Scorpion Scheme Read online

  "Only three!" Tucker flashed me a toothy grin. "The fourth person was an Egyptian tour guide."

  "Yay."

  "But that's the good news about today, Hope. They were relieved that no one was killed this time."

  "Yet." They were not professionals, the grey-turbaned man, the tour leader, had said. His name was Muhamed. I'd taken his phone number, too, so we could stay in touch. I turned my head from side to side, testing my tight scalene muscles as I said, "It could have been worse. There was no second IED." Yet.

  "See? Now you got the spirit of it. One of the other guys told me, 'You know how you have school shootings in America? We have bombs.'"

  "Good to know."

  "No one was hurt too badly. They mostly have eye injuries and PTSD and need stitches and glue, but they'll be all right."

  "Except Mr. Becker," I pointed out.

  "Yeah." Tucker picked up his phone. "You could call his daughter. I wish they were at the Cairo International Hospital with us so we could check on them."

  "I guess the KMT Hospital was closer. I'll wash up before I message her." I yawned and reached into the closet for a pair of white terry slippers. They looked twice my size, but … free slippers!

  "I'll come with." Tucker's eyes gleamed.

  I couldn't help smiling. This guy would do me on my deathbed. As I unzipped my suitcase and scooped up my toiletry bag, I asked, "What did you make of Youssef?"

  "He seemed like a nice guy." Tucker grabbed his razor and moved close behind me.

  I shrugged. "Once he showed up."

  "Well, to be fair, the whole area was blocked off for police and ambulances. He had to walk in. And he did keep in constant contact once he got our Egyptian phone numbers."

  Youssef had looked 30ish, with dark, observant eyes, carefully-combed black hair, pleated grey dress pants and previously-polished leather shoes. He said he'd missed us in the airport between the toilet incident, us exiting the wrong doors, and—this was the big problem—us changing SIM cards.

  "Yeah, but I e-mailed our new numbers to Isabelle and Sarquet Industries. They should have figured it out." I shook my head. No matter how courteously Youssef had led us to the Egyptian Classic Continental, offering us dinner and room service, I didn't trust the guy. "But at least he made sure we didn't have to go with the police to make a statement on the IED. Points for that."

  "Want to join me in the shower?" Tucker wiggled his eyebrows at me.

  I laughed. "I should probably wash off the blood and bomb dust first."

  "That's what the shower is for!" He dropped his voice. "Ladies first."

  I blushed. He meant that he'd make me come before he did. Most times, he succeeded.

  "Oh, you think I jest. But wait 'til you see this." Tucker waved his phone at me and pressed play.

  A drum beat and a tambourine immediately straightened my spine. I knew this song: "Walk Like an Egyptian."

  "Nooooo!" I covered my eyes. Total '80s night cliché song for our Cairo debut.

  "Yessssss," he said, shaking his hips in time with the first guitar chord.

  By the time the Bangles started singing, Tucker was shimmying his shoulders, showing off his pecs and biceps.

  I applauded.

  He reached for the hem of his shirt, and I bent over, almost barking with laughter.

  I needed this. Total decompression. No time to think about IEDs or blood or the old man fighting for his life on a hospital gurney.

  Don't worry, the turbaned man, Muhamed, had told Tucker. Tourists get the best medical care. They pay for the best. Not like Egyptians.

  I shook my head. No. Stop. Stay in the moment with Tucker.

  Tucker lifted his shirt, flashing me his hairy stomach before he turned around to swivel his ass suggestively on the chorus, almost like he was belly dancing for me.

  "Woo hoo!"

  Tucker executed the classic "Walk Like an Egyptian" hand moves, flexing at the wrist and elbow and pointing one hand forward and the other behind his back and away from him. Then he whipped off his shirt.

  "Ay caramba!" I wished I could call out in Arabic. I loved the muscles in his chest and abdomen and even his slight love handles. The hair on his chest and back had surprised me after Ryan's smooth skin, but I'd gotten used to it.

  Tucker spun around to pivot his ass a few more times before he reached for his belt buckle. Once he got his belt free, he waved it in the air before he drew me closer and tried to spank me with it.

  The hotel phone trilled in the air.

