'But—why?" Cleopatra asked, appalled.

"So there could be a stable population along the banks of the Nile, mostly, and the cities not be endangered by the floods."

"And for this they drowned half of Egypt?"

"It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now we're discovering that without the floods, there is no silt, and without the silt, the land and the river both are much poorer. People have to use fertilizers for the first time in our history."

"But that makes no sense!"

"It did for a while. But now that the negative effects of the dams

have taken their toll, a project has been under way to reengineer the dams to allow silt-rich waters to pass through, creating an artificial flood that will raise the river so it can flow into newly dug irrigation ditches as well as the old ones. It will not be as high or as beneficial as the floods once were, but better than it is now."

"I must see this."

Gabriella considered what she had just said and caught her breath. "/ hope we don't see it from too close a perspective. The first release is scheduled for this week. If we are still down here when it happens—well, we won't be, surely."

She changed the direction of her thoughts. "There's to be quite a celebration. Once we're above ground again, well away from here, Mo will collect us, and we'll leave Alex for a while, maybe go to Cairo so we can see some of the festivities while we get lost in the crowds until these thugs find others to torment. Which won't take long, they hate so many people."

"How will my beloved find us? Once the handsome mercenary takes our bait and the amulet to be blended with him, that is?"

'I don't know. Does he have our cell phone number?" Gabriella asked. She was unaware that at that very moment her cell phone was ringing except that it was muffled by the paraphernalia in her bag.

CHAPTER 14

'Still no answer?" Andrew asked, as Leda hung up the phone once more.

'No. Not at the house and not at her office. I'm going to try her aunt. She might know what's going on."

But the phone at the contessa's villa switched at once to the voice mailbox. Leda left a message saying that she was concerned that she could not reach Gabriella.

'Try not to worry," Andrew told her. "We'll be in Alexandria by next Thursday anyway."

'We can find her there unless…" His voice faltered uncertainly and his eyes widened with question. "Unless you think she…"

Leda sat still for a moment, then said in her elegant, slightly accented voice, "Not dead. I'd know. But she is in trouble. I keep thinking of a place, dark, stone, cool…" She shrugged, the fabric covering her shoulder shimmering with the gesture.

'A tomb perhaps?" Andrew asked. His voice was hushed with the excitement the image gave him. He'd confided in Leda during their first long talk that as Andrew McCallum he'd cared only for modern, highly technical devices with practical applications. But once he blended with Sir Walter, the writer's love of antiquities, their mysteries and stories, became a consuming passion of his own. With Sir Walter's acquisitiveness and Andrew's money, the collections, though started late, had already grown to such proportions that he had added a museum wing to his home in the Scottish Borders.

'Perhaps," she said. "As you say, we soon will know."

Just then, the telephone rang. Andrew answered. "Yes, Contessa. She's right here. I'll put her on."

The Contessa Virginie Dumont sounded slightly out of breath. "Your message was forwarded to me and I tried to call you back when I got it, but it was blocked then, saying you were no longer available," she said. "I am on Kefalos. We were betrayed by one of the people we tried to help. Gabriella and her family were attacked, the police told me, although the idiots implied that perhaps they were not and Gabriella made up the story to cover for her supposed part in a robbery and attempted sabotage of the Biblioteca last night."

'Why in the hell would they think something like that?" Leda asked.

'Perhaps they were led to believe it by people who wished them not to look too closely into the matter."

'You think they were bribed?"

'Probably. They are certainly wrong. I spoke to her when I called to warn her, and she could have been killed but for this rather devastating man I met later, here on Kefalos.'

'Wait. What man?"

Ginia explained. "His name is Galen Kronos and after meeting my niece he—well, I cannot discuss it on the telephone." There was a bit of a giggle in the contessa's voice. Leda was annoyed. Ginia shouldn't have mentioned the guy's name if there was something about him she wasn't going to discuss because it was too sensitive.

'Odd that he rescues Gabriella, then ends up on Kefalos at the same time as Ginia," Leda mused.

'Not all that odd," Cleopatra replied, amused. "I have a feeling that my counterpart may have had a hand in that. If the man was as devastating as Ginia says, he may be a worthy vessel for Antony."

"She must have found that doohickey then, the one with Antony's hair. I'm surprised she'd hand it over to a strange guy, tell him to go blend with Antony, and he'd trot right off to do that little thing. I've never known devastating guys to be so accommodating myself."

'I believe I may be able to help you change that, Leda dear," Cleo purred, smugly, Leda thought. "Our Andrew, for instance, appears ready to accommodate you in most matters."

"Yes, well, 1 feel sort of the same about him. What's not to like? He seems like a real grown-up person, not just another bad boy. He knows all about the blend, is blended with a great author, also a real grown-up person but with a lot of brilliant romantic notions. He thinks, reads, is age-appropriate, not bad-looking, thinks I'm not bad-looking, and I like him a lot. But Cleo?"

"Yes?"

'When it comes to being accommodating on our behalf, please remember that I'm somewhat older and a whole lot creakier than you were the last time you indulged in horizontal refreshment with Antony. I'm not sure what it was exactly you did in bed that rendered Romans so—accommodating—but I hope if it was really athletic, you'll respect your vessel and tone it down a bit, okay?"

'Was it bad news?" Andrew asked.

She told him.

'Poor lass, this is a great strain for you, isn't it? Have you been sleeping at all?"

She admitted she had not.

'You should lie down, get some rest. There are two extra rooms in this barn of a suite. I'll call you if anything comes up."

Gratefully, she agreed, though she doubted she'd be able to do more than a quick nap. However, as soon as she lay down, she was plunged into a deep, dreaming sleep.

The cisterns were three stone-vaulted stories deep, and although Gabriella's flashlight was not strong enough to make out many details, she knew that many of the repairs had been done with ancient columns from other structures, the capitals stuck on upside down on some. Still, it was an awesome feat of architecture. It was actually something for which Egypt was well-known.

They descended past the first arch and the second, but as they approached the ground, Gabriella's light picked up the black gleam of water quite high on the columns.

'I was afraid of this," she moaned to herself.

'If the floods no longer come, from where came these waters?" Cleopatra asked.

'It must be left over from the quake," Gabriella guessed. "My guess is it's salt water, not fresh. Perhaps it filled these lower levels when the sea came flooding back into the harbor, but there is a blockage closer to the shore that prevented the waters from receding into the sea again. This is too high for us to wade. We'll have to take our chances on the street."

She began climbing back up the ladder but when she came to the opening through which she had descended into the cistern, she found it was no longer open. A stone slab sat directly overhead. She could not budge it with the single hand she could spare from the ladder, which trembled beneath her feet.

'Trapped," she said. "Probably unintentionally. Some enterprising security guard no doubt remembered the excavation and that it had an entrance to the cisterns."

'An awkward time for your guards to become efficient," Cleopatra said. "What is that smell?"

'Sewage probably. They rerouted the sewers when the cofferdam was built and may have punched through too far in places—or perhaps it's more earthquake damage. That's the least of our worries now. I truly don't want to swim in this, but if we can't go back, I don't know what else we can do."

Gabriella had been focusing on her dialogue with Cleopatra so totally that she was startled when the boat glided past two levels below her.

'What's a boat doing down here anyway?" she asked aloud.

The boatman looked up, seemingly as startled as she was, and waved. A gold tooth glinted in the beam of a lantern he held aloft.

'What is a lady doing down here anyway?" the boatman answered good-naturedly. "What did you do that brought you here?"

'I'm an archaeologist with the Biblioteca," she said, ignoring the odd way his question was phrased. He was a tall, imposing man with an aristocratic look about him, but she thought anyone who would choose the cisterns as a place for a boating holiday had to be a bit strange. "I was checking on the effects of the recent earthquake on these cisterns, but my colleagues seem to have forgotten I came down here and blocked off the door to the upper regions."

'Ah," he said as if that made perfect sense. "I am in charge of this place, checking the integrity of these cisterns and the water level. I have seen many snakes and rats down here, lady, and the water is almost eight feet deep. It will be deeper still when they free the river. You had better ride with me."

'Thanks. I guess I'd better," she agreed, and descended the ladder again to climb into the boat.

The boatman was a rather majestic-looking older man, late fifties or early sixties perhaps, with a hook nose and a humorous mouth. He helped her settle into his boat before lifting his oar again. She shivered. It was chilly down there. She pulled the sweater from her pack.

'I have a thermos of hot coffee, lady. You would like some, yes?"

'That would be wonderful," she agreed. She realized suddenly she had had nothing to eat or drink since her dinner with Mike Angeles the previous night, which seemed as if it had happened years ago. The boatman wiped the edge of the plastic thermos cup, poured steaming and fragrant coffee into it, and offered it to her. She sipped it gratefully, warming her hands on the cup. It felt wonderful going down, though the taste was a bit strong and slightly more bitter than usual. The brand, no doubt.

She had hoped it would wake her up, but suddenly her weariness was too great for mere coffee to contain. Her hands trembling, weak with lack of sleep, she was able just barely to return the cup before she felt her eyelids getting heavy, right there, sitting up in the boat.

Somewhere a dog howled. "What's a dog doing down here?" she wondered and began to worry that it had been washed in with the earthquake and was starving and injured or more likely starving and drowning somewhere in the watery labyrinth of the cisterns.

'I've heard that howl before," Cleopatra said. "Between the time the snake bit me and the time Octavian came into my mausoleum."

'Oh, you think it's Anubis, then? I bow to your experience but really, doesn't one dog sound pretty much like another?" Just the same, chills unrelated to the temperature ran down her spine. Though how she could tell them from the chills that were related to the temperature she wasn't sure. There were quite a lot of those.

The slap of the boatman's oars and the warmth of the coffee soon changed that, however, and she felt herself nodding off. The lamp cast peculiar shadows on the arches. She was mildly surprised, in her drowsy state, to note that these shades were not long and even but short dapples of figured darkness, almost like hieroglyphics. In fact, she became sure that if the boat had not been traveling so quickly, she could have read them.

Shortly after serving the coffee and returning to his oars, the boatman had begun singing a little tune under his breath. His voice was magnified by the echoes in the cavernous chambers, and it seemed less a song and more a chant. It was soporific. The coffee had not done a thing to keep her awake. She dozed again, and as she did so, the chant grew louder and the shadow hieroglyphics moved and shifted, though how she could tell with her eyes closed, she didn't know. Perhaps this was all a dream?

"Dead? What? Again?"

"So it would appear. Are not the names of Osiris writ by magic upon the arched ceilings?"

"Ah, so they are."

'Sokar, Osiris, Wennefer." Yup, Leda decided, that would be Osiris, he who was blue of head and with turquoise on his arms. It was dim in the Field of Reeds, but you could still make out the colors a little—the rain hat the boatman wore was definitely blue, and his shirt did look turquoise.

"Field of Reeds? We did not come to the Field of Reeds. Only to the cisterns beneath the city."

'Oops, sorry, those things poking up out of the water look like reeds to me," Leda said.

"So they are. But how? These cisterns are entirely of stone."

'Cracks maybe from the quakes?" Leda surmised. A babble of interior voices discussed the idea.

Leda had, of course, seen herself in dreams before. But she'd never talked to herself in four-part harmony in previous dreams and anyway, she wasn't seeing herself, or even

Gabriella. She was seeing Cleopatra exactly as she appeared in the queen's own memory of her reflected image. Except, of course, that she was wearing baggy modern clothes and carrying a knapsack.

So, whose dream was this anyway? Hers? Cleo's? Gabriella's? Hard to tell. It seemed to belong to them all. Asleep, she and Cleo blended more completely than during waking hours. Now it seemed that perhaps they all drew closer in sleep.

'Is this the bit where our heart gets weighed?" she wondered to anyone who might pick up the thought. She received the image of Cleo shrugging, distracted by the scene opening before them as the little boat—a barge of sorts really, because those weren't actually oars the boatman used but more of a pole—plied the reed-choked underground waters.

"Don't give me that. You ought to know this stuff. You've done it before, after all. If we're going to have our heart weighed against a feather, I've got some serious explaining to do first."

Cleopatra's focus returned from the dimly lit progress of the boat. "Why do you say such a thing? We have lived a blameless life this time."

'Maybe since you've been on board, but you just ask Rudy if you think I have. Of course, I've never murdered anyone, and I haven't actually ever stolen anything, though I have borrowed Rusti's clothes on occasion and relocated other little articles, especially when I was in the Navy. I don't lie about things—/ evade the questions. And watching Daddy cured me of getting into too much trouble with bad boys."

