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Annie

Annie watched as Charlotte and Mona reassessed each other in front of the Temple of Dendur. They both had dark hair and eyes, but that was about it. Mona’s face was a different shape from Charlotte’s; their profiles were different as well. But then again, Annie hardly resembled her mother at all. That kind of thing happened all the time.

If Mona was indeed Layla, how awful for Charlotte. She would have found her daughter, but one who had done a terrible thing by stealing the Cerulean Queen. A daughter who fought against everything Charlotte believed in.

“When were you born?” asked Charlotte after an interminable silence.

“The tenth of February 1939.”

“My daughter was born in August of 1937.”

Close, but not that close. Even Annie, who’d had little interaction with young children, knew it would’ve been hard to pass a five-year-old off as a three-year-old.

Of course, if Henry had changed his name, he could have easily changed Layla’s and falsified the birth record.

Mona looked Charlotte up and down. “Rest assured, I am not your daughter, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Charlotte didn’t seem so convinced. “Did your father ever mention me?”

“Did he ever tell me that he’d been married before? No, of course not.”

“What about your mother?”

“What about her?”

“She obviously recognized him in the photograph I showed her, even if I called him Henry Smith.”

Mona’s mouth shot up in a snarl. “What are you talking about? When did you see my mother?”

Charlotte, caught up in the moment, had given away too much. She looked over at Annie, as if she was unsure how to respond, so Annie stepped in. “We just got back from Egypt. We tracked down Leon Pitcairn in Luxor last week, and ran into your mother when we stopped by the Farid Gallery,” she said.

“You were in Luxor and Cairo? Why were you at the gallery?” Mona’s accent had become more pronounced, and now that Annie had spent time in Egypt, she recognized it as Arabic, a fact she never would have picked up before. She recalled their conversation before the Met Gala, as the bartenders were setting up, when Mona had complained about the many traffic lights in New York. Now it made sense: She had been comparing it to the free-flowing mayhem of Cairo.

It had been Mona all along.

Charlotte was pale, probably still in shock from the revelation about Mona’s father being Henry, so Annie took over. “The Farid Gallery is where we first saw the King Tut plaster statue, the one that had the Cerulean Queen hidden inside it.”

Mona took a couple of steps back. “Wait, how do you know that?”

Before they’d left Egypt, Omar had told Annie and Charlotte what the police learned from Heba’s assistant, Nephi Nasr—the man Heba had called out for the first time they’d visited the shop and the same one who’d attacked her and Charlotte both at the Met and in Cairo.

Annie took a deep breath. “We know you were working with Leon, Ma’at’s logistics coordinator, who handled the customs arrangements for the King Tut plaster to get from New York to Cairo. After Nasr stole it from the Met, he sent it back to Egypt in a box filled with cheap souvenirs bound for the Farid Gallery. From there, it was supposed to be handed off to another operative by Nasr, but we intercepted it before that could happen.”

Annie didn’t reveal the rest of the story: that once in custody, Nasr admitted that he’d recognized Annie from the Met heist when she and Charlotte first wandered into the Farid Gallery. He’d retreated to the back room, listened in on their conversation, and decided to trail them, make sure they didn’t get too close. Luckily, Jabari’s grandfather had insisted Jabari keep an eye on Charlotte and Annie until they were safely out of the country, which meant their stalker had a stalker of his own.

It was Mona’s turn to be speechless. “How do you know all this?” she finally sputtered.

“I saw a photo of you and your mother on her desk.” In the photo, Mona’s arm was draped over Heba’s shoulders during a trip to the seashore. They were laughing, obviously comfortable in each other’s company, obviously close. Mona’s mother was her weak point, her Achilles’ heel.

It was time to go in for the kill, and Charlotte took over.

“The police raided the shop,” said Charlotte. “Nasr led the Egyptian police to a storage unit where they recovered the other antiquities, similarly hidden inside King Tut plaster statues. Nasr, Leon Pitcairn, and your mother have all been arrested, and we’re told there will be more Egyptian arrests announced soon.”

