From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

-Napoleon Bonaparte (17691821)

Chapter Twenty-One.

Why did the gods spare the women through magic plants? Is it because women do not make war, as men do? It is not for us to know, but in those four, it was as if the crabs never existed.

I tore my veiled eyes away from the television screen and glanced quickly around the cafe one last time. Its patrons appeared engaged in their own conversations, their own meals, their own lives. Nobody seemed to notice that the woman sitting near them was the American murder suspect being talked about on the TV. I stood and walked as nonchalantly as possible out of the restaurant.

I strolled down the Corniche along the Nile, with the final three sentences of the nardo document mocking me.

HER2 is a breast cancer gene. While its presence has been confirmed in tissue other than breast tissue, and its relevance in other types of cancer has been explored, the effectiveness of HER2-targeted medications was demonstrated in a subset of breast cancers, the subset with the highest quantities of HER2.

The patients that had benefited from the nardo's effect were all women. I had assumed this to be merely an experimental artifact-an error-because the women and men were housed in separate rooms of the hospital, and only the plants near the bedsides of the women had been observed by the document's author. One woman had noticed a change in the plant and then reached forward to touch it. The other three and their caregiver had quickly followed.

Damn it!

I had no way of knowing what had-or had not-taken place in the other room, the room housing the men. Were there nardo plants at their bedsides? Or were those in the women's room only there as a feminine gesture? Assuming the men did have a nardo plant next to each bed, did the same phenomenon strike those plants as well? Did the men simply fail to observe it? Did they lack the interest of the women-the need to reach out and touch the plants during that transient moment? Or was the phenomenon ineffective on their diseases? One thing was certain-the men had not been spared. The document clearly stated as much.

Trust nobody. Her 2.

The text message was a warning, on so many levels. The HER2 gene itself, to a frustrated scientist, epitomizes the double-edged sword. HER2 treatments are toxic. They can lead to cardiac malfunction. The oncologist must perform the precarious balancing act of freeing his delicate patient from the cancer while not murdering her with a heart attack.

Could I be on the wrong track with HER2? Could Jeff be warning me not about the gene itself but about duplicity? Could the latter half of the text simply be underscoring the former? Reminding me that someone I'm inclined to trust might be exactly that-a double-edged sword? A wolf in sheep's clothing?

John.

I found another Internet cafe. This time, my story ranked Number One among trends on the web.

I clicked into one of the news videos.

"A world-famous biotechnology company in San Diego, California, has been robbed, and its husband-and-wife owners are both missing. Security was breached at Collisogen Research, and the theft of large quantities of research data has been reported. The co-founders of Collisogen are prominent scientists Jeffrey Wilson and Katrina Stone. Wilson and Stone, who serve as the company's chemistry and biology department heads respectively, have both disappeared..."

I clicked out of the newscast and then scrolled through several more stories. My racing heartbeat began to slow, and my breathing became steadier. There was no evidence that Jeff's body had been turned in, or that I had been reported by Larry Shuman. But authorities were seeking any information concerning our whereabouts.

An unrelated news story detailed the emergence of a new, aggressive form of pancreatic cancer, to which three patients had now succumbed worldwide.

My face felt hot beneath the niqab.

With trembling hands, I clicked into Jeff's secret e-mail account.

There was a response from Romano Moretti, the Naples chemist Jeff, and now I, had employed under the table, on conditions of secrecy. Moretti asked no questions about the publicized disappearance of his employer or his wife.

Instead, he simply offered the latest lab results. Moretti and his team had spent the previous day completing the processing of the biological samples that Alyssa and I had collected. They had found nothing of interest.

There was no response from John.

Please hurry. The first patient just died.

The message had come in two days earlier.

He has dozens... maybe even hundreds of patients...

Now, there were two more deaths.

Which meant that additional deaths within the cluster of cancer patients John had been treating were now imminent. And that Lexi may have very little time left as well. Perhaps, so did I.

I felt sick again.

The Luxor sun was already nearly unbearable. Even at five in the morning when my train had arrived, I had stepped out into a hot, sweltering Upper Egypt. Now, at seven thirty, I was certain the temperature was already well over one hundred ten or even one hundred twenty degrees. There was no hint of a breeze.

