Tales of the Red Panda: Pyramid of Peril (8 page)

The stream of angry words from downstairs was relentless, switch
ing furiously back and forth between English and Arabic. At last another voice called out, in a tone that seemed to rattle the windows like thunder:

“Enough!”

The Red Panda and the Flying Squirrel quickly exchanged a look and broke back toward the hallway to hear as much of what followed as they could.

“It was you, my dear Captain, who bungled this operation,” the voice said, dripping with menace. “It was you who failed to subdue this mysterious stranger, bested by a mere girl-”

“But, Thatcher-
effendi
,” El-Nemr’s voice protested to no effect.

“You who failed even to learn his real name, who failed to take his woman hostage,”
the voice continued. “You told him of the Eye of Anubis-”

“
Effendi
, he must have already known-”

“You took him to the Old Man, the one solid lead we might have had,”
Thatcher berated.

“The Old Man would never have talked to us,
effendi
. Master Pavli knows that,” El-Nemr protested.

“And this man might have followed the clues the Old Man gave him and led us right to the Eye,
or to Falconi, which would be the next best thing,” another voice said. It was calmer than the voice identified as Thatcher, and bore a slight accent that was not Egyptian but might have been Greek. This could be Pavli. “He might have done, Captain, had you not failed so completely.”

“And now, when your incompetence has been so far indulged,”
Thatcher broke in again, “you have the gall to berate your men for losing him tonight? You are overmatched, Captain. You have been beaten, and we cannot afford that kind of failure.”

“My Lord
Thatcher,” El-Nemr’s voice called out in fear, “I beg of you, do not!”

There was a crackle of otherworldly energy that rang throughout the building, and El-Nemr cried out in anguish. Kit stepped forward as if to throw herself over the banister and into the fray on impulse, but the Red Panda grabbed her arm and motioned back the way they had come in.

“The Eye of Anubis is a mighty prize,” a voice boomed in anger, “and Maxwell Falconi is the key. If we lose either of them due to your bungling, Captain, you will suffer as no man before ever has!”

The unearthly light flashed again and the tortured cries of El-Nemr rang out through the house
. But the upper levels were empty except for the silent darkness of the night.

It was the sound that made Kit Baxter open her eyes. It was a small sound to be sure, but it was repetitive and her first thought was that she wished it would stop.

Her second thought was that there was bright sunlight creeping in around the edges of the thick, dark curtains in the hotel room, which meant
that he had let her sleep until morning.

She sat bolt upright in indignation and discovered that the small sound she had been hearing was the Red Panda on the floor doing push-ups. He had clearly been at it for a while, as his breathing had become audible, and this had been the very small noise that she had heard in her sleep.

“I knew it!” she said crossly.

“Good morning, Kit,” he said, as much as possible as if he had not broken
a promise to wake her after three hours to take the second shift. They had been quite some time making it back to their hotel, as neither of the transportation options they had used in getting there were really available to them for the return journey. Absent a significant height to throw herself off of, the Flying Squirrel couldn’t hope to pull off a glide like the one that had brought her there. And while stealing one of the cars at the old house would have been child’s play, it also would have tipped off their rivals to their presence. If one was very good with the controls for their Static Shoes, one could adapt the system that they used when running over rooftops to land travel, alternating attraction and repulsion with the powerful field generators in the shoes. The result was a strange loping stride with a pretty impressive top speed, but the trip back to the hotel had still taken a long time.

It was clear that their enemies knew where they
were, and that for safety’s sake they would have to spend what was left of the night in the same room. This had happened on a few prior occasions, though usually one of them was unconscious at the time. And any situation dangerous enough to merit shared quarters meant that one of them would have to stay awake and watch. Given that each of them had senses honed by practise and heightened by danger, this was probably unnecessary, but even Kit Baxter would never have joked that he ought to curl up next to her. She was certain she could never get the words out without tripping over her own tongue in excitement, and then it wouldn’t exactly be a joke, just horrifically awkward. So she had behaved herself and lay down to sleep while he kept guard. It actually felt like a fairly cozy arrangement, and about as domestic as they got, and Kit Baxter’s last, contented thought before falling asleep was that there had to be something really wrong with them.

