A/N: Kiki, you were logged in as a guest so I couldn't reply to you directly - but your review made me go squee! in the middle of the supermarket :-) So this chap is for you. And thanks to all the other readers who have favourited this or posted reviews.

The direct flight from New York to Cairo got in at just after 06:00 local time, but it was more like 08:00 by the time they cleared customs. Joss was rubbing her temples, trying to subdue a pounding headache as they left the relative comfort of the air-conditioned arrivals hall and ventured outside to the taxi rank. There they were surrounded by a crowd of young men, some only boys, all touting for hotels. The babble of their voices washed over her, and she was content to let John deal with the furore. She sat exhaustedly on her suitcase while he haggled in Arabic with a couple of them, finally winnowing them down to one middle-aged man who nodded and smiled at them, half-bowing as he ushered them in the direction of his taxi and hastening to seize the handle of her case from her. The other touts drifted away or turned their attention to other passengers trickling out of the building. It was actually only moderately warm, in the shade at least, but she could tell that as the sun rose the temperature would climb rapidly. They collapsed onto the back seat of the taxi and watched the straggling pale beige outskirts of Cairo roll past them.

"Do you have any idea where we're going next?" she asked John, leaning her head on his shoulder.

"I've got a contact here, someone I knew from a while back," he said, taking her hand and stroking it. He looked unshaven, but alert. Lucky stiff had slept nearly all the way from New York; she supposed he must have had a lot of practice at sleeping on airplanes. "We'll dump our stuff at the hotel and freshen up and I'll make a couple of calls, see if I can locate him. Then we'll see."

The hotel was a small building jammed in between two much taller, sleeker towers near the city centre. When they arrived in the lobby Joss was impressed with the marble facings and gleaming brass fittings. "Don't get your hopes up, Joss. They put all the money into the lobby," John whispered to her. So it proved as things got a lot more plain in the hallway leading to their room. Still, it was cool and clean enough, even though the view was of the closed shutters of another hotel room in the next building, five feet away. She tottered across the tiled floor and collapsed on the bed with a relieved huff. John sat down next to her, peeling off his shoes and socks. There was a wooden fan on the ceiling above the bed, and slatted wooden shutters at the window – open now to receive the tiny whisper of a breeze making its way between the buildings. The sound of Cairene drivers continuously tooting their horns at each other echoed around her head as she fell asleep….

POI*POI*POI*POI*

When she woke it was early afternoon. John was sitting in a chair by the window turning his phone over in his hands.

"Did you make contact with your guy?" she asked, sitting up.

"Yeah. He's out of the Army now, providing security at tourist resorts and such. But he's going to call in a couple of favours and ask around. He'll get back to me tomorrow."

Joss ran her hands through her hair. "So what do we do while we wait?"

John raised his eyebrows at her and gave a long, slow blink, accompanied by his most brazen smirk. Really, there should be a law against that look…

"Are you kidding? We can do that any old time. Not every day of the week I get to visit Cairo! C'mon, John. You've been here before, right? Where should we go visit first?"

He pretended to be downcast, though she could see the glint in his eyes which promised good things for later.

"I was working last time I was here, but there used to be a good restaurant not too far down this street. And we're only about a fifteen minute walk from the Egyptian Museum. If you want to kill a couple of hours we could go there, I guess."

"Right, then. The Museum and then dinner at the restaurant." Energised, she grabbed her suitcase, abandoned just inside the door, and hoisted it up onto the bed.

"Make sure you wear something with sleeves. When I was here last the local men tried hassling Kara because she was dressed in a sleeveless top and shorts."

"I bet that didn't end well," said Joss, pausing as she pulled her travelled-in t-shirt over her head.

"Well, no. She hospitalised three of them, and we had to, um, cut our visit short and leave the country quite quickly. The folks at Langley were pretty pissed with us."

"Uh huh. Okay, I promise not to hospitalise anyone. Or draw unnecessary attention to myself."

She changed into a cotton skirt and a long-sleeved blouse and they made their way down to the marble-clad lobby and out onto the street.

Maybe it was John's presence with her, or perhaps the male population of Cairo had developed some manners since John's visit, but in any case there were no incidents on their walk to the Museum. They played tourist for more than three hours, moving through room after room of wonders. A monumental statue of Akhenaten looming over her from the shadows, its immense, distorted visage like something from a Halloween funfair. The inscrutable calm of Tutankhamun, gazing at her from his gleaming golden death mask. The rank of great kings of the past, their strange grey-brown mummified faces, wisps of reddish hair clinging to their dry scalps. An enchanting collection of little models of everyday life in the Middle Kingdom from some noble's tomb – farmers driving cattle, a bare-breasted woman kneading dough... Joss stared in fascination at it all, feeling like one of the gawking tourists she'd so often smiled at in New York. At last they emerged into the Cairo dusk. Cars were still tooting their way along the streets and around Midan Tahrir as they began their stroll back through the night to the hotel.

