David Gibbins - Pyramid

“You doing a paradrop?”

“Yep.”

“You promised me. Do you remember? Almost two years ago.”

“I said I dropped out of planes only when it was absolutely necessary and not for the thrills. Anyway, you’re your own boss now. You can arrange a paradrop with the IMU training director.”

“Yes,” she exclaimed, putting an arm around Jeremy. “We can do it together, Jeremy. Our first proper holiday, just the two of us.”

Jeremy looked more studious than usual as he stroked his beard. “Not really my scene. Diving, yes, maybe, but jumping out of planes? No. I was thinking we could spend a week back in Naples with your mother’s family to give me a chance to get up to speed with the conservation work on the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Some amazing new texts are being revealed. You could help me piece them together.”

Rebecca looked aghast and pushed him away. “I’m talking holiday , Jeremy, not work.”

Jack cracked a grin. “Remember what Maria has in store for you. She asked me to tell you that the trip to look at the monasteries on Mount Athos is all fixed.”

“You been seeing Maria, Dad?”

“In Cairo. She came out to look at some new manuscript finds in the Ben Ezra synagogue.”

“I know about the Geniza. You mean you’ve been seeing her at the bottom of a hole in a wall.”

“Something like that.”

She shook her head. “You’re the one who needs a holiday with Maria, Dad, not me.”

Jack smiled at her. Ten years of schooling in New York had given Rebecca not only her distinctive accent but also a candor that he found refreshing, even if it sometimes presented him with awkward truths.

He glanced at the Jaffa Gate, at the medieval crenellations and stonework that seemed to rise unperturbed above the tides of humanity that swept beneath it, the countless pilgrims and warriors, merchants and prophets who had come to Jerusalem in its long history. The last time he had stood at this spot had been more than twenty years before, on the eve of the first Gulf War, when Jerusalem had been devoid of tourists and the air-raid sirens were sounding. Standing here then, with his khaki bag slung over his shoulder and his camera poised, he had felt like a diver about to plunge into the unknown, and he felt that same frisson now. The crisis that again loomed over Israel and the Near East lent the same sense of danger to the place. He turned to Rebecca. “Okay. I’ve told you about my latest find. Now it’s your turn to show us yours.”

Ten minutes later Jack hurried with Jeremy through a maze of alleyways and narrow streets in the Coptic quarter of Jerusalem. They were trying to keep up with Rebecca as she led them deeper into the city. Apart from army and police patrols and local men who eyed them as they passed, there were few people to be seen, the usual bustle of activity reduced to the minimum as people stayed indoors with the threat of missile attack. Rebecca stopped at a poky hole-in-the-wall street vendor, greeted the woman behind the counter like an old friend, and waited while she squeezed her a fresh orange juice. She took a bread roll as well. “Breakfast,” Rebecca said apologetically. “Didn’t have time earlier.”

Jack shook his head when she offered to buy him one. “You came here to volunteer for the Temple Mount archaeological project. How’s pot washing going?”

She finished the roll and wiped her mouth. “Yeah. Good.”

“Really?”

“It was fun. For about ten minutes.” She gave Jack a glum look. “They’ve got twenty metric tons of the stuff, Dad. I did a quick calculation as I was sitting in front of my first tray. With each sherd averaging five centimeters across, that means fifty million sherds.”

“Each one a precious link to history. And one day one of them might just provide a clue to something bigger.”

“I know. I get that. It’s kind of a privilege. And it is special to a lot of the volunteers who’ve never done archaeology before. But I’ve been spoiled, haven’t I? I was digging at Troy at the age of fourteen, and hunting for Ghengis Khan’s tomb in Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan the year after that. Anyway, I’ve been finding my own links to history.”

“I’d guessed you might be.”

She swerved into an alleyway lined with dingy metalworking shops, swerved again into a smaller alley with men squatting along the side, smoking and talking in low voices, and then came to a halt in front of a decaying wooden doorway in the shadows beneath a balcony. The man squatting in the alley beside the entrance nodded at her, peered suspiciously at Jack and Jeremy, and then unlocked the door and pushed it open.

“That’s my friend Abdul,” Rebecca said quietly, leading them into a gloomy passageway. “He’s the one who showed me the way to the tunnel entrance.”

“What tunnel?” Jack said.

“Patience, Dad. Here first.”

They reached another door, and Rebecca knocked. A small boy opened it, grinning broadly when he saw Rebecca. He ushered them in, and then locked and bolted the door behind them. The room looked like a living room, with shoes lined up beside the door, a table covered with schoolbooks and papers, and the typical furnishings of a well-appointed Arab household. The boy went over to the far wall and pushed aside an ungainly looking wooden bureau, the base sliding easily on rollers. Behind it was another door, and the boy beckoned them through. The space beyond was dark, with only a crack of light visible at the far end. He flicked on a light switch, led them to a door with a lit space beyond, and ushered them in.

Jack had already guessed where they were going from the smell. It was the same smell he remembered from the storerooms of the Cairo Museum and the Geniza chamber: the smell of ancient artifacts and decay, of millennia-old dust and the organic matter that built up in long-sealed tombs. It was as if he were entering an Aladdin’s Cave of antiquities, with artifacts of every description filling every available space: pottery vessels of all types and periods, oil lamps, metalwork, bronze armor, and weapons, much of it intact and in spectacular condition. It was as if all the top museums of the world had been shorn of their best exhibits of Near Eastern and biblical antiquities, and yet Jack knew that none of this material had ever seen the light of day in a museum, that it had all been spirited out of tombs and dark places unknown to archaeologists and destined for the international black market in antiquities.

A small wizened man appeared, white bearded and wearing a robe and a tatty red fez. His bloodshot eyes lit up when he saw Rebecca, and he took her hands, clasped them between his own, and shook them. Then he let her go and clicked his fingers at the boy, who went off the way they had come. He turned to the other two, and his eyes alighted on Jack. “So, you must be the famous Jack Howard ,” he said, rolling the words slowly, his English thickly accented. “You think you know what happened to the temple menorah, eh? Well, I know where the rest of the treasure lies. Maybe you give a little, I give a little, and I will tell you.” He laughed, a low cackle. “You have a fine figure of a daughter, eh? She has the makings of a tomb raider. I think nobody messes with her.”

Jack looked at him coldly. “Nobody messes with her,” he repeated.

The man peered at Jack, and then waved an arm in the air dismissively. “Yes, yes, we know all about that. She has a bodyguard, yes, your man Ben-Gurion? We could have made him disappear, but we are all friends, yes? You are in the business of antiquities, Jack Howard, and I am a businessman too, and we can help each other. It has been this way in Jerusalem for more than a thousand years, ever since my ancestors began selling pieces of the holy cross to the Crusaders.”