Pyramid

CHAPTER 6

Jack Howard walked along the old quayside of Alexandria harbor toward Qaitbey, the fifteenth-century fort built on the foundations of the ancient lighthouse that now served as headquarters for Maurice Hiebermeyer’s Institute of Archaeology. The sun was beating on the rocks, the light shimmering off the waters of the harbor, and for a few moments Jack allowed himself to relish the summer air of the Mediterranean and forget that he was in a country on the brink of war. He cast his mind back ten years to the discovery of a scrap of papyrus in the mummy necropolis in the Faiyum that had led them to the truth behind the Atlantis legend. The Egyptian student who had made the discovery was now Hiebermeyer’s wife, and together they had created one of the premier centers in Egypt for the study of archaeology.

Jack had a strong sense of déjà vu as he made his way across the worn stones toward the fort. He was going to hear the latest from the mummy necropolis, still an ongoing excavation producing extraordinary finds, and he in turn was going to match Maurice with an account of their latest underwater discoveries, hoping for that sparking of ideas and rush of excitement as things fell into place that had marked their collaboration over the years.

But there was a dark side to this day. All Jack’s projects since Atlantis had been threaded together, interlinked by discoveries that had sent him around the world, from Egypt to Greece and Turkey, from India and Central Asia to ancient Herculaneum and across the Atlantic to the frigid waters of Greenland and the jungles of the Yucatan. The loose ends of one project had become the beginnings of another. Yet for the first time today, he had felt a looming sense of finality, that what had begun here a decade ago was about to offer up its last, that the extraordinary wellspring of ancient Egypt was about to close down forever. He felt edgy and nervous, and that heightened sense of awareness he experienced while diving was now with him all the time. If there were to be any more discoveries in Egypt, they were going to have to happen in the next days, even the next hours, in a window that was rapidly closing down on all of them.

He stared over the bobbing boats in the harbor at the extraordinary form of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new library of Alexandria. Just like its predecessor, the famous mouseion founded by the Macedonian king Ptolemy in 283 BC, the library seemed fated to suffer from religious extremism. Back then it had been Christianity, culminating in the antipagan purge by the Roman emperor Theodosius in AD 391, that led to the library’s destruction, whereas now it was extremism and the threat of regional war. The reconstructed library had been a noble enterprise at a time when many believed that the Internet and electronic publishing had eclipsed the need for physical repositories of knowledge. And yet the threat of destruction and of Internet sabotage meant that electronic means of data storage were just as vulnerable as the libraries of old. Each epoch seemed destined to build up a critical mass of knowledge, only for it to be largely destroyed and a few precious fragments to survive, buried by chance like the library that Jack had excavated at the Roman site of Herculaneum, or the shreds of papyrus reused as mummy wrappings that Hiebermeyer and his team had unearthed in the desert necropolis.

Jack shaded his eyes against the sun as he thought about the Atlantis papyrus. The story of Atlantis had come down from the sixth-century-BC Athenian traveler Solon, who had visited the Egyptian temple of Sais, heard it from the High Priest, and had then written it down, only for his original papyrus to have been lost and then reused as mummy wrapping. The knowledge memorized by the High Priest had been passed down through generations from earliest times, an oral tradition whose days were numbered with the arrival in Egypt of the Greeks and their new religion. But what if at the height of ancient Egypt, during the New Kingdom of the later second millennium BC, a visionary pharaoh had decided to collate and transcribe all that ancient knowledge? What if there had been an earlier library somewhere in the heartland of ancient Egypt? Jack stared at the extraordinary discoid shape of the modern Bibliotheca, deliberately designed to look like a sun disk rising out of the horizon to the east. Who would that visionary pharaoh have been? Would it have been Akhenaten, the one who rejected the old religions, the pharaoh who worshipped the sun god, the Aten?

Jack reached into his pocket and took out a military campaign medal from the Victorian period that he had bought from a market stall near the docks where the taxi had dropped him off. It was a Khedive’s Star, worn and battered, awarded to an Egyptian soldier who had fought under British command in the 1880s war against the Mahdi in Sudan. Jack thought again of those British officers in the desert, who were there not only for war, but whose exploration for ancient sites had so fascinated him. Had they been hunting not just for confirmation of Old Testament history but for something even greater than that, for a lost repository containing the greatest treasure that a civilization could offer, the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of the ancient Egyptians?

He grasped the medal until the points of the star hurt his hand, and then thrust it back into his pocket. These thoughts had run through his mind endlessly since he and Costas and Hiebermeyer had been forced to leave Sudan almost two months previously, bringing with them enough evidence from the ancient temple carvings beside the Nile to suggest that Akhenaten’s City of Light lay somewhere near modern Cairo and that the pyramids were the key to its entry. He and Costas had been there, on the cusp of an incredible discovery, suspended beneath the Pyramid of Menkaure and seeing where the reflected sunlight shone against something far ahead, beyond a tunnel almost completely blocked by rockfall. Ever since they had been forced to leave the site, he had tried not to think of it, knowing that there was no chance of them returning with the tools they would need to break their way through. He had gone to the Gulf of Suez intent on moving on, and yet as long as he was in Egypt, as long as there was a glimmer of hope, the image of Akhenaten kept returning to him. Perhaps there was another entrance to the underground complex, closer to the Nile. He needed to look again at the plan that he believed was preserved in the radiating arms of the Aten sun symbol on the plaque from the wreck of the Beatrice, and at the known layout of the early dynastic canal system that linked the pyramids with the Nile. As long as there were still IMU feet on the ground in Egypt, he would pursue it. He would not give up.

Ten minutes later he mounted the worn stone steps at the entrance to Qaitbey Fort. He passed the red granite blocks from the toppled ancient lighthouse that had been incorporated into the fort when it was built in 1480. Inside, Hiebermeyer’s institute occupied a modern single-story stone structure set against one wall of the courtyard, with a library, a conservation lab, and research facilities for the Egyptian graduate students who were the mainstay of Hiebermeyer’s team. The institute was funded by a fellowship scheme managed by his wife, Aysha. On the opposite side of the courtyard were the foundations of the new museum, being funded by IMU’s main benefactor, Efram Jacobovich, to complement their existing museum in the ancient harbor at Carthage, in Tunisia. The Alexandrian museum would showcase shipwreck finds made by IMU teams off the north coast of Egypt and in the Nile. Like everything else here, like the fellowship scheme, the future of the museum project now hung by a thread, something that Jack knew he was going to have to discuss with Hiebermeyer once they had shared the excitement of their latest discoveries.

Costas came hurrying up the steps behind him holding out a VHF radio. “Jack, there’s a message from Captain Macalister on Seaquest. He wants to talk to you as soon as possible.”

Jack shook his head. “Not now. I’ve got to devote all my attention to Maurice. It’s going to be pretty intense in there. Every time I checked the news in the taxi from the airport, the situation in Cairo seemed to be deteriorating. This could be Maurice’s swan song at the institute. Tell Macalister I’ll contact him in an hour.”

“Okay. I’ll deal with anything urgent.” Costas stopped to make the call, and Jack turned in to the courtyard. On the wall to the left was an IMU poster showing Seaquest, the research vessel that was his pride and joy. The image was now as iconic from her many expeditions around the world as Captain Cousteau’s Calypso had been in his youth. For much of the summer the Seaquest had been in the West Mediterranean off Spain with an IMU team excavating the wreck of the Beatrice, the ship that had been taking the sarcophagus of the pharaoh Menkaure to the British Museum when she had foundered in 1824. It was the discovery of an extraordinary plaque within the sarcophagus, not of Menkaure but of Akhenaten, that had propelled Jack on his current quest. But right now he was more concerned with the whereabouts of Seaquest’s sister ship, Sea Venture, which had been carrying out geological research off the volcanic island of Santorini, north of Crete. Like Seaquest, she carried a Lynx helicopter, and she had been diverted south toward Egypt ready for an evacuation. Jack had been relieved to see the line of crates on the helipad beside the fort, but it had also made him unexpectedly well up with emotion. If that image brought home the reality of the situation to him, he could hardly imagine how it made Maurice feel. Not for the first time he was thankful for the presence of Aysha, a rock who had kept Maurice anchored through storms in the past and was going to be needed more than ever now.

Costas came up behind him, and together they walked through an open doorway into Hiebermeyer’s main operations room. It was a familiar clutter of computer workstations, filing cabinets, books and papers, though the wall by the door was lined with plastic boxes where material had been packed for departure. Hiebermeyer himself was seated with his back to them behind an outsized monitor in the center of the room. Jack smiled as he saw the tattered khaki shorts and an Afrika Korps relic from the Second World War that he had given him years before at the outset of their careers. He was still wearing his leather work boots and was caked from head to foot in dust, having driven in from the desert that morning.

The day before, Jack had used the secure IMU channel on the VHF radio to fill him in on their discovery while they had been waiting by the Red Sea for their nitrogen levels to reduce enough to allow them to fly, and there was more to tell him now. But he was determined that Hiebermeyer should have first say; there must have been something exciting for him to have taken a break from the mummy excavation and come all the way here to meet them.

Hiebermeyer turned as they entered. “Jack. Costas. Good to see you.”

“You too, Maurice.” Hiebermeyer looked exhausted, even more weather-beaten than usual, and Jack noticed that he had lost weight since they had last met. “What have you got?”

Hiebermeyer gestured at a paused image from Al-Jazeera news on the TV screen above him. It showed a reporter in front of the dark shapes of the pyramids on the Giza plateau. “What we’ve mainly got is that cleric raving again about blowing up the pyramids. He was the one who hit the headlines a few years ago when he first threatened to do it. Then, it seemed like a sick joke. Now it looks like reality.”

“Let’s forget that for a moment. I want to see what you’ve got.”

Hiebermeyer stared at him, his eyes suddenly gleaming. “All right, Jack. Prepare to be amazed.”

“Go on.”

Maurice pointed to his computer screen. “Take a look at this.” He clicked the mouse, and an image of an ancient underground chamber appeared. It had plastered walls, an array of artifacts in the corners, and a mummy casing in the center, its painted eyes just visible.

Jack peered closely. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “Undisturbed?”

“Completely intact,” Hiebermeyer enthused. “It’s an incredible rarity; there’s no evidence of tomb robbing at all. Last night I was the first person in that chamber for more than three thousand years. It’s eighteenth dynasty, Jack. I’m sure of it.”

“Eighteenth dynasty,” Costas said. “Late second millennium BC? I know that most of the necropolis is later than that, from the first millennium BC, like the mummy that produced the Atlantis papyrus.”

Hiebermeyer peered at him. “Mein Gott. Costas, we’ll make an archaeologist of you yet.”

“No chance of that, my friend. Not as long as you guys have robotic equipment you don’t know how to fix. So is this a royal burial?”

Hiebermeyer shook his head. “Not in the Faiyum oasis. They’re mostly officials, though some of them are pretty high ranking. This one’s an army officer, a previously unknown chariot general by the name of Mehmnet-Ptah. Actually, it wasn’t the mummy casing that got me so excited, but the wall painting. That’s really what I wanted you to see.” He clicked the mouse again, changing the image to a close-up of one of the walls showing flaking colored plaster. “What do you make of that?”

Costas leaned over his shoulder and peered closely, and then straightened up. “Men in skirts. The usual Egyptian thing.”

Hiebermeyer snorted impatiently. “You mean Egyptian infantry, marching to the right and carrying spears. Now, if I scroll the image along, you can see chariots, just like the ones you’ve found in the Gulf of Suez, with the charioteers holding bows. And now here’s another group of charioteers, larger than the first and more elaborately attired.” He paused, looking up. “Any thoughts?”

Jack stared. The charioteers were also skirted but wearing sandals, some form of cuirass, and distinctive segmented helmets, and they were carrying short thrusting swords with bows slung over their shoulders. Above them were a faded hieroglyphic cartouche and the symbol of a bull’s horns. Jack felt a rush of excitement. “Mercenaries,” he exclaimed. “But not any old mercenaries. These are Aegean mercenaries. Those are bone and tusk helmets like the ones found at Mycenae, and the swords are the same type we found on the Minoan shipwreck we were excavating when you and Aysha discovered the Atlantis papyrus.”

“Perfect,” Hiebermeyer said. “And they’re completely consistent with an eighteenth-dynasty date. Before then we’d expect to see Nubian mercenaries, large dark-skinned men from the desert. But by the eighteenth dynasty they’d become too integrated within Egyptian society. Mercenaries have to be outsiders with no vested interest in the politics, in it only for the loot and the battle. Think of the Varangian bodyguard of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. They were Vikings from Scandinavia who guarded the emperors over a period of several centuries, but they weren’t born and bred in Constantinople. New recruits returned to Scandinavia once they’d finished their service and made their fortunes. I believe that the same happened in Egypt during the eighteenth dynasty with the sea peoples from the north.”

“Mycenaeans?” Costas offered.

