The Lost Tomb of Cleopatra (Brook Burlington Book 1)

by JT Osbourne

  Brook's anger flared in her chest. There was nothing she could say. He was more powerful than she was, stronger, in a higher, more esteemed position, and a man.

  "Professor Green?" Brook whimpered, hating herself for it. She couldn't fight, so she'd cry?

  "Listen," Green offered, sitting forward and speaking softly, allowing more than an ounce of human sympathy into his voice, which Brook had never seen before. "If this is so important to you, why not have your friend Ali investigate this? He's closer, and it won't involve so much red tape—no need for visas, travel, and all that. You know how budgets are these days. Let him take the lead."

  Brook sighed. She didn't feel like sharing the intimate details of her relationship with Ali with the old professor. She didn't want to reveal how little she really trusted him, or how possessive she was about her research, much less her personal attachment to Cleopatra and Antony.

  "I know," Green said simply, as if he understood all these things without Brook saying them aloud. For a moment, she felt like confiding in him, the way she'd never confided in her father.

  "But the answer's 'no.' A firm 'no.' Now move along. I have more important work to tend to. And so should you… how's that budget presentation coming along, by the way?"

  Green waved Brook off with the wave of his hand the way you'd shoo a fly, then tapped his own manuscript. As quick as it had dawned, the feeling of exhilaration had dissolved, replaced by icy dejection.

  Brook didn't need to be told twice.

  "Should have brought you along," Brook told Saqqara when she walked back into her house later that night. "He seems to like you." Through the weighty fog of her disappointment, Brook had managed to teach a couple of classes, suffer through three student conferences, and even outline one of next week's classes, before arriving home.

  All this she'd managed without contacting Ali, but now her phone sang insistently, a calypso song Brook had accidentally programmed and couldn't figure out how to change piercing the silence of the room.

  "Ali," Brook sighed into the phone. She checked her watch. It would be the middle of the night in Cairo. What was so urgent?

  "I got it! I got it!" Ali told her excitedly.

  "Got what?"

  "The money! I got the money! For a dig, an excavation, whatever it takes. You need to book a flight! Get here as quickly as possible. It's all set."

  "How...?" Brook tried, the source of what was a seemingly impossible sum of money evading her. "What, when, why, where?"

  "Strelov."

  The world around her stopped, and her thoughts fell deathly silent at the name.

  "Strelov." Brook repeated finally, with a hiss.

  7

  Somewhere over the Adriatic

  People who haven't had much experience with institutions of higher learning assume they are generally incorruptible, dedicated to lofty thoughts, great ideas and the nurturing of young minds. Brook suspected this wasn’t the case early on, and her assessment had only proved truer the longer she remained in the system.

  She wasn't totally cynical yet; just practical, and she knew that when it came to a big research grant, all bets were off. Strelov was generous, very generous—so generous, in fact, that Brook was granted an immediate leave of absence. Her classes were assigned to a fellow professor, a plane-ticket issued, and a budget approved. Any objections Professor Green might have had, any question of the reliability of the evidence or the importance of the research, had all been wiped away by one big, fat, check.

  The flight from Washington, DC to Cairo was comfortable but cramped. Twelve hours in the air. Brook dreaded it, thanks to her thing about enclosed spaces. Fortunately the passenger next to her, an Arab businessman on the short, skinny side, seemed content to sleep curled up away from her, leaving Brook room to manipulate her laptop and consult the file folders containing her research.

  Brook hadn't confided to Ali about the manuscript in the Church. She'd go there first without him—if it proved useful, then she'd include him. Ali was the language expert after all, speaking Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Egyptian, and Aramaic. By all rights, he should go. It was a day's drive for him, not halfway around the world, yet he would claim it was easier for her to make the trip regardless.

  Brook sighed. What's with you and men? she wanted to know. It was all so complicated with them, wasn't it? Or was it just the particular men she knew? They had all had issues, starting with her father. Why were men so difficult?

  The businessman next to her grunted and snored, a rude answer to a tough question.