'That is a very good start," Cleopatra said, seeming relieved. "But—ah—/ do not think this is the part where our heart is weighed. See you? Osiris docks the little boat and our sister climbs from it to shore. How can it be that we have come so far, but look! She climbs and as she emerges from the underworld, she is just inside the city wall—"

"There's not one anymore, you know."

"Yes, but I know well enough where it is, even without the proper landmarks. Formerly the Nile entered at this point and branched off into the channels my ancestors caused to be dug to supply us with water."

But climbing from the boat had stirred Gabriella's consciousness. She no longer dreamed, and the connection, if not broken, sagged like the string between two tin cans. Leda fell back to sleep dreaming of Andrew and his wonderful library.

CHAPTER 15

Gabriella emerged from the underworld into a breezy dawn breaking over Alexandria, most of which lay behind her. She pulled out her cell phone and to her dismay saw that she had forgotten to turn it off. The batteries were dead again.

She shoved the phone back into her bag and looked up the street that turned into Canopic Way leading to Rosetta or to Highway 1 to Cairo. A minivan taxicab slowed as it reached her. It was not a familiar one, but Mo leaned across the passenger seat. "Need a ride, lady? Climb in the back like a regular passenger," he told her.

She was so glad to see him she didn't even ask how he had known to be there at the precise time she needed him.

'Was there much difficulty?" he asked her once he'd rammed the minivan back into the torrent of traffic.

'No. For you and the others?"

'All are safe just as we planned. Twice I have traded cars with friends to keep our enemies from my own trail."

'You weren't followed?"

'I do not think so. You?"

'I wasn't followed but the cisterns were flooded. I caught a boat ride with a man who was apparently some sort of city maintenance person—no. Wait. How can that be?"

'How can what be, cousin?"

'The man brought me all the way from the cisterns beneath the Biblioteca to this place. But the parts known to us do not extend this far."

Mo shrugged. "Perhaps they've been enlarged recently, and you have been too—preoccupied—to notice. Certainly some things have changed if the city has assigned someone to look after them. Or perhaps the quake broke down some of the old barriers?"

'It seems unlikely," Gabriella said. Quake damage was seldom so convenient. The most recent one had already resulted in the discovery of Cleopatra's canopic jar and DNA and subsequently her tomb.

They fell silent, both considering the ramifications of her journey but neither wishing to discuss it further.

'So," Mo said, breaking the silence, "where do we go now?"

'Cairo. I think now is an excellent time to clear out of Alex for a while. There are to be a great many boats making the journey to Aswan for the release of the waters. Perhaps it is time for us to embark on that journey up the Nile I've had that nagging need to make. But—Mo?"

'Yes?"

'Let us cross back over the bridge and take the Desert Highway. We would see the pyramids and the sphinx once more."

'Very well," he agreed, hearing in the request from his cousin the politely phrased command of Cleopatra.

He concentrated on his driving until they were beyond the edges of Alexandrian traffic. Of course, the highway was still busy—both of them were—but it was a straighter shot with fewer vehicles turning onto and off the road.

She dozed for a while, despite the traffic noise. When she awoke, she found Mo was snatching glances back at her in the rearview mirror. She met his eyes and he put his arm up and waggled his fingers back at her in greeting, then stretched the arm across the back of the front passenger seat.

'You have bad dreams, little cousin. Other than the recent catastrophes, what is troubling you?"

She smiled slightly, "You mean other than almost being blown up, murdered, or possibly only my family murdered while I was kidnapped?"

'Yes, other than those little things," he said, answering her smile with the ghost of one that did not quite break through his worried frown. "I do not think matters are working as you hoped they would. All of us assumed that once you found Cleopatra's tomb, you would relax, enjoy your triumph. When you told me that in spite of our mistake before, you wished to blend with the queen and she had consented, I thought, ah, now she will be happy. She will learn the secrets of the ancients, which have always fascinated her. But no, you have become withdrawn and silent even to us who love you, you snap at times, and are always distracted. We who love you miss you. Come, tell your old Mo your problems as you did when we were kids."

Gabriella sighed deeply and leaned forward from the backseat of the cab to lay her head against the arm her cousin had stretched across the raggedly upholstered back of the passenger seat.

It was indeed wearing, this balancing of the skills, needs, and knowledge of two different personalities, particularly under the stressful circumstances of the last twenty-four hours. She had hoped for a longer and more peaceful settling-in period.

'You're right, Mo," she said. "I've been under a lot of strain, and I know it has been difficult for you, too. You have been with me through it all, everything that has happened

here and much of what occurred on Delos. You know what we went through, even causing a death to achieve our goals. And yet, I fear, now that I have achieved it, instead of adding to the legitimacy of our cause, my blending with Cleopatra has put it in greater jeopardy."

'Is it not always so with a great risk that might bring great rewards? And even so, we have seen little evidence of the queen in your demeanor. And it was not your fault or hers that terrorists attacked the Biblioteca. Nor was the attack on our home the fault of your blend. It was, again, the result of the risks that we take to help the mistreated women, as we have done these many years."

Mo's eyes in the mirror were even darker than usual with concern and ever-ready sympathy.

'If only my brothers had been like your cousin," Cleopatra observed wistfully, "there would have been no need to kill them nor to ally with Rome. Why is it that you have not married him? I gather that cousins marry all the time these days."

"I guess because neither of us wants to. Mo is like a brother to me."

"As if that matters."

"Perhaps not, but also I am like a brother to him sometimes as well. That sort of thing does matter. I gather you had no fraternal feelings for Antony?"

"None whatsoever. But what about the financial side of things?"

"My money comes through a trust administered by Ginia. She has been married several times and doesn't really approve of it. She knows what has been done to me also and would be very surprised if I decided to marry anyone, especially my Egyptian cousin. So you lied to our brave friend about that supposed treasure for nothing."

"I did not lie to him! Antony ruled half the Roman Empire before Octavian made war upon us. You know of the gift he made us of the Pergamum Library, but what you don't know is that Alexandria never received all of those books. Somewhere along the way, some of them were lost, along with a great deal of other tribute Antony acquired for his war chest. He did not ever give me gold,as Egypt was richer in gold than any other land in the world, but he did not send it to Rome, either, as far as I know. I never asked what he did with it. We had so much else on our minds, then. Perhaps he will tell us when the American returns blended with him."

'You seem very sure that will happen," Gabriella said.

'Aren't you? That sort of man risks his life for the love of riches. He would die for them. Taking on a second life in order to gain such a prize as I described to him should be no problem at all. Oh yes, he will blend with Antony and Antony will return to me— us—within him."

'I rather doubt it," Gabriella said glumly. "Once he finds out where the treasure is, nothing will cause that one to make even the slightest detour in his plans."

Cleopatra smiled within her. "You are underestimating Antony." Actium and her beloved's political marriage in Rome occurred to them both at the same time and Cleopatra shrugged. "Or perhaps not. In that case we will have to seek him out, I suppose. Without being too obvious about it, of course."

"I rather think the police will be seeking him for us. He said he has an idea where your mummy is, and I'm sure the authorities would like him to confide that information to them."

When she awoke, Leda told Andrew about the dream.

'It was the cisterns? You're sure? Might it not have been a flooded tomb complex?" Andrew asked. His voice was hushed with the excitement the image gave him.

Leda shook her head, smiling slightly. "No. This wasn't just impressions like the other times. This was very clear, perhaps because it was a dream and took place when I was asleep. I didn't have the rest of the world making psychic static between the Cleos, so we got better reception, I guess you could say. Anyway, she seems safe for now, and we'll be in Egypt soon."

It wasn't quite soon enough. Wednesday on her way back

to the hotel from Rusti's, Leda was once more snatched from her own time and place and felt herself, blinded, deaf, and unable to speak, suddenly, roughly, lifted. The movement tore at her so that she felt she might fall to pieces. Then, as with the other episodes she had experienced, she was back in the cab, which pulled up to the hotel.

Fortunately, she made it up to Andrew's suite before the second part of the incident occurred. It felt similar to the first one, except that when it stopped, when at last her bones settled back into their sockets and she could see and hear once more that she was safely back in Portland, she lay on the floor of the hotel room, left with the impression that the wind was blowing right through her.

'Are you all right?" Andrew asked, pressing a glass of water into her hand for want of anything better to do.

'You must think you've taken up with some kind of nut or something," Leda said.

'No, no," he said, and his voice carried a slight Scottish burr. "You're communicating with your other half. I'm sure you're right about that. It's not mental illness, it's a gift."

'Gee, I wish they'd just sent a card," Leda said, accepting the water and drinking it in a single swallow, as if it were a shot of something more substantial.

He laid his hand on her shoulder, and without thinking about it, she reached up and covered it with her own.

The following day Andrew's private jet left for Alexandria with an intermediate stop in Athens, where it picked up the Wolfes and Chimera, who had flown into the larger airport by helicopter from Kefalos.

By midnight that night, Portland time, they arrived in Alexandria, and the next day began their preproduction work on the program, which had by now been titled by someone who had read entirely too much H. Rider Haggard, Finding the Femme Fatah Pharaoh.

As soon as he arrived back in Alexandria, after a brief stop to collect his weapon from the place where he'd stashed it before leaving, Mike Angeles made his way to Gabriella Faruk's family compound. Since Gabriella/Cleopatra was able to convince him to take on Marc Antony, she was his best hope of getting Marc Antony to level with him about the treasure.

He took the bus, with much comment from Antony on damn near everything both on and off the vehicle. Mashed in with other hot, sticky, smelly people, he was sweating buckets when he left the bus about two blocks from his destination. A good stiff breeze dried him so quickly he was almost chilled before he'd taken two steps. A few more steps rectified that, however, and he was dripping again. His skin and clothes reeked with the food odors emitted by everyone else on the bus.

He took a deep breath as he approached the entry to the compound. It was open, and nobody seemed to be guarding the door. But then he remembered that the bohab had been injured, so that probably explained it. Though if he'd been running things, the guard would have been replaced immediately, especially considering how he got hurt.

'Will I know her?" Antony wondered. "Will she know me? What will I say to her?"

'How about 'hi, honey, I'm home,''" Mike suggested. He was still outside the compound, sniffing, listening. "Not that I'm sure we're going to have to worry about it for a while. I have a feeling we may be the only ones home."

'But she wanted me here. You said so. She would wait. I know she would." He seized control of Mike's feet and carried them through the entrance and the outer room, also wide-open, and into the courtyard. "Cleopatra!" he called. "// is your Antony returned to you from death itself, my love!"

'Will you keep it down, dammit?" Mike demanded. "I thought you were a hotshot soldier. I should have known better. Officers!"

'Is there a war I should know about?" Antony asked. "I gathered that Octavian has been dead for some time."

"Just trust me, pal, there is something wrong here."

"How can that be? The place looks empty to me."

'That's what's wrong. She's got a big family, and they all live here. Or did. I wonder if the bad guys came back after I left. If they did, I bet they brought a tank or something. These people were armed to the teeth. But there's nobody moving now, no lights, no sounds, no smell of food being cooked…"

'On the bright side," Antony said, "there's no stench of death, so either they're all fine or were killed very recently."

'Thanks for the input, General, sir," Mike said. His weapon was in his hand now, and he prowled around the courtyard. It was closing the barn door after the horses had been plundered to try escaping notice now that his Roman guest had just announced their presence to all of Egypt, but with Mike stealth was habit.

The courtyard was untidy. The dry fountain was broken, which as far as he remembered it hadn't been before. A scrap of something white blew across the tiled path several yards away. Several other scraps and tatters hung from the bushes and draped across upended ceramic planters.

The wind gusted with a sudden whoosh, and he did hear a sound after all—doors and the shutters of the courtyard windows knocking from frame to wall and back again, a scrabble of gravel rattling across the paving stones.

'The doors are open," Antony said, whispering even though he wasn't speaking aloud. "/ think we ought to look around. Perhaps they left some clue—food or drink maybe. We could taste it and see how fresh it is, and we would have some idea of how long they've been gone. I still have a powerful thirst."

"And I may have been born much more recently than you, but it wasn't yesterday. Anyway, you're out of luck. I'm not sure what Gabriella is, but most of her family seems to be Muslim, and they don't drink."

