The Unspoken

But now…

He eased himself slowly along the hull, fumbling at his dive belt for his underwater camera. As he began to snap photos, the sound of the shutter whirred softly in the water. The flash illuminated bits and pieces of the ship. There it was—the grand salon, exposed by a gaping hole in the port side, encrusted in weeds and grasses, occupied by fish, large and small. The treasures would be down below.

Yes!

The hull was ripped open belowdecks, as well. He didn’t have much time. Just minutes left now, but he could slip through the great tear in the port side, move along the length of the ship….

It was dark within. Eerie. Time had stolen any vestiges of life that might have remained; the cold and the elements would have eaten away at organic fabric—and human bodies.

He found the hold and moved past giant crates, some protected by tarps that had withstood the years. Before him was a door, which swung open when he pushed it. The door hadn’t been sealed, which might have aided in the flooding that had brought about the ship’s demise, he thought, distracted. He didn’t care at that moment how the ship had sunk. He’d nearly reached the treasure….

As he kicked his flippers and swam through, the dive light strapped to his head suddenly went out.

He muttered to himself, tapping the light. It came back on.

He saw the boxes—huge crates, really, wrapped and sealed in waterproof tarps!—and in the midst of them, he could see the giant box with the label peeling and nearly gone, and yet…he could still read the name on it.

Amun Mopat.

There it was! The box containing the sarcophagus holding the inner sarcophagus and then the mummy. It had survived; the men who’d discovered the treasure had stolen it away carefully sealed….

Over there, boxes of jackals and sphinxes and funerary artifacts, bows, quivers—

His light went out again. Cursing silently, he tapped it. As he did, he heard a curious sound. A noise so deep in the water was different from what it would be on the surface, and yet…

It sounded like the hold door was closing on him!

The light came back on.

He stared in horror.

He opened his mouth to scream. Losing his regulator, he sucked in air, and his scream was silent.

He was stunned, terrified….

The curse! The curse, silent, unspoken in these depths…

It was real!

Yes, he had found the Jerry McGuen.

But he would not live to tell the tale.

1

“Amun Mopat,” Katya Sokolov said to Logan Raintree. “You’re kidding me, right?”

The heat that had been shining through the skylight seemed to disappear, as if the sun itself had lost some energy.

The name made her shudder. They’d just finished investigating a death in Los Angeles at Eddie Archer’s special effects studio—a death based on an old film noir remake. The original movie had been titled Sam Stone and the Curious Case of the Egyptian Museum. The new one, fittingly, was called The Unholy.

“No, I’m not kidding,” Logan said.

He had a fascinating face, the result of Native American and European parents, handsome and filled with character. She had learned to read it well, and she knew—he was not kidding.

Amun Mopat.

It was the name of the insidious ancient Egyptian priest who had supposedly come back to life to perpetrate murders. He was a character in a movie.

A character used in the very recent tragedies that had taken place.

And now…Amun Mopat?

“Amun Mopat, yes,” Logan said, almost as if she’d spoken aloud. He leaned back, looking around with a sigh. They sat in the beautiful little lobby-café of their boutique hotel, surrounded by wrought-iron lattice work and art deco design. The past weeks—although somewhat traumatic in the final resolution and cleanup—had still contained some nice upswings. They’d seen tapings of half a dozen TV shows, including Kat’s favorite comedy, spent days at the beach in Malibu, visited the Magic Castle and other attractions, and actually experienced something that resembled a vacation.

This meeting didn’t bode well. She’d received the call to meet Logan while she was enjoying a visit to the La Brea Tar Pits. It had been an urgent call, and she’d known it meant she wouldn’t be seeing a retro performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show that night with Tyler Montague and Jane, two of the six in their special FBI unit.

She’d wondered if the others were going to be involved, but she was sitting here alone with Logan.

She had all but forgotten her strange dream of the night before. And now, even as it seemed to come crashing down around her, she wondered what a storm at sea could have to do with Amun Mopat.

The curse. She’d heard the words in her dream. Egyptian entities always seemed to come with curses!

“Go figure. After all this—Amun Mopat. In Chicago,” Logan said in a dry voice.

“Yeah, go figure. Chicago,” she repeated blankly.

