The Ben Hope Collection: 6 BOOK SET (107 page)

Pierre Claudel was a master at what he did. In the shadowy circles in which he moved, his name was a whispered legend. The truth about his life was a closed book, and he preferred to keep it that way.

At the age of forty-two, he was a confirmed member of the Cairo rich list. He was tall and suave, always well-dressed, impeccably mannered and extremely eligible. He played tennis and polo, enjoyed fine art and fine wine, had a private box at the opera, could recommend the best restaurants and hotels in any city in the world, and was seldom seen in public without the latest addition to the procession of expensive, but always eminently replaceable, women who passed through his life and bed. He drove a bright red Ferrari and lived in a mock Tuscan villa set in 1.6 acres of clipped and manicured country parkland in Hyde Park, one of Cairo’s most exclusive gated communities.

As to where all this had come from, Claudel was highly secretive about the nature of his business. When asked what he did, he would just smile his charming smile, give a modest little wave of his hand and reply
that he specialised in cultural exports. That answer was good enough for the small-talking country-club elite and the women he seduced at the city’s fashionable high-society parties. They didn’t need to know the truth. Nobody did.

A long time ago, back in his native France, Pierre Claudel had been a passionate archaeology scholar. As a young student he’d worked himself mercilessly, graduated top of all the classes he’d ever taken and formed the makings of a glittering career in academia. He’d taken a lecturer’s post at the Sorbonne, where some of the students were older than he was. He’d done well, settled into a comfortable if not terribly luxurious lifestyle. Found himself a nice girlfriend, Nadine, and moved into a flat together. A little car, a little dog, a cosy little Parisian routine. Talk of marriage, starting a family one day.

It would have satisfied a lot of men, but that wasn’t the way Pierre Claudel’s mind worked. He wanted more. And within a year or two, he was becoming restless.

Then, at the age of twenty-seven, his passion for Egyptology had brought him to his first excavation in the Western Desert and he’d felt the first kiss of adventure. He’d been hooked. It suddenly hit him what he should be doing with his life. Fortune and glory were the promises that lurked under the sands, and he was going to find them.

On his return to France he instantly started winding up his old life there. He quit his job, left Nadine weeping over a brief note on the kitchen table. With his whole
world in a suitcase he boarded a flight, stepped down on the hot Egyptian soil and never looked back.

The new, reinvented Claudel installed himself in the cheapest rented rooms he could find in Cairo, and immediately got down with fierce enthusiasm to setting up his new business. He became, in effect, a professional tomb robber. And within a year of starting up his operation, he was already on the fast track to becoming a very wealthy man. He could still remember the day he’d made his first million.
This is fucking easy,
he’d thought.

And years later, that was still exactly how he felt about it. It was easy. Ridiculously easy. He was damn good at it, and it had been very, very kind to him.

He liked to think that his profession was older than prostitution. Ever since the earliest civilisations had started honouring their dead by burying them with precious objects, there had been opportunities for men like him. He wasn’t the kind of idiot that the Egyptian Antiquities Police would catch, shovel in hand, digging at the foot of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. Claudel’s operation was slick and sophisticated. And safe. He made sure that the guys doing the actual thieving never knew who they were working for, while he himself never even went near the desert. The wine bars and top class restaurants and golf courses were the places he carried out his business, and that suited him fine. Hot sand was bad for his handmade Italian shoes.

Claudel had travelled everywhere in the course of his trade-Rome, Athens, Ankara, Beirut, Damascus, Delhi were all potential sources of prime merchandise
for him. But Egypt was the real deal. Egypt was where it was truly at, and he wasn’t the only greedy piglet suckling on her fat teat. Everyone with half a connection was muscling in for a piece of the action. Even government officials trusted with the job of protecting Egypt’s heritage had been caught amassing huge fortunes by squirrelling artefacts to private buyers in Europe and the USA. Pharaonic slate palettes, pottery, glazed figurines, bronze statuettes, amulets, gold trinkets, carved stone heads, tapestries, even furniture-not to mention the wealth of items left over from the Graeco-Roman period. There was a veritable avalanche of stuff pouring out of the country.