'What are Muslims doing in Alexandria?" Antony asked, evidently having failed to notice the mosques they passed on the way, the veiled women on the bus, that sort of thing. Mike wasn't too surprised. He'd been there. The guy was still worried about his next drink. "Hah! Don't tell me. Rome couldn't hold on to it without Cleopatra's help. Once we were gone, it fell to the sultans."

'Yeah. It did. Later." The doors all opened outward, which was good because that way nobody could be hiding behind them. He simply had to look inside to see that the rooms he passed had been torn to pieces, everything broken, shredded, or pissed or crapped on. Still, there were no bodies, so maybe this was spite vandalism committed after the intended victims got away. Off to his right was the room he remembered as being Gabriella's. He didn't really expect it would be any different than the others, but it would be sloppy not to look.

'Shit!" he said when he looked in.

'It looks as if someone's here, at least," Antony said. "There's a body on the bed. Now, that smells dead to me, but old dead, if you know what I mean."

'Shut up and let me think!" Mike said, and added, also from habit, "sir."

For a change, however, Marc was on the money. The body on the bed did smell, though not strongly, of old death. She had been dead a very long time but when they drew close enough to see her it was Marc Antony rather than Mike who sank to his knees and began to cry.

'Oh, Cleopatra! Oh, my love!" He took the mummy's crumbling hand, still holding a flail, in both of his, and leaked tears all over it.

With great effort, Mike unclenched his fingers from the queen's dead body. He didn't want someone to come on them and find him bawling over this dried-up blackened bundle of bones with her glass eyes and her face frozen in rictus. And he was confused because superimposed on the mummy as she was now he saw the queen in the bloom of life, her skin flawless, her wide intelligent eyes closed in sleep, her hair without the wig short, lustrous, and soft as bird down. Still, he himself was not the kind of guy to cry over women. Even dead ones. But then, he wasn't Italian, so maybe that was the difference. Mexican men did cry over women but only on culturally approved occasions, like the death of a mother or a wife's dead body after you'd killed her and her lover. Guys who were sloppy with their crying tended to be sloppy in other emotional directions where he could not afford to go.

'Sorry, buddy," he told Antony as he remembered that yeah, he had cried when his wife and little girl left him. Not in front of anybody, though. "That lady is valuable archaeological remains and therefore property of the government of Egypt. You're gonna break her, and let's not go leaving my DNA all over her, shall we?"

'We can't leave her like this," Antony said.

'No, I know. But don't try to pick her up. You'll break her to smithereens. Looks like a fair amount of that's been done already." One foot had fallen off and was at the end of the bed. "It's got to be Abdul Mohammed's gang because they're the ones who stole the mummy. But what does he have against Gabriella anyway? He must have sent those goons here, too, but I never heard anything about it when I worked for him. And now, if we report having found the mummy, it's going to make her look guilty of stealing it. What to do. What to do."

CHAPTER 16

The production company spent its first full day in

Alexandria being told they couldn't visit the tomb or the excavation in the harbor bed where Leda had first discovered Cleopatra's canopic jar without the permission of Dr. Faruk, who was out of town for an unspecified time. It was possible she could be contacted later at the Cairo Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, but she was expected to be in the field most of the time and unreachable.

Leda tried not to worry. She knew from the dream that Gabriella had made a clean, if somewhat damp, getaway, though she wasn't sure what the other, less clear and far scarier episode of—connection—she supposed you'd call it, was about. It was almost too vague to be psychic, and though she felt that Gabriella was associated with it, it wasn't precisely about her. It was far too confusing and disturbing, and she couldn't do anything about it, so she attempted to put it out of her mind.

Meanwhile she taped some preliminary background material overlooking the harbor, showing where her beluga laboratory had been before the earthquake. They wanted her to go into "the tragic death of her heroic father, Duke Hubbard," but she refused. That was private. Of course, Daddy would have loved the notoriety. She would have loved to suggest that they contact Gretchen Wolfe for further details about the accident but figured that would complicate matters unnecessarily. Gretchen, Wolfe, and Chimera kept a low profile. Wolfe was still a bit the worse for wear from his ordeal.

She took the crew on a quick tour of the various artifacts, exhibits, and landmarks that had helped her (with the as-yet-unmentioned assistance of the queen herself) locate the hotel beneath which the entrance to the tomb was buried.

But by then Ro had decided he wanted to film interviews and a reenactment of the theft of the mummy, though the theft was old news hardly worth one of those little ticker tape updates running underneath the general blather on CNN. However, the crime remained big news in Egypt and on the archaeological news lists on the Internet.

They spent all afternoon Friday setting up. Iris was kept busy with phone calls and meetings with various experts. Ro hired extra camera people from the Egyptian TV industry to shoot the coverage for this part of the program. Stela Beer even sent over a huge Styrofoam cooler full of beer for all concerned and agreed to be one of the local sponsors. By evening, the beer was gone, the cooler emptied, and the Biblioteca Alexandrina bristled with more policemen and government officials than it had right after the theft.

Leda was such a vital part of the proceedings that of course she had to participate, even though they had nothing for her to do but stand around looking scholarly. The Edge TV folk talked among themselves about lighting and camera angles when they weren't grilling the police for the benefit of the cameras. Normally they wouldn't have started filming so early, but Ro said they could not pass up a chance to interview the investigators of this dastardly crime. The Egyptian authorities preened and pontificated for the cameras. The narrator chosen for the non-Leda-specific bits of the program, a prominent American Egyptologist most distinguished by the fact that she was also the only Navajo Egyptologist in the field, questioned them. Dr. Nizhoni was brilliant, but she was also slender and photogenic and possessed of a gorgeous, lilting alto voice only slightly spiced with the tribal accent.

She was also way more patient than Leda could have been. Over and over and over again she had to ask the same questions as the Edge crew shot different takes. They started and stopped countless times attempting to capture on the faces of the interviewed cops and authorities expressions correctly grave or shocked or whatever, trying to get the police to speculate about the things Ro thought they should and Leda knew they shouldn't.

This took place in the basement, next door to Gabriella's office, the crime scene where Cleopatra's inner coffin now lay empty.

Leda yawned. She had said her piece about fifty times already, and her back and legs were stiff and sore from standing. She thought she might see if there was an open office with maybe a chair. Chairs looked too relaxed for TV purposes, considering the enormity of the crime under discussion.

She stepped out into the hall. An office two doors down had no cops and no crew hanging around. It was unlocked so she turned the knob and opened it, reaching for the light as she stepped inside.

A voice from the darkness said, "Hey, lady, can I interest you in a used mummy?" and a hand reached out to keep hers from flipping the switch. "Close the door first, okay?"

'Eek," she said feebly. None of the self-defense moves she knew were easy to pull off when you couldn't see the person you were defending yourself against.

The door shut without her cooperation, and the light came on. "Sorry, Leda, didn't mean to scare you, but I don't want to be spotted by the cops either."

'And why would that be?" she asked, surveying the dark and handsome stranger in front of her. He wasn't actually very tall—about the same height as her own five-eight. But he was compactly built, giving an impression of solidity without an extra ounce of anything but muscle. And come to think of it, he wasn't exactly a stranger, either. The silver-streaked black hair had not had the silver streaks before, but the twinkly bad-boy blue eyes, manly chin, and wry grin were memorable. "Mike, right? You nearly got my friend Edie kicked out of the Navy."

Surprisingly, he looked a little embarrassed. "Yeah, well, I was drinking heavily then. Got kicked out myself for it later. But right now I'm trying to keep a friend of yours out of trouble, and I need your help. Only I'm not sure how much the cops know about my—er—recent activities, and I have better things to do than to help them with their inquiries."

'I have a couple of inquiries of my own," Leda said in a fierce whisper. "What the hell are you talking about?"

'I found Cleopatra's mummy in Gabriella's bed."

'What were you doing in Gabriella's bed?"

'I wasn't in her bed. I was looking for her. The place is deserted, but somebody came in and trashed it and left the mummy as a calling card. I have an idea who it was, but I don't really know why, except that if the mummy's found there—"

'They'll think she stole it, though why anyone would be lamebrained enough to think something like that is beyond me."

Then suddenly, he drew her toward him and kissed her fiercely and possessively and began disarranging her clothes. "Whoa there, big fella," she said, and started to push him away. Then from within her Cleo cried, "Antony! You have returned!"

'Cleopatra, my queen, when I beheld your lifeless and shriveled body I nearly died again but here you are, in the flesh, and I…"

'It's not just her flesh, buddy, it's mine, too. And while you kids may have a long history, Mike and I don't. There's a roomful of senior policemen just down the hall, and if you don't cease and desist pawing me at once, I'm going to yodel for them."

"You wouldn't! Leda, this is my Antony."

"Only partially. Besides, I thought you'd put him behind you. You want to dump Andy for this guy? Because I know the character he's inhabiting, and, trust me, it wouldn't be a good trade."

"You are so cold-blooded. It must be growing up with all that rain."

'That and a dear daddy who has been married five times," she said. "Anyway, I think he's got the wrong Cleo. He has a previous acquaintance with Cabriella, and my guess is she's got dibs on this version of Antony."

'Yes, but if I hadn't permitted it, Gabriella wouldn't—"

"Don't go there, okay? It's too complicated. Maybe this will cool you off. Mikey is a cute guy, but he's no Roman conqueror. He doesn't have an army or millions or probably a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. And as for the part of him that interests you, we ain't gonna pick it up because, girlfriend, we got no idea where it's been."

"You are a cruel, cold woman, Leda Hubbard, but what you say does inspire caution at least."

'We'll just take a few deep breaths and think of blizzards and Popsicles—no, scratch that—blizzards and driving on ice and…"

Apparently, a similar exchange had been occurring within Mike/Marc because he released her, took two steps back, and jammed his hands firmly into his pockets.

'So, as I was saying, we need to move the mummy, or Gabriella is going to be blamed. I came to find her in case she was still here."

'She's not," Leda assured him.

'But you'll do. I know you and she discovered the tomb together. I saw it on the news. Got any suggestions as to where we can move the body?"

'Sure. Let's bring it back here. That's the safest thing."

'How do we manage that without having a lot of explaining to do?"

'Elementary, my dear Michael. We just do a purloined letter number and stash her in the storeroom with the rest of the mummies until we can arrange for someone to 'find' her. I came to know this place pretty well when Gabriella and I were first uncovering the tomb."

'Sounds good. Can you tear yourself away from your photo ops and fans long enough to help?"

'No problem. Just keep Antony's hands to yourself, and we'll get along fine. I even know where I can find help we can trust. Chimera, Wolfe, Gretchen, and Andy would all help. We'd have to go back to the hotel for Chimera and the Wolfes, though."

'Whoever they are, we have no time to go looking for any of them. We don't know how much longer this place will be open, do we? I'm assuming we need to do a certain amount of sneaking."

'That's affirmative. Okay, let me get Andy, then. For one thing, if we get caught, his billions can smooth over a lot of problems, and, for another thing, he'd never forgive me if I left him out of something like this."

Mike's voice lowered and took on an Italian accent. "And it matters to you, this man's forgiveness?"

'Don't answer that," Leda warned her inner queen. Aloud she said, overruling the mutiny rising within her, "You betcha."

Leda found Andrew leaning on a pillar off to one side, while Ro explained his concept to the dignitaries and policemen, now gathered in the rotunda upstairs in the middle section of the library. "How long do you think we'll be?" she asked the financier.

'Ages yet, I expect. You could go back to the hotel if you want, though. I believe your part in this is finished."

'Actually, I was wondering if you could slip away with me for a bit without being noticed. Something's come up, and we need your help."

'Oh? How much do you need?" he asked.

'We don't need your checkbook, sweetie. We need your masculine upper-body strength. And the keys to the rental van. And a cover story."

He brightened considerably and looked almost completely awake once more. "Really? It sounds illegal."

'It is. Sort of. We're trying to undo a frame-up so to speak. We'll explain in the van. Coming?"

'Yes. I think I have even arranged my excuse already. It was about time to see to it." He yawned, caught Iris's eye, pointed at his watch, and walked his first two fingers away from his body to indicate he was leaving. Iris smiled distractedly and nodded. Probably if he hadn't been the moneyman, she wouldn't have bothered to smile at all, Leda thought.

Twenty minutes later Mike, Leda, and Andrew loaded Cleopatra's mummy gently into the purloined Stela Beer cooler, now emptied and thoroughly dried. It was designed to look like a mummy case, once the decorative lid was in place.

