Channeling Cleopatra (28 page)

Gretchen knelt beside Leda. "Kid?" Gretchen
felt for her pulse, but Leda grabbed the hand and mouthed, "Hi,
Daddy." Then she closed her eyes again. "Possum," she mouthed
before peeking again. Gretchen winked Duke's wink.

Rasmussen roused, and between respirations
and compressions of his heart by the machines that sustained him,
spoke. "Ah, Dr. Faruk. How. Nice. Soon. I. Join. You. Permanently.
Wolfe! Chimera?"

"We are here," Chimera said from the
doorway.

"Two. Blends. Faruk. And. Wolfe."

Madelaine's voice was tremulous as she
answered. "Two are prepared, Mr. Rasmussen."

"Good. Now."

He sounded stronger all the time. Leda
carefully inched her way toward the ladder, crawling. All attention
was on the bed except Rasmussen's, which was on his intended
victims. You had to hand it to the sick old man. He had focus.

Thunder shook the yacht so hard, for a
moment no one could speak. Leda lay wedged between the stairs and
the bulkhead, hoping anyone who noticed her change of position
would assume she had rolled there with the movement of the
yacht.

The deck shuddered beneath her like a
washing machine with an unbalanced load. All she could see was
feet, the hems of the bedclothes, beneath the beds, and the
baseboards of the walls. If she escaped to the deck, what could she
do then?

Cleopatra, within her, saw
the same things and sighed.
How unfortunate
we have no venomous snakes . . .

We haven't lost our asp
yet,
Leda told her. Seeing Duke's twinkle
in Gretchen's eyes had cheered her considerably. He seemed happy,
except for the minor detail that maybe he was about to get killed
again, along with Gretchen.

"Bring. Machine. Here. Now." Rasmussen said.
"Girl. First. I. Watch."

Crack!
Came the noise of the storm, as if the deck were breaking in
two. The yacht bucked beneath them, and Leda rolled as it subsided,
thinking,
Nope, the stabilizers are fine.
This is just one hell of a big storm.

She got stepped on three times, but when she
stopped rolling, her feet were beneath the head of the bed.

With an outstretched, seemingly limp arm
shielding her face, she could see the doorway through the bathroom,
where Chimera and Madelaine staggered, carrying the portable
machine and the computer.

"Help them!" the contessa commanded, whether
for the good of Chimera and Madelaine or for the good of the
equipment, Leda wasn't sure.

The computer and machine were both
completely portable and were set up quickly, bases secured with
duct tape by one of Rasmussen's flunkies.

Gabriella was forced into a chair, and
people parted from the foot of the bed, presumably at Rasmussen's
command.

Chimera fitted the goggle-eyepieces over
Gabriella's face.

From the bed came a ghastly chortle.

* * *

Cesare Rasmussen knew he was dying, could
feel his life return and recede with each puff of the machine
inflating his lungs, each pump of the machine compressing his heart
muscle. He could not complain, however. This was a fitting
ending.

He would see himself transferred first into
the woman, a willful, principled, beautiful woman he would enjoy
conquering in every conceivable way. To begin with, he would see to
it that she closed the permanent female tea party at her home and
returned the women to their families and countries where they
belonged. He had better plans for her.

And Wolfe! What a wonderful joke to have
Wolfe under his control. Wolfe was still comparatively young,
handsome even, and virile enough to keep the shapely blond who
seemed to be his wife. He was also in control of the blendings.
Rasmussen could extend his own power infinitely while controlling
these two attractive young people—and have the little blond wife
for an appetizer.

Wonderful that he had lived to such a great
age that science could now preserve his essence this way.

The spittle that flowed down his chin as he
watched the Faruk woman struggle with her bonds was not entirely
because of the respirator. In another moment, he would be very
close to her indeed, would feel her revulsion, and quell it.

What a horrible man,
Cleopatra said.
He reminds
me of
an uncle of mine. I had to have him
strangled.

He's a honey, all
right,
Leda agreed. She had maneuvered
herself so that only her head and arm were still exposed. The rest
of her was beneath the bed frame.

