Channeling Cleopatra (14 page)

While the computer was crunching the final
bit of data in the report she would add to the original donor
sample, Leda stepped outside for what seemed like the first fresh
air she'd taken since she found the jar.

The heat hit her like a dragon's belch, but
when her eyes stopped swimming, she saw the setting sun splashing
the sky with Halloween orange above bright blue waters turning to
indigo. Outlined by the sea, the partially lit silhouette of a man
strolled across the back of the dam. Her dad on his rounds, his
stride at that distance now almost as familiar to her as his face.
Now and then he took out binoculars to have a long look at
something or other in the hole below, but when he turned the lenses
in her direction, she waved.

He waved back. She picked up the cell phone,
to call and ask him to come to the beluga. She had already sent a
message to Chimera that Dad would be bringing the specimen to
Kefalos.

Duke stopped, lifted the phone from his
belt, and she heard a few staticky noises. With the scientific
approach to technology of men from his generation, he glared at his
phone, shook it, held it up to his ear again, and jammed it back
into his belt.

Then he waved again and doubled back along
the dam in the direction of the fort, beyond which the beluga
claimed squatter's rights.

She waited for him.

He joined her with a "Hi, Kid. Damn phone. I
forgot to recharge it before I left. Hey, don't you have sense
enough to go in out of the heat?" The two of them stepped back into
the cool white cave as her computer beeped to announce it had
finished the crunching. She hit Send for the report and opened the
minifridge, extracting a couple of Italian beers for them to
celebrate with.

The fridge jittered against the floor, and
at first she thought it was making ice cubes. Then she remembered
it didn't do that.

And the fridge wasn't the only thing
jittering. The earth beneath her feet rolled and bucked like a ship
on stormy waters, rattling the machinery on the counters and in the
storage cupboards. Her computer's mouse jumped off the desk and
tried to escape. The generator bounced against its bolts, and the
lights flickered. Then the air conditioner died with a sigh and a
thundering silence.

Leda dove under the desk for the errant
mouse and hauled it back toward her. "Oh, no, you don't," she said.
As she tried to rise again, she saw the computer screen's error
message blacken to a blank screen. "Aw, shit," Leda said. But for
the moment, the earth stopped moving.

At the first tremor, Duke's eyes had
narrowed into the watchful, hawkish expression he assumed when he
was in a questionable situation, as he often was.

"What?" he asked, nodding at the dead
computer screen. "Did it go through or not?"

Leda sighed with relief and frowned as she
rolled up a sheet of paper. "Not, I think, but I got the printout.
You can take it along with the specimen."

"Wait a minute, Kid," he said. "I'm not
going anywhere right now."

"Daddy, you have to. What if we've had—are
having—a major quake?"

"Exactly."

"No, the most important thing is to get this
to Chimera. If my data is damaged, it can be reconstructed from
this. It's the most important thing in the whole country right now.
Daddy. Because this is her. She, I mean. It's she."

Duke had from time to time peered over her
shoulder when he came to check on her, but her work didn't mean
much to him. The computer screen was always a mess of numbers and
letters that looked a lot like algebra, but with brown dashes
beside them, zigzag graphs that looked like the ones a heart
monitor showed, or little squiggles.

"She who?" he asked. "Oh, her," he said,
striking a pose like a dancer on a tomb wall and making
chicken-pecking movements with his chin.

"Of course, her!"

"You're sure, are you? I
still haven't seen any sign that says 'Julius Caesar
and
Mark Antony slept
here.'"

"Silly asp," she said, smacking playfully at
his arm. To her surprise, he went sprawling. So did she. Beneath
them, the floor shook as if a freight train was rumbling across
it.

"Damn, there it goes again," she said,
hauling herself up after a few seconds from the still-vibrating
floor. She grabbed her specimen and the three-inch-long titanium
cylinder that was its transport case.

Her dad had prudently moved himself into the
door frame, but she was determined to by God accomplish her damn
mission. She hadn't come this far just to let a little hissy fit on
nature's part screw things up.

