“How are we doing this?” Nat asks as she reaches for a pastry. “We know he’s headed for the Valley of the Kings and he has to go through Luxor to get there. He’s got a plane ticket, but that could be a decoy.” The others nod agreementand Nat continues. “You saw the card the desk clerk gave him. He might be renting a car. Or hiring a private driver to take him to Luxor.”
“It’s at least three hundred and fifty miles,” Mary Alice points out. “Over really, really bad roads.”
“Further than that if they’ve closed some of the highways,” Helen says in agreement. “They’re always rerouting and detouring and setting up roadblocks. I don’t think our man wants anything to do with official channels and heightened security.”
Mary Alice frowns. “Did you see all the police at the airport when we arrived? Every one of them carrying a semiautomatic.”
“Can you blame them? People are tense,” Nat says with a shrug.
Terror attacks at tourist hot spots have left everyone—visitors and law enforcement—twitching, waiting for the next explosion or outbreak of violence. Armed guards patrol pyramids and temple complexes, a sight that is both threatening and reassuring to tourists.
“What about a Nile cruise?” Mary Alice asks. “Couldn’t he just sail up to Luxor?”
“Most cruises leave from Luxor to cram all the highlights into a few days,” Billie tells her. “He could hire a private boat from Cairo but it might take a week to sail down to Luxor. That’s a lot of wasted days when you have loot to move.”
Mary Alice speaks up. “The plane is the fastest way to go. An hour wheels up to wheels down. I’ll book a ticket on the evening flight in case that’s the way he chooses to go. And ifhe chooses to sail, we’ll be there waiting when he shows up. The most important thing is that we can’t let him get to the valley before we do or we’ll never find his little stash.”
“I’ll come with you,” Helen says. “It might take two of us to track him.”
Mary Alice turns to Billie. “You have your pensive face on. What are you thinking?”
“That this guy is all over the map,” Billie says slowly. “Why slip out of his hotel in a half-assed disguise and wind through the souk to pick up a decoy plane ticket and then openly ask about a car to rent? I think he’s hoping to mislead us—or anybody else who might be watching him.”
“I’ll ask around about a car,” Nat says to Mary Alice and Helen. “Then I’ll fly down on the late plane to meet up with you in Luxor. Tomorrow morning at the latest. Book me a room at the Winter Palace.”
They agree and Helen turns to Billie. “Where will you be?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know yet. I need cigarettes.” She gets up as Mary Alice points to the hotel across the street.
“I saw some in the gift shop,” she calls. Billie gives her a wave over her head and crosses the street, nipping under the nose of a horse drawing a calèche for tourists. They don’t carry Eves, but she finds a pack of Marlboros along with an assortment of pharaoh-themed tchotchkes. She grabs a Tutankhamun pocket knife as a joke for Helen along with a stack of postcards and is paying cash for her purchases when she catches something out of the corner of her eye.
Fermín Bosque is on the move. He is wearing the grey djellaba again, but this time he has shaded his eyes with darkglasses. He is carrying a small leather satchel, and as he makes his way through the lobby, she sees him slip his room key into a box on the front desk without breaking stride. He walks smoothly out the front door and steps into a waiting taxi.
There is no time to signal to the others. She follows him out of the hotel and dives into the first taxi she can find. Traffic is heavy and her taxi is able to keep pace with his, always with several cars between them. They head east to the Ramses Railway Station, where Billie loses sight of him twice, finally finding him at the ticket window. She edges into line ahead of a placid-looking woman with several children hanging around her neck.
“Hadha hu zawji,” she says to the woman with an apologetic shrug. The woman nods as if to say she understands about husbands. Billie thrusts cash at the clerk.
“A ticket on the same train, please,” she says, nodding to Bosque’s departing back and crossing her fingers the train is not about to leave. The sleepy clerk shoves a ticket and too little change back to her, but she doesn’t stop to count it.
She hurries after Bosque, but he does not move to the platforms. Instead, he goes directly to the taxi rank, climbing into a vacant cab that swings into traffic.
“Oh, this is bullshit,” she mutters to herself. She shoves in front of an annoyed businessman to take the next cab in line and listens to him cursing her and her entire line of progeny, but she is still in pursuit. They plunge into the murderous Cairo traffic once more, crawling their way towards the Nile. It is not until they have crossed the river and the Great Pyramid of Cheops is in sight that she realizes where he is headed.