  We both stared at the phone, a fancy, white, gold-trimmed contraption resting on the closest night stand.

  "Forget that thing," said Tucker. He flexed the belt at me.

  "But what if it's about the IED?"

  He hesitated. "They'd call us on our cell phones, not at the hotel."

  "That's true."

  He smacked my ass with his belt. I yelped.

  But the moment had passed, and we both knew it.

  The phone rang and rang, a high, brittle sound that filled the room.

  No. Unfair. I hadn't even had a chance to tell Tucker about Mr. Becker's last words (treasure? Kruger?). And this was our time. We deserved silence and privacy and shower fun.

  Still, I crossed the room to pick up the phone receiver with the tips of my thumb and index finger. "Hello?"

  4

  "It's Isabelle Antoun, darling." As if I wouldn't have recognized her lovely, throaty voice with a slight English accent. She'd invited us to Egypt, all expenses paid, and talked past my objections, only to abandon us at the airport. "Youssef told me you'd arrived safely at the Egyptian Classic Continental, but I wanted to assure myself, is everything to your satisfaction?"

  I gazed longingly at Tucker. He bared his teeth at me as I said, "We're fine."

  "What a dreadful welcome to Egypt for both of you. I hope it hasn't turned you off our entire country now."

  "Of course not." My hand curled on the receiver. I hate when people use my name as a verb. Go away.

  "I know you were supposed to start your rotation tomorrow, but really, I think it would be best if you took a day to recuperate. Youssef could take you to see the Pyramids. What do you think?"

  Strange. "I thought you wanted us to start in the emergency room right away."

  She chuckled. "Darling. Why would you think that? It's far more important to look after you and Dr. Tucker and establish cordial relations between our two countries."

  "Um." No doctor or administrator had ever offered me a day off. They prescribed work, work, work, and for kicks, more work.

  Tucker raised his eyebrows at me in a meaningful way.

  I smiled back at him.

  He danced toward me with the "Walk like an Egyptian" hands and a head bob, making me choke back a laugh. "I think we're okay to start working. My ears are almost back to normal." Such as they are.

  "Oh, I insist. What a way for my country to greet you! Let me take you to the Pyramids. You want to go, don't you?"

  "Yes, of course."

  Tucker's legs sprang apart, startling me.

  He jumped around so his butt faced me. Then he started twerking, rhythmically shaking his butt along with the song.

  I almost screamed into the receiver. Especially when he reached for his crotch.

  I frantically gave the throat-cutting signal, pointing at the phone.

  He winked at me and popped open his jeans button with a kapow! motion.

  Oh, God. He was such a goof. But he was my goof.

  And there went the zipper. Another hand flourish, like he was playing the guitar chord right over a critical area.

  I writhed with silent laughter. I held up my hand for him to stop.

  Instead, he wriggled his hips against mine, shedding his jeans before dancing backward, inviting me to join him in the bathroom.

  "Sunrise over the Pyramids. Such a magical experience. Something not to be missed in one's lifetime. Riding on a camel's back. Or horseback, should you prefer a more stable ri
de. We could commission it all for you. You wouldn't have to do a thing."

  "Um." I couldn't think when Tucker whipped around to waggle his booty in my face.

  "Or some people prefer to visit the Pyramids late in the day, when most of the tour buses have left. Next week, you must come see the golden sarcophagus of Nedjemankh, which was smuggled out of the country and recently recovered from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. On Monday, the sarcophagus will be unveiled at a grand ceremony by the Ministry of Antiquities—"

  Tucker grinned as I checked to make sure his front half was as ready as his rear half. Let me tell you, he was ready to rock and roll. A bomb literally could not keep this guy down.

  "Sounds good," I managed to say to Isabelle.

  "Which do you prefer? The Pyramids, the sarcophagus—"

  I had no idea what she was talking about. "Could I call you back?"

  "Oh, but darling, I need to make arrangements."

  Meanwhile, Tucker encouraged me to strip and join him.

  I shook my head at both of them. "I'm, uh, we should work at the hospital. Establish a routine. After hours, we'll visit the Beckers and the Mombergs—"

  "Don't feel that you must, Dr. Sze. We already know you're a committed physician, and we applaud you."

