Channeling Cleopatra (27 page)

Gretchen's concentration was on her patient
by then, a small boy with a gash running from the roots of his
dusty black hair to his eyebrow. Her leather jacket was gone,
wrapped around a woman who had been going into shock, and was
replaced with a white coat. Despite all the things the makeshift
hospital was missing, a good supply of white coats had come over
from the laundry.

Much later, the patients with superficial
injuries and homes to go to had been released, while those who had
been treated but had no homes were sent to a public shelter Wolfe
organized in a disused theater building. The patients who needed
more intensive treatment had been transferred to Cairo or Rome by
Nucore copters flown in from that city.

Gabriella worked tirelessly, organizing,
reassuring, escorting, chaperoning, even assisting with medical
chores when necessary. Many of the women seemed to know and trust
her more than the medical staff.

Someone mentioned that it was Dr. Faruk's
investment of both money and influence that had caused the women's
hospital to be built in the first place and had kept it going
since.

Finally, other hospital staff members
arrived to relieve them of the care of the few patients left at the
museum. At Gabriella's urging, Wolfe and Gretchen wearily agreed to
return with her to the villa.

"Your aunt?" Wolfe asked.

"How kind of you to remember," Gabriella
said. "She was transferred for further treatment to Rome. I fear
her right side may take considerable time to heal."

Gretchen rode beside her husband in the back
of the van. His arm went around her, and she snuggled under it.

He actually looked down. At her! "That's an
unusual costume you're wearing, my dear," he said. Having lost the
white jacket as well as the leather jacket, she was clad in the
skirt over her leather pants and a rather revealing laced-up
leather vest, most immodest in a Muslim country.

"You are liking,
Wilhelm,
ja
? It
gives me, I think, a dark gypsy biker babe look, do you not think?"
And as she said this, she had an uncharacteristic twinkle in her
eye and her hand, so skillful at healing, edged over the top of his
thigh and rested there playfully.

"Ja.
Before we met, I drove a motorcycle, you know."

CHAPTER 25

Rasmussen slept deeply for several hours.
Then, as if even in his drugged sleep he kept a navigational chart
on the insides of his eyelids, he awakened. The yacht was
approaching the waters of Alexandria's western harbor.

The contessa vacillated between hanging over
Chimera and Madelaine, apologizing and giving false reassurances
about their safety, and holding Rasmussen's hands in hers.

Probably trying to make
sure he doesn't cop a feel of us,
Leda
said.
Not that we would like that any more
than she would.

Suddenly, Rasmussen roused, his eyes flying
open. He struggled to sit. When the contessa tried to press him
back down again, he called out. The doctor, who had been in the lab
with Chimera, and all three flunkies came running.

"Launch the boats. Bring Faruk to me. She,"
his eyes indicated the contessa, "will show you where."

"And if there are witnesses?"

He shrugged, which
the
ba
interpreted
to mean
kill them.

The contessa interjected, "Gabriella's
household in Alex is composed of some of the women she harbors from
punishment by influential families in Egypt and other Islamic
countries. She often brings them along on her trips to see me, and
I smuggle them for her farther into Europe, with new identities.
They could be valuable—or useful, at least—in controlling
Gaby."

"Bring them, then," Rasmussen said
indifferently. "She will tell you." He had raised himself a little
as he said this, despite the contessa's efforts, but now he
subsided onto the bed again with a sigh like a bellows
collapsing.

* * *

Mo parked the van, and Gabriella climbed out
and stretched her legs. In the back, Gretchen nudged Wolfe awake,
and the two of them climbed out as well.

The villa was silent. All of the "aunties"
remaining would be asleep now. Mo said good night and disappeared
around the moon-shadowed corner of the main building to his own
quarters within the "family" compound.

As they entered the front
of the house, Gretchen said suddenly,
"Gott!
Pete! We forgot about Pete and
the bike."