Logan Raintree was her superior, the head of their team. Their actual boss was the elusive Adam Harrison, who had begun this excursion into the unknown—and the known—combining FBI technology and certain…unusual talents. Logan worked loosely with the head of the first team, Jackson Crow, evaluating information from those who sought help and deciding which cases truly called for their unique abilities. Since the original group of special investigators had become known as the Krewe of Hunters, they’d unofficially been dubbed the Texas Krewe. Their first case had been in San Antonio, home to many of them. Working with Logan and the other team members was thrilling and gratifying at once; it felt as if they spoke an ancient and secret language, and had come together as nationals from the same foreign country.

At the moment, she wasn’t feeling especially thrilled. Or gratified. She wished she was back at the Tar Pits.

“And you want me to go out there now?” Kat asked. She didn’t add alone.

Logan glanced at his watch.

“Yes. It could be nothing.” He shrugged. “And it could be something. But we’re talking about a dead body, and the autopsy is probably being performed as we speak.”

“Chicago is a big city, and I’m sure they have a fine staff of medical examiners and pathologists,” Kat said.

“I’m sure they do, too. But before too much time goes by, I want you in on it. Even the best people in their fields can miss little signs and clues, especially when they’re convinced by the circumstances that they’re looking at an accidental death.”

Everyone on the Krewe had his or her technical or “real world” specialty.

Hers was forensic pathology.

“Amun Mopat,” Kat said again. “In Chicago.”

Logan leaned forward. “As I said, this could be nothing—nothing at all. That’s why I need you there first. Sean is still out in Hawaii, but he’s been alerted,” he said, referring to another of their team members, Sean Cameron, who had been most heavily involved in the recent occurrences. “And we still have a few loose ends here—the last of the legal documents, another deposition—so I’m keeping Kelsey, Jane and Tyler with me. If it’s a tragic but simple case of drowning, there’ll be no need for the whole team. In that case, we’ll meet back at headquarters. But if it’s something else…”

Kat nodded dully. There was a dead body. She was a medical examiner. The dead body, of course, wasn’t an ancient Egyptian priest. It was a historian and diver.

Who had died. Searching for a sunken ship in Lake Michigan.

“I dreamed I was on a ship last night,” she told Logan.

“Really?”

“And the passengers were talking about a curse.”

His expression was serious. “Maybe you’ll be able to use that,” he said.

She smiled. “Maybe it was to warn me I was about to head off—to Chicago. And a sunken ship. And a curse.”

“I think in our line of work,” he said, eyebrows raised, “we’ve learned that curses are pretty much things people invent when they want to do something evil for their own gain. And you may only be there a few hours. Who knows? The situation might just be that this diver went overboard in his excitement when he should have waited for the other researchers. The entire discovery was supposed to be filmed. But, like I said, he didn’t wait. His excitement might have led to carelessness, which is probably what happened. And there’s always competition to salvage the treasure on a sunken trip. But because we’ve been helped by the documentary crew in question, I feel it’s important that we help out in return.”

“Who’s doing the documentary?” Kat asked.

“Alan King. We barely saw him when we were in San Antonio, but he had a bad time with the documentary there, especially losing his star. Apparently the Chicago Ancient History Preservation Center—where our dead man worked—is struggling like the rest of the world. They need funding.” He studied his papers. “One of the staff, Dr. Amanda Channel, sent out queries to various film people and hit upon some friends of ours—you remember Bernie Firestone, right?”

“Of course,” Kat said.

“Yes, well, he’s frequently hired by Alan King, who can make films whenever he wants because he has billions—no, he didn’t make his billions in film. He’s able to do documentary films because he does have billions. Bernie approached Alan, who loved the idea, and there you have it.”

“Sean should be available soon,” Kat murmured. “He’s worked with them before.”

“If he’s needed, he’ll be there. Remember—we don’t know if this is anything at all. Anyway, if you do end up staying, you’ve at least met Alan and you know Bernie and his cameraman, Earl Candy. Right now, you’ll take a look at the deceased, read the autopsy report, talk with a few people—and, if there’s nothing, we’ll all meet back in Virginia. Requests for our expertise are already piling up back at headquarters.” Logan paused. “But like I said, I feel we’re in debt on this one. There’s also the fate of a historical institute on the line, not to mention an incredible discovery.”