But that was then and this was now. Now she was not contented, she was angry.

“I knew, I knew, I
knew
it!” she said.

He did not stop what he was doing. If anything, his push-ups got a little faster.

“Sorry if I woke you,” he said.

“You were
supposed
to wake me,” she said. “You were supposed to wake me hours ago so I could take the second shift! Not let me have a lie-in and watch me sleep all night.”

He stopped quite suddenly, and his knees dropped to the floor.

“All right,” he said, raising one hand in protest. “First of all, there’s a difference between keeping watch and watching you sleep.”

She threw a pillow at his head. He blinked in surprise.

“I’m supposed to be your partner,” she said, her eyebrows furrowed. “What part of
don’t forget to wake me
didn’t you understand?”

“In my defence,” he said, standing
, “you’re kind of a crab when you don’t get enough sleep.”

“Don’t you even
,” she said with a warning wave of her finger. “You need sleep too, you know.”

He shrugged. “I spent some time on a meditation style I learned in India,” he said
. “I feel quite refreshed. I think we should have breakfast out, rather than have room service send up an assassin, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Red Panda-
,” she said, not letting go of her indignation at being treated like the delicate half of the equation.

“Oh for heaven’s sake, Kit,” he said, slightly exasperated
. “I couldn’t do it, all right? I went to wake you, but you looked so… contented, I suppose. Like a big, dangerous baby. I couldn’t do it. So I didn’t.”

She blinked at
him from where she was still crouched on the bed. “You let me sleep because I looked too cute to wake?” she deadpanned.

He paused a moment, as if trying to decide if she were about to throw another pillow at him. “You looked very peaceful,” he corrected.

“How did you know how cute I looked if you weren’t watching me sleep?” she said, a grin creeping across her face.

He shook his head and raised his hands in mock surrender. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said.

“You want me to stand guard?” she quipped without thinking. “I bet you’d look real cute.”

His eyes popped open wide and
Kit felt her face grow hot and beet-red.

“Kit Baxter, behave yourself?”
she offered meekly.

He nodded his slightly dumbfounded agreement, but did not look entirely displeased. She noted that his ears were almost painfully red, so at least she had given as well as she had gotten. Time to dial it back a bit.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked. “Aside from washing and eating.”

He shrugged. “That’s about as far as I had gotten, really,” he said.

“Boss-,” she protested.

“I mean it,” he said
. “We’ve been operating to a degree on the assumption that Max had fallen into the hands of his enemies, in many ways because it was a worst-case scenario and this is kind of what we do.”

“But they don’t know where he is either,” she said, picking up the thread.

“Right,” he nodded.

“But we’ve also been operating under the assumption that if we looked for the Eye of Anubis, we would find the Stranger,” she said
. “And aside from driving to Luxor, where there is not actually a pyramid of any kind… we don’t really know how to do that.”

“Right,” he agreed.

“So?” she demanded, standing at last.

“Maxwell Falconi has been a mystery man since 1890 at least,” Fenwick said
. “He got us from Toronto to Egypt with a penny postcard. So
he
must have had a plan for contacting
us
.”

“That’s gonna be tough to do,” she said
, “with Heckle and Jeckle watching us like hawks.”

“Yes it is,” he agreed brightly
, “unless we get out in the bright sunshine and lose ourselves in the crowds. The temples really are quite stunning, I’m rather excited to show you.”

She blinked at this. “You’re saying that the best way we can help is to go play tourist?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Get out and see the sights,” she continued.

“And have breakfast, yes.”

“Like a pair of human targets,” she grimaced.

“Now you’re on the trolley,” he said.

There was a small pause.

“That one was more Jolson than Cagney,” she said gently.

“Well, they can’t all be winners,” he shrugged.

The day felt like a whirlwind to Kit Baxter. There were other travellers seeing the sights of Luxor, of course. Most of the people in the crowds were either there to see the wonders or to sell something to the people seeing the wonders,
but Kit didn’t really notice any of them. She was awestruck at the enormity of her surroundings, at the fact that people had made such things with their own hands, and at how very long ago they had done so. She felt like she was on an alien world somewhere, and for a time she allowed herself to be entirely distracted.

