In this third installment of the New York Times bestselling Charlie Thorne series—which #1 New York Times bestselling author Chris Grabenstein called “a real page-burner”—Charlie tracks down Cleopatra’s greatest treasure in Egypt. Charlie Thorne is a genius. Charlie Thorne is a renegade. Charlie Thorne isn’t going down without a fight. After tracking down incredible discoveries by Einstein and Darwin, Charlie is back. This time, the great ruler Cleopatra has left behind an extremely valuable and powerful treasure, its location encoded on an ancient stone tablet. In 30 BCE, Cleopatra and her husband, Marc Antony, lost their war against Octavian for control of the Egyptian Empire. However, Cleopatra knew Octavian was really after the mysterious item that was the source of all her wealth and influence, so she hid it before dying by suicide. She left a series of devious clues behind for her children to find it, but they were lost to history…until now. In a breathless adventure that takes her across the globe, Charlie must fight for her life against ruthless enemies, match wits with Cleopatra, and solve the two-thousand-year-old mystery to prevent the most powerful treasure of the ancient world from falling into the wrong hands. Stuart Gibbs is the New York Times bestselling author of the Charlie Thorne series, FunJungle series, Moon Base Alpha series, Once Upon a Tim series, and Spy School series. He has written screenplays, worked on a whole bunch of animated films, developed TV shows, been a newspaper columnist, and researched capybaras. Stuart lives with his family in Los Angeles. You can learn more about what he’s up to at StuartGibbs.com. Chapter One ONE Giza, Egypt Present Day On the evening of her thirteenth birthday, Charlie Thorne committed a crime. As crimes went, it was a minor one, merely illegal entry. Charlie had no intention to steal anything or hurt anyone—although she knew from experience that even the most carefully thought-out plans often went wrong. Which was exactly what happened that night. The location was the penthouse condominium of Ahmet Shah, the oldest son of an extremely wealthy Egyptian shipping magnate. Charlie had been plotting the crime for two weeks, surveying the building, doing research, learning everything she could about Ahmet and his home. Charlie was exceptionally smart. She had an extremely high IQ and a gift for languages; since arriving in the country, she had taught herself Egyptian Arabic. She could have hacked Ahmet’s computer to get the information she wanted—although that hadn’t been necessary. Ahmet loved the spotlight and was extremely active on social media, and so he had unwittingly posted everything Charlie needed to know online. Ahmet was a vice president at his father’s company, but he didn’t appear to work very much—if at all. Instead, his main profession seemed to be spending money. He had vacation homes in Aspen and Malibu and an eight-bedroom yacht that was currently anchored off Ibiza. He belonged to seventeen different country clubs around the world, three of which he had never even visited. He had just returned to Giza after spending two weeks in a $10,000-a-night hotel room in Bali. And now he was throwing a massive party to celebrate being home again. Charlie had briefly considered breaking into Ahmet’s condo while he was in Bali, but the security system was elaborate and state-of-the-art, and the building was patrolled by armed guards. Charlie had many talents, but breaking and entering wasn’t one of them. Besides, there were far easier ways to get into someone’s home, no matter how well protected it was. Under the right circumstances, you could just walk through the door. Ahmet Shah loved entertaining. It hadn’t taken Charlie long to learn that about him; her first Google image search for the young man turned up hundreds of party photos taken at his penthouse. Large, crowded, glamorous parties, the kind that certain types of people were desperate to score invitations to. The condo had also been featured in several architectural and design magazines, which allowed Charlie to easily memorize the layout of the rooms and catalog most of the artifacts on display. Including one artifact in particular. The one Charlie had been trying to locate for the past two months. In a magazine photo, it was in the background behind Ahmet as he showed off another piece of art that wasn’t anywhere nearly as important. An artifact so powerful and significant should never have been in a private collection. Ahmet Shah would have been wise to keep its location a secret. But then, Ahmet did not appear to be a very wise person. From Charlie’s research, he was a wealthy brat who wanted to be famous—and he didn’t even know what he possessed. Charlie took it as a good sign that the party happened to be on her birthday. She felt like celebrating, but unfortunately, she was no longer in touch with any of her friends. Four months ea