Never was a mummy moved so tenderly, since for some reason Leda via Cleo felt each jolt the body received, each crack in its ancient fragile wrappings and epidermis. The mummy was wrapped in the blanket on which it lay—no doubt the same one in which it was transported to Gabriella's bed, since it seemed to be draped over her covers, still disheveled as she left them when the attack began.

Loading the cooler back into the van, the mummy snatchers took another twenty minutes, with one brief detour, to return to the Biblioteca, where Mike and Leda entered from the downstairs door, which they'd left unlocked. They had a rug draped over the cooler to disguise it.

'Hmm," Cleopatra said. "This occasion is not at all like the other one in which I had myself disguised inside a carpet."

"A good idea is worth repeating."

As if Mike were a workman helping her store some soon-to-be-neglected artifact, Leda led him into the complex of storerooms beneath the Biblioteca, rooms that were in their own right as labyrinthine and mysterious, and certainly as full of grave goods, as any pharaoh's tomb. Here was where items still to be conserved or cataloged waited their turn for the attention of the few human beings qualified to attend to them.

Once well inside the storerooms and out of range of the security cameras, Leda and Mike moved several crates and boxes and stowed the cooler behind them, then piled containers on top of it, restoring the stored articles as much as possible to their original places.

Standing back, Leda surveyed her handiwork and turned to ask Mike what he intended to do next, but he had vanished. She shrugged and joined Andrew upstairs, where he was enjoying coffee and the Krispy Kreme donuts he had earlier asked to be flown in from the franchise in Rome.

She snatched up the last donut and the dregs of the coffee. The donut compressed into cloudlike sweetness between her teeth. "Ummm," she said. "The perfect distraction."

'Mrs. Wolfe suggested it when she heard we would be interviewing policemen," he said. "It seems to have been the right thing to do."

'Yeah, well, Gretchen knows what cops like."

Soon afterward she and Andrew returned to the hotel. "That was fun," he said. "I'm glad you included me in your little conspiracy. Though I can't help wondering who that other guy was. I mean, who he really was."

'I don't exactly know that either," she said. "I met him in the Navy. He was a SEAL then but later got kicked out for being what they call a 'liberty risk.'" He had a drinking problem and a loud mouth when he drank. I gather he's cleaned up his act since then. Ginia Dumont said he helped Gabriella out of a couple of tight scrapes, though I have to wonder how he happened to be there when she needed him to be. And um—well—he's a blend, too, Andrew."

'Is he?" Andrew asked, though he didn't sound at all surprised. "Let me guess—judging from the looks he sneaked at you I'd say it had to be either Caesar or Marc Antony."

'Bingo," Leda said. "Antony. At the other Cleo's instigation, I gather. And I didn't even want to ask about the rest of that one."

'And how do you—does Cleopatra in you—feel about that?" he asked, too casually.

Leda shrugged. "I'm not sure, and she's not saying. I think she's a bit confused, to tell you the truth."

He smiled at her fondly. "That's one thing I adore about you, my dear. You always do seem to tell me the truth. Very few people do, you know. I find it quite refreshing. By the way, I have a little surprise for you."

'Yes?"

'We are leaving for Cairo tomorrow, then on to Luxor. Ro wants to set some of Cleopatra's story against what a lot of people are calling "the rebirth of the Nile." The boat we'll be using is—"

'Let me guess, an exact replica of Cleopatra's barge."

'Not quite that good, but certainly more convenient. It's a replica of the boat that was used in the filming of the 1979 movie Death on the Nile, and it looks very much like it on the passenger decks. But it's completely modernized and updated. It looks like any other luxury river yacht until we want to make time. Then we activate the air cushion and— well, needless to say, I've had the propulsion mechanisms and the entire engine room completely refurbished and overhauled."

'Your yacht is a hovercraft?" Leda asked.

He nodded as happily as any small boy with the shiniest fastest bike on the block. "Yes! It can do up to 150 miles per hour. I have a smaller one—a flarecraft, on the Tweed outside my New Abbotsford home." Despite the mention of his Scottish manor, a la Sir Walter Scott's beloved historic home in the care of the Scottish Trust, the boat owner was all Andrew McCallum, techno whiz kid.

'Cool!" Leda said. She was trying to imagine an art deco hovercraft, but meanwhile didn't want to sound unimpressed.

'I knew you'd be pleased. What with you having been in the Navy and Cleopatra having owned a navy."

As they fell asleep that morning Cleopatra mused, "I wonder what he really wants."

"Who?"

"Andy. He seems in no rush to bed us."

"Well, I think he'd like to, but he's just sensitive enough to know it's going to take me a while to get used to the idea again."

The inner queen gave an inner sniff of disdain for that idea. "In spite of all your experience, my dear other self, and your much-avowed distrust of some men, you have learned little of the species as a whole."

"Maybe I just never learned that much about politicians."

"Well, I have, and, like it or not, a man of Andy's wealth andinfluence is a politician whether he holds a scepter or not. He is too understanding, too accommodating, too helpful, too forgiving, too good."

"Yes, but I've heard it's like that sometimes when you find the right guy. Happily married friends of mine have told me they couldn't believe how understanding, helpful, accommodating, and forgiving of their faults the right person was once they found him or her."

'Hmm, yes, but were their right people spending billions to impress them? Not that I think less of him for it, mind you, but I suspect our Andy's exemplary behavior is motivated by something other than our womanly charms, scholarly erudition, and delightful—if somewhat dramatic—company. Both my Caesar and Marc Antony loved me and usually did what they could to please me, but I never lost sight of the fact that had I not been Egypt, the richest country in the known world, my charms, if no less thrilling, would have been less amply rewarded."

'You sure know how to spoil a good time," Leda grumbled, punching her pillow. "He's just a nice nerdy billionaire who acquired a romantic streak late in life and appreciates a girl with the same qualities. Now let's get some sleep."

Abdul Mohammed's plan should have worked. It was simple, took care of two problems, would cause the person he wished to harm great damage that would ruin her career and possibly land her in prison, where she could no longer annoy his benefactors. In fact, while she was in prison if the benefactor wished to have her killed, he could then easily do so.

He had thought himself a model of flexibility to have conceived of the plan so brilliantly. He had sent back a team to finish the job started by Amir Marid ibn Yasin Abu Kadar, but his operatives found the compound deserted. Although the place had been watched, and no one had seen anyone coming or going, only the sand and the wind remained. At first he was angry and ordered the place looted (as if it were necessary to give such an order), but then he had an even better thought. He had on his hands a most inconvenient mummy, supposedly that of Queen Cleopatra. He'd ordered it stolen thinking to have a ransomable treasure, but so far such an item was much too hot to be marketed, and to publicly destroy it, which was the way for its destruction to make the most impact, could possibly have left a trail leading back to him. It was more amusing to use the mummy to destroy one of its discoverers, thus implicating her in the museum's attempted sabotage and robbery. He had friends among the police who had already suggested to their colleagues that it might be an inside job and that there was only one museum staff member in place the night of the attack.

So he planted the mummy and waited for the police to return to the compound to look for Faruk and question her again, whereupon they would find the archaeologist missing and the mummy in her bed. The illogic of an expert who had dedicated her life to preserving antiquities treating such a valuable one in such a careless manner did not trouble him. It would be suggested that perhaps the woman had a drug habit acquired on those trips she often took to her wealthy relative in Greece.

But for some reason, his informants and the police officials they were to notify were not available after he had the mummy planted. Finally, he managed to locate one of them at the museum, of all places, where they were ingesting donuts with an American television crew. His people seemed to have forgotten that they were not actually good policemen and had been enjoying regaling the foreigners with stories of their more colorful cases, including the invasion and robbery of the museum.

By the time these worthless devils convinced their friends of the need to search the Faruk compound again, it was well into the next day. While the police found the site of the looting, they found no mummy. In fact, his informants said, they felt that their original suspicions of Dr. Faruk had been mistaken. Clearly, from the damage to her home, she might have been a target of the attack on her workplace as well. They expressed concern about her, since she had disappeared from the museum without anyone seeing her leave. But then, later in the day, they got word from museum officials that Dr. Faruk was simply on a business trip to Cairo and various sites along the Nile.

This little favor for a friend was turning into a great inconvenience. Abdul Mohammed telephoned the amir and informed him that since he had lost so many men in the explosion following the aborted bombing of the museum, he simply did not have the manpower to follow Faruk up the Nile. He reported to his patron what had been done, and the amir agreed it had been a brilliant plan, had it not been a failure. But now, Abdul Mohammed said, his attempts to avenge the honor of his friend had cost him a valuable piece of property. No one had any idea what had become of the mummy. Once the compound was discovered to be empty and the mummy planted in the accursed woman's room, he had removed the watcher from the street.

The amir laughed lightly. Perhaps Cleopatra had simply arisen and walked away, he suggested. Perhaps Abdul Mohammed should lock his doors at night and beware of bandage-trailing shadows.

And Abdul Mohammed must not halt his important work of undermining the hold the ancient infidel religion still maintained on Islamic Egypt. The amir himself had a yen to see the Nile at this time of year. It was a good time for a family outing and an object lesson for the female members of his family. No matter how clever or how high a position she had artificially achieved, a woman was still a woman and could easily be put in her proper place. He would see to that and leave Abdul Mohammed to blow up whatever it was he wished to blow up next. Of course, if the amir needed a bit of assistance, he might call on his old friend. Surely blowing up a temple, a dam, or a tomb couldn't occupy all of his time and manpower?

CHAPTER 17

'Does your other voice speak so loudly and so long within you that you cannot find peace, cousin?" Mo asked.

Realizing that he had waited perhaps twenty minutes for an answer to his previous question while she waged an inner debate, she gave him a smile that was much thinner and fainter than he deserved. "You guessed it," she told him.

Mo shook his head sadly.

'Don't worry so much," she said, sitting up and giving him a consoling pat on the arm. "After all, you have helped me get this far."

'If you have the sort of problems Ginia did after her blend, I will not be proud that I have helped," he said, and heaved a dramatic sigh before starting the engine again.

'He takes a lot on himself, for a mere driver," Cleopatra said. "/ know he is your family, but you are clearly the ranking person, the one with education and erudition …"

'There you are wrong," Gabriella told her. "Mo drives a taxi by choice. He has degrees in history, philosophy, and psychology, which is what makes him such a very good cab driver."

"Why does he not teach?"

"He is a male of the royal line. At one time laws kept him from holding any job for which he was qualified. Now it is simply the custom to deny the good positions to the men in our family. My sex is an advantage in this instance because I have not been seen as a threat up until recently. Now that I have influence, and some money behind me, I could help Mo advance to a professional job, but he refuses. He says it would not leave him time to help with my real work with the women, and besides, he gets plenty of opportunity to use his education while driving people around. You would be surprised at some of the exalted personages who prefer riding with Mo to hiring a limo. My other cousins, his younger brothers, are not so well educated as he is, but all of them are intelligent and work quite hard. Except maybe for Salah. He's a bit slow."

Mo spoke again, more hesitantly. "I am only guessing this, but I think you have taken on a problem you do not know how to solve. You have wanted the political power to change the lives of women in our country and its neighbors, and you have wished for academic power and advancement in your career. But until now, you have not tasted real power. Such as being a queen. Now that you know—and now that the queen has returned, she must wish to be queen again. This is true?"

'I see what you mean," Cleopatra said, smiling inside her, "he is indeed a very perceptive man, your cousin." And this time she took it upon herself to answer, "Yes, Cousin, that is what I wish. Real power. Although Cleopatra Philopater has been credited with little to show for her reign but two love affairs and the loss of Egypt, she made some very beneficial changes in her country. She could implement beneficial changes in it again, if only she had the power."

When he looked back at her again, Cleopatra and Gabriella both saw that Mo knew he was speaking to the queen. "As always, we will do our best to get you where you wish to go, Lady, but it will not be an easy thing. Unlike matters in the days of Cleopatra, women have no power now. If a princess were to kill her brothers and sisters to gain power, she would be put to death, and no protector could save her. Still, Allah has a very good sense of humor and perhaps will provide a way."

As they continued up the Desert Highway, the heat increased, and the air quality disimproved as they drew nearer to Cairo in the late afternoon. The main bulk of the city sprawled across the Nile, a hive of noise and activity.

Mo had been lost in his own thoughts when Gabriella's voice spoke from the backseat. "Of course, I do not know exactly where we are, but are we not near the place where the great pyramids stand? Why can we not see them?"