The Red Panda was clearly enjoying himself, playing guide. In his supposedly misspent youth he had travelled the world, but
all that time he had been gathering the training he needed to start his crime-fighting career. Kit had no idea that he’d even been to Egypt, but he plainly had, as he waved his hands about speaking of history and architecture and hieroglyphs and all sorts of other things that flew past Kit in a blur. She watched him talking as they walked down the narrow street. He was in a white linen suit in deference to the heat, with a white panama hat upon his head. August Fenwick usually wore browns or blacks, if only to stay away from his alter ego’s all-grey color scheme. But today he not only looked different, he
was
different. Thousands of miles away from home, he felt no need to put on the wealthy, foolish prat attitude that served as his best disguise. He was calm and in good spirits and slightly in love with the sound of his own voice, which was fine because so was she. Kit wondered if this was what August Fenwick was actually like, and if she would ever know for sure.

She sensed movement in a stand of palm trees beside them as they passed, and leaned in slightly toward him, not wanting to break
the spell.

“Boss,” she said
, “in the trees-”

“Not now,” he smiled
. “I’ve been saving this one all morning.”

They rounded the corner past the palm trees and she suddenly saw what he had been talking about. It was a row of sphinxes
– there had to be thirty or forty of them at least, all guarding the path that led past crumbled walls to the left toward an enormous temple. There were two seated statues, one on either side of the gap in the great wall of the temple building itself, and while they were still too far away to tell, it seemed to Kit that they had to be at least fifty feet tall.

He was already talking about the enormous obelisk in front of the temple and what is was made of and what it signified, and she supposed she ought to be listening, but she only had eyes for the sphinxes. She had seen pictures of the enormous one on the Giza plain and these were much smaller, but there were so many of them, and they seemed to stretch down the road beyond
. It made them seem somehow more real. Some were broken, of course, and where faces and details had been replaced by crumbling sandstone the illusion was broken, but if she did not look too closely, she could imagine them to be a pack of fantastic animals descending upon them.

It was then that she realized what she had seen moving in the trees
– she saw him again, stepping casually out from between two sphinxes. She stumbled slightly as she turned and grabbed on to Fenwick’s arm to steady herself. As if by automatic reaction, his elbow lifted slightly, presenting her with a small crook to hold onto if she liked. She wondered exactly how she could do this and make it look like she just sort of forgot to let go of his arm. Who were they supposed to be right now, exactly? Did it matter if they went about arm-in-arm? She decided that it didn’t, just as she remembered what had caused her to stumble in the first place.

“Boss,” she said
, “it’s one of our playmates from the hotel last night.”

“Where?” he said, looking at the obelisk and pointing as if he were still pontificating.

“By the sphinxes, to the right,” she said, “about thirty feet back.”

“Good,” he said.

“Good?”

“I don’t mind being watched,” he said
, “but I dislike it when I can’t watch the watchers. The last one dropped back ten minutes ago.”

“The last one?”
she asked, her brows furrowed crossly.

“We’ve been under observation since we left the hotel
.” He smiled at her as if he were discussing something extremely trivial, and she saw the August Fenwick mask come up as he did so out of long habit.

“Why didn’t you say something?”
she hissed.

“I assumed you knew,” he said
. “Besides, we were having a very pleasant morning, and I didn’t wish to disturb it.”

Kit Baxter’s head whirled as they got closer to the temple entrance. “You didn’t want to spoil our special time being stalked by killers?”

“I haven’t seen anything from this crew that says you and I can’t handle them,” the Red Panda smiled. “It’s their masters with the magic powers that we’re ill-equipped to deal with, and I’m operating under the assumption that they won’t try anything in these crowds in the middle of the day. They’re waiting for us to make a move.”

“And we are…
,” she asked, trailing off.

“Boring them to tears, I should expect,” he said
, “and waiting for
Max
to make a move.”

She started to turn her head, but he gave her hand a squeeze with the crook of his arm, the first sign she had that he was even aware of their proximity.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “I’ve got him. Don’t miss the temple over this, it really is amazing. They’re still in the process of excavating it. It used to be almost entirely buried under all of the cities that have been here since it was Thebes.”