There was a rasping whisper from the bed,
then the contessa said. "Gaby, Cesare wishes you to know that the
first thing you will do when you wake from the blending is begin
negotiations to sell your refugees back to their families and
governments for the appropriate disposition. He has other plans for
the two of you—the three of us actually—and doesn't want you tied
down, unless he arranges it."

"How could you, Ginia?" Gabriella protested,
but the contessa didn't answer.

"Do it." Rasmussen's command was weak, and
there was a lust as diseased as the rest of him in his voice as he
said it.

Chimera sat at the keyboard and raised his
hands.

Cleopatra's consciousness
intruded on Leda's, which was firmly fixed on a course of
action.
I
sense we
are about to do something, but why? Is this woman not your enemy?
You hold her responsible for the murder of your father. If this man
seeks to harm her, why should we
care?

Because he's the one that actually did
murder Dad, and he wants to be to Gabriella what you are now to me.
It's pretty complicated, but it wouldn't kill her, and it might
make her worse. If she doesn't say thank you nicely when and if I
pull this off, then we kill her.

And with that, her foot connected with a
heavy cord. She bent her ankle and dipped it, winding the cord
around her instep, and yanked. Nothing happened. "Must have been
the one to the bed controls," she said.

Chimera's hands were on the keyboard. Leda
wriggled farther back and felt with her foot again until she
located another cord and yanked again.

The plug came free and smacked her ankle
bone, but suddenly all that could be heard was the storm and the
click of computer keys. The pumping and soughing of the life
support machines was still.

Of course, nobody
immediately thought to check and see if the machines were still
plugged in, at least no one on Rasmussen's staff. They stood around
with their faces hanging out, probably thinking
a short, the electrical storm outside, black magic,
whatever, but Leda was well out on the other side
of the bed by then.

Gretchen Wolfe said in a sweet, concerned,
doctorly voice, "Please to let me help. I am a physician also."

A question hung in the air. Then came the
sound of slitting tape as the hands of the innocent-looking,
helpful Gretchen were freed.

Leda hunkered up as close as she could to
the under edge of the bed. Directly in front of her were the
jogging shoes and uniform pants of one of the fake Nucore guards.
He stood with legs parted, to maintain his balance on the rolling
deck. She lowered her head like a charging bull, aimed her crown at
his crotch, and shot forward at an angle that caught him where he
lived.

The ship rolled again, and the guard was on
his butt. Chimera lurched backward to the foot of the bed.

Lightning cracked, and Rasmussen's physician
came up, holding the plug to the machines as if it were some
de-charmed snake. As he knelt back down to reinsert the plug, he
fell against the bed. Meanwhile, using some moves that looked
gratifyingly familiar to Leda from the police training films Duke
had made, Gretchen took out the two guards closest to her.

The contessa jumped her.

Then someone fired a shot.

Everyone looked at everyone else. The guards
fumbled to raise their guns, as if they'd forgotten about them.

"Drop it," a voice said from the top of the
ladder. Pete stood there, with a gun of his very own. "This vessel
is surrounded by the Egyptian Navy and will be impounded for
violations of the maritime code occurring within Egyptian waters as
well as the kidnapping of persons from Egyptian soil."

"I am the private physician of Mr. Cesare
Rasmussen," said the man who was, "and these people are preventing
me from caring for my patient."

"In that case, send them up here," Pete
said. "Slowly, unarmed, I want to see Mr. and Mrs. Wolfe, Gabriella
Faruk, and her aunts . .."

"I'm here, too, Pete," Leda called. "And so
is Dr. Chimera."

"And Madelaine," Chimera added.

"You guys, too, then, Punkin," Pete
called.

CHAPTER 26

Fortunately for all of them, Pete didn't
actually have the Egyptian Navy waiting topside to arrest the
wrongdoers. What he had was the dam construction and diving crews
from the dig in the harbor. They were much easier to deal with,
Pete said, and they asked for less red tape. For this, Gabriella
and her aunts were particularly grateful.

"My hero," Leda said, and she meant to make
it a joke and bat her eyelashes satirically, but it came out more
seriously than she intended. Pete did a double take.

"All I did was get some guys together," he
mumbled. "You or your dad would have done the same for me."

Cleo!
Leda said.