  Tucker pulled me in for a kiss. I gave him a quick peck that he immediately deepened before his own phone started broadcasting Arabic music from the depths of his abandoned jeans.

  He swore.

  "Is everything all right?" asked Isabelle in my right ear.

  Steezy. Out loud, I said, "Dandy! Peachy keen!"

  As Tucker released me to dig for his phone, Isabelle continued, "If not the Pyramids and the Egyptian Museum, then how about the Al-Azhar Mosque, which is not only one of our oldest mosques, completed in 972 CE, but one of the world's oldest universities?"

  Mosques make me happy whenever I see their round domes. I like circles. I smiled involuntarily.

  "Or the Church of Sergius and Baccus, where the Virgin Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus took refuge when King Herod slaughtered all male infants."

  Gah. That killed my mood, along with Tucker taking a left into the bathroom for his call.

  "Downtown Cairo was once called the Paris of the East in the 19th Century. Or, if you grow weary of history, you could shop, eat, play tennis, or ride horses on Gezira, an island in the Nile."

  "Oh, that's okay. I know I'm here to work." Everything she described sounded more like a fantasy than anything accessible to me.

  "Not at all, Dr. Sze." She pronounced my name correctly, with the "tse" sound instead of the simplified version like the letter C. "Please. You must indulge yourself. This is the trip of a lifetime."

  I exhaled. I'd transformed myself into a test-taking, procedure-acing robot doctor. Then, when I came to Montreal and inexplicably ran into murder and deceit, I took on the amateur sleuth mantle too.

  It never occurred to me that I might have fun. That this could be a vacation.

  Tucker had done his best to sell Egypt to me, but my brain had subconsciously answered, Yeah, yeah while I figured out what to pack, if we needed vaccinations, and how to persuade McGill's powers-that-be to let us out of the country for an elective. (Truthfully, the last was a cakewalk. St. Joe's couldn't wait to shed me and my hithertofore unseen ability to magnetize evil toward their hospital.)

  Yet here was the woman who'd solicited us and whose organization had paid for our trip across the world. And she was telling me to take time off.

  "Huh," was all I managed to say aloud, when I pressed the phone back to my ear.

  "Think about it, Dr. Sze. You deserve a day to yourself."

  "But don't you want us to come and help patients?"

  She paused for a moment. "The best way you can take care of patients is by taking care of yourself first. We don't want you jet lagged and stressed when you make important decisions. We want you to enjoy your stay, and our country. Please think about it, Dr. Sze. You can call or text me any time, and I'll let your hospital know. They're already aware of your difficult day. No one expects you to go to work right away. It would be inhumane."

  And yet that inhumanity was how I'd lived my entire life. I needed to wrap my brain around this.

  Isabelle had never given me a straight answer about why she'd recruited me and Tucker for a free trip to Egypt. She'd insisted we could talk about it face to face.

  Now she didn't expect us to spend every waking hour at the hospital in penance.

  So why did they want us here?

  My cell phone buzzed. "I'm sorry, Isabelle, could I call you back? Someone's trying to reach me, and I'm afraid it might be about the IED."

  "Of course. Whatever you need to do. Please take care of yourself. Not to mention that handsome fiancé of yours." She tinkled a laugh and bid me farewell.

  I ignored the new call and popped in the bathroom to touch my handsome fiancé's back. He smiled briefly but didn't stop blathering on his cell.

  I sighed and answered my phone. WhatsApp told me it was Mr. Becker's daughter, so my stomach knotted even before she updated me on the bleeding in her father's brain.

  5

  Thursday

  The next morning, I disembarked from the taxi into the rain, still slightly groggy from a fitful sleep.

  "You okay, Hope?" asked Tucker.

  "Yup." I lifted my bag over my head as a shield. Who knew it rained in the desert? I followed Tucker and Youssef past the white concrete pillars mounted at the front of the Cairo International Hospital.

  It looked more like a hotel than a hospital, to my inexperienced eyes: white, multi-storied, with rows of reflective green glass. That plus the surrounding palm trees made me feel like I was on vacation.

  I shielded my eyes and focused on the upside. "I never thought I'd work at a hospital with palm trees out front."

  Tucker smiled and squeezed my hand. "A good omen, right?"

