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attention to the otherwise silent murkiness around me, the ruined remnants of palace and temple.
Everything had a dim green light about it. Visibility was limited to maybe fifteen feet because of the bits of
sand and algae floating in the water. But even so&
It was amazing. Like a fantasy world. Like& magic.
Not far from me lay a sphinx, submerged for almost two thousand years. She was pitted and encrusted
and yet as enigmatic as when she'd first been carved. A flick of my fins sent me skimming past her to
more treasures in the sand a hawk sculpture that I assumed represented the god Horns, and a headless
body in that stiff posture of so many Egyptian statues. And blocks dozens of stone blocks, some with
faint hieroglyphs still visible even after millennia of erosion.
Apparently that's what you end up with if you sink part of an ancient city with first an earthquake and
then a tidal wave the same thing you'd get if you knocked over a child's building blocks, but much
bigger and much more historically important.
Cleopatra may have once walked here, I thought, awed, as I drifted through the wreckage. A cluster of
ever present little fish, silver flashes of darting movement, flitted by me to add to the surrealism of the
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moment.She may have invoked the goddess Isis , right here,and now &
I turned to check on the salvage operation. When I saw that the cluster of divers had all but vanished in
the hazy water, I guiltily swam back.
My partner, Rhys, waved with what looked like relief and mimed,Stay there . Aware that I'd broken a
cardinal rule of diving never leave your buddy I nodded. He rejoined the others in fastening the
harness that would lift the twelve-ton pylon to the surface. Some of them wore full dry suits like Rhys and
I. More of them had grown nonchalant about the risk, after so much exposure, and left off the gloves, or
the hood. Cat's honey hair writhed loose, Medusa-like, in the tide.
Catrina&
Remembering my conversation with Lex, the previous night, I smiled around my regulator. He'd taken so
long to get over my edited story about our brush with Hani Rachid that I'd just about decidednot to pay
him back for the collect call. By the time he wound down, I'd almost forgotten to ask him about the
tapestry.
Almost.
"Did you help the Cloisters purchase a tapestry that theClunywas acquiring?" I then asked from my
crouch, where I'd slid down the wall for heightened comfort during his tirade.
He said nothing, which worried me.Don't lie, Lex. Please don't
"You said it was the pet project of the woman who stole the Melusine Chalice from you."
"So you did what bought it to avenge me?"
"That's& an extreme way of phrasing it."
"Damn it, Lex! Just because you have more money than should be legal& " But I was having an
embarrassingly hard time with my moral outrage. I left it at a decidedly halfhearted, "Shame on you."
I heard the smile in his voice when he murmured, in a particularly sexy way, "Are you saying that I've
beenbad , Maggi?"
And I laughed.
Hell, as much as anyone could deserve that sort of setback, Catrina had. And it's not as if the tapestry
had been destroyed. The Cloisters is an incredible museum.
"I'm not having phone sex with you in the lobby of an Arabic hotel," I whispered, after glancing both
ways to make sure the desk clerk wasn't close enough to hear. "So don't even start."
"Which leads us back to why you don't have your own phone."
"Not your problem, Lex."
"It is if we can't have phone sex."
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"Goodbye, Lex."
"Be safe," he'd pleaded. "Please? Surprises like speed-dialing you and getting someone named Hani
have me thinking I'll jump a plane to the Land of the Pharaohs."
"Don't even think about it."
But once we hung up, I'd been glad I hadn't mentioned the sword fight.
Even if I'd forgotten, also, to complain about the ring.
Activity around the submerged pylon drew me from my reverie and back to the present. It looked like
they were ready to raise it. They were using a procedure that involved connecting the harness, which had
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