David Gibbins - Pyramid

Jack stopped reading, his mind reeling. For Howard Carter, the Fatimid ring had pushed the story beyond credulity, yet it was precisely the detail that nailed it for Jack. He stared at Jeremy. “It’s the ring, isn’t it? That’s the clincher.”

“Now you know why I was so excited when Maria showed me the Halevi letter. Carter nails it for us by identifying the caliph as Al-Hakim and the ring as a signet, worn only by the caliph and his immediate family. Corporal Jones must have stumbled across his body. What he meant by his new friend pointing the way out is a little mystifying, but Jones may not have been entirely grounded at that point. He’d been underground for weeks, probably months, and may have been hallucinating. Do you remember Wilson in the Tom Hanks film Castaway ? People alone in desperate situations make friends out of the most unlikely objects, and a skeleton at least has a semblance of humanity.”

Jack’s eyes were ablaze. “The other breakthrough is Carter’s reference to the ruined fort on the banks of the Nile, giving us a modern way marker to another entrance to the underground complex. If those ruins can be pinpointed, then there’s a chance, a small chance, that we might be able to find the entrance under the river that swallowed up Jones and the French diver, and an even smaller chance that we might get in.”

Jeremy grinned at him. “A small chance is still a chance, isn’t it?”

“Damn right it is.” Jack pulled the satellite phone out of his bag, pressed the key for the secure IMU line, and waited for the connection. He turned to Jeremy. “Can you email that scan to Lanoswki, Costas, and Aysha?”

Jeremy typed quickly and tapped a key. “Done.” He shut down the computer and slipped it into his bag. “We’ve got to go. Our flight’s boarding.”

Jack peered at him. “What do you mean, our flight?”

“You didn’t think I’d come all the way out to Cyprus just to see you and then return, did you? I’m coming to see Rebecca too.”

“Does she know?”

“Remember, I didn’t even know myself that I was coming until this morning. I sent her a text from Heathrow but haven’t had a reply. The last I heard from her yesterday was that she was going underground.”

“That would be Temple Mount,” Jack said, pursing his lips. “I hope she hasn’t pushed the boundaries. That place is a tinderbox at the best of times. David Ben-Gurion is due to meet me at Tel-Aviv Airport and take me straight there.”

“IMU’s Israel representative?”

Jack nodded. “I’m glad you’re coming with me, Jeremy. Rebecca’s got something she really wants to show me, but it looks as if I’m going to be doing a quick turnaround. I may not have more than a few hours in Jerusalem.”

Jeremy looked at him shrewdly. “Back to Egypt?” Jack nodded.

“David’s a reserve captain in the Israeli navy. With any luck he’ll be able to get a reconnaissance flight to divert out to Sea Venture for a paradrop, and then it’s a short flight by helicopter to Alexandria.”

“Sounds like a return to special forces days, Jack.”

“The real test is going to be Cairo. It was bad enough when we left, but by tomorrow it could be in the grips of an extremist coup. Somehow we’ve got to get through that if we’re going to get to this ruined fort beside the Nile south of the city.”

“By ‘we,’ do you mean you and Costas?”

Jack looked nonplussed. “Of course. If he’s up to it.”

“You need to access some satellite imagery to look for the site of that fort.”

“Lanowski will be onto it the moment he reads that email.”

The satellite phone flashed green to indicate a link, and Jack quickly tapped in a number and raised it. After a few moments, a familiar voice answered.

“Jack?”

“Costas? How soon can you be in Alexandria?”

“The Embraer is due to touch down on its return flight to Valencia in two hours, and it can be refueled for Herakleion in Crete immediately. From there I’ll take the Lynx to Sea Venture two hundred miles due south. Twenty hours from now, maybe a little more.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it all mapped out.”

“I’ve learned to be one step ahead of the game, Jack. I knew we were going back even before we left Egypt.”

“Equipment?”

“I’ll get everything together on Sea Venture . E-suits, rebreathers, underwater scooters. I’ll need to score some extra oxygen off the equipment storekeeper on Sea Venture . We’re always somehow in short supply with them. But I’ll manage. No worries, Jack. You just do what you have to do with your daughter.”

“Bring my Beretta, Costas. You know where it is.”

“Roger that. And I’ll be visiting the armory on Sea Venture .”

“Rendezvous Alexandria, twenty-four hours from now?”

“You got it. Over and out.”

Jack quickly replaced the phone in his bag and got up just as the announcement came on for final boarding. He strode alongside Jeremy to the departure gate, his mind filled with what he had read. A great chamber with many lidded jars on shelves, tall jars, hundreds of them, filled with papyrus . He was on a knife-edge still, but coursing with excitement. If all went well, a little over a day from now he would know whether the soldier’s story was the key to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made. He glanced at his watch, wishing the hours forward. He could hardly wait to tell Rebecca.

Jack had arranged to meet Rebecca outside the Jaffa Gate into the Old City of Jerusalem. He saw her there now, in the shade of the ancient wall chatting to two Israeli soldiers who were guarding the entrance. In the last year since turning nineteen, she had grown into a self-confident young woman, her slender limbs and height coming from Jack but her dark hair and complexion reflecting her mother’s Italian background. She was wearing khaki trousers, a T-shirt, and sturdy hiking boots and had on a small backpack. Jack knew that she had spotted him but had not wanted to attract attention, so she was waiting for him to come to her.

He quickly led Jeremy across the busy street and the pedestrian square and reached her, nodding at the soldiers and giving her a kiss on the cheek. She embraced Jeremy and turned back to Jack. “Good trip?”

“We were met at Tel Aviv Airport by a friend of mine who dropped us off just up the hill.”

“I watched the live stream of the sarcophagus being raised on CNN on my iPhone. It seemed to go without a hitch.”

Jack nodded. “It was a relief to get it on deck. Now the politics begin.”

She peered at him. “Uncle Costas sent me a text just before you arrived at the airport. Said he’d thanked you but had forgotten to say he owes you. Usually, when he sends me a message like that to pass on to you, it means that something bad happened, but the unspoken hallowed code means you can’t thank each other directly because if you do, then the next time it won’t work out so well. Am I right? And what about that bandage on your arm?”

Jack cleared his throat. “Okay. There was a small hitch, but everything worked out fine in the end, and we’re all in one piece. I’ll tell you about it later. The crucial thing is that we found the missing fragment of the plaque that was inside the sarcophagus, and it seems to give us a location for getting into the underground complex from the Nile.”

“So you’re definitely going back to Egypt?”

“The friend who dropped us here is going to pick me up again in the early evening and take me to the coast south of Tel Aviv, where I’m taking a ride on an Israeli naval reconnaissance plane out to Sea Venture .”