George had been called in on the third year of the dig, just after Thorpe's foundation had threatened to pull Johnson's funding. His pedigree had impressed Johnson, and although he should have been qualified to work with them on the basis of his educational background alone, that wasn't what had set Johnson on his trail. Johnson was convinced that only George could help him find the lost tomb of Ahknaten.

Johnson had found the maps made by Ahknaten's tomb builders. That in itself had been a coup, since nearly everything associated with the heretic Pharoah's reign had been destroyed as blasphemy. But modern society recognized Ahknaten as a pioneer, and the interest in the first monotheist was high. Thorpe's foundation had given out millions of dollars in grants to different projects promising some insight into the ancient ruler. Johnson was sure that they'd reward him handsomely if he could find Ahknaten's tomb, and after all the others who'd tried and failed, such a discovery would secure his place next to Carter in the pantheon of modern archaeology. All he needed was George.

George Mailley had special talents. They'd first come to light when he'd been selected to participate in a "psychological study" in college. He hadn't been aware of it, but the study had revealed that he had an ability to predict things that happened outside his presence.

When he'd been drafted into the Army during the Viet Nam war, that ability had enabled him to escape the war with only minor injuries, and he'd saved the lives of his comrades on numerous occasions. They'd taken to calling him "Lucky," and the nickname had followed him back to the states when his tour was over. He elected to stay in the Army for a while, to build up the savings he'd need to pursue his dream of becoming an archaeologist.

He was stationed in Berlin next, and was assigned to eavesdrop on the East Germans' electronic communications. George saw it as a game, and became very good at it. On one of his trips back to Virginia to visit his family, he fell in love with the daughter of a neighbor and requested a transfer to the Intel operations branch at Fort Meade. Soon after his transfer came through, he and Sarah were engaged.

George's reputation for knowing what was going to happen next or knowing what was happening somewhere else soon brought him to the attention of those in charge of Operation Grill Flame, in which the Army was experimenting with the use of "psychic spies." George was recruited for their project to become, in Army parlance, a remote viewer.

After a few years, however, George became disenchanted with the politics involved and put in his papers requesting a discharge. It was time for him to follow his dreams. Sarah, who had her heart set on marrying an Army officer, told him he was being foolish to throw away his Army career and broke off their engagement. George told himself it was all for the best, since the life of an archaeologist is largely lived in the field. A wife would only be an encumbrance.

Six years later, George had finished his doctorate, specializing in Egyptology, and was looking for work in the field, precisely at the time that Johnson was seeking help to keep his grant. He was ambivalent about joining Johnson's group, but when Sarah became engaged to someone else, getting out of town suddenly seemed like a good idea.

While in graduate school, George had used his RV talent to look at ancient maps and divine which sites would yield the best results upon excavation. It was an extension of the gifts the Army had exploited in him, and he tended to keep it to himself to avoid being taken advantage of. He realized that in the field, it would give him a definite edge in building a track record which would assure him continued funding.

Johnson had connections in the Army, however, and those connections provided him with a full dossier on George, including his work with Grill Flame. And of course, it was that project, not his stellar academic record, that piqued Johnson's strong desire to have George join his team.

It was a symbiotic arrangement in the end. Johnson needed George's peculiar talent, and George needed an escape from watching the one that got away marry someone else.

The desert was as hot and dry as he'd been led to believe that it would be. But nothing had prepared him for how cold the nights got, out here in the middle of nowhere. The diggers sat around a fire built from imported wood and talked and laughed the night away. Occasionally, one or two of them would pull out their ouds and tambourines and drums and sing the lively Arab folk songs that George loved so much.

When morning dawned, they'd be back at the dig, shoveling sand into sieves and shaking it out to look for shards of pottery or the bones of ancient dead, still singing their desert songs. George envied the simplicity of their lives, especially when Johnson started pressuring him to find something, anything, to reassure Thorpe that his foundation's money wasn't being wasted.