Ah! The queen was awake even if his cousin still slept. Cleopatra seemed to be getting used to him and was becoming almost chatty. He looked in the rearview mirror. Gabriella sat as still as before but her eyes were open. It was as if she were sleepwalking. Mo found this rather creepy but he answered the queen deferentially as befitted their respective stations. At least as she would perceive them.

He gestured toward the souvenir shops cheek by jowl with mud huts, service stations, and fancy villas that had sprung up along the highway. A triangular crown seemed to top the second floor of a mud-brick home. "Great Queen, if you look closely you can see the top of the pyramid of Khafre—there! But as for the rest, from here they are obscured by these buildings."

'Ah, yes," she said. "I can see a little. But why are these structures in the way? There seem to be many people living here and yet, the West Bank is reserved for the dead, and no person prosperous enough to build these edifices would wish to live here."

'Perhaps not in your time, Great Queen, but these days, as it may have come to your attention, Egypt is populated largely by Muslims, who do not share the beliefs of the ancients regarding zoning restrictions. By situating their

businesses and homes close to such a magnet for tourist wealth as the pyramids, families not formerly prosperous become so."

'What a pity. I have looked forward to seeing them."

'We will see a little more from this road as we draw closer. However, we would have to turn onto the pyramid road to see them closely. There are many tourists there now, jostling and being very rude. I fear you would find it most unlike a royal procession." He didn't mention that his cousin still seemed to be resting, if not sleeping, and that it was a rest he was loath to interrupt.

But Cleopatra said, "No, no. My poor Gabriella is too exhausted for such an excursion. A great pity, but perhaps another time."

Despite her casual words, Mo heard an undertone of loneliness and loss. The queen, though enfolded by the body and soul of his cousin, was cut off from those who would have known her home as she did. He felt for a moment the longing she must have for the sight of something familiar, if not exactly the same as it had been when last she saw it. It made him appreciate the value of those objects men held to be immortal. Anchors in time, they would be, for one out of her own time.

'There is another way, Great Queen, if you do not mind a slight detour."

Gabriella's lips curved in a mischievous and yet eerie smile, "A detour? Dear Mo, know you not that our journey has been more rapid than the flight of a gazelle compared with its duration when last I came to this place? By all means take this detour of which you speak."

He swung south onto the new Loop Road and east toward the Cairene suburb of Maadi, where many Americans lived. Maadi was situated on a hill south of the city. Then he drove west again until they were looking out across farmland.

In the distance the pyramids stood bathed in the glow of sunset.

'Ahhh," said Cleopatra. "When last I beheld them my love was with me, and my children."

As Mo drove closer, the pyramids swelled in size until it seemed that the car sat beside them in the desert, while the moon rose over their tips.

'They do not shine as they once did," Cleopatra said reflectively. "Once their sides reflected the very shape of the moon and stars."

Gabriella's own voice spoke then. "After your time, the people who settled here carried off some of the outer blocks and spoiled the surface. Then, too, there is a problem now with what is known as acid rain, which eats the stone."

Mo smiled into the mirror, "You have not been this way before, I think, cousin?"

'No, I haven't. I'm always in such a hurry when I come to Cairo, taking meetings and dashing out to digs." Her eyes were awake now, fully the eyes of a living person, and dancing with wonder. "This is beautiful. You remember my friend Susan Wilson, Mo?"

'The American woman who writes books and brokers deals between American businesses and Egyptian ones?"

'Yes. Susan says that because the pyramids are dwarfed by the expanse of the desert, one doesn't fully appreciate their enormity. She says it is like picking a Christmas tree in a lot, then bringing it into your house. It did not look as big in the lot as it turns out to be in a confined space."

'Oh," Mo said blankly.

'Yes, well, my experience of Christmas trees is limited also, but I believe I understand what she means tonight."

Later they reconnected with the Giza road and drove across the Tahrir bridge into Cairo. On the river below the bridge, large beautiful boats vied with the usual feluccas and short tour boats, seeking the deepest part of the channel.

Mo drove them straight to the Nile Hilton. The hotel had a room permanently reserved for visiting museum staffers, since the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities was right next door. The reservation of the room was particularly fortunate at this time. The desk clerk looked a bit crestfallen to see her and complained that she was not expected, but that, of course, since the doctor required it, the museum's room was in readiness.

Mo smiled as they walked to the elevator. "No doubt finding a room where there are none to be found is worth a sizable tip for an enterprising man."

'Not exactly opulent but a good arrangement," Cleopatra said, when they reached the room. Mo thought that she spoke aloud for his sake. He had felt intimidated by her presence in his cousin before and now found himself being pleased by her acceptance of him. It was disconcerting, but, still, he could understand why many great men of her time were so charmed by her.

'Not so good as it seems," Gabriella informed Cleopatra. "This hotel and the Sadat bus terminal, as well as the traffic on the highways and bridges, generate much pollution, which penetrates the museum and damages the exhibits. Now we must get more rest. I have a meeting in the morning with the director of antiquities at the museum to determine what if any part of your scrolls should be transferred here."

She promised to lock the door and admit no one, and he departed, returning again to drive her the block to the museum the next morning.

He refused to leave her side even after she was in the meeting room until he saw that everything was as it should be, and she received cordial treatment from her colleagues. Then he wandered around the museum until the meeting finished.

His behavior was not considered odd or overly protective despite Gabriella's protective stature. He was, after all, her male next of kin. The highly conservative, even fanatical Muslim men—and she said there were more of them all the time, even in her professional circle—probably considered Mo's honor compromised because his kinswoman privately closeted herself, unveiled, with unrelated men.

His avid interest in certain exhibits excited no particular attention. The calls he placed on the cell phone he brought from the cab were ignored by those around him. He was waiting on a woman, of course. Naturally he was bored and calling a few friends to pass the time. He did what he could to reinforce this impression by rolling his eyes, tapping his toes, and lighting one cigarette after another.

But before Gabriella emerged from the meeting around noon, he had made considerable progress, contacting and making his reports to the required parties.

'I've been patient with you, son," Marc Antony told

Mike in the fatherly voice Mike imagined he'd probably used to rally his troops back when they were losing battles. That had to be it because Mike was now about the same age as Marc Antony had been when he died. "You have it all wrong about the treasure. When you lie expiring in the arms of your beloved, you realize that the real treasure isn't gold, it's your love, your life."

'Yeah," Mike said, "because when you're expiring in the arms of your sweetie, you know you aren't going to need any gold, but you would like a little more love and life to enjoy. You sort of conveniently forget that an enjoyable life and love, for that matter, don't come cheap. So now that you're on your feet again, fella—or should I say my feet, our life is going to require financing. Hence the treasure. Meanwhile, we need to save money, and you didn't much help by making us run off before we could hitch a ride with Leda's well-heeled friends up the Nile."

"I couldn't help it. The woman contains the essence of my queen, and I could tell already that her heart belongs to that wealthy man."

'There's another woman who contains the essence of your queen, too, and her heart—do you always talk like a cheap romance novel about this stuff?"

"I'm Italian, so censure me in the Senate if you don't like how I express what is in my heart."

"Yeah, well, I'm Mexican, but I only talk that way in Spanish. Hmm. I guess they don't call them the romance languages for nothing. It's okay to talk to women like that because they like it, and it might get you somewhere, but between us men it sounds overly dramatic in English."

"English? You mean the tongue of the Britons, those hairy barbarians who paint themselves blue and go naked into battle? I do not even know that language, so how can I be conversing with you in it?"

"These days Britons usually shave, no longer paint themselves blue, and only go into battle naked if they're attacked while in the shower. I was born in the USA, so English is my official first language, even though I learned Spanish at home. Since I'm the guy whose body we're in, the blend's universal translator seems to be using my language. Sorry, buddy, but times have changed."

While he carried on what was intended to be a multilingual conversation and led two lives inside himself, the Egyptian countryside moseyed past outside the windows of the train. All along the Nile people worked clearing old irrigation ditches, putting the finishing touches on new ones, and repairing the stone walls on the river's bank.

The train was crowded but not as crowded as the waterways, and with a little baksheesh, he'd scored an air-conditioned second-class seat to Cairo's Ramses Station, with stops at every village and mud hut along the way.

He needed to find Gabriella, not just because of Cleopatra,

but to see if she could give him any more information—not to mention some kind of official sanction—that would let him search for the treasure. And he needed to hook up with Leda again in case her rich new boyfriend might want to bankroll the project. But for now what he needed most was to have a little time to hear himself—the new part anyway— think. No sense involving anybody else until he knew where the treasure was located.

"Time is not all that has changed. Frankly, I feel cheated out of my proper afterlife. I'm damned if I can remember anything about feasting with the gods. This world you claim used to be the one I knew is uglier than a battlefield on the day after, more crowded, and smells worse, too. My Cleopatra loves another. And despite all of this you begrudge me a glass of wine to smooth the edges?"

'Marcus, read my mind if you can, okay? Your edges were already way too wine-smoothed. The Cleopatra in Leda isn't our Cleopatra—not the one who got me to blend with you anyway. That's Gabriella, the contessa's niece. A very classy lady, and smart. She's younger than Leda, too, and cute in a sassy kind of way. And I think she already likes me since she told me about the treasure."

"No doubt that was Little Egypt's way of getting you to embody me."

"Little Egypt?"

'I call—called—call?—Cleopatra by that name since although she is Egypt—or was—she seems—seemed—too young, too fragile, and so very small for such a weight of responsibility."

'So anyway, I think that—er—Little Egypt is still waiting for you inside Gabriella, so you can't use losing your true love as an excuse to drown your sorrows. Face it, when you were alive you were a damn drunk. That last battle you fought was a textbook example when I was in the Navy of how not to fight a battle at sea. History remembers you as a loyal follower of Julius Caesar, a rival of that nephew of his, Cleopatra's boyfriend, and pretty much a screw-up otherwise."

"You read Plutarch, didn't you? He didn't like me. He was a friend of Cicero's, and that old goat tormented me and plotted against me until the day I was able to have him killed. Plutarch never forgave me. And, of course, he didn't like Cleopatra. She was a woman, and he didn't think much of the sex. Of course, nobody knew her like I did."

"That's why you gave her a library but kept the rest of the loot for yourself?"

"It was gold. Egypt overflows with gold."

"Past tense, buddy. Up until now not even the river has been allowed to overflow."

"Of course it does, during the annual floods. Why else do you suppose they have the Nile-ometer?"

Mike formed an image of himself shaking his head. "Nope. They built a dam or two that took care of that."

"Who would do such a thing? Rome?"

"The Egyptian government and the Soviets from what I read."

"What are Soviets? Oh, I see. Gauls and Hun mixed. Terrible combination, that. But why would they do such a thing? Even to Egyptians in our time, the Nile was as much a goddess as a river."

'Damming provides power and makes irrigation easier. That was the theory anyway. Turns out, the silt that's always made the valley so fertile gets dammed up, too, so now the Nile Valley farmers have to use fertilizers where they never did before. So in a couple of days they're letting the river out on a short leash—enough of it for long enough to silt things up, they're hoping."

Marcus wasn't really listening but seemed to be thinking fast, calculating, weighing possible good against possible bad. "Where exactly are these dams anyway?"

"The first one's at Aswan; the High Dam is farther upstream."

'This does not bode well. I thought perhaps if the floods no longer came, it might make what you seek easier to find. How much farther upstream is this second dam, and what effect does it have?"

"Let me put it this way, buddy. It's drowned several ancient temples and monuments."

He suddenly found himself chuckling, then guffawing, drawing a breath, sniffing, then giggling a little before it hit him again—the image of piles of bars of gold with the Nile waters rising high above them while crocodiles and hippos swam merrily around. At that point he burst into such gales of mirth that he thought he would choke on it.

Under all that he demanded, "What's so damn funny?"

"You are, son. You are. You went to all that trouble to steal my spirit so you could steal my treasure and never realized that, from what you tell me, it's been submerged beneath the great river for lo these many years."

'Let's be clear about this. I didn't steal anything, man. I'm giving you a chance to live again, in partnership with me. The gold would have made sure it was a comfortable partnership, the kind I guess you would be used to when you weren't out in the field. Without it we will be back in the field pretty soon, getting our butts kicked, if your past experience is any indication of how you're going to affect my performance in battle. Where the hell is it anyway?"

"I have no idea now. I stuck it in a cave under my fort near the Isle of Philae. When we abandoned the fort I forgot about it."