  Right. If you didn't count Mr. Becker's epidural hematoma and cerebral contusion and the cut-up Mombergs as bad omens.

  Outside the hospital, I surveyed the taxi drivers, the families, and the black-uniformed guards with SECURITY lettered in yellow across their backs. Could any of them harbour a bomb?

  No. I wouldn't succumb to the stereotype of Middle Eastern terrorists. I reached for Tucker's hand instead.

  Youssef grinned over his shoulder at us. "Which tree do you mean? It could be a real palm tree or a mobile tower."

  I stopped interlacing my fingers with Tucker's. "What are you talking about?"

  Youssef studied the closest tree. "That one is real." He pointed to one near the sidewalk with grey/brown, flaking bark. "But see? That's a tower disguised as a palm tree."

  I surveyed Mr. Fake, the concrete marked with horizontal lines, like a bleached, airbrushed version of a palm tree. Unease flickered in my chest. Post-IED, I preferred everything out in the open. "Why make your cell phone towers look like palm trees?"

  Youssef's eyebrows jumped up and down in surprise. "They're more beautiful that way."

  Beauty. That had never occurred to me, or any local politician in my lifetime. Jobs and efficiency, yes. Beauty, no.

  And yet maybe that was a guiding principle in Egypt.

  Inside the hospital, my eyes widened. So much natural sunlight! That alone made my Vitamin D-starved soul expand. True, the walls could use a fresh coat of paint, and I felt slightly claustrophobic at the sea of bodies crowded in the lobby, but its high ceilings and wooden front desk thoroughly shamed our home base of St. Joe's. Which doesn't take much.

  We nodded at the security guards, stepped through metal detectors, and ran our back packs through X-ray machines on a conveyor belt.

  Youssef's phone buzzed. He shook his head as he read the text. "Excuse me. Isabelle has a software problem at Sarquet. You can wait for me if you need an introduction to the head of the emergency department."

  "We're fine," said Tucker. "Good luck to you and Isabelle."

  I wasn't so sure
, but I smiled gamely. After twisting down progressively narrower hallways with zero windows, we came through a side door to the main ER entrance. Tucker pointed to a triple-nurse triage station beside a series of registration desks in the ER.

  "We made it!" I said.

  I let Tucker bat his baby brown eyes at the registration clerks. White male privilege is a total thing, with extra helpings for a charming blond dude.

  While the clerks giggled and fluttered, I rolled my eyes and followed the Dr. Tucker fan club into my first real taste of an Egyptian hospital.

  My mind whirled at the similarities to St. Joe's—intense-looking doctors giving lectures to eager medical students and residents, X-rays and CT's displayed on computer screens, and even a familiar-looking electronic medical record system, although their EMR logo said Selsis instead of SARKET. The ER even smelled pretty much the same, sort of antiseptic with a whiff of pus.

  Of course the differences popped too. A strong preponderance of brown skin, which seemed cool. Nearly all of the doctor leader types were older men. Most of the women, whether staff or patients, wore a head covering.

  But the rest of their clothes made me pull at the front of my scrub top and wish I'd ironed it. Every Egyptian doctor sported a white coat with a name and specialty embroidered on the breast. The men wore ties and dress shirts. Females looked like they'd stepped out of Instagram. I'd never realized that the black outfits with eye slits could be made of silky material that was much nicer than the two sets of ink-stained green scrubs I'd packed.

  Tucker switched to Arabic to hail two men in white coats who stood outside exam room 5, directly opposite the nursing station.

  I glanced at the taller one in silver glasses, whose white coat said Pathology. He avoided my eyes. The other guy, short and good-looking, turned and smiled.

  "Do you know him?" I muttered out of the corner of my mouth.

  Tucker grinned. "Now I do!"

  How annoying was that. I exchanged a few shy smiles with the women and asked, "Can he point us toward the chief of emerg?"

  "He says, 'I'm sure he'll be here within the hour.'"

  An hour? Dr. Mostafa Sharif was scheduled to ease us into our elective eight minutes ago. I checked my e-mail. Nothing from Dr. Sharif. Sounded like a lazy chief. Which meant I might not learn as much. On the other hand, I kinda welcomed a boring day after the jet lag-IED combo.