Candice Cushing and the Lost Tomb of Cleopatra Read online

  Table Of Contents

  Other Books by Georgette Kaplan

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Epilogue

  About Georgette Kaplan

  Other Books from Ylva Publishing

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  www.ylva-publishing.com

  Other Books by Georgette Kaplan

  The Woman at the Edge of Town

  Ex-Wives of Dracula

  The Scissor Link Series

  Scissor Link

  Face It

  The Cushing-Nevada Chronicles

  Easy Nevada and the Pyramid’s Curse

  Candice Cushing and the Lost Tomb of Cleopatra

  Time laughs at all things, but the pyramids laugh at time.

  —Arab proverb

  Prologue

  Dubai, United Arab Emirates

  (back when music didn’t suck)

  The Burj Al Arab was

  the third tallest hotel in the world, and too good for the mainland. A bridge curved off the beach to an artificial island where the mainmast of the building sloped up almost seven hundred feet to the world-famous helipad that had been converted into a tennis court for a recent match between two Grand Slam winners.

  If Easy Nevada fell off the building now, it would take almost seventeen seconds for gravity to turn her into a pancake.

  This far up, the ground stretched outwards as unreal as a mirage. Nevada wondered if this was how the rich always saw the world. Buildings were models, and the ocean was a painting with speedboats flittering through it like insects, just flecks of white on the endless blue vista of Jumeirah Beach. And people were less than nothing—specks, static, not even visible to the naked eye. Killing one wouldn’t even be a conscious act. From here, it would be like swatting a gnat.

  Nevada looked over her shoulder as a helicopter approached, its looping curves doing their best to turn the ungainly vehicle into something ergonomic. It mostly succeeded. The Sikorsky S-76C++ rode down to the helipad like a magic carpet. Holding the bowling bag away from her body, she watched the doors slide open and steps unfurl. An Indian man disembarked.

  She raised her voice. “Send the chopper back up. I don’t know what you’re planning on using this for, but I’m guessing you’d rather it be near-mint.”

  The man complied by waving off the helicopter. It took off in a gust of backwash from its rotors. Nevada shifted her weight as the wind tore at her body, and she saw the man stumbling about before he got his footing. He shook his head and ran his hand through his hair, then cracked his neck as the Sikorsky departed. “Easy Nevada? Hi! Big fan! What are you doing on the roof? Was the room not to your liking?”

  “It was tops. I just prefer my doors to lock from the inside.”

  He was a tall, lanky man, with chocolate-brown hair arranged in a pompadour and a neatly trimmed beard compensating for a rather weak chin. The excessive length of his arms and legs were left exposed by the short white pants and polo shirt he wore, Air Yeezys on his feet and athletic socks crawling up his skinny shins. Nevada could see the power in his limber body. He had a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, and despite its evident weight, lifted it like it was nothing. In his other hand, he held a tennis racquet. Long, jaunty strides carried him across the rooftop to her. When he was close enough, Nevada turned to face him and he stopped in his tracks.

  “And the men who picked you up at the airport?” he asked. “Courteous, I trust?”

  “Five stars. Just like the guys who picked me up in Belize. In the future, though, I’d prefer a company car to a chauffeur. I kinda like to be in the driver’s seat.”

  “Ah, but I’ve noticed you have a few reckless driving citations on your record. We wouldn’t want any harm to come to you before we’ve concluded our business.”

  “Don’t worry about me. My last fortune cookie said I was going to die at the age of 92… murdered by a jealous husband.”

  “An all too common fate.”

  She shrugged. “Eh, didn’t say it was my husband. You’re Singh?”

  “Akbar Akkad Singh, and it is a true pleasure to meet you.” He came forward, holding out his hand, and Nevada held the bag higher. “Ah. Business before pleasantries. I totally understand. Very good business practice, no chat-chat-chat, let’s talk money .”

