“This can’t be!” Kilgore sat at the central lab table, papers scattered to the point of spilling into the sink. Her hot gaze should have scorched a hole in the report she held. Reid perched on the lab stool beside her, his forehead etched by a frown.
Across from them, Bill Minor had a knowing smirk on his lips. The man kept rising up on his toes, then dropping flat on his heels as if possessed of a barely contained energy.
Reid was fully aware of the implications arising from the Carbon-14 analysis. Kilgore’s attention remained fixed on that final figure on the dating column.
“Impossible,” she whispered.
“Face it,” Reid told her. “You’ve got a three-thousand three-hundred and thirty-five–year date, plus or minus fifty years. That puts the mummy’s age in conformity with the tomb architecture and the artifacts inside it. Yusif, who’s dug more of these things than any man alive, said the chariots, statuary, and ceramic vases were consistent with the Eighteenth Dynasty.”
“The guy is modern! Egyptians didn’t have orthopedic surgery. They didn’t machine titanium screws. They didn’t have mitochondrial haplotype C. And they sure as hell didn’t have modern dentistry like we see in the buccal surface of that one remaining molar!”
And they didn’t bury electrical boxes with their mummies!
“It’s got to be the sample,” Reid suggested. “Maybe we screwed something up. Maybe lab contamination.”
Her troubled brown eyes betrayed a reluctance to agree. “It’s got to be the lab.”
“Run it again,” Minor suggested from the other side of the counter. “Physics are physics. It’s going to come back the same.”
If Reid hadn’t known that Minor was the kind of man who’d break every bone in his body, he would have loved to have smacked that silly grin right off his face.
Instead, he fixed the guy with a hard glare. “All right, Bill. Why don’t you come clean? Every time we’ve asked, you’ve avoided the question, but those goons who murdered Yusif’s men, they were yours, weren’t they? Skientia was behind this whole thing.”
Minor gave a faint shrug of the shoulders, expression noncommittal.
“You murdered twenty-three innocent Egyptians? Why?”
“Because, Doctor Farmer, when you actually located the tomb, proved its existence, it became glaringly apparent that the Egyptians—once they learned of its value—would have canceled the export permit. They would have seized everything. Botched the investigation into the tomb and its contents.”
Reid’s temper frayed. “Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to have just bribed the Egyptian ministers? I knew those men! And you’d have killed Yusif, too! He’s my friend, damn it!”
Minor extended a hand as Reid started around the counter. “Stay where you are, Dr. Farmer. You can be just as productive with a broken jaw as you are whole.”
Reid stopped short; anger, and frustration continued to brew.
Kilgore, in a remarkably calm voice, asked, “Why call in the military, Bill? And after they arrived, why on earth would you order your hired mercenaries to fire on them?”
Minor’s lips bent in a sour smile. “You were sealed in the tomb. I needed the sarcophaguses and you out of there. I needed it done both rapidly and efficiently, and without Egyptian hassles. And I didn’t need a bunch of gun-toting, money-grubbing adrenaline junkies, who’d already screwed up the operation, telling wild tales.”
He gestured dismissively with his right hand. “Besides our Latin expert had translated Dr. Farmer’s superb recordings. We knew exactly who was in that tomb.”
“And who is he?” Kilgore asked.
“The guy’s name is Fluvium. Means “river” in Latin, but it’s also apparently a common name in the time he comes from.”
“I don’t understand,” Reid growled.
“Of course, you don’t, Dr. Farmer. That’s why we chose you for the job. You’re an American archaeologist. Not an Egyptologist. You don’t have extensive training in classical archaeology, no knowledge of either Latin or ancient Egyptian, but you’re a meticulous excavator. And, fortunately for us, Yusif, too, was a digger. He always relied on colleagues, epigraphers, to translate the hieroglyphs.”
Kilgore crossed her arms defiantly. “Let me get this straight. You knew you were looking for a guy named Fluvium? In a tomb in Egypt? What’s so special about him? Why take all these risks? My God, the cost has to be astronomical. Not to mention pissing off not only the Egyptians, but the whole American government! It just doesn’t—”
“Make any sense?” Minor laughed. “Oh, yes it does.”
“Explain,” Kilgore snapped.
“The phrase over the tomb door,” Minor told her. “Tempus devincero. Translated it means, ‘I conquered time.’”
Reid worked his fingers. “Maybe you’d better tell me why that’s important.”
Bill Minor pointed at the door in the rear. “He came from the future. Or maybe I should say . . . a future. He and his wife went back in time to ancient Egypt. Problem was . . . he got stranded.”
Reid’s jaw dropped. Kilgore looked stunned, her dark eyes widening, and then she burst into laughter, barely managing to ask, “And you know this . . . how?”
“Because his wife appeared in one of our labs. Pop! There she was. Unfortunately for us, our investigators didn’t realize the implications until long after she’d been hauled off as an intruder. She left behind an electrical device—the design of which we’d never seen.”
Reid barely caught himself before he glanced at the electrical box they’d taken from the sarcophagus.
No! Impossible!
Minor was saying, “Given the woman’s ignorance of our reality, she had no clue of what had gone wrong, or where she was. When our lab security tried to interrogate her, they thought she was crazy, so they turned her over to Los Alamos security, and eventually DHS locked her away in a federal mental institution.”
Reid felt his anger draining away, and actually broke into chuckles. “You’re being scammed, Bill. Someone must be bilking you out of billions.”
“Actually, billions will be made, Dr. Farmer. So, please, keep your anger in check. Do that, and you might even cash in on a tidy nest egg yourselves. If you promise to act like professionals, I’ll even allow you to be present when the Domina comes to visit tomorrow.”
“The Domina?” Kilgore asked.
Minor gave her a superior grin. “The woman who popped into our lab. She’s coming to see her husband . . . who died in Egypt three thousand five hundred years ago.”