“That’s what you might think. We know that by the fourteenth century BC the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece had taken over the island of Crete. We think of the Mycenaeans as a warrior society, so you might assume that Aegean mercenaries of this date would be Mycenaean. But the truth is more interesting. Far more interesting. In fact, it revolutionizes our picture of this period. For a start, the word in that hieroglyphic cartouche, Hau-nebut, doesn’t specifically denote Mycenaeans, but it’s an old Egyptian term for Aegean peoples used from the time when the Minoan civilization of Crete dominated the Aegean. Why would that term, with its strong Minoan connotations, be used for these warriors if they were Mycenaeans, who were quite distinct? And the bull’s horn symbol specifically denotes Crete, where the symbol is prominent on the palaces of the Minoans.”

Jack took out his phone and showed Hiebermeyer the screen saver, part of a fragmentary painting showing ducks flying out of a papyrus thicket, impressionistic in shades of blue. “I’ve still got this from when we last debated it, Maurice.” He glanced at Costas. “It’s a wall painting from Akhenaten’s new city of Amarna. It’s a typically Egyptian scene but very reminiscent in style of the Minoan wall paintings from Crete. Amarna also famously produced a cache of clay tablets that shows the extent of trade with the Aegean during this period. I argued that the link with Crete wasn’t just about trade, but that there were cultural influences as well. Akhenaten had turned the old Egyptian religion on its head and was clearly receptive to outside ideas. Now that I see what Maurice has found, it figures that he might have had Aegean mercenaries too. Akhenaten may have been something of a dreamer, but he was practical enough to survive as pharaoh for more than twenty years, so having a strong force of mercenaries who would not be swayed by the factions against him would have made a lot of sense.”

Hiebermeyer swivelled his chair and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender to Jack, and then cracked a grin. “You and I have debated it for years, and finally I’m forced to concede. It was a two-way process. Egypt influenced Greece, and now we know it also happened in reverse. And there’s even more. In the sixteenth century BC, the first pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty, Ahmose I, made an astonishing dynastic marriage. A stone stele in the temple of Amun at Thebes describes his wife, Ahhotep, as Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut. That’s the first known use of the word Hau-nebut, the term for the Aegean lands, for Crete, that you see in the cartouche here. It goes on to say the following: ‘Her reputation is high over every foreign land.’ This leads me to the most astonishing revelation in our necropolis find.”

Costas had been peering again at the image of the tomb painting on Hiebermeyer’s screen. He coughed, pointing. “About those cuirasses. Those breastplates. I mean, breast-plates.”

Hiebermeyer swivelled back to the screen and grinned again. “I was wondering when you’d notice.”

“Not men in skirts.”

“Not men in skirts.”

“No,” Costas said, shaking his head. “These are girl mercenaries.”

“Good God,” Jack exclaimed, peering. “You’re right.”

“Feast your eyes on this, then.” Hiebermeyer swept the mouse, and the next charioteer in the army came into view, an astonishing sight. It was unambiguously a woman, her breasts bare above her cuirass, her head towering above the others. Her long hair was braided down her back, and she held swirling snakes above her head. Jack gasped. “It’s the Minoan mother goddess, the Mistress of the Animals.”

“Not quite, Jack. Look at that cartouche above her head. It’s exactly the same as the one for Ahhotep a century and a half earlier. ‘Not Mistress of the Animals, but Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut.’ ”

Jack’s mind raced. “What are you thinking, Maurice?”

“I’m thinking, forget all that romantic guff about the Minoans being peace-loving idealists. You just didn’t survive in the Bronze Age that way. The term Mistress of the Animals was made up by Sir Arthur Evans when he excavated Knossos and wanted it to be some kind of paradise, an idealized antidote to the ugly modern world of a hundred years ago. You English can be sentimentalists, Jack. Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut is undoubtedly a military term, like Count of the Saxon Shore for the late Roman defender of Britain. Crete was an island too, and that’s where her defenses lay. Your Minoan mother goddess was in truth a Boudica or a Valkyrie, a warrior queen.”

Jack’s mind raced. “Here’s a scenario. The volcano on Thera erupts in the fifteenth century BC, right? Minoan civilization is devastated, leaving Crete vulnerable to Mycenaean takeover. Shortly before that a Minoan queen, Ahhotep, marries an Egyptian pharaoh, Ahmose I. The bloodline of the Minoan rulers passes down not in Crete but through the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt. Maybe that fuels the brilliant mix of genius, military leadership, and iconoclasm that makes the New Kingdom stand out so much, peaking with Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti. Meanwhile, the warrior tradition of Minoan Crete, the female warrior tradition, survives the Mycenaean takeover, perhaps in the remote mountain fastnesses of the south. For generations those warriors sell themselves to the highest bidder, led by a woman the Egyptians knew by the old title of their first Minoan queen, Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut. How does that sound?”

Hiebermeyer opened his arms. “That’s one small corner of Egyptology conceded. One small corner.”

Jack was thinking the unthinkable. And King Minos was a woman. He put his hand on Hiebermeyer’s shoulder. “Congratulations, Maurice. Really brilliant. This might just lead to that joint book we’ve often talked about. Rewriting contact between Egypt and Crete in the late Bronze Age.”

“And putting women on the map,” Costas said, still staring at the charioteer. “Big-time.”

Hiebermeyer turned back to the computer, clicked the mouse, and called up the first image, showing the tomb with its contents. “There’s more to be found in there, Jack. A lot more. We’ve been working against the clock, and I’ve had to make just about the hardest decision of my life, to shut down the tomb and seal it. There are already too many other parts of the excavation ongoing that need to be finished up. I can’t even report the tomb discovery, as that would see the looters descend like vultures as soon as we leave the place. I’m not even sure about the book idea, Jack. What we’ve just discussed is going to have to remain our own speculation, as it’s too controversial to publish without the full excavation and appraisal of that tomb. We all know what happens when a theory like that gets put out prematurely and is ridiculed. It then takes ten times more evidence than is needed to make it stick.”

Hiebermeyer slumped forward, his head in his hands, looking defeated. For a moment Jack felt paralyzed, unable to think of anything to say that might help. He had a sudden flashback to their boyhood together at boarding school in England, swapping dreams about the great discoveries they would one day make as archaeologists. Those discoveries had come to pass, more than they could ever have imagined, and yet there still seemed as much to uncover as there ever had been. No single treasure was the culmination of the dream, and every extraordinary revelation spurred them on toward another. It seemed impossible that the perversity of extremism, of human self-destruction, should overtake that dream. Jack knew that if their friendship meant anything, he should do all he could to push Maurice through and see that their shared passion was never extinguished.

Costas put a hand on Hiebermeyer’s shoulder. “Don’t kill yourself over it, man. You’re doing the best you can. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

Hiebermeyer grasped his hand for a moment. “Thanks, Costas. You and Jack have seen it, haven’t you? That light underneath the pyramid. As long as we know it’s there, maybe there’s hope for us yet.”

Jack took out a memory stick and inserted it into Hiebermeyer’s computer. “I know you have to return to the necropolis as soon as you can, but I want to show you an image from our dive that you haven’t seen yet. I’d like Aysha in on this. Is she around?”

Hiebermeyer gestured at the door. “Outside on the quay, talking to our son on the phone. We sent him away to stay with my mother in Germany. This place has become too dangerous for a five-year-old. She said she’d come back in here when she finishes.”

“I sent him a picture from our dive,” Costas said. “A selfie of Uncle Costas with a sea snake wrapped around his helmet, and a goofy face.”

“That’s good of you, Costas. I really appreciate it. He probably doesn’t get too much humor from his dad right now.” He straightened up and took a deep breath. “Okay, Jack, what have you got?”

CHAPTER 7

Jack felt a huge surge of excitement as he saw the photograph on the screen that Costas had taken two days before in the depths of the Red Sea. It was the unmistakable form of a chariot wheel visible in the mass of coral. Hiebermeyer moved the mouse over different points on the image and then zoomed in on the gilded wing of the falcon at the front of the chariot that was partly exposed beneath the coral. “There should be a cartouche above that, a royal cartouche,” he murmured. “An inscription on the temple of Karnak at Luxor mentions a chariot of Thutmose III made from electrum, and this one must have been from the same stable. With this gilding it can only have been a royal chariot, perhaps lent by the pharaoh to a favored general.”

“It was our final dive, and we were in the same quandary as you were in the tomb in the mummy necropolis,” Jack said. “No time to try removing any of that coral.”

Hiebermeyer zoomed out to the original view and sat back in his chair, shaking his head. “Still, it’s an incredible find. You know it was Howard Carter who first reconstructed their appearance, based on the disassembled chariots he found in 1922 when he opened the tomb of Tutankhamun?”

“I know that they first appear in Egypt about the beginning of the New Kingdom, copied from the chariots of the Near East.”

“It was our friend Ahmose I and his Minoan wife, Ahhotep, fighting off the Hyksos in the northern marshlands of the Nile Delta, capturing and then copying the weapons of their enemy,” Hiebermeyer replied. “Judging by the wall painting in the tomb, it may have been Queen Ahhotep’s Minoan warriors who took to the chariots most readily. Not what you might expect for a people from a mountainous island.”

Jack shook his head. “The Minoans were renowned for their naval might, remember? They probably used small vessels like the Liburnians of classical antiquity, designed to dart into range of an enemy flotilla and attack with the bow and the slingshot. The transition to desert warfare was maybe not that much of a leap from a tactical viewpoint. Ships at sea became chariots on land.”

Hiebermeyer put his hands behind his head and stared at the screen. “Two centuries later, at the time of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, the chariot was at the pinnacle of its technology. They were like modern fly-by-wire jet fighters, capable of astonishing speed and agility but inherently unstable. Drive them too fast and the traditional wheeling maneuver you just described became impossible, leaving them no choice other than to hurtle directly into an enemy and take their chances.”

Jack looked thoughtfully at the screen. “Technology so advanced that it backfired on them: sheer speed and nimbleness was perhaps their undoing.”

Costas came over from the computer workstation, where he had been backing up their Red Sea images. “Or maybe someone who knew the risks of the technology played with it. The best systems, the best technologies, often have an inherent instability; it’s that instability that often makes them capable of great things, like those fly-by-wire planes, but also leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and sabotage.”

“Go on,” Hiebermeyer said.

“It’s something that Costas and I discussed on the flight here,” Jack interjected. “Thinking laterally, that is. What if the pharaoh, Akhenaten — if that’s who it was — engineered the whole thing? Think about the backdrop. There’s all the modern speculation that he and Moses were more than just master and slave. Sigmund Freud even thought they were two sides of the same coin. Let’s imagine they share the revelation of the one god in the desert, and Akhenaten determines to let Moses take his people and establish his own City of Light. For Akhenaten, it might provide assurance that the new religion, the new monotheism, would have a chance of surviving outside Egypt, where he must have guessed that his focus on the Aten might not survive his own lifetime. If Moses was his big hope for the future, for spreading the word, then the pharaoh is hardly going to want to destroy him as he leads his people to Israel, is he? But it might be politically expedient for him to appear to do so. Akhenaten knows there’s a strong faction against him among the old priesthood, but he also knows he lacks the military credentials of his forebears. Chasing and destroying the Israelites would raise his kudos and hark back to the great victories of earlier pharaohs against the Hyksos and the other peoples of the Middle East. The strength this gave Akhenaten might buy him the time he needed to establish his new religion more firmly, building temples and converting as many people as possible to his beliefs.”

“So you’re suggesting he faked it,” Hiebermeyer said, staring at him.

Jack leaned forward, nodding. “Faked the destruction of the Israelites, but not of his own Egyptian army. He would have known that a victory could be made even more glorious by sacrifice. Imagine Akhenaten returning to Amarna with only a few survivors, telling of a great victory but one where divine intervention caused victor and vanquished alike to plunge into the sea. That’s the basis of the story in the Book of Exodus. Akhenaten’s status is enhanced not only by his claim of victory but also by his miraculous survival. Maybe he even lets a favored general use his golden chariot, the one we found, so that Akhenaten would return without it, something the people would take as evidence of his own role in the battle. Pharaohs in the past would never let others take their place. With the Egyptian army gone, the Israelites could escape from Egypt unhindered. There’s no reason why Moses and his people should ever be heard of again in Akhenaten’s lifetime as they develop their settlement in a new place of worship that Akhenaten has secured for them in the land of Israel.”

“You’re suggesting that Akhenaten was party to the entire exodus?”

“More than that. I’m saying that he engineered it. I’m saying that the death ride of the charioteers was a setup. I’m saying that he and Moses chose the place in advance, that the Israelite encampment was placed dangerously close to an unstable cliff, but that Moses and his people had left it secretly before the attack. To pull it off, Akhenaten would have needed some way of egging his men on, of convincing them that they could wheel to safety after trampling over and destroying the encampment and its occupants.”

“Mercenaries,” Hiebermeyer said. “Those who would do a pharaoh’s word without question.”

