off. The occupant was forced to leap off to save himself, breaking a leg in the process. When the boat was finally recovered, the engine would not work at all. The following day, however, it operated normally.
Day 4: Three people, using the library late in the evening, reported hearing a strange, dry voice whispering to them in an unknown language.
Day 6: A cook reported two sides of beef missing from the meat locker-almost two hundred pounds. A careful search yielded nothing.
Day 9: Cory Landau was found wandering the marsh outside the perimeter after nightfall. When questioned, he said he’d seen a strange form in the distance, beckoning to him.
“Huh,” Cory had said to him not half an hour before. “Maybe that explains it.”
Day 10: Every electrical object, computer, and other equipment in Green shut down spontaneously at 3:15 p.m. Attempts to restart them were unsuccessful. At 3:34 p.m., they resumed functioning normally. No explanation was found.
Day 11: Tina Romero reported that the outfit of an Egyptian high priestess was missing from a closet in her office.
Day 12: Several eyewitnesses in Oasis, the drinks lounge, reported seeing strangely colored lights flickering near the horizon, accompanied by an ominous chanting, barely audible.
Day 13: A worker in the communications room reported strange noises and a machine that suddenly sprang to life when it should have been dormant.
Day 14: A machinist reported seeing a strange woman in Egyptian garb at a distance, walking across the Sudd at nightfall.
Day 15: An as-yet-undiagnosed equipment problem forced a diver to panic and surface, causing him severe injury.
Logan looked up from the screen. He already knew about the last one, of course. He’d witnessed it himself.
His thoughts drifted to King Narmer’s curse. Any man who dares enter my tomb will meet an end certain and swift… His blood and his limbs will turn to ash and his tongue cleave to his throat… I, Narmer the Everliving, will torment him and his, by day and by night, waking and sleeping, until madness and death become his eternal temple. There was something the recitation of incidents had in common. Except for the diver and the Jet Ski rider, nobody had been hurt. That did not jibe with the details of the curse.
Of course, Logan thought to himself, nobody had yet found-or entered-Narmer’s tomb…
For perhaps the dozenth time, he wondered what Narmer’s tomb might contain. Why had the pharaoh expended such effort, made such lavish sacrifices of gold and men’s lives, bestowed such a curse, to make sure his remains were never violated, his most important possessions undisturbed? What was Porter Stone keeping from him? What would a god take with him to the next world?
There was a quiet sound behind him. Logan turned from the laptop screen to see Ethan Rush standing in the doorway.
“Mind if I come in?” the doctor asked with a smile.
Logan took his duffel bag from the guest chair and placed it on the floor. “Help yourself.”
Rush stepped in, glanced around. “Rather spartan accommodations.”
“I guess the interior decorators were uncertain just how to stock the lair of an enigmalogist.”
“Funny thing about that.” Rush took the empty seat, glanced toward the bookshelf. “Interesting selection of books: Aleister Crowley, Jessie Weston, Stowcroft’s Organic Chemistry, The Book of Shadows.”
“I have eclectic interests.”
Rush peered at a particularly old and moth-eaten book, bound in leather. “What’s this?” He reached out, glanced at the title. “ The Necro- ”
“Don’t touch that one,” Logan said in a quiet voice.
Rush pulled back his hand. “Sorry.” He turned his attention to the two framed quotations. “ ‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious,’ ” he read from one of them. “ ‘It is the source of all true art and science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead. Einstein.’ ” He glanced at Logan. “Message?”
“Only that it sums up my vocation rather well. You could say I’ve got one foot in the world of science- Einstein’s world-and the other in the world of the spirit.”
Rush nodded. Then he turned to the other frame. “ ‘Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.’ ”
“It’s Virgil. From the Aeneid.”
“I don’t read Latin.”
When Logan didn’t offer to translate, Rush turned to the objects on the desk. “What exactly are those?”
“You use scalpels, forceps, and blood-oxygen meters, Ethan: I use tri-field EM detectors, camcorders, infrared thermometers, and-yes-holy water. Which reminds me: Do you think you can scare up a key for this desk drawer?”
“I’ll talk to Supplies.” Rush shook his head. “Funny. I guess I never thought of you as using instruments at all.”
“That’s not all I use. But then, we all have our professional secrets.”
This was met with a brief pause.
“I suppose,” Rush said, “you’re referring to what you saw in my examination room a few minutes ago.”
“Not necessarily. Although I am curious.”
“I wish I could tell you. But I’m afraid that research is of a rather, ah, sensitive nature.”
“So is mine.” He thought of what Romero had said: Maybe with you poking around, people will calm down. “I’m on-site now. If I’m to be of any use at all here, you can’t be keeping things from me.”
This was followed by another, longer silence.
“Oh, hell!” Rush suddenly burst out. “You’re right, of course. It’s just that Stone is so into compartmentalization, he lives and breathes secrecy…” He paused. “Listen. I’ve told you of our work at the Center.”
“In general terms. You’re doing research on people who have undergone near-death experiences. And you implied you’d made some very interesting findings.”
Rush nodded. “And our primary interest lies in one of those findings: that the experience of ‘going over’ has, in many cases, a direct effect on a person’s… well… psychic abilities.”
“Indeed? Manifested how?”
Rush broke into a broad smile. “Thank you, Jeremy. Nine times out of ten, the moment I mention the word ‘psychic’ I get the hairy eyeball.”
Logan nodded. “Go on.”
“The manifestations are quite broad. The bulk of our research at CTS is devoted to codifying it. That’s what separates us from other organizations or universities studying NDEs. There’s no pseudoscience or new age mumbo jumbo about this, Jeremy-we’re using extremely sophisticated statistical algorithms to quantify it. In fact, we have developed a way to very precisely rank a person’s psychic ability. We call it the Kleiner-Wechsmann scale, after the two researchers at the Center who developed it. In some ways it’s not unlike an intelligence test, but extremely subtle and complex. The scale takes into account an entire battery of tests for psychic sensitivity-divination, telekinesis, cold reading, ESP, astrological prediction, telepathy-half a dozen others. Naturally, the scale compensates for such things as standard deviation, probability, and simple luck.”
Rush stood up and began pacing the small room. “Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say I’ve got five bills in my pocket-a one, a five, a ten, a twenty, and a fifty. I pull one out at random and ask you to guess what it is. Assuming a null hypothesis-that is, no psychic ability at all-the base success ratio would be one in five, or twenty percent. On the Kleiner-Wechsmann scale, that equates to twenty. This would be the ranking of your man on the street. On the same scale, a person with some psychic ability ranks, oh, around forty. A person with pronounced psychic power ranks sixty. A person with psychic power developed to a remarkable degree might rank eighty-he or she would guess correctly four times out of five.”
He stopped pacing and turned to Logan. “But here’s what we’ve discovered. Of the people we’ve tested