"Who is this Pete?" Wolfe asked, as they
stepped through the entrance hallway and into the courtyard.

"He is . . ." and her voice died away. As
they stepped into the courtyard, they saw two women bound and
gagged, kneeling at the feet of men in the uniforms of Nucore
security. Gretchen began to back up, but something hard and cold
prodded the middle of her back.

Steady,
Duke advised.
I'll show you what to do
when the time comes. Just look all scared and girlish for
now.

This is not very hard, I
think,
she replied.

The black and white night shadows that had
been so sharp a moment ago suddenly melted to gray. A flotilla of
clouds covered the moon. The fronds of the palms and the branches
of the other trees sheltering the courtyard rustled fitfully. A
brief flash lit the sky as thunder grumbled in the distance.

The lightning showed for a split second a
woman's form in the doorway, and Gabriella gave a sharp cry, as if
in pain. "Ginia! What have you done?"

The contessa stepped into the courtyard, her
tiny, crooked form flanked by a pair of guards standing over the
bound and gagged women.

"Gabriella, it is the only way. I didn't
know you had company, dear. Why! It's Mr. Wolfe! Cesare will be
very happy to see you, I'm sure. You can cheer him up. He is having
some health problems. That's the reason for all of this haste and
rudeness, Gaby, dear."

Wolfe spoke up, "Contessa, I don't know what
this is about, but if Mr. Rasmussen is in need of medical help, he
is fortunate. This is my wife, Gretchen, an excellent
physician."

"Oh, ja,"
Gretchen said. "I would be most delighted to
examine Mr. Rasmussen and give to him the treatment, even though he
is somewhat older than my usual patients."

The contessa nodded and said to the
uniformed men, "Bring them now."

Their hands were bound with tape, and they
were marched out of the courtyard, through the house to the back
entry, near the lake, and forced into a taxi van similar to the one
in which they'd arrived. The van drove them along the western edge
of the city and out onto the Desert Highway a short distance, to a
spot where two Zodiaks, rubber rafts with Mercedes-Benz engines,
were waiting. In the distance, what looked like a cruise ship
wallowed on the sea as the waves billowed and crashed with the
ever-increasing winds.

The thunder suddenly escalated from a
grumble to a boom and crack as lightning forked across the
water.

Not a great time for a
cruise,
Duke said.

* * *

The
ba
wandered restlessly over the yacht.
She peered over the shoulder of Chimera as the scientist tinkered
with Rasmussen's sample, trying to sculpt it somewhat to produce a
profile less ruthless than the original. She followed Rasmussen's
physician, observing the potions and machineries that were the
tools of his trade. She studied Rasmussen, sleeping fitfully beside
her own earthbound vessel.

She watched as the Zodiaks carrying the
contessa and the ersatz Nucore security guards dropped away from
the mother vessel like baby spiders leaving the web.

The weather had been clear then, even with
the daylight ebbing. Since then had come the thunder, lightning,
the rising swell of the sea.

The annual floods are
beginning now,
Cleopatra's
ba
said.
Some things never change, at least.
The queen had been saddened and silent to see,
even at a distance, the ruinous remains of her once-beautiful city.
The lighthouse was gone, the palaces vanished without a
trace.

I don't know how to break
it to you,
Leda said,
but actually, since the Aswan Dam was built, the Nile doesn't
really flood like it did in your day. And you remember Nubia ?
Well, it's a lake now.

For the next hour or so, they watched the
shoreline, illuminated solely by lightning. Leda saw the squat Fort
Quait Bay, part of it crumbled away since the earthquake. Cleopatra
saw in her mind's eye the wonder of the world that had been Pharos
Lighthouse with its three-tiered tower and its brilliant lens that
could be seen thirty miles out to sea.

Cleopatra beheld palaces where Leda saw
tumbled stones and a lot of water.