“Female mercenaries,” Jack said. “Bare-breasted female mercenaries. What better way to get an army on the move.”

“Like running a rabbit before a pack of racing dogs,” Costas said, sitting down on a chair. “I love it.”

Hiebermeyer shook his head. “I’m going to miss these brainstorming sessions, Jack.”

“One thing I wanted to ask,” Costas said. “About your tomb in the mummy necropolis.”

Hiebermeyer swivelled his chair. “Go on.”

“The chariot general. Did you get a look at him? I mean, did you see inside his sarcophagus?”

Hiebermeyer pursed his lips, nodding. “I didn’t mention that earlier because I felt like a tomb robber. Thank God none of my team saw me. Just before leaving and sealing up the tomb, I took a crowbar and jacked off the coffin lid. As I suspected, it was empty.”

“Huh? I thought the tomb was undisturbed.”

“It was. The empty sarcophagus means that Mehmet-Re died in action and his body was never recovered. The best his family could do was to go through the motions and hope that the gods would still accept him into the afterlife.”

“The action in the wall painting,” Costas said. “Could that be the actual battle?”

Hiebermeyer sat back, tapping a pencil on the table. “I’d assumed it was a generic scene. If a body wasn’t recovered, that usually meant a catastrophic defeat, one leaving few survivors or eyewitnesses.”

“Sounds like our chariot charge into the Red Sea.”

Hiebermeyer stopped tapping and stared at the screen. “It’s possible. We know that Mehmet-Re was a general and died in battle during Akhenaten’s reign. We don’t know of any other catastrophic defeat incurred by Akhenaten, certainly none in which such a high-ranking officer died. Assuming that Akhenaten was the pharaoh of the Old Testament story of Moses, that chariot charge would fit the bill.”

“And no surprise that there’s silence about it in the other sources,” Jack added.

Hiebermeyer nodded again. “You’re going to find evidence buried away like this only in tombs. You don’t celebrate a catastrophic defeat with inscriptions and relief carvings in the great temples, especially the apparent destruction of the most powerful chariot army in the world by a band of unarmed slaves. If you’re going to talk about it at all, it’s more likely you give a supernatural explanation. The desert was a feared place, and this wouldn’t have been the first time an Egyptian army had disappeared into the dust, never to be seen again. The Israelites might not be the only ones who invoked the powers of a deity in their explanation of what happened that day beside the Red Sea.”

“Is there anything else in the tomb that could pin it down?”

Hiebermeyer slumped forward. “I had only a matter of minutes in there before I had to call in the bulldozer to bury that part of the site. I had my camera with me and photographed everything I could see, and it’s just possible that something else will show up in the images of the walls — a hieroglyphic cartouche perhaps. The problem is that much of the wall was heavily mildewed and the painting was obscured. The other problem is that apart from Aysha, you two are the only people to know about the tomb, and I can’t risk giving the images to anyone else in my team to analyze in case word slips out. I might be able to snatch a few moments to glance at them myself over the next few days, but I can’t promise it. The priority for me now is getting back to finish off the parts of the necropolis that are still under excavation.”

“We hear you,” Jack said.

Another figure walked into the room, a short, compact woman also wearing dusty khaki, her dark hair tied back in a bun. She handed Costas a thick sandwich and offered another one to Jack, who shook his head. Jack knew from glancing at her that now was not the time for niceties, and she walked over and put a hand on Hiebermeyer’s shoulder, her expression serious. “I’ve seen the pictures you sent from the Red Sea, Jack. What else have you got?”

“I wanted you to see this, Aysha, because you were the one who came across that First World War diary entry that led us to the site, and it specifically mentioned what you’re about to see.” Jack put a memory stick into the computer and opened up the file containing the images that Costas had taken of him in the final moments of the dive. He found what he wanted, and clicked it open. Hiebermeyer stared at the screen, and then clapped his hands. “I knew it,” he cried. “I knew when I saw the sketch in that officer’s notebook that it was one of those.”

“You can identify that for certain?” Costas asked, his mouth full.

“It’s a khopesh sword,” Hiebermeyer exclaimed. “Look at that poster on my wall, from the Tutankhamun exhibition that travelled the world a few years ago. You can see one there, almost identical.”

“It’s not the most practical-looking weapon, is it?” Costas said, munching on his sandwich and peering at the poster. “I mean, from a military point of view. That sickle-shaped blade would have been difficult to balance and unwieldy in battle. It’s more like an executioner’s sword.”

Hiebermeyer nodded. “Howard Carter thought they were more suited to crushing rather than cutting, but with a razor-sharp edge and the weight of the blade it would have worked well for decapitation. They seem to be Asiatic in origin and arrive in Egypt about the beginning of the New Kingdom, about the same time as chariots, and disappear by the end of the Bronze Age. There’s no doubt that these were high-status weapons carried by officers, by army or divisional commanders. It shows that those charioteers were being led by their officers when they rode off that cliff into the sea, and the men were not being forced on some kind of suicide charge by officers who remained behind.”

“Can you date it more closely?” Jack asked.

Hiebermeyer rocked back on his chair, staring at the photograph. “The closest date we’ve got for one is the example from Tutankhamun’s tomb, about 1320 BC.”

“The son of Akhenaten and Nefertiti?” Costas said.

“Not all would agree, but I believe so,” Hiebermeyer said. “Whatever their true relationship, they were certainly only a generation apart.”

“Good enough for me,” Costas said. “And Akhenaten’s our man? I mean, are we sure he’s the pharaoh of the Old Testament, the one who chased the Israelites across the sea?”

Hiebermeyer looked at Jack, who nodded. “We’re not sure, but that’s the consensus.”

“Well, looking at those two photos, I’d say those two swords were cast in the same foundry.”

“You may well be right,” Hiebermeyer said. “But it’s not enough evidence to confirm the identification of the pharaoh at the time of the chariot disaster. Egyptologists are used to dealing with very precise data, and our theory won’t wash unless we can find archaeological evidence to pin this with absolute certainty to Akhenaten. Did you have time to look closely at the blade of that sword, Jack? Any indication of hieroglyphs?”

“Nothing that I could see.”

“Any other artifacts at the site? Any at all?”

Costas suddenly shot bolt upright. “Ah.” He turned to Jack, a guilty look on his face.

“I know that look,” Jack said, narrowing his eyes. “It means Costas has seen something archaeological but forgotten to tell me, usually because whatever technical thing he was doing at the time was more important. Am I right?”

Costas coughed, spilling crumbs down his shirt, and reached into his shorts pocket. “Well, not seen something, exactly. I found something. I’d clean forgotten about it until this moment. Had it in these shorts all the way from the dive boat.”

Jack stared at him. “You mean you went through security at the airport with some looted antiquity in your pocket, just when we were trying to remain incognito and avoid any confrontation with the Egyptian authorities?”

“Sorry, okay?” Costas took another bite from his sandwich. “Anyway, I’d also forgotten that my notebook had the full specs for the latest IMU deep-submergence Aquapod on it. That’s far worse. I must have had too much nitrogen still circulating in my head. Now it would have been a disaster if they’d found that.”

Hiebermeyer stared at him. “If you hadn’t been my son’s godfather…”

“And an all-round good guy,” Costas said, munching away and handing him the object he had fished out of his pocket. “You were going to say?”

“Mein Gott,” Hiebermeyer whispered, staring at the artifact in his hands, turning it over and letting Jack look. “It’s a fragment of gilding from a wooden panel that’s thick enough to be gold plate. It must be part of the openwork decoration on that chariot facing. Look at that poster again and you can see a shield decorated that way from the tomb of Tutankhamun that shows the pharaoh smiting a lion, and a small panel on the side containing his two first names.”

“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.”

CHAPTER 8

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.”

“My worst nightmare,” Hiebermeyer murmured. “And he didn’t even have explosives.”

“Any more takers?” Aysha asked.

“Well, there’s Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah,” Jack said. “The one whom the Druze Christians regard almost as a god. He springs to mind because Rebecca and I talked about how he ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in the tenth century.”

“Okay. He’s the one I want. Anything more about him?”

Jack thought for a moment. “Odd behavior. Took to wandering alone at night in the desert, disappearing for days on end. Murdered, I think.”

“And what do you know about the Cairo Geniza?”

Jack stared at her. “Arguably the greatest treasure ever found in Egypt, greater even than Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.”

Hiebermeyer shot bolt upright. “You’re treading on thin ice there, Jack. Very thin ice.”

Jack grinned at him. “I thought that would get you going. Intellectually, I meant. Tut’s tomb may have contained the greatest physical treasure, but the Geniza has drawn us into the detail of the past like no other archaeological find except perhaps Pompeii and Herculaneum. And studying it hasn’t been just a matter of cataloguing and conservation, but immediately involved some of the greatest scholars of recent times, not just of Jewish religion and literature but also of medieval history and historiography, of the very meaning of history and why we study it.”

Costas peered at Jack. “You’d better fill me in, Jack.”

“Genizot were the storerooms in synagogues where worn-out sacred writings were deposited. In Jewish tradition any sacred or liturgical writing in Hebrew was considered the word of God and therefore couldn’t be thrown away, but the Cairo Geniza was unusual in containing a huge amount of other material related to the medieval Jewish community in Egypt as well. It was found in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, the Old City of Cairo, the synagogue of the Palestinian Jews. When the Ben Ezra Geniza was opened up in the late nineteenth century, the bulk of it — over two hundred thousand fragments — was shipped to Cambridge under the care of Solomon Schechter, reader in rabbinical studies at the university. I was fortunate to be able to study the archive firsthand when I was researching for my doctorate. I was looking at Jewish involvement in maritime trade in the Indian Ocean.”

Aysha peered at him. “So you’ll know that it also contains a huge amount of incidental detail on early medieval Cairo, and not just on Jewish life.”

“ ‘The unconsidered trifles that make up history,’ as one Geniza scholar put it,” Jack said.

“Including references to the caliphs, and to ancient parts of Cairo that have since been demolished or lie buried beneath the modern city.”

“Where are you heading with this, Aysha? Fustat was the main settlement of Cairo when the Fatimids arrived from Tunisia to take over control of Egypt, and much of the Geniza dates to about the time of Al-Hakim and the two centuries or so that followed. Is that the connection?”

“I don’t want to tell you more now because what we’ve found is being translated as we speak. You need to see it for yourself at the actual place where it was discovered. Today may well be our last chance. Cairo is still open to us, but a midnight curfew has already been imposed, and the city will very likely be a no-go zone within days. I’ve arranged for transport to get us there this evening.”

Jack thought for a moment. “All right. If you think it’ll be a good use of my time here. The clock’s ticking.”

“Believe me, it will.”

Hiebermeyer gestured down the corridor. “Before you go, there’s another friend here who wants to see you. A genius-level physicist with a penchant for computer simulation and Egyptology.”

“Uh-oh,” Costas said, raising his eyes theatrically. “Here we go.”

“What on earth is Lanowski doing here?” Jack asked.

“He flew in from Seaquest late last night. You know that Seaquest is still over the wreck of the Beatrice off Spain? They were making the final preparations for raising the sarcophagus of Menkaure, but there’s been some kind of hitch. He’s come to consult Costas.”

Jack nodded. “I know Captain Macalister’s been trying to get in touch with me. Costas took the call before we came in.”

Costas grinned. “Lanowski comes all the way across the Mediterranean to consult with me? We must really be friends.”

“You and me both,” Hiebermeyer said. “His brain is like an analog of ancient Egypt. Every measurement, angle, and coordinate is in there. I can’t keep up with him.”

Jack pursed his lips. “They weren’t supposed to raise the sarcophagus without me being there. I don’t like being out of the loop.”

Hiebermeyer peered up at him. “Well, Jack, you have been out of the loop. You’ve been incognito in the Gulf of Suez for the last four days, with instructions that nobody from IMU should try to make contact. The board of directors decided to bypass you and authorize the Seaquest team to raise the sarcophagus in your absence. It was a way of deflecting attention from everything that’s going on in Egypt, from the possibility that the antiquities people here might rumble your diving escapade and create a huge stink. Better to get the sarcophagus in the public eye before anything like that happened, and to make a huge splash in the media: Taken from the pyramids at Giza in the 1830s, lost in a shipwreck on the way to the British Museum, recovered by IMU. The board went public about the discovery yesterday, and there are now a dozen reporters and film crews on board waiting for the recovery. The press release has even included your promise that if the protection of the sarcophagus can be guaranteed by the Egyptian authorities and overseen by a UNESCO monitoring team, then it goes back to the pyramid. That’s what we all agreed upon from the get-go.”

Costas snorted. “From the look of what’s going on here, it’s more likely to be hacked to pieces by the extremists.”

