“‘I would think this amulet an invention of the trader had I not discovered an account in a Greek history of such a charm. It was not reported as a sexual charm, though, but a talisman that brought good fortune to the pure of heart and ill to those opposed. And there was none so impure as Theodora, and accordingly she died not long after, a depraved fiend gone from the world, unloved and unmourned by all who knew her.’” Alex set the book down. “Hey, don’t hold back, Sidonius. Tell us how you really feel.”
“She was good at making enemies, this Theodora.”
“At least one that we know of. Maybe her rapaciousness didn’t include the royal press secretary.”
From the laboratory came the faint sound of a ringing bell. For a moment, they just looked at one another blankly.
And then they shot to their feet. “The Internet,” Julia cried, springing up to sprint toward the door.
18
Sunday, 3:30 p.m.
IN THE OFFICE, ALEX sank down in the chair. “Something’s come through on his account.” With a click of the mouse, he opened the Web browser. “Okay, let’s see if we get lucky. Nypd.gov ought to do it.”
Julia stood to one side, looking over his shoulder. “Why don’t you use a search engine?”
“I bet this will work.”
“Oh, really?” she asked, watching as the URL defaulted to a generic search page. “Hmm, guess you lost that bet. What do I get?”
“A sample of my rapacity?”
“Been there, done that. Why don’t you try a search engine?” she persisted as he keyed in another guess. “Oh, wait a minute, I get it. This is one of those guy things, like not asking for directions, right?”
Alex gave a long-suffering sigh. “I don’t want to use a search engine because it’ll bring up NYPD Blue and every other damned thing we don’t need.”
“Just try it and see. Then you can go back to your guesswork. Search under NYPD,” she suggested.
Alex keyed in police and new york.
“What are you doing?”
“See? New York State Troopers, Port Authority of New York, Getting Guns off the Streets…”
“Just do me a favor, search under NYPD.”
“Okay.” Alex heaved another long-suffering sigh. “There. Are you satisfied?”
“Completely,” Julia said smugly and pointed to the first result on the list. “That one, please. The one that says ‘Offical New York City Police Department Web Site.’”
Alex glowered at her and clicked. Blue flooded across the screen. “Great. All right, here we are. Gates of heaven. The world at our fingertips. Let’s see, you want to see the list of most-wanted felons? Or look up crime statistics? Or maybe buy NYPD gear?”
“I’ll settle for ‘Contact Us,’” she said, and he clicked on it obediently. The link brought up a page of phone numbers for every precinct in the city. Julia stared. “You’ve got to be kidding me. They don’t have an emergency e-mail address?”
“Maybe they figure if it’s really an emergency, you’ll call,” Alex said mildly.
“What if we don’t have a phone?” she snapped.
“Here we go.” He clicked on an E-mail Us link.
A page loaded inviting them to write to the police commissioner. “Great,” Julia said. “We ought to hear something in what, a week?”
“Okay, who else do we know who can help? You want to go to a Web-mail site and try to get through to family or friends?”
“I don’t have anyone’s address memorized,” she said helplessly. “Do you? I just use their aliases in my address book.”
He scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Only work contacts, and they won’t be there right now.” They stared at each other a moment, nonplussed. “Well, you want to at least buy some NYPD gear?” Alex asked.
“Too late. I think we lost our connection again.”
He waved a hand dismissively at it and closed down the browser. “Aw hell, I think at this point it’s a sign from God. We’re supposed to be in this damned basement. Some way, somehow, we’re supposed to learn a lesson. And we won’t be released until we do.”
“You believe the universe is that focused on you and me?”
“Obviously, you don’t.”
“I think it’s chance. There are too many people on this globe for there to be a path for each and every one.”
“Do you believe in fate?”
“Maybe,” she said cautiously.
He rested his elbows on the corner of the desk, pushing aside a stack of books and folders. “So by that logic, we got locked in here by chance, but maybe in some way it was kind of fate that it was you and me as opposed to you and someone else, that the universe is throwing us together because it knows that something’s supposed to happen with us and we were too close to walking away.”
“I’m not sure the theory works that way.” Her voice was uneasy.
“You’ve got to be flexible.”
Julia wet her lips. “Alex—”
“It was different last night, Julia,” he said softly, rising. “Didn’t you feel it? Can’t you trust it? Can’t you just give it a chance?” He slipped his hands up into her hair, sliding his fingertips through the strands. “Trust me,” he whispered, and pressed his lips to hers.
For a long moment Julia stood unmoving, lost in the touch of his mouth. It wasn’t a demand, it was a question, an invitation, a spreading warmth that beckoned to her. And she yearned for more, not a desire of the flesh but a desire of the heart.
Alex stepped toward her, slipping his arms around her, and she half turned toward him.
And with a rustle and thump, the pile of books and folders and papers on the corner of the desk fell to the floor.
Julia pulled loose and looked at the mess. “Good Lord, we’re tearing apart his office.”
“Like he’d notice.” Alex moved to pull her into his arms again.
She pushed his hands away and stepped back. “Yes, he would.” Kneeling, she began to pick up the pile, stacking up books and handing them over to Alex. “I mean, how would you feel if you walked in and your stuff was all over the floor?”
