* * *

"I will stay here." Nuri leaned against the wall across from the hotel-room door Tavak was unlocking. "Unless I'm needed, Ms. Kirby? You have only to call and I will charge in and take care of disposing of him. After he pays me what he owes me, of course."

"Of course." Tavak opened the door and stood aside to let Rachel enter first. "That goes without saying." He turned on the overhead light and dropped his backpack on the floor before he shut the door. "Stay where you are. I need to check the room out."

"Why?"

"Because Dawson has had almost twenty-four hours to do any damn thing he wanted to do." Tavak took out a small device and moved carefully around the room. "And one of the first things would be to hit this room if he hadn't already done it before he went to the tomb."

She watched him run the device over the windows and closet door. "What kind of hit?" Then she realized what he was talking about. "An explosive?"

"It's what he used in the tomb. I'm sure he still had cyclotol enough for a little job like this."

Fear surged through her as she realized this ordinary hotel room could be a death trap. "Wouldn't it have gone off when you unlocked the door?"

"No, it wasn't the door. I set up a signal device that would have gone off if the lock mechanism had been tampered with." He glanced at her. "Would you like to wait outside with Nuri?"

"No, I would not." She moistened her lips. "Just do what you have to do, and let's check that readout."

"I didn't think you'd let me out of your sight."

"What's that detector you're using?"

"It's a sensor that reads particulates in the air—the same way bomb-sniffing dogs do." He ran the device over the lamp on the bedside table, then turned it on and checked the area behind the table. "There are about nineteen thousand odors associated with explosives. This detector works very well, and it isn't affected by distractions and fatigue as dogs are."

"Do you always prepare your hotel rooms to be bombproof?"

"I try."

"That's pretty drastic. There must be a lot of people who dislike you."

"Only one would be enough." He checked the bathroom door, then opened it. "One like you, Rachel."

"I wouldn't plant an explosive… unless you tried to set me up. Unless you kept me from finding help for my sister."

"Unless." He came out of the bathroom. "That word makes me uneasy."

"It should."

"Well, I can't find anything that seems suspicious." He grinned. "Which makes me suspicious." He moved toward the desk occupied by the laptop and a small six-inch-square external hard drive. "Let's see if Natifah sent us anything we can use." He ran the small detector over the desk area and flipped open the computer. "Better still, let's see if Jonesy was able to decode anything."

"What's the external hard drive for?"

"It's Jonesy's decoding program. It was using too much memory, so I put it on a separate hard drive." He pulled up the transmission that revealed his photo of Peseshet in the tomb. "Here she is. Your first glimpse of Peseshet. Looks arrogant as hell, doesn't she?"

"Yes, but I doubt if she posed for it. It's just the way she was perceived."

"Perception is everything. Whoever created that image thought she was either a goddess or a Pharaoh." He zoomed in on her face. "And if she saved the life of Kontar, the man who occupied that tomb, he probably worshipped her as if she were both. And you're right, she didn't pose for it. She was dead by the time this tomb was built. Natifah was undoubtedly the one who told the man who built it how Peseshet should be portrayed and what should be written on the wall."

"Natifah?"

"Remember? She was the physician who carved the story of Peseshet on that mastaba wall in Brighton. She was one of her disciples and evidently was chosen by Peseshet to hide her formulas from the Pharaoh. Pretty difficult since she was on the run herself."

"Why? I thought you said the Pharaoh appointed Peseshet the head of his institute of female doctors."

"He did and was elated at her success. She was a jewel in his crown. He sent her and the other doctors to all the countries in the civilized world to show them the power and brilliance of his court. Peseshet became famous and a very valuable resource since the Pharaoh could barter their services to foreign leaders in exchange for goods, access to trade routes, or whatever else he could hold them up for. As she continued to make medical discoveries, his prices skyrocketed." Tavak zoomed in on the hieroglyphics on the wall beside Peseshet's mosaic. "At some point Peseshet rebelled and told him she wanted to give away her formulas and procedures to whoever needed them."

Rachel shook her head. "That wasn't very smart of your 'brilliant' doctor."

"No, but he thought he had the solution. He'd forced her to give him copies of all her research work. Now all he had to do was rid himself of a troublesome insurgent before she gave away his precious secrets. He ordered his soldiers to hunt down and kill Peseshet and all the other women doctors, which they did with great efficiency. As far as we know, only Natifah survived the bloodbath."

"It's sickening."

"In his eyes, he was a god, and they had tried to take something from him. So he let loose his lightning. Only later did he discover that Peseshet hadn't given him and his personal physicians the entirety of her cures. She had left out some vital ingredients and processes in all of them."

"Good for her." She frowned. "But maybe if the Pharaoh had gotten the right formulas, we wouldn't have to be searching for them now."

"Or maybe he would have kept the secrets and had them buried with him. After all, he considered them as belonging to him to take to the next world if he pleased." He frowned. "I can't see anything that could be encoded here. Let me check and see if Jonesy found anything… " He typed in an access code and waited. "It's not responding. This is damn slow going."

Rachel waited for a couple minutes, staring at the blank monitor screen before she asked, "So before Peseshet died, she told Natifah to hide her secrets from the Pharaoh?"

"Yes, but she also told her that the knowledge must not be lost. That she had to find a way to cheat him, yet give her legacy to those who needed it. So Natifah set out to do what she'd been commanded to do. She couldn't risk just hiding the tablets in a single place. Their location had to be a puzzle so complicated that no one in Pharaoh's court would be able to put the pieces together. So, like Hansel and Gretel she started scattering bread crumbs of information that would eventually bring someone to the tablets."

"If I remember correctly, Hansel and Gretel were almost eaten by the witch before they had the opportunity to make a try at getting home," Rachel said dryly.

"Yes." He smiled. "That comparison must have been a Freudian slip. Ben and I were almost devoured by Dawson because we followed Natifah's bread crumbs."

"And the first crumb told you to go to that tomb and find the chamber of Peseshet? She wrote that on the mastaba wall?"

"It wasn't that simple. But in the story she casually listed Kontar as a friend to Peseshet along with many others. And after Natifah said that about scattering information and setting her puzzle, I set Jonesy to work on developing my decoder. Translation of hieroglyphics and decoding combined was a monumental task. He finally picked up Kontar as a possibility and came up with this tomb."