“The new antiquities director is aware of that,” Hiebermeyer said. “He may be a political stooge who cares nothing for archaeology for its own sake, but he’s also a pompous egotist who would like nothing better than to be associated with the return of the sarcophagus. He’s been in the job for only six months, but he’s shutting down foreign excavations across Egypt to keep his xenophobic masters in the new regime happy. But at the same time he’s resisting the extremists, who want a repeat of the Taliban nightmare in Afghanistan, the desecration of anything they perceive to be non-Islamic. If the extremists get their way, he knows he’ll be out of a job and just as dispensable as the monuments that are supposedly in his care.”

“It sounds like a losing battle,” Costas said.

Hiebermeyer looked at them grimly. “With the press release the board of directors has been buying us time, dangling a carrot in front of the antiquities director, which results in our own projects in Egypt remaining off the hit list for the time being. We have to pray that the current director remains in power long enough for us to complete our main excavation at the mummy necropolis.”

“And that scenario could crumble to dust at any time,” Costas muttered. “Someone from the extremist faction holds a knife to his throat, or the expected coup takes place and the extremists oust the moderates. Then Egypt winds back to year zero and archaeology goes to hell in a handbasket.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Hiebermeyer said.

“Were you in on the decision-making about the sarcophagus?” Jack asked him. “Did the board consult you?”

“From the very outset,” Hiebermeyer said. “They weren’t going to go public without my approval.”

Jack took a deep breath. “Okay. You did the right thing. You’d think by now I’d have learned to let IMU sail on without my hand always at the helm, but sometimes it throws me. Now, where’s Lanowski? If the Seaquest team is on hold with the sarcophagus and I can hitch a lift back with him after visiting Cairo, I might even get a look-see at the raising after all.”

Hiebermeyer gestured with his thumb. “Down the corridor. He’s set up his simulation computer in my office.”

“What on earth is he doing with that?” Jack said.

Hiebermeyer gave a tired smile. “You know Lanowski. He says that when his feet hit Egyptian soil, he gets so wired that he can fly through the past and see every detail as if it’s laid out in front of him. I told him what you and Costas have been up to in the Gulf of Suez. I’ve never seen anyone so hyped. He’s simulating the Bible.”

Costas coughed. “Say again?”

“Simulating the Bible.”

“Simulating the Bible,” Costas repeated, shaking his head. “Isn’t that flying a little close to the sun? You know, the big guy in the sky?”

“That’s Lanowski for you,” Hiebermeyer said. “Boundaries are there to be crossed.”

“God help us,” Costas muttered.

Aysha stood up, glancing at her watch. “No more than an hour. Maria’s expecting you in the Old City of Cairo at 1900 hours.”

“Maria,” Jack exclaimed. “So that’s who you mean about people working behind the scenes. What’s she doing here?”

“I was going to mention it before we left, of course,” Aysha said. “Remember, she’s director of the Institute of Paleography at Oxford. Who better to study a new document from the Cairo Geniza?”

“And Jeremy too?”

She shook her head. “He’s just been appointed assistant director, so he holds the fort while she’s gone. Anyway, he’s in London at the British Museum doing some other research for this project that you don’t yet know about.”

Jack put up his hands. “I surrender. It sounds as if my world really has spun out of my control.”

Costas slapped him on the shoulder. “It’s what friends are all about, Jack. Sometimes you just can’t manage it all on your own.”

Jack stood up and put his hands on his hips. “All right. Lanowski first, then Cairo. And then we’ll see what happens. We could be back to Seaquest for another dive to a thousand meters in a submersible.”

“I’m good with that,” Costas enthused. “Very good.”

Aysha checked her phone. “I’m going ahead to Cairo. Before you think of planning ahead, wait until you see what Maria and I have to show you. Your quest for Akhenaten’s City of Light might not be over just yet, inshallah.”

Jack glanced at Costas. “Let’s move.”

“Roger that.”

CHAPTER 9

Jack and Costas made their way along the lower floor of the institute to the director’s office, its door slightly ajar. Hiebermeyer preferred the workroom where they had met him, so he usually lent his office to a visiting scholar, and there was one in there now. Costas had wanted to capture an image of Lanowski hard at work for the IMU Facebook page, and had his phone at the ready as he gently pushed the door open.

Lanowski was occupying Hiebermeyer’s desk. More accurately, he was perched on it, legs crossed, arms resting on his knees in the lotus position, eyes tightly shut, humming to himself and occasionally uttering a surprised chortle, as if in a state of constant revelation.

Costas took a picture. “Look, Jack,” he whispered. “He’s gone archaeologist.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ever since we let him take these little sabbaticals out of the lab, he’s tried to become one of us. Check out the boots and shorts. He’s copying Maurice. Sweet, isn’t it?”

Jack scratched his chin, trying to keep a straight face. “Doesn’t really work, does it?” He stared at Lanowski, at the long, lank hair hanging over the little round glasses, the mouth in a half smile of apparently joyous discovery, seemingly oblivious to them. Lanowski had looked exactly the same since they had poached him twelve years earlier from MIT to help Costas develop strengthened polymer materials for submersibles casings. Since then he had become IMU’s all-round genius, with a particular knack for computer-generated imagery, or CGI. He was here because a childhood fascination with the mathematics and geometry of ancient Egypt had led him to work closely with Hiebermeyer, a relationship that Jack had been happy to foster and that seemed all the more precious now that the institute was threatened with imminent closure.

Costas coughed, and tapped the door. “Jacob, what are you doing?” There was no response, so he tried again, louder this time. “Ground control to Dr. Lanowski. Come in.”

“I’m conducting a thought experiment,” Lanowski replied quietly, his eyes still shut. “Come, take a voyage in my mind.”

“You must be joking,” Costas exclaimed. “Real life with IMU is enough of a trip as it is.”

“A thought experiment,” Jack said.

“Like Einstein,” Lanowski replied. “He used to spend hours imagining he was sitting on a particle of light flying through the universe.”

“The theory of relativity?” Costas said. “Are you developing a better one?”

Lanowski suddenly opened his eyes, stared at them, and threw himself off the desk, stumbling toward the computer workstation on the far side of the room. He pulled up the chair and began working the keyboard with one hand, the other hand clicking the mouse. “I wasn’t riding a particle of light,” he said, his eyes darting over the CGI image he was creating. “I was riding a chariot. To be precise, an ancient Egyptian chariot, at thirty miles an hour on the desert beside the Gulf of Suez, on the twenty-second of March 1343 BC at 0645 hours. The year is a best-fit during Akhenaten’s reign; the month seems plausible, before the hot season, and the time of day just after dawn is right for an attack.” He glanced at Costas, who had come up alongside and was staring at the screen. “The only part that’s complete guesswork is the day of the month, and to conduct a thought experiment in the past you need a precise day and time.”

Costas nodded thoughtfully. “I get that.”

Jack came up on the other side. “I gather Maurice has told you about our discovery.”

Lanowski stopped typing and punched the air. “I’ve got it.”

“Got what?” Costas asked.

“Solved the Bible.”

“Solved the Bible?”

“Book of Exodus, chapter fourteen. ‘And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.’ That’s the King James Version, right? Well, I’ve checked the original Greek with your old mentor at Cambridge, Professor Dillen, and he thinks it allows for some latitude in translation. I know Aysha’s been talking to you about the Cairo Geniza, Jack, because she told me what she has in store for you. Dillen also brought up the Geniza when we talked about the problems of translation. One of the greatest discoveries in the Geniza has been original Hebrew pages of the Ben Sira, the Book of Wisdom from the second century BC previously known only from its Greek translation. He said that seeing those original pages and then comparing the Greek, the Latin, and the English versions has made him think again about the huge problem of conveying exact meaning through languages that simply don’t have the appropriate words or expressions, resulting in translations that are either inaccurate or too obscure to understand without a mediator. He thinks the original Hebrew of the scriptures was meant to be clear and precise and to not require a priestly interpreter, and that the development of a priestly class was actually a consequence of the written word becoming too baffling in its transmission for people to understand.”

Jack nodded. “He’s been developing that idea since looking at the foundation of organized religion in the early Neolithic, when religion became a tool of control for the first priest-kings. Go on.”

“Your discovery in the Gulf of Suez makes it absolutely certain that this event took place where the sea could have been parted only by a supernatural occurrence rather than, say, a marsh or a lake where the Israelites could have crossed some kind of shallow causeway that was then flooded.”

“That would be fine with most believers,” Costas said. “God through Moses caused the sea to be parted.”

“Sure. But let’s look at the hard evidence. That says to me that those chariots weren’t there because Moses parted the sea and they were swallowed up. They were there because someone ordered the charioteers to ride at full speed toward the cliff top, which then collapsed as they flew over it, causing them to be submerged in the sea and also to be buried in the resulting landslide.”

“That was our theory too,” Jack said. “We think the Israelite encampment was right on the edge of the cliff. Go on.”

“It’s about thinking laterally, Jack. Or I should say at right angles. If we assume that the Israelites could never have walked across the seafloor, then they must have gone along the edge. So instead of going east across the sea, they went north up the western shore. The biblical reference to the ‘wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left’ therefore means not walls of water within the sea, but the walls of the sea itself — that is, the western and eastern shores of the Gulf of Suez. Professor Dillen thinks the Greek allows for that. Now take a look at my CGI. I’ve exaggerated the height of the cliffs for effect, but you can see what I mean. And to cap it all, look at this.”

A close-up satellite image of a beach appeared on the screen. Costas peered at it. “I recognize those rocks. That’s where I had my lunch two days ago between dives.”

“Look closer. With the wide-brimmed hat, sitting with his feet dangling in the water. Almost as if he’s on holiday.”

Costas peered again. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Yep,” Lanowski beamed. “I can follow your every move. If you won’t let me join in the fun, at least I can watch it and imagine myself there.”

“I thought the Egyptians had cut off Maurice’s access to their live-stream satellite imagery, as well as to every other foreign project in the country.”

“This isn’t through the institute. It’s Landsat, U.S. military. I’ve got a friend in the CIA who owes me a favor after I did the math in his PhD for him.”

“You’re a useful man to have around, Jacob,” Jack said.

“Glad you noticed.”

“The new translation makes sense. A lot of sense. Anything else?”

“Of course.” He dragged the mouse, and the image zoomed out. “Aysha told me about her discovery of the First World War diary that led you to that spot, the account of the crates of arms lost overboard, and that officer finding the ancient Egyptian sword. Well, she and I read through several previous entries in the diary last night. They showed that the British had developed a ruse in case they were spied on in the desert. Instead of driving the camels with the crates to a point on the cliff directly above the rendezvous point with the dhow, they off-loaded them several miles to the south and used a hidden track just below the cliff top known to local tribesmen to carry the crates out of view of the desert above. Captain Edmondson, the diarist, was also an archaeologist, and he mentioned how he thought the trackway was probably millennia old based on the number of rock slides and mud falls they had to negotiate on the way.”

“And then they came down to that beach where I had lunch,” Costas said. “Just above the spot where we found the rifles and ammunition underwater, and then the chariots.”

“Right. And just above that, the Landsat image shows a concavity in the line of the cliff where there’s a break in the path. I’m convinced that the concavity is evidence of the ancient cliff fall caused by the massed chariot charge, and I’m also convinced that Moses used that path to lead away the Israelites right under the noses of the Egyptians, leaving an empty encampment. The path continues for miles up the coast, so it would have been a viable escape route. What do you think, Jack? Bingo. Case closed.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jack said, staring in fascination at the image. “I think you might just have earned your pay, Jacob.”

“I’m not the first one to have these ideas. You ever heard of Hiwi al-Bakhi?”

Jack was glued to the screen, but nodded. “His name means the Bactrian Heretic, a medieval Jewish dissenter from ancient Bactria, modern Afghanistan. He openly criticized the Hebrew Bible for lack of clarity and contradictions, and for representing God as inconsistent and capricious. His writing was another great discovery in the Cairo Geniza.”

“Well, he also tried to debunk the supernatural. For him, the parting of the Red Sea was a matter of the water ebbing and flowing, something he’s probably seen in the huge tidal flows on the shores of the Indian Ocean. He wasn’t to know that the Gulf of Suez doesn’t have much tide, nor does it have tidal flats like those he might have seen off India, but I like his way of thinking.”

“A rationalist like you, Jacob.”

“There’s something else that’s very interesting about Hiwi, Jack. Dillen and I talked about it too. His sect was so intent on cleansing Jewish religion and starting afresh that they wanted to change the Sabbath from Sunday to Wednesday, the day in Genesis when the sun was created. The sun, Jack. Does that ring any bells? We thought of Akhenaten and Moses together in the desert, and the revelation of the one god, the Aten. Akhenaten too was seeking a cleansing of the old religions, a return to a purer notion of deity, a rejection of gods who had become too anthropomorphic and displayed the human traits that Hiwi lamented in the God of the Bible. Maybe we should expect these periodic attempts at cleansing in the history of religion, but maybe too we should be looking for continuity, for a memory preserved even in Hiwi’s time of that foundation event in the desert almost two thousand years before. Egypt has had its takeovers — the Greeks, the Romans, the Muslims — and cultural destruction like the loss of the Alexandria library, but it never suffered the utter devastation of so many other regions, the sweeping away of its culture and people. And for the Jewish people, their history is all about maintenance of the tradition, isn’t it? That’s the biggest lesson of the Cairo Geniza, that it’s about continuity, not change.”

