The Third Gate

11

Christina Romero’s office was situated in Red, the container facility devoted to the med center and the various science labs. It reminded Logan more than a little of his own office back at Yale: orderly and clean, with row after row of books sorted by author and subject matter on long metal shelves. A large desk in the middle of the room was littered with artifacts and notebooks, yet somehow managed to look tidy; more artifacts were stored against the rear wall in a stack of carefully labeled plastic containers. Several diplomas and framed prints hung on the other three: a photo of an Egyptian wall painting; a print of Turner’s Regulus, and-bizarrely-a very childlike depiction of the Sphinx.

If the office seemed vaguely familiar, however, Dr. Romero herself was a surprise. She was thin and very young-no more than thirty. Logan realized he’d been expecting a frowsy old woman in tweeds, a female Flinders Petrie. Romero could not have been more different. She was dressed in blue jeans and a black mock turtleneck with its sleeves pushed up to her elbows. She had kinky, shoulder-length black hair, parted in the middle, and it flared away from her face, looking not unlike the headdress of an Egyptian king. As Logan entered, she was seated behind the desk, absorbed in filling a fountain pen from a bottle of blue-black ink.

He knocked politely on the doorframe. Romero jerked in surprise, almost dropping the pen.

“Shit!” she said, grabbing for a tissue to wipe up the spilled ink.

“Sorry,” Logan said, remaining in the doorway. “Get ink on yourself?”

“That’s nothing,” she said. “I might have ruined this.” She held the pen up for him to see. “You know what this is? A Parker Senior Duofold in mandarin yellow, vintage 1927, the first year of production. Very scarce. Look-it even has the yellow threads on the barrel, before they switched to black.” She waved it at him like a baton.

“Very impressive. Although I always preferred Watermans, myself.”

She put the pen down and looked at him. “The silver overlays?”

“No. The Patricians.”

“Oh.” She screwed the cap onto the pen and slipped it into the pocket of her jeans, then stood up to shake his hand.

The handshake told Logan even more about Romero than the office decor did. He held her grasp just a shade longer than was typical.

“What do you want?” she asked. “I haven’t seen you around before.”

“That’s because I just got here last night. The name’s Jeremy Logan.”

“Logan.” She frowned.

“We have an appointment.”

She brightened. “Oh, of course. You’re the ghost-” She fell silent, but her green eyes twinkled with private amusement.

The same old silliness. Logan was used to it. “I prefer the term ‘enigmalogist,’ myself.”

“Enigmalogist. Yes, that does lend an air of legitimacy.” She looked him up and down, an expression on her face somewhere between skepticism and veiled hostility. “So-where is it? In that duffel bag you’re carrying?”

“Where is what?”

“Your stuff. You know: the ectoplasm detector, crystal ball… and a dowsing rod. Surely you’ve got a dowsing rod around somewhere.”

“Never carry one. And by the way, crystal balls can be very useful-not for clairvoyance necessarily but for emptying the mind of needless thoughts and distractions, say prior to meditation, depending, of course, on the impurities in the stone and its refractive index.”

She seemed to consider this a minute. “Won’t you come in and have a seat?”

“Thanks.” Logan stepped inside, chose a seat before the desk, and placed his bag on the floor.

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be flippant. It’s just that I’ve never met an… enigmalogist before.”

“Most people haven’t. I’m never at a loss for conversation at cocktail parties.”

She shook out her black hair and leaned back. “What is it you do, exactly?”

“More or less what it sounds like. I investigate phenomena that lie outside the normal bounds of human experience.”

“You mean, like poltergeists?”

“On occasion. But more commonly, scientific or psychical activity that can’t be easily explained through traditional disciplines.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And you do this full-time?”

“I also teach history at Yale.”

This seemed to interest her. “Egyptian history?”

“No. Medieval history mostly.”

The interest died as quickly as it had come. “Okay.”

“As long as we’re playing twenty questions, why don’t you fill me in on your background?”

“Sure. Got my PhD in Egyptology at the University of Cairo.” She waved a hand at the diplomas. “Studied under Nadrim and Chartere. I assisted them in the Khefren the Sixth excavation.”