“I still say…”

“That it’s ironic?” Logan asked. “I thought that, too, but then, not so much. Not really. When the original Sam Stone was filmed in the early forties, the sinking of the ship in Lake Michigan had occurred half a century earlier. A writer, one who was fascinated by Egyptology, would readily have seized upon a real priest for his story. I looked into it and found out that the original screenplay was by a man named Harold Conway—who was born in Chicago. He grew up going to the Field Museum and hearing stories about the Jerry McGuen. The priest’s actual mummy, with the inner and outer sarcophagi, as well as other treasures, went down with the ship. So our screenwriter would definitely have known about Amun Mopat, and he was obviously interested enough in the historical character to use him in a movie.”

“Great,” Kat muttered.

“Hey, it could be an M.E.’s dream,” he said.

“A mummy? An anthropologist’s dream, not mine,” she retorted. “But…all right, so I’m to examine the body and try to discern if he died by natural means, or…”

She let her voice trail off.

They dealt with the unknown, the world that lay beyond the veil. Their “sixth sense.”

But Logan had a point. In her experience, and in that of the others, they’d never come across a ghost or a curse that killed.

It was human beings who killed other human beings.

“They’re not expecting to find much left of the people who went down with the ship,” Logan was saying. “According to the records, there were no survivors, and no bodies rose to the surface—or none that were found or recognized. But I’ve read that time would have destroyed even their skeletons by now. Is that true?”

Kat nodded. “Unless someone was caught in a sealed area, it’s unlikely that there’d be any remains. Time and sea creatures take their toll. They may find skeletal remnants, but only once they’re into the bowels of the ship.”

“So, it really is one big watery grave.”

“It does seem respectful to salvage what might be important to history and the living, and then let the ship itself stay where it sank, a memorial to those who were lost.”

“I believe that’s the eventual plan.” Logan flipped a page in the file that lay before him on the table. “You won’t be alone,” he told her, grinning as if he’d read her mind. She wasn’t afraid of being alone, nor was she unaccustomed to the strange and unusual.

“Oh?”

“A member of the original Krewe is out there now. He happened to be visiting an old buddy in Chicago when this came down. You’ll meet up with him. His name is Will Chan. He’ll stop by to see Alan, Bernie and Earl this afternoon, and he has an appointment with the people at the Preservation Center bright and early tomorrow morning. He’ll meet you at the morgue at 10:00 a.m.”

“Okay, but do I need to reach him first?”

“No. Head straight to the morgue. Will’s going to catch up with you there.” Logan handed her the folder. “His contact information is in here. Between the two of you, we’ll have a good sense of what’s going on, be it too much enthusiasm by a diving historian—or a predator with an enthusiasm for murder. Oh, and Alan King has hired private security to guard the dive site.”

“You can guard a dive site?”

“I thought you were a diver?”

“Yes, but I dive because I love it, not because I’m looking for lost treasures.” Kat offered him a wry smile. “I’ve seen salvage from the Titanic and the Atocha in museums. I never went looking for them. And I usually dive in nice warm water in the Caribbean or the Gulf.”

“Salvage rights are complicated. Federal law says that all wrecks belong to the state that claims the waters. Depending on what’s found, ownership of artifacts and the wreck itself may wind up in court for years. But the Preservation Center did file papers for the right to dive and work on the wreck. However, it’s not the legal aspect that people worry about as much as the black market.”

“Other divers stripping the site and selling salvage illegally?” Kat asked.

“You can’t begin to imagine what can be bought and sold on the black market.”

“Still…it’s got to be tricky, raiding a dive site.”

“Yes, but it’s been done. Hence, the security.”

“I guess so.”

“You have gone diving in cold water, right?” he asked next.

“Well, yes.”

“Make sure you pack a good dive suit. I understand the water temperature ranges between fifty and sixty at this time of year, and I believe that’s kind of cold when you’re down there.”

“I’ve never been in Lake Michigan.” Kat frowned. “And I’ve never been involved with the discovery of a wreck.”

“See, you’re all excited now.”