Jack nodded. “Even dissent like Hiwi’s became part of the Jewish intellectual tradition, one of debate rather than persecution, ensuring that inquiring minds were not stifled in the way they have been in so many other religions.”

Costas looked at Lanoswki. “I’d no idea you were also something of a rabbi, Jacob. A real multitasker.”

“ ‘Happy is the man who meditates on wisdom and occupies himself with understanding.’ That’s from Ben Ezra. My parents were Ukrainian Jews who were smuggled out of Europe just before the Second World War. All the rest of my family — my grandparents, my uncles and aunts — died in the Holocaust. Both my grandfathers had been rabbinical scholars, and my parents hoped that I’d follow the same route.”

“Is that how you got interested in Egyptology?” Jack asked.

Lanowski nodded. “I always wanted to know the specific identity of Pharaoh in the Bible. It annoyed me that he was unnamed, as if he’s the one and only pharaoh, but then I realized there was something special about him. Being part of your team in the quest for Akhenaten is fulfilling a childhood dream, Jack. I’m grateful to you.”

“We’ve got a good way to go yet.”

Lanowski turned to Costas. “And now about the theory of relativity. Funny you should mention that. As it happens, I do have a niggle with the space-time continuum model. It’s…well,” he chuckled, “wrong.” He suddenly looked deadly serious. “I mean, wrong.” He whipped his portable blackboard from beside the desk, picked up a piece of chalk, and scribbled a formula. “It’s like this.”

Costas immediately took Lanowski’s hand and steered the board back down to the floor. “Not now, Jacob. That’s too big even for IMU. Save it for the Nobel Prize committee. Jack has got to go. He’s meeting Aysha and Maria in Cairo this evening. And I need to get back on the phone to Macalister on Seaquest.”

Lanowski looked crestfallen, but then brightened up. “Anything comes up out there, you let me know.”

“Come again?”

“Boots on the ground. Jack and Costas stuff.” He pointed meaningfully at his gear. “You need help, I’m good to go.”

Costas nodded slowly. “I can see that. Good to go.”

Jack stared at him. “Thanks for the offer, Jacob. We’ll let you know. Meanwhile, get this written up so I can send it to the board along with Costas’ photos of the chariots for the press release. It’ll make a fantastic mix of hard data and speculation.”

Lanowski looked dumbfounded. “Where’s the speculation, Jack? From where I see it, there’s only hard data.”

Jack grinned, and slapped him on the shoulder. “Of course. Only hard data. Brilliant work, Jacob.”

Just over four hours later, Jack jumped out of the institute’s Land Rover and hurried after Aysha under the medieval wall into the ancient compound of Fustat. He was thankful to be in the old part of Cairo, away from the din and congestion of the modern city. The drive from Alexandria had been hampered by a seemingly endless succession of police roadblocks and checkpoints. It was already almost nine in the evening, just over three hours to curfew. The Institute of Archaeology logo in Arabic on the Land Rover had eased them through a few sticky checkpoints, but they knew that once the police had been ousted by the extremists, then any Western affiliation, in Arabic or otherwise, would become a liability. Earlier, while they had been in Alexandria, Aysha had not wanted to depress Hiebermeyer any further by dwelling on the political situation, but in the Land Rover she had told Jack that she believed a coup in Cairo was now a near certainty. The moderate Islamist regime that had replaced the pro-Western government a few months ago was never going to work, with policies that satisfied nobody. The decision of the new minister of culture and his antiquities director to shut down foreign excavations had not been enough for the extremists, but they had been too much for Western governments, which had begun to withdraw financial aid in protest. Increasingly the new regime was being seen as a prop that had been engineered all along by the extremists, a stepping-stone to their own imminent takeover. The regime was filled with petty tyrants such as the new antiquities director, who had jumped eagerly on the bandwagon without realizing that the extremists who had opened the door for them would also be their nemesis in the aftermath of a coup.

As they drove into the city, Aysha had been concerned by the absence of gunfire or signs of demonstrations, routine features of Cairo life for months now. The extremist thugs who had battled the pro-democracy demonstrators had seemingly disappeared into the night, leaving the squares festooned with banners but strangely empty of protesters. It had seemed ominous, like a lull before a storm. Reports had come through on the radio of convoys of “specials,” pickup trucks with mounted machine guns, breaking through the border from Sudan virtually unopposed by the Egyptian police or army. The presence of extremist training camps to the south had been an open secret for some time, and now they were seen for what they were: staging posts for a terrorist invasion of Egypt, taking up where their forebears had been forced to leave off after Kitchener’s defeat of the Mahdi army at Omdurman in 1898. Those events of more than a century ago had come back to haunt the world. The slaughter at Omdurman, and Kitchener’s desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb in revenge for the death of General Gordon, had been barely remembered in the West, eclipsed by the horrors of the twentieth century. Yet for the extremists they were still as fresh as if they had happened yesterday. The smell of the blood of Omdurman and the sight of the Mahdi’s paraded remains were embedded in their collective memory and were stoking the fires of hate. Jack and Costas had been on the edge of that tidal wave of extremism in Sudan a few months ago, and now Jack knew they had been lucky to get out when they did. If Aysha was right, that wave was coming at them again, a matter of days at most before Cairo was overrun, with the Egyptian army officer corps infiltrated by sympathizers and the extremist leaders calling for the mass desertion of conscript soldiers. She was convinced that this evening would be their last chance in Cairo, and they needed to make the most of the few hours that lay ahead of them now.

Jack followed Aysha into a maze of narrow cobbled alleys and high stone walls, of men in fez caps and galabiya robes, reminiscent of the Old City of Jerusalem. He remembered that it was to Egypt as well as Spain that many of the Jews who escaped the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 had fled, and there had been other Jews in Alexandria involved in trade with India even before that.

A bearded beggar sat at the entrance to the synagogue precinct, and Jack tossed him a few coins. Then he followed Aysha into the building itself, through the doorway and onto the gray marble floor of the main open space, which was mottled in pools of white where it was lit up by hanging lamps. Above him, on either side, upper-floor balconies ran the length of the building. They were faced with pillared colonnades of little arches painted in alternating white and red that would not have looked out of place in the courtyard of a Cairo mosque. Not for the first time, Jack reflected on the intermeshing of Judaeo-Christian and Muslim culture in the Near East, so at odds with the polarization created by politics and extremism.

Aysha motioned for him to stay while she quickly ran up the stairs to the left-hand gallery. She disappeared behind a section at the far end that had been cordoned off with hanging shrouds lit up from within. He could hear low voices, hers and another he recognized as Maria’s, but he blocked them out for a moment and breathed in deeply, enjoying the smell of old stone and wood after the smog outside. He was relishing the tranquillity he always found in old churches and mosques and synagogues in the middle of bustling cities, a precious respite from the cloud of uncertainty that hung over Cairo.

He was fascinated to be in the Ben Ezra synagogue at last, the source of the Cairo Geniza, the greatest collection of medieval documents to be discovered anywhere in recent times. In most synagogues the geniza chambers were cleared out periodically and their contents buried in cemeteries, whereas the geniza in the Ben Ezra synagogue appeared to contain everything that had been put into it from its inception in the ninth century. When the geniza was first studied, it proved to contain not only thousands of pages of sacred writings — biblical, Talmudic, rabbinical, even fragments of the Qur’ān — but also a trove of secular material, documents in Aramaic and Arabic as well as Hebrew that preserved an extraordinary picture of Jewish life in Egypt in the medieval period. When Jack had first pored over those documents as a student at Cambridge, he had seen the collection with an archaeologist’s eye, much as if he were looking at the evidence of an excavation. The geniza fragments seemed all the more valuable because, like Hiebermeyer’s papyrus mummy wrappings, they were writings that had not been selected by scholars or religious authorities for preservation, and they revealed details of day-to-day life that so rarely survived in written records before modern times.

The hanging shroud on the upper floor parted, and Aysha stood at the balustrade of the balcony. “Okay, Jack. Maria’s nearly ready. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking how pleased I am that Solomon Schechter over a century ago arranged for the bulk of the archive to go to Cambridge University. I hate to think what the extremists would do to this place.”

“If they were true Muslims, they’d leave it alone. Moses was one of our prophets too, and to Muslims the Jews are People of the Book, those to whom scripture has been divinely revealed. Did you know that the baby Moses was supposedly found at this spot, in the reeds in a tributary of the Nile that ran just behind this place?”

Jack walked toward the stairs. “Nice story, but it was two thousand — odd years between the Exodus and the reemergence of the Jewish community in medieval Cairo. It’s hard to believe that anyone would have remembered the exact spot. Also there’s a lot of uncertainty about what was going on in the New Kingdom period where Fustat now lies, and whether there was a settlement or perhaps some kind of temple establishment. The site for the story is more likely somewhere north in the marshlands of the Nile Delta, good papyrus country.”

Aysha stood with her hands on her hips. “What about that famous Jack Howard leap of faith? Maurice says that’s your biggest asset.”

“Faith in my instinct, not in every old legend,” Jack said, mounting the stairs and grinning at her. “Anyway, I’m being Lanowski. Where’s the hard data?”

“Well, here’s something fascinating for you. You remember the diary of Captain Edmondson, the archaeologist-turned — intelligence officer whose notes led you to the Gulf of Suez? A year before that botched arms shipment, he was a newly commissioned second lieutenant in Cairo, working in the same cipher office as his friend T. E. Lawrence, both of them bored out of their minds. Things perked up one day when high command detailed him to act as a discreet escort for a very important visitor who wanted to come incognito to visit the synagogue. Well, the VIP rumbled that Edmondson was following him, and when he reached the synagogue he let him catch up and invited him inside. The VIP was none other than Lord Kitchener, newly appointed secretary of state for war, visiting Egypt only months before he went down with the cruiser Hampshire in the North Sea. It turns out that there were half a dozen other men waiting in the synagogue, all of them getting on a bit in years. Kitchener told Edmondson that they were all in some way associated with General Gordon of Khartoum and came together every few years in the synagogue to celebrate his memory. One of the other men present was an American, Colonel Chaillé-Long.”

Jack stopped on the stairs. “How extraordinary. Gordon’s former chief of staff, the explorer of Lake Victoria?”

“By now an elderly man, and a famous author.”

“Of lavishly embellished tales, as I recall. Something of a dandy.”

“And Edmondson mentioned someone else. I’ve been itching to tell you, Jack, but I wanted to wait until we were here. It was a Royal Engineers colonel well known to you: John Howard.”

Jack stopped in his tracks, staring at her. “My great-great-grandfather? Incredible.” He looked down, thinking hard. “He’d retired by then, but he traveled several times to the Holy Land. He was a friend of Kitchener’s and had known Gordon. They were all Royal Engineers together. It makes sense.” He stared back at the floor of the synagogue, suddenly seeing those men standing there in his mind’s eye. “Amazing.”

“They came here to the synagogue because they believed in the Moses story. But, being engineers and practical men, they decided to find proof. Apparently, one night almost a quarter of a century earlier, in 1890, they had gathered together here for the first time, intent on excavating beneath the synagogue: Chaillé-Long, the then Colonel Kitchener, Captain Howard, and a Colonel Wilson, who had died since.”

“That would be Colonel Sir Charles Wilson,” Jack murmured. “Intelligence chief on the Gordon relief expedition, but before that a surveyor in Palestine who had discovered ancient structures beneath medieval Jerusalem. I prepped Rebecca on him before she went out there, as well as on Gordon and Kitchener. All of them were linked by their archaeological work in Palestine. In 1883 Gordon took a kind of sabbatical there, dispirited by his lack of progress in the Sudan and more interested in seeking proof of the Bible in the archaeology of Jerusalem.”

Aysha nodded enthusiastically. “They brought surveying equipment and digging tools and went out into the synagogue precinct. They’d been led to the spot by another of the colorful characters in Egypt at the period, Riamo d’Hulst, a self-styled count and subject of Luxembourg who was probably a German deserter from the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 and something of a shape-shifter. In 1890 while the synagogue was being restored and refurbished, he took advantage of the construction work to dig around the precinct. Following his lead, the British officers discovered indisputable evidence of a silted-up river channel. That doesn’t prove the Moses story, of course, but they did also find the plinth of an ancient structure. According to Edmondson, it contained the worn remains of a hieroglyphic cartouche. Finding something of a Pharaonic date was enough to convince them that they were at the right spot. Edmondson himself might have been able to decipher the hieroglyphs with his archaeological background, but he wasn’t able to see the inscription because the stone block had been removed in secret to England for safekeeping by Lieutenant Howard.”

“By Howard?” Jack exclaimed. “By my great-great-grandfather?”

“Do you remember any Egyptian antiquities on the Howard estate?”

