The Exodus Quest (10 page)

SIXTEEN

I

Stafford and Lily were already waiting by the Discovery’s passenger door when Gaille went out at twelve minutes to five. ‘Sorry,’ she said, holding up Stafford’s book by way of an excuse. ‘I got carried away.’

‘It
is
good, isn’t it?’ he nodded.

‘The Copper Scroll,’ she said as she and Stafford climbed in and Lily went to open the gates. ‘That’s for real, is it?’

‘Do you imagine I’m in the habit of populating my books with make-believe artefacts?’ he asked sourly. ‘Go and visit Jordan’s Archaeological Museum if you don’t trust me.’

‘I didn’t mean for real like that,’ said Gaille, gunning the engine a little to warm it up before pulling away. ‘I mean, how can you be sure it’s not a hoax of some kind?’

‘Well, it’s certainly not a modern hoax,’ he said, as Gaille braked to allow Lily to climb in the back. ‘Scientific analysis has proved that beyond question. As for an
ancient
hoax, the Essenes weren’t exactly known for their frivolity, were they? Especially as the copper was over ninety-nine per cent pure – effectively
ritually
pure; and the Essenes took ritual purity very seriously.’

‘Yes.’

‘Besides, it wasn’t on just one sheet of copper, surely plenty for a hoax, but on three sheets riveted together. And it wasn’t inscribed in the normal fashion, with the letters scratched out with a sharp stylus. Someone actually punched the letters out from behind with a chisel. Extremely painstaking work, believe me. No. Whoever went to all that trouble believed it genuine.’

‘Believed?’ asked Gaille.

He granted her a slight smile, a teacher rewarding a bright pupil. ‘The text seems to have been copied from another, older document, probably by someone unfamiliar with the language. So it’s possible, I suppose, that some mischief-maker wrote out a hoax on parchment or papyrus, and that this hoax was somehow mistaken by the Essenes for the real thing, and that it became so venerated by them that when it began to disintegrate, they copied it out, only onto copper this time. But that’s quite a stretch, wouldn’t you say?’

A donkey cart ahead, laden with long green stalks of sugar cane that bounced and swished like the skirts of an Hawaiian dancer, blocked the full width of the narrow lane, forcing Gaille to fall in behind. It was still dark, but the eastern horizon was just beginning to lighten with the first intimations of dawn. Stafford leaned across and tooted the horn again and again until Gaille swatted away his hand. ‘There’s nowhere for him to pull into,’ she said.

Stafford scowled and folded one leg across the other, crossed his arms. ‘Do you realize how important this shot of sunrise is for my programme?’ he asked.

‘We’ll get there.’

‘Akhenaten chose Amarna as his capital because the way the sun rose between two cliffs mimicked the Egyptian sign of the Aten. That’s going to be my opening shot. If I don’t get it—’

‘You’ll get it,’ she assured him. The cart finally found a place to pull in. Gaille waved gratefully as she sped by, the acceleration making Stafford’s book slip from the dashboard. He picked it up, flipped the pages with authorial pride, stopped to admire a photograph of himself by the Wailing Wall. Gaille nodded at it. ‘How come you’re so sure these Copper Scroll treasures came from the Temple of Solomon?’ she asked.

‘I thought you’d read it.’

‘I haven’t had a chance to finish it yet.’

‘The scroll’s in Hebrew,’ he told her. ‘It was owned by the Essenes. So the treasure was unquestionably Jewish. And the amounts involved are staggering, I mean
over forty tons
of gold. That’s worth
billions
of dollars at today’s prices. The kind of quantities only a hugely wealthy king or a very powerful institution could possibly own. Yet some of the treasures are described as
tithes
, and tithes are paid exclusively to religious organizations. Others are religious artefacts like chalices and candelabras. A religious institution, then. In ancient Israel, that means either the First Temple, the Temple of Solomon, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586
BC
; or the Second Temple, which was built on the ruins of the first, and which was destroyed by the Romans in
AD
70. Most scholars ascribe these Copper Scroll treasures to the latter. But my book proves that impossible.’

‘Proves it?’