Cleopatra saw a broad street with white
columns and beautiful buildings surrounding it, a channel of the
Nile connecting Lake Mauritus, an inland sea, to the River of Life.
Alexandria of her time was all but an island.

Leda was still marveling at this when the
specks that were men and women being carried across the sea in
rafts began speeding toward the yacht.

By now the waves were so high that the
Zodiaks played peekaboo with the larger vessel. Still, the
high-powered motors of the small craft propelled them so that every
time they reappeared, they were larger and nearer.

Suddenly, there was a
flurry of noise and movement from below, unconnected with the
rolling of the yacht in the swells. The
ba
located the source in Rasmussen's
cabin. The man was a ghastly gray blue again. The heart monitor
showed a flat line. His physician, several crewmen, Chimera, and
Madelaine clustered around him. The physician pulled out the
defibrillating paddles, told the others to clear, and applied them
to the bared chest of Rasmussen. The physician didn't notice or
didn't care that Rasmussen's left hand was still lightly resting
against Leda's arm.

As Rasmussen's body jerked,
the chest humping upward, Leda's spasmed, too. The
ba
found itself back
inside Leda's body. As the paddles lifted, the connection stopped,
and the truck Leda had felt slamming into her rolled back.
The
ba
no longer
saw or heard anything.

But Leda suddenly felt hands on her as she
was rolled off the bed and thumped to the floor, the impact
scarcely cushioned by the strong hands and small knees of her
rescuer.

Chimera. Leda's eyes flickered open, and she
looked into her friend's face. She was lying on the floor, Chimera
bent over her, but she was awake again. She started to say thank
you, but Chimera put a finger over her mouth and gave a barely
perceptible shake of the head. Leda winked and allowed herself to
relax and subside into a mock faint.

I thought they were going
to mummify that hideous old man,
Cleopatra
whispered inside her head.
Instead, they
returned him to life. I would like to know how this is
done.

Electrical shock,
Leda said.
We got some,
too. That's why we're awake now
—
a bit early for a blending sleep. Who
knows, maybe it will even cheer me up a bit.

If Cleopatra was puzzled about the last
remark, she let it pass.

Rasmussen's physician was still very busy.
Chimera joined him, asking, "How can we help?"

"His heart will not last much longer," the
doctor replied. "You see how erratic the rhythm is even now? But he
wishes to see this thing done. So I will hook him to the life
support so he may breathe and have his heart rate regulated. You
must prepare your apparatus to carry out his wishes."

"It is ready," Chimera said without
inflection.

The puff of the respirator, the beep of the
monitor, were punctuated by booms of thunder and a grapeshot of
rain on the decks above them. Something knocked against the hull.
Voices hollered to be heard over the storm, feet ran to a single
point on the deck, and there was a lot of groaning of wood and
lines while people were hauled aboard. The voices, all male except
for the contessa's soprano competing with the wind, became
threatening. Some of the footsteps stumbled. The yacht listed so
violently to one side that Leda's body rolled toward the bulkhead,
away from Rasmussen's bed.

Either the stabilizers on
this tub just went out or that was a hell of a big wave,
she told Cleopatra.

The doctor yelled for help. Rasmussen,
retching with the motion of the yacht, rolled away from his
machinery. Footsteps clattered down the steps.

"Suction!" the doctor yelled and then after
a moment or two of sickening slurping sounds that made Leda want to
retch also, "Help me strap Mr. Rasmussen to the bed."

Big feet ran past Leda to accommodate. Then
the contessa came down the ladder, Gabriella right behind. Leda
could tell this because she slitted her eyelids and watched and
also from the voices, the footsteps, the shoes. Next came a
crewman, then Wolfe, followed by another crewman. Last came a small
blond bombshell who looked only slightly like the Gretchen Leda had
known in her youth. The crewman who came behind her ignored the
blond. Probably figured she wouldn't do anything dumb because she
was Wolfe's wife and yes, oh my yes, there were weapons drawn and
pointed in Wolfie's general direction.