“That’s what he sees every day,” Alex said, taking the paperbound conference proceedings she handed him and stacking them neatly. “He’ll probably be traumatized to find something straightened up.”
Julia reached to scoop up a manila folder that had spun away across the floor, scattering papers around it. “Look at it this way, maybe we’ll inspire him to do better.” She stacked them, flicking Alex a mischievous glance. “We could convert him, change his life,” she continued, turning her attention back to what she was doing.
And froze, staring at the paper in her hand. For a moment she said nothing, only read. Then she began swiftly picking up papers, setting some aside immediately, reading through others rapidly.
“What’s up?” Alex demanded. “What are you looking at?”
“Test results,” she said slowly. “Materials tests from the scientific lab.” She looked at him. “They’re for the statue of Anubis.”
“He was analyzing it.”
“It looks like it.”
He crouched beside her to help her gather the papers. “So what do all these little lines mean? It looks like a picket fence.”
“They’re EDS data.”
“EDS?”
“Part of the scanning electron microscope. It uses light to profile the material in a sample. Those little lines are like the fingerprints of all the materials that make up the statue—silica, iron oxide, whatever. It’s an analysis of what a material really is, not just what it looks like. Two materials can look identical but be very different.”
“Sort of like steel and tin?”
“Sort of,” she agreed. “The EDS can differentiate between them. An EDS plot of steel would have one set of lines, an EDS plot of tin would look very different. The downside is that you have to actually take a tiny physical sample of the piece.”
“That’s a pretty big downside.”
“Oh, it only has to be three or four millimeters, and we usually take it from the bottom, where it won’t show. We use the analysis to pick out modern materials, show if a statue is, say, cast stone instead of a Nile Valley sandstone.”
“Or help you figure out how to make your cast stone look like Nile Valley sandstone, right? He’s using the test results to match his forgery to the real thing.”
“Yup.” Julia rose and grabbed one of the blocks from the jumble, checking it on all sides. “See the label?” she said excitedly. “These printouts include data for samples labeled A through G. He’s testing sample blocks to find a match.”
“And then he just molds a new statue and sends it off to his friend.”
“Sort of.” She paced around the office, searching every available surface. “You know, on one hand, I can’t believe he’s doing this because I can’t imagine someone involved in a criminal act being so careless. At the same time, it makes perfect sense. Who’s going to notice? It’s all stuff he’d have around anyway. And he’s Paul. He marches to his own drummer. No one would suspect him.” She paused and stared at Alex. “Including me.”
“You came around, though,” he said. “I like to think you came around on a lot of things.”
But Julia, studying the shelf behind Paul’s desk, didn’t hear him. Suddenly she spied what she sought, grabbing up a plastic Baggie on a lower shelf. “I’m on to you, Paul,” she murmured to herself and turned to Alex. “This is the other part of his art project.”
“Dirt?”
“Stone dust. A person selling forgeries isn’t going to last too long if they get found out. You can’t get an exact spectroscopic match with cast stone because you have to use polyester resin to hold the powdered stone together. Polyester resin, or almost any man-made material, has a radically different spectrum—the set of lines,” she elaborated, “than stone and the typical organics used in ancient art. Test an object made with polyester, even a fractional amount, and you’ll get a whole bunch of lines in your spectrum that aren’t supposed to be there. Plus, polyesters fluoresce differently under UV illumination—they’ll look yellow, say, instead of clear. That’s where the isinglass comes in.”
“What’s he doing, coating the statues with stone dust?”
Julia nodded. “And pigmenting them. He can make the coating really thick and able to stand up to mechanical sampling. He could even adhere some excavation dust if he wanted, to make it really authentic. Isinglass is organic, so it isn’t going to show up in your data. Presto, he’s made an undetectable copy.”
Julia threw Alex a furious look. “The son of a bitch is forging our collection.”
19
Sunday, 4:00 p.m.
ALEX SAT BACK DOWN at the computer. “So maybe we ought to take a closer look at the spam our buddy is getting from his Egyptian correspondent. Maybe there’s something buried at the bottom.”
Julia drew the second chair over to the desk and sat, heedlessly, on the pile of paper it held. She looked mad enough to spit. “I can’t believe he’s been doing this. I’ve been seeing reports of forgeries out there. I would never in a million years have suspected Paul.”
Alex clicked on the hot-and-horny-teens e-mail. “So just for kicks, let’s see what we’ve got here.” He scrolled to the bottom. “Nothing hidden underneath, it doesn’t look like.”
“It started with the Sphinx,” Julia said. “‘Looking for action?’”
“It gets right to the point, you’ve got to admit. So does Paul’s reply. ‘Hi, my name’s Ani. I’m eighteen with long blond hair and double-D breasts. This is a picture of me with my dog. I play around with him sometimes when I get horny. You should see the things we get up to. I could bring him to see you if you want. You can watch us play and even join in.’”
Julia made a face. “Charming.”
“I don’t think Paul was suggesting bestiality,” Alex said in amusement. “You’ve got to admit, he gets the tone right.”
“So Ani and her dog. Three guesses what picture he sent him.”
