Lincoln Child - The Third Gate

Despite the warmth of the night, Perlmutter shivered. If the dig succeeded… Talk of the curse of Narmer had been growing in recent days. At first-as the project got under way, and word of what they were after slowly filtered out among the crew-the curse had been a joke, something brought up over beers to get a laugh. But as time went on, the talk had grown more serious. Even Perlmutter, who was the most committed atheist you’d ever want to see, had started to get the heebie-jeebies-especially after what had happened to Rogers.

He looked around again. The blackness seemed to be pressing in on him from all sides, squeezing him almost, pushing against his chest, making it hard to breathe…

That did it. He grabbed the still-warm soldering gun and other materials, threw them into his satchel, and closed it up. Kneeling in the Crow’s Nest, he unzipped a half circle of the protective tarp, exposing an opening to the inside of Red. Below was a vertical tube, lit infrequently by LEDs, into which the housing of the mast descended, like a pipe cleaner into a pipe. Slipping the satchel over one shoulder, he grabbed the rungs, descended past the tarp, paused to zip it closed again, then continued down. He climbed carefully-it was thirty feet to the bottom, and he sure as hell didn’t want to fall.

Reaching the base of the mast, he fetched a deep breath, wiped his sweaty hands on his shirt. He’d go check out the low-frequency radio, make sure its gremlins had been exorcised. Then he’d look for Fontaine, no doubt grabbing himself an early dinner.

But as he prepared to leave the mast enclosure, Perlmutter paused. There were two hatches leading out of the enclosure. One led to the hallway containing the science labs and the communications room. The other led to Red’s power substation. Fifteen minutes earlier, when he’d stepped into the mast enclosure, the substation hatch had been closed.

Now it was open.

He took a step forward, frowning. Normally the substation was a lights-out facility, operating without need of human intervention. The only time anybody would have to go in would be to make repairs. But if there was something wrong with the electrical system, he’d have been the first to know. He took another step forward.

“Hello?” he said into the darkness. “Anybody in there?”

Was he going crazy, or had he just seen a dim light deep within the substation extinguish itself?

He licked his lips, stepped through the hatch into the substation. What the hell-there was a puddle of water here. What was going on? Had some kind of a leak to the outside formed?

He took another step forward, simultaneously fumbling for the light switch. “Hello? Hell-”

And then his world exploded in a concussion of pain and furious, inviolable white.

At nine thirty the following morning, the internal phone in Logan’s office rang.

He picked it up on the third ring. “Jeremy Logan here.”

“Jeremy? It’s Porter Stone. Am I interrupting anything?”

Logan sat up. “Nothing that can’t wait.”

“Then come to the Operations Center, if you would. There’s something here I think you ought to see.”

Logan saved the file he’d been working on-a write-up of his conversation with Hirshveldt the evening before-then stood up and stepped out of his office.

He had to stop and ask directions twice before he found his way. The people on the Station seemed jumpy this morning-and it was hardly surprising. The previous evening, a communications worker named Perlmutter had been badly, almost fatally, electrocuted. Logan had pieced together the story from various mutterings he’d overheard during breakfast: how the worker had stepped into a puddle of water in which a live electrical wire had been lying. “It was Fontaine, his boss, who found him,” Logan had heard someone say. “Horrible. Like he was covered in soot, almost, blackened from the electrical burns.”

Logan had been irresistibly reminded of the curse of Narmer. His limbs will turn to ash. Rather than mentioning this to anyone, he mentally shelved it for later consideration.

Unlike the previous tragedy at the generator, there had been no follow-up meeting to analyze this accident, to try to determine cause. Logan assumed that one had not yet been scheduled-or, perhaps, it had been confined to the very highest levels of management. He did know that Perlmutter was in serious condition and was being closely monitored by Ethan Rush.

The Operations Center, located deep within White, turned out to be the large, monitor-stuffed space he’d visited before. Once again, Cory Landau-the cherub with the Zapata mustache-was manning the futuristic central cockpit. On a nearby screen, Logan noticed the wireframe CAD image representing the extent of the dig mapping. Its extent had advanced dramatically since the first time he’d seen it.

Ranged around Landau were Porter Stone, Tina Romero, and Dr. March, all of whom were staring at one of the larger monitors that displayed what looked to Logan like a kind of greenish soup, punctuated by lines of static.

As he entered, Stone looked over. “Ah, Jeremy. Come take a look at this.”

Logan joined them at the central cockpit. “What is it?”

“Skeletons,” said Stone. He said the word with almost hushed reverence.

Logan peered at the screen with increased interest. “Where is this, exactly?”

“Grid square H five,” murmured Stone. “Forty-five feet below the surface.”

Logan glanced at Tina Romero, who was staring at the screen and playing idly with her yellow fountain pen. “And how far is this from the first skeleton?”

“Approximately sixty feet. In exactly the direction I suggested the divers concentrate on.” She glanced over at March with a smug I told you so smile.

“Here’s another,” came a squawky voice over a microphone. Logan realized it was one of the divers, speaking from the muddy depths of the Sudd. On the monitor, the figure of a diver in a black wet suit suddenly emerged out of the green soup. He was holding a bone in one hand.

Stone leaned toward a microphone. “How many is that so far?”

“Nine,” the distant voice replied.

Now Stone turned toward Romero. “Ethan told me what you said during his examination of the initial skeleton. That you knew the death was a suicide and that you knew where the next cache of bones would be found. Care to enlighten us?”

If Romero had felt like remaining coy, this request from the boss dispelled it. “Sure,” she said, pushing back a stray hair from her forehead with a finger. “First, we found one body. Now we’ve found several-I’d guess twelve in all. Next, we will find a huge cache of bones. It’s because of the way Narmer would have been buried and the way his tomb was concealed. Recall this was before the days of pyramids-the earliest pharaohs were buried in shaft tombs and mastabas. We have to assume that Narmer’s tomb, whatever it looks like, is unique in prefiguring later tombs to come. But unlike many kings who followed him, Narmer didn’t want even the location of his tomb to be remembered. At the site of its construction, there would have been hundreds of workers doing the building, as well as members of Narmer’s bodyguard. Once the work was done, all those workers-every last one-would have been killed. Their bodies would be left at the periphery of the tomb. Later, when Narmer himself was placed in the tomb, the priests and lesser guards who attended the ceremony would have been killed at a ritual distance from the tomb by Narmer’s personal bodyguard. The bodyguard himself would then have moved out another respectful distance-and killed himself. All this to maintain the sanctity of Narmer’s earthly remains. An army of the dead was to stand guard around the tomb for all eternity. Only one person, the god-king’s personal scribe, walked out of the desert with these secrets in his hand. And once he had committed them to the ostracon, he would have instructed his personal guards to kill him, as well.”