The Exodus Quest (15 page)

He climbed down the rope ladder for one last look. But his torch lit nothing save their own detritus: empty water bottles, discarded food wrappings, the stub of a candle, a book of matches. Discipline had been an early casualty of failure. Six metres deep already, and still they hadn’t reached the foot!
Six metres!
He shook his head at the absurdity of the ancients. So much effort! And so pointless too.

After all, who on earth needed a sump six metres deep?

TWENTY-FIVE

I

Knox had drifted off into a restorative sleep in the Latin Cemeteries. He woke to footsteps slapping the paving slabs outside. For a moment he feared he was bound to be discovered, but the footsteps passed by without changing cadence. He waited for silence, pushed himself grimacing to his feet, his body stiff. He hobbled out of the cemetery, bought a Menatel card from a general store, then found a secluded phone-kiosk from which to call Augustin.

‘
Cedric, mon cher ami!
’ boomed Augustin, the moment he recognized Knox’s voice.

Knox picked up his cue at once, switched smoothly to French. ‘There are people with you?’

‘A fine officer of the law. He speaks some English but I think we’re okay in French. Hang on a second.’ Knox heard some muttering, Augustin’s hand clamped over the mouthpiece. Then he came back on. ‘We’re fine,’ he said. ‘I just called his mother a fat sow. Not a flicker.’

Knox laughed. ‘What are you doing with the police?’

‘On our way to Borg.’ He gave a quick rundown of what he’d learned about the Texas Society of Biblical Archaeology, their links to UMC, their excavations in Cephallonia. Then Knox filled Augustin in on his mystery assailant, and how he’d made off with his laptop.

‘Shit!’ exclaimed Augustin. ‘I only just bought the damned thing. But you’re okay, yes?’

‘I’m fine. But I need somewhere to hide out. I thought maybe Kostas. Pick his brains while I’m there. But I can’t remember his address.’

‘Sharia Muharram Bey. Number fifty-five. Third floor. And tell him I want my copy of Lucretius back. Bastard’s had it for months now.’

‘Will do,’ said Knox.

II

This was the time to visit the desert, the late afternoon sun coaxing sharp contrasts from the same cliffs that had earlier seemed a flat monochrome, tinting the western sky fruit-bowl colours. Gaille cut out past the southern tip of the Amarna cliffs then circled north to the eastern end of the Royal Wadi. She pointed away across the sands. ‘The desert road’s about five kilometres that way.’

‘And it runs all the way down to Assiut, right?’ asked Lily.

‘Yes.’ The car ferries would stop running after dark; they needed to head south on this side of the Nile. She turned into the wadi. There was no sealed road this end, just a rock-strewn floor. Gaille navigated it cautiously, while Stafford sat beside her, his arms pointedly folded, sighing every few seconds, until they reached an impassable barrier of scree.

‘I thought you knew the way,’ he said.

‘You can walk from here. It’s straight ahead. Only a couple of kilometres.’

‘Two kilometres!’

‘Then we’d better set off now, don’t you think?’ said Lily. ‘Unless you don’t want this scene any more?’ Stafford threw her a caustic look, but got out and strode off down the wadi. ‘That’s right,’ muttered Lily. ‘Don’t help carry the equipment.’

‘What a prick!’ said Gaille. ‘How do you put up with him?’

‘It’s just for a couple more days,’ said Lily, getting out. She turned back to Gaille, still sitting there. ‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘I’d better stay with the Discovery. Just in case.’

‘Sure. I bet this place is just crawling with car thieves.’ She tipped her head onto one side. ‘Please. I can’t take him alone.’

‘Fine,’ said Gaille, just about managing a smile. She climbed out of the Discovery and locked it behind her.

III

Augustin was growing bored on the drive out to Borg. Farooq was hardly the world’s greatest conversationalist. A few blunt questions about Omar and Knox that Augustin had managed to deflect easily enough, then a slump into almost complete silence. He got out his cigarettes, offered them across.

‘Thanks,’ grunted Farooq, taking one.

Augustin lit his own, passed his lighter to Farooq, then lowered his window, cupping a hand to catch the passing air. A white pick-up was coming towards them, sunlight reflecting off its dusty windscreen in such a way that it was only when they were passing that he saw the driver and his passenger, a young woman with long fair hair, whose eye Augustin caught for the briefest of moments.

They took a sharp right a kilometre further on, headed down a long lane, then turned left over an earthen bridge across an irrigation channel, pulling up to speak to a security guard. They’d just missed Griffin, apparently. That must have been him with the blonde in the pick-up. But Peterson was on site. The guard sent them in to wait by the office. They’d only been there a minute when Peterson arrived. ‘Detective Inspector Farooq,’ he said. ‘An unexpected pleasure. What can we do for you?’

‘Just one or two details to clear up. You know Doctor Augustin Pascal?’

‘By reputation,’ said Peterson.

‘He’s offered to help me. Explain archaeological terms, that kind of thing.’

‘How good of him.’

Farooq nodded, took out his mobile. ‘If you gentlemen will excuse me. I need to check in.’