Jack was stunned. Of course. “Yes, I do. On the edge of the fireplace in the drawing room. My father found it in a storeroom and didn’t know what to do with it. Egyptian red granite?”

“That’s what Edmondson said.”

“Does Maurice know about this?”

“Not yet. He has enough on his plate for the time being.”

“Well, it might just cheer him up. When I first brought him home for holiday from boarding school, he became obsessed with that thing. He used to spend hours with it, staring at it, sketching it. It was what really spurred him into Egyptology. We thought it was a relic of someone’s grand tour of the nineteenth century with no known provenance, the kind of thing that wealthy Europeans brought back to adorn their stately homes. But Maurice constructed all kinds of theories for where it might have come from in Egypt. And of course he translated it.”

“And?”

“It was Akhenaten. The royal cartouche of Akhenaten. The pharaoh of the Old Testament. The pharaoh of the time of Moses.”

The shroud parted, and a slim, dark-haired woman of about forty stepped out, reading glasses dangling from her neck and a pair of conservator’s gloves in her hands. “Evening, Jack. You look a little flushed. Excited to see me?”

Jack stepped forward and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ve just had a revelation, Maria. In fact, a really big revelation. Out of the blue.”

“Sounds like Jack Howard,” she said, her Spanish accent giving the words added emphasis. “You can tell me once we’ve finished in here.”

Jack nodded toward the shroud. “This brings it back, doesn’t it?” He turned to Aysha. “Maria and I first met in the coffee room of Cambridge University Library after discovering that we were both there to study the Geniza documents. We haven’t looked back, have we, Maria?”

“Or forward,” Aysha added, eyeing him.

Maria put her hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Well, Jack Howard just wouldn’t be the man I know and love if he wasn’t always disappearing on adventures, would he? But before you disappear yet again, you need to come in here and see what I’ve got.”

Jack was already staring past her into the gap beyond the shroud, seeing the ladder and hole at the top of the wall that he knew led to the geniza chamber. “You lead, Maria. I can’t wait.”

CHAPTER 10

Jack parted the hanging shroud and followed Maria and Aysha into the enclosed section they had created at the end of the gallery. Within the shroud the air was noticeably warmer, the heat emanating from two portable angle-poise lamps bent low over a wooden table set up in the center of the space. Two briefcases were open on the floor, and the table was covered with Maria’s tools of the trade as a paleographer: protective plastic sheeting for manuscript fragments, tweezers, a magnifying glass, gloves, and a laptop. Its screen showed a blown-up section of text that Jack recognized as Hebrew by the serifs on top of the letters. Beyond the table the stepladder that he had seen from outside rose to a rectangular opening in the wall some three meters above them just below the ceiling. An electrical extension cable snaked over the rim into the darkness beyond.

Jack leaned over and stared at a black-and-white photograph propped up on the table. “That’s Solomon Schechter,” he said, pointing at the bearded man in a black suit hunched over what looked like a pile of old rags. “I know the famous picture of him surrounded by the boxes and piles of Geniza fragments in Cambridge University Library, but I haven’t seen this one before.”

“That’s because Jeremy’s just unearthed it,” Maria said. “He’s become quite a sleuth, you know. For a long time it was thought that no photos survived of Schechter’s time here in the synagogue in 1896, when the full contents of the Geniza were pulled out of that hole above us and laid in piles all over the floor for him to inspect. In fact, the Scottish twin sisters who had led him here, the widows Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, had brought a box camera with them and took some snaps. Jeremy trawled through all the surviving family he could find in the search for old photo albums and eventually came up trumps. Geniza scholarship has for so long been a man’s world, but this photo really reinforces the role of those two women in setting the whole thing in train. It was their search in Egypt for old manuscripts that led them to show fragments from the Geniza to their friend Schechter in Cambridge.”

Jack glanced at her and at Aysha. “With you two here, it looks as if that role of women in Geniza scholarship has come full circle.”

“There at the beginning, and there at the end,” Maria said. “I feel as if we’re closing one of the most incredible chapters of historical discovery ever.”

Jack peered at the figure in the photo. “He looks a little overwhelmed.”

“You’d be too, faced with almost two hundred thousand fragments of manuscript. Overwhelmed, but overjoyed. It became his life’s work at Cambridge, where as you know the Geniza archive is one of the university’s prized collections, studied by scholars of Jewish history from around the world.”

Jack looked at her shrewdly. “I thought the Geniza chamber had been completely emptied. What exactly are you doing here, Maria?”

She glanced at Aysha. “Put it this way. One thing I learned years ago from your husband, Aysha, before you’d even met him. When I was a student I worked on one of Maurice’s projects in the Valley of the Kings. I was collecting papyrus debris still lying in a storage chamber that had not only been robbed in antiquity but also cleared out by Howard Carter’s team in the lead-up to the discovery of Tut’s tomb. That is, never assume that earlier archaeologists have picked up everything.”

“Go on,” Jack said.

“Do you remember our project in England a few years ago at Hereford Cathedral, where Jeremy and I found the Vinland map showing Viking exploration in the Americas? Everyone thought the famous chained library contained all there was to be found in the cathedral, but then we discovered that sealed-up stairwell with its trove of manuscripts.” She reached over and tapped the wall beside the desk below the opening, producing a hollow sound that evidently came from the Geniza chamber beyond. “It’s what Jeremy and I always tell our new students at the institute. Never forget to tap the walls. Sahirah al-Hadeen, one of Aysha’s friends who’s studying the architecture of the synagogue, a graduate student who spent a term with us in Oxford, got into the chamber and did what I just did, on the opposite wall that forms the exterior of the synagogue. As soon as she realized that there was some kind of space beyond, she contacted Aysha and then me.”

“Is she with us now?”

Aysha gave Jack a grim look. “Earlier this afternoon she was arrested and imprisoned. One of my contacts still employed in the antiquities service got a message through to Maria just before we arrived. That’s what we were talking about while you were waiting below in the synagogue. She’s in the Ministry of Culture, which now has a security wing with cells and interrogation rooms where there used to be conservation labs. She was arrested on a trumped-up charge of dealing in antiquities without a license, because when she was detained they found a fragment of manuscript in her briefcase that she was in fact taking to Alexandria for conservation in the institute, there no longer being any facility in Cairo. But the reality is far worse. Sahirah is from one of the oldest Cairo Jewish families, and the truth is that she’s a victim of anti-Semitism. Have you seen the extremists with the black headbands, Jack? They’re terrifying. We watched them beat up a man outside the synagogue last night just after I arrived, and it was like those images of SS thugs laying into Jews on the streets of Germany in the 1930s. Did you see the posters plastered all over the precinct wall? Some of them came and did that last night. They’re calling for all Jews to leave Egypt or face being asset-stripped and imprisoned. Even the worst of the caliphs didn’t go that far.”

“We should be getting her out,” Jack said. “Not digging around in here.”

Maria put her hand on his arm. “The best possible thing we can do for her is to finish up here. The manuscript she was carrying when she was arrested was a scrap she managed to reach in the hole she made in the wall of the chamber where she heard the hollow sound. If they torture her and threaten to arrest her family, she might reveal where she found it, and the last thing she’d want would be to provide the thugs with an excuse to descend on this place. She’d want us to be here now, getting out everything we can before that happens. It’s become personal for me too, Jack. When I lock up here later tonight, this synagogue will be empty and perhaps doomed to destruction, but we don’t want it to be as if a thousand years of history were closing down. Removing these last shreds of the Geniza is not an ending, but a thread of continuity. The history represented here has survived darkness before, and we must not let these people get their way. That’s why, when Sahirah contacted me, I wanted to come out here to help in any way I could, in the eye of yet another storm of ignorance and destruction.”

Jack paused thinking hard. “We didn’t bring a satellite phone from Alexandria in case we were searched at a checkpoint and had it confiscated, potentially compromising the IMU secure line.” He took out his cell phone and looked at the network indicator. “What’s mobile reception like?”

Aysha shook her head. “Pretty well nonexistent outside Cairo. I can’t raise the institute or Maurice, who’s in his Land Rover heading toward the Faiyum excavation as we speak. The extremists have been sabotaging the transmitters across the country.”

Jack pocketed his phone. “Okay. This is what I’m going to do. First thing tomorrow when I’m back on Seaquest, I’ll get the IMU board of directors to rescind our offer to return the sarcophagus of Menkaure to Egypt unless they release Sahirah, immediately. That should put some fire under the antiquities director while he still has any power. The return of the sarcophagus was going to be the big event of his probably very short career. We just have to hope that we can still play him before the extremists take over.”

Aysha nodded. “That might just work, Jack. It’s about the only leverage we’ve got.”

Jack thought hard for a moment longer. There was nothing else they could do, bar storming the ministry and demanding her release, something that would almost certainly get them arrested or worse. “All right. Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Maria looked at him. “We enlarged the hole that Sahirah created as much as we could, but it’s still barely big enough to get your arm into. It’s a crack in the fabric of the wall that seems to have been overlooked when the synagogue was restored in 1890 and then again a few years ago, probably because the opening that had once existed had become bunged up centuries ago with congealed vellum and other organic matter. Countless generations of mice dragged bits of manuscript into the hole and shredded it to make their nests, so nothing of paper or papyrus has survived beyond a few tiny shreds. But what we do have is some larger pieces of vellum. It seems the mice didn’t like something about the vellum, perhaps the gum used to stabilize and dry the gall ink. In time those fragments became glued with mouse droppings to the interior of the hole, actually helping to insulate the nest. When Sahirah showed us the few postage-stamp-sized fragments that she managed to prize out, we got really excited because vellum generally was used for religious texts, so there was a chance of it being something really important. After I saw her photos in the email, I booked the first flight here.”

Jack pointed at a matte of tissue covering something on the table. “Have you got a fragment here?”

Maria sat down on the chair and raised the tissue. Beneath it was a piece of vellum about half the size of a standard book page. It was torn along one edge and filthy. “Partly the dirt is centuries of mouse droppings and body decay, a kind of congealed stickiness,” she said. “And partly it’s the spread of ambient ink from the lettering, as well as moisture stains that look almost like burning. After I’ve cleaned this back in the lab and put it under the electron microscope to check the gall ink stability, I’ll put it in a humidification chamber to give the leather back its suppleness, and then strengthen it with methycellulose and starch paper. But even without cleaning, you can still make out the words.”

Jack leaned closer, but then recoiled. “That’s a serious stench,” he said, crinkling his nose. “I think I need a gas mask.”

Maria gave him a rueful look. “Nice, isn’t it? Nine hundred years of mouse. Solomon Schechter was never the same after the months he spent in here. His health was broken. He took to wearing a mask when he studied the manuscripts in Cambridge, but it was probably too late, and ultimately that fetid exposure was what killed him.”

“Nine hundred years,” Jack murmured, staring again. “That makes it early- to mid-twelfth century. Have you managed to transcribe it?”

“Take a close look first. What do you see?”

Jack held his breath, stared closely, and then backed off again. “Hebrew letters, about seventeen lines, broken off at the bottom as if the lower part of the page is missing.” He held his breath again, and peered closely. “My God. I thought so. It’s a palimpsest. I can see older letters floating under the upper text, upside down. I can’t make out the words, but the letters have Hebrew-style serifs as well.”

Maria nodded. “At the moment I can’t translate the lower text. That’s a prize that awaits us back in the lab. I’m hoping against hope for more lines of the Ben Sira, the Book of Wisdom, which is probably the greatest single treasure to come out of the Geniza.”

“Lanowski talked about that this afternoon. About the problem of translation and transmission in sacred texts, and the importance of finding the Hebrew originals.”

“I talked it through with him as well on the phone. He’s had some startling ideas. He follows many scholars in thinking that Joshua Ben Sira in the second century BC composed the book in Alexandria. But he’s taken it one step further and suggested that the great library of Alexandria, newly established at that time, would have allowed Ben Sira ready access to many of the surviving books of wisdom from Pharaonic Egypt, texts that mostly didn’t make it through the destruction of the library in late antiquity and are therefore unknown to us. Both he and Professor Dillen think there’s enough in what we know of the Ben Sira to suggest a Pharaonic link, though they need more original text to make a case for it. Maybe we’ve got it here; it’s tantalizing, but a brick wall at the moment. What I’m really interested in now, what I’ve got you here for, Jack, is the upper text. Has Aysha prepped you on this?”

“Only that it’s something to do with Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, the eleventh-century caliph of Egypt.”

“Okay. Al-Hakim ruled from 996 to 1021. This is a letter written about a hundred and twenty years after his death, by Yehuda Halevi.”

“The Jewish poet?” Jack exclaimed. “I know that the Geniza contained one of the richest archives of letters from him.”

