A car horn beeped at the bottom of the hill. A man standing next to a beat-up old Land Rover had one hand in the car and the other waving in the air. Saxon waved back, slipped into his desert robe and turban, and led the way down the slope. The man blowing the horn in the sandblasted vehicle was an aristocratic-looking Arab whose upper lip was hidden under a luxuriant mustache.

“What’s up, Mohammed?” Saxon said.

“Time to go,” the Arab said. “Bad people come.”

He brandished the barrel of the Kalashnikov automatic rifle toward a point about a half mile distance. An oncoming vehicle was kicking up a dust cloud.

“How do you know they’re bad people?” Saxon asked.

“They all bad people around here,” the Arab said with a gold-toothed smile. Without another word, he got behind the wheel of the car and started the engine.

Saxon had learned to respect Mohammed’s skill at keeping him alive in the Wild West atmosphere of Yemen’s backcountry. Every chieftain in the area seemed to have his own private army of brig-ands, and larceny and murder in his heart.

He slid onto the passenger seat. The Bedouin piled into the back. Mohammed mashed the accelerator. The Land Rover kicked up dirt and sand. As the driver ground through the gears, he managed somehow to steer and hold on to his weapon as well.

Mohammed kept checking his rearview mirror. After several minutes, he patted the dashboard as if it were the neck of a trusty steed.

“We’re okay,” he said with a wide grin. “You find your queen?”

Saxon told him about the sarcophagus and the mummy of the young girl.

Mohammed jerked his thumb at the Bedouin in the backseat. “I told you. This son of a camel and his village are all crooks.”

Thinking that he was being praised, the Bedouin displayed a toothless grin.

Saxon sighed and shifted his gaze to the barren countryside. The locale changed, but the scene was always the same. A native con man would tell him in excited tones that the queen he was looking for was literally beneath his nose. Saxon would make a hair-raising crawl into the middle of an ancient necropolis that the con man’s forebears had looted hundreds of years before. He couldn’t count the number of mummies he had encountered. He had met a lot of nice people along the way. Too bad they were all dead.

Saxon dug a few riales out of his shorts pocket. He handed the coins to the delighted Bedouin and declined the man’s offer to show him another dead queen.

Mohammed dropped the Bedouin off at a cluster of desert tents, then he drove to the old city of Ma’arib. Saxon was staying at the Garden of the Two Paradises Hotel. He asked Mohammed to come by the hotel the next morning and they would decide on his plan.