'Forgot about it?" Mike demanded. "How the hell could you forget about all that gold?"

"I was more concerned with saving our kingdom from my countrymen. Egypt is rich. I am rich. It wasn't all that important at the time."

'Man, you really were drinking hard back then, weren't you?"

'I'm a soldier," Antony said. "Of course I drink hard. I would like to be drinking hard right now."

"Sorry about that. I've been clean and sober for twenty years, and I'm not about to louse it up because of you. In fact, maybe you were supposed to be blended with me so you could see what you could accomplish if you weren't drunk all the time."

"What would you know about it? I was a soldier!"

'Me, too. I was a SEAL—that's an elite branch of the Navy. But I got kicked out for being a liberty risk—they didn't think they could trust me when I'd had too much to drink. They gave me a couple of chances to shape up, but I didn't really take them seriously. Then they told me they figured I couldn't stop. I didn't want to think there was anything I couldn't do, so I stopped. It wasn't that easy, but I did it with the help of a bunch of other people with the same problem."

'That's just—strange," Antony said. "Didn't you get thirsty? A man must drink something."

"There's water. Coffee. Tea. Soda pop, There's even alcohol-free beer. None of it is the same of course."

'I don't know what any of those things are," Antony said. "Well, water of course. But we didn't drink that. It was for bathing."

Mike switched back to the topic that interested him. "There has to be some way to get to that treasure. Unless someone else got to it first, and if they did, it would have had to be a long time ago. Something like that would have been in the news."

"You don't make much sense sometimes, Michael."

"I mean there would have been a widespread message so that everyone knew about the treasure being found. It would be in history books probably, and I've never heard anything about it."

"I hid it well."

"You don't think you could find it again?"

"Not if it's underwater, no. In the old days, the cave would have been covered by the floods and the entrance difficult to reach most of the year. This new lake I see in your mind is a much greater obstacle."

"Yeah, but it has a low point, too. I remember reading about how they had to move some of the temples that were submerged after the second big dam went in. They were less submerged at some times than others. Maybe if you combine that with this controlled drain, we'd have a chance of finding the loot. When would the river ordinarily be at its lowest level?"

"In the summer, of course. Before the rains begin."

Mike's inner calendar and Antony's didn't jibe. Using his Turkish Arabic, Mike asked the man in the seat next to him when the river was at its lowest. The man looked at him, puzzled. "Sorry, guy. No habla the local lingo. Do you speak English?"

Mike shook his head. He didn't want to make friends with a fellow American right then. Things were confusing enough with an ancient Roman sharing his body. Fortunately, at that point the train pulled in at Ramses Station, only a few blocks from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. He stood up and waited to depart, ignoring the other man's question so determinedly that the detail about the guy's footwear failed to register with him.

CHAPTER 18

Before Gabriella had time to think, Cleopatra flung her into the arms of the man she knew as Mike Angeles. For an instant, he seemed startled, then his brown eyes kindled and his arms closed around her so that she had to elbow him in the ribs to get loose.

'What? Shit. Sorry, lady, I…"

'Darling, did she hurt you?" the woman he knew as Gabriella Faruk asked in low tones throbbing with emotion. To his surprise, Mike Angeles found that other parts of him were throbbing, too, not just his rib cage from the sharpness of her elbow but other more pleasurable throbbing as well.

'I'm sorry, too," Gabriella said. "I hope I did not puncture one of your lungs or something. She told me you would blend with Marc Antony, but I wasn't so sure."

'Say no more, cara mia," he said, sweeping her back into his arms, and wrapping them around her so that he could gently but firmly cup her elbows in his hands. Then he kissed her—or rather, they kissed each other, fervently and for such a long time that when she opened her eyes again

Gabriella saw that they were drawing outraged looks and a few leers from several of the other people in the cafe.

'Ahh, at last I am alive again," Marc Antony said.

'Yes," Cleopatra breathed, leaning into him even more heavily than his grip strictly required. "These people thought they revived me before, but until this moment I might still have been entombed. Oh, my love, my husband, is it really you?"

'More or less," replied the man Marc Antony occupied.

'I am going to lose my job if we remain here like this," Gabriella said. "Public displays of affection between the sexes are highly frowned upon."

'We'd better get a room then before these kids have us going at it like a couple of bunnies," Mike told her. "I'm sorry, Doc, but I don't know what else to do."

'It is the most discreet thing," she agreed, though five minutes before she would have thought it scandalous. "I have read silly books where it is said that a lover's body seemed to have a mind of its own, but that was before blending! If only they knew!" Her chest felt so tight it was hard to breathe, much less speak, her skin was flushed, her heart was thudding, and every cell in her body yearned toward his.

'The Nile Hilton is just…"

'Not there!" she cried. "Anywhere else but not there. My colleagues all go there. We can try the Heliopolis Hilton," she said.

'Oh, okay. I guess we should get a cab then."

'It is a shame my cousin the taxi driver was called away to business in Alexandria," she said, then realized why she needed a taxi. "Or perhaps it was a very good thing. Mo is a very modern person, and he knows about Cleopatra, but I'm not sure the modernity entirely extends to me."

In the taxi, as a precaution against untimely passion, he sat in the front with the driver and she, her eyes never leaving him, sat in the seat behind, rubbing his neck with fingers that suddenly seemed longer and more shapely than Gabriella had ever noticed them appearing before.

When they reached the hotel, he said, "Damn, I haven't got any cash. Have you?"

She laughed giddily, "I'm surprised! I was beginning to believe you think of everything."

They hardly had time for those few words, since the original occupants of the two bodies could exchange only a few words between longing looks, prolonged embraces, and stolen kisses, as well as much touching. Gabriella thought self-consciously that she must look like a cat in heat; but inside of her, Cleopatra was suffering with the need to be physically reunited with her lover. And what, really, were she and Mike going to do about that? Ah! A cold shower perhaps. They would take cold showers, and that would cool the ardor of their respective blends until they could decide what to do. Not that she really knew what to do. She couldn't even run in the other direction. She knew without so much as an internal conversation that Cleopatra would not allow her feet to move. She might have a stroke, something like that, if she tried. This was a situation Chimera had not included in his cautions for the newly blended.

For Mike there was no longer any wondering about the treasure or anything else. How in the hell was he going to rein Antony in so he didn't rape this poor woman? It wasn't like she was some bimbo he picked up at a bar in the old days or one of the danger-addicted babes he sometimes hooked up with before, during, or after his various jobs. She was a respected, well-educated professional lady and—God, how could he ever have thought of her as merely cute? The arch of her brow, the curves of her neck and back, those slightly parted, moist pink lips, the enormous tip-tilted black eyes and that flood of curly dark hair he could imagine brushing his bare chest, thighs…

It was a good thing the hotel had a last-minute cancellation, or they might have embarrassed themselves in the lobby.

Mike could barely get the key card in the slot, and paying closer attention to the procedure evoked imagery that made it even harder—more difficult—for him to hit the target. Finally, she guided it in, twisted the knob, and they entered together.

Mike was able to free an arm long enough to pull the door to and lock it behind them.

Cleo and Antony reasserted themselves immediately, locking their bodies in another lengthy and stimulating embrace.

Behind Cleopatra's languorous and loving gaze, Mike saw Gabriella's fear and confusion. "I'm sorry about this," he said, though he didn't know why he should be apologizing since his blending with Antony was her idea. He just wasn't sure the "her" whose idea it had been was Gabriella.

'Yes, well, I should have seen this coming." She pulled away from him as if ripping off a Band-Aid and made for the modern bathroom that had been installed during the conversion of the old palace.

'Where are you going?" Marc Antony wailed.

'To take a cold shower, and I suggest you do the same." Grinning, he started after her. "When I have finished."

'I don't think that's such a good idea," Mike told her, as he tried to rein in Antony. "Not if you want to discourage them, I mean, though I'm not certain it's going to do any good. If I were you, I wouldn't get naked anywhere within a fifty-mile radius of him—us. Assuming, of course, that you don't want to just let them have their wicked way with us."

'And what would be so wicked about that?" Cleopatra purred as she began unbuttoning the sleeves of Gabriella's overblouse before starting on the buttons covering Marvin the Martian's image on the T-shirt beneath it. Still unbuttoning in a maddeningly sexy way, Cleopatra swayed back toward him. "We have waited millennia to be reunited. It is wicked to keep us from each other."

She reached out to unbutton something of his, which made Antony roar like a bull, but Mike caught her hand, though he stroked it as he held it. "I know you want to and he wants to and frankly, I wouldn't mind at all, in fact, I'm going to have to—uh—sublimate—pretty soon or…"

Cleopatra's other hand now strayed in a very frank and highly dangerous way. "Oh yes, I do see what you mean," she said, and giggled.

'Stop that!" he said insincerely.

To his surprise, before Marc Antony could reach his arms out for her again, she sighed and retreated to the edge of the bed.

'You modern people are such prudes!"

'I'm trying to be a gentleman," he growled. "And it doesn't come all that naturally, so watch it, lady."

'I know," she said. "And you are very sweet. But it is not what you think. She wants you, you know." As she said this, Gabriella's face flushed so he could see the change even in the darkened room.

'No kidding?"

'Oh yes."

He waited, and Gabriella looked up at him so he could see that it was so.

'That would make everything a lot easier," he said, but stayed where he was. Antony tried to protest, but something in Mike's attitude stopped him.

Gabriella laughed nervously. "You look at me as though I am—what is the term?—booby-trapped."

Then he laughed, too, much harder than the very slight pun warranted. Being weak from laughter gave him an excuse to sit down beside her.

'You tell me, Doc," he said, lifting her chin so she had to look him in the eye. This was not a good way to conduct an interrogation, since Antony and Cleopatra climbed back into the psychic driver's seat—or was it the backseat?—and made the situation much more urgent with another embrace that, by the end of it, left him shirtless and Marvin the Martian leering up at them from the floor.

Gabriella still said nothing, then it dawned on him, what Cleopatra had said before. "Have you never made love before, like she said?" he asked. "Pobrecita! For your maiden voyage you seem to be drawing a kinky cross-time foursome. But corny as it sounds, Doc, I will be gentle."

Cleopatra spoke up. "You'd better be, or Antony or no Antony, I'll have you strangled."

'Fair enough," he said. If they waited any longer, he wouldn't have to worry about being gentle or not for a while anyway. A guy could only just get so tense before something had to give.

This time when Marc and Cleopatra went at it, Mike and Gabriella joined in, but when her skirt came off she stopped.

'Mike," she said. "It isn't that I am shy. I—I have these scars. Horrible ones."

He stroked her hair and kissed the bridge of her nose. "Is that all, querida? Maybe you haven't noticed, but I won't be posing for any body wash ads myself." He dropped his pants a little and twisted so she could see the scar running down his spine and cutting a wedge out of one hip. "That was a machete." He raised a trouser leg to show a calf missing another hunk. "A shark with poor aim. And this one"—he drew his finger down the muscular bulge of his left arm where a ridge of proud flesh puckered—"that was where a bullet passed before it killed my friend Clive."

Her hand rested on his arm for a moment. "These are battle scars. I got mine when I was a little girl and could not fight back. You've heard of what some families do to their girl children?"

'You mean that female circumcision thing?" he asked, wincing. "Ouch."

'It is a mutilation, Mike. Mine is the most severe kind. I cannot feel what women are supposed to feel when they make love."

'Really? How do you know if you've never tried?"

'Everything is gone… well, not everything. There's enough that I could bear a child."

He didn't know what to say for a moment, then Marc Antony and Cleopatra lost patience and reentwined. This time, however, Marc Antony kissed his beloved's face, her mouth, eyes, nose, cheeks, and each ear. Then, before continuing his campaign down the length of her body, he whispered into her right ear, "Fortunately for you, cara mia, you have here the soul of a great lover in the body of a qualified diver."

Gabriella awoke to the call of a full bladder. She felt a little sore, oddly contented, and extremely disoriented. She opened her eyes and rolled cautiously onto one elbow. Except for the extreme edge of about a quarter of the bed where she lay, the rest was occupied by Mike, who sprawled on his back with a smile on his face and the thin sheet tented above his midsection.

Cleopatra seemed to be sleeping, too. Since Gabriella's side of the bed was pushed against a wall, she scooted to the end and slid off to get to the bathroom. Her bag sat by the stool, where she did not recall leaving it. She checked her watch. It said 7:00, which she took to mean 7:00 P.M.