Augustin and Peterson locked gazes as Farooq walked off, sizing each other up, neither backing down. It was a good minute before Farooq came back to join them, looking rather pleased with himself. ‘Well,’ he said, rubbing his hands vigorously. ‘Perhaps we could get started.’

‘On what, exactly?’ asked Peterson.

‘I’d like to speak to your people. Find out what they saw.’

‘Of course,’ said Peterson. ‘Follow me.’

‘Thank you,’ nodded Farooq, as they set off across the broken ground. ‘You told me last night that Knox and Tawfiq visited you yesterday after noon. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they say why?’

‘Perhaps you should ask Knox.’

‘We will,’ promised Farooq. ‘The moment we find him.’

‘You’ve lost him?’ frowned Peterson. ‘How could you have lost him? The man was half dead.’

‘Never you mind,’ scowled Farooq. ‘And I’d like to hear your version anyway.’

‘He’d seen some kind of artefact in Alexandria. A jar lid, as I recall. We told him they made jars all around Lake Mariut, so there was no reason to suspect it came from here.’

‘And then they left?’

‘Yes. We thought no more about it until we had an intruder. In fact, not even then. We had no idea it was them. We just assumed it was some petty thief.’

‘I understood this was a training excavation,’ murmured Augustin. ‘Are you finding things of value here?’

‘Not of intrinsic value, no. But the locals don’t know that. So there’s always a danger they’ll trespass and contaminate our data. Surely you appreciate that, Doctor Pascal?’

‘So you chased them off.’

‘It was just as I told you last night, Detective Inspector. Nothing has changed.’ They reached the cemetery, dusty young excavators exhuming two graves. ‘You want to speak to my team,’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘Well, here they are.’

TWENTY-SIX

I

Gaille’s thighs were burning by the time they’d walked along the wadi and climbed the hillside close to the Royal Tomb. They all fell silent without being told, aware that they’d have a terrible time explaining their presence should they meet anyone. But the door of the Royal Tomb was emphatically closed, and the road deserted. Gaille grinned at Lily in unspoken relief.

‘We’re only just in time,’ said Stafford, nodding at the sun, low on the western horizon.

‘Then you’d better get started,’ suggested Gaille.

‘If you’ll get out of my eye-line.’

She turned and walked off, not trusting herself to speak. But it wasn’t easy to get away. To her left was a deep cleft in the hilltop, as though one of Egypt’s gods had attacked it with an axe. And to her right was the cliff’s edge itself, and a vertiginous drop down to the wadi floor. But at least that way was out of Stafford’s line of sight, so she inched as close to it as she dared, saw to her surprise what looked like a ledge a few feet below, a boot-print clearly visible in the dust.

She went a little further along the edge, found a way down onto it. Lily and Stafford were still setting up. They’d be a few minutes yet. Her toes tingled as she started out, but her curiosity proved stronger than her fear of heights, so she steeled herself and pressed on.

II

Kostas always took his own good time answering his front door, blaming either his failing hearing or his failing legs. He took it as a privilege of age to make people wait. But eventually he arrived, patting down his wreath of tangled, snowy hair, producing a pair of half-moon spectacles from his jacket pocket, then peering over the top of them. ‘My dear Knox!’ he exclaimed. ‘What a
delightful
surprise.’ But then he blinked and took half a pace back. ‘My! You have been in the wars.’

‘That bad, is it?’ grimaced Knox. ‘I couldn’t use your bathroom, could I?’

‘Of course. Of course. Come in.’ Kostas shuffled along his obstacle course of a hallway, using his cane as a white stick to help him navigate between the dusty high stacks of academic tomes and packing chests of exotic artefacts, making the place feel more like a bric-a-brac store than a home. His walls were just as cluttered, a collage of astral charts, lurid occult posters, his own watercolours of herbs and other medicinal plants, framed frontispieces of arcane works and yellowed press clippings of himself in the news.

Knox examined himself in the washbasin mirror. A sight indeed: dried blood on his scalp and forehead, his face haggard, his hair prematurely aged with dust. He lathered up some soap, cleaned himself as best he could. A line of Greek text across the top of the mirror made him smile: NIΨONANOMHMATAMHMONANOΨIN. One of the earliest known palindromes:
Wash your
iniquities not just your face
. He dried himself with a hand-towel, turning it an ugly brown, then went back out.

‘Well?’ asked Kostas impatiently. ‘What brings you here in such a state?’

Knox hesitated. It wasn’t that easy to explain. ‘I don’t suppose you’re on the Internet, are you?’ he asked.

‘Sadly, yes,’ said Kostas, leading Knox through to his library, where subdued lighting glowed on the burnished leather of innumerable old books. He opened his bureau to reveal a slimline laptop within. ‘One can’t do anything without them these days.’

Knox logged on, went to his hotmail account. But, to his dismay, Gaille’s email had vanished. That bloody man in his motorcycle helmet must have deleted the photographs. He closed down the browser. ‘Looks like I’ll just have to tell you,’ he said. ‘But please bear with me if everything’s not entirely clear. I took a bit of a bang on the head.’