‘It’s all to do with dates,’ said Stafford. ‘The Copper Scroll was found in the Qumran caves, remember. And Qumran was taken and then occupied by the Romans in
AD
68, two years before Jerusalem fell. Advocates of the Second Temple theory would have you believe that Jews took the treasure
out
of Jewish-held territory to bury it in Roman-occupied territory, then hid the map to it right under the noses of a Roman garrison. How crazy would they have had to be to do that? But even that’s beside the point. The Copper Scroll was found buried
beneath
other scrolls that had been left there at least twenty years before the Roman invasion. And, as I just said, it was copied from another, older document. And the script itself is a very peculiar version of archaic square-form Hebrew dating to 200
BC
or even earlier. Tell me, is it likely the Second Temple treasures were hidden from the Romans hundreds of years before they came rampaging?’

‘It does seem odd.’

‘So if the Copper Scroll treasure didn’t come from the Second Temple, it must have come from the first. QED.’

They reached the Nile road, headed south. The lime, flamingo and turquoise strip lighting of a minaret lit up the darkness like a fairground ride. Gaille turned right and then left, wending through a small village then out between lush fields of budding grain and down a gentle incline to the Nile, flowing sedately by. The glow of dawn was turning the eastern horizon blue, though the sun wouldn’t rise over the Amarna cliffs for a while yet.

‘Any good?’ she asked.

‘Perfect,’ grinned Lily from the back.

They climbed out, yawned, stretched. Lily set up the camera and checked the sound while Stafford took out his vanity case and primped himself. Gaille sat upon the bonnet, savouring its radiated heat, her mind buzzing pleasantly. Somewhere, in the far distance, a muezzin began his call to prayer.

The Copper Scroll. Ancient lost treasures. She laughed out loud. Knox was going to love her for this.

II

‘That’ll have to do,’ grunted Griffin, as they stamped down the mix of sand, rock and earth with which they’d filled up the shaft. Even with everyone helping, it had been a long night’s work, and he felt drained. The two or three hours of sleep they could still get wasn’t much, but it was better than none.

‘What about the reverend?’ asked Mickey doubtfully. ‘Shouldn’t we wait for him?’

‘He’s scarcely going to turn up now, is he?’ snapped Griffin irritably. Peterson never had to explain himself. He just barked out orders and these damned munchkins ran to obey. ‘We’ll come back later.’

‘I still think we ought to—’

‘Just do as I say, all right?’ He wiped his hands on his backside, turned and strode over to the truck with as much authority as he could manage, hoping rather than expecting that his students would follow. But when he turned to look, they were kneeling in a circle, arms around each other’s shoulders, giving thanks to the Lord.

A familiar sweet stab of envy in Griffin’s groin, disturbingly like lust. How fine to release oneself into the group like that, to surrender one’s cynicism and doubt. But his own cast of mind had been set decades ago, and it didn’t do submission, it didn’t do faith. ‘Come on,’ he said, hating the wheedle in his voice. ‘We need to get moving.’

But they didn’t pay him any heed. They took their own good time. His impatience turned to something akin to fear, a sense of impending doom. How the hell had it come to this? Nathan hadn’t said what had happened to Tawfiq and Knox, but from the state of shock he’d been in, it clearly wasn’t good. He’d sent him away before the others could see him, but now Griffin was worried he might have bumped into Claire at the hotel. Claire wasn’t like these others. She made her own judgements on things. If she found out that something really bad had happened … Christ! This whole house of cards could easily come crashing down.

Finally, they were done. They walked across, still exuberant with prayer, climbed onto the pick-up’s flatbed, not one of them joining him in the cab. There were times he
hated
them, how low he’d sunk in the world. A moment of weakness. That’s all it had been. The girl had sat front row during his lectures, staring unblinkingly at him with her guileless blue eyes. He’d been unused to the frank admiration of an attractive young woman. It had set his heart pounding. Lecture after lecture, he’d kept glancing her way. She’d still been staring raptly. Then she’d come to his office one lunchtime, pulled a chair up beside him. When their knees had brushed beneath his desk, his hand had moved almost convulsively, with a life of its own, to the warm top of her inner thigh, fingertips pressing down between her legs.

Her shocked shriek haunted him still, made his cheeks burn whenever he thought of it.