  Brook's one female friend, and for the sake of the trip, impromptu dog sitter, Katy James, had laughed when Brook had brought up the subject.

  "But that's the fun of it, isn't it?" Katy had exclaimed with glee. "It's not about comfort and ease and compatibility. It's sparks, fire, inferno!"

  Katy made it all sound glorious, but had been set on fire herself a few times, Brook guessed. And burned. As far as Katy’s analogy was concerned, however, Brook was still looking for her matches.

  Taking Saqqara in on such short notice was extremely kind of Katy, and for that Brook expressed undying gratitude. The dog loved Katy as much as Brook, and patiently tolerated Katy's several cats, which made Brook feel a million times better about leaving her.

  Katy and Brook had been undergraduates together, and best friends from day one, despite the huge differences in their personalities.

  "Complementary," Katy had called it. "Yin and Yang."

  "Oil and water," Brook had countered. "Cain and Abel..."

  Brook had gone on to academic "fame and fortune", whereas Katy pursued it in a more literal sense.

  "All that research is too exciting for me!" Katy had joked, before embarking on a globetrotting career tracking down rare artifacts and golden art objects; ancient specimens of human glory, inhuman greed, and beastly cruelty. "Fortune-hunter, that's what I am," Katy had admitted to Brook once. "But I don't care. I'm not hurting anyone—most of the pain happened long before I get there."

  Ironically, Katy's home base was sleepy old Weston, West Virginia, a town best-known for its now-abandoned lunatic asylum, where she owned one of the crowded little antique shops right on old-town Main.

  "I sell the same Civil War garbage as everybody else," Katy had laughed. "And folk-art, and anything else knicky-knacky-ticky-tacky. Pays the bills."

  Katy was being modest, and had become one of the top treasure hunters on the planet, a subject Brook knew a little about from her father's work.

  The plane shuddered, but the businessman next to Brook slept on. Brook wrote "Katy" in her small notebook, then "Strelov" across the page, with an arrow between them, then another arrow back the other way, and a question mark over both.

  Did Katy know Strelov? Had he been one of Katy's flames? Brook couldn't remember. Surely she would have remembered that?

  Though no one knew exactly who Strelov was, he was reported to be both a Russian oligarch of untold wealth and a major collector of historical items. He favoured Nazi memorabilia especially, the forbidden kind, but also had an interest in anything Greek, Roman, Egyptian, or utilized by the Spanish Inquisition for torture of the exercise of power. Regardless of their age or value, on his word totems, amulets and stones were stolen, torn from cold, dead hands, and swept away from poor, suffering, Third World nations.

  "He flies too close to the sun," Brook had heard. He was widely rumored to collect his artifacts in the pursuit of godliness, yet most seemed to find they willed his wings to melt away.

  Brook put the thought aside for the moment. What did it matter? She didn't work for Strelov, no matter where the funding came from. Right? As for the artifacts themselves, they belonged in Egypt. Brook would hate it if Cleopatra and Antony ended up in New York, or the British Museum. She'd hate it even more if they were imprisoned in one of Strelov's private collections in an undisclosed location, for his viewing only.

  But the priceless objects themselves had never been Brook's emphasis.


  The mystery, that's the important thing. The secret...

  "Ask Katy." Brook wrote on the page, with another arrow toward her friend's name. The sensitive subject of buying and selling historic pieces; as well as the ethics of the plundering, stealing, and looting needed to obtain them had generally been avoided between the pair. It had been a source of friction between Brook and her father; who had been quick to point out that a significant portion of Brook's own first-class education and upper-crust comfort had been made possible by such commerce.

  After leaving Saqqara with Katy, Brook had stopped at her father's grave, situated not too far from the University. It was a habit she'd developed over time, and something she always did before a long trip.

  "Dad," Brook told the once-famous, complicated man beneath the simple, weather-scarred stone, "I know you've heard this before, but this time I really think I'm losing control. Tipping over the edge. I need you to be there for me."

