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FLASHBACK- Abusir, two years earlier
"Where did you find them?" I had asked him as soon as I saw the atypical writing on the pieces.
"I'll have Kaleel show you the way," Feisal said with a wave of his hand, slowly lowering himself to sit on a crate. "He found the shaft originally anyhow."
"He's at the shop?" I asked abstractedly, looking at the intricate carvings of the stone tablet.
"Yes, yes, Katiya will see him respectable and me in an early grave," he groused, and shook his head. "Enough. Tell me about my find." He grinned impishly, giddy like a child with a new toy.
"This here," I tapped at the tablet's edge, "was it covering something?"
"Yes. There was a vessel in the shaft. Not very large space, no pictures on the walls, no writing or markings of any kind. Just this little box." He gestured, holding his hand roughly two feet off the ground.
I was crouched in the center of the room and swiveled on the balls of my feet. "Wellwhere's the rest of it?"
"Still in the shaft. A storm had picked up while we were collecting the other pieces, we had to chance leaving it behind. Besides, all those things are heavy. You can't expect an old man like me to carry all that and a heavy stone chest too?"
"Because I suppose Kaleel was simply standing around doing nothing?"
"You and my wife coddle that boy. You like his pretty face more than mine," he replied good-naturedly. "Though perhaps he and I could retrieve it later- when he shows you where it is," he suggested with a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
"Did the box have similar writing on it?"
"No. None at all. Resting atop this were two small figurines- those there, behind the scrolls," he pointed and I picked through the plunder. They were small, shwabti statues, votives actually.
"What's this?" I picked up a leg missing a figure. The two figures I had seen had been whole.
"There must have been a third sitting there too at one time, we found that in the dust. There's an arm- and part of a head too, I think, around here somewhere," Feisal looked dispiritedly at the storeroom, cluttered with all sorts of paraphernalia he had collected over his long years. "There was a papyrus too- the only one that wasn't inside its chest. There-" he gestured to one by my knee. "That's the one."
It was in less than pristine condition, which generally doesn't mean much when one is talking about objects that have been around for millennia, but the other twelve were. Absolutely perfect, as if they'd been rolled the day before with the ink just barely dry.
"Did you see these symbols?" Feisal asked, grabbing one of the other papyri and unrolling it. I frowned as I watched his quick movements. "Ach, I know, I know. To be careful with the paper. But you see it, no breaks," he held up the sheet to demonstrate that it remained intact. "These drawings they are like none we've found before. They are old, yes? Older than Middle Kingdom?"
"I don't know what they are," I replied truthfully, looking over the lines of tightly written script. "It could be some earlier form of glyph but Feisal, they don't look Egyptian."
"Bah! You need new glasses. You will have someone else look over them. Have them deal with that," he waved a hand at the disreputable looking scroll.
"I will take it to an expert," I promised. "But Feisal, you know they'll ask me where I found them"
His brow clouded and he drew himself up to his full height. "My son is a respectable man. And I may have been many things, my dear sitt hakim, but not without my own sense of honor. Do you think otherwise?"
"No, but-"
"Woman! I know what they think of me. I hope they know what I think of them. You will take the pieces to the museum and we will see what we will see," he proclaimed, stalking off proudly.
His wife later helped me load the reliquary into my car.
"Thank you, Katyia," I said, brushing my hands off. "Tell Feisal I'll be over later to visit Kaleel."
"Yes, of course," she nodded solemnly, shooting a furtive glance back at the house. "My husband is a good man, you know. He always was, even when he was less than respectable."
I sighed. "I know, Katyia. But the scholars don't know him, or you or Kaleel. All they know is a thief and a liar."
"Good day to you, lady," she said shortly, tightly compressing her lips, watching from the threshold as I drove away.
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"So you got the pieces from a well-known forger and antiquities thief?" Daniel looked up from his notes.
"Alleged. He was never formally charged with any crime. And he's retired," she replied archly.
"I tried that once. Didn't work out," Jack said lightly, examining his fingertips.
"Pity," she countered.
"So you had these things professionally looked at?"
"As I told Doctor Jackson, most people thought it was a joke. Writing wasn't even thought to have originated until centuries later- and even then, no papyri could have survived that long, that well-preserved Even to say that it's papyrus is to be misleading: there are organic elements found in the fibers of the paper that cannot be identified as any know plant species in the world. I did run some blind tests on the coverstone- potassium argon puts it at anywhere from 12 to 10,000 BC."
"And the pieces are where now?"
