Channeling Cleopatra (4 page)

So what the other security cops thought of
the rookie was their mistake. He was used to smart-ass younger guys
being cocky little shits who thought he'd slow them down.

And, to give them credit,
they
were
faster
with the computerized surveillance equipment used to monitor the
Nucore campus.

Duke thought that stuff just caused the
troops to relax their vigilance, but he kept his mouth shut and
paid attention. He was relieved when the class was over, and Leda
and he transferred, along with Chimera, to the Nucore facility on
the isolated Greek island of Kefalos, which was the staging area
for the Alexandria project.

The island had once been owned by what the
Kid referred to as a "shipping maggot" whose taste for privacy
matched Nucore's security requirements. Outwardly, the island
seemed much like other Greek islands. The postcard village of
white, square houses with red roofs staggered along the beach and
clung to the side of the hill that was the highest place on the
island. The hill was actually the top of an ancient volcano, and
ringing the rim were the ruins of an old Knights Templar citadel, a
monastery, and the former owner's mansion and shipping offices.
Olive trees twisted toward the sky, turquoise waters lapped white,
sandy beaches, and the little birds sang from the clotheslines, tra
la. Some of the islanders who had worked for the shipping magnate
now worked for Nucore instead and stayed as they always had in some
of the red-roofed houses. The other houses had been renovated and
sheltered other Nucore technicians and employees as well as a few
middle-management types. There was even a vineyard or two, which
Duke found a redeeming feature.

Here on Kefalos, the security classes were
more specific. The chief of security was one Theophilus Agelakos.
Agelakos took the attitude that Duke was cute. "So, you go along to
Egypt with your daughter, eh? Her poppa make sure she is not
carried off to the tent of some pasha."

"Nah, I just want to make sure I get enough
camels for her," Duke said, trying to laugh it off. "And be there
to . . . uh . . . take her back when the pasha finds out what he's
got himself into."

"Very amusing!" Agelakos said. "No need to
explain. We understand family here."

Duke had a certain understanding of it, too,
from criminal elements he had contact with in Portland, but he
didn't want to wreck his amusing-old-duffer image by mentioning
it.

"This is maybe not a job for a man such as
yourself," Agelakos said. "In Egypt it is not protected as we are
here. We have not the alarm systems to guard the company holdings.
Much is in the open, on the water, and along the dam."

"Dam?"

"Oh yes, the company has built for the
Egyptian government a great cofferdam that has completely emptied
the harbor and some of the area beyond."

"Why?"
Duke asked.

"Because the government,
with the help of Nucore's money, hopes to uncover, raise, and
reconstruct above sea level the most important structures of the
ancient city: the lighthouse of Pharos, the palace of Cleopatra,
perhaps the ruins of the Egyptian Navy and the Great Library's
storehouse, continuing the work of the underwater archaeology teams
of the late twentieth century. It will be like your American Disney
parks—visit Ancient Alexandria in all its glory—a magnificent
tourist attraction, you see. A
new
ancient tourist attraction people have not grown
accustomed to. This should help bring in the . . ." Agelakos rubbed
thumb and first two fingers together meaningfully. "Money, which
can then be used, as the company hopes, to repay us. Of course, our
corporation also has other more immediate interests in this
project, which it will be your duty to protect."

Duke nodded.

Agelakos picked up a stack of DVDs and
signaled for Duke to follow him. He opened the door and gave a
theatrical bow, bending the creases ironed into his uniform sleeves
in the process. The room he'd led Duke to was an office with little
more than a desk containing a computer and a chair. "Please be
seated," the Greek said with a flourish. "These are
English-language newscasts of recent events in Egypt over the last
few years, so that you will understand more about the attitudes of
some of the people you will be working with and some of the
factions who take an unenlightened view of the work you will be
protecting. Please study these carefully, and if you have any
questions, you may click here." He indicated an icon at the bottom
of the screen. "The company expert on Egypt will be available
on-line to answer."

