Channeling Cleopatra (12 page)

"This is what
I
am here for," she told
him firmly. She shoved sweaty strings of hair from her forehead,
wrapped her arms around her find, and stood. She may not have
published in any fancy journals, but she certainly knew her way
around dead people. "In exchange for spending heaps and gobs of its
shareholders' money on this project, Nucore gets first crack at
anything resembling human remains. I'm sure this was explained to
all of you during orientation," she said, clucking like an
officious file clerk. "I represent Nucore here. If you don't like
it, have your company's lawyer call my company's
lawyer."

"Me, I am not budging," Habib said. "You
will damage the jar, and it will be lost to my people."

"Sorry you feel that way.
But you could get damaged yourself if you don't get out of my way.
I'm feeling all hot and cranky now. So all of you scoot." They
continued to surround her. Hugging the jar closer, she cleared her
throat and hollered,
"Dad-deeee!"

Fortunately, she didn't really have to yell
that loudly. Right after he pointed out the jar to her, her
father's curiosity had overcome his dislike of the harbor floor so
much that he had clamored down one of the ladders. Now he jogged
across the scaffolding toward them, the boards bouncing under his
feet and then bouncing some more as three of his security crew
followed right behind him.

"What's the matter, Kid?" he asked her.

"Take this, will you? It's heavy."

"Officer Hubbard," Yussuf protested, "you
must not allow personal considerations to enter into this. Dr.
Hubbard is behaving badly."

"Nah, she's doing good," Duke said. "She
hasn't stamped her foot yet or held her breath till she turns blue,
but I suggest you give her her way. And incidentally, this isn't a
personal consideration. Helping her retrieve and take care of this
stuff is what I was hired to do."

When Duke had the jar clasped firmly to him,
Leda stood and looked down on Yussuf. He hated that. As she figured
he would, he stormed off, looking for Dr. Namid. Duke and his men
momentarily cleared the scaffolding of the rest of the muttering
onlookers.

Duke then handed the jar back to Leda and,
with him walking point and his posse protecting her flank, Leda
abandoned the corpse of the sunken city for the belly of the
beluga. As they left the basin, the other diggers, like the Red (or
Reed) Sea, re-converged upon the place where they had been and
began searching the basin floor with renewed dedication.

CHAPTER 9

Of course, Dr. Namid had to tell her what he
thought of her conduct.

She tried sweet reason first, using the same
argument she had used on Yussuf, but with no more success. "I don't
see your problem, here, Dr. Namid. You agreed to this already, and
in the end, it can only provide us with more information about this
individual and his or her life and times. It can only enhance your
own reputation and increase our knowledge about this person, place,
and era"

"Bah!" he said. He actually said "Bah." She
waited for the "humbug!" but it didn't come. "I did not understand
that valuable artifacts would be removed entirely from my own care
to be subjected to some experimental hocus voodoo by an amateur. If
you truly care about Egyptology as you claim to, you will allow us
to record and gather the information we need from this piece before
you contaminate it with your untried and unproven tinkerings."

"Which you won't give a chance," she
said.

"Which I have never even seen demonstrated!"
He countered. "Which have not been properly published in scientific
journals or discussed in scientific circles."

"Well, I'm sorry, but that was the deal. As
for contamination, the jar is in the clean room in a special
storage cabinet, and I think I can assure you that my work will
contaminate it way less than anything you'd do to it. You have a
whole empty harbor for your sandbox, Dr. Namid. Why don't you go
back to digging and maybe, like I said, you can come up with the
other three jars or even a nice mummy?"

He called her a crass American opportunistic
degenerate—and those were just the adjectives. The noun was a very
rude word in Arabic, which he didn't think she understood.

She'd been called worse. After all, sailors
were famous for inventive terms of endearment for those of
the—well, it used to be only the fair sex, but since women sailors
served aboard ships, now the terms were applied by each sex to the
opposite.

