Jim Beegle

A Fool's Errand Jim Beegle

1323 BC - Thebes, Egypt -A young teenage boy-king worries that the day-to-day duties of being the ruler of Egypt are diverting him away from his true calling as a warrior king. His counselors, priests, and even his stepmother are bombarding him with the current domestic crisis: the lack of water in the Nile. To placate them, he has ordered a tunnel to be dug from the Nile to the farm valley. What the boy-king fails to realize is there is more to the daily domestic issues than that of just farms and water. His stepmother, seeking the power she knows she deserves, has decided to exploit a newly discovered power to clear her way to the throne. Modern Day Egypt - Valley of the Kings - Jake Bracken and Leon Platte, employees of Solaris Oil, are on loan to assist a group of university students in using state-of-the-art ground penetrating radar (GPR) as they work to unearth secrets of ancient Egypt. When the results hint of other aspects of the tunnel that was more than just a way ancient Egyptians moved water, trouble begins to visit those connected with the discovery. Mysterious deaths begin to plague the dig site, and people begin to vanish into the dry sands of the desert without a trace. Bracken and Platte find themselves trying to discover the common thread that links the death of a highly placed Egyptian Government official, with an attack on a college professor in Paris, to the disappearance of day laborers, government officials, and others in the Valley of the Kings; as they find themselves racing against a deadline to reconcile secrets of the past with mysteries of the present that surround an incidental image on a computer file.