This seemed to Duke like one of the smartest
things that had been done in this whole Mickey Mouse training
course. Leda knew a lot of stuff about Egypt, but most of it was no
more recent than a couple of thousand years ago, except for all the
scuttlebutt about the archaeologists in the nineteenth century.

Seemed to Duke, during the history part of
his lesson, as if no conqueror or invader since Julius Caesar had
bothered to kiss poor old Egypt before it screwed her. In fact, the
whole thing had been pretty much of a gang bang after the Romans
left. Everybody had had a piece of the country at one time or
another. Romans, Greeks, Arabs, the French with Napoleon, the
English, the Germans—everybody but Quinn the Eskimo had claimed the
Nile.

Duke found all of this pretty interesting.
After all, if Nucore had more or less the status of an independent
state within a country, and he was supposed to be part of a force
that represented the customs, immigrations, army, navy, air and
police force, it behooved him to know what he was dealing with.

And who. There was the current government,
which tended toward fundamentalist Islam, but it was being opposed
on several fronts. There was the CCM, Coptic Christian Movement
(the Coptic Christian Church claimed it had no connections with the
movement), large and predominantly black from the southern part of
Egypt, where people were still angry over the flooding of Nubia by
the Aswan Dam over a century before. And there was a pharonic
wanna-be group of people who thought the ancient Egyptians had the
right idea and wanted to take the country back and run it like King
Tut or someone. Then there were the neighbors—Syria, Libya,
Turkey—all of them promising all kinds of assistance in exchange
for a military toehold in Egypt. So far, the government was smart
enough to see through that one. Then there was the West—Western
Europe and the U.S.—and their economic interests, including
Nucore's. That was pretty complicated.

Still digesting the information when the
training session was finished, Duke took the lift to the top floor
of the security complex. The main part was inside the crater,
accessed through the ruins of the old Knights Templar citadel.
Someone had a sense of humor. Chimera's villa was down the road
from the mansion and shipping offices where the lab was located. It
was still on the top tier of the wedding cake shape formed by the
volcano cone with its layers of red-roofed white houses. One of the
larger guest houses for the people who lived in the mansion, Duke
supposed, the villa had a private lab for Chimera built into it.
Leda and her old buddy spent a lot of their time holed up down
there, while Chimera showed the Kid the double-helixed ropes to his
process.

By now, Duke pretty well understood what
Chimera's process was all about, but he wasn't very interested. Why
the hell would anybody want someone else's excess baggage in the
way of memories, anyway? He didn't even want all of his own, most
of the time, especially the ones involving the ex-wives. He sure as
hell didn't want someone else to climb inside his skull with him
and snuggle up and yap all the time where he couldn't keep them
quiet when he preferred to be alone. And he had a lot of thoughts
he didn't care to share with anyone. Jesus, the things rich people
thought of to keep themselves entertained!

Fortunately, nobody was asking him to
participate in the process, just to protect it, which he would do
because it was kind of interesting and also, he could keep an eye
on the Kid. This was a big break for her. He had never had or
married enough money to be able to send her or the other kids off
to fancy schools, and of all of them, Leda would have enjoyed that
the most. She had to get her education through the Navy, and she
did all right. She'd been working with the state lab since she got
out. But this kind of thing was what she'd always wanted to do, and
he was glad she wanted him along to help her. Of all his offspring,
Leda was the one who took after him the most, poor baby.

Hiking down the road in the heat, Duke
mopped the sweat off his face with both hands and flapped his
loosened shirttails to give his belly a little breeze. He looked
forward to one of the imported beers in Chimera's fridge. He was
mentally tasting it, feeling it pouring cool and smooth down his
throat, when he heard the roar bearing down on him from behind. He
jumped aside barely in time to escape being run down. He got up,
dusted himself off, and stared down the road at the oddest-looking
machine he had seen in a long time. He fell instantly and totally
in love and forgot all about the beer. He had to have that
bike.

CHAPTER 3

About three days after they arrived on
Kefalos, Chimera received a phone call at the villa. Leda was
dutifully staring into a microscope, though the truth was she was
still so jet-lagged she had trouble seeing color until she finished
her third cup of coffee.