  Bending to one knee, he set down the duffel bag. The zipper rasped open and he spread both sides. Inside was the root of all evil. Enough to need a lot of rubber bands.

  “A fair price, and good cardio if you’re planning on lugging this all the way to the nearest bank. I know, I find online banking is just the worst .” His voice was light and high-pitched, with a faint, pleasant English accent that Nevada imagined had come straight from Oxford. Overseas education. The jubilant excitement he spoke with, though, would fit in better with a tour guide at Disneyland. Along with the open expressiveness of his face, it gave him a handsome boyishness despite the gray beginning to infiltrate his hair.

  “Slide the money over here,” Nevada instructed. “Then take a few steps back.”

  Singh gave the bag a heave; it jostled its way over the hissing concrete and came to a stop a few feet from Nevada. She looked at Singh and he backed up, playing with the tennis racquet for lack of anything else to do with his hands.

  Nevada checked over the money. There were no tricks that she could see. No newspaper or ones inside the stacks of cash, just hundred-dollar bills from top to bottom. She counted them, stack by stack, and it quickly became obvious that this was more money than she’d ever seen in her life. She should’ve closed the zipper, hefted the bag, and walked, but that much money had its own gravitational pull. She was almost in awe of it. God, she’d won the fucking lottery and she hadn’t even bought a ticket, just stumbled across a souvenir she thought would look cool next to her stereo.

  “Love your work, by the way,” Singh said. “I mean, here I was wondering where the hell you’d put my skull. We were all wondering. I was like, Where is it? Where’d she put it? Giving it to someone else, putting them up in my own hotel, and picking it up from them when you were ready—that’s classic! All my guys, they thought you had a safety deposit box or that you’d buried it in some geocache, but here it was, right under my nose the whole time.”

  “Yeah. And then I set a towel on fire and walked out when the fire alarm unlocked the door.”

  “That’s alright, we expect the towels to be stolen. And the elevator?” Singh wagged a finger at her. “Guests aren’t supposed to have access to the roof.”

  “Swiped an access card off the maid. You aren’t supposed to hold people prisoner in a hotel,” Nevada chided right back. “The routines are posted on the website.”

  “Prisoner? In the only seven-star hotel in the world? We let you have all the premium cable channels!”

  Nevada closed her eyes and forced herself to review her options. Money didn’t spend unless she could walk away with it. The helicopter might’ve left, but she didn’t doubt Singh had a rogue’s gallery packing the stairwell, ready to chop her to pieces and mail her wherever the postage was cheapest. He might give the order, he might not. But Nevada couldn’t see much of a play besides assuming he wouldn’t. She could always shove that tennis racquet down his throat later.

  She set the bowling bag down and gave it a shove down the rooftop. Singh snatched it up the moment it was within reach, slipping
and falling to his knees in his exuberance, ripping open the bag without bothering with the zipper. He looked inside, then turned his face heavenward consumed with relish, clutching the bag. “Oh, it’s real. It is real ! You can just tell—well, maybe not you—I can tell. Do you know what this is, Easy Nevada? Do you have any idea what we have ?”

  “World’s greatest bong?”

  Singh looked at her. As open as his gaze was, Nevada had a hard time parsing it. Was he looking at her as a child looked at a new toy, as a player contemplated his next move, or even as a man stared at a beautiful woman? “Fancy a game?”

  “This before or after you show me your etchings?”

  Singh reached slowly into his pocket, then brought out a remote control. He pressed it and the surface of the helipad irised open. In its place, a tennis court rose into view, the netting taut between them. A second tennis racquet and a tube of balls lay on the ground. Nevada wondered if Singh had planned for this specifically, or if it was one of many outcomes he’d prepared for—and which was more intimidating.

  “A nice match!” Singh said, bouncing on his heels, then launching into a series of stretches. All that was missing was a boombox playing YMCA. “Shake off the cobwebs! Get the blood pumping. A little more oxygen to the brain and we can discuss business. It’s the twenty-first century—who wants to talk shop over a lousy game of golf?”

