But either weapon might be appropriate here, she reminded herself. She strapped on the guns, one on her left ankle and one on her left ribs, in the opposite positions to the knives.
She checked her skinsuit. It was fully active now that she had taken off the fullsuit. There was no sign of it on her at the moment, for it was retracted into the upper layer of her skin, waiting for a biological menace in her environment to kick itself into action.
Pruit slid a finger along the underside of her left forearm and activated the skinsuit control panel. Skinsuit cells pulled themselves out of her arm and formed a small readout in shades of blue and red. With her right hand, she manipulated the readout, checking the suit’s functions. Everything was operable.
She dressed herself in cotton pants and a cotton blouse and running shoes. The clothes were loose enough to cover her weapons, and she found them quite comfortable.
She pulled out a stack of paper money from Kenya. She had traded several pieces of gold and silver, items that had been stocked in the pod survival kit, to get the cash, and she would now trade it in for the local Egyptian money. She tucked the bills into one pants pocket and slid her passport into the other.
Leaving the changing booth, she studied herself in the bathroom mirror, standing next to several other women who were washing their hands or touching up their faces. Her brown-red hair was drawn back tamely into two small braids that reached her shoulders at the back of her neck. Her copper skin was not the rule here, but it did not stand out. Only her blue eyes seemed unusual, when taken with the rest of her coloring, but she did not believe they were odd enough to mark her as alien.
Eddie stood outside the customs area at the Cairo airport, looking across the small barriers at the crowd emerging from baggage claim from a London flight. As third-world airports went, this one was fairly nice. Built in the 1960s, it featured gray-and-beige linoleum tiles and recessed fluorescent lighting along walls of an abstract honeycomb design. It was reasonably clean and was kept secure by hundreds of military guards in jaunty dark-blue uniforms with machine guns over their shoulders. Over loudspeakers, a pleasant female voice announced arriving and departing flights in Arabic and English and French.
Eddie had driven from the dig to the city the night before and had stayed at the Semiramis Hilton, a tall modern hotel perched in gaudy self-complacency at the edge of the Nile. He had reveled in the hot shower and now wore pressed cotton slacks and a white jersey and a baseball cap, everything feeling wonderfully clean after weeks at camp. He was tan from his time in the desert, and his good-looking face stood out against the white of his shirt. He knew he looked attractive, and he was glad of it. He was here at the airport to meet two archaeologists who were joining the dig. One of them was Gary Brewer, a well-known British Egyptologist specializing in the Old Kingdom, which encompassed the Third through Sixth Dynasties. The other was Julianne Malcosky, an American expert in the evolution of Egyptian religion. Julianne was the reason Eddie had volunteered to make the airport run. He had met her at several Egyptology conferences over the last few years. She was unattached, or so he had gleaned, and he had notions of a brief fling while sharing the dig site together. He was not a woman chaser, though his good looks provided him with opportunities for intimate encounters. He admired beautiful women, would sleep with them if the occasion arose, but he soon tired of them if there was no intellectual substance behind the skin. Julianne, he knew from his few conversations with her, was bright and driven, and it seemed only natural to him that they should be drawn to each other.
Julianne had connected onto this flight from New York. Gary had boarded in London. As Eddie watched the passengers slowly making their way through customs, he saw the two of them emerge together from the baggage claim doorway, pulling their extensive luggage behind them. Gary, Eddie now noticed with some annoyance, was an attractive man in his forties. Irritatingly, the two were deeply engaged in conversation. From their attitudes it appeared they had been talking for hours, had perhaps managed to sit together on the flight. There was even, Eddie had to admit to himself, a visible spark between them.
He waved to them, and they smiled as they reached him. There were introductions; then Eddie signaled for a porter to bring their bags outside for them.
“You have three meetings in Giza tomorrow, Gary,” Eddie said, “so I thought it best if we stay in Giza tonight and tomorrow night, then head out for the dig together the day after.”