A few street vendors were still around, most packing up their wares. One young lad was listlessly displaying his tray of plastic-wrapped cookies and snack bars in the hopes of a last sale for the day. As John and Joss approached he lifted his head hopefully, the street light showing the opaque, grey pupils of his soft brown eyes. Cataracts. Joss caught her breath – the kid was way younger than Taylor, should be in school but here he was scraping a living on the street. It didn't seem right. She fumbled in her bag for some coins and bought one of his cookies. John looked on, an odd expression on his face. "You can't help everyone," he murmured to her as they turned away.

"You're a fine one to tell me that," she shot back.

He gave a sad smile. "Yeah, you're right."

They walked on in silence.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

"So, I called some of my contacts and asked around about your guy," said Muhammed. He was a tall, handsome man with thick, wavy black hair and smooth mahogany skin. They were sitting outside a restaurant sipping tea and watching the passers-by. He paused for another sip, and went on. "It took some digging, but I finally found someone who remembered him."

Reese leaned forward. "So do you have a location on him?"

"Yes – and no." Muhammed's face was serious. "My contact remembered him because he continued to deny his involvement in any terror network, or anything else, the whole way through his interrogation. Your people were especially interested in the money trail from his transaction with the Chinese, but he denied it all. In the end some quite, ah, extreme measures were taken, but he still denied it." Another sip of tea.

Joss was shaking her head at this. "Didn't it occur to anyone he might be innocent? Nah, stupid question," she answered herself.

Muhammed gave an elaborate shrug. "What happens, happens. In the end they gave up and dumped him. Out in the desert, beyond Giza. He was still alive at the time, but..." He shrugged again.

Reese sat still, thinking this through. "Can you give me a map location? Even an approximate one?"

Muhammed sighed and shook his head. "It's not going to be any use, Joe," he said.

Reese was getting Google Earth up on his phone. "Just give me an area, Muhammed. I need to wrap this one up with as much certainty as I can."

Muhammed took the phone and scrolled around until he found the area he wanted and handed the phone back to Reese. "From what they said, I think it's about here. But you won't find anything."

"I know," said Reese. "But I have to look."

"Well, good luck, Joe." Muhammed got up from the table. "Thanks for the tea." He turned and walked away into the crowd.

"Joe?' said Joss, smiling.

Reese shrugged one shoulder. "Didn't seem any point in telling him the truth now."

"No, I guess not. So what do we do next?"

Reese was looking at the map on his phone. "I guess we hire a car and go look."

POI*POI*POI*POI*

They waited until after the heat of the day before venturing out of the city. The road was dead straight; the landscape almost completely flat. Desert to the right, desert to the left, desert straight ahead, all the way to the Libyan border, hundreds of miles away. After a few miles Reese slowed the car down. The sun was setting ahead of him, its horizontal rays throwing every slight dip or hump in the ground into high relief. At last he pulled to a stop, turned the car, and they began the drive back towards the city, hugging the side of the road and slowing to not much over walking pace. Nothing – not that he was even sure what they were looking for. A grave mound maybe, where a dessicated corpse had been dumped in a scrape in the desert and covered over. Maybe to be dug up by archaeologists in a thousand years' time, a natural mummy.

The sun dipped lower, and disappeared. The desert was purple, the sky deep blue. There was a bright glow in the sky ahead of them – a city of twenty million people lighting up the night. Some flickers and flashes in the gathering dark out to their right caught Joss's eye. "Hey – look, John," she said softly. "It must be that sound and light show they do for the tourists at the pyramids each night." Beams of light were stabbing up into the sky, playing across the tiny triangular shapes away on the horizon.

He glanced out in that direction. "Yeah." After another couple of minutes the light was almost gone and he began to increase the car's speed. "There's nothing here, Carter. Let's go home."

Back at the hotel he stretched out on the bed, gazing up at the ceiling fan as it rotated slowly.

"We could go back out tomorrow," said Carter tentatively. "Take another look."

He shook his head slowly, still transfixed by the fan. "No. No, I don't think so. I don't think he's there."

"Hm." She flopped on the bed beside him. "What next?"

He let out a long sigh. "I think I'll sleep on it. But right now I can't think of anything else. I guess we have something to tell Talbot, at least."

