Hollywood Scream Play (2 page)

Everyone leans forward, intrigued. Yep, that has certainly got our full attention.

“Around its staff are petroglyphs detailing her meeting with King Solomon.” The prince pauses as he bows his head. “Just at the moment of the scepter’s discovery, the rebels swarmed the site. Sadly, only one member of the excavation crew, a woman, was in the tomb, and survived the rebels’ attack. The rest of her party were slaughtered. Frightened—for obvious reasons, considering her knowledge of Al Qaeda’s torture techniques—she waited until nightfall before re-emerging and making her way back to Sana’a. Afraid she might run into the rebels again, she had the foresight to leave the scepter in the queen’s tomb. As you can imagine, it is priceless. All the more reason it must be retrieved before the rebels learn of its existence.”

“At this point, you presume the raiders have given up, and we can waltz right in?” Jack asks.

The sheikh shrugged. “I don’t expect it will be that easy. However, your government’s satellites show little interest from the raiders. Their own search of the surrounding ruins revealed a few minor antiquities, nothing more.” His eyes swept over me. “Besides, most of the region’s villages have already been decimated, or the tribal sheikhs in control have been paid off. The rebels have, as you Americans so quaintly put it, bigger fish to fry. They have moved onto the task of terrorizing Yemen’s larger cities.” His eyes graze over me as he massages the word, “terrorize.”

“Then it should be safe enough for your own security teams to secure the ruins and the treasure you know is there,” Jack reasons.

“Our neighbor to the south would not welcome Saudi Arabian armed forces within its borders.”

“And yet, Yemen’s tribal chiefs accept your, er, ‘financial patronage’ with open arms. Or, I should say, palms. Go figure,” mutters another of our usual mission members, Abu Nagashahi.

“Until now.” The prince’s nod is proffered with a sneer at our Persian associate. “These days, Al Qaeda’s pockets are also lined with gold. And sadly, Yemen’s tribal fiefdoms are always up for bid. All the more reason the Emirates—and the United States, for that matter—must bolster the current Yemeni president’s administration, and in this case, his cultural minister’s attempts to protect what is left of their country’s priceless artifacts. In the long run, they may be what save it.”

“That, and its oil,” Arnie Locklear, our mission’s tech op, murmurs.

The prince frowns. “Al Qaeda is also sabotaging Yemen’s pipelines, almost on a daily basis. But terrorism is just one of several factors which has led those of us who rule the Middle East to face up to the fact that, whereas oil ruled our past and present, it may play a diminished role in our future.”

This is an intriguing comment, coming from someone whose family has made billions of dollars from black gold.

As if reading my mind, the prince adds, “Now that China has crossed the bridge into the twenty-first century, it is faced with the cons as well as the pros of a modern society. Its air can’t stay black and still have its citizens survive. GDP is meaningless if you have no citizens to enjoy it. When the Chinese finally put an anti-pollution mandate in place, the rest of us will be forced to do the same.” He frowns. “But the more immediate issue for my neighbor to the South is the protection of its most valuable asset—the scepter of Sheba.”

“Yemen is a very important ally of our country—as are all the Arab Emirate states, Umm al-Quwain included. All the more reason we’re ready to send in our number one team,” Ryan assures him. “At your behest, they’ll leave tonight.” The sheikh’s country may be tiny, but it’s a financial cash cow to several US petrochemical corporations. With US government contracts drying up, Acme has no option but to accept the mission.

So yes, our success would be a feather in Acme’s cap.

The sheikh nods toward me. “She is also on this ‘number one team?’”

I understand why Ryan hesitates before answering. In the sheikh’s world, women rarely do a man’s job, let alone a deadly one. “Donna is one of our most capable agents.”

The prince motions for me to stand up. I rise slowly, unsure of what else he expects from me. He circles me, as if I were a prized calf. If he opens my mouth to inspect my teeth, trust me, he’ll lose a thumb.