Chimera, chipper as ever, said into the
phone, "Oh, yes, she is right here. Do you want to speak to her?
Oh, yes, that would be much better! We will see you soon."

"Let me guess," Leda said. "Was that Wolfie
maybe?"

"Yes! He is here to speak to a couple of the
board members who wish a blending. One will be arriving soon, and
he wishes you to sit in on the interview."

That sounded good to Leda. What kind of a
nut, other than most of her friends, would volunteer to be
possessed by the soul of some long-dead person who had probably
never been all they were cracked up to be to begin with?

Leda tried to look halfway respectable,
since they were meeting a member of the board. She put on a clean
print skirt and plain T-shirt, and a beaded necklace and matching
earrings, each adorned with an eye of Horus, a friend had made for
her. Then she and Chimera tootled up the hill to the main offices
and lab in a cute little corporate golf cart-esque
three-wheeler.

Thinking again of her friends, she asked
Chimera, "What do you do if everybody wants to be the same person?
I know at least three candidates for Mary, Queen of Scots, two for
Elizabeth the First, and you wouldn't believe the number of
nutcases who would really like to be Anne Boleyn or Henry the
Eighth. And it's a darn good thing for you guys King Arthur,
Guinevere, Lancelot, and especially Morgan Le Fey and Merlin were
more or less fictional, or you'd need graveyard loads of them to
fill the demand from the Society for Creative Anachronism
alone."

Chimera considered this a reasonable
question and didn't even crack a smile. "First, this is still a
very expensive procedure, you understand, Leda. While we obtain as
much sample material as we can from each source, often our access
is very limited. We were able to obtain a small sample of tissue
from Sir Walter Scott, for instance, but we certainly did not wish
to desecrate his remains. Sometimes our samples are not taken
directly from the body at all but are hair, ancient blood, even
dandruff from clothing and so forth. The best samples are from
teeth, as you know. But we can obtain more of what we want from
what would be considered inferior samples by others who lack our
equipment and methods. Even so, it is very expensive."

"So that alone prevents duplicates?"

"No, but of course the first host to request
a specific donor, providing the host was suitable, would be
blended. Later we may consider blending donors with different
hosts. The host personality is not submerged in that of the donor,
as we've discussed, but eventually combines to form a new whole, if
seldom with the harmony we do. So two blendings from a single donor
would not produce two identical blended personalities."

"I suppose not. But what if what each of the
hosts wanted from the donor was something very specific . . . like,
oh, an exclusive on the secret of whether or not Richard the Third
did in the little princes, or the location of buried treasure,
say?"

"We would discourage a blending for such
reasons, to begin with. A blending is, so far as we now know, a
lifelong commitment rather than a temporary means to an immediate
goal."

"Makes sense to me," she said.

Leaving the cart outside the mansion, they
stepped into the great receiving hall. Leda wanted to stop and go,
"Ooh, ah," but Chimera led her quickly through to a
courtyard/garden, where Wolfe, older, more distinguished and
prosperous looking, but still pretty darn cute, sat at a table near
a fountain of Aphrodite. He sipped something icy and brown while he
spoke with two women.

The older one had a body that, although trim
and with as erect a carriage as possible, suffered nonetheless from
the crippling effects of arthritis. Her hair was artfully auburn
with little wings of silver at the sides where it swept up into a
sleek chignon. Her skin was taut, though there were small wrinkles
at her mouth and above the bridge of her nose, not quite hidden by
her sunglasses, which could only be from pain. Her profile,
however, with its Roman nose and square jaw line, was formidable.
She wore white slacks, an oversized white shirt with the sleeves
buttoned to the gold coin bracelets at her wrists, a coral tank
top, and a coral, white, and pale aqua scarf swathed her neck. Good
brown leather sandals, sturdy and serviceable and at the same time
of a graceful, somewhat antique style, allowed her pedicure to
show. No coral toenail polish. Class!