Feeling a need to connect with her ordinary life after so many extraordinary events, she pulled her cell phone and charger out of the bag and plugged them in. She smelled like low tide, so she decided to shower next. She realized suddenly that she hadn't bathed for almost three days and was retroactively embarrassed to have had her first sexual encounter when she wasn't even clean, much less as glamorous as the women in the movies. Though that hadn't seemed to matter to Mike any more than it had mattered to Cleopatra and Marc Antony.

Her cell phone rang while she was drying her hair.

'Dr. Faruk? Dr. Mazar would like a word with you if you'll stay on the line please." Merde. Someone had probably reported her for greeting Mike too enthusiastically in the cafe.

'Gabriella? Glad I caught you. The BA called after you left the other day and said your voice mailbox is full. Apparently there is an international film crew that needs your help. Dr. Hubbard is with them. I have taken the liberty of acquiring their contact number for you."

'Thank you, Akim. I'll get in touch with them at once."

'And Gabriella?"

'Yes?" she said calmly, thinking, Oh no, here it comes.

The line was quiet for a moment, then he said, "Never mind. But good for you and that man, whoever he is. I for one think it instructive to be reminded that not everyone around here is dead."

'Thanks, Akim," she said. He had a reputation as something of a lecher, so perhaps that was why he didn't mind. But she was glad of his tolerance anyway, and it made her feel warmer toward him than she had before.

She stepped back into the bedroom for a moment. She didn't need to look to know that Mike was still sleeping, as he lay on his back, snoring. She hoped he didn't do that when he was off doing something dangerous and sneaky. His enemies would hear the snore and think a lion was lying in wait for them. She wanted to go back and snuggle up next to him again, to feel his warmth and touch his skin, which seemed like an extension of her own now, and most of all to have him touch her again with his large, blunt-fingered hands. She sighed. One more call and she would.

But before she could tap the keys again the phone burped in her hand. She silenced it with a whispered, "Yes?"

'Dr. Faruk?"

'Yes."

'This is Iris Morgan of Edge TV. I got your number from Dr. Hubbard, who is with us. We badly need your help with this project, both because of your position and because you are the Co-Finder of Cleopatra's tomb. We need to interview you for our program and wanted your input at this stage of the production. Where are you now?"

'Cairo. Look, I can't talk right now. Give me your number, and I'll ring you back in a couple of hours."

'In a couple of hours we'll be in Luxor. Right now we're in Cairo, too, not far. I'll send a car for you."

'No!" Cleopatra cried from within her.

'Yes," Gabriella said into the phone. She dressed quickly. Mike was still asleep, so she scribbled a note, restrained herself from kissing him and starting something she could not finish, and hurried downstairs, where the driver waited for her.

It wasn't until she was inside the car and the door closed behind her that she remembered she hadn't told Iris Morgan where in Cairo she was.

CHAPTER 19

As soon as Gabriella left the room, Mike opened his eyes. He listened for her footsteps specifically as they retreated down the hall amid the roar of vacuum cleaners, the occasional slam of a door, and the chattering of maids. Their room overlooked the street, and he stood at the window and watched as she climbed into a cab.

Marc Antony wasn't going to be happy about this when he made his presence known, but Mike Angeles needed a little thinking time. While part of him wanted to drag Gabriella back into bed, another part of him was really worried if she'd respect him in the morning, so to speak. She seemed to have had a pretty good time, but it was hard to tell if that was her or Cleopatra.

'Yeah, but does she love me for myself?" he asked aloud in a melodramatic voice, the back of his wrist to his forehead in a matching gesture.

'Of course, she doesn't," Antony answered. "She loves you for myself."

'Bite me," Mike replied. "I'm talking about Gabriella."

"I know that, naturally. She loves me, too. I always enjoyed threesomes. You are nothing but a vehicle for my amorous talents, son, face it."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. They hadn't even invented some of my moves back in the ancient times, old man. Even Cleopatra was pleasantly surprised by some of it. And she wasn't bad herself."

"So why did you let her go?"

"Because I was actually wondering how we were going to lose her anyway. We have treasure to find, remember?"

"I rather thought she could finance it, as she did in ancient times."

"She doesn't have the wealth of Egypt behind her now, old boy. In fact, she needs us to find the treasure to grubstake the political future she wants. Providing we're going to go along with that. Personally, it sounds to me like as good a way as any to avoid the high cost of nursing homes. But we're going to need someone with deeper pockets than Cleo and Doc, whatever we decide."

'But who else… ? Ah, the other Cleopatra. Is she wealthy?"

"No, but she has influence with someone who is."

"Yes, but she loves him, not us. Why would she or they help?"

"The usual reason. We'd cut them in."

'She left a note," Antony said, as Mike's eyes returned briefly to the bed. "You didn't read it, did you? Read it. Where did she go?"

Mike skimmed it and grinned. "She's gone to help the TV crew. Great minds, General. Great minds. Let's go."

After the pyramids of Giza and the sphinx, Leda's second spirit was disappointed. "They look smaller somehow, and duller. There used to be more, too," Cleo had said mournfully.

'Well, they are," Leda replied, "and you can see the others when we get back to Cairo. They used the stones from the pyramids to build the city."

She was wringing wet with sweat, no new thing in Egypt,

Very tired from her interrupted sleep, worried about how she would present Cleo, or Cleo present herself, during the programming conferences, and she itched from bug bites, in spite of the repellent, which also usually raised a rash on her skin. The crew and cast members had wandered about in ones and twos making frames with their hands or expounding at length on technical points understood only by each other.

Andrew had kept close to her, and when he suggested that they slip away to preview the boat before the rest of their party arrived, she was relieved.

Just stepping onto the gangway leading from pier to boat she felt the temperature drop a couple of degrees, even though the boats were bow to stern all along the dock, which buzzed with noise both mechanical and conversational. Andrew had bragged about the boat's air-conditioning, one of his modern touches, but the engine room and all of the other technical hovercrafty things he showed her weren't in that part. Still, in spite of everything, she was amused and touched at his enthusiasm and tried to make very practical, sailor like comments and suggestions. She refrained from mentioning that her particular specialty at sea had been submarines or asking how deep the boat could dive.

Then suddenly a wave hit her that had nothing to do with water and everything to do with overwhelming lust.

Andrew had just taken her up the ladder to the passenger decks and opened a door into a less-than-spacious but still fairly deluxe cabin. "This is one of the first-class staterooms. As you can see, we've had to refit the heads but…"

'They're just perfect," she purred.

'Now," Cleopatra fairly whined.

'Oh, Andy, please can we close the door for a moment."

'What is it?" he asked. He looked startled when he saw her expression, but simply asked, "Oh?"

'Oh, yeah."

'I suppose I'd better lock it then, huh?" He asked, fumbling for the lock as she peeled off his shirt and began unbuckling his belt.

'Good idea. There's four of us already. Any spectators would be a real crowd."

'Leda? Your Majesty?" he asked.

'What?"

'Since you seem to be in this mood, I was wondering if we might try something."

'All things," Cleopatra promised.

'Well then, and I promise I'll buy you a new one but, may I, just for the sake of research, mind you, rip your bodice?"

'Oh, Andrew, you beast, you nasty animal, you, how could you make such a lewd suggestion to little old me?" Leda asked, wiggling her quite substantial prow under his nose in a suggestive manner that made it rather difficult, just for a moment, for him to find the target. She was wearing a T-shirt at the time, and it was quite a challenge to rip the material; but after she, squealing protestations of offended innocence the whole time, pierced the material with her nail scissors to give it a head start, he managed quite masterfully and to the satisfaction of all concerned, as was the rest of the encounter.

Leda awoke to the ringing of her cell phone and the drum of feet on the deck outside the stateroom. Andrew no longer lay beside her. She sighed, rolled over, and reached for the phone.

'Hello?"

'Dr. Hubbard?"

'Yes."

'You spoke to our director earlier today about wishing to contact Dr. Faruk?"

'Yes. Is she there?"

'I'm afraid not. She was here earlier, but left before you phoned. I called to tell you that she just telephoned us and was given your message, but said she was already on her way to some emergency at a dig near Karnak and wanted you to know that she would be out of contact for a couple of days, but would try to meet you in Luxor."

'Does she realize how important this is?" Leda asked, piqued.

'I couldn't say, Madame. I was asked to give you this message, and that is all that I know."

'If she phones you again, tell her I want her to call me. Here's my cell number. I've left it before, but since I haven't heard from her, I can only assume she didn't get the message."

'Yes, Madame. I will pass it on," the secretary—Leda presumed the woman was a secretary—said in a stiff and, Leda thought at the time, defensive tone.

After a quick wash in the teensy head to wipe most of the pleasantly sexy stink off the humid tender bits of herself, she dressed and ventured back out on deck to find Andrew and break the news.

He and the others were less concerned than she'd feared.

'We're just picking up local color between here and Karnak anyway," Ro said. "Besides, if there's anything relevant, she can tell us on the way back up. There's nothing we actually need permission for at this point. We'll just be doing the touristy, 'what Cleopatra might have seen on her journeys with Caesar and Antony' sort of thing for this part of the trip."

The reassurance didn't ease Leda's mind as much as she would have thought. She still felt a vague anxiety, left over, no doubt, from a troublesome dream just before she woke up. Too bad she couldn't quite recall it.

'Well then," Iris Morgan said briskly. She was attired in a Hollywood version of a kaftan, silken glittery fabric trimmed with gold and cut almost to her waist in the front, and wore coin earrings that brushed her shoulders. "I suppose since everyone else is aboard now, we may as well go. There's still time to get away from the city and see the sun set on the Nile this evening, isn't there?"

Andrew exchanged a brief glance with Leda, who shrugged, then gave the order to cast off.

The taxi from Heliopolis stopped at the bustling dock.

Mike jumped out. Fancy luxury cruise boats in various stages of coming, going, and staying put churned up the waters, in spite of their relatively slow speeds.

A glistening wedding cake of white, teak, and brass with an incongruous little skirt around the bottom was pulling out into midstream. The skirt did not belong on that kind of a boat, in Mike's experience, but it didn't look too bad. It reminded him of an old-fashioned lady with her long skirts extending below her bustled stern to hide her feet. An officious-looking Egyptian woman was writing something on a clipboard. She wore a head scarf and sunglasses, like a movie star, except that the rest of her was much more covered up.

'Excuse me, ma'am," he said. "I was supposed to meet the rest of my TV crew here, but my train was delayed. Do you know which boat belongs to Mr. McCallum? Andrew McCallum?"

She pointed to the white one disappearing beyond a larger and more modern blue job.

Mike groaned but thanked her.

The cab driver was yelling at him about paying. Mike suppressed an urge to tell him to "follow that boat."

He shoved the money at the man and asked him in Turkish Arabic where he could hire a boat. Boats everywhere, but would any of them take him where he wanted to go?

Too bad he hadn't thought to have Gabriella prepay for the hotel room, but it had seemed unimportant at the time, in the heat of the moment as it were. His funds were dwindling rapidly, and he expected the hire of the felucca he needed to catch up with the cruise boat would take a lot of what he had left.

The cabbie waved vaguely farther down the shore and drove off. Beyond the big pleasure boats, Mike finally found a makeshift fleet of the small traditional sailboats, the like of which had been plying the Nile since ancient times.

One of the captains waved him over. He was a large white-haired, white-bearded fellow with a blue baseball cap and a turquoise shirt, unusual among the sailors there, who mostly wore the white djellabas for the sake of the tourist trade, though some who were working on their boats were bare-chested.

'You wish a river trip, effendi?"

'Yes. Do you see that boat way down the river there?"

'I can see that boat very well, effendi. My boat is not like that boat."

'I know. But can your boat catch up with that one? I want to board it. I have some business with the people on it."

The man whose white teeth bore a striking gold accent when he smiled ingratiatingly, said, "One can but try, effendi."

'How much?"

'It depends upon the length of the trip, effendi. Get in. If we are to reach your friends, we must start now."

Mike was a little surprised the man didn't insist on being paid in advance but did as he was told.

There was a good breeze on the river, and the sails caught it readily. The white-haired guy was a good sailor, but, try as they might, the felucca never quite caught up with the cruise boat. The sun set. The boatman stopped tacking, as he had been doing all afternoon, and made for the west bank.

'Why are we stopping?" Mike asked. "There's a full moon. We could catch up to them when they dock for the night."

