if he’s lying, he’ll soon be found out. He won’t be able to keep a find like this quiet for long. Even with everything that’s been going on with my father these last few months, I would’ve heard something from someone.
“Everyone in the universe knows how badly my father wanted to find Cleo’s last resting place. Someone would’ve taken great pleasure in rubbing his nose in the fact that somebody else did what he’s spent a lifetime trying to do. But I haven’t heard a scintilla of a hint of a whisper. All of which means that somehow, some way, Dylan has greased palms or kissed butts. He would have had to name the find in his paperwork—and considering he was connected to my father and the number of times he claimed to have found Cleopatra’s tomb, the news would have spread faster through the archaeological community than fleas on market rats.”
Thorne frowned. He needed specifics if he was going to plan out their next move. “How long before he makes a public announcement?”
“Excavating a tomb won’t be quick. Even he’s not stupid enough to make a false claim until he’s absolutely sure of what he’s found. It would have to be something big and definitive—her sarcophagus would do it. We can go there tomorrow, see what he’s doing—”
“What we don’t have time for is to wait to see what’s on the valley floor before it becomes a lake next week.”
“But if there’s a chance, even a small chance, that my father was in the Valley of the Scorpions three months ago, or a year ago, and this amulet was taken from there… then the lake project will be forced to wait. Right?”
He shrugged. “It took four years to move the Temple of Abu Simbel to higher ground.”
“But it was moved.”
He suspected that if necessary, Isis would supervise the move personally if the tomb were found. But he also suspected that in six days the valley would be a pleasant recreational lake beneath the cofferdam, and all this supposition would be moot. “Do you want to visit Dr. Najid at his office?”
She shook her head. “I’d like to go out to the site first. Just to… see.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do.”
“GOD. WE WON’T BE able to stop this, will we?” Despite her dark glasses, Isis shaded her eyes against the intensely bright sunlight reflecting off the pale sand. The heat seeped through her shoes and burned her legs beneath thin cotton pants. Very few people were stupid enough to be outside when it was this hot, and the shiny new settlement was a ghost town of pristine, empty buildings and emptier streets.
Perspiration and the humidity caused her hair to puff up and curl around her neck and shoulders. She scooped the mass up in one hand to shove under her hat.
Thorne, too, shaded his eyes as he looked across to the other side of the deep valley, where mirror images of the buildings and green strips of grass and trees waited for tourists and locals alike to enjoy. Docks strategically placed along the edge of the ravine looked oddly surreal jutting several hundred feet over sand, marking where the level of the lake would reach in a week. “It won’t be easy,” he admitted.
He’d pointed out where he “saw” the GPS location of her amulet’s original resting place: across the deep valley and snugged into the hillside, in a skinny ridge that snaked along the eastern wall and looked from here like piles of rocks. To see anything she’d need powerful binoculars. Everything was the same sand-colored sand.
There was no frantic activity with large machinery, or the thousands of people who’d been involved with the preparation for the flooding of the valley. Their work was done. On the hilly rim circling the mile-long Valley of the Scorpions were the new hotels, restaurants, and shops, the paved streets, parks, the recreational buildings for boat rentals and ski equipment—empty now, but all with a future ringside seat to the second-largest man-made lake in Egypt.
They’d passed the hydroelectric plant several miles back, and the faint throb could be heard even here. The graceful, multiple arches of the cement buttress cofferdam wall held the water in the upper dam. Leaking moisture quickly evaporated in the stifling heat, leaving a sweat stain on the gray surface.
Behind them the blank eyes of hotel and shop windows looked out over the valley of sand and rock, but in a week a hundred million acre-feet of sparkling blue