She hesitated, glancing at one man and then the other, weighing her options. Then she closed her eyes and shook her head.
"Aw, come on!" Jack said testily. "Fine. Then let's talk about how you know about the Stargate."
Daniel looked up at Jack in surprise. "She knows" then turned quickly to her, "You know about the Stargate?"
Her eyes grew wide but she didn't say anything. "I've never heard that term before," she said slowly.
"You visited Dr. Langford, did you not? Had a nice chat did you?" Jack said, in poor imitation of a cozy conversationalist.
"Dr. Langford does she work for you too?" she said with a curl of her lip.
"Once upon a time."
"Retired?" she quipped with a sardonic half-smile. She stopped herself mid-quip and paused, thoughtfully, before continuing. "Just like her father, wasn't she?"
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Jack asked, oblivious to Daniel's furious hand-gestures beckoning his silence.
She stared hard at Daniel. "So that's why he never went back to Egypt. Did his wife really die or was that all set up by the military too?"
"No," Daniel sighed resignedly. In for a penny, in for a pound. He had a feeling that they were in over their heads. It had been easy enough to wrest Goa'uld artifacts out of the hands of people who had no idea what they were. But to connect them to the gate itself that spelled trouble.
"How fortunate for you," she commented sarcastically, before replying to Jack's unasked question. "She didn't tell me anything."
"Not anything you didn't already know, you mean."
"Are the Baegundorff memoirs involved in this?" Daniel interjected, shooting a warning look at Jack.
She didn't reply. "He was there, wasn't he?" Daniel said, conjecturing aloud with an awed tone. "The same season that the Langfords were, the season that the Stargate was found. Winter 1928?"
She sat in silence and searched Daniel's face. "This 'Stargate' as you call it is it circular- like this?" She took Daniel's pen from his grasp and pulling off the heat protector from her coffee cup, she began to draw a rough sketch.
"Oh my god," Daniel said under his breath, watching intently as her pen sketched out the form of the gate.
"With seven notches, at equidistant marks around the circumference?"
"Yes," he replied, his stomach sinking lower by the second.
"And the symbols on it- are they the same as on the papyri?"
He was nodding 'yes' when he felt a jerk on his collar. "Daniel, a word?" Jack said through clenched teeth, yanking the other man out of his chair and giving him a hearty push to the other end of the room. "What part of the definition of classified is unclear to you?" he hissed.
"Jack, I'm not giving away anything that she hasn't already figured out for herself, or wouldn't have figured out soon enough. Besides, the only way she's going to tell you where those papyri are is if you're willing to compromise. Catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, that sort of thing."
"Thanks for the revolutionary tip, Mr. Diplomat."
"Not to mention your own little faux pas"
"Hey! At least I wasn't handing over the 'Gate on a silver platter!"
Daniel glanced over to see her surreptitiously unfolding a piece of paper and comparing it to her sketch. He walked over and glanced over her shoulder, getting a glimpse of what it was just before she hastily crumpled it in her fist.
"May I?" he asked softly, his hand outstretched for the paper.
"What? What does she have?" Jack asked, striding over, angry and ready for a fight.
She glared up at them and uncurled her palm. Daniel snatched away the paper and unfolded it, smoothing it against the tabletop with the palm of his hand. "It's an illustration of the Stargate," he confirmed. "Where did you find this?"
"Baegundorff's memoirs."
"Oh boy," Daniel sighed. "I don't suppose you have a copy on you?"
To his surprise, she turned slightly in her chair to her armbag and pulled out a small hardcover book with dozens of yellow post-its protruding from its edges. "It's my only copy. I expect it returned to me."
Daniel flipped through the book, his fingertips lightly grazing the sides of the pages. There were illustrations and photographs throughout. "He did the illustrations himself?"
"Yes. And the photographs. He fancied himself an artist. And before you ask, Colonel: no, there are no photographs of your Stargate."
Jack narrowed his eyes and had opened his mouth to retort when a series of knocks interrupted him. "What now?"
Striding to the door, he opened it in one violent motion to reveal a slightly startled airman from the tech department.
"Excuse me, sir, but thought you should know: we've decrypted the files. It was slow going until someone realized that the security program was just a variant of the protection software the CIA uses."
"Now that's interesting, don't you think?" Jack said, rocking contentedly on the balls of his feet, smiling in reply to the death-glare their guest was giving him. "And what did you find?"
"Well, sir, that's not for us to say. We thought we'd consult Dr. Jackson to see what he made of things," said the technician timidly.
