Edric rubbed his lip but said nothing.
Wolfgang grunted. “There’s more to the story. Something the Egyptians aren’t telling us. Maybe there’s something on the scroll that isn’t visible in the pictures—the location of another tomb or other hidden artifacts. Regardless, our next step is obvious.”
Everybody looked his way, eyebrows raised.
Wolfgang held out his hands. “We have to go to Dr. Pollins’s apartment and retrieve the images. If they abducted her in public, we can assume the kidnappers didn’t know the location of her apartment, so the images are still there. If we can find them and have somebody translate them, we’ll know where to find the kidnappers. The scroll will lead us right to them.”
Edric swirled his drink again, then nodded. “I like it. Megan, go get the address.”
Megan slipped into the adjoining room and obtained the address before Ashley fell asleep. She returned a moment later, and Lyle punched it into a computer.
He grimaced. “Well, it’s not Fort Knox, but it’s damn close.” Lyle spun the computer around, and they all leaned in.
Amelia Pollins lived in a twenty-floor, high-security condominium tower on the eastern bank of the Nile. Her apartment was on the eighteenth floor, with a balcony facing the pyramids.
The complex was owned by a private company named IronGate that specialized in providing secure living in dangerous cities around the world. According to their website, they prided themselves in twenty-four-hour security featuring armed guards, a complex check-in system for guests, and a full array of lobby, hallway, and elevator surveillance.
“I didn’t realize Cairo was that sketchy,” Lyle muttered.
“It’s not,” Edric said. “Cairo is actually a pretty safe place, Ashley Pollins’s attack notwithstanding. But many places in the Middle East aren’t safe at all, and I’d imagine Cairo is a great place for IronGate to showcase their product to potential customers who deal in this part of the world.”
Lyle scratched his chin. “Whelp . . . Whatever the reason, it’s gonna be a hell of a place to infiltrate. There’s no chance we just walk in like the pizza guy.”
“What about the elevator shaft?” Kevin asked, breathing whiskey breath over them.
Lyle shook his head. “I’ll have to find some blueprints to be sure, but now that I think of it, IronGate owned that tower in Johannesburg. Remember, from last year? There were motion sensors in the elevator shaft. These guys really aren’t joking.”
“Stairs?” Wolfgang asked.
Again, Lyle shook his head. “Cameras. And secure access doors.”
“So, we climb it from the outside,” Kevin said.
Lyle pulled up an image of the tower from the company’s website and zoomed in on the sleek surface of the exterior. The tower was round and encased in glass. Windows faced out on all sides, broken only by balconies that jutted out in an offset pattern, with the balconies of one floor slightly overlapping those of the floor directly beneath it.
“You’d have to climb the dead spaces in between the windows,” Lyle said. “The face is sheer glass, so it’d be slick. Also, you can’t climb straight up because of the way the balconies overlap. You’d have to shift back and forth, avoiding open windows where somebody might see you. It’d take a while . . . a couple hours. And no offense, but are any of you in that kind of shape?”
Silence. Wolfgang rubbed his temple with one finger and stared at the tower. Then he glanced at Megan and sized her up from head to toe. When he looked back at Lyle, he saw a smirk playing at the corners of the tech wizard’s lips.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Wolfgang asked.
Lyle grinned. “I believe so. And it just might work.”
“Aw, screw this,” Megan snapped. “I’m not doing it.”
She folded her arms, staring at the drone where it lay behind the van. The eight-bladed flying monster was a full ten feet across when fully constructed, and it vibrated as desert wind tore through downtown Cairo. They were parked on a quiet street two blocks from Amelia Pollins’s condominium tower, and Lyle held out a rappelling harness to Megan.
“It’ll work. I promise,” Lyle said. “If we drop the battery out of the drone and power it with a cable, it’ll lift up to one hundred twenty pounds. And you weigh . . . ?”
Megan’s eyes blazed, but nobody spoke up to defend her.
“One twelve,” she growled.
“Great. So we’ve got eight pounds of wiggle room.” Lyle tossed her the harness, then knelt beside the drone and disconnected the power wires from the battery tray.
“Edric, I don’t trust his toys,” Megan said. “Remember what happened with the com units?”
Edric patted the air with one hand. Wolfgang and Lyle’s scheme had already won him over, and Wolfgang could see the impatience growing in his body language.
“He knows what he’s doing, Meg. Nobody else is light enough to do it.”
Megan jabbed a finger at Lyle. “He is!”
Lyle shrugged and spoke around the flashlight in his mouth. “Technically, I’m one twenty-one. But that’s not the problem.”
“What’s the problem?” she said.
Lyle grinned. “Can you fly the drone?”
Wolfgang rubbed his chin, trying not to laugh. Megan glowered at each of them individually, then stomped around the van and put on the harness. It was designed for rappelling, not being hoisted beneath a giant drone like a teddy bear, but Lyle assured them it would suffice.
Wolfgang knelt beside Lyle and whispered low enough that nobody else could hear. “You’re sure about this, right? She won’t fall?”
Lyle took the flashlight out of his mouth. “Pollins’s apartment is on the eighteenth floor. So, assuming fourteen feet per floor, that’s about two hundred fifty-two feet up. The extension cord we’ll be using weighs about eight pounds per hundred feet, so we have to calculate about twenty pounds for the cord.”
“That puts you twelve pounds overweight,” Wolfgang said.
“Yes, but I’m increasing the voltage to the motors. The battery runs them at about eighty percent output to