“Sounds fine,” Gary replied, emitting a world-weary sigh and smiling in what Eddie considered an obnoxious, self-obsessed fashion. Julianne rubbed Gary’s arm lightly as a gesture of comfort.
Eddie turned away, leading them out into the late-afternoon sunlight and hot air blowing in from the desert. They waited at the curb, and Eddie scanned the packed cars for the van he had hired to bring them to their hotel. It appeared the driver had been forced to make another circuit of the airport.
The new arrivals chatted with him about the dig and then fell back into conversation with each other, continuing a friendly debate. Vexed that he had been so thoroughly preempted, Eddie put his hands in his pockets and sighed his own world-weary sigh, searching for the van. As his eyes traveled over the honking cars and pedestrians pushing baggage and the guards idling along the walls, he noticed a girl crouched down on the sidewalk, studying a map spread out in front of her. There was a backpack slung over her shoulder.
There was nothing particularly unusual about her, but he found his eyes staying with her for a moment, and he caught sight of something shiny around her neck. It was a pendant hanging off a leather thong, and because of the way she was crouched over, it had come out from underneath her shirt and was hanging in the air below her chin. Without thinking, he took a few steps toward her. There was something oddly familiar about the necklace. It was a few more moments before he realized what was holding his attention: She was wearing one of his crystals. The shiny object on her necklace was none other than one of the crystals he had stolen from the dig. He moved nearer to her, and now he was certain of it. There, on a leather strap, was a small orangish crystal with two dark bands of color crossing it. He caught his breath. He was standing only two steps away from her now, and she heard him and turned her head.
When she turned, he could see the crystal very clearly, resting against the white of her blouse. It was not exactly like his, he now saw. The bands on hers were dark blue, not dark green, and her crystal had cracks running up from one end, as though it had been partially crushed at some time. Other than these small differences, however, they were identical in form.
It took a moment for him to realize that she was staring at him. His eyes moved from the crystal to her face.
“Yes?” the girl said.
She was rather exotic looking, with brown skin, blue eyes, and reddish-brown hair, a rare combination. Her face was pretty, or more accurately, Eddie thought, striking.
“Sorry,” Eddie said, flustered for a moment. To cover for his presence next to her, he glanced down at her map and said, “Can I help you with directions?”
“I’m going here, to Giza.” She pointed to the location on her map. Looking more closely, he saw that she was studying a large, topographic map of Egypt, with elevations marked clearly and small Xs the only indication of towns and cities, though she had written city names in small letters by some of the Xs. It was not at all the kind of map a tourist would have. “Is a taxi the best way to get there?” She gave her words an unusual intonation, but Eddie could not immediately recognize her accent.
“Uh…” he was trying to get his mind around her, with her strange map and the crystal. “Yes…yes. A taxi is fine.”
“Good.” She stood. She was perhaps five feet eight inches tall, with the slight wiry frame of a dancer. She was already looking around for the nearest taxi.
To stall her, Eddie blurted, “You’re going to see the pyramids?”
“Pyramids?” She began walking toward a cab, shouldering her backpack more firmly.
“At Giza,” he said, walking after her. “The Great Pyramid.”
She hesitated for the briefest of moments, then said, “Yes, of course.”
“Eddie!” he turned and saw Julianne and Gary calling to him. The van had pulled up, and they were already loading in their bags.
“Be right there!” He turned back to the girl. She was opening the door to a cab.
“We’re going to Giza,” he said quickly, not wanting her to leave. “You’re welcome to ride with us. There’s plenty of room.”
She paused and studied him for a moment, then smiled and shook her head. “Thanks, but no.” He noticed that her speech was already becoming more natural, more like his own. “I’d prefer to go by myself.”
“All right. I understand. You don’t know me.” He took a step back so she could close the taxi door. “But you should stay at the Mena House. It’s the only nice hotel in town, and the Great Pyramid is right across the street.”
