Free 24 Bones by Michael F. Stewart

not gone well for the Copts. At least the prior regime afforded them some peace. The Egyptian Brotherhood is outright hostile.”
    Mamoud’s tic-like honks crescendoed as another car shot into his lane.
    “See,” David said, pointing at the car’s bumper. On it was a shark sticker. “It’s a shark to eat the Jesus fish plastered upon Copt cars.”
    “Where is that music coming from?” Zahara asked.
    Calliope music drew David’s attention back into the car. The music had been fading in and out. Because of his exhaustion, it took him a minute to make the connection between Mamoud depressing the brakes and the ridiculous music.
    “The brakes. Each time he presses the brakes it plays.”
    Mamoud grinned at them in the rearview mirror. This was part of what David did like about Cairo. The music might grate, but it abounded, even connected to taxi brakes.
    “Now that we’re on the ground, will you tell me why we’re here?” Zahara asked.
    He’d told her that he was going on a work trip to his birthplace, but little else. And he wasn’t about to explain now, not until he determined the validity and origin of the artifact he’d come to inspect. It was one thing to be caught with his pants down with a grad student, wholly another to have his hands on an ill-gotten stele. The antiquities world was full of the trade of these goods. One might say that academics even depended on it to a degree.
    “One of the sisters from St. George’s convent, she needs my help with a translation. I’ll know more in a couple of hours.”
    This seemed to mollify her. “Was your mother a nun?”
    “I never knew who she was. She joined the convent soon after my birth.”
    “What about your father?”
    He shook his head. As a member of the Shemsu Hor, his father could not commit to his day-to-day care either. “I was raised by the nuns, mainly Grandmama, the Mother Superior. My father died soon after he did this to me.” He clutched his shoulder.
    She started laughing and covered her mouth with thin manicured fingers.
    “What?”
    “I’m sorry, that was horrible. I just can’t imagine you in a nunnery.”
    “I didn’t need to take the veil or anything, I was more like an orphan. I attended church daily and prayed where Moses had prayed.” He thought back. “It wasn’t all bad. Before the branding my father taught me to use a bow and I learned ancient Egyptian. He groomed me for the role he expected me to play in his weird cult.”
    “I can see why you studied what you did,” she said. “I wish I had such conviction in what I wanted to do.”
    “Follow your natural enthusiasm,” he told Zahara. Not for the first time that day, he was reminded of their age difference. “Besides, I’m not sure this was what either of my parents would have wanted.” Like many sons, he had rebelled, but in a way that followed closely to his father’s wishes. He continued to excel in archery and trained in the gallery below Toronto University’s Hart House. He became a professor of comparative religion, well versed in hieroglyphics and cryptology.
    But his work carried an edge, and that edge sought the truth behind modern religions, their origins. It was why he was here. In his pack was a rubbing of a stele that, if authentic, would prove without a doubt that parts of the Bible came before the birth of Christ. Heed the call of Re, the email from Sister Tara Amat Yasu had stated. He’d heed the call all right, but for very different reasons. He owed the sisters nothing.

Chapter Eight
     

    T he taxi stopped outside the walled city.
    “Thanks,” David said and handed Mamoud a bundle of bills.
    “Where do you go next? I take you there,” the driver said.
    David wasn’t sure. He was supposed to meet Tara at her house within the Coptic walls after meeting with Pope Shagar, and afterward he’d hoped to take Zahara to the Khan el-Khalili , a vast market place, for some shopping before checking into the Four Seasons.
    “We’re good,