  “I thought our business was concluded,” Nevada said.

  “Only if you want it to be.”

  Nevada eyed the roof access door. Either there was a kill squad waiting down the stairs or there wasn’t. She didn’t see how it decreased her odds to hear him out. “One game.”

  Singh set the skull down by the net. Nevada set her money down on the other side. She chopped her racquet back and forth in a few practice swings. Her arm registered no aches or pains, just tendons stretching supplely and muscles flexing smoothly.

  Singh served. It was an easy serve, and Nevada returned it with equal ease. Singh barely moved from his sphinxlike waiting to send the ball rebounding back. Nevada only had to move a little more to hit it herself.

  In the crisp, frail-seeming air at this height, the sound of the ball being struck was as regular as the ticking of a metronome. It didn’t echo, of course, not this high up. Instead, the noise seemed to hang suspended in the air, uninterrupted, not lost in any background noise as it dwindled into nothing. Nevada thought uncomfortably of a soul leaving a body, or a child leaving home...

  As if sensing how Nevada’s mind had wandered, Singh returned the ball with sudden savagery. It soared past her, out into the dizzying drop that separated this perch from solid ground, and she watched it fall into nonexistence. She remembered stories of how you could drop a penny from the Empire State Building and it could shoot right through a man’s skull. If that were true, she wondered what a tennis ball at this height could do. Maybe total a parked car.

  “Have you ever read about myths, Easy? All of them have a common factor. Hercules, Achilles, Xena—they’re all about immensely powerful beings right here on Earth, capable of amazing feats. And not just one, no, not the monotheism that came when Man stripped his beliefs down to make them smaller and more acceptable. There were whole pantheons. An entire race of gods. And where do you think they all went?”

  Nevada held up her hands. “Out for cigarettes and said they’d be right back?”

  Singh shrugged and went to get another ball. “Honestly, I don’t know either. Fifteen-love.” He pointed his racquet at the skull. “That’s all that’s left of whatever they were. That and eleven more. Proof that every story ever told about gods and goddesses was based in fact.”

  He served, fast and harsh, and Nevada broke a sweat for the first time as she returned it. Singh was going harder now. Nevada ricocheted his shots back, but it was like playing against a wall. Wherever she sent the ball, he was there, and the ball only came at her faster and faster.

  He’d been toying with her before, and that only made Nevada more incensed. “I know the rich are eccentric,” she said, “but wouldn’t it be easier for you to get into green coffee extract?”

  Singh was a machine, mercilessly hammering the ball back. “I don’t care about losing weight, Easy. I care about the future of humanity. According to legend, if all twelve of the skulls are brought together, the man who does it will be granted one wish.”

  Nevada smashed the ball hard, sending it almost whistling at his face. “Yeah, I can see how you’d want to improve your circumstances.”

  Singh knocked the ball back in a wide arc over the court. Nevada made a run for it, saw the ball sloping down past the rim of the court, and skidded to a stop before she could reach it. She saw the ball graze the edge before it dropped away into nothingness.

  “Thirty-love,” Singh said. He already had another ball. “I’ve been searching for the skulls for years. You, you aren’t even looking and you find one. That’s not coincidence. You are fated for this search.”

  He bombarded her with his next serve, the ball whistling through the air.

  Nevada threw herself across the court. This time it wouldn’t get away from her. She was too damn tired of being Singh’s straight man as he amused himself.

  Coming up to the drop, she got under the ball and snapped her racquet to knock it back past Singh while she teetered on the edge. The fall gaped open underneath her and Nevada felt like laughing. “Try flying coach sometime. The universe will seem a lot more random.”

  She recovered her balance, taking a step back from the edge to see Singh throwing his racquet down in a fit of pique.

  “Enough games!” he shouted, coming to the net. “I want you to find the other eleven skulls. For each one you deliver, I will pay you ten times what’s in that bag. Money like that can open doors for you and your son.”