Maria nodded. “More than fifty of them. He’s one of the most celebrated poets of medieval Judaism. He was Sephardic, from Spain, and had a wide circle of friends there and among the Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean. He came on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1140, in the last year of his life, arriving in Alexandria in September of that year, probably alighting near the site of the ancient lighthouse at the very spot where you left the institute this afternoon. After several months in Cairo, he finally left on the eleventh of May 1141 for Jerusalem, where his trail is lost to history. Under the Crusaders, neither Jews nor Muslims were allowed into the city, but pilgrims like Halevi were allowed to pray at the Mount of Olives. Perhaps he died there after fulfilling his dream. He’s another shade from the past you can imagine standing on the floor of the synagogue, Jack. In fact he had quite a lot in common with General Gordon and his circle. Like them, Halevi had become convinced that religious fulfillment could be found only in the Holy Land. He lived at the time of the First Crusade, when Baldwin the Third was King of Jerusalem, and also when the Jewish community in Spain was caught between Christianity and Islam.”

“Your own ancestors, I remember.”

Maria nodded. “They were forced to convert to Christianity and adopt Christian names to avoid the Inquisition, eventually losing their Jewish identity. But I have a huge diaspora of distant cousins who chose to flee, to England, to Holland, to Constantinople, to the New World, even here to Cairo, readopting names like Sarah and Rebecca and Moses and Abraham. Handling this document from the twelfth century gives me a strange feeling, as if that Jewish identity had been lying dormant in my family for all those generations since the conversion, and not been extinguished after all.”

“They say you can never lose it,” Aysha murmured.

“And there’s something else. Like those soldiers in the late nineteenth century, Halevi also turns out to have had a fascination with what we would now term archaeology.”

“That’s what’s in this letter?”

Maria nodded. “It’s a fantastic addition to the archive. His feathery hand is instantly recognizable, and it’s incredibly exciting for me to be holding this. It’s actually Arabic, but written in Hebrew letters. The Geniza represents a rich fusion of Arabic and Jewish traditions, evidence of a cosmopolitan world far removed from the version of history peddled by the preachers of hate who indoctrinate the extremists. Halevi had been influenced in Spain by Islam just as the Jews had been in Cairo, and had come to believe that Arabic forms of expression could mediate Jewish thought, in poetry and in prose.”

“And he had an eye for the history he saw around him.”

“Correct. And now we’re getting to the nub of it. While he was in Cairo for those months in 1140 to 1141, he became good friends with the nagid, the Jewish community leader — a man named Samuel ben Hananiah — and with a wealthy merchant named Halfon ben Netanel. He also corresponded regularly with his intellectual friends back in Spain. He loved Egypt: ‘This is a wondrous land to see, and I would stay, but my locks are grey,’ he wrote. He was anxious to get to Jerusalem, but he wanted to lap up everything he could about Egypt while he was here. The caliph Al-Hakim comes into the story because the Jews in Spain had a particular fascination with the behavior of the Muslim potentates of the Near East at a time when Spanish Jews were looking anxiously over their own shoulders at their own Islamic overlords and wondering what the future might hold. Al-Hakim wasn’t exactly the flavor of the month. He was reviled among Jews and Christians alike for ordering the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1021 and, for good measure, the Ben Ezra synagogue here in Cairo as well. But they also saw him as a complex and intriguing man who might be the basis for a lesson in morality. Halevi loved a mystery, and he was especially interested in the questions over Al-Hakim’s death. This letter seems to be a draft of something he may never have actually sent off, written to his son-in-law, the scholar and historian Abraham Ibn Ezra in Toledo.”

“Can you translate it?”

She clicked the screen, calling up an enhanced photographic image of the text with English words overlaid. Jack leaned over her shoulder and followed as she read:

Maria looked up. “The literal translation of the epithet he uses for Al-Hakim is ‘sand-traveller,’ which itself is the literal translation of an ancient Egyptian term known only from hieroglyphs. It’s almost as if they were speaking the same language.”

Jack shook his head in amazement. “Fascinating,” he exclaimed. “That meshes with my own revelation just now in the synagogue when I realized that I knew that a stone excavated in 1890 from the synagogue precinct contained the hieroglyphic cartouche of none other than Akhenaten. It begins to fit with a wider picture, that the site of medieval Fustat was once connected with the ancient complex of Heliopolis, where northeastern Cairo now stands. Heliopolis was the center for the worship of the sun god Ra, and a logical place for Akhenaten to build a great temple to the Aten. Maurice told me that blocks from that temple have been identified in the medieval walls of Cairo. That was my first thought when Aysha told me about the British officers discovering the stone with the cartouche here in 1890. But the account in that officer’s diary makes it sound as if it came from an in situ ancient structure, not a medieval one, so it fits with what Halevi suggests about a separate Pharaonic religious complex here, one aligned to the pyramids rather than to the old cult center at Heliopolis. Is there more, Maria?”

“A few sentences, before the tear.” She carried on reading:

Jack waited in silence for a moment, coursing with excitement. “The underworld. Go on,” he urged.

Maria sat back. “That’s it.”

Jack closed his eyes. That’s it? “Are you sure?”

Maria glanced at Aysha. “Well, there might be more. Yesterday evening after I got set up here, Aysha and I climbed into the chamber and managed to see through the hole with our torches. We were able to prize free this fragment, but we saw another sheet compacted against the stone beyond it that could be the torn lower half of the page. We don’t have any extraction tools that wouldn’t damage it, and would probably tear it into shreds. Everything has to be done here the old-fashioned way, with bare hands. And Aysha and I are, well, both a little short on length.”

Jack stared at her. “You’re telling me you got me all the way here because I’ve got long arms?”

“The longest in Cairo. Probably the longest in Egypt. And fingers used to feeling around in the murk. Diving down holes is your specialty, isn’t it?”

Jack shook his head. “What you need is Little Joey. Costas’ miniature robot. His buddy. That’s the real reason he’s pining to get back to his engineering lab on Seaquest, not the problems of raising the sarcophagus of Menkaure.”

“We thought of asking him along too, but we didn’t think that mouse droppings were really his thing.”

“That’s probably wise. Underwater is fine, but holes in the ground full of decayed matter are not what he signed up for.”

“Of course, there’s the inevitable curse, as well,” Aysha said. “The Geniza was said to be guarded by a serpent who bedded down in the manuscripts like a dragon with its treasure. Anyone who went in was doomed. Look what happened to Solomon Schechter.”

“Snakes,” Jack muttered. “Definitely not Costas’ scene.”

“Then you’ll have to go it alone,” Maria said.

Jack stared at the filth on the fragment of vellum. “I’ll need protective clothing. Some kind of respirator.”

Aysha nodded at a large plastic crate beside the ladder. “We’re one step ahead of you. Full biological, chemical, and nuclear protection suits liberated from an army depot by a friend of mine.”

Maria glanced at him. “You good to go?”

Jack looked at his watch, and then up at the hole into the Geniza chamber above him, black and slightly forbidding. “Okay. There’s no time for dithering or, the gods protect me, for curses. Let’s do it.”

CHAPTER 11

Alight came on, harsh, blinding, and the young woman in the center of the room turned her head away from it, shutting her eyes tight against the glare. She strained against the bindings that held her hands to the back of the chair, no longer feeling the pain where the rope had cut into her wrists. Even the slight movement of her head had brought back the sickening stench of the room, full of people bound like her who had lain in their own filth for days, and in the filth of others before them who had died or been dragged away for execution. She had been in here for only a few hours, but with their watches removed and no clock, she was already beginning to lose track of time. The only break in the sepulchral gloom was when the light cut in, when those who still had the energy moaned and whimpered with fear, when their captors came for another victim.

The first few times it had happened after she had recovered consciousness, she had managed to look around, above the terrified faces and twisted bodies, and had seen the cupboards filled with chemicals and the half-torn posters on the walls advertising forthcoming exhibitions in the museum. She had been here before. She knew she was in the archaeological conservation labs of the ministry, now used as detention cells by the extremists who had been the driving force behind the new regime. She was only a short walk away from the Old City and the synagogue where they had snatched her, only a stone’s throw from family and friends. Yet she knew she may as well be a world away, beyond rescue. Only a few weeks before, these labs had been a hive of activity, filled with colleagues of hers in the archaeological service. The people around her now had been smartly dressed politicians and civil servants. Those torn posters and soiled clothes might just as well be archaeological relics themselves of a time before Egypt had begun to fall before the forces of darkness and the people began to stare into the void.

The light shone hot against her face, and she knew it was her turn. A hand pulled her head and jerked it upright, the fingers smelling of khat. A man spoke harshly in English. “Open your eyes.”

“Turn away the light,” she said hoarsely. “And speak to me in Arabic.”

“You are a Jew. We will not speak to you in the language of the Prophet.”

“My family has lived in Cairo for two thousand years. Arabic is the language we speak.”

She heard the man talk to another in the distinctive dialect of Sudanese Arabic, and the light moved away. She opened her eyes cautiously and saw two bearded men in front of her wearing black headbands, both with handguns and one carrying a powerful torch. The closest man waved a tattered piece of paper in front of her face. “What is this?” he said, still speaking in English.

She squinted at it. “It’s a twelfth-century document from the archive in the synagogue,” she said. “I was taking it away for study when I was brought here.”

The man leaned forward and spat a stream of khat juice into the face of a woman on the floor, and then turned back. “You’re a liar. Our informant told us you were stealing holy documents of Islam, and he was right. This is written in Arabic. Even the stupidest of my men can see that. This is a page of the holy Qur’ān.”

She looked at him defiantly. “It’s true that there are pages of the Qur’ān in the archive. They’re one of its greatest treasures. But there are also thousands of other documents in Arabic. If you and your fighters are as holy as you’d like to think you are, then you’d have memorized the Qur’ān and you’d see that this is not a holy page. In fact, it’s a letter from a wealthy Jewish matriarch to one of her three lovers, encouraging him to keep his Muslim faith because she knows that for him it is the true route to God.”

The man spat again, dropped the fragment of paper, and held her by the chin, coming close to her face. “We know who you work for. You are a spy for the Zionists. We have seen you go into the synagogue with that woman from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria.”

She said nothing. The man raised his pistol and cocked it beside her ear. “Answer one question, and I will make this easy for you. There is a man we want, a so-called archaeologist who spied in my country when he was supposedly hunting for relics, and who is now on the trail of something we want in Egypt.” He let go of her chin, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a crumpled page from a magazine. He straightened it and then held it in front of her. It showed a picture of two men in diving gear on the side of a boat, one of them tall with graying dark hair and the other shorter and stouter. He pointed with the butt of his pistol at the taller one. “Where is this man?” he demanded.

She pursed her lips defiantly, saying nothing. He rolled up the page, tossed it aside, and then aimed his pistol at the woman he had spat on. There was a deafening crack and her head exploded, brains and blood spraying their legs. He turned back to her, held her chin again, and brought the pistol close enough that she could smell the smoke. “I will ask only one more time,” he snarled. “Where is Jack Howard?”

She continued to say nothing, sitting as upright as she could and staring defiantly ahead. The man waited for a moment longer, raised his pistol, and then swung the butt at her head, hitting her and throwing her violently sideways. For a brief moment she saw the fragment of ancient text lying on the floor beside the dead woman, and then she saw a terrifying rushing blackness.

And then nothing.

Twenty minutes after leaving Maria, Jack was crouched at the bottom of the Geniza chamber looking up at the aperture in the wall leading back into the synagogue. The space was cramped, an arm’s breadth across each way and some six meters high; it was like being inside a large chimney well in a medieval castle. He watched Maria follow him carefully down the rope ladder they had dropped from the aperture, her white protective suit shimmering in the light from the single bulb they had suspended from the top of the chamber. Jack’s own suit felt strangely insubstantial after the countless hours he had spent underwater in a Kevlar-reinforced E-suit, and he had to move and hear the crinkle of the plastic to convince himself that he was wearing anything above his own clothes. He shifted the respirator and clear plastic visor to get a more comfortable view, and then looked at his exposed right hand, already smeared with dirt, where he had cut off the glove and sealed the wrist with a rubber band. They had brought mini Maglites with them, but what he was about to do was going to be a matter of touch and feel, with bare fingers essential for the sensitivity needed to prize out what might remain of the ancient vellum letter in the hole in the wall.

Maria landed beside him and looked at the smear on his hand. “Solomon Schechter called it Genizaschmutz,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by her respirator. “Dust, insects, decayed manuscripts, flecks of whitewash from the ceiling, desert sand, the residue of all those human hands sweating and smudging as they wrote, and of course mouse goo, stuck together with a gummy ooze from the vellum. It’s like pine resin when you get it on your hands. Almost impossible to get off.”

Jack looked up at the aperture, lit by the single stark bulb, their route out. “So this was filled up to the brim with manuscripts?”

“Virtually overflowing. They say the opening is up there so that the holy words in Hebrew go directly to heaven, like the soul. In reality it was the only practical place they could put the opening, like a giant rubbish bin. Even though the manuscripts were removed over a century ago, I still feel as if I’m diving into a well of history when I come inside here. Aysha is only a few meters away on the other side of this wall, but it’s as if we’re halfway back to the world of the Geniza, in a kind of shadowy netherland with all those faces and voices about to spring to life. I’ve never felt quite like this before in a medieval manuscript repository. In most cases, like the Hereford Library, the manuscripts were part of a scholarly library, so in your mind’s eye you walk back into a candlelit scriptorium or a monk’s study. Here, you walk back into a bustling Cairo street scene of the eleventh or twelfth century, filled with all the color and vibrancy that life can offer.”