It was to be my first full day in a black galabia and niqab, and I knew that I could not possibly travel through Luxor and Thebes without a car. In addition to the prohibitive heat already upon me, I had learned from my guidebooks that the sites I needed to visit were spread too far apart to walk, even in the most pleasant of circumstances.

I glanced again at my watch, as if seeing the time again could help me plan my next move. Assuming that Dante had found Alyssa, the two of them would now be traveling to Luxor from Naples and could not arrive before evening. But with my daughter's tortured wails pushing me forward, I could not afford to lose an entire day of research, especially now that I knew what to look for to help her. So instead of a pagan theologist and an Egyptologist to help me, I had an Egyptian tour guide.

I figured I had two choices: hire a taxi or take a tour. Either way, I would be speaking to someone. In English. I decided it might as well be an English-speaking tour guide rather than another taxi driver like the one in Cairo who accidentally drove me to the wrong location. Or worse, one who might do so deliberately.

I took a deep breath and walked into the office of the nearest tour agency and announced through my veil that I needed a tour of Luxor.

The agent at the desk appeared surprised but then complied with my request. "Would you prefer a woman, madam?" he asked kindly.

"Yes, please," I said, and a wave of relief washed over me. It had only then occurred to me that I was about to drive out into the Egyptian desert with a complete stranger.

As it turned out, I felt perfectly safe. My tour guide was a friendly middle-aged woman, and a young British couple was my only other company on the tour. The driver did not speak to us, but the tour guide occasionally spoke to him in Arabic.

The air conditioning felt like heaven, and the van itself was surprisingly new and comfortable. As we rolled gently out into the desert, I found myself lulled into a surprising sense of calm. My ingrained intellectual curiosity, coupled with the research nature of the task at hand, almost made me forget my reasons for being there.

I found myself marveling at the landscape. The greenery along the banks of the Nile was stunning. As we followed a frontage road parallel to the river, I tried to pick out different species of plant life that I knew. Some, like the many giant palms lining the road and the river banks, were the same species popular in Southern California. Other plants were unrecognizable to me.

The river itself coursed through a shallow trough, flowing northward from mountainous Sudan, thus leading to the counter-intuitive designations of Upper Egypt in the south and Lower Egypt in the north. The green trough containing the river met harshly with steep low cliffs on both sides, above which there was only desert. The Nile was a swath of verdant green cutting through a vast sea of brown.

The desert was unlike any I had ever seen. Having driven on numerous occasions through the California and Arizona deserts, I was familiar with deserts containing cacti, snakes, scorpions, and other heat- and drought-tolerant life forms. In contrast, this desert appeared to support no life at all; there was only sand. Dune upon dune of absolutely uninhabitable sand billowed away forbiddingly from the lush, life-giving Nile. The stark and abrupt contrast between the two landscapes was breathtaking.

Our tour guide broke the ice by asking the three of us if we had seen the pyramids. The British couple, who at first seemed a bit afraid to speak to me directly, nodded. I shook my head and lied. "I'm afraid I haven't been to Cairo yet. I will be heading up there after Luxor."

The young Brits looked as shocked as the woman on the Cairo Metro had when I had asked her the meaning of the word zuro. The tour guide, who knew I had requested an English-speaking guide, was prepared. She continued speaking. "The Old Kingdom built pyramids," she said simply. "The ancient Egyptians believed in resurrection. They built pyramids to help their kings find their way to the heavens. They built them in the west because the sun sets in the west. The east was for birth, and the west was for death, like the birth and death of the sun every day.

"But the pyramids kept getting robbed. So by the time the New Kingdom came and the pharaohs moved to Upper Egypt, they finally said, 'No more pyramids. Pyramids get robbed. This makes the gods very angry.'

"So they built the Valley of the Kings. They buried their kings underground instead, where nobody could find them. But they were sneaky." The middle-aged woman smiled at the British woman. "This time, they built the tombs under a rock that is shaped like a pyramid. That way, they could still send their kings to the heavens, but they could also fool the robbers."

Our van pulled into the entrance of the Valley of the Kings, and I immediately recognized the rock she had mentioned. The tall pyramid jutted out of the sand as if it had been carved there. But it was a natural formation. Had I not been looking for it, I would not have noticed it. The rock blended right into the desert.