'There is no need for such haste, effendi. They will sleep very late in the morning, and we will catch up to them then. It is forbidden to sail after sunset. But as you see, we have sleeping bags and very delicious foods with us. Soon the other passengers will join us, and we will have camping out just like your Boy Scouts. That will be a good thing and very much fun for everyone, yes?"

Mike reached for his wallet to offer baksheesh then realized that he probably didn't have enough to make up the standard fee, much less extra, unless he could borrow from Gabriella once he reached the cruiser. He didn't much care for the idea of doing that, but when he found the treasure, they would share it, so he could pay her back that way. He thought they might be sharing quite a few things in days to come. Most of all they'd be sharing their inner extra selves with each other, but it went further than that, though he didn't wish to reflect on it too deeply for the time being.

"Cheer up, son, this will be like it was when I was campaigning. Just us and the stars, the stench of death, and the eyes of the jackals in the darkness beyond the campfire."

"You really are a romantic, aren't you, General?"

The boatman tied the little boat to a small homemade dock, a short wooden extension beyond the stone-walled riverbank. Once ashore, the men built a fire with some of the suspicious-looking fuel the boatman had on hand and arranged sleeping bags beside it. Other than the dock, the place was less inhabited than any he had seen that day. The other boats had disappeared, apparently each tied up elsewhere. They were probably lucky to have this spot to themselves. But it seemed funny that nobody at all was there, not even the flocks of ragged kids who would normally swamp any tourist with sacks full of trinkets, clothing, "really authentic artifact from tomb of King Tut, mister," and other such goods.

Maybe a couple of miles away was the outline of a small village, lamps glowing like lightning bugs in the night. Since the dams were built, more of the villages now had electricity. That was probably where the kids were. Home watching satellite TV or doing their homework on computers.

No sooner had the boatman begun boiling water, however, than company at last came calling. The twilight was long, and Mike could make out that everyone coming toward them seemed to be walking on two legs except for one, a dog, which barked impatiently and was the first to reach the fire. The shapes looked strange in the dying light, the heads seeming larger than they needed to be, the shadows thrown across the ground by the moon grotesquely elongated and more active than they should have been, since the people who cast them seemed to walk sedately enough.

'Ah, the other passengers arrive," the boatman said.

'What other passengers?"

'The other passengers who also wish to board the fine boat you seek, effendi."

'You mean you were going there all along? For these other people?"

'That is what I mean, yes. But something delayed me, and now it seems I awaited your arrival before departing to meet these passengers."

'How did you know to pick them up here?"

'Why, they hired me before they left Cairo, effendi, and told me that they wished to see a place that is near here. And so I brought them here, but they wished to stay for

a time before I took them to the fine boat. So I returned to Cairo seeking other fares."

'What are they, archaeologists?"

'People interested in Egypt's great past, yes, effendi. That is who they are."

His gold tooth gleamed in the firelight. The dog charged toward them from the shadows, but a sharp call made it return the way it came.

A man with a patch over one eye walked into the fire circle, his hands both holding the dog by the collar. "You must excuse him," the man said. "He is an excitable beast."

Except for the eye patch, the man looked like any other upper-crust tourist, as did the two women and six other men behind him. They all looked to be between thirty-five and fifty, though perhaps the light was kind to some of them. One of the women and one of the men had an Asian cast to their features, at least two of the people were definitely Middle Eastern or Semitic anyway, and since this was Egypt, they probably weren't Jewish. The other five all appeared to be Westerners, European, Australian, American, maybe South African. One of the women even sported a pith helmet with a veil. Otherwise, they were dressed in a collection of sports gear, T-shirts with animals on the front, and camouflage, khaki, or olive drab pants with a touch of the paramilitary about them, though he saw no firearms among them.

Then the last man arrived, much quieter than the outfit he wore. He sported a knit golf shirt, the kind with the gator on the left breast, but this one was printed with big tropical flowers, the colors sepiaed by the low glow from the fire. It was a variation on a kind of shirt that was the stereotypical badge of male American tourists and was universally tacky except in Hawaii or at a retro fifties party for gay men. Over it he wore a loose, striped vest of the kind some Egyptian men wore over traditional white tunics.

It was overdone, an effect not improved by the hand-tooled and painted cowboy boots with the dancing skeletons on them. Mike recognized those boots first, then he recognized the man. The hair was graying but still red, buzz-cut instead of windblown, the always rather sunburned face clean-shaven, and he now wore spectacles, but it was Jaime. Jaime, Eljefe's lieutenant. No last name that Mike had ever heard, and, of course, if there'd been one, it probably wouldn't have been his real one. He was called El Rojo because of his perpetual sunburn. Mike didn't think he was Mexican, but you couldn't always tell. Some Spaniards were red-haired and freckled. Jaime spoke flawless Spanish and heavily accented English. Now he sat next to Mike, the glasses magnifying his eyes, and said in another accent, a Texan one this time, "Hey, when's supper?"

Mike's gun was on his right side, farthest from the fire, and he eased his hand toward it slowly. He didn't really think Jaime would avenge their former boss in front of all these people, but then, Mike didn't know who all these people were. They could have been a consortium of Central American drug lords for all he knew, here to witness his execution. Nah, now that was where paranoia left off and delusions of grandeur began. Mike just wasn't that important.

'I wouldn't do anything stupid, Miguelito. Not in front of all of these nice people."

'Wouldn't you? I'm glad to hear that. I won't if you won't. When are you planning to kill me exactly? Just so I can say my prayers and make out my will and that kind of thing."

'Kill you? Why would I want to kill you, amigo?"

'Didn't the syndicates send you to take me out to avenge Eljefe?"

Jaime chuckled, "That would be really funny if they did that."

'Yeah, I'd die laughing."

'Because I know for a fact that you didn't kill Eljefe."

'How do you know that?"

Jaime nodded. "Because I did, as soon as you began to look more interesting."

The conversation was carried on in very low tones that would sound genial to anyone else.

'You did?"

'Yeah. Why, were you getting attached to him?"

'Oh yeah. Drug lord who trafficked not only in narcotics but also in highly overpriced and watered-down prescription drugs. He was a doll. I miss him terribly. But what do you mean I looked interesting? Was it your week for boys or something?"

Jaime looked pained and rolled his eyes, the whites glistening and reflecting the fire, giving him a demonic aspect that was not totally out of character. "Oh, yeah. You bet. I've missed you, you big handsome brute."

'He's a bit old for us" Marc Antony observed. "A youth once in a while for variety is one thing …"

'Don't worry about it. He's not gay, and neither am I. Doing a youth once in a while nowadays will get you thrown in prison if you get caught. Of course, if you're inclined that way, which I didn't think you were, being the great lover of Cleopatra's you're supposed to have been, prison can be full of romantic opportunities. But not in my body you don't."

'So you killed El Jefe for my sake and followed me to Egypt out of sheer devotion? How'd you find me?"

'How do you think? You're bugged, of course."

'How?"

'That would be telling. Don't get all upset. It was for your own good, to protect you from falling in with more evil companions like Eljefe and getting stuck serving some insignificant evildoer instead of fulfilling your destiny."

'Fulfilling my what? And speaking of evil companions, you missed one, buddy. And he was trying to kill me, which would have really screwed up both our plans."

Jaime shrugged. "Oh well, you wouldn't be any good to us if you couldn't get yourself out of a little trouble once in a while. Once you were here but your main contact, Dr. Hubbard, wasn't, the plot against the Biblioteca put you right where we wanted you, always providing you managed to, you know, escape getting killed."

'Your faith in me is touching. Don't try to tell me you knew I'd come here though. And how did you know about Leda?" Mike tried to keep his eyes on Jaime, but the tourists were distracting. One of the women seemed to be doing a little dance, and somewhere behind her he saw another pair of eyes, iridescent gold-green at about the height of a cat or a coon, sometimes glinting red with reflected flames. "She's very tempting, but you'd better pay attention, son. This man is trying to tell you why he hasn't killed you so far. You don't want to miss anything."

"Jaime always liked to hear himself talk. Funny that he never said any of this before. Some people can say all kinds of stuff, and none of it is the important stuff you really ought to know about them."

'I probably know more about Dr. Hubbard than you do. She's been on my list for quite a while. Imagine my joyous surprise when I saw how you reacted when your old girlfriend was on CNN for finding Cleopatra's tomb. You showed an enthusiasm over that I never much noticed in you while we were working for Eljefe."

'That's right. We were cooling our heels watching TV in El Jefe's living room, doing sentry duty while he got it on with that FDA officer's wife in the bedroom. I guess I got all focused on what Leda was doing and forgot you were there. But meanwhile you considerately offed Eljefe to keep me from having to give notice so I could expand my career horizons?"

'Not entirely. I also offed him so I could avoid being killed myself for quitting to expand my career horizons. And here I am."

'Doing what? Seeing the sights?"

'Security. Same thing as before except these people are a lot more influential than a thug like Eljefe. They pay better, too."

'Damn. You must have found a better class of meeting than I did." Oddly enough, Jaime had been his sponsor at the first meeting he attended in Mexico, and was the one who suggested he apply to Eljefe for employment.

'I've been cultivating my own contacts for quite a while," Jaime said. "In fact, I was just moonlighting, working for Eljefe."

'Well, it just goes to prove what my granny always said. You never do really know people, do you? So you're CIA, right?"

'Not exactly, though they report to us."

'Really? That sounds pretty powerful. What is it then? Don't tell me. Oh, no, I should be able to get this one. I've heard enough conspiracy theories by now. So—is it the Knights Templar? The Rothschild’s? No? Rockefellers maybe? How about the Illuminati? Okay, the Masons, then? Elks? Rotary Club?"

Jaime looked like he was nobly rising above the impulse to shoot Mike, but merely said, with exaggerated patience, "If you'll stop with the questions for a minute, I'll explain."

'Please."

'You're not too far off in some ways, actually. I guess you've heard about the New World Order."

'Yeah, sure."

'Well, the people I work with are dedicated to trying to keep the world in order. In spite of what we hear in the States about how it's all up to our government or the UN to police the world, it just doesn't work that way. You need a larger network of dedicated operatives with loyalties beyond borders, people who are interested in seeing that whatever is going down doesn't rock the world's boat too much."

'Who decides what's too much?"

'That's a little more complicated. But basically it's these people around us and others like them."

The other people didn't seem to be paying much attention to Jaime's recruiting spiel if that's what it was. They murmured among themselves and stared into the fire, accepting cups given to them by the boatman and sipping from them almost ceremoniously.

Jaime picked up a stick and wrote letters in the dirt.

'WWVI?" Mike read them aloud. "World War Six?"

Jaime gave his head a slight shake. "World Wide Vested Interests. These are the real owners of multinational corporations, the powers behind thrones, the people who pretty much keep the earth spinning on its axis."

'Sounds heavy."

Jaime gave him a rueful smile. "It is. But we're not without our sense of whimsy. You've no doubt heard of the men in black? They report to us, too. We're known as the men in vests." Then he nodded toward the two women on the opposite side of the fire. "Or maybe I should say people in vests. It would be a real waste of talent if we were all men."

Mike studied the other people more closely. Sure enough, each and every one of them wore a vest of some sort. Even the woman in the pith helmet wore one of the vests with lots of little pockets.

Marc Antony stirred. "Some things never change. Power over power over power and men like us, fighting men, seldom get to be more than pawns."

"No shit."

'Well. So. If these vests are the good guys, why were you working for Eljefe?"

'Keeping an eye on him mostly. And the world is a funny old place, Miguelito. People and power structures and good guys and bad guys—it's kind of what you might call an ecostructure on its own. Even the vermin serve a purpose, as long as they don't overrun the place."

Mike nodded. He'd have to think that one over, but it made a weird kind of sense. "Okay. But why would all these high-and-mighty vests be interested in little old me?"

'At first they weren't. We were all more interested in your connection with Dr. Hubbard."

'It's not like she isn't closely connected with other people, too."

'Closely, perhaps, but nothing like a romantic involvement. So much more possibility for intrigue there."

'So you thought I might make a male Mata Hari — in a vest?"

Jaime shrugged. "It's a big pond, Miguelito. I'm just a small frog. A scout in some ways. Various scenarios occurred to me. If, once I removed El Jefe from the scene, you went somewhere else and didn't pursue your involvement with Hubbard, we might have found a way to give you a little push or found some other way to approach the matter. However, you did what I thought you might."

'I'll try not to be so predictable next time."

'Then when you met up with Kronos, just prior to his removal…"

'So his death was no accident?"