“The Giza railway station, please,” she tells her driver. “As quickly as you can.”
He floors it, nipping in and out of cars until he delivers her to the curb. She tips generously as she jumps out, blending with the crowds before Bosque’s taxi arrives. She goes directly to the platform where the eightpmsleeper has just arrived.
When she approaches the train, she understands the cleverness of Bosque’s tactics. While Egyptians must wait to be cleared by security, tourists are simply waved on board. The tickets they’re holding were from the Ramses station, but by boarding at Giza instead, Bosque ensures he has bypassed the stringent security in the capital. She locks herself in her sleeper compartment and turns out the light, watching the platform from behind a gap in the window shade. At the last moment, Bosque passes her window and turns left, climbing aboard. She waits until they have left the station to relax. They are en route to Luxor and Bosque is on the train. She has no way to contact the others and no gear, nothing but her passport and a toothbrush and an emergency belt of gold pahlavis. But she has Fermín Bosque in her sights.
The next morning, she rises before dawn, sipping gritty coffee as they approach the Luxor station in the dark. It is not even sixamwhen they arrive. She hangs back, waiting to make sure Bosque gets off the train, and heaves a sigh of relief when she sees him. He’s dressed in his khakis this time, wearing a fedora like half the other Indiana Jones wannabes at any other archaeological site. His leather satchel is strapped over his chest, and he keeps the hat pulled low. Behind him, Billietugs on her khaki jacket and dark glasses, the nearest thing she has to a disguise. She has to rely on nothing more than body language and how she carries herself to seem like a different person than the woman he might have spotted in Cairo.
The bag carriers swarm the arriving passengers outside the station, but Bosque and Billie have nothing for them. They make their way through the throng, taking a direct route to the corniche, the elegant pavement lined with palms that faces the Nile. At another time, Billie might have been distracted by the restaurants and shops facing the river, but she is focused on one thing only as she follows Bosque onto the ferry dock. There are dozens of brightly painted boats to carry tourists across the river to the Valley of the Kings, but Bosque has opted for the local ferry, riding with the people on their way to work. The ferry is enormous compared to the little tourist boats, and Billie takes a seat far from Bosque, positioning herself to disembark ahead of him. The rising sun spreads across the river as they cross, sending long beams of light over the cliffs that surround the tombs. Billie heads that direction after leaving the boat, stopping long enough to purchase a ticket for the tombs. From there, she is directed to a tram, garishly painted to look like Tutankhamun’s headdress. It takes the tram three minutes to cover the distance to the entrance to the valley. Armed guards patrol the area, a reminder of the violence that has been dealt here. But none of them look twice at the American woman who passes by, guidebook and map in hand as she searches for the first tomb.
It is early, but already tour groups are assembling. One group from Australia passes by, the leader holding aloft astuffed kangaroo tied to a stick as she calls out facts about the valley. “This is one of the most important and comprehensive archaeological sites in the world. It is the resting place of pharaohs from the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Dynasties of the New Kingdom. The tombs were dug out between 1539 and 1075 BC. Now, if you look directly ahead, you’ll see a peak shaped almost like a pyramid. This mountain, the highest spot in the valley, is called Al-Qurn. Don’t worry, folks, we’re not hiking up there! But if you step this way, we will be heading first to the tomb of Ramesses V. A quick reminder about flash photography—”
Billie uses the group as a shield as she steps off the main path, pretending to study her guidebook. Other travelers pass her by, and just as she is wondering if she has somehow lost him, Fermín Bosque comes into view. She keeps her face in her book, turning away slightly as he passes. The morning is warm and damp patches are already forming on the back of his shirt. He moves quickly but without hurry, directing his steps to the west, past the tombs of Amenhotep II and Seti II. Billie is thirty yards or so behind him, keeping pace. Around them, the walls of the valley rise starkly, the barren brown of the cliffs softened only slightly by the rose gold of the rising sun.
The furthest tomb from the entrance is Thutmose III. No one else has made it this far so early, and the area is quiet. Billie can hear only her own pulse beating steadily in her ears and the soft scrape of her shoes on the stones. The walls of the valley seem to shrink together as they approach the tomb, narrowing so closely they begin to shut out the morning light.Long shadows fall over the entrance. A low stone wall separates the rockier ground from the pathway that leads to a steep staircase up to the tomb’s entrance.