Claudel was careful never to let the artefacts too close to him. There was no Egyptian art in his home, not a scrap of anything that the Ministry of Culture or the Antiquities Police could ever catch him with. They’d never come close to suspecting him, but if they ever did come knocking on his door he’d be only too happy to show them around the place. Everything he personally owned was legit. Nobody could ever know that he’d paid for his collection of Ming vases by tunnelling through the wall into a storeroom used to house artefacts at a temple in Karnak and making off with a truckload of statues. He’d never even seen them. Even before they were his, they were sold.

It had been the same with the priceless Louis XIV desk in his study, a trade for a Ptolemaic-era gold mask lifted from a mummy at the necropolis of Deir-el-Banat. One of his first really big sales. He could still remember
it well. The tombs had been nice and shallow, sometimes just a metre under the surface. Grab and go. By the time the authorities had rolled up, all the good stuff was gone. They could keep the bones and bandages. Claudel had little use for dusty old corpses.

And that was the way it had continued. Fifteen years on, business had never been more brisk. The appetite for Egyptian antiquities was as hot now as it had been in ancient times. Occasionally, an eagle-eyed Egyptologist would spot the stolen goods that cropped up in the auction rooms of Christie’s and Sotheby’s and the alert was sounded. The trail would sometimes lead back to the source and heads rolled, especially when the Ministry of Culture boys got together with Interpol to hunt down the crooked dealers. But Claudel was far too clever to let that happen. He’d made a fine art of creating buffers and paper trails to protect himself, and in any case most of his trade was with private owners. Unscrupulous connoisseurs were always keen to expand their collections, and blush-making sums of money would change hands-even if the artefacts could never be openly displayed.

So, Pierre Claudel was a man with just about everything in life. But it was in his nature to want more, as it had always been. He would stand at his balcony in the mornings, sipping espresso, and gaze out towards the desert far away. The sands still held many secrets. There were still undreamed-of fortunes to be made out there. He yearned for one really big find, something he could retire on. Some of the legendary treasures of ancient Egypt were still undiscovered-like the fabled
tomb of Imhotep, one of the nation’s earliest and most influential rulers, a man long thought not even to have existed. Armies of archaeologists and historians were out there and had been for years, scouring the sands for that elusive prize. If only he could snatch something of that magnitude out from under their noses-what a coup
that
would be. Something like that would set him up for life and for twenty lives afterwards.

He would lie awake at night, just imagining it.

Then, one day in late September, seven months ago now, Claudel had had a call that changed his life.

The minute he’d heard the man’s voice on the other end, he’d known this was serious, heavy shit. Normally he’d have slammed the phone down or demanded to know where they’d got his private number. But instinct had told him otherwise, and he’d listened to what the man had to say.

As a result of the call, a meeting had been set up. Not in the city, but in the desert. The man had been insistent on that point. Claudel had been uncomfortable with the idea, but his gut feeling again directed him to go with it. So he’d driven out there, alone as instructed. It had been a long, hot, dusty drive. The meeting place was a spot he knew from years ago, one that had never been worth visiting again. Whatever scraps the lonely ruined temple had to offer had been pilfered centuries ago. Now it just stood there, neglected and half buried in the sand, in the shade of a towering escarpment miles from anywhere.

As he’d pulled up and stepped out into the searing sun, Claudel had sensed he was being watched from
the escarpment high above. Time had passed. He’d paced up and down, checked his watch impatiently. The heat of the sun was giving him a headache. He wasn’t used to roughing it any more. He’d been just on the point of leaving when four off-road vehicles had appeared out of the shimmering heat haze and bounced across the dunes towards him.

He’d shielded his eyes from the sun and watched them approach. The ten men who climbed out of the dusty vehicles weren’t the kind he normally did business with. Most of them looked like ex-soldiers, or mercenaries. Nobody was smiling. Several of them were carrying stubby automatic weapons on slings over their shoulders. Claudel didn’t generally come into contact with guns in the course of his work, and he didn’t much like them. These had evil-looking, curved magazines, folding stocks, a brutal military appearance to them. They looked scuffed and worn with use, and he could only wonder how many people had been shot with them.