She heard him out, maintaining a cheerful
smile in the face of his tirade. He was very upset. However, he
couldn't flunk her. He couldn't fire her. And he couldn't take the
jar away, because Daddy was standing at the door. Ah, it was so
good to have backup!

"Dr. Namid, really, this is
very unprofessional of you, and you're getting all red in the face
for nothing. It doesn't matter to me how loudly you yell, I'm
keeping the damn jar," she said when he had sputtered out of
breath. "I know you're disappointed not to get to probe and pry
into it yet, but just think what Mr. Rasmussen would say if he
heard you carry on like this! He already thinks the whole site is a
waste of money, and if he could hear your—well, the only word I can
think of is
ungrateful
—your ungrateful attitude toward Nucore, when they have
been
so
generous
letting you have the entire harbor to play in and only wanting this
one itty-bitty artifact I found all by myself . . . I just don't
think he would understand. He would feel that Nucore shouldn't be
letting someone like you run this at all. He might want to replace
you."

"If that happened, I would be forced to ask
the government why it is that Nucore is interested only in canopic
jars," Namid said with cool menace at odds with his ranting of a
few moments ago. "Oh yes. Dr. Hubbard, I have learned a few things
about the company's activities in other parts of the world, and I
would be forced to let the press know that similar abominations are
being attempted here. How our past and our dead are being
prostituted. Again."

Duke cleared his throat. "I hate to hear you
say that, Mahmoud," he said in a man-to-man voice, moving in a bit.
"And I'd really advise against it. Because I've done a little
checking on Mr. Rasmussen, and from what I can tell, people who
tried to make a name for themselves at his expense ended up
disappearing so thoroughly nobody can remember their names at
all."

"What are you talking about?" Namid
demanded.

Duke sighed as if he was trying to be
patient with someone who was acting stupid. "Let me put it to you
this way. Nucore is a very idealistic outfit, really. They want to
do this project of yours in cooperation with the government and not
upset anybody. The attitude toward the fundamentalists has been,
well, what they don't know won't hurt them. And if you started
trouble over this because you got fired, think of the jobs you'd
cost your people and the loss to its heritage."

Leda lifted her brows at her father's
high-minded arguments.

"But more than that, what I really want you
to think about is something Rasmussen told my daughter the doctor
while he was here. He said that because of the interest he holds in
Nucore, he has a substantial amount of his personal fortune
invested in the projects in this country, especially this one. You
doing as you say would cause him to lose a lot of money. Now, this
is not a nice man, Mahmoud. Made a lot of money in the illegal arms
trade. Knows a lot of dangerous people, some of them within range
of you, and I mean that literally. Some of these friends of his
might take it personally if you cost Mr. Rasmussen a lot of money
because you didn't want to keep your agreement with Nucore and let
my kid here do her job."

Leda rolled her eyes. Wow. Daddy had been
reading way too many Tom Clancy novels and watching too many
gangster movies. He was, in her opinion, overdoing it a little.
However, he was very good at this sort of thing, and it was one of
the longest speeches she had ever heard him make. It was incredibly
fatherly and protective of him, a side she had seen only once
before, at the used car dealership when the car they'd sold her
broke down for the twelfth time in the first three months she had
it.

So she said soothingly, "I
promise Nucore will share with you the information we glean from
this technology
and
let you have all the credit. We just need to make sure what's
in there, and if it's what we need, well, we'll need that, too, or
most of it, but you can have almost all of the data we gather and
all of the glory, and when we're done, you can have the jar, too.
But for now, I need you to scat. I have work to do."

He started in again, but then he saw the
look that passed between Leda and her father and backed away
quietly, compared to how he'd begun the conversation. He didn't
even slam the door of the beluga. Before the door had closed,
however, Leda's father quietly slipped out behind Namid. No doubt
he intended to saunter nonchalantly along behind the good doctor,
just to make sure he didn't get into any trouble.

