Sighing, she shook off the memories, unsure why thoughts of her family had chosen to plague her just then, when she had so much else going on. Lives at stake, lives only she could save.
Maybe.
She slid her backpack off and set it on an empty chair, flipped on the high-intensity overhead lights and moved to the wall full of drawerlike bins in the back. They flanked a second door, which led out into parts of the vast university basement the students never saw and, eventually, to the loading dock just outside.
It wasn’t the door but the bins on which she focused. Each drawer was tagged with the alphanumeric code that told her where its contents had been recovered, and when. She knew the section with the bins from the 1954 dig in Northern Iraq. She knew it well. She spent most of her time working on the hundreds of bits of clay tablet from that section.
In fact, she’d spent countless hours scanning broken clay pieces in search of those that might possibly belong with the tablet she’d translated. The one that had given her fifteen minutes of fame and then proceeded to tear her life to bits. There were a hundred still to be checked, give or take. She pulled out that bin, took it with her to the table and unloaded each piece with care. Then she grabbed her supersized magnifying glass and her stiff-bristled brush, put on her headlamp and sank into a chair that bore the imprint of her backside, thanks to all the hours she’d spent there. And then she began searching for answers. Automatically, she reached up for her glasses before reminding herself that she no longer needed then. Thanks to James. For a moment the memory of his healing touch washed over her, warm and soothing. Recalling the look in his eyes brought tears to her own, but she brushed them away.
She was still there, bending over a chunk of stone where she’d glimpsed Utanapishtim’s original name, Ziasudra, when she heard voices outside in the hall.
“Open it.”
The tone was commanding, male—and she’d heard it before. It was Scarface! She was on her feet, grabbing handfuls of clay fragments from the table and stuffing them into her pockets, the only thing she had time to do.
“The artifacts in this room are priceless,” said an other familiar voice. Frank Murray, one of the BU deans. “And, I assure you, utterly useless to you. There are only a handful of people in the entire world capable of translating—”
“I said, open the door.”
“Yes, yes, I’m trying.”
Grabbing her backpack, Lucy darted to the rear of the room, slid through that second door and closed it quietly, then belatedly realized her headband lamp was still in place. She yanked it off, moving quickly through the basement toward the loading dock in the rear, where all the workers were, unfortunately, milling about.
She could hear Scarface and the dean behind her. Scarface was shouting and getting excited. Clearly he could that see someone else had been in the room. They would be coming after her momentarily.
She picked up the pace as she climbed the ramp to the loading dock, emerging into the outdoors and quickly hid alongside a large truck. It was dark, but the workers were still there. They often put in long hours during the summer months, in order to be done by the time the place came back to full screaming life in the fall. No one saw her. And Scarface was coming, with a half-dozen underlings in tow. She had to get out of sight.
Making a quick decision, she jumped up onto the truck’s step, opened the passenger door and got in, then ducked low, scooting over until she was sitting on the floor between the seats.
There she quickly transferred all the clay fragments from her pockets into her backpack. She tucked the headlamp in there, as well, then unzipped an other compartment to retrieve her baseball cap and sunglasses.
As she did, she saw something from the corner of her eye. Folded and stacked neatly in a box beneath the seat were a pair of overalls, a pair of safety glasses and a hard hat.
Smiling as she began pulling them on over her own clothes, she thought maybe being heroic wasn’t so hard after all. Five minutes later she was climbing down from the truck and moving toward, rather than away from, the clusters of workers, all of whom were dressed