Inside the clean tent, something crashed
with an extremely expensive amount of noise. Leda cringed and
paused for a moment, willing the building to stop shimmying.
There'd been four more minor tremors in the last week, but none of
them disturbing enough to mess up the power supply or even distract
her from her work. All of them had subsided so quickly that Leda
had only realized they'd happened afterward. This one was more
tenacious, but she was determined to ignore it if she could.

Her dad was grinning as he assessed the
situation. He liked things that bucked and snarled: motorcycles,
turbulent air when he was flying, race cars, most of his
ex-wives.

They were adrenaline junkies, both of them,
father and daughter, though Leda's addiction had a more
intellectual bent to it, causing her to get all fluffy about things
like the canopic jar and Cleopatra's personal cartouche.

The building lurched and swayed again, and
something groaned deeply, while more glass crashed. The ceiling
began to bow. Leda finished preparing her precious specimen for its
trip and stuck it in its special container. About then, the floor
jerked out from under her, and she landed on her butt.

"You okay, Kid?" her father asked, taking
one hand from the door frame.

"Sure. Who knows? If the last quake brought
us Cleopatra, we might get Alexander the Great with the next one.
It could happen." She rose to all fours and crawled toward him, the
specimen tube inhibiting use of her left hand. "But you need to get
this to the airstrip pronto."

"I need to ride herd on what's happening
here, Kid," he told her. "My job, remember."

"Delegate it," she said, and it was the
first and last time she would ever give her father an order. "This
is way more important."

"Hey, you could get hurt here."

"So could you. Do it, Daddy, please?"

He grunted and reluctantly accepted the
tube.

"Don't forget your phone batteries," she
called after him. "I want you to call from the airstrip."

He made an impatient slapping gesture back
over his shoulder but jogged toward Fort Quait Bay. He paused near
the control center, and in a moment the lights filling the bowl of
sea floor below the dam blinked out. When they came back on again,
he was running from the barracks where he and the other single men
slept. A squad of other men, some in uniform, some in street
clothes, some in night clothes, were right behind him. One of
them—Pete maybe?—stopped for a second and exchanged a few shouted
words with Duke.

Dad retraced his steps to where he had
parked his bike, jerked something from his saddlebags, shoved
something else in, and secured the bag again before jumping on his
bike. Then, without so much as a "Hiyo, Silver!" he was away.

The shaking began again.

About to bolt for the beach, Leda suddenly
remembered her data and the canopic jar with what remained of the
original specimen in the clean room. She sprinted for that instead.
Unzipping the outer flap, she stepped over the wreckage of the PCR
machine and popped a minidisk from the computer hooked up to the
electron microscope. With this, she had the data she'd duplicated
from the patched strand. As long as she was safe, so was Cleo.

She reached for the canopic jar, deciding
that now would be a good time to take it to Namid's office and tell
him whose DNA it contained, before it got broken.

But before she could lay hands on the jar,
the ground shook like a wet dog, a boom and roar filled Leda's
ears, and beneath the plastic ground cloth zipped to the walls of
the clean room, a wide trench began opening in the floor.

"Oooooooh, shit!" she said
and bolted for the doorway, which was crumpling toward her. She'd
be smothered
and
crushed if she didn't get it open. The zipper jammed, and she
had to lay down the jar and use both hands to yank at it, with the
floor tilting under her and the refrigerator toppling forward along
with the computer and other equipment.

The room went dark suddenly as the generator
gave up the ghost. Well, at least she wouldn't be electrocuted as
well as smothered and crushed.

She unzipped the door just enough for her to
stick her hand out before the damn thing stuck again. The ground
did the bunny hop under her sandals. Her toes cringed under the
sandal straps as glass from the screens of the ruined machinery
tinkled. The plastic underfoot drained like water into the trench
the quake made in the floor.