  Nevada felt her grip tightening on her racquet. “You say one skull is worth ten times what’s in that bag to you?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Then I’m going to need at least five more bags.”

  Singh smiled in agreement—a childish grin—and Nevada pictured a little boy in her head.

  Nevada didn’t have a picture of her kid. What she did have was a CT scan. A cross-section of a brain maybe the size of a bocce ball, incomprehensible in its artistic swells and curves, all except for the ghostly white lump. That she could understand. He was her son, and like her he was imperfect, with a fatal flaw she’d passed on in her blood, the single inheritance he’d taken with him to his new family. And now, like a cuckoo’s egg ready to hatch, it swelled and blistered and turned inward. The doctors could irradiate it, but there was no operation, no cure. Unless someone made one. Unless someone paid for one.

  Nevada felt unnatural. Didn’t every animal care for its young? Every beast but man. She’d given him up, abandoned him to a better life.

  Harry Calhoun. That’s who he was now. And his new family had two mortgages and an empty college fund, trying to keep him alive. God, what a con she’d pulled.

  She told herself she was a heartless bitch. And she tried very hard to make that true.

  Chapter 1

  Within the mud and thatched

  roof of a tukul , David Pike awoke covered in sweat. It had nothing to do with the nearly hundred-degree heat and everything to do with the evil that had entered the room.

  A white man in his mid-forties, Pike still looked nearly every inch the biker he had been before hearing the call to come to Africa. His hulking body was stout, with the solid bulk of a potbelly like a diesel fuel tank doing little to reduce the physicality of his bearlike six-foot-two frame. A long mane of black hair flecked with gray went down to his shoulders, while the many biker tattoos along his arms and neck had long since been crowded out by ones showcasing crosses, Bible verses, and a select few faces of the Ubangi tribes that had become his adopted family. A horseshoe moustache and little-shaven cheeks gave his wide, flat face an uncut appearance, like rock that had been hewn into the rough shape of a man, bu
t no one had finished chiseling out the details.

  Blinking blearily, he saw a face beyond the mosquito netting that surrounded his bed. There was something strange about it, some trick of the eye that he couldn’t yet sort out through the midnight shadows and moonlight seeping into the room. It wasn’t until he wiped his face with his hand that he realized what was wrong. There was no face, only an invisible force pressing through the gossamer net, leaving an imprint of a man’s features where none existed.

  Pike backed away from it, nearly off his mattress, feeling now what his animal senses had been warning him about when he’d woken. Turning his head the other direction in an instinctive search for a way to flee from this evil presence, he saw another face there as well, crowding into the mosquito netting. There was another next to it, and another, a legion of faces disturbing the windy sway of the netting. He groped underneath the bed, searching for his flashlight and the Desert Eagle he always kept on hand, when God said, No. Pray.

  “Something’s in the room with me!” Pike replied. His hand was almost clawing at the dirt floor, trying to find a weapon. God spoke again, not more insistent—how could God be more or less insistent?—but more resonant, more showing of His authority.

  Start Praying Now.

  Pulling his hand away from the dirt like it’d been bitten, Pike threaded his fingers together and prayed. He prayed for his soul, stained by the violence he had done and the crimes he had committed, for the lives of the children he had taken in at Camp Esau, for an end to the bloody war that had put them in danger and taken away so many of their parents, for all those he had harmed in his days as a lost sheep, and even those he had harmed since, trying to stop them from destroying this holy place and these loving people.

  He prayed long into the night, the wind stirring the mosquito net around him.

  Finally, he slept, and when he woke, he wondered if it had been a dream. Then he looked at the ground. There was a perfect circle around his bed where the dirt floor was undisturbed. The unbroken boundary of that line fit exactly to the mosquito netting draped around his bed. Outside the circle, every inch of the dirt floor was covered in footsteps.