The problem was that George was distracted. Remote viewing took an immense amount of concentration, and he couldn't do it with Johnson breathing down his neck. He hadn't done any serious RV work since he left the Army, and the conditions there had always been stringently controlled. What he needed was peace and quiet. So one night, after everyone had gone to sleep, George rolled up his sleeping bag, grabbed some supplies and drove off in one of the expedition's Jeeps.

For three days he was missing, and Johnson was convinced that George had abandoned them. But on the fourth day, George returned, smiling tiredly, and gave Johnson the coordinates of Ahknaten's final resting place, the site he'd been looking for all these years. The camp was a flurry of activity as Johnson barked orders, but George collapsed in his tent, exhausted by his efforts. He'd been able to give Johnson what he sought, but he was sure that it wasn't what Johnson wanted.

They didn't take the time to break camp and move closer to the new site, so George slept in blessed peace for a day and a half. He'd only been awake for a couple of hours when Johnson's jeep barreled into the encampment. Johnson was sweaty and streaked with dust, but the red of his face was evident beneath the grime.

"Mailley, what the hell do you think you're doing?" he demanded, walking purposefully to the table under a canopy where George was eating a breakfast of cubed casaba. He was so angry that George thought he could see him vibrating. George smiled slightly and looked up at him.

"What do you mean?" he asked innocently, although he knew why Johnson was so incensed.

"Those coordinates you gave me were a bust! I moved the whole damned operation out there in the middle of the desert and all they found was a damned skeleton. No tomb, no funerary temple, no nothing! Just a bunch of goddamned bones!" Johnson spat at him, and slammed his fist onto the table. "If you think this is some kind of joke, guess again!"

George shook his head slowly, the same slight smile still on his lips. "You asked me where Ahknaten was buried. That's what I gave you. The bones you dug up were Ahknaten's. If you don't believe me, check the DNA. He is Tut's father."

With a disgusted grunt, Johnson stalked off. He sent one of his assistants in the Jeep on the two day journey to Cairo with one of the bones they'd dug up at the coordinates George had supplied. Five days after he left, the student returned with the news -- these had, indeed, been Ahknaten's remains. Johnson found his fame, at last. But the Egyptian government had seized the bones, and Thorpe was so disappointed that he withdrew Johnson's funding anyway, and Johnson was forced to go back to teaching in a community college in San Diego.

George stayed behind in Egypt, and once the furor over Ahknaten's discovery was over, he mounted his own modest expedition in roughly the same area. He was very secretive about what he was seeking, only telling the diggers where to dig and not what to look for. After he'd been at it for eight months, the news reached Johnson in San Diego that a new darling had been crowned in the world of archaeology.

His name was George Mailley, and working with some ancient maps, he'd discovered the tomb of Ahknaten's second wife, filled to brimming with golden statues, jewelry and a richly decorated sarcophagus. And most wonderful of all, there was a mural on the wall that chronicled the entire history of Ahknaten's reign.

Ahknaten's second wife had been Nubian, and the discovery of her tomb had taken place just over the Egyptian border, near the headwaters of the Nile, in Sudan. The Egyptian government could make no claim on Mailley's find, and Sudan had no precedent to justify taking any action. Mailley made a generous donation to the Sudanese government, and they allowed him to remove the treasures from the tomb.

When the semester ended, Johnson took a personal loan and bought a ticket to Egypt to see Mailley's discovery. All he found was the funerary temple, naked of all of its riches. The artifacts from the tomb were part of a touring exhibition in America. When Johnson returned to San Diego, he realized that the exhibit had been showing in San Diego while he'd been in Egypt for two days on its way to Tokyo.

All he found when he rushed to the museum was a brochure containing photographs of the treasure. With the realization that he'd never be more than a footnote to Mailley's story, he rolled the brochure in his hands and went back to his studio apartment.

Props to the CHPercolator List for the prompt
February 24, 2001
1677 words