David Gibbins - Pyramid

He grinned at Jack, and then made a whirling motion at Joey and gave a thumbs-up. The eye peered closely at them and cocked sideways, and then the manipulator arm pivoted upward on its elbow and the hand extended palm outward toward them, as if blowing them a kiss.

“Now that was weird,” Jack said.

The submersible shuddered, and they both lay back and braced themselves. They felt it rise and swing sideways, free of the seabed. After a few seconds hanging motionless, Jack saw the depth readout slowly but surely begin to reduce, meter by meter. As they rose above the cloud of silt created by their departure, he looked out the viewing port beside him and saw Joey bustling around the sarcophagus, feeding the hawser beneath it and then jetting over to the other side to pull it through. A pool of light in the darkness became smaller and smaller until it was no more than a smudge of yellow, and then it was gone entirely. All Jack could see was blackness, the utter void of the abyss, as if the wreck of the Beatrice and their extraordinary discovery had been no more than a phantasm of the night, as quickly dispelled as it had been conjured up.

He shut his eyes, and was instantly, dreamlessly asleep.

“Jeremy! Good to see you. We haven’t got much time.”

Jack stood up and extended a hand as the tall young man loped through the airport concourse toward him. He was wearing a T-shirt and khaki trousers and carrying a compact backpack. He shook Jack’s hand, sat down at the coffee table, quickly opened the rear of his pack, and took out his computer. He glanced at the people milling around the terminal. “Is there anywhere more private?”

Jack shook his head. “This is as good as it gets. Rule number one of travelling incognito is to be part of the crowd, not apart from it.”

“You worried about being spotted?”

“The last thing I want is for one of my journalist fans to tweet about how they’ve just seen me in Cyprus checking in to a flight to Israel only two days after the world saw me off Spain raising the sarcophagus. Reminding the extremists in Egypt that we also have a research presence in Israel might be the final card that brings everything crashing down around Maurice. We’re walking on a knife-edge as it is, and I don’t want to provoke the Egyptian regime any further.”

“I heard that the medicos on Seaquest wanted you to wait three days for observation before flying,” Jeremy said.

“That was just precautionary. I didn’t breathe any compressed gas at depth, so there was no problem with excess nitrogen. I had some soft-tissue rupture in my sinuses and air passages but no lung collapse. Even the twenty-four hours I agreed to stay was pushing it. The Israelis banned incoming private and commercial aircraft other than El-Al three hours ago, meaning that the Embraer had to put me off here in Cyprus. The latest threat of an all-out terrorist attack from the extremists in Syria means that they’re probably on the cusp of halting incoming flights altogether, which would cut me off from seeing Rebecca. And then to cap it all, I’ve just had a text from Aysha saying that Maurice and the rest of his workers are on their way back to Alexandria from the Faiyum this afternoon. That can mean only one thing — that they’ve been booted out. Events could be coming to a head very quickly.”

“At least the delay gave me the chance to come out and see you,” said Jeremy.

“We could have Skyped.”

“Not when you see what I’ve got to show you. When I saw the image you sent us yesterday of the plaque, I knew you’d want everything I could fire at you.” Jeremy glanced up at the departures board in front of them. “We’ve got forty-five minutes to final boarding. That should be exactly enough time.” He flipped open the computer and began typing.

Jack took a deep breath, trying to forget his frustration over the lost day, and watched Jeremy. He had grown a thick black beard but still looked as boyish as he had eight years before when he had joined Maria as a graduate student in her palaeography institute in Oxford. It was hard to believe that he now had a doctorate as well as a prestigious research fellowship from his Oxford college under his belt, and had just returned from a six-month sabbatical at Cornell University, his alma mater, where he had turned down a faculty position in order to remain as assistant director of Maria’s institute. For IMU he had become an invaluable complement to Maria where ancient writing and textual analysis was concerned, and for Jack no small part of his role had been the friendship he had developed with Rebecca since she had joined her first IMU project while she was still in high school.

Jeremy stopped tapping and looked at Jack. “You ready?”

“Fire away. About Howard Carter.”

“Right. After what Maria told me about the Halevi letter from the Geniza, you’ll see how this fits. Carter was born in London in 1874, the son of a painter. He went out to Egypt at the age of seventeen as a draftsman. Within a year he was working under Sir Flinders Petrie at the excavation of El-Amarna, Akhenaten’s capital, and by the age of twenty-seven he was inspector general of monuments for Upper Egypt. But then he resigned after a dispute, spent four years as a painter and antiquities dealer, and only gradually got back into archaeology proper. He eventually found patronage from Lord Carnaervon to begin his exploration of the Valley of the Kings. In 1924 he chanced on the tomb of a little-known boy pharaoh, and the rest is history.”

“So somewhere along the way, he heard the story of the mad Sufi claiming to be an English soldier in the Old City of Cairo. Aysha told me about the article she’d found.”

Jeremy nodded. “It was in an issue of the Cairo Weekly Gazette from 1904. The Gazette was less a newspaper than a social and entertainment journal for the British community in Cairo, with a travel section mainly aimed at ladies disposed to explore Old Cairo while their husbands were away doing frightfully important things like drinking gin in their club. One of the columns was a whimsical offering by an anonymous lady who described how the Sufi had become something of a tourist attraction. He evidently played up to the ladies, who were fascinated by him. It was hot and steamy, and they were bored and frustrated. I think there might have been a bit of the Rasputin effect.”

“But none of them believed his story.”

“They might not have, but somebody else did. What Maurice remembered when Aysha found that article was Howard Carter’s journal from his so-called lost years, between his resignation as inspector general in 1903 and the beginning of his exploration in the Valley of the Kings some ten years later. Because that period has less bearing on the lead-up to the discovery of Tut’s tomb, it hasn’t received as much attention from biographers, so some of his papers from that time haven’t been thoroughly studied. But trust Maurice to have done so, while he was researching some of Carter’s manuscripts held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford when he was a student.”

“I remember him going there,” Jack said. “He was trying to trace the whereabouts of a sculpted head of Akhenaten that had been sold in Egypt before the First World War, and he remembered Carter’s period as an antiquities dealer. Back then the distinction between archaeologist and antiquities dealer was less clearly defined, with some eminent scholars being both. Carter was forced into it as he had no private means and felt his career as an archaeologist was over.”

“It took a lot of ferreting about, but eventually I found the diary that Maurice had seen for 1908,” Jeremy said. “It makes for fascinating reading, and is a spotlight on the period. It shows that Carter really had his nose to the ground, like any good dealer. Cairo was awash with antiquities at the time, with mummies falling off the back of camels brought in by hopeful Bedouin from the desert, and every street urchin hawking a pocketful of scarabs and little bronzes. Carter had his trusted network of informants, including former Egyptian employees of his in the antiquities service who had also fallen on hard times. They were unable to find legitimate work because Carter himself had been blacklisted. It was a world of patronage and corruption, with some senior officials up to their neck in it.”