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Adam came up to the opposite side of it—and then promptly stepped back. “That’s… farther down than I thought it’d be.”

“Is this setting off your vertigo?” Ellie demanded, surprised. “But it’s goingintothe ground, not out of it.”

“Ss’ good,” Adam replied queasily. “I’m good. Just gonna… stand over here.”

Constance took his place and studied the wooden scaffold that hung over the shaft. A rope dangled from the pulley rigged to the top of it. Ellie could just see the bucket tied to the far end of it at the bottom of the hole.

“Is this how we get down?” Constance suggested.

Ellie felt a dart of hopeful interest. Though descending thirty feet into the ground in a bucket was a moderately daunting prospect, she would happily attempt it for the chance to venture into a bona fide Eighteenth Dynasty tomb built by one of the most important figures in Egypt’s New Kingdom period.

“You are not going down,” Mr. Mahjoud calmly and flatly informed her. “Mr. Abdelrahman will descend and inform Dr. Fairfax that you are here.”

“Hmph,” Constance replied with a dissatisfied frown.

One of the other workers called down to them from where he stood on the high ground outside the dig site.

“Abdelrahman! Ya amir hena!”

“Mâshi. Ana gai,” Mr. Abdelrahman shouted back. He gave the three foreigners a narrow-eyed look. “You stay,” he ordered firmly before striding back toward the entrance.

“What’s all that about?” Adam’s eyes narrowed. He seemed to have recovered from his brief encounter with the pit.

“He said their amir has come.” Mr. Mahjoud watched the older man depart with a thoughtful frown.

“Their amir?” Ellie echoed.

“It means boss,” Constance clarified as she gave the winch for the bucket a thoughtful, deliberate turn.

“But Neil is in the tomb,” Ellie said, pointing down the shaft.

“Then they must mean the man with the money,” Constance replied.

“Oh. Of course,” Ellie agreed uneasily.

The funds for Neil’s excavation had been provided by the British Athenaeum for Egyptological Studies, a well-established and respectable scholarly organization. This newly arrived amir must be their local representative.

The sky above them was streaked orange with the decline into evening. It was a bit late for someone like that to be paying the excavation a casual visit.

Adam moved to the doorway of the chapel, standing in the shadow of the remaining wall as he cast a wary look over the rest of the funerary complex.

His body tensed like a jaguar before a pounce as his voice went low with warning. “We’ve got company.”

A moment later, Ellie heard the cause of his alarm for herself.

“I don’t care what time it is,” a familiar voice complained in pretentious, Scots-accented tones. “I will speak to Dr. Fairfax immediately!”

The sound tossed a bucket of ice water over Ellie’s brain.

“Dawson!” she hissed.

He couldn’t be any further than the next chamber.

“Looks like it’s just the idiot,” Adam reported warily from his post by the entrance. “There’s no sign of Jacobs—yet.”

Ellie quickly assessed their options. Though the chapel was roofless, the walls that framed the space were still over ten feet high. Adam stood by the only door—which led right to where Dawson approached.

“Should we go over the top?” Constance prompted in an eager whisper. “I’m sure Mr. Mahjoud can vault us up there.”