"Your ticket is good for three tombs," my guide said, and she motioned to a man at the entrance, who brought her a packet of postcards. "You can't take pictures inside," she explained, "but you can buy these if you want." She began flipping through them to demonstrate to us what to look for inside the tombs. As she began pointing out the various gods and goddesses on the walls, I cocked my head when she pointed to an image of the goddess Isis.

"Whose tomb is that?" I asked.

I carefully scanned the reliefs within Merneptah's tomb, dumbfounded.

These tombs were each built and decorated during the reign of the pharaoh, I recollected from the tour guide's monologue. In most cases, that was only a matter of a few years.

I recalled an international episode that had taken place almost fifteen years prior. A mine had collapsed in Chile, trapping thirty-three miners. It took months to extract them through the rock, and the survival of all thirty-three men was considered nothing short of miraculous. A brand new rock drill was pioneered in the rescue effort, and a variety of space technologies designed by NASA were incorporated in the process-both to keep the miners alive and to subsequently bring them to the surface.

These tombs were built through labor alone, more than a thousand years before the birth of Christ. The effort that must have gone into burrowing into this rock was scarcely fathomable to my modern mind.

And then there was the art work. Every square inch of the tomb was not only painted, it was engraved and then painted. And that was just the surviving art after three thousand years. I tried to imagine how these walls had looked during the time of the pharaohs. I tried to imagine modern technology, modern artists, modern methods creating the reliefs before me. I could not do it.

The image of Isis drew me into the tomb.

I would learn that day that the goddess Isis was everywhere in ancient Egypt. She graced the walls of nearly every temple, every tomb, every shrine. She was easy to recognize because she always looked the same. I desperately wanted to understand why-because the patron goddess of Cleopatra, the Egyptian goddess of medicine, never looked anything like I had expected. And this discrepancy was frustrating my search for the medicine that could save my daughter.

She came to me again in the Valley of the Queens. She presided over the tomb of Nefertari. The same Isis, so different than the one I had imagined.

Alyssa, I wish you were here to explain this, I thought, and then I remembered what I needed to do before her arrival-and Dante's.

I stepped out of Nefertari's tomb, and my attention turned to my modern surroundings rather than the ancient ones. I was shocked at how quickly and easily I formulated a plan for something I never would have thought I could do.

Luxor was vastly different from Cairo. In Cairo, I had seen tourists only in the Egyptian museum. There were none walking the streets except for me. Luxor, in contrast, was like a theme park. Hordes of tourists poured from buses and filtered through tombs like ants through the tunnels of a child's ant farm.

And, inevitably, with the tourists came the touts. Children and adults alike peddled postcards, small statues, miniature pyramids, T-shirts, and very expensive bottles of water. Men in long galabias and women in headscarves offered maps of the tombs and personal tours. Many of them spoke remarkably good English.

Several pairs of uniformed, armed police stood guard over the tombs but afforded tourists no protection from those seeking to take advantage.

I watched as a pair of dark teenaged boys followed a group of tourists toward a tomb. The taller of the two boys motioned toward a handsome thirty-something man wearing jeans and a polo shirt. The second boy smiled, and I stepped forward to follow from a distance as they approached the man and his young family. As the family stepped into the crowded queue to push forward into a tomb, the tall boy accidentally bumped the man as he passed, offering a shy apology. The shorter boy then stepped away from the crowd with a hand in his pocket. And I knew that the handsome thirty-something man had just lost his wallet.

I had just found my accomplices.

The two young pickpockets had resumed their duties selling sheesha pipes when I approached their makeshift booth. An older man and woman, who might have been their parents, were sitting on boxes in a small recess of shade provided by the tables.

I began examining one of their pipes with feigned interest, and the shorter boy materialized before me. "Four fifty," he said.

"I'm sorry? Four hundred fifty Egyptian pounds?"

The boy shook his head. "American dollar," he said with a smile that was missing a few teeth, and I laughed.

I set the water pipe back down. "You've got to be joking, kid."

"OK, three hundred. Two fifty! Two fifty!"

"Two fifty Egyptian," I said, and the boy looked as if he was considering it. Egyptian pounds were worth one fifth the value of American dollars.