“We’re just supposed to keep sightseeing?”
she protested.

He shrugged. “Who knows if we’ll ever get back
here?” he said. “You always say I never take you anywhere.”

She was pretty sure that she had only said that once, and it was in jest, but it was nice to know he had been listening. “I was just kind of hoping for the pictures,”
she mumbled. “I didn’t say nothin’ about assassins.”

“You love it,” he said.
“If we weren’t constantly in mortal danger, we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.”

She set her second hand on his arm as well and looked up at him, just for an instant.
What to do with ourselves?
What she didn’t know she bet that she could learn pretty quickly, given the opportunity, but she decided not to say so. If he wanted to show her the sights of ancient Thebes, she could do that.

The temple was an enormous, sprawling thing inside that just seemed to go on and on. Kit was swept up in the wonder of it all, but she was
n’t quite able to turn off the Flying Squirrel’s senses now that they had been awakened. It became clear to her that there were, in fact, three of El-Nemr’s men in the temple with them. If El-Nemr was still in charge of them, or even still alive. His screams last night had been terrible things, and she could only guess at what Thatcher had done to him. Magic gave her the creeps. She and the Boss could out-think and out-fight just about anything, but there didn’t seem to be a way around this hocus-pocus.

Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted something
else. A young Egyptian boy who shrank back into the shadows as she turned, but did not disappear entirely or avoid her gaze. He looked to be about nine or ten, poor but not desperate, and he was afraid, that much she could see.

“Red Panda,” she said, interrupting his discourse on
Amenhotep’s colonnade, “boy in the shadows. Four o’clock.”

“Oh yes?” he asked, without turning.

“He doesn’t belong. Local, poor, not selling anything,” she said. “And I’ve seen him earlier today, I’m sure of it.”

“Where?”
he asked.

“Don’t know,” she admitted
, “but I’m sure of it. He sees us, and he sees our shadows, and he’s biding his time. That’s my guess.”

He nodded. “Good enough. Follow my lead,” he said. They walked quietly for another moment, then suddenly broke into a run, turning a corner and ducking immediately behind an enormous sandstone column. He held his hand aloft and closed his eyes in concentration, reaching out with the tendrils of his mind.

Their three pursuers rounded the corner at full speed and stopped for just an instant before running ahead with an excited cry, each of them convinced that they could see their quarry just ahead in the distance. The two of them stood in silence another moment before the young boy Kit had spotted also ran around the corner, more tentatively, but still quickly. He looked from side to side almost hopelessly at seeing no sign of his quarry. Kit whistled at him from the shadows and he turned, his eyes opening wide in amazement and grinning broadly at the sight of them.

“I get the feeling this one is all right,” the Red Panda said, waving the boy over.

“If he isn’t, I quit,” she said seriously.

The boy spoke no English, or if he did, he didn’t speak any to them. He led them quickly and furtively away from the well-trod paths filled with tourists, into the narrow streets and slums of the city. The Red Panda was certain that they had lost their pursuers, but knew they could
n’t stand out much more in these surroundings than if they had been… well, if they had been a six-foot-four man in a white suit and hat travelling with a beautiful redhead. There didn’t seem to be anything more alien to their surroundings to compare it to. The boy led them down an alley to the back door of a shuttered building and gestured that they should enter. He smiled again, pleased with his success, and his grin was an infectious one.

Kit looked at her Boss. “If this is a trap,” she said
, “it’s a good one,” and opened the door.

The inside of the broken building was surprisingly cool, but maybe that was only after a morning spent in the desert sun. There were cracks between the boards covering the windows, but after the stunningly bright sunlight outside, the darkness seemed so complete that it almost appeared blue for a moment. In the corner, a patch of the darkness seemed to shift and move. Kit settled back into an action stance and pulled a crimson boomerang from her sleeve, ready to throw it at the next thing that moved.

“That won’t be necessary,” a familiar voice said from the shadows, and Kit gasped in joy in spite of herself.

“I see you got my note
,” the Stranger said.