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Jasmine braced her empty hand on the back of the seat in front of her and counted the seconds until they arrived at the airport.
The driver came to a screeching halt in front of the departure terminal.
Jasmine let go of Ace’s hand, pulled a wad of over two hundred dinars from her pocket, tossed it into the front seat of the taxi and dove out the door.
Ace was right behind her.
Once inside the doors, she looked around frantically. “Where would they go?”
A chirping sound had Ace glancing down at his cell phone. “They’re at the gate, boarding a plane for Athens.”
Jasmine ran to the closest departures display board and searched for the soonest plane leaving for Athens. “There!” She pointed at the one leaving in less than ten minutes. When she turned toward security, a hand gripped her arm.
She spun toward Ace. “What are we waiting for? They’ll leave soon. We have to stop them.”
Ace shook his head. “You won’t get past security without a passport and a boarding pass. By the time we get through that line,” he nodded toward the line to get into the airport through the security checkpoint, “they will be well on their way.”
She looked left and right, desperation making her want to scream.
Ace draped an arm around her shoulders and leaned close. “And you don’t want to draw any attention to yourself from the security guards, or we won’t get in at all.” His cell phone chirped again. “And now, we have a bigger problem.”
Jasmine’s belly clenched. “What?”
He guided her back out the doors. “The museum was just notified that the copper scroll has gone missing. Hank is working with the curator and their security staff, going over surveillance videos to determine when it happened and who is responsible.”
“Damn,” Jasmine muttered beneath her breath. “They’ll know it was me.”
Ace nodded, his brow knitting. “Most likely, they’ll forward your image to the police and security personnel at airports, train stations and security checkpoints.”
At that moment, a tour bus stopped in front of the terminal, and tourists started to disembark, laughing and talking with each other. The bus driver and a porter pulled suitcases from the storage area beneath the bus and stacked them by the curb. As they exited the bus, tourists searched among the cases for theirs.
“I’ll be right back,” Jasmine said. She left Ace’s side, waded into the clump of men and women and grabbed a black suitcase that looked much like many of the others but had a bright pink bow on the handle. She covered the bow with her hand and rolled the case away from the others before all the people had made it off the bus.
She kept rolling the case, heading back into the terminal.
Ace followed. “What are you doing?”
“We have to get on a plane to Athens,” she whispered, ducking her head as she passed an airport security guard.
Following closely beside her, Ace waited until they were past the guard before saying, “How are you going to do that when they’ll know you were the interpreter?”
“I’ll explain in a minute,” she said, then ducked into a ladies’ bathroom.
She entered a stall, closed the door and locked it. Then she held her breath as she opened the suitcase. “Thank God,” she breathed as she stared down at a bright array of ladies’ clothing. After riffling quickly through the contents, she selected a pair of khaki slacks, a white blouse and a navy-blue blazer.
She quickly stripped off the dark tunic and trousers she’d worn to the museum and stepped into the trousers she’d selected. Thankfully, she’d worn the pouch she carried with her everywhere, tucked beneath her clothes. In it were a number of passports she’d acquired over the last four years and the burner phone that was her only link to Eli.
She extracted a passport with her American identity, tucked it into her front pocket, then pulled the blouse over the pouch, tucking the hem loosely into the waistband of the trousers.
The clothes were large on her narrow frame, but the thin red belt she found among the woman’s accessories helped her cinch the waistband of the trousers so they wouldn’t fall off. Her dark shoes were serviceable runners a tourist might wear.
She pulled her hair back, tied it with a flashy blue and green scarf at the base of her neck and fit a white floppy hat on her head. Satisfied with her transformation from dark to light, she zipped the suitcase and removed the luggage tags that indicated the tourists were headed for Egypt next. She tucked the tags and the pink bow inside the case and zipped it closed.
The entire transformation took less than five minutes.
Before she left the bathroom, she dropped the tunic and trousers into a waste bin and added enough wadded paper towels to cover them.
When she emerged, she found Ace leaning against the wall beside the door.
