Karla Raven stepped out of the women’s shower room and nodded at the orderly who monitored the door. Karla dutifully handed over her towel and watched Ann Hammond check it off the list before she dropped it into a dirty-clothes hamper. Everything was counted in Ward Six. People just never knew when a shoelace might vanish and wind up with one end tied around a rafter and the other around someone’s suicidal neck.
“Good workout, Karla? You were at it for over six hours.”
“Yeah, well, I’d planned to go outside for a ten-kilometer run with the Skipper this afternoon, but having a meeting with the president at one, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at three, I just couldn’t work it into my busy schedule.”
“Sure, Karla.” Hammond—a middle-aged lady heading to overweight status—gave her a knowing grin. “As if the Skipper would let any of you past Secure One for anything less than a heart attack. Besides, he’s been closeted with a whole team of shrinks this afternoon.”
“What happened? Somebody skip their meds again?”
The woman surreptitiously glanced back and forth—as if the overhead camera wasn’t recording everything anyway—and whispered, “They gave Gray a physics book.”
Karla gave her a flat stare. “A physics book?”
“Yes!”
“You’re kidding.” She gestured incredulity. “Oh, come on. And this is important . . . why? If Gray can get jazzed, hot, and panting over a physics book, God help her if she ever lays her hands on a copy of Cosmopolitan.”
Still chuckling, Karla made her way into the common room. Falcon sat at one of the gaming tables, his thoughtful eyes on the television where Fox News was flashing images of a desert valley someplace in Egypt. Two chairs to his right, Winny Swink was leaned back insolently, her features pinched as if irritated. Periodically, she’d run anxious fingers through her red hair, attention on the screen.
Swink pointed a finger. “Yeah, I know that country. That’s just west of the Valley of the Kings. I wrangled a guided tour of the tombs. Must have been what, a decade back? Got to see most of the Nile.”
“You seem to have been everywhere,” Falcon noted.
“Hey, I’m fourth generation Air Force. Wherever they sent Dad, Mom insisted on seeing the sights. Made me the geography queen. I could’a waxed those kids on geography bee. You know, that TV show?”
“Falcon? This chair taken?” Karla asked, pointing to the plastic chair to his right. With Falcon, you never knew when some of his “people” were with him. Must have been hell to make dinner reservations back when he was on the outside.
“The major’s to my left. Sit,” he told her through a frown as he watched the camera angle change.
“The attack came suddenly.” The reporter’s voice sounded grave. “While we don’t have a complete count, Egyptian authorities say twenty-three local workers and security personnel were murdered in an apparent shootout with foreign mercenaries. The motivation for the attack was for possession of this newly opened tomb . . . and the priceless artifacts it contained.”
The camera displayed a recessed doorway in an excavation dug into a hillside.
“But the real marvel is inside.”
The image cataloged a bare room, then focused on the walls where a six-engine jet was oddly rendered. There, too, were Egyptian hieroglyphics and Latin script.
“Many of the priceless artifacts had already been removed by the thieves and have been recovered in the waiting trucks. But the greatest mystery lies in the burial chamber, down this dark and treacherous passageway. It was in here that two of the looters met their ends . . . victims of the ancient Egyptians’ booby traps.”
Camera lights flashed over a lip and down a drop into a narrow shaft, bloodstains visible at the bottom. Then the cameraman pulled back to the main passage, walked across a narrow bridge, and focused on a bloodstain in the main hallway.
“And finally we enter the burial chamber where the looters had only begun their work before being apprehended by Egyptian authorities.”
Here a chariot lay disassembled on the floor, and a large black sarcophagus could be seen. Various jars, a table, and little statues were filmed. Then the camera panned around to the walls.
Karla watched as the hieroglyphics and odd compositions of dots, bars, and glyphs filled one wall.
“Doesn’t look Egyptian to me,” Swink muttered. “I’ve been in those tombs. Got a guided tour of the great pyramid, once. That’s plain . . . What the hell?”
The camera was now showing an image of what looked like an electrical diagram, or an engineering schematic. More of the funny dots, bars, and symbols could be seen on the drawing’s margins.
“The tomb, we are told, is unique. Currently, Egyptologists are converging from every corner of the globe to study the find. And fortunately for the rest of us, this time, it seems, the looters were just a little bit slow.”
Fox went to a news break, and Karla heard Falcon grunt under his breath. “Doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t?”
“That last diagram drawn on the wall,” Falcon said. “Those little blocks of dots and bars? They were patterned, you could see the order, the system, unlike the Egyptian hieroglyphics.”
Falcon frowned, cocked his head, and glanced off to his right, saying to the empty chair, “Theresa would understand, Major. Yes, hieroglyphics are ordered, but they’re patterned linguistically. The dots and bars and glyphs were depicted with an elegance that bespeaks of mathematical precision, not a grammar.”
Karla snapped her fingers to get his attention. “Over here, Falcon. Yeah, that’s right. The one made of flesh and blood. You’re saying those drawings were mathematics?”
“The pattern is mathematical, Chief. We just had a glimpse, but I’d say it was algebraic.”
“Egyptians had algebra?” Swink cocked her head. “I thought the Arabs invented it.”
Falcon shrugged. “None of us are historians.”
Karla gave him a sidelong glance, wondering which “us” he was talking about.
Winny was shaking her head. “I don’t remember any artwork like that. Especially that airplane. Someone had to have drawn that later, like in the last century.” She shot a glance at Karla, as if seeking reassurance. “Did you see the way it was designed? Six engines, three per wing? And something looked really odd about that tail. It’s as if whoever drew that, they didn’t really know anything about aerodynamics.”
“So, Major Swink, what kind of airplane was it?”
“Didn’t look military, that’s for sure. Almost as if it came from a different school of design.”
“I thought there were only so many ways to make an airplane fly.”
“Chief, I tested experimental aircraft in California and Nevada. If it had wings, rotors, jets, or rockets, I flew it. I’ve been through debriefings and skull sessions with some of the best aerospace engineers in the business.” She paused. “That drawing just didn’t look right.”
“The major thinks a kid drew it,” Falcon noted, his chin propped as Fox tried to sell them gold coins to ensure their future prosperity.
“Must have been a pretty important kid to draw on the guy’s tomb wall.” Swink pulled at the lobe of her ear. “So what’s with airplane drawings and pieces of a chariot lying in the middle of the floor. And that big sarcophagus? That makes no damn kind of sense.”
“Maybe it’s aliens? Remember when History Channel went all crazy with that?”
“I want to see that image again,” Falcon said absently, his expression shutting down as it did when he was preoccupied. “There’s a key there, a pattern. I can almost see it.”
Karla slapped a nervous hand to the table. “I’ll go see if patient services can get you a copy. If it’s on the news, it ought to be on the web already.”
She pushed back and stood, aware that Fox had moved on to the latest presidential initiative on the economy. Yeah, lots of luck on that one, buddy.
As she walked off, she heard Winny Swink muttering, “I tell you, I could fly a crate like that.” The wistful longing filled her voice.