You did not tell me we had
such a handsome suitor at our command,
the
queen replied.

* * *

The yacht disappeared, and later, the
contessa returned to Kefalos during business hours to have her
blending reversed. She told them that Rasmussen's doctor had been
unable to revive him. Once the blending had been reversed, she
seemed relieved and ashamed at the same time.

"I will try to get his stockholders to agree
to a Viking funeral for Cesare," she promised. "So . . . historical
and appropriate, don't you think?"

Wolfe paid enough baksheesh to allow the
refugees at Gabriella's house to be brought to Europe under false
credentials.

The cofferdam was repaired and strengthened,
and renewed excavations, under the leadership of Dr. Leda Hubbard,
an American anthropologist with an astonishing intuitive insight
into Egypt's past, took energetic and innovative new
directions.

Nucore's interest in Egypt was, on paper at
least, bought out by another corporation, Helix. Papers were
shuffled, names and logos changed, and the Egyptian public settled
back down, pleased with the knowledge that, for once, they had
guarded their ancient trust from foreign interlopers.

In October of the following year, a new
excavation uncovered a partially collapsed tunnel beneath the
island that had contained the royal complex and the temple of Isis.
This tunnel, once cleared, led inland, deep underground, to a
secret tomb long buried beneath the building and grounds of the new
Alexandria Library. In December of the same year, a huge news story
erupted.

TOMB OF CLEOPATRA;

Instead of Fancy Jewelry, the Queen Took
Along Some Good Books

According to anthropologist Dr. Leda
Hubbard, her team has recently discovered a mummy DNA tests have
positively identified as that of Queen Cleopatra VII. Though the
mummy carried none of the treasures usually associated with such a
royal burial, it was locked in an imaginatively engineered and
superbly constructed crypt apparently of the queen's own design,
Dr. Hubbard reported.

"The treasures Cleopatra chose to take with
her to this secret burial were intellectual. We found cases and
cases of scrolls we believe the queen rescued from the burning of
the original library, including some authored by Cleopatra herself,
and others by famous scholars of her day and earlier times. These
works should give us many insights into the great mysteries of the
ancient world, including, perhaps, the burial site of Alexander
himself, long believed to be in Alexandria."

Dr. Peter Welsh, the engineer and
hydrologist for the expedition, credited Hubbard's intuition to the
unearthing of the queen's crypt.

The newly appointed antiquities inspector
for Alexandria, Dr. Gabriella Faruk (who replaced Dr. Mahmoud
Namid, arrested earlier this year when he was found to have
extensive holdings in brothels in Thailand and the Philippines),
says, "Leda's discovery is the most wonderful thing to happen to my
country in this century. It is as if Cleopatra herself chose this
time to reveal her great secrets. The scrolls, of course, will
remain in Egypt, as will the queen's remains, though DNA samples
have been sent for analysis to the laboratories at the Hubbard
Foundation, established in honor of Dr. Hubbard's late father, who
died during the great quake of last year."

EPILOGUE

The Christmas party was lavish but small,
exclusive, and distinctly interdenominational.

Wilhelm Wolfe was an agnostic of Jewish
descent; Chimera a Buddhist (or two Buddhists); Gabriella Faruk not
a Muslim at all, as she seemed to be, but a Coptic Christian;
Contessa Virginie Dumont a lapsed Catholic; as were Madelaine, Pete
Welsh, and Duke Hubbard; and Gretchen Wolfe, alias Gretchen
Graffin, a Lutheran. Leda Hubbard had been a Wiccan for many years,
and Cleopatra Philopater was a time-lapsed worshiper and embodiment
of Isis.

Nonetheless, everyone sang carols around the
tree and exchanged gifts.

Pete had already received his from
Leda/Cleopatra and sat with a deeply satisfied, dazed look on his
face while nursing a 7Up. He no longer imbibed six-packs. Nor did
Leda. The queen of the Nile, busily educating herself on all manner
of modern discoveries, decreed that her father had been an
alcoholic and Mark Antony more so, and she would not allow anyone
she loved in this new life to destroy himself in that fashion. It
amused Leda that Pete hardly missed what had been an integral part
of his life as long as she'd known him. Cleopatra could be
extremely persuasive.