No one had taken his side, of course. His boss had seized the opportunity to cut him loose. She’d never liked him. And she must have put the word out too, the vindictive bitch, because no one had even bothered to answer his application letters. No one except Peterson.
What did they expect him
to do?
he thought defiantly.
Did they expect him
to starve?

A strange noise reached him over the rumble of the engine. He took his foot off the gas, glanced over his shoulder. They were singing in the back, moonlit faces shiny with devotion, hands raised in ecstasy, worshipping together. His low spirits sank even further. Maybe there was something in religion after all. Maybe if he believed like that, attractive young women wouldn’t shriek in horror just because he put his hand on their leg.

Maybe.

III

Knox woke abruptly, nebulously afraid without being quite sure why. It was almost pitch black in the room, at least until some passing headlights painted yellow slats upon the ceiling. But that only made him all the more anxious, because he didn’t recognize his surroundings at all. He tried to lift his head, but he had no strength in his neck. He tried to push himself up, but his arms felt atrophied and useless. He worked his eyes instead, left, right, up, down. A catheter taped to his forearm. He followed the translucent tube up to an IV drip on a stand. Hospital. At least that explained why he felt like shit. But he had no recollection whatsoever of what might have brought him here.

Another car passed by, its headlights silhouetting a man standing by his bed, looking down. He tugged the pillow from beneath Knox’s head, held it squarely in his hands, made to place it over his face. Heels started clacking on the tiled floor outside, drawing closer and closer. The man vanished into the shadows. Knox tried to call out, but no sound emerged. The heels passed on by, pushing through swing doors and away, leaving only silence behind.

The man re-emerged from the shadows, pillow still in his hands. He placed it over Knox’s face, pressed down. Until that moment, there’d been an almost hallucinogenic aspect to the whole experience, like a waking nightmare. But as the pillow pressed down hard and he couldn’t breathe, his heart kicked into overdrive, pumping out adrenaline, belatedly giving him some movement and strength. He scrabbled at the man’s hands, kicked with his feet and knees, tried to twist his mouth sideways to gain some air. But he had no leverage; his muscles were already tiring, his mind swimming from lack of oxygen, his system closing down. He flung up an arm in a last effort to claw his assailant’s face, tugging the IV tube so hard that the stand teetered and then tumbled with a great clatter. The pillow was instantly whipped from his face, falling to the floor, allowing Knox to heave in great gasps of air, savour the oxygen flooding gloriously through his system.

The door flew open. A policeman came in, flapped on the light, saw the fallen IV stand, Knox gasping, went back out into the corridor, shouting for medical assistance, panic in his voice. Knox lay there, terrified his assailant would finish him off, until a doctor finally appeared at the door, two days of stubble on his chin and cheeks, eyes gluey with tiredness. He picked up the IV stand, checked the tube, reaffixed Knox’s catheter. ‘Why do you do this to me?’ he muttered. ‘I only want to sleep.’

Knox tried to speak, but his mouth wouldn’t work, he could manage only a plaintive croak. A trickle of spittle ran down his cheek. The nurse wiped it sympathetically away. He checked Knox’s pulse, raised an eyebrow. ‘Panic, yes?’ he said. ‘Is normal. You have a bad crash, you know. But you’re safe now. This is hospital. Nothing bad can happen here. All you need is rest. That’s all any of us need.’ He picked the pillow up from the floor, plumped it and replaced it beneath Knox’s head. Then he nodded in satisfaction, went back to the door, turned off the lights and left Knox at the mercy of this stranger who wanted to kill him.

SEVENTEEN

I

The Nile car ferry was little more than a motorized metal raft. Gaille leaned against the rail and watched the fishermen paddle their sky-blue boats with their flat slats of oars, the floating mats of vegetable matter passing serenely by. A Coptic monk muttered as he ran his finger across the small print of his Bible. Kids dangled their feet over the side, watching for the sudden pale flash of fish. Four young farmers kept looking at Stafford then howling with laughter. But even that couldn’t put him out of the cheerful mood he’d been in since he’d bagged his sunrise footage.

