David Gibbins - Pyramid

“Can you see any detail?” Jack asked,

“Just a moment,” Hiebermeyer murmured, carefully prizing away a layer of marine accretion from the gold and revealing the lower end of a cartouche with symbols inside. “We’re in luck!” he exclaimed, his voice hoarse with excitement. “Hieroglyphs.” He turned to Costas, his face flushed. “As the discoverer and guardian of this priceless artifact, the honor of translating it should be yours.”

“What do you mean? You’re the Egyptologist.”

“Have you seen those symbols before? In the crocodile temple on the Nile, for example? On the panel inside the sarcophagus of Menkaure in the shipwreck? At Tell-el Amarna?”

Costas stared. “A reed. That bird. A ball of string. That half-sun symbol.” He looked up. “Is this our man?”

“Neferkheperure-Waenre Akhenaten, to give him his full name,” Hiebermeyer said triumphantly. “This cartouche could have been put on a chariot only during his reign. That clinches it. We’ve not only got the lost chariots from the biblical Exodus, but we’ve pinned down the pharaoh.”

“Bingo,” Costas said, beaming at Jack.

“What do you mean, bingo?”

“I mean, Costas saves the day again. What would you do without me?” He reached across for the fragment of gilding, and Hiebermeyer gently but firmly pushed his arm away. Then he placed the artifact on a foam pad beside his computer. “I think you’ve taken care of that long enough. I need to get it cleaned up and photographed. When the time’s right, we’ve got what we need for the biggest archaeological press release from Egypt since the time of Howard Carter.”

“When will you do it?” Jack asked.

“It’ll have to be just after we’ve packed our bags and left. Otherwise I’ll have to explain how we raised an artifact from Egyptian waters without a permit, and there will be hell to pay. I’d rather close up shop here before the thugs arrive to do it for me, and then we can leave on a high note.”

“Unless you get some last-minute find from the mummy necropolis.”

“Unless you find a way into Ahkenaten’s underground City of Light.”

Aysha put a hand on both men’s shoulders. “Now that’s what I like to hear. The Jack and Maurice of old. If we’re finished here, Jack, I’ve got something I want to show you.”

Jack looked at her. “You’ve done great stuff already for us, Aysha. You should get back to the necropolis with Maurice. This is your country, and you need to do whatever’s necessary to leave it in your own terms, with your own projects resolved.”

She took a deep, faltering breath. “I don’t feel that Egypt is my country anymore. I feel we’re on the verge of an exodus just like the one that Moses and the Israelites set out on more than three thousand years ago. We’ll be like so many others who have fallen back before this modern-day darkness, like the Somalis, the Afghans, the Syrians, living in exile, a modern-day diaspora. We can’t delude ourselves. Egypt will fall, and we have only a few weeks left at most, probably only days. The hours ahead are going to be the most intense of my life. Part of that is doing what I have to do for you.”

Jack stared back at her. “Okay, Aysha. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say.”

At that moment Jack’s phone hummed, and he glanced at it. “It’s a text from Rebecca. She’s arrived at Tel Aviv airport. Israeli security interrogated her for more than three hours.”

Aysha looked at him. “You worried, Jack?”

“About my nineteen-year-old daughter flying into a war zone? Of course not.”

Costas coughed. “What were you doing at that age, Jack? I seem to remember you telling me about Royal Navy diver training, and then a stint with the Royal Marines on some special forces ops in the Arabian Gulf.”

“The Special Boat Section,” Jack said. “Anyway, I wasn’t really with them, I was just trying it out. I’d already decided to go to university instead, which is more than can be said for Rebecca.”

“Given all the experience we’ve provided her with on IMU projects during her school vacations,” Aysha said, “you can hardly blame her for wanting to bypass that. Anyway, I think she’ll do it. I spotted her looking at the prospectus for Cambridge.”

“What’s she doing in Israel, anyway?” Costas asked.

“She’s been wanting to go there ever since I told her about our hunt six years ago for the tomb beneath the Holy Sepulchre,” Jack said. “She found out about the big project at the City of David site to sort and wash ancient debris swept off the Al-Aqsa mosque platform when it was built. There are millions of sherds dating back to prehistory, and volunteers are always needed.”

Aysha furrowed her brow, looking skeptical. “Mmm. I remember Rebecca at Troy three years ago volunteering to help us clean potsherds. As I recall, it lasted about a day. Cleaning potsherds isn’t really a Howard thing, is it? Not when there’s real excitement around.”

“It did strike me as a bit odd,” Jack said. “I thought there might have been a boyfriend involved. I think Jeremy was there. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to interfere. It’s tricky being a dad sometimes.”

Aysha gave him a questioning look. “Would you ever put a girlfriend above archaeology? And remember, I’m good friends with both Katya and Maria. I know everything .”

Jack fidgeted slightly, tapping a pencil on his hand. Katya and Maria were two of his closest colleagues, instrumental in several of his greatest discoveries. Jeremy had been Maria’s graduate student in Oxford. He was an American who was now assistant director of her palaeography institute. “Katya’s always impossible to get hold of, always in the middle of nowhere looking for ancient petroglyphs in Kyrgyzstan, and Maria’s always up to her neck in some medieval manuscript in Oxford.”

Aysha peered at him. “When did Rebecca make the decision to visit Israel?”

“We’d been talking about General Gordon in Khartoum, about how he and the other Royal Engineers survey officers had a fascination with the Holy Land and its archaeology. I’d been telling her my theory that their quest for Akhenaten in the desert of Sudan had been spurred by something they’d found in Israel, in Jerusalem itself, something that had drawn them there repeatedly over the years right up to the time of Gordon’s final appointment as governor general in Khartoum.”

“And Israel is the one place you haven’t visited on your quest.”

“I’d been planning to go there if things in Egypt go belly-up.”

Hiebermeyer looked at him. “Did you put Rebecca in touch with IMU’s Israel representative, Solomon Ben Ezra? Sol and I have been planning a joint Israeli-Egyptian project to evaluate coastal sites at the border, something that seems inconceivable now.”

“I tried that. She wanted to go it alone. But I let him know anyway, so he can keep a discreet eye on her.”

“It had better be pretty discreet,” Costas muttered. “Otherwise you won’t hear the end of it.”

“That’s it then,” Aysha said. “Rebecca hasn’t gone to Israel to clean potsherds. She’s gone there as part of this project, to make her mark. And she’s not the only one working behind the scenes this time. You’d be surprised who else is involved, Jack, right here in Egypt. That’s what I want to talk about now. What do you know of the early caliphs of Cairo?”

Costas raised his hand. “I know about Malek Abd al-Aziz Othan ben Yusuf, son of Saladin in the twelfth century. He was the one who tried to destroy the pyramid of Menkaure, who’s responsible for all that missing masonry on the southern face above the entrance where Jack and I went in.”