She hugged him around the waist. "Do you think he'll let you go?"

"Don't know." He didn't feel like talking, so he pulled her close and kissed her instead. She responded enthusiastically. He pulled her on top of him, and she didn't object in the slightest, running her hands over his shoulders and up his neck to bury her fingers in his hair. In return he slid his hands under her tee shirt and along her back, rejoicing in the smooth expanse of warm skin. Suddenly they seemed to be wearing far too many clothes…

After they finished they lay in a happy, sweaty tangle of limbs. The sounds of the traffic outside had died away a little. Reese planted a kiss on Joss's forehead as she lay with her head pillowed on his chest. He ran his fingers through her hair: such beautiful hair, thick and dark and glossy.

"Hey John." Her voice was sleepy.

"Mm?"

"Let's go be tourists again tomorrow."

"Huh?"

"Well, we don't have any more leads on Marriott right now. Let's take a day off this and go do something else. Sometimes that shakes new ideas loose."

He thought for a moment. Maybe she was right. He kissed her forehead again. "Admit it, you just want to see the pyramids."

She chuckled in the dark. "Yeah, you got me there. But who knows? Maybe something will come of it."

"Hm. Maybe." There was silence then, just city noises coming in through the window as they drifted off to sleep.

POI*POI*POI*POI*

There was a gaggle of beggars waiting just inside the gate to the pyramid complex. Some danced around offering themselves as guides; others, more realistic perhaps, simply sat at a short distance, calling out. "Baksheesh! Baksheesh!" the babble wove into itself, becoming just a confusion of white noise. Reese took Joss's arm firmly and they wove themselves through the crowd. Tourist police looked on, bored but prepared to move in if any of the beggars or touts got too aggressive.

They began the walk towards the pyramids. From a distance they didn't look all that impressive, Reese thought with disappointment. But as they drew closer he revised his opinion. The problem, he decided, was scale. In the flat desert there was nothing to give a sense of scale. It was only as they got close enough to resolve the dots moving around the plateau on which the man-made mountains sat, that he realised just how mind-bogglingly big they were. Those blocks of stone which formed the lower courses of the nearest pyramid were not just knee-high – they were the height of a tall man.

"Wow," he heard Joss say as she suddenly got the change of perspective. Suddenly his heart lightened. He couldn't be sure what they'd return to in the States – how Talbot would take his lack of success – but he had a surge of happiness that he and Carter were here, now, together. It wasn't exactly a vacation, but it was surely the nearest they were going to get for a long time, maybe ever. So he grabbed her hand as they strolled closer, their necks gradually craning back as they took in the towering height of the ancient monuments.

And so again they played tourist. Carter paid for a camel ride, laughing and clinging on as he took pictures with his phone. They queued up to see the restored ship in its special museum. They paid Egyptian pounds over to a local, who guided them into the burial chamber of Khafre's pyramid, and pointed out the graffiti to them – some from the French invasion at the turn of the 19th century, some dating back to Roman times. They wandered among the tumbled stones of the mortuary temple of Menkaure at the far end of the complex, marvelling at the high shine still there on massive granite blocks more than four thousand years old. Then they sweated in the hot afternoon sun as they trudged back towards the entrance, although Carter stoutly maintained that it got hotter in New York in the summer. There were food vendors selling falafel and cold sodas nearer the heart of the site; they bought some and found a baking hot fallen stone to sit on while they planned their next move. "Wait'll I tell Fusco about this," said Carter as she ate. "Can you imagine what he'll say? 'Jeez, Carter, ya didn't need to go all the way to Egypt for falafel, there's a great falafel stand just two blocks away!'"

Reese smiled back at her as he took a swig of Coke. Then his eyes narrowed. There was a beggar over there – one of the ones who just sat on his mat and called out to the tourists as they passed. A big guy, bigger than the normal run of Egyptian beggars. A straggly beard which was mostly white but still betrayed the odd streak of blonde…

He was on his feet, moving towards the guy, his Coke forgotten.

"Baksheesh! Baksheesh!" the beggar was saying, over and over again, mechanically. Reese was faintly aware of Carter catching up with him as he reached the man, who turned his face towards them. A sunburned face, baked deep brown in the Egyptian sun. But where Reese expected to find piercing blue eyes there were vacant sockets.

"Baksheesh!"

Carter sucked in a shocked breath at the sight of the man's ruined face, but Reese was suddenly completely sure. He crouched down next to the beggar. "Daniel Marriott? We've been looking for you..."

To be continued...