Channeling Cleopatra Read Free Page A

the . . . bosses."
    She turned out of the parking lot and
rounded the block, onto the bridge spanning the river, and headed
toward downtown Portland. The rain, already fairly heavy when the
two of them left the convention center, rapidly intensified. It
flung itself in buckets against her windshield and rear window. The
windshield wipers slapped away only every other bucketful. Then
there was the steam rising off the warm car and the defroster,
which wasn't working well, not to mention the mist rising from the
surface of the river.
    "Good thing I am a veteran submariner," Leda
told her passenger, who twitched nervously in the seat beside her.
She could barely see the headlights of oncoming cars, much less the
taillights of the ones ahead of her. One set of headlights followed
her onto the bridge and across it, not at all unusual. A little
unnerving that they followed so closely in this weather but not
surprising. Out-of-towners, no doubt.
    "Yes, it is. You continued in the Navy then,
after you graduated?"
    "Yeah, I retired eight years ago."
    "You did not continue your studies?"
    "Yes, but I've only been able to study
Egyptology informally. I've studied hieroglyphics for several years
now with a class sponsored by the museum. We have speakers and that
sort of thing. And the Egyptian section of my personal library is
bigger than the one in the main city library."
    "No graduate school?"
    "Oh, sure," she said very casually, as if it
didn't matter. "But I got into forensic anthropology instead. You
know, identifying remains from fragments found—kind of like
archaeology, but more recent remains."
    "Oh, that is wonderful! Very useful!" Leda's
former friend clapped his or her hands together with satisfaction,
as if she had done something very bright.
    "Well . . . yeah," Leda said, surprised. She
glanced in the mirror. The headlights were still behind her—two
sets of two long rectangular ones, riding high.
    "Oh yes, you are already
familiar with DNA fingerprinting, then, and other skills we will be
much in need of if certain discoveries are made. We knew you were the one for
this task! We hope you will not think it unscientific of us to
confess this, but we dreamed we should come here to find
you."
    "Uh-huh," Leda said, hanging a right onto
the Broadway Bridge and casting a glance into the rearview mirror
where the same twin pairs of rectangles still gleamed. "Did you
also dream someone would be tailing us when we got together again?
Tailing us inexpertly, I might add. Way too close and obvious."
    "How annoying. They're just doing their job,
but it is confining to have security people tagging along
everywhere. That is why we asked you to take us away from the
convention center. What we have to ask you is not something we want
reported back to certain people at Nucore."
    "I can probably lose them if you want," Leda
said. "Especially if they're not from Portland."
    "We think not."
    Leda accepted that for a wish to ditch the
headlights. She took the exit for Martin Luther King Boulevard
without signaling, which brought her back to the convention center
side of the water, where she'd entered MLK Boulevard, and she
promptly ducked back two streets into the residential district.
This was familiar territory to her because she lived here. After
cruising for ten blocks or so, she turned back onto MLK and, seeing
no signs of the double rectangle headlamps, continued on the road
until she once more reached the entry to the Broadway Bridge. She
took the bridge onto 1-5 south to the Terwilliger exit, ensuring
that the other car would lose her. This particular exit had
extremely misleading street signs. Everyone moving to Portland from
out of state had to spend two or three hours being hopelessly
befuddled while following the sign that said south when it took you
back north to Portland.
    Then she wound her way up the back streets
to Hospital Hill, where the University Hospital and the Veteran's
Hospital were joined by a skywalk. Pulling into the