"Okay then. Daniel, do your stuff," Jack said with a wave of his hand to usher his friend out of the room. "Daniel?"
"Hmm. Oh, right," Daniel said distracted by the book in his hands.
"Make yourself at home, Doctor," Jack said in saccharine tones as he closed the door on the indignant woman.
"Jack, this is so... I can't imagine why we didn't consider it before," Daniel was saying as they walked down the hall, the technician leading the way.
"Consider what before?"
"That other people outside of the government knew about the Stargate before it became classified. It was excavated in the plain light of day; anybody who was in the area couldn't have missed it. It was only once it was taken back to America for study that it became a secret who knows how many others out there know about it?"
"We are not telling her about the Stargate."
"I never said that we should. But, really, when you think about it, we've been ridiculously lucky that every time a Goa'uld artifact has been unearthed that we've found out about it. If it hadn't been for Steven, then we might have never even known that she had them at all. There could be who-knows-what floating around out there-- "
"Hey, Indiana, you're drooling. Look, it's not that I don't appreciate that she must have done some digging to come up with all of this stuff. I just don't care."
"Don't be an ass, Jack."
The technician led them into a lab and directed Daniel to a seat in front of a monitor that had been hooked up to the laptop. An open folder sat on the desktop, its contained files and folders in the hundreds.
"You shouldn't have a problem accessing any of the individual files. We think that the main security program was it. Let us know if you have any problems," said the tech before leaving the two men alone.
"She wasn't kidding when she said two years of research," Daniel muttered, scrolling down the file list.
Jack squeezed both of Daniel's shoulders. "Have fun. Let me know what you find. I gotta brief Hammond in" he glanced down at his watch, "almost three hours." He looked up at the ceiling and sighed heavily. "You know there are like ten things I'd rather be doing today, right?"
"Yeah," said Daniel, entranced already in his reading.
"Right," he said, by way of leaving, slapping the doorjamb lightly and leaving the archaeologist to his work.
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A little over two hours later, Jack found Daniel in the same position that he left him, his eyes intent upon the computer screen and his nose only inches away from the monitor. A half-eaten Power Bar hung in his mouth as he wrote notes furiously in one of his journals.
"Daniel- back away a little from the screen, huh?"
"What? Oh, Jack, I can't talk don't tell me it's been three hours already?"
"Time's up, pencils down," Jack nodded, and swiveled a chair over next to Daniel's. "So. Whadda we got?"
"Jack, this is well, it's phenomenal. She consulted everyone- and I mean, everyone, that she could find on this. There's loads of stuff on Baegundorff and practically a day by day account of who was in Egypt from '27 to '28"
"Whoa, whoa. Slow down, there. Don't choke on your enthusiasm. Perhaps I should specify that when I said, whadda we got, I meant, what does she have about the Stargate and those gate addresses?"
"Like I was saying, Jack, everything that she could that isn't classified, she has. This is thorough. She doesn't have any images of the Gate other than Baegundorff's drawing and no other mention of it as a portal other than the first papyrus."
"The one that you read earlier?"
"Right. She has, however, collected information on practically every other kind of portal, gate, or pylon ever built in Egypt-- architectural schematics, references in literature, inscriptions"
"Thorough, I got that. What about the addresses?"
"Apparently, she did figure out that some of the signs seem to be referential to the constellations."
"I don't like the sound of this."
"BUT, she tagged it wrong. She has all the signs from the papyri catalogued and photographs of them from all angles on here. Her latest theory, dated less than a year ago, was that the papyri were records of some kind, of agricultural seasons or astronomical charts. She figured that someone was cataloging some thing, either like a Farmer's almanac or for a mystic cult- you know, divination, horoscopes, that sort of thing."
"So she doesn't know what the Gate does, then?"
"No."
"Or that it's an alien device?"
"No."
Jack sat back in his chair and sighed. "Thank god for small favors. Now all we have to do is get the papyri, upload the addresses, and say good riddance Doctor P for Pain in the--"
"Come on, Jack. Be fair. I don't think she considers you to be Mister Ray of Sunshine, either."
Jack ran a hand over his face. "Yeah, I suppose not." He stood up and cocked his head to the side. "You want to go see her? She's been demanding things left and right, and is hell-bent on getting that translation you promised her."
"Wouldn't that be classified?"
Jack got up to leave. "I think we would be worse off if you didn't tell her. Or at least, that's what she threatens. And it's Colonel Ray of Sunshine, civilian."
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