Logan nodded. These were very impressive credentials. “Is this your first project with Porter Stone?”

“Second.”

Logan shifted in his seat. “Dr. Rush said you’d fill me in on the background. What you found at Hierakonpolis when you searched the Temple of Horus. How you managed to locate this particular spot for the tomb.”

Romero slid her hands into her pockets. “Why do you want to know?”

To Logan, this translated to Why should I waste my time telling you? Aloud, he said, “It might help me with my investigation.”

She paused. Then, slowly, she sat forward. “I’ll make this brief. Porter Stone managed to locate something called an ostracon-”

“He showed the replica to me.”

“Good, that’ll save time in explanations. Stone learned, from the ostracon and from several other scholarly investigations, that Narmer used Hierakonpolis as his staging point for building his tomb.” She looked at him. “You do know who Narmer was, right?”

Logan nodded.

“The first king of a unified Egypt.”

“I believe there’s been some debate about that. In the past, scholars believed King Menes should be credited with the unification.”

“Many scholars-myself included-believe that Narmer and Menes are one and the same.” She peered at him again. “So you do know ancient Egypt.”

Logan shrugged. “In my business, it’s helpful to know a little bit about everything.”

“And how far does this erudition extend exactly?”

Logan nodded toward the framed Egyptian wall painting. “Enough to guess that dates to the Amarna Period.”

“Really? What gives you that idea?”

“The busyness of the scene, the overlapping of bodies. The emphasis on the feminine form: hips, breasts. You don’t see that in earlier Egyptian art.”

For a moment, she looked at him. Then a smile slowly broke across her face. “Okay, Mr. Ghostly Detective. You’re clearly more than just a face from a magazine. Touche.”

Logan grinned in return.

She sat up again. “All right. Using geophysical analysis and remote aerial sensing techniques, we were able to identify what appeared to be the site of a funerary quarry. This was unusual, because the very early Egyptians usually buried their dead-even nobility and royalty-in sand pits. So as a result, March began a targeted excavation.”

“March?”

“Fenwick March. The head archaeologist for the project. He runs the show when Porter Stone isn’t around.”

“What did you find?”

“At first, what you’d expect. Early black-top pots with carbonized rims, pollen, paleozoological remains. But as work continued we realized just how large the site was.”

“Big enough to be the city where tomb builders and engineers were based?”

“Bingo. And then, we found this.” She stood up, walked over to a filing cabinet, and opened a drawer. Pulling out two rolled-up sheets, she walked back to the desk and handed one to him.

Logan unrolled it. He saw a color photograph of an ancient Egyptian inscription, incised and painted. It showed a seated ruler, along with lines and arrows and a variety of early pictographs.

“Recognize it?” Romero asked.

He glanced up. “It looks like some kind of stela.”

“Very good. A slab stela, to be precise. Know what’s written on it?”

Logan smiled. “My erudition only goes so far.”

“It’s a road map.”

“A road map? To where?”

Romero raised one hand, index finger extended. Then, very slowly, she pointed straight down, between her feet.

“My God,” Logan said.

“You must know how advanced the ancient Egyptians were in astronomy, in terms of mapping the sky. This stela was a map to show the engineers and builders how to get to the site of Narmer’s tomb during its construction. No doubt it was supposed to be destroyed, smashed to dust, once the tomb was complete. Lucky for us it wasn’t, because it allowed us to triangulate the tomb’s location to within a few miles. Once on the site, geological and scholarly analysis allowed us to narrow it down even farther.”

Logan thought of the Grid he’d seen on the flat-screen monitor in the dive Staging Area. “Incredible. Vintage Porter Stone.”

“Indeed. But Stone found something else. On the far side of that site.”

“What’s that?”

“A giant, square piece of black basalt. Apparently, the plinth for some kind of statuary-perhaps of Narmer himself. It had been polished to an agate gleam, even after all the intervening centuries. It contained something, too.” And she handed him the other sheet.

Logan took it. It was a photograph of another inscription, somewhat shorter.

“What is it?” Logan asked.

“It’s the reason you’re here.”

Logan looked at her. “I don’t understand.”

She returned the look with a smile, but this time the smile didn’t extend as far as her eyes. “It’s a curse.”