Free The Cruel Ever After by Ellen Hart Page B

minarets with crying male voices, calling people to prayer. There was no old city, no street bazaars, no riotous color. Just endlessly boring modernity.
    Glancing out the back window, Chess searched the street to make sure nobody was following the cab. So far, so good.
    Old, in the Middle East, meant ancient. In Minnesota, old barely stretched a century and a half. As a kid, Chess had dreamed of time travel. Going backward had always appealed to him far more than going forward. All his curiosity was centered on the ancient, which was science fiction enough.
    He remembered begging his parents for books on archaeology. Later, in high school, he had read everything he could find on the ancient world, pouring over photos of archaeological digs, reading books on ancient art. He wanted to be an archaeologist when he grew up but discovered, much to his embarrassment, that he was too lazy to make the effort required.
    When Chess turned forty, he finally found his way into the kingdoms of his dreams. Antiquities . People were insane to think they could own ancient artifacts. These treasures belonged to everyone and no one. If a few came into Chess’s possession, legal or otherwise, who was he to give them away for free? He wasn’t above using other people’s obsessions to make a living. If anything, ancient cultures had taught him that time was the lord of all. Every life was a tiny speck on an endless continuum. The shortness of a human life argued for enjoying what you had while you had it.
    Chess was particularly drawn to Babylon before the Persian conquest and to ancient Egypt, when the pharaohs ruled—not the newer Ptolemaic dynasty that took root after the death of Alexander the Great. It wasn’t smart to admit to oddball beliefs, but Chess had undergone several hypnotic regressions. He already believed in reincarnation, and this merely cemented it. His first birth had come during the reign of Abieshu, the grandson of Hammurabi. He could still taste the saltiness and dust on his tongue, smell the sweet scent of burning herbs in an alabaster bowl.
    “Ever think about time travel” Chess asked the cabby.
    The guy turned briefly to stare at him. “You mean like Star Wars ?”
    “Forward in time or backward. Either one.”
    “I’d like to go back to eleventh grade, when I decided I didn’t need to graduate from high school.”
    Chess studied each car as it passed, each driver, then swiveled again to see who might be far enough behind to look innocent but have the cab in his sights. When he returned his attention to the front, the Hyatt was just ahead of them.
    Five tense minutes later, he was safely inside his hotel room. He was as positive as he could be—without the gift of divination—that he hadn’t been followed and that nobody had noticed him arrive at the hotel. He rode up to the sixth floor alone, and nobody, not even a housekeeper with a cleaning cart, met him in the hallway.
    Fumbling nervously in his pocket for his pack of Camel Turkish Royals, he lit one, inhaled deeply, and then, with the cigarette dangling from his lips, ripped off the sport coat and sweaters. Sweat soaked his undershirt, so he took that off, too. He didn’t like this cloak-and-dagger shit but agreed with Irina that continuing to stay at the Hyatt was like walking around with a bull’s-eye on his back. He could easily be tracked through his credit cards, so he couldn’t use those either.
    Flopping down on the bed, he stuffed a couple of pillows behind his head. He snatched a glass ashtray off the nightstand and set it on his stomach. Then he took another deep drag. He didn’t plan to stay in the room for more than a few minutes, but he needed those few minutes to calm down.
    As he blew a stream of smoke into the air, his thoughts turned grimly to his current problems. There was no arguing with probability. Based on the fact that Dial’s house was tossed, as was the gallery, Dial’s and Morgana Beck’s murders had likely been the