“Excited. Well…I’m not sure that’s the best word to describe how I’m feeling, not after we nearly lost Madison Darvil to Amun Mopat—or his look-alike!”

“We knew that Amun Mopat wasn’t the killer. And we know that mummy isn’t swimming around planning to kill anyone who discovers the ship.”

“We don’t know that anyone is killing people at all yet,” Kat said. “We’ve probably been asked in because Alan King is feeling a little worried—since his luck with documentaries hasn’t been so good lately.”

Logan looked up at the skylight. Then he looked back at her. “No, we won’t know anything until you examine the body and get more information. Since Alan has hired private security near the site, hopefully no one else will be exploring the area and ending up dead while the situation is investigated. You’re booked on a 5:40 p.m. flight out of Burbank. You should be in a nice cozy room by midnight, and then tomorrow… I’ll be waiting to hear what you have to say.”

“What if I can’t find the answer in the autopsy?” Kat asked him. “Or in anything else we’re able to examine?”

“Then we’ll join you—and figure out where the answer does lie.”

Kat nodded and sipped her coffee. The sun seemed to come out again and stream through the skylight overhead.

“You have information on the ship, the sinking, the discovery of the tomb—all kinds of stuff—in the folder,” Logan said. “Along with info on all the principle players working on the discovery and preservation of Egyptian antiquities.”

“Anything else?”

He grinned. “Be glad it’s not the dead of winter?”

* * *

There was no keeping down a true scholar.

Will Chan hadn’t come for a lesson in Egyptology, but it seemed to be part of the interview.

Senior researcher Jon Hunt grew animated as he spoke, saying, “Amun Mopat lived and died during the reign of Ramses—Ramses II, the most powerful ruler of the New Kingdom and the nineteenth dynasty and perhaps the most powerful of all the great pharaohs or god-kings of Egypt. Ramses ruled from 1279 BC to 1213 BC, and it appears that Mopat, reputed to be a shady character, was born in the same year and the same month, which seemed to be a great oracle to people at the time. Ramses was first drawn to him, believing in the power of sorcery. Amun Mopat lived a life of luxury, respected and consulted on most important matters of state. Ramses, you’ll remember, was a warrior king. He’s the one with Moses in all the movies—the villain, you know.”

“Except,” Amanda Channel—also a senior researcher—interjected, “historians have argued constantly over the true factual dates of ‘the time of Moses.’ And whether or not he eventually expelled the Hebrews from Egypt, Ramses II was a builder and a soldier and a peacekeeper. In short, a remarkable ruler. Living in a world with a totally different belief system, of course. Must have been nice to be a god, huh?”

Will sat in a conference room at the offices of the Chicago Ancient History Preservation Center as he spoke with—or, more accurately, listened to—Jon Hunt and Amanda Channel. Both of them were trying to explain everything at once, or so it seemed. More than three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history, Brady Laurie’s tragic death and the story behind the Jerry McGuen.

Apparently neither of them needed to take a breath very often. And they switched from Egyptian history to Brady and then to the Jerry McGuen with record speed.

But then, Egyptian history, Brady and the ship were now joined for all eternity.

“Brady loved anything that had to do with ancient Egypt,” Jon said. “He could rattle off every pharaoh in every dynasty in the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom more quickly than your average high school kid could come up with all fifty states.”

Will wasn’t sure most high school kids could rattle off all fifty states.

“But,” Amanda jumped in, her voice almost a fluid continuation of Jon’s thoughts, “Brady especially loved the New Kingdom, and everything that’s been learned from excavations in the Valley of the Kings.”

“Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb happened after the discovery of Amun Mopat’s. Since the treasures of Mopat’s tomb—a good portion of them, anyway—went down with the Jerry McGuen, a lot of important artifacts and information were lost to history,” Jon explained. “And Amun Mopat, much as he wanted to be a god, was only a priest. Tut had been a pharaoh.”

He actually paused for breath and Amanda remained silent. Will took the opportunity to survey the conference room; there was an excellent bust of Nefertiti on a counter that stretched out from the back wall. Next to her were a dozen or so canopic jars, all copies, according to Amanda and Jon.

