The words caressed her ears. “You don’t say,” she seductively replied. He glanced over his shoulder at her understudies, none of whom
seemed interested in listening in on the conversation. “A hieroglyph, more precisely.”
“Ahh. Looks like the gods have anticipated your visit to the oracle,” she teased, eyeing the jug. “Best be gentle with this one,” she instructed him, pointing at the amphora. “She’s flaking.”
Grinning, Amit treated it more tenderly.
“A glyph, you say. I suppose you’ve brought it with you?” Jules eased back on her knees. Amit nodded. “Then let’s have a look,” she said.
Amit set down his brush. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out a photo, and handed it to her.
“I found this etching, you see, and . . .” He pointed to it, realizing it pretty much spoke for itself.
She bit her lip, her head tilted to one side as she studied it for only a moment. “Clear enough.” She refolded the paper and gave it back to him with a taunting smile.
“Well?” He pocketed the print.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were in Egypt?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Oh,” she said, confused. “Just seems like the only place you’d be able to take pictures of something like that.”
“What does it mean?”
“It represents a nome.”
A nome was ancient Egypt’s equivalent of a province. “Are you going to make me beg for the name?”
“Maybe I’ll just have you work for it. Now let me think of clues.”
Jules’s trademark trivia caught the attention of one of her students. The attractive young woman made eye contact with Amit, smiled, and shook her head in a sympathetic gesture.
Jules’s eyes scrunched, pinching subtle crow’s-feet at the corners. “Okay, it’s probably the most famous of ancient Egypt’s forty-two nomes, and today it exists only by name, though the place to which it applies is not its original location.” She glanced at him with anticipation. After ten seconds, she correctly assumed that he needed some help. “Hints: Book of the Dead, Atum, Horus, Ra—”
“Heliopolis?”
He exchanged a victorious glance with the student, who bestowed her solidarity with a thumbs-up. Then, briefly falling into a trance, he tried to determine what purpose the glyph could possibly serve among the seemingly unrelated discoveries he’d unearthed at Qumran.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
Rousing, he said, “No . . . It’s nothing.” He waved it all away. “I knew I could count on you to figure this one out. Would have taken me hours of sifting through books.”
“You’re welcome.” She smiled. “Care to tell me what this is all about?”
“I’d love to, Jules, but it’s not something I’m at liberty to discuss,” he softly replied, motioning with his eyes to her nearby crew.
“Oooh . . . mysterious.” Her eyebrows flitted up and down and she poked his large belly with a stiff index finger, making him laugh out loud. “You know, it’s okay to ask for help if you need it. If you found that glyph here in Israel, there’s no one better than me to help you decipher its context. So why don’t you show me what you’ve found?” she challenged him.
How feisty could this woman possibly be? He scowled and shook his head. “Not sure if I’m ready to—”
“Jezza,” she called to the student, cutting him off.
“Yes?” the young woman responded.
“Think you can watch over things for the rest of the day?”
“Of course.”
“Excellent.” She turned back to Amit. “Then it’s settled.” Springing to her feet, she grabbed a towel and wiped her hands.
He groaned as he got up.
She tossed the towel to him, then stepped over to the ladder. “Off we go.”
10
******
Phoenix, Arizona USA
Another call went to voice mail as Charlotte Hennesey pored over the genoscan data again. Finally pushing aside the reports, she swiveled her leather chair and gazed out the floor-to-ceiling windows of her sleek sixteenth- floor corner office. BioMedical Solutions had spent lavishly on its corporate headquarters: an expanded state-of- the-art genetics lab, refurbished offices, and a cavernous mahogany paneled conference room. Times were good. BMS was growing like wildfire. And she was the second in command—executive vice president of genetic research.
Seeing as she’d recently cheated bone cancer, by all measures, things couldn’t be better.
Just beyond the glass, the city’s panorama spread wide before the serrated peaks of the Phoenix Mountains. The desert’s perfect blue sky offered tranquility. Nowadays, she still needed to remind herself to take stock of life’s more simple beauty. A fancy job title and stock options were fleeting novelties that she likened to new-car smell. A
