The Scorpion’s Bite by Aileen G. Baron Read Free Book Online Page A

upstairs, Lily sat outside at the café across from the hotel, watching the traffic along the dusty street: old carts and new cars; men wearing three piece suites and carrying briefcases bustling along; Bedouin on sleek Arabian horses; women in Paris dresses; women wearing head scarves and embroidered abayas. And everyone walked down the center of the road, casually blocking traffic.
    Amman was still a town that was building. Some streets were paved, some not yet finished; everywhere, half-built stone houses, some Turkish style, some modern Bauhaus with curved balconies and glass brick partitions.
    She had ordered a crème caramel and a bottle of Jordan Valley water. While she waited, the man with the straw-colored hair who had been watching her at Petra snaked through the tables toward her.
    He sat across from her and asked in faintly accented English, “Do you mind if I join you?”
    There were plenty of other tables. The café was less than half filled, mostly with men, some by themselves engrossed in the newspaper; some with friends, leaning forward, speaking with eager faces and elaborate gestures.
    “I’d like to talk with you,” the man said.
    A shepherd moved his flock slowly down the center of the thoroughfare, ignoring angry drivers blasting horns of automobiles.
    The waiter brought the bottled water and crème caramel and set them in front of Lily. She fingered the cool bottle where small drops of water ran down the outside.
    “About what?”
    “We have much to discuss,” the man with the straw-colored hair said. He leaned forward, and grabbed her hand.
    She snatched it away and rubbed it on the side of her dress.
    “I know who you are,” he said. “You are not his sister.”
    He’s talking about Gideon. Who was this man? What did he want?
    The man looked around at the other tables, lowered his voice. “It could be to your advantage,” he said. “And not too much trouble.”
    She felt a vague uneasiness, felt the menace underneath his soft voice.
    He wants to pay me to do something underhanded? Lily didn’t answer. She threw a handful of piastres on the table, grabbed the bottle of water, and stood up.
    “Don’t go yet,” he said, reaching for her arm again.
    She pulled away, ran across the street back to the hotel, her heart pumping, and left the crème caramel on the table, untouched.
    ***
    When she returned to her hotel room, the laundry sat on the freshly made bed, starched and ironed, and all colored a vivid electric yellow, with the orange scarf, the one that she had used to cover her face in the whirlwind, neatly folded on top. The laundress had boiled everything together.
    And the next morning, in a new Jeep, a new hat tied under her chin with shoelaces she had fastened above the brim, and dazzling yellow jodhpurs and shirt bright as the morning sun, she drove back to Rum.

Chapter Eight
    Lily, Gideon, and their new guide, Hamud bin Abdul Aziz from the Beni Sakhr, sat in the shade of the wall of an ancient ruin about forty kilometers north of Petra, eating a lunch of tomatoes and cucumbers and hard-boiled eggs. Klaus was lying in the sun half-propped up on one elbow, his eyes on Hamud, his face tilted up toward the sun.
    “Mad dogs and Englishmen,” Lily told him.
    “Englishmen can’t always be wrong,” Klaus said. “The sun is good for the soul.”
    “We’ll go along the King’s Highway,” Gideon had said when they left Rum. “Any spot of strategic value has ancient fortifications—Roman, Crusader, Turkish.”
    “Is that why we’re here?” Lily asked. “To find locations of strategic value?”
    Gideon stared at her. Is it possible that he doesn’t know why we’re here any more than I do, she wondered?
    “Donovan picked us to work in Trans-Jordan. Because we’re archeologists?” she asked.
    Gideon still didn’t answer.
    Of course he knows why we’re here. He visited Abdullah and Glubb in Amman, and left me to map the Roman theatre. He knows.
    “Archaeologists can go