Mona’s scornful pride crumbled. “They arrested my mother? She had nothing to do with it, nothing at all. We kept her out of it, to protect her.”

“You used your mother’s shop assistant to funnel stolen items into the country,” said Charlotte. “How are you surprised she got caught up in the police raid?”

The confusion and fear on Heba’s face finally made sense. She might have wondered what Charlotte and Annie were up to after they showed her the photo of the man she knew as Darius, and lied because she didn’t trust them. But she had no idea that her daughter was part of Ma’at.

“I have to go. Consider your file destroyed.” Mona spun on her heel but came to a sharp halt as Mr. Fantoni and his security team, along with Frederick and Mr. Lavigne, streamed out of the Temple of Dendur. At the same time, uniformed police officers stepped out from where they’d been posted at each gallery exit.

One policeman handcuffed Mona as another read her her rights. “The police are currently searching the Upper East Side apartment you share with your husband, the importer/exporter named Karim Salah,” said Mr. Fantoni. “Karim is in the process of being arrested in Munich, where we believe he’s been surveying another museum for a possible hit.”

“My mother?” Mona cried. “How is she? Where is she?”

The transformation of Mona from a haughty, overconfident Upper East Side matron into a panicked, frightened daughter was sudden and shocking. While she might love her mother, her single-minded zeal had brought them both down.

Mona swiveled her head around as the police began to lead her away. “Wait a minute. You want to find your daughter? I know where she is.”

“You do?” Charlotte stepped toward her. “Where?”

Mona gave her a dark look and spit on the floor. “I’ll never tell. You go after my mother? This is what you get in return. And to think she was right under your nose.”

“Please. What are you saying?”

She smirked, as if enjoying a private joke. “It will be a cold day in hell when I tell you. Very, very cold.”

Mona’s laugh echoed off the walls as she was led away.

After the arrest, Mr. Lavigne, Frederick, and Mr. Fantoni congratulated Charlotte for a job well done and she insisted they extend the same courtesy to Annie. “I couldn’t have accomplished any of this without Annie Jenkins,” she said, and they made a point of shaking Annie’s hand as well. On their way out, at the information desk in the Great Hall, Charlotte asked for an interoffice memo and placed the slides of the faded hieroglyphs from Hathorkare’s tomb inside, along with a note to her conservator friend Helen. “It’s worth a try,” she said to Annie with a shrug.

Outside the Met, the air smelled like snow and Annie shivered in her windbreaker, already missing the desert warmth of Egypt. Neither she nor Charlotte had been home yet—not that Annie had a home—and it felt odd to be parting after the roller coaster of the past few days. She didn’t want to have to say goodbye just yet.

“Do you think Mona really knows where Layla is? Or that she is Layla? She said, ‘Right under your nose.’ Does that mean herself?”

Charlotte hugged her arms to her chest. “I have no idea anymore. I wouldn’t put it past her to lie in order to torture me. In the end, only Henry can tell me the truth. If she is Mona, I’ll be relieved that she’s alive, but bereft at who she turned out to be.”

“So you’re going to try to find Henry?”

“Yes. I have to find out what happened, hear his side of the story. I’ll head to Switzerland as soon as I’ve had time to go home and repack.”

Her voice trailed off and her eyes grew watery.

Annie had gotten what she was after by going to Egypt, and she should be bursting with excitement that she’d helped track down the Cerulean Queen and bring the thief to justice. But she wasn’t, because Charlotte had come away empty-handed, with even more questions than she had when she’d started.

“I’m happy to come to Switzerland with you,” offered Annie. “We make a good team, and you might need someone around to divert bad guys with broken perfume bottles.”

Charlotte pulled Annie into a deep hug. “I have to do this on my own,” she whispered into her ear. “You understand, don’t you?”

Now they were both crying. “Of course I do.”