But it was too late to run now. He was committed-to what, he didn’t yet know.

Claudel had been shoved against his car and frisked for weapons and wires. ‘Watch the suit,’ he protested.

‘He’s clean,’ the tall bearded one had muttered. They released him and he dusted his clothes off indignantly. The men signalled across to one of the jeeps, and only then had Claudel noticed the eleventh man, the one who’d hung back, sitting smoking in the rear seat, quietly watching from a distance.

The man had stepped down from the vehicle and
walked across the sand. His face was long and lean, the dark curls receding across his high forehead. He was wearing khaki trousers and a loose-fitting shirt that billowed in the warm breeze, the black rubber butt of a pistol protruding from a Cordura holster on his hip. He carried a slim briefcase in his left hand. He was slightly built, not tall, not physically striking or intimidating in any way. But he exuded an air of menace that seemed to come from somewhere behind those deep, dark eyes.

Claudel had looked into them and he couldn’t tell what the man was thinking. That scared him most of all. Something told him those eyes had seen things he couldn’t imagine. This was a man without any trace of kindness or humour or compassion. Even the rest of the group had almost visibly shrunk away from him as he moved past them.

The man had strode up to Claudel. Stood with his boots planted apart in the sand and gazed at him impassively. ‘My name is Kamal,’ he said. His voice was soft, almost gentle.

Claudel could sense the rest of the men watching him. The burly one with the baseball cap, the least mean-looking of the bunch, glanced nervously at Kamal. Another one, a ferret-like little guy with a shaven head and an ammunition belt wrapped around his torso, was fingering his gun.

Then Kamal had beckoned to Claudel and walked towards the shade of the rocks. The Frenchman had followed, feeling the sweat run down his temples, not just from the heat. His neck and shoulders ached with
tension, expecting a bullet. He racked his brain as he walked. What had he done? Had he offended someone? Stepped on the wrong toes?

But then Kamal had done something unexpected. He sat down in a shady hollow in the rocks and motioned to Claudel to join him. ‘I know who you are, and what you do. You can help me.’

Claudel eased himself down on a rock. ‘I don’t know what you want,’ he replied hesitantly.

‘I want to show you something.’

Then Kamal had opened the case. Inside it was a large manila envelope. He handed it over. Claudel frowned at it, looked inside and saw that it contained a series of glossy colour prints.

Kamal was watching him expectantly. Claudel shot him a baffled look, then started leafing through the photos. They showed a stone slab, ancient and pitted, covered in sand-dusted hieroglyphs.

‘You can read them?’ Kamal asked quietly.

Claudel nodded distractedly. He was already deep into them. He could feel an icy tingle running down his neck, down his spine as his eye traced the lines of symbols, converting them into words. He suddenly broke away from them and looked up. ‘Where did you—’

‘Read,’ Kamal said, interrupting.

Claudel’s fear was gone now. He read on.

‘What does it say?’ Kamal asked.

Claudel studied the glyphs again for a moment, struggling to condense their meaning. ‘Amun is content,’ he read slowly out loud. ‘The Heretic of Amarna shall be denied, the treasures restored to their rightful place.’

Kamal smiled. ‘An educated man. I had to have it translated.’

But Claudel wasn’t listening. The icy tingle was intensifying into a mounting excitement that made him breathless.

The Heretic of Amarna shall be denied.

The Frenchman couldn’t hide the tremble that made the glossy photo in his hands flutter.

It couldn’t be. Amarna, the city in the sands. The heretic pharaoh. The ancient story of the three High Priests who’d defied him. Claudel knew what this was about. Treasure. Big time.

But it was just a legend. A myth. Dismissed by every Egyptology scholar in the world as fantasy and nonsense.

Could it be true after all? Surely not.

But what if it was?

He suddenly felt as giddy as a schoolboy. This could be it. This could be the big one. The thing he’d been waiting for. The biggest discovery of his career. Maybe the biggest haul in history. If even half the discredited legends were true, it would be like finding Tutankhamun’s tomb all over again. And then some.