They bumped against the east bank, drove up a short hill through a dusty village. Youngsters stared wide-eyed at them, as though they’d never seen tourists before. A shopkeeper polished with spit and cloth his tired display of lemons and mangoes. They passed a cemetery, drove along an empty road to the Amarna ticket office. The shutters were closed, though two tourist policemen were sitting beneath a sunshade by a cabin, sharing a cigarette. One stood, wandered across. ‘You’re here early,’ he grunted.

‘We’re filming,’ Gaille told him. ‘Aren’t you expecting us?’

‘No.’

Gaille shrugged. It was ever thus in Egypt. You got clearance from the Supreme Council, the army, the security services, the police, a hundred different bodies; but no one ever bothered to alert the people on the ground. She beckoned Lily across with her fat file of documentation, offered it to him. He looked blankly at a page or two, shook his head. ‘I call my boss,’ he said, heading inside the cabin. ‘Wait here.’

Gaille returned to the Discovery, opened her glove compartment. It was second nature now to carry a selection of goodies for such occasions. She took a bar of chocolate over to the second tourist policeman, peeled back the silver foil, offered him a chunk, took one herself. They smiled companionably at the sweet flavour, the way it melted in their mouths. Gaille handed him the rest of the bar, motioned for him to share it with his comrade. He nodded and grinned happily.

‘Chocolate-bar diplomacy, huh?’ murmured Lily.

‘It can be a life-saver, believe me.’

The first policeman finished his phone call, made a gesture to indicate that his boss was on his way. They stood around smiling and eating the chocolate as they waited.

‘What’s going on?’ grumbled Stafford. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘Just Egypt,’ Gaille assured him. At last, a truck trundled into view, trailing a cloud of dust. A man jumped down, looking for all the world like an army officer in his beautifully pressed military-green uniform with polished black leather belt and holster. His complexion was unusually soft and pink for Egypt, his hair razor-cut, his moustache silky. Yet there was a hardness beneath the surface vanity. ‘I am Captain Khaled Osman,’ he declared. ‘What’s this I hear about filming?’ He held out his hand for Lily’s file, leafed through it, his frown growing. ‘No one tells me about this,’ he complained. ‘Why does no one tell me?’

‘It’s all in order,’ said Gaille.

‘Wait here.’ He marched inside the guardhouse, made a phone call of his own that rapidly became heated. He came back out, beckoned to Gaille. ‘Where exactly you want to film?’ he asked.

Gaille took back the file, flipped through for the shooting schedule. It listed every major site in Amarna, including the boundary stele, the workmen’s village, the Northern Palace, the Southern Tombs and the Royal Tomb. ‘You really expect to film all these in one day?’ she murmured to Lily.

Lily shook her head. ‘We started getting permissions before Charles had finished his script. We applied for everything, just in case. All we actually need is the boundary stele, the Northern Palace and the Royal Tomb.’

‘Where in the Royal Tomb?’ demanded Captain Khaled.

‘Just the mouth and the burial chamber.’

He squinted unhappily, but seemed to accept it. ‘You will need an escort,’ he declared, thrusting the file back at her. ‘Nasser and I will come with you.’

Gaille and Lily shared a glance. The last thing they wanted was this man treading on their heels all day. ‘That’s very kind,’ said Gaille, ‘but I’m sure we’ll be—’

‘We come with you,’ said Khaled.

Gaille forced a smile. ‘That’s very kind,’ she said.

II

Knox lay petrified in his hospital bed, waiting for the intruder to reappear, grab his pillow, finish what he’d started. But the seconds ticked by and nothing happened. He must have left already. It was a limited comfort, however. Someone wanted him dead, and they knew where to find him too. He needed to get away.

The adrenaline burst had given him a little strength. He moved his right leg to the edge of his bed, let it drop heavily over the side. He waited till he was stable, moved his left leg to join it. It dragged his thighs with it, his backside, then his whole body went crashing to the floor, ripping his catheter free, the IV stand wobbling but remaining upright. He lay there winded, half-expecting the door to fly open. But no one came in. His clothes were on the chest of drawers. He crawled laboriously over, grabbed them down, torn and stained with soot and oil, yet still less conspicuous than a hospital gown. He pulled on his jeans, his shirt, his black jersey. Using the iron bed-frame, he hauled himself to his feet. A dizzying rush of blood, he had to fight past the urge to faint. He let go of the bed-frame, staggered across the room to the door. A moment to compose himself. A deep breath. He opened the door. Morning sun blurred on the facing window. He used the wall to hold himself up as he went out.

