Page 81 of The Stolen Queen

Omar stood next to Annie.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“This will take a series of X-rays of the object, slices, if you will”—he made a motion with his hands to demonstrate—“and when they’re all put together, they will give us a virtual three-dimensional view of the object.”

“Why can’t you just force the box open and look inside?”

“The viscera inside were preserved using a resin that ended up gluing the lid shut. This way we won’t have to damage anything.”

As the images began appearing on the monitors, Omar used a pen to point out what he believed was a liver. The grayish image reminded Annie of a cow’s tongue. She was glad she hadn’t eaten a big breakfast that morning.

Charlotte gestured to a small white object on the scan, near the bottom of the box. “What do you think that is?” she asked.

Omar studied it and conferred with the technicians. “Something solid. A bone, maybe?”

“It’s a tooth.” Annie didn’t realize how loudly she’d spoken until everyone turned around to stare at her. Heat rushed to her face at having interrupted the experts’ deliberations. She shrugged. “I had my wisdom teeth out earlier this year.”

The technician turned back and nodded his head. “She could be right,” he said in English.

“An oral surgeon!” cried Omar. “Get me an oral surgeon, right away!”

Not long after, one appeared. Omar and Charlotte explained to him what they were doing, and the man leaned in close to the monitor and studied the image. Using a pen, he pointed to a long tendril that extended from the object, and said something in Arabic that got everyone excited.

Charlotte waved Annie over. “You were right, it’s a molar,” she explained. “Do you know what this means?”

“That Hathorkare ate too many sweets?”

Charlotte rolled her eyes. “If the tooth in Hathorkare’s canopic box matches a missing molar in one of the mummies’ mouths, then it’s more than likely that mummy is Hathorkare. It would be a way to definitively identify her, and the fact that this molar has only one root will help narrow the location down.”

All this discussion of missing teeth was making Annie’s own mouth ache.

“The other clue will be the size,” continued Charlotte. “Right now,the technician is measuring the tooth, and then we’ll scan each of the mummies’ jaws and see what we find.”

It was nice to see Charlotte distracted from her hunt for her daughter, even though Annie knew they’d be right back to it once the scan was over. And what a distraction. The box was removed from the scanner and then, very carefully, the mummy with the folded arm was lifted from the crate and laid gently on the scanner bed. Charlotte hovered over the handlers, urging them to take care, as if the mummy were a living human being. Its thin locks of reddish hair shone under the bright fluorescent lights. The neck was slim, the cheekbones jutted out, and the lips were slightly parted, as if the mummy were about to comment on the indignity of her current situation. Annie already considered the mummy a female, which she knew was a big assumption, but there was no question she emanated a grisly beauty, with her narrow chin and high cheekbones.

Once again, everyone waited as the CT scan was activated. The room remained silent the entire time, and Annie prayed that the tooth would prove Hathorkare’s identity, for Charlotte’s sake, since Charlotte’s search for her husband and daughter so far had been fruitless. At least this way she could go back to New York with an archaeological triumph, and a major one at that.

Finally, the scan was completed. Annie made her way closer to Charlotte in order to be nearby in case the results were disappointing. She felt responsible, in a way. After all, she was the one who’d accidentally found the canopic box and stirred everything up.

Charlotte took her hand and gave her a quick smile. Annie squeezed her hand back. There was always the second mummy. If this one didn’t match, then maybe the other would.

The technician zoomed in on the image of the mummy’s jaw. Annie wasn’t a dentist, but it sure looked like the mummy was missing more than a few teeth. On the screen, the technician’s cursor blinkedbeside a whitish tendril that trailed down from a space at the back of the mummy’s jaw, like the tentacle of a jellyfish. One tendril, not two. Annie held her breath. He pressed a bunch of keys on the computer that allowed him to measure the empty space above the tendril from many different angles, then murmured back and forth with the oral surgeon. Then they huddled with Omar.

The room remained perfectly silent.

Finally, Omar turned and addressed the assembled group. “That space”—he pointed to the scan—“is where a molar once was. You can see here that there is still one root remaining in the gum. The tooth that is in the canopic box was measured to be 1.74 millimeters wide. The space in the jaw of this mummy is 1.8 millimeters wide. According to Dr. Aziz, that can be considered a perfect match.”

A perfect match.

They’d done it. Annie and Charlotte had discovered the mummy of the ancient Egyptian female pharaoh Hathorkare.

Applause and cheers broke out. Omar raised his voice to be heard.

“Ladies and gentlemen, may I present you with Hathorkare, the fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt.”

A roar of excitement rose up from everyone present, but it was drowned out by the sound of something exploding. A blinding green-yellow light flashed from the examination room, as powerful as a beam from a lighthouse. Annie turned away, covering her face with her hands, certain that the CT scanner must have blown up. When she opened them, she noticed Charlotte staring into the examination room, her mouth slightly opened, eyes wide, as if she hadn’t even blinked.

“What happened?” Annie asked.

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