‘I noticed.’

‘It seems I stumbled across some kind of antiquity out near Borg last night. It’s being excavated by some biblical archaeologists, and it seems it might have some connection with the Therapeutae. I took some photographs. There was a statuette of Harpocrates. Six severed mummified ears. A mosaic of a figure inside a seven-pointed star that reminded Augustin of a picture of Baphomet by some French guy whose name I can’t remember.’

‘Eliphas Lévi,’ nodded Kostas. ‘I know the one.’

‘And there was a mural of Dionysus. Another of Priapus. That’s about it.’

‘What a
fascinating
list,’ gloated Kostas, his eyes watering with pleasure. ‘You realize of course that the Therapeutae lived out near Borg?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Harpocrates. The Romans worshipped him as the god of silence, you know, because the Egyptians depicted him holding a finger to his lips. But in fact that had nothing to do with hush.’

‘No,’ agreed Knox. It was one of the ways that the Egyptians had indicated youth, like the curled forelock on a prince’s forehead.

‘His name is actually a corruption of the Egyptian
Har-pa-khared
. Horus the Child. Horus being the falcon-headed god who fused with the sun god Ra to become Ra-Horakthy, rising each morning in the east.’

‘I am an Egyptologist,’ observed Knox.

‘Of course you are, my dear boy. Of course you are. That’s why you’ll already be aware of the connection between him and Baphomet.’

‘What connection?’

‘Aleister Crowley’s religion of Thelema, of course. Crowley picked up where Eliphas Lévi left off, as you no doubt know. He identified Baphomet as Harpocrates, though to be fair that was mostly due to his extraordinary ignorance. On the other hand, now that I think of it, Harpocrates
was
associated with a particular – and quite fascinating – group of Alexandrian Gnostics.’

‘Which group?’

‘A cup of tea first, I think,’ said Kostas, licking his lips. ‘Yes. Tea and cake.’

III

Khaled climbed back up the rope ladder, then contemplated a final visit to the burial chamber. Crossing the sump wasn’t a comfortable experience. The only access was on a makeshift bridge of two planks, each just a few centimetres longer than the shaft was wide, and which bowed uncomfortably when you stepped upon them.

It hadn’t mattered when they’d first brought them in, for the sump had still been nearly full of rubble, so the fall would only have been a couple of metres. But now, even with a torch, you could scarcely see the foot. Sometimes he had nightmares about tumbling into that great hungry darkness. Yet he hadn’t wanted to be the first to suggest they get longer planks. And none of his men had either.

He negotiated the crossing safely, however, entered the burial chamber, high heaps of rubble obscuring much of the walls, completed and plastered but not yet decorated, presumably because the tomb hadn’t been—

He froze suddenly. A voice. A man’s voice. Coming from above. He listened intently. But now there was only silence. He relaxed, smiling at his foolishness, his heart slowing back down. These ancient tombs! They’d play tricks on your imagination. They’d make you feel—

The voice again. No question this time. He recognized it too. That damned TV man. He must have come back! He looked in horror up at the ceiling, unnerved by how close he sounded. Maybe he
was
close. There was a cleft in the hilltop above them. And the first time he’d come here, it had been ankle-deep in storm water. So there had to be a fault in the rock. He hurried back across the planks, up the passage to the entrance. Faisal and Nasser had heard the voices too; they’d turned off their lamps, were squatting there by the mouth, sackcloth curtain glowing russet against the setting sun.

‘The TV people,’ whispered Faisal.

Khaled nodded. ‘They’ll film and then they’ll go.’

‘What if they see our truck?’

The other side of the sackcloth, a shoe slithered on shale. Khaled went cold. Faisal sniggered with nerves, clenched his jaw in both hands to stop himself, his eyes blinking maniacally. Khaled quietly unbuttoned his holster and drew his Walther. He aimed at the mouth of the tomb. A sudden sharp vision of home, childhood, the way his mother had boasted of him, all those photographs of him in uniform on her walls. Another scuff on the ledge. A mutter of surprise and then the sackcloth drawing back and the woman Gaille standing there, silhouetted against the sunset.

How quickly a life can turn, thought Khaled bleakly, as they stared at one another. How suddenly catastrophe can strike. He felt strangely calm, like the one time he’d seen anything approaching action as a soldier, on checkpoint duty in Sinai, waving down a truck laden with timbers and other carpentry supplies, ready to haggle out a small gift of
baksheesh
, glimpsing a gun barrel beneath the tarpaulin. He’d been aware of his bodily reaction then too, the fizz of adrenaline, yet in a bizarrely detached way, watching the scene unfold on TV as much as living it. He’d relished the way his senses had sharpened, data flooding his mind, sharper than it had ever been; hearing breath catch in a throat, seeing the driver glance in his rear-view; feeling the truck lurch slightly as someone reached for their weapon, having all the time in the world to take command, as though they were moving in honey while he alone was free.

But this time it was Gaille who reacted first. She span on her heel, shouting warnings as she fled.