CHAPTER 10

When everyone had gone, Leda measured and
cleaned her find carefully, brushing it, wiping it with dry rags.
She meticulously collected the dust and dirt samples in a sterile
bag. It was always possible there could be some dried skin from the
mummy on the outside of the jar, especially inside the carvings
where the dirt and stone from the harbor floor wouldn't have
contaminated them. Until she knew the condition of the material
inside the jar, she needed to protect all possible sources of DNA.
If the organs had been sufficiently dried and had withstood the
years, it was possible she might find definitive, nuclear DNA
within the sample.

So she continued brushing and collecting
until the carvings on the surface were all as clean as her brush
could make them. She kept catching her breath in little gasps as
she cleaned the cartouche, and the evidence of the jar was
revealed. At first the very shape of the jar made Leda doubt her
hunch about its royal origin.

King Tut's canopic jars had been miniature
coffins of the pharaoh. The animal figures were not as distinctive.
But here, below the dog's head lid, engraved in the stone and
chased with gold, was the written evidence, in words both Egyptian
and Greek, spelled out in hieroglyphics that were both pictograph
and phonetic representations of letters and ideas.

The queen's cartouche was a long one, full
of the royal titles both granted to and arrogated by a powerful
woman. Embodiment of Isis and Hathor. Pharaoh of Upper and Lower
Egypt. Cleopatra.

Actually, from what Leda
had read, the Egyptians wouldn't have been able to pronounce the
name Cleopatra correctly, since there was no
l
sound in the Egyptian language. But
they approximated it with
r
and
rw
sounds. If Cleopatra didn't herself have a little bit of an
Egyptian drawl—and it was well-known that she was a Greek
culturally and linguistically, so probably, being an upper-class
lady, she didn't have the local accent—she must have felt she was
constantly being Elmer Fudded by her kingdom's indigenous people
who would have pronounced her name "Krwiwapadra."

As she cleared away more of the dust and
encrusted dirt, Leda also uncovered the rest of the queen's
credentials.

Lest anyone confuse Cleopatra the Seventh
with her ancestresses, siblings, or descendants, besides her royal
titles and names cartouche there were two others, the obvious
Ptolemy cartouche, of course, which, situated beside Cleopatra's,
had helped researchers decipher the code of the Rosetta stone. And
her nickname, Philopater, father-lover. Every woman in the Ptolemy
family seemed to have been named Cleopatra, Berenice, or Arsinoe,
which covered the names of Cleopatra's sisters and herself. There
was even another Cleopatra who was her older sister. So the
nicknames were essential for keeping people straight.

Leda could see where the main cartouche had
actually been lengthened in three separate places, as old
boundaries were filed away and new engraving added by a slightly
different hand, new titles added, borders and gold reapplied.

Such fine materials and such an awesome object to
have such strange imperfections in craftsmanship lending it an
almost secondhand air.

Hadn't she read somewhere that Cleopatra had
actually surrendered her own tomb with all of her jewels and
funerary equipment to Octavius when her threat of burning herself
up with it failed? So, what was this then? Cleopatra's death was
famous but her resting place unknown. Some histories said she'd
been allowed to be buried with Mark Antony, and he had been
accorded all of the rites of a pharaoh, but that seemed odd, since
he still had a wife and children in Rome. Some authorities believed
Octavius had ordered Cleopatra's body burned so that according to
her adopted Egyptian religion, she could not have an afterlife.

And yet, here was seeming proof to the
contrary.

Only a portion of the cartouche had been
visible on the exposed area of the jar, but it was distinctive
enough to fuel her hopes, and she knew that she wouldn't be the
only one to recognize it. Its presence was the main reason she had
been so protective of her find. If Yussuf and the others had seen
it, Dad would have needed an army using deadly force to keep them
away from the jar.

Once she was sure of what she had and the
original sample as well as the decoded replicated strands were
safely in Nucore's lab and presumably, in Mrs. Wolfe as well, she
would tell Namid and the others what she had found.