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Adam realized that all of them were women—and not just any women. It was the ladies from the souvenir stand at the base of the temple, cloaked from head to toe in Egypt’s ubiquitous black abayas. Their faces were veiled, but the one holding a scalpel to Jacobs’ throat sported a pair of angry green eyes that struck Adam as oddly… familiar.

She muttered something at Jacobs’ ear, her voice too low for Adam to make out—but whatever she said must’ve been damned threatening, because it made Jacobs drop Adam’s machete.

The other black-cloaked women were armed with what looked mostly like an assortment of kitchen knives—damned sharp kitchen knives.

Faced with three blades leveled at various parts of his body, Beardy dropped his cudgel. Ears let a tall, slender woman pull his rifle from his hands, prompted by another who stood at his back, prodding her knife into his spine. The taller one immediately leveled the gun at Muscles, cocking it with clear expertise.

Though Adam couldn’t see her face behind her black half-veil, he was oddly certain that she was smiling.

Muscles slowly raised his hands over his head.

Ralph had already thrown his own arms up, flashing his veiled ambushers a nervous smile as he held his rifle over his head.

Adam counted nine ladies all together. They held themselves with a silent, determined readiness.

A short, stout woman stepped out from behind the others. Based on the deep lines around her near-black eyes, she was probably someone’s grandma. She spoke a line of quick Masri that had the air of an order.

“She says to go stand against the wall,” Al-Saboor the First called out in translation.

He had somehow scrambled into the antechamber, where he crouched behind a jumble of rock like someone expecting an explosion.

Jacobs was stiff with seething, dangerous frustration—but the scalpel at his jugular didn’t waver. “Do it,” he barked flatly.

The rest of the Al-Saboors shuffled morosely over to the wall of the courtyard, where the women engaged in a quick, huddled conversation that resulted in the sudden appearance of a small pile of scarves and belts from under their black cloaks.

The Al-Saboors were rapidly bound. All the while, the green-eyed woman kept her blade at Jacobs’ throat, her body as poised and ready as a cat.

At another murmured prompt from her, Jacobs held out his wrists. The gesture was calm—but Adam could see the wicked tension that seethed through his figure.

The grandma tied Jacobs with a fisherman’s expertise, and then the willowy girl with the rifle was there, directing him to stand by the Al-Saboors with a casual wiggle of the muzzle.

Jacobs joined his thugs, black eyes flashing with rage—and Adam found himself swept up in a sea of quick-moving women. They hurried Sayyid and Ellie along as well, carrying them to the stairs like a flood of black water.

??

Twenty

Carried along ina current of cloaked ladies, Ellie stumbled into the open air of the temple. The German picnickers had thankfully moved on, leaving the space deserted.

The harsh bark of Jacobs’ voice sounded from the sun court. The green-eyed woman who had held the scalpel to his throat hissed out a command to the others, pointing across the courtyard.

“Yalla!” one of the nearest women said, waving at Ellie urgently.

They dashed past the piles of rubble and the broken columns into the ruins of another chapel, where Ellie could see signs of past excavation work. Beyond that, Hatshepsut’s temple ended in a steep, rocky slope scattered with red-brown scree. The women shooed Ellie onto it, and she half-skidded down into the shadow of the enormous cliff that loomed over the site.

A cluster of donkeys and four impatient-looking horses waited for them at the bottom, minded by a diminutive woman in another niqab and black cloak, who popped up urgently as they appeared.

Ellie’s rescuers hurried over to join her in the shadows of the cliff, holding a rapid conference in Masri. Their urgent tones and hand gestures left Ellie wondering just how well-planned their actions had been.

She turned to Adam, taking in his split lip and bruised jaw. She could vividly recall the way the light had glinted off his machete as Jacobs held the blade to his throat. Had Jacobs not hesitated—had he moved just a few seconds faster…

“I could have lost you!” Ellie burst out as she threw her arms around Adam’s chest. She clutched him tightly around his bound arms as she buried her face in the warmth of his shoulder.

“Not that I mind this,” Adam commented with a wince, “but could you make it just a little less tight?”

Ellie held him back as she made an urgent assessment of his person. “What is it? Where are you hurt?”

“Arms. Face. Probably bruised a couple of ribs,” Adam replied.