She groped around on the floor until her
hand closed on a long sliver of the glass. Wrapping the tail of her
T-shirt around it to protect her hand, she stabbed at the plastic.
It was tough plastic, but the broken glass pierced it and with a
long tug she opened a rent, then sawed at it until it looked big
enough for her. She turned to pick up the canopic jar, but it
rolled toward the trench. She lunged for it, but her feet flew out
from under her, and only her grip on the doorway kept her from
following the jar down the hole. But the tent was rapidly
collapsing. If she didn't get her ass through the hole now, she
would become a plastic-wrapped mummy, entombed in the hole under
the ruins of the beluga.

She forced her arms and upper torso through
the slit in the tent.

The slab on which the building sat, made of
a quick drying ready-mix plastic composition material, cracked in
another place, and she lost her footing again. Her arms flailed at
the floor outside the tent while she kicked wildly, trying to free
her feet and legs from the plastic.

The price of being an isolationist: She'd
sent her only ally away, and now she would die alone in this damned
thing if she didn't get out. She looked up as the supporting rods
on the beluga's ceiling bowed inward, and the ceiling's belly
ballooned toward her.

One more kick, a twist to free her foot, and
she half crawled, half ran for the door, praying it hadn't jammed
shut.

CHAPTER 12

Despite the roar and vibrations from the
souped-up old Sopwith between his legs, Duke definitely felt the
causeway lurch under his tires as he sped toward the mainland.

He gunned the motor, congratulating himself
on the modifications that allowed him to treat the relic with such
disregard for its venerable age. He was pretty sure he could make
it fly if he had to.

The Nucore-sponsored airstrip lay in a field
west of the city. Theoretically, it serviced Nucore-sponsored
excavations throughout Egypt, but in reality, most of the traffic
it received was small fixed-wing and helicopter shuttle flights
from Cairo. Otherwise, occasional private or courier flights
arrived from Kefalos or Rome, the staging city for the Egyptian
digs.

One of the fixed-wings was there for Duke's
use. He could drive almost anything with a motor. Planes, boats,
even mini-submarines, bikes, cars, trucks, you name it, if he
hadn't already logged in plenty of miles in a vehicle, give him a
few minutes, and he'd figure it out. He was also a former Navy
deep-sea diver, sky-diver, para-glider, jet-skier, snow-skier,
snowboarder, and ex-hockey champ. There were probably a few
athletic skills he hadn't mastered, but hell, he was only
seventy-two. He figured there was plenty of time. He had to
practice his marksmanship and get married some of the time, so that
slowed him down a little. His kids said that no matter how old
Daddy got, he was always looking for new ways to die young. Or, as
Leda liked to say, "Daddy has a Swiss Army life."

For a few moments, the tremors seemed to
quiet. Duke risked his life, not to mention a traffic ticket,
weaving through the confusion on the Corniche. The joint was
jumpin', literally, and not in a good way. Flimsy buildings crashed
all the way down the beachfront as if they were made of toothpicks.
Fires were breaking out, sirens wailing, people screaming and
darting into traffic.

He veered southeast off the Corniche down
the Ras at-Tin and roared along the edge of the inner harbor,
parallel to the tram line.

The tracks were all over the place, stuck up
in the air, jutting across the road, halfway into the water.

Over the growl of his bike he heard the
squeal of rubber, metal grinding against metal, and the crash of
smashing glass right behind him.

In his rearview mirror he saw cars
accordioned into one another all the way back up Ibrahim-al Auwal.
What looked like a small mountain erupted into the middle of the
street about 300 feet back from the turn-off. He headed due west
through El Wardyan, which was more or less the local ghetto. Just
to the east of the cutoff and along the shores of Lake Mariout was
the street with Gabriella's villa. He wondered briefly if the poor
kid was okay. He'd have to check on her on the way back.

For Leda to put delivering this doohickey he
carried above her own safety and the safety of everybody else on
the site, it had to have top priority. He was glad nobody had any
animals there, no pets or donkeys or anything. The people could get
themselves out for all he cared, but animals were different. He
suddenly missed Leroy, his cat, back in McMinnville with his
current wife.