Danger in the Desert. Merline Lovelace

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      Prologue

      If she hadn’t tripped over her own feet while gawking at the tombs in Cairo’s City of the Dead, Jaci would never have spotted the tiny bit of green. It was almost buried in the dirt, tramped down by the centuries of mourners who’d brought their dead to be buried in the jam-packed maze of tombs that stretched for miles along the west bank of the Nile.

      “Be careful, dear!” Susan Grimes, the seventy-something retired schoolteacher who sat next to Jaci on their tour bus, stretched out a quick hand to keep her from falling.

      She didn’t go down, thank goodness. She still had a nasty bruise on her hip from the tumble she’d taken a week ago. Wishing to heck she was a little less klutzy, Jaci righted herself. That’s when she spotted the bit of green. She thought at first it was a shard of glass or broken piece of plastic. Curious, she nudged it with the toe of her sneaker.

      Mrs. Grimes leaned closer and squinted under the brim of her University of Florida visor.

      “What is it?”

      “I’m not sure.” Jaci dug a little deeper with her toe. “Hey! It looks like a scarab.”

      It wasn’t the first scarab she and her fellow tourists had spotted since arriving in Egypt early this morning. Cairo’s souvenir shops were crammed with cheap plastic imitations of the beetle that ancient Egyptians associated with the creator god Aten.

      This one, Jaci saw when she pried it out of the dirt, looked different from the fat little good luck charms hawked by souvenir sellers. Its body was longer, leaner. And it had lost one of its antennae. When she turned it over, the hieroglyphics on its belly were so worn they were barely distinguishable.

      “Looks like a cheap fake,” silver-haired Mrs. Grimes commented.

      “Feels like it, too,” Jaci confirmed. “Probably dropped by some other gawking tourist.”

      But СКАЧАТЬ