly headdress slipped down and covered one eye. She managed to stay in the saddle somehow but came close to tumbling off again when the creature got one front leg under him. Or her. Who could tell?
Swaying from side to side, the ungainly creature rocked up. And up. And up. Jaci looked down, gulping at the distance to the hard-packed dirt, and hung on for dear life. As if mocking her fears, the driver leaped aboard his own mount and brought it to its feet with seemingly liquid grace.
“We shall go to the edge of the plateau, yes?”
She unlocked one hand from the pommel just long enough to push the tail of her borrowed turban out of her eyes.
“Well …”
“You must see the pyramids by themselves. Away from the all these people. To do so is to see Egypt.”
The guidebooks warned about this. Always, always establish a price up front.
“How much?”
“Very cheap, miss.”
“How much?” she insisted.
The driver glanced at Hanif, as if calculating how much he could gouge from a member of the guard’s group.
“Twenty dollars U.S.”
“Done!” Jaci was too excited to haggle. She would have paid twice that for this experience. “Let’s go.”
The driver took her mount’s reins and kicked his own into gear. The animals’ shuffling, rocking gait took some getting used to. Side to side. Forward and back. Feeling like a rag doll strapped into the wooden saddle, Jaci hung on to the pommel with both hands while they descended the sloping plateau.
Then the magic of the pyramids engulfed her. There they were, right in front of her. The great tomb of Cheops, flanked by two lesser pyramids, burial chambers for the king’s wives. They’d been constructed on a windswept stretch of desert many miles from the ancient capital of Memphis.
Egypt’s present capital now formed a dramatic backdrop to these majestic structures. Cairo shimmered in a haze of heat and exhaust fumes just across the Nile, but Jaci had no eyes for the sprawling city. Her fascinated gaze remained locked on the pyramids.
As she and her guide got closer, she could make out the monstrous blocks of stone the builders had positioned one on top of the other. How, she couldn’t imagine. The massive reality of these monuments seemed to make a mockery of every theory her study group had read or researched concerning the tombs’ construction.
She was so enthralled by them that she didn’t realize the camel driver had angled toward the dark green palms lining the river banks.
“Excuse me! Where are you going?”
“You must see the pyramids from the Nile. It is to see them as the ancients saw them.”
“I’d like to, but …” She threw a glance over her shoulder. “I’d better get back to my group.”
“It is not far. Just there.”
Jaci injected a stern note into her voice. “Our tour is on a tight schedule. I need to get back. Turn around, please.”
When the driver ignored her command and kept dragging on her camel’s reins, the light dawned. How stupid was this! How stupid was she! In her excitement and eagerness to view the pyramids from the back of a camel, she’d fallen for one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Thoroughly disgusted with herself, she called out to him. “I get it now. Twenty dollars to approach the pyramids. How much to take me back?”
The driver kept going.
Okay, now she was pissed—and just a tad nervous.
“Hey! You! How much to go back?”
When he didn’t respond, she bit down on her lower lip. This had ceased to be fun. Fighting to hang on to both her balance and her composure, she angled around and stabbed a finger repeatedly toward her group.
“Back! Take me back.”
To her profound relief, she saw Hanif break away from the cluster of tourists and lope down the plateau in her direction. No, not Hanif. Another guard, this one in jeans and a lightweight sport coat.
He moved fast, thank goodness! Within minutes, he was close enough to shout something.
Startled, the driver twisted around in his saddle. When he spotted their pursuer, he muttered what sounded very much like a curse. Producing a short, braided whip from the folds of his robe he slashed the neck of his camel while yanking on the reins of Jaci’s.
Her mount brayed and made an awkward lunge.
Jaci yelped and tumbled sideways.
Chapter 2
Talk about timing!
The moment Ace had cleared security at the Cairo airport, he’d contacted Kahil. As promised, his friend had obtained an updated itinerary from the local agency handling the tour for the University of Florida group. Ace had jumped in a rental car and arrived at the most touristy of all locales—the camel circus on the plateau above the Giza pyramids—just in time to spot his target lumbering off.
He’d hung back, mingling with the crowd while he observed this supposed messenger from Ma’at. It didn’t take him long to decide the goddess had to be pretty hard up for emissaries. Jacqueline Marie Thornton looked just short of ridiculous with a greasy headdress tilted over one eye and an overstuffed canvas tote thumping against a hip while she bobbed along.
“Oh, dear.”
That came from a smallish woman wearing a visor decorated with a University of Florida Gator. She was standing a few yards away, her worried gaze on the camels.
“I hope Jaci doesn’t go too far,” she said to another member of her group. “The tour leader warned us about these drivers.”
With good reason. Ace had spent enough time in Egypt to know these guys had a real racket going here. They dressed like Bedouins, but most had never trekked across a desert. They also raked in so much from the hordes of tourists that many sported Rolexes and Air Nikes under their robes. Even the tourist police on their distinctive white camels rubbed their fingers together, demanding payment for every digital photo snapped by