“It got the Sphinx hot. ‘I never knew such hot chicks were around. Your picture is really sexy. I’m showing it to a friend. He really likes dogs.’”
“Maybe this is the way they do business. Paul picks out a likely item and sends it to the Sphinx. He looks around, finds a buyer and they go forward.”
“It makes sense. Look at the dates on the e-mails. This all started back in January. Paul answered the Sphinx’s message with ‘I can’t wait,’ and it’s another month before the Sphinx replies. ‘Ani, you are such a babe. My friend really wants to meet you. He is so hung. He’ll show you a good time. My number’s 105-0706.’”
Julia glanced speculatively at Alex. “The fee?”
“One way a guy could be hung,” he murmured, studying the number, trying to remember if any other country besides Canada used a seven-digit phone number.
“This particular piece would probably get something close to half a million dollars at auction. Maybe it’s a code. Knock off that last number and you’ve got a reasonable black market value.”
Alex leaned back for a moment and just let himself look at her. Lovely dark eyes, a tumble of dark hair, a mouth that had a way of making him forget his own name. It was no wonder he’d fallen first for her looks, for the slamming sexuality of her that night at the gala in her red dress. Somewhere along the line, though, he’d begun to fall for her mind instead.
And this weekend had just sealed the deal.
Julia was staring at him. “What?”
“Sorry. It’s like I told you, smart women are very sexy. And you are one smart woman,” he said.
Her cheeks tinted with pleasure. “So, okay, this arrives and Paul swings into production. He gets the statue, tests it and spends some time matching the stone. You know,” she said thoughtfully, “all the doors have time locks that track coming and going. We can prove when Paul went into inventory, although again, it’s hard to prove it wasn’t in the course of his regular business.”
“Don’t get discouraged,” Alex told her. “He’s got to have left enough lines dangling to trip himself up. Let’s keep going. So he replies, ‘I really want to meet your friend. Maybe me and my dog and him can have some fun. My number’s 205-0906.’ Counter offer?”
“Could be. It’s a nice little profit.”
“Works for me.” Again, the zeros, each number a neat mirror of the others.
“Apparently the Sphinx agreed. ‘We can give you all the pleasure you ever dreamed of,’” he says. “‘You know where to find me. Just bring yourself hot and horny and ready for action.’”
“And all they have to do is arrange a pickup. Slick,” Alex said in reluctant admiration. He took a closer look at Julia. “What’s wrong?”
“All of this. I can’t believe he’s been doing this. How many of our pieces has he forged?”
“It can’t be that many. Wouldn’t people eventually recognize them from your collection?”
She sighed wearily. “It doesn’t work that way. People only know the really important artifacts. We display a fraction of our inventory, and our holdings aren’t published anywhere. A lot of them aren’t memorable.”
“Yeah, but this one’s different,” Alex argued. There was something about it, something that drew his eye. He opened the box again and stared at it. “It’s special.”
“I agree. It caught my eye when we went through inventory last year. The problem is, we acquired a three-foot-tall Anubis statue in 1982, and that’s the one we keep out in the Egyptian-sculpture room. There’s just too much here to display it all,” she said helplessly. “Paul knew exactly what to go after. A piece practically no one but us knows we have.”
“That’s the problem with inside jobs. You’ve got someone who knows all the ins and outs.”
Julia rose. “Look, Alex, close that up. And the computer. We need to get his office looking like it did when he left on Friday. He can’t know we were looking around. He can’t kno
w what we’ve found. Tomorrow morning, as soon as we get out, we go to security and the police.”
“No way,” he said. “First, we bust open this bottom drawer. Then we put everything back as it was.” It was an old desk, oak, from the Thirties or Forties. It would be easy enough to open the lock. Hell, he could probably slip it with a nail file.
“Alex, we’re not the right ones to deal with this,” Julia said positively. “We shouldn’t even be touching anything at this point. I mean, I’m confident you’re right, something’s going on, but we’ve only got a suspicion, nothing conclusive.”
“That’s exactly why we need to see what he’s hiding.”
“That’s exactly why we don’t,” Julia countered. “The last thing we need to do is compromise more evidence. There’s no way any of this would be admissible in court—we’ve broken in to get it all and we’ve touched everything. A defense attorney would have a field day. Paul could wind up getting off scot-free. We’ve got to get someone in here to watch him and catch him at it.”
“What, are you going to hide somebody in the closet? Give Felix a camera? Come on. We’ll lock it back up after,” he wheedled.
“And maybe scratch the lock so he sees we’ve been in it? No way. What’s to stop Paul from saying the forgery’s planted? Assuming there’s even a forgery in there. That drawer could be empty.” She paced restlessly in the small office. “It could have been locked when he inherited the desk and the key was just lost. You know what some of those old desks from the basement are like. Just because it’s locked doesn’t mean there’s anything to find. Maybe he’s making these things at home—assuming we’re even right about it.”
“We are right and he’s making them here. He’s got to be. He has to have the originals as reference,” Alex reminded her. “He’s got to be doing it here, at least the final part of it, and given the isinglass and the e-mails, he’s got to be at the finishing stage with this one.”
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