  Brook sighed, cringing at the catch-phrases and clichés. She could do better than that.

  "Strelov," Brook spat, the name leaving a bad taste in her mouth. "You never knew him. Or maybe you did. You at least knew men like him, I'm sure. Do I work with him, Dad? Ignore the ugliness and just work with him? I wouldn’t even consider it if he wasn’t controlling the money I need. It's all money. With him, Green, and the university. I don't know about Ali."

  Brook waited in vain for a sign. Nothing.

  "I need you to remind me to stick to my guns. I'm exhausted, not to mention the black sheep of the department, maybe the whole university. I'm not like you. I'm not like Katy. I don't thrive on adversity. They're grinding me down to nothing."

  Again, there had come no reply, no gust of wind, thunderclap, or sudden storm. Brook thought fleetingly of all the mummies she'd seen in her career. They weren't ground into nothing. They'd been wrapped and treated and anointed—flesh lasting centuries.

  Brook smiled to herself "You've gotta be a mummy.” Walk like an Egyptian—wasn't that the song? She rolled her eyes at her own bad joke, inhaling sharply as the plane shuddered again.

  Nothing to be afraid of. Turbulence.

  Despite all the breathy romance surrounding the sacred, secret art of mummification, it was mostly the hot, dry air of the Sahara itself that kept flesh preserved for thousands of years, Brook reminded herself as she got up from her seat and joined the roving bands of walkers in the aisles of the plane high in the air. Other passengers occupied every piece of empty floor space, bare feet resting high on the sides of the fuselage, as if they'd all read the same article about blood-clots, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary failure.

  The plane was somewhere over Europe, skirting the back boot of Italy, Brook figured—Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina down on the left, Montenegro, Albania and Greece coming up. Already Brook could feel a subtle descent in her shoes, under her feet, in the plane's carpeting and in the pressure in her ears. For some reason, it made her light-headed, excited, and unsettled. Was this the burning inferno Katy talked about? Was her soulmate down there somewhere?

  Brook smiled at the thought.

  If she'd been able to look straight down, if she'd believed in fate, Kismet or the luck of the draw, she'd have recognized the connection—only 30,000 feet of air-space separated her jet and an antique sailing vessel making its way down the Adriatic, travelling from Venice to Port Said. If Brook had taken her shoes off right then—like many of the other health-conscious passengers—and somehow been able to toss those shoes out of a window, one or both may very well have hit a three-masted schooner with a three hundred year history down below. The ship was ferrying a small cohort of elite passengers from New Europe to Old Egypt, across a couple thousand years of civilization.

  8

  Adriatic Sea

  Nobody but Tom Manor thought it was a good idea, but he had told everybody else he didn't care, and made the decision to do it anyway.

  "Travel the world and experience everything it has to offer" was his stated goal, though stated goals were something Tom instinctively sought to avoid.

  "I don't know what's in store," he had said when grilled by concerned friends and family. "I'm trying not to have any preconceptions about the experience."

  "You're going to write a book?" his father, Raymond Manor, a hedge-fund tsar and head of the firm Tom worked for—the family business— had asked with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.

  "No, I don't think so," Tom had replied simply.

  There'd be no documentary film, travel guide, or collection of art and antiquities at the end of it, either. Even a charitable endeavor—something Tom's super-rich family understood very well—wasn't on the cards. He wouldn't be looking to help others or set up aid projects, feed the starving, dig wells, or build shelter either, though he approved of all those things.

  "It's a Grand Tour," Tom had explained. He seemed to be fascinated by the concept, which had been a standard rite of passage for young, wealthy men (and some women) for several hundred years; an effort to taste the fruits of civilization, learn languages, see great works of art, improve oneself and enjoy one's position in society.

  Tom's professional life had already contained a Grand Tour: He'd been the youngest division director for the Fuji-Korski Trust, posted to Tokyo and Moscow for two years each, and as a result spoke fluent Russian and passable Japanese. Outside of work, he preferred Shakespeare, and had read Smollett and Beckford, Boswell and Twain—anybody who traveled the Grand Tour seemed compelled to write about it—but for this journey, Tom brought along only two books: Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, and a biography of Howard Carter, the man who discovered King Tut's tomb.