Instead, he pulls a retractable measuring tape out of his jacket pocket—

And stretches it around my breasts, shoulders and back.

What…the….

The next thing I know, he has the damn thing around my hips, bending slightly, to read my measurement. “
Hmmm
. It will be a tight squeeze, but she’ll do.”

Jack puts a hand on my shoulder, and just in time. Otherwise, my knee would have slammed into the prince’s monocle, and he’d have to find an eye patch to match his headscarf.

Still deep in thought, he murmurs, “Excuse my impertinence, but it is necessary to indulge me. You see, in order to enter the tomb, someone with a small build will have to slip through a compartment with an opening no bigger than eighteen by eight inches. Your measurements fit the bill—but barely.”

Suddenly, the heads of everyone else in the room swivel in my direction, then tilt in order to follow his stare:

Which is aimed at my bum.

By the looks on their faces, I know what they’re thinking.

In response, I scratch my nose with my middle finger.

As for you, Lovely Reader, I know what you’re thinking, too: 
Poor Donna! Has it come to this—?

Tomb robbing?

No.

Well, not exactly. I wouldn’t do anything if it weren’t government-sanctioned, now would I?

Okay, maybe.

But this ain’t one of those times. However, these are the times that try spies’ souls, what with the NSA cancelling black-ops contracts left and right.

Should Carl be put in charge, my neck will certainly be on the chopping block.

Maybe the prince should have measured it, too.

By the time we land in the Yemeni desert, it is just an hour before dawn.

Besides blowing up pipelines built by US and Canadian oil companies, for almost a week now Al Qaeda has been detonating car bombs all over Yemen’s larger cities—the capitol, Sana’a, and Amanat Al Asimah.

For all we know, it’s already too late, and Bilqis’ tomb has also been blown to smithereens.

This is a three-man mission—just Jack, Acme’s pilot George Taylor, and me. So as not to attract the attention of either the rebels or the local police, George flew our Super Puma helicopter from a Saudi Arabian airstrip just across the Yemeni border, touching down four miles from the GPS coordinates of the dig site, which is in a remote canyon. The Puma’s cargo hold also contains three motorcycles, on the off chance our getaway has to be made on land instead.

While Jack oversees all satellite reconnaissance within a forty-mile range of the dig, I’m to go in alone, via motorcycle.

An hour before we landed, Al Qaeda set off a bomb at a major shopping mall in Sana’a. Thank goodness, Yemeni police squads are too busy herding fleeing citizens through security checkpoints to notice a lone biker zipping through the desert on a starry night.

So that I don’t unwittingly run into roving bands of Al Qaeda Shi’a, I’m riding without a headlight. To compensate, I wear infrared night vision goggles under my helmet.

I keep my eye on the digital GPS system of my Supermoto as I parallel the road, and I zigzag through the desert at the first sign of lights in any direction. For this journey, I’m not in regional garb—a headscarf to cover all but my eyes, and a floor-length 
abaya
, both made of plain white linen. Instead, I wear a bike helmet with a tinted visor and a bulky black leather jumpsuit that obscures my womanly curves.

Better to be shot as an enemy than raped as a victim.

For that matter, the marauders have plenty of others to traumatize during the chaos. By staying off-road, I’ve barely sidestepped a group of livestock-herding Bedouin women, heading south.

But just a mile behind them is a car, commandeered by two men. The one in the passenger seat shoots an Uzi skyward, just for the hell of it. At the speed at which they’re traveling, they’ll catch up with the women in no time. What will take place won’t be pretty, and unfortunately, the memories will stay with the women forever—

That is, if they’re allowed to live.

I turn my motorcycle in the direction of the car.

Because my GPS coordinates are being tracked by Jack through my contact lenses and ear buds—which also give him wireless feeds of everything I see and hear—I’m not at all surprised to hear him warn me, “Donna, you don’t have time for a detour. It’ll be daylight soon. We’ve got exactly one hour to pull off this mission and turn the plane around.”