‘Hey!’

Knox glanced left. The policeman was smoking by an open window. He flicked the cigarette away, folded his arms, assumed a stern expression, evidently expecting that to be enough to bring Knox to heel. But Knox turned the other way instead, stumbled through swing doors into a stairwell, clutching the banister tight as he staggered down a flight.

‘Hey!’ cried the policeman, from the swing doors. ‘Come back!’

Knox lurched out onto an identical corridor, a porter leaning against the wall, warming his hands around a glass of
chai
. He heard the policeman shouting, set down his glass, began striding towards Knox. A door to Knox’s left. Locked. Across the corridor to the windows, opened them, looked out. A cement mixer below, a pyramid of sand. He hauled himself onto the windowsill, tipped himself out, just as the policeman grabbed his ankle. Gravity ripped him free, he turned his shoulder, hitting the side of the sand heap, bouncing out onto the driveway, a car swerving around him, the driver shouting and shaking her fist.

He picked himself up, hobbled out past the deserted guard-post onto the road. A lorry forced him back against the wall. A taxi-driver tooted. Knox waved him over, pulled open the rear door, collapsed inside, just as the policeman ran out onto the road.

‘You have money?’ asked the driver.

Knox’s tongue felt as huge and clumsy as a balloon in his mouth. He couldn’t form the words. He searched his pockets instead, found his wallet, produced two tattered banknotes from it. The driver nodded and pulled away, leaving the policeman shouting vainly in their wake. ‘Where?’ he asked.

The question took Knox by surprise. His only concern had been getting away. But he had questions that needed urgent answers: about this mysterious crash that had put him in hospital, the stranger who’d tried to kill him. His last clear memory was meeting his French friend Augustin for a coffee. Maybe he’d know something. He mumbled his address to the driver, then collapsed exhausted across the rear seats.

III

‘Do you have to stand there?’ complained Stafford. ‘You’re in my eye-line.’

Gaille looked helplessly around. Lily had already taken her footage of the boundary stele itself, and now Stafford was setting up the camera to film himself against the desert backdrop, leaving her a choice of standing in his eye-line or actually in shot.

‘Come with me,’ said Lily, gesturing at a thin track that led up the slope. ‘I’ve done my bit.’

The steep path was treacherous with loose shale, but they soon emerged onto a hilltop plateau with a magnificent view over the bleak sandstone plain to the thin ribbon of vegetation that shielded the Nile.

‘Christ!’ muttered Lily. ‘Imagine living here.’

‘Wait till midday,’ agreed Gaille. ‘Or come back during summer. You wouldn’t build a prison here.’

‘So why did Akhenaten choose it? I mean there must have been more to it than this sun rising between the cliffs business.’

‘Amarna was virgin soil,’ said Gaille. ‘Never consecrated to any other god. Maybe that was important. And you must remember that Egypt was originally a fusion of two lands, Upper and Lower Egypt, always vying for the ascendancy. This is effectively the border between the two, so maybe Akhenaten thought it a pragmatic place to rule from. Though there are other theories too.’

‘Such as?’

Gaille pointed north, to where the crescent of cliffs rejoined the Nile. ‘That’s where Akhenaten built his own palace. It’s got plenty of natural shade, yet it’s also close enough to the Nile to have beautiful gardens and pools. And whenever he had business in the main part of Amarna, he rode in on his chariot with soldiers running alongside to shade him from the sun.’

‘All right for some.’

‘Quite. There were hundreds and hundreds of offering tables in the main Aten temple. Each one would have been piled high with meat and fruit and vegetables during ceremonies. Yet the human remains in the cemeteries here show clear signs of anaemia and malnutrition. And then there’s a famous letter from an Assyrian king called Ashuruballit. “Why do you keep my messengers standing in the open sun? They’ll die in the open sun. If the king enjoys standing in the open sun, then let him do so by all means. But, really, why should my people suffer? They will be killed.”’