“Thanks.”
“Really, you should stay there. It’s very convenient.”
She nodded slightly, dismissing him, then leaned forward to speak to the driver. One of her hands gently tucked the crystal back under her shirt.
“Where did you get that necklace?” Eddie asked, before she could give the order to go.
She paused and looked at him. “It was a gift.”
“Is it very old?”
“Yes, very.” Then she leaned forward and told the driver, in Arabic, to head for Giza. But Eddie could see that he had caught her attention now. As the taxi pulled away, she looked back at him, and they held each other’s eyes for a moment.
Eddie stared after the taxi until it was out of sight. He was thinking there was something serious and strange and both wrong and right about her.
He was brought back to himself as the others called his name again, and he joined them in the van. As the vehicle pulled out of the airport, Julianne and Gary were still talking to each other, and they were sitting quite close together despite the car’s roomy interior. Eddie no longer noticed.
CHAPTER 25
Pruit sat at an outdoor breakfast table in the restaurant of the Mena House, under an awning of striped red and white. It was early, and she was the first diner. From where she sat, she had a view up the cement walkway that followed a winding route back to the hotel proper. Beyond the walkway she could see the hotel building, framed by tall palm trees and green lawns. Behind the building, looming huge against the sky, was the Great Pyramid.
On the table in front of her was a plate of fruit and fuul, an Egyptian fava-bean breakfast dish that she was enjoying very much. All fresh food was delicious after living so long on the ship. Spread out in the center of the table were her maps. As she ate, she studied her smallest-scale map of the target area. The beacon was very close to her present location, probably in the proximity of the pyramid.
When that young man had spoken to her at the airport and mentioned the Great Pyramid, she had only vaguely remembered reading something about it when she researched her target area. The pyramids were monuments of some kind. She had not assigned them particular importance, however, for they were just one more item among hundreds of thousands of items related to Earth.
The evening before, however, she had read about the pyramid in a hotel brochure. It was estimated to be nearly five thousand years old and so might have been constructed during the survey crew’s tenure. It took on new relevance to her mission.
She glanced around to ensure she was still alone on the patio. Seeing that she was, she pulled up the sleeve on her left arm and activated the skinsuit control panel. The cells seeped up from her skin and formed themselves into the display. She manipulated it, and in a moment, it presented her with the precise Earth coordinates of her location, bouncing its signals off various Earth satellites to determine this with exactitude.
She compared these to the coordinates of the beacon site on her map. Then she looked back up at the pyramid and calculated the distance. Something occurred to her.
She reached up under her blouse and pulled out her laser gun, fitting it to her right hand. With her thumb she tabbed the amplitude control, setting at it at its lowest value, infrared radiation. The gun used this for range-finding and was capable of bouncing beams off objects, then receiving them back and measuring the distance. With her little finger, she tabbed on the receiving function of the weapon.
She sighted down her hand and aimed it at the top of the pyramid. She fired. A weak, invisible beam shot out from the gun, hit the pyramid, and bounced back to her, all in the space of an eyeblink. She glanced at the receiver. It gave her the exact distance to the pyramid and the direction the laser had traveled. She plotted these on the map in front of her. The line she drew led straight to the target mark.
The beacon wasn’t close to the Great Pyramid. The beacon was the Great Pyramid. She smiled, thinking of an old adage that warned against things too obvious to see. Despite the accident with the pod, her mission was moving along very well.
She looked up the stone walkway and saw a man approaching from the hotel, so she slipped the gun back into its holster on her ribs. After a moment, she recognized the man as the one who had spoken to her at the airport yesterday. She had hoped to see him again. After his comment about her crystal, she had wondered if he might know something of the ancient Kinley technology left on Earth. She surreptitiously slipped off her crystal necklace and tucked it into one of her deep pants pockets. She would wait to see if he asked about it again.
In a few moments, he had arrived, and he was smiling at her.