  At thirty-five years of age, he stood on the deck of the schooner, watched a plane pass overhead, and looked out at the blue Adriatic, which would become the Ionian Sea in a few hours if the wind held, before giving way to the Mediterranean itself. A swing east, and they'd sail past Derna, Tobruk, and Alexandria. For thousands of years sailors had taken this route, to trade, to conquer, to fight wars and take slaves—

  To rob and steal...

  Tom sighed.

  The ship blasted its horn to a freighter going the other way. Tom made a note to learn the signals ships sent to each other—one toot this, two toots that—and the meaning of the flags, as well as the flashing signal lights at night. He already knew Morse code—did they still use that? The air was thick with salt, the strong smell of fish, and the heady electricity of possibility. There was so much to learn, and Tom wanted all of it. He wasn't a kid, but he felt like one.

  He'd let his beard grow and left his best sports jackets at home. He'd bought clothes in London before getting aboard the Orient Express; a deluxe train from the Gilded Age made famous by another Agatha Christie novel. On the journey he passed through Calais, Paris, Lausanne, Milan, and Venice. Tom had elected to omit the "Oriental" parts of the journey—Belgrade, Sofia, and Istanbul—in favor of this schooner, which, though a bit touristy for Tom's taste, had proved perfect.

  Officially, Tom was on a six-month sabbatical from his Wall Street position, a short breather off the corporate pathway. Unofficially Tom wouldn't be going back. Whether the journey was a success or not, he'd amassed enough of his own money to last a lifetime if he didn't live too long, and slightly more frugally, even if his father disinherited him, a near certainty.

  Tom intended to book a felucca—the traditional wooden sailing boat of the Nile— to sail south from a site near the pyramids past the Valley of the Kings and Luxor, eventually arriving at The Old Cataract, a famous hotel in Aswan located right on the water. The trip would take ten days, but Tom wasn't on any kind of schedule, and he intended to see every tomb, temple, obelisk, statue, fresco, and pyramid the country had to offer. For the most part, he'd try to leave civilization behind, hedging his bets with only a smartphone, laptop and SLR camera. He'd take pictures and look up every site, and was certain he could make substantial progress in his knowledge of the Ancients.

/>   9

  Giarabub, Libya, 1942

  The first thing Kurt Muller noticed as he stepped into the tent was the smell—exotic oils overwhelmed him. The second thing he noticed was the bloodied old man bound to a chair, his bloodshot eyes staring vacantly back up at the young German lieutenant.

  Stretching the darkened, leathered skin around his crooked nose and hollowed, deep-set eyes, the terrified captive managed a broad, toothless grin.

  Muller hated the man instantly.

  "Who are you?" he demanded.

  "He's the village elder," the main torturer, a sergeant, explained.

  "I asked him!" Muller spat out.

  "Yes sir!" the torturer replied, transforming Muller's wrath into his own as he shouted at the interpreter: "Ask him!"

  The interpreter, a soldier of Somalian descent, said something in their common language, Arabic, and received a shrugged reply.

  "He's the village elder," the translator replied flatly in German.

  "Thank you," Muller replied, calmer now. "But you know that's not what I meant. What I want to know is, is he a Guardian? "

  Muller studied the man's face for some response to the word. There was none. "Ask him," he insisted.

  The interpreter tried. "He says, 'What is a Guardian?'"

  Muller leaned in, getting close enough to the elder that he could bite the man's nose off if he wanted.

  "A keeper of knowledge," Muller hissed. "Knowledge that has been passed down through his people for generations."

  The Somalian translator spoke rapidly, afraid of more impending violence, and anxious to please the determined lieutenant.

  The old man's fear faded, and he relaxed more with each familiar word, as though bathed in the sing-song, soothing Arabic of the interpreter. When the question had been fully translated, he shook his head slowly, obstinately.