"Let me ask you a question," I said then, and the taller boy approached to involve himself in our conversation. "How long does it generally take you to make five thousand Egyptian pounds?"

The tall boy frowned. "This is tourist time," he said. "Uh, sayf... summer. We make a lot of money in summer."

"Still," I said. "Five thousand. How long?" It was the equivalent of one thousand American dollars. A lot of money by any standards, but possibly more money than these children would possess in their entire lifetimes.

The boys did not answer. I glanced at the older couple still sitting nearby and lowered my voice. "I have five thousand Egyptian pounds for you here," I said, and to prove my sincerity I held out the money for them, letting them touch it, letting them imagine how it would feel in their hands. "But I need you to do something for me. And you will do it because, if you don't, I will put an end to your real business." Without warning, I snaked a hand forward and yanked the stolen wallet from the shorter boy's pocket.

A few moments later, the two boys disappeared inside the crowded tomb of Queen Nefertari, easily the most popular tomb in the Valley of the Queens. Within a few moments of that, a commotion arose that led a few tourists, mostly with young children, to rush out of the tomb. But considerably larger numbers forced their way inside.

As if on cue, one of the uniformed policemen stood upright and stepped away from the tall jutting rock he had been leaning against. He motioned toward his partner and then toward the tomb. The partner approached it, turned and waved at his superior, and then stepped inside.

Within minutes, the shorter of the Egyptian teenagers emerged. He walked nonchalantly over to his sheesha stand, which I had since vacated. I waited for a few moments and then wandered over toward a smaller, less populated tomb. I stared toward the tomb from the outside, and I could feel the boy's presence as he walked up beside me.

"Did you get it?" I asked without looking at him. I opened my gloved hand just enough for him to see the money within.

Wordlessly, the boy took the money and replaced it in my palm with the heavy, cold metal of the uniformed officer's pistol.

Back in the tour van, I asked my guide about the Greco-Roman period. She laughed.

"Everyone comes to Egypt looking for Cleopatra," she said. "They are all disappointed. We know so little about her.

"After the New Kingdom fell in 1070 BCE, there were almost eight centuries of-how do you say?-big mess in Egypt. Other countries invading. No government. Big mess. Alexander the Great and the Ptolemies, Cleopatra's family, they stopped the big mess.

"The Egyptians accepted them. They accepted them because the Ptolemies acted like Egyptians. The Ptolemies made government again. They ruled like pharaohs ruled. And they built temples to Egyptian gods."

This statement seemed to contradict what I had learned from Alyssa. The Ptolemies built hospitals, not temples. They followed empirical evidence, not superstition.

Now it appeared that they built both. Why?

"Why did they do that? Surely, they didn't worship the Egyptian gods? They were Greek!"

She looked impressed. "You're right!" she said. "They were Greek! But, they acted like Egyptians. And this is how they ruled the Egyptians. The Ptolemies understood that people want to make their gods happy, but not other people's gods. If you appeal to the gods of the people, the people listen to you. To make their own gods happy.

"After Cleopatra, the Romans brought Christianity to Egypt, and the Arabs brought Islam. And all of this brought back big mess. Nobody can agree on which gods to make happy. Big mess is still today.

"Where are you from?" she asked me.

"America," I said, and she looked puzzled.

"You're Muslim?"

I was prepared for the question. "My husband is Egyptian," I said.

"Then you speak Arabic? You asked for English tour."

"No, I'm afraid I don't speak Arabic," I said.

Beneath her pastel-colored hijab, she frowned in confusion. And as her natural curiosity about this unusual tourist in her charge took hold, I began to realize I had made a horrible mistake. Whereas in Cairo I had been totally out of place in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, and especially with my auburn hair flowing freely, now I was almost out of place in traditional Egyptian dress. In Luxor, there were shorts and tank tops, sundresses, and giant hats to offer pale flesh some protection from the unrelenting sun.

I should have taken off the niqab. I should have purchased a huge touristy hat and a large pair of sunglasses and done my best to conceal my face. I should have done anything but pretend to be Muslim. Because now, I was enmeshed in a line of questioning I had no idea how to free myself from. If I answered incorrectly, she would know I was a fake. And that might lead to my undoing.