“I hoped you took my advice and stayed here,” he said. “Would you mind company for breakfast?”
“Not at all.” She gestured to one of the other chairs at her table.
He put out a hand and said, “I’m Eddie.”
“I’m Pruit,” she said. They shook hands.
Eddie went inside to get breakfast, then joined her. She saw him looking at her neck, but the crystal was no longer there. She could not tell if he was suspicious of her or merely curious. In either case, his interest in her was not flirtatious in the least. She did not know quite what to make of him.
After exchanging a few pleasantries, Eddie said, “I’m free until this afternoon. Would you like a tour of the Great Pyramid? I’m an excellent guide.”
She almost said no but stopped herself. A guide familiar with the pyramid could be helpful, and she wanted to see if he had anything else to say about her crystal. If she decided later she did not want him around, she did not think it would be difficult to lose him.
“All right.”
An hour later, she and Eddie were up on the Giza Plateau, that desert prominence that held three enormous pyramids and a city’s worth of other burial structures. They stood directly beneath the Great Pyramid, squinting in the bright morning light. It rose above them, tier upon tier of brown weathered blocks falling gently up and away until the four sides reached each other at the very top.
It was still early, and there were only a few locals in worn cotton gallibiyas standing near the pyramid to hawk postcards and other trinkets to the tourists. Some way off were men on camel- and horseback waiting to sell rides on their animals. A camel-mounted police squad passed by the pyramid, patrolling the plateau.
The Giza guards wore white military uniforms and carried machine guns. Three of these men were gesturing them away.
“Closed,” one of the guards said.
“Why?” Eddie asked.
“Closed,” the man said again, unable to explain in English.
“Why closed?” Eddie asked in his broken Arabic.
The man answered with a short sentence of which Eddie understood only a few words. Pruit saw his confusion and translated. “He says it’s closed pending a seismic study.”
“You speak Arabic?”
“Yes.” She turned to the man. “Why seismic?”
“I have heard that it was shaking slightly a few weeks ago,” th
e man told her, quite pleased that a foreigner spoke his native tongue, and with only a slight accent. So few tourists bothered to learn local ways. With her good Arabic, he was even willing to forgive her for walking around with her head uncovered. “Nothing was damaged. But Mister Hawass, who runs the plateau, is only thinking of safety.”
Pruit felt a surge of excitement. If the pyramid had been shaking a few weeks ago, the motion had probably been caused by her own transmission. This was verification that it was, indeed, the beacon. She explained to Eddie what the man had said.
“Shaking?” Eddie asked. “It’s been standing for five thousand years. What are they worried about?”
She shrugged. “Safety, he says. But I’m not personally worried. I’d still like to go inside. Can we bargain?”
“Always.” Eddie sized up the man. Despite the guards’ formal uniforms and considerable firepower, they were generally a lax lot. Their training was minimal, as was their pay, and they were open to bargaining if it was perceived as harmless in intent. “Tell him that we would be very thankful if he could find a way to let us in,” Eddie said as Pruit translated. “We have come so far that it would be worth a great deal to us…”
He walked Pruit through the ritual of Baksheesh. Though Westerners often mistook Baksheesh for a bribe, Eddie understood that its meaning was quite different. Baksheesh was simply money given as charity or in recognition of a service rendered. It was the grease of all human affairs in Egypt and most of the Middle East. After many polite rejections by the guard, the deal was sealed for four hundred Egyptian pounds, and they were invited to return during the lunch hour, when the other employees of the plateau would be less attentive.
Accordingly, at noon, Pruit and Eddie were quickly ushered up the steps carved into the bottom tiers of the pyramid’s face and into the doorway that had been hacked through the outer walls by Al Mamun, Caliph of Cairo, in the ninth century. They passed two other guards sitting on either side of the small, low door. These stared at them without comment, for they were, of course, getting a cut of the Baksheesh.
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