He assumed they were telling the truth. Next to the canopic jars was a large coffee urn, and the usual collection of paper cups, sugar, creamer and whatever else one might desire for a cup of coffee. Nothing truly valuable would have been kept so casually and haphazardly where coffee could spill at any time.

He’d only had a quick glimpse of one of the workrooms. It was sterile in appearance except for a piece Amanda had been working on, a funerary statue that had been dug out of a pit in the city—property of someone who’d lost everything in the Great Chicago Fire. The fire had occurred in 1871, before the sinking of the Jerry McGuen, but collectors had been avid about ancient Egyptian pieces for a hundred years by then, and there’d been those who’d coveted Egyptian art even before Napoleon’s soldier had cracked the code in 1799 and translated the Rosetta Stone.

“Brady was being an ass,” Amanda said mournfully.

Jon Hunt immediately looked offended, and Amanda softened her words.

“An ass in the way we can all be asses. Jon, please, I’m not insulting him. I’d say the same thing about us. We get too excited about a discovery like this.” She sighed. “Brady grew up hearing his great-grandfather talk about the disappearance of the Jerry McGuen. Maybe that’s when he fell in love with Egyptology. Or maybe it started with the visits to the Field Museum. And you can imagine how he felt, considering what he knew about both Egyptology and the Jerry McGuen. We can’t help it. I guess we’re real nerds—oh, my God! Who would’ve thought that being a nerd could be dangerous? We think we know what we’re doing, and then…”

“He was brilliant.” Jon shook his head as if he still couldn’t accept that his friend and coworker was dead.

“Brilliant—and, this one time, so foolish!” Amanda said. “Yes, I admit the rest of us hadn’t totally believed in his theory. I mean, we believed—we just weren’t as insane about it as Brady. That’s how we work. Even when we’re not convinced that someone else is right, we work with them to find out. And all of Brady’s calculations did make sense. We were scheduled to start looking together. If they hadn’t been sound theories and calculations, we wouldn’t have approached the film director—Mr. Firestone. Oh, if Brady could just have waited…”

“We would have been right with him,” Jon said. He gritted his teeth. “I was the one who found him,” he whispered.

“We found him,” Amanda corrected.

“Yes, well, I was the first to see him…floating there.”

“We have two boats,” Amanda said. “He took one out ahead of us. We have a small, exploratory dive boat, and then our larger vessel. It was Saturday and—”

“Yes,” Jon interrupted. “If only it hadn’t been a Saturday!”

“We were supposedly off work, but Brady called both of us that morning. He said he was going to take the boat out and use sonar,” Amanda said. “Seriously, finding anything actually salvageable on the McGuen was always a long shot, but Brady believed that the treasures taken from the tomb had been so carefully packed, there was a real chance. I thought we were going to start on Monday, but he called me. I called Jon, and we agreed we’d go out with him, but he’d already taken the smaller boat. We let him know we were on our way, but I think he ignored us because he had to prove it to himself first. He shouldn’t have gone down to the wreck. He shouldn’t have gone down alone—he knew that. I was furious with him. Before we found him, of course.” She paused, looking at Jon and then at Will and added, “I was afraid. We didn’t want to lose our funding.” She glanced at Jon again, as if feeling guilty about something she’d done while trying to rationalize it at the same time.

“We brought out our second boat—the big one, Glory—and found the Seeker at anchor. There was no sign of Brady. And it was wrong of him, because Mr. King, the producer, said from the beginning that he’d finance us as long as we let him document every step—right or wrong—along the way,” Amanda told Will.

“I think Brady was afraid we’d start work, and there’d be no ship,” Jon said. “And if that was the case—”

“We’d already taken money,” Amanda broke in. “It’s also really competitive, diving for salvage. It can be confusing, too, with U.S. laws, state laws, international laws…except that we’re not in it to make a fortune. A 1987 federal law says the states own all wrecks found in their territorial waters, but there’s still money in salvage. There’s another law about disturbing a grave site, but really, there can’t be anything left of the people…. Except if the mummy itself was properly sealed… The thing is, we believe in returning antiquities. What we’d earn would be a percentage of what Mr. King makes in IMAX films and the like. Of course, he gave us a hefty sum as a down payment.”