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supported the return of antiquities to their country of origin. But I don’t have much time in the city and I thought it would be a good place to make your acquaintance and visit the monument myself.”
    He checked his watch. “If we grab a taxi, we should be able to get to the restaurant before they give away my reservation. And,” he said, giving me a grave look, “you can tell me more about this incident that happened at your apartment on the way over.”

10
    She’s in danger …
    It wasn’t a complete thought on the part of Fatima Sari as she followed at a distance and watched Madison Dupre and Mounir Kaseem as they walked to Fifth Avenue to flag down a taxi.
    Fatima Sari was small, thin, and fragile. Dark blotches under her eyes and an almost panicked look on her face revealed that the source of her physical deterioration was due to mental suffering.
    Having a sympathetic response to the danger she sensed to a woman she had tried to stab hours earlier was not a contradiction to Fatima. Her thoughts were jumbled, her reasoning meandering; she had no clear and concise notion why she wanted to kill the woman earlier and yet now was concerned about the woman’s safety.
    Even more havoc was created in her mind and body because she knew her thinking was warped and she couldn’t do anything about it. She had been told that the woman was a danger to the artifact she had been sworn to protect, but she couldn’t focus on exactly what danger the woman posed.
    Things she thought she saw weren’t always there; conclusions she had reached—like trying to stab the woman—didn’t always make sense after she did them. Fatima realized she was losing her grip on distinguishing between the real and the imagined. Worse, she felt as if someone else was getting more and more control of her thoughts and actions—a voice and messages telling her what to do, what to think, who her enemies were.
    A voice that called herself Sphinx.
    In Fatima’s culture the sphinx was both a creature of myth and legend, a sacred beast that the pharaohs of old had called upon to defend the land when enemies were at the gates.
    A still-rational part of Fatima’s brain knew that the person who gave her commands over the phone was not the stone representation of a sphinx, but to her fogged brain, the woman appeared to have the spirit of the sphinx as she told Fatima that it was her duty to get back the sacred amulet that had been stolen from her.
    Even if it meant killing the enemy who kept her from it.
    She had struck out at the Dupre woman, too, because she was on the constant edge of panic, ready to flinch and bolt at any given moment—or to lash out with a deadly weapon.
    Her friend Fuad tried to tell Fatima that her thinking wasn’t straight because she had been drugged. She trusted Fuad, yet knowing that her mind was twisted because of something that had been slipped to her didn’t make her thinking any clearer.
    In the beginning, there had been a battle for control in her head as she struggled to clear her thoughts, but that war had been lost.
    She still felt a compulsion to warn the Dupre woman about Kaseem … warn her that he was a dangerous man … warn her to stay away from him … but she didn’t know why she felt that way. It hadn’t come from Sphinx. Instead, it was a random thought flowing in her mind that she wasn’t able to focus on.
    Fatima had positioned herself earlier behind some bushes in Central Park and watched as the two of them walked around the obelisk.
    She had not been ordered by Sphinx to go to the place and watch them; she no longer had any communication with Sphinx because Fuad had warned her that the woman who called herself by that name meant her harm.
    To keep herself from being commanded by the woman, Fatima threw her cell phone in a trash bin. It had not occurred to her that doing so would cut her off from the only