Lily frowned. ‘You think he was a sadist?’

‘I think it’s possible. I mean, imagine your boss is right, that Akhenaten suffered from some dreadful disease. It isn’t hard to see him taking pleasure in the suffering of others, is it?’

‘No.’

‘But the thing is, I don’t know, not for sure. No one does. Not me, not Fatima, not your boss. We simply don’t have enough evidence. You should try to find some way to make your viewers understand that. Everything in your programme will be best guesses, not fact.
Everything
.’

Lily squinted shrewdly. ‘Is this about what Fatima told us last night?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Those
talatat
showing Akhenaten without genitalia. You’re not comfortable about them, are you? That’s why you went to bed.’

Gaille could feel herself blushing. ‘I just think it’s too early to be sure one way or the other.’

‘Then why did she tell us?’

‘This is a wonderful part of Egypt. The people are enchanting, the history is magical, but hardly anyone ever comes here. Fatima wants to change that.’

‘And we’re the bait?’

‘I wouldn’t put it quite that bluntly.’

‘It’s fine,’ grinned Lily. ‘Actually, I’m glad. I’d like the programme to do something good.’

‘Thank you.’

Lily nodded. ‘Can I ask you a really stupid question? It’s been bugging me ever since we got down here, but I haven’t dared ask.’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s about pronunciation. I mean, the Ancient Egyptian alphabet didn’t have vowels, right? So how do you know how all these names like Akhenaten and Nefertiti were pronounced?’

‘That’s anything but stupid,’ smiled Gaille. ‘The truth is, we don’t, not for sure. But we do have some good clues from other languages, particularly Coptic.’

‘Coptic?’ frowned Lily. ‘I thought Coptic was a church?’

‘It is,’ agreed Gaille. ‘It all goes back to Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt. He introduced Greek as the language of administration, but all the people still spoke Egyptian, of course, so the scribes gradually developed the habit of writing down Egyptian speech phonetically with the Greek alphabet, which
did
have vowels. That eventually became Coptic, which in turn became the language of early Christianity here, and the name stuck. So whenever we find an Egyptian word written in Coptic, we get a very good idea of its original pronunciation. Not perfect, of course, particularly for the Amarna era, which finished over a thousand years before Alexander. Our best guesses for that actually come from Akkadian cuneiform rather than Coptic; and Akkadian is a bastard, believe me. That’s why Akhenaten’s name has been transcribed in so many different ways over the years. The Victorians actually knew him as Khu-en-aten or Ken-hu-aten, but recently we’ve …’ She broke off, put her palm flat upon her belly, her breath suddenly coming hot and fast.

‘What is it?’ asked Lily anxiously.

‘Nothing. Just a little turn, that’s all.’

‘This wretched sun.’

‘Yes.’ She gathered herself, found a smile. ‘Would you mind terribly if I went back to the car, sat down for a bit?’

‘Of course not. You want me to come with you?’

‘Thanks, but I’ll be fine.’ Her legs were unsteady as she made her way down the path to where the Discovery was parked. The tourist policemen were dozing in the front of their truck. She took Stafford’s book from the dashboard, sat sideways on the driver’s seat, the dark synthetic fabric feeling gluey from the sun. She flipped through the pages, found what she was looking for.

Yes. Just as she remembered.

But it couldn’t be. It
couldn’t
be. Could it?

IV

The moment the IV stand had crashed to the floor, Peterson had known his opportunity was gone: the best he could hope for was to get out unseen. He’d hidden behind the door as the policeman had looked in, had slipped out when he’d gone hunting for a nurse, through the swing doors at the end of the corridor, down two floors and out through a fire exit. Then he’d sat in his Toyota, taking a few moments to gather himself, think things through.

He prided himself on his strength of character, Peterson. On his ability to hold his nerve. But he undeniably felt the pressure right now. Knox was sure to blab about the intruder in his room. Even if he didn’t remember yesterday’s events, he’d have no trouble describing his assailant, and Farooq would make the link in a heartbeat. Straight-out denial wouldn’t save Peterson. He needed an alibi. He needed to get back to the dig.