ancient civilization had vanished over the years, but Saqqara, the necropolis of the ancient city, still stood and drew visitors by the thousands every year. Saqqara would be the destination for Janet and Carlos on their final day. They planned to continue to Alexandria the next morning.
It was a buoyant late morning of bright sunshine and less humidity than on the previous days. Most of the smog had lifted from the city. Up until now, Carlos had done all the driving, but Janet was intent on having her day at the wheel, nutty Egyptian traffic notwithstanding.
They walked together to the parking lot of the hotel. Their rental car sat by a curb. Janet jumped into the car on the driver’s side and asked for the keys.
“No,” he said, “
“It’s my day to drive,” she said.
“What? You think I want to get killed?”
Janet laughed. Carlos jumped into the front seat and slid toward her from the passenger’s side. Their laughter filled the car. She snatched the keys from him. Her hand pushed the keys toward the ignition, but his hand blocked hers.
Then he pressed his hand to her ribs and tickled her with intensity, causing her to squirm in the seat, laugh, and use both her hands to push him away. His reactions were faster than hers and he snatched the keys back.
“All right, all right,” she finally said. “You drive out of the city traffic, and I’ll take it on the highway,” she said.
“Deal,” he said.
“I’ll come around.”
The battle over, they kissed.
Carlos slid into the driver’s seat. Janet circled the car in a quick trot, came to the opposite side, and opened the door.
“Hey,” he said. “Where’s the map?”
“What map?”
“The one that will take us down to Memphis?” he said.
“Oh,” she said. She put her hand to her mouth to cover a smile. “It’s still upstairs.”
“How are we going to find our way without a map?” he asked.
“Duuh,” she said.
“Duuh,” he answered. Playfully, he swiped at her backside, and she ducked away.
“Good question,” she answered. “I’ll get it.”
She turned and jogged back toward the hotel, a flurry of bare legs and arms.
In the lobby of the hotel, she skipped past the doorman and the amused gaze of the porters and front desk staff. Anxious to get going, she went to the stairs near the elevator and sprinted up them to the first floor, taking the steps two at a time. She felt great.
She would always remember how great she felt at the start of that day.
The door to their room was open. She walked in, startling the morning maid. They exchanged greetings.
Janet spotted the map. She grabbed it, gave the maid a courteous nod, then was down the stairs, through the lobby, and out the door again. She turned the corner. The sidewalk was quiet. Across the parking lot she saw their car. It hadn’t moved. She felt a new surge of love for Carlos. This vacation had been what they needed. She was more certain than ever that he was her perfect partner and the right man to marry. She was about fifty paces from the car, and she raised her hand with the map, waving to him. Through the rear window of the car, she saw him raise his hand and wave back. The day was set to begin. Time to get going.
He cranked the ignition. The car give a little shake as the engine turned over.
A tremendous eruption roared in a firestorm out of the car’s engine, then out of the chassis. It happened so fast that Janet later had a sense of first seeing it happen, then feeling the shock waves and then, with a disconnect of several seconds, hearing it.
The explosion knocked Janet backward and sent her sprawling. She whacked her face and arms hard on the hot asphalt.
The car flew up into the air and into the driving lanes of the parking lot, rocking the cars parked in front of it and behind it and setting them on fire.
Stones, mortar, and brick cascaded off the walls of the hotel and tumbled down into the street near Janet, almost burying her.
Her entire world was suddenly immersed in a silence punctuated by a profound ringing. She felt nothing, knew nothing.
Then it came to her that she was lying down on the sidewalk. Smoke billowed and flames raged from the wreckage of the car. There was something wet all over her, which she quickly realized was her own blood.
An excruciating pain throbbed through the silence. Her vision blurred. Mentally and physically, she was in shock. Prone, she moved her hands, which seemed like someone else’s. She saw that all that remained of the auto in front of her was wheels and a chassis. The rest of it burned before her, the body of the young man she loved within it.
She blinked. There was hot sticky blood in her eyes. Everything in her vision had a reddish tint. Words and ideas formed in slow motion, but they formed anyway. Carlos is dead, and in a few seconds I will be too.
Good thing, she thought as an excruciating pain shot through her head.
Things went very white, and then completely black.
FOUR
In a quiet wing within the main building of the United States Department of Treasury in Washington, DC, Alexandra LaDuca leaned forward at her desk. On the screen of her main computer, Alex studied the final anatomy of a case she had plunged herself into upon her return from Spain two months earlier.
Ray Medina’s clients had been his wealthy friends. He had promised them twelve percent on their investments; then, using the old technique of underselling his abilities, he had produced K-1 tax forms showing returns of twenty percent.
But Medina had also been battling a serious liver infection. His health had declined to such a degree that he had taken his wife and children to the mountain home he was having built in Aspen. He needed time to convalesce.
Medina’s clients grew worried. So while he was away, several clients exercised a remote clause in their agreement with him that granted them access to Medina’s office should he become incapacitated. A few hours later, the investors were phoning their friends. Office records showed that there was hardly any money in the brokerage accounts. Other accounts didn’t exist. The K-1 tax forms Medina had been providing them for years were forgeries.
Two days ago, Medina had pleaded guilty to fifteen counts of theft, securities fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, and forgery. He had been sentenced to sixteen years and eight months in the Arizona state prison system, plus a restitution order of nine million dollars.
Through a default judgment in the civil case, which Alex had helped arrange, some of the victimized clients had reclaimed just over three million dollars of their missing funds.
Another “mini-Madoff,” as these schemes had come to be known. With the downturn of the world economy in the first decade of the twenty-first century, there was no shortage of them. These cases were starting to depress her. She was bored to tears of white-collar frauds, mini-Ponzi schemes, and their slick- as-oil perpetrators.
A phrase came to mind from the old Woody Guthrie ballad about Pretty Boy Floyd:
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
She was glad she had been able to help some of these people recover some of their retirement savings from one of the fountain-pen thieves.
Enough!
She sighed. She glanced at the time at the bottom right corner of her computer screen. It was past 6:00 p.m. For today, she was more than ready to blow out of the joint.
She logged out of both computers on her desk. She was conscious of the weapon on her right hip. She was overdue at the firing range and always needed to stay sharp, just in case. Not everyone she went up against robbed with a fountain pen, and increasingly she found the other type of criminal a more exciting challenge. So she wore her firearm everywhere now. There was no reason not to.
Recently, she had gone over to a new weapon for personal protection: a Glock 26, better known as the “Baby Glock.” The weapon was a snub- nosed automatic that carried ten rounds. It had been developed for ease in concealing and accuracy in firing. Alex had acquired it when she returned from Spain. It fit her hand nicely and on her right hip just as well. She appreciated the perfect match.
Now if she could only get to use it…
FIVE
Shortly before dawn the next day, in southern Ontario, a blue Volvo pulled to a stop on the road that led to the official entry point into the United States. Out stepped a Syrian named Nagib, a large bulky man, about six-four when standing. His boots crunched on the thin layer of packed snow on the edge of the roadway. Winter had come early to the region just north of the border, twenty miles east of Buffalo; then again, it often did.
Nagib looked at his driver, then over his shoulder at the southern embankment of the highway. It first sank lower than the road, then led up into a stand of trees that veered into deeper woods. He scanned the area for several seconds. He saw no one and neither did his driver. The location was quiet in the dim gray light of near-dawn. The only sound was the rhythmic flap of the windshield wipers and the rumble of the engine. Frost had turned the side and rear car windows