He’s right. Stopping to help them will set me back badly. But it will haunt me for the rest of my life if I don’t do something, so I circle back around.

When I finally spot the rebels’ car on the side of the road, I turn off my engine. So that they don’t hear me, I jog the last quarter of a mile.

I get there just in time to see the driver yank the youngest—a girl of about thirteen—out from the cluster of frightened women, and drag her behind his car while his compatriot holds her screaming mother and aunts at bay with his Uzi.

The man has already shoved his pants to his ankles with one hand and is holding the sobbing, struggling girl down with the other when I come up behind him.

When my switchblade slices the rapist’s throat, he lets out a groan, more painful than orgasmic.

Every time I take a life, I’m awed and humbled by the act: the stark fear glazing my victims’ eyes, that final gasp of realization, followed by the peaceful calm of resignation; then, finally, the anticipation of oblivion.

Will I feel the same, when my time comes?

The young girl’s hysterical screams are so loud that, by the time I get to the other man, all it takes to finish him off is a single shot to the back of his head with the rapist’s handgun.

As the women bless me to Allah, I toss the gun at the girl’s mother, along with the ammo cache that I found in the back of the rebels’ car. “God’s gift is not me, but your own lives. Keep moving,” I command them.

Then I dart back out into the dark desert night.

I have no doubt they’ll make it. The mother smiled when what was left of her captor’s head hit the sandy asphalt.

I would have reached my destination quicker, but a skirmish between some tribe and another band of marauders forces me to loop out so far from the target coordinates that it takes me another twenty minutes to get back on course.

When, finally, I enter the narrow mouth of the canyon, I yank off my helmet and scan the valley before me for anything that resembles an excavation.

Then I see it: the ruins surrounding Bilqis’ tomb.

In the dawn’s early light, the outline of the ancient mounds resemble a sleeping old woman, fatigued and limbs akimbo. For the past three millennia, the hot breath of the desert has been blowing sheets of sand against her crumbling flanks.

Silence shrouds every corner of the ruins. Good, I’m alone. But just in case someone else comes calling while I’m inside, I hide my bike behind a copse of scrub trees.

Now that two thousand years of dust has been moved from a hole some sixty feet wide and 100 feet deep, a massive tomb, built on the backs of a thousand Sabaean slaves, is nakedly exposed.

Wraiths of dust, caught in the dawn’s early light, waltz lazily around the clay pillars flanking its entrance. Carved onto each is a likeness of the queen of Sheba. On one, the canes she holds in each of her hands are topped with the heads of lions. Her straight-on stare is blank, her eyes filled solid with clay.

On the other pillar, Bilqis is in profile. Her eye—a slit, really—is dark, fathomless.

I take a switchblade from the back of my boot. Following our client’s instructions, I stab the empty-eyed silhouette once, quickly and deeply.

When the blade connects with a clasp buried deep within the eyehole, a tiny trap door at my feet slides open. It’s just large enough for me to drop down into it.

Okay, no. My shoulders are stuck.

“What’s taking so long?” The impatience in Jack’s voice is enough incentive to shift my arms. They are squeezing my breasts to the point that I’ve given myself the kind of cleavage I’ve only dreamed of. 
Hmmm
. I should pose like this more often—

And that does the trick. I fall through the opening—

Onto some sort of slide that takes me on a ride in pitch darkness.

Finally, I skid to a stop. With trembling hands, I flick on my flashlight. The shadows swallow its glow. Still, I angle its beam around the room. Despite its massive size, the room is empty, except for a rectangular stone box—six feet in width, three feet in depth, and only three feet wide.

“The queen of Sheba’s sarcophagus!” Jack’s awed whisper echoes in my ear.

The lid has been nudged to one side, but only by a few inches.

I take a deep breath as I give it a shove. It is hinged in such a way that it slides open easily—not with a creak, but with a whisper.

The body inside is tiny, almost childlike. It is wrapped in weathered strips of cloth.