Jack spied a fleck of lighter colored material sticking to the wall beside his face and put his forefinger on it, peeling it away with his thumb. It was a tiny piece of paper with a letter on it, a serif just visible. Maria opened up a small plastic box that she had taken from a pouch on her belt and Jack gently flicked the fragment into it. She closed the box and replaced it carefully in her pocket. “This is real archaeology, Jack. Creating a huge mosaic from the tiniest of tiny details. That single letter may float through history by itself forever, or it might just form the crucial piece in a jigsaw puzzle. With the Geniza, you never know.”

“Let’s get the job done,” Jack said.

Maria pointed to a hole just above the floor of the chamber on the side opposite the synagogue balcony. It led into the outer wall of the building. It was even smaller than Jack had imagined, barely wide enough to fit his bicep. He eased himself down until he was lying on his right side, his hand poised to reach inside. He paused for a moment, eyeing Maria. “About that snake,” he said. “The venomous guardian of the Geniza. If there were mice living in there, then this hole isn’t going to have been his lair, is it?”

Maria looked thoughtful. “The last mouse died in there about five hundred years ago, trapped behind a congealed plug of resinous vellum. The snake could have burrowed its way in there after that. It could be waiting in there for you, Jack.”

“I’m so glad Costas isn’t here,” Jack muttered, flexing his fingers.

“There’s a great line from Ben Sira, words on a piece of parchment that was floating in that mass of manuscripts where we’re sitting now. It goes: ‘Concealed wisdom and hidden treasure, what’s the use of either?’ Whatever’s in there needs to come out, Jack. I don’t think the snake will bite.”

“Okay. I’ll trust you.”

“There’s something else I wanted to say to you, Jack, while we’re here together. Whatever we find in that hole, you’re going to want to leave here as soon as possible afterward and the opportunity will be lost.”

Jack rolled back and looked at her. “Maybe not the best time, Maria.”

She shook her head impatiently. “It’s not that. It’s about scholarship. It’s about the exhilaration of discovery. It’s about what drives people like Solomon Schechter, like Howard Carter, like you, Jack. At the time when the Geniza was discovered, there were many who felt that Jewish scholarship had turned in on itself, like the sophists of late antiquity or medieval Christianity, with too much intellect being wasted on trivia and obscurity, with piety becoming burdensome and negative. The Geniza gave a huge burst of vitality to all that, almost a cleansing. It allowed people to see afresh not just the fundaments of their religion but also the sheer vitality of the people who had lived by it. It was as if what had gone before was foam on the sea of scholarship. But the uncovering of the Geniza created a tidal wave in the sea itself, one that survived even the darkest days of the Holocaust. It drove some of them to a vision of the world that was not partisan, was not divided into separate communities, but was as cosmopolitan as the world they found in the Geniza, a world where peaceful coexistence across all the world’s great religions might be possible. It was idealism, but idealism based on an astonishing historical revelation. That’s what I wanted to say to you, Jack. Every time you make a great discovery, it gives that burst of vitality to the world, a rekindling of wonder and excitement. With another dark cloud hanging over us now, we need that more than ever. Don’t ever give up on the quest.”

Jack stared up at that aperture near the ceiling. He was utterly still for a moment, feeling his heartbeat slow, as it did when he was underwater. “It’s no longer just Jack Howard,” he replied quietly. “The quest is driven by all of us, by the team.” He rolled back, took a deep breath, and thought again. “But I know what you’re saying. It’s the bigger picture, isn’t it? Discovery isn’t just about the adrenaline rush, the thrill of the chase, the problem-solving. It’s about consequences, about what you find and how you present it to the world, about enrichment and uplifting, and sometimes, just sometimes, about improving the human condition. I’m with you on that, up to the hilt. And I’m humbled that you can think of me alongside scholars like Schechter and Carter. I’d say the same about you, as I would about Aysha and Maurice. And I’m not always the star. Sometimes,” he said, flashing her a smile and raising his right hand, “I’m just a long arm, aren’t I?”

Maria smiled back. “Time you put it into action.”

Jack bunched his fingers and pushed his hand into the hole, continuing until he was elbow deep. At first he felt only a void, but then his fingers brushed against the edges, against slippery stone and a sticky mass. He tried not to think about what he was touching and pressed in farther, reaching the middle of his bicep and already feeling the edges of the hole constricting his arm. “Still nothing,” he exclaimed, pushing in farther. “I can’t feel the end.”

“Another hand’s length, no more,” Maria said. “You can do it.”

He gave another shove, flinching in pain as his shoulder wedged into the hole. “Okay. I’ve got to the far end,” he said, his face pressed hard against the chamber wall above the hole. He closed his eyes, imagining what he was feeling — a smooth but undulating surface with edges that curled back from the underlying stone. “I think I’ve got the piece of vellum,” he said. “About twice the size of my hand? I’m prizing it away now.” He pulled gently at the edges, carefully forcing his fingers behind, working his way around until only the central part of the vellum remained attached to the masonry. Slowly, with infinite care, he pushed his fingers farther behind the flap, feeling it come away millimeter by millimeter until finally it broke free. “Okay. Got it.” He edged backward from the wall as he withdrew his hand, pulling out a blackened object that looked like a piece of leather caught in a fire. He handed it to Maria, who peered at it closely and put it in another lidded plastic box. Jack sat upright, his hand blackened with filth. “Could you see anything?”

“I could, Jack.” Her voice was taut with excitement. “Maybe twenty lines, and it’s in Halevi’s hand. The upper tear is exactly consistent with the tear we’ve got in the other piece. Let’s get out of here and see if I can read it.”

Five minutes later they were both outside on the balcony floor stripping off their suits, Jack quickly rubbing off the worst of the dirt from his hand with a pile of wet wipes. Aysha had already taken the box and opened it on the table, and Maria immediately went over and sat in front of it, pulling down one of the angle-poise lamps, and putting on a pair of conservator’s gloves. She carefully removed the vellum, placing it on a plastic sheet on the table, and picked up her magnifying glass and notebook, jotting down words in translation as she peered at the lines. Jack gave up trying to clean his hand and walked over. “Can you see more palimpsest?”

“Definitely. It’s even clearer than the other piece, but I’m just concentrating on the upper text.” She continued jotting down words, and after about another ten minutes stopped and sat back. She was silent for a moment, and then stripped off her gloves and put the notebook on the table. “You’re going to love this, Jack.”

“Go on.”

“You remember we left off where the boy had been following Al-Hakim into the desert, and had secretly watched him faking evidence of his own death?”

“Right.”

“Well, this tells what the boy saw next.” She read out from her notebook:

Jack looked at the vellum, his mind reeling. “Amazing,” he exclaimed. “That’s exactly what Costas and I saw from under the Pyramid of Menkaure, only this seems to be from another entrance in another direction, looking west toward the pyramids. What he’s describing is the sun symbol of Akhenaten, and the one he mentions in Fustat may well have been associated with the Akhenaten cartouche excavated by those British officers and taken back to England by my great-great-grandfather.” He took a deep breath, shaking his head. “It’s amazing, though it doesn’t necessarily bring us closer to another entrance that we might get into. The one he’s describing sounds as if it would require a major mechanical excavation to open up, and could be anywhere within a radius of several dozen square kilometers, probably beneath the southern suburbs of Cairo.”

“I’ll get one of my Hebrew experts back in Oxford to take a look at the translation,” Maria said. “Maybe there’s an alternative nuance to some of those words that might give a better clue.” She glanced at her watch. “Meanwhile, I’ve got to get on here. There’s a cluster of smaller fragments of other manuscripts from the hole that need to be dealt with. The clock’s ticking.”

“Okay,” Aysha said, pulling out her phone. “I’m calling our driver in the Land Rover. He should be outside the main entrance to Fustat within fifteen minutes.”

Jack turned to Maria. “How did you guess there might be something like this in the second part of the letter? The first half left Al-Hakim’s fate wide open.”

“Call it instinct. A Jack Howard moment.”

“You have those?”

“Very occasionally.” She smiled at him. “Actually, it was something Jeremy found in his research into the Howard Carter papers. He gave me only the barest details in a text message after I’d boarded the plane yesterday for Cairo, but it seems as if Al-Hakim wasn’t the only one to disappear under the desert. And it seems as if there might be a connection with your Royal Engineers officers in the late nineteenth century. Jeremy was expecting his research to be finished by tomorrow and will contact you then.”

Jack glanced at his watch. There was something else he had wanted to do in Cairo, something he had planned since he and Costas had first laid eyes on the relief sculpture of the pharaoh and the Israelites inside the crocodile temple beside the Nile. There, he had seen the pharaoh in two dimensions; now he wanted to see him in three. He turned to Aysha. “Do we have time to go to the museum? I’d like to see the colossal statue of Akhenaten from Amarna that went with the travelling exhibition around the world a few years ago.”

Aysha looked uncertain. “It’s shut to the public, but I still have a pass. Our driver knows the back routes and could get us to the rear entrance. I’m supposed to return you to Alexandria and then I’m straight off to the Faiyum to join Maurice at the mummy necropolis. But we could squeeze in the extra hour if you really want it.”

“Who knows when I’ll be in Egypt again.”

Maria eyed him. “You’ll be back. I’ve never known Jack Howard to walk away from something like this.”

“I’m thinking of visiting Jerusalem next.”

“That’s going from the frying pan into the fire, isn’t it? There have already been rockets from Syria falling on Haifa.”

Jack shrugged. “I was there doing research for my doctorate in the week before the first Gulf War, remember? There were no tourists, and I had the Holy Sepulchre all to myself. I told Rebecca she should seize the opportunity to explore as much as possible while she’s there now, when the place isn’t swamped with tour buses.”

Maria looked at him shrewdly. “If the real reason you’re going to Jerusalem is to look out for Rebecca, forget it. She’d never forgive you. You’ve got to let her plough her own furrow, and then ask you out there herself.”

Jack pulled out his phone and showed her an image. “That’s the tunnel she’s about to go down under the City of David. She sent this just after we left Alexandria. She wanted Costas to go too, but I texted her about Lanowski’s visit and said Costas might be tied up for a while with some engineering problem on Seaquest.”

“When you reply, tell her the trip she and I have planned to Greece is definitely in the cards. I’ve just had permission for us to visit the monasteries on Mount Athos to look at the manuscript libraries. At last they’ve agreed to let women in, and she and I are going to be the first.”

Jack raised his eyes. “Fascinating. I’ve always wanted to have a look in there. Maybe I’ll join you.”

“As if, Jack, as Rebecca would put it. This is a strictly girls-only trip to a once-strictly-male preserve. It’d look as if we had a chaperone.”

Jack put away his phone, and paused. “I’ll call you in Oxford. We should spend some time together.”

Maria turned back to the vellum. “How’s Katya?”

Jack shrugged. “Haven’t seen her for months.”

She turned to him. “What’s going on there, Jack? She’s perfect for you. A paleolinguistics PhD who can hold her own in a gun battle and runs her own project on the Silk Road in Kyrgyzstan. What is it now, ten years since you first met? She helped you find Atlantis.”

Jack shrugged. “You helped me find the last Gospel of Christ.”

“What are you doing, Jack? You need to make up your mind.”

“She’s with that Kyrgyz guy, Almaty, at the petroglyph site.”

“Well, I guess at least he’s on the same continent as she is. I know how she feels.”

Jack glanced at Aysha, who gave him a rueful look. “Time to go, Jack. There’s a curfew at midnight, and we definitely can’t push that.”

Maria looked at them. “I’m doing an all-nighter here and then I’m on the early morning flight back to Heathrow. I want to get my Hebrew expert at the institute to look at this and then I’ll email you the final translation. And watch out for something from Jeremy. He’s working flat out in the British Museum stores looking for more Howard Carter manuscripts, for anything further on the old soldier and his story of lost treasure under the pyramids. Jeremy usually comes up trumps, if you give him time.”

“We may not have a lot of that,” Jack said.

“He was on to the last box of correspondence when I left. With the pyramid a no-go zone, his findings may be the last hope you have of discovering another way underground. Who knows what that guy told Carter.”

“I’ll text him when I get back to Alexandria, right after I contact the IMU board and do all I can to get your friend Sahirah released. Any plans to return the sarcophagus to Egypt are on hold until she walks free. If we are indeed able to raise it tomorrow, that would bring maximum public humiliation to the antiquities director. Releasing Sahirah should be a price he is willing to pay to keep face.”

“Tomorrow might be your last chance,” Aysha said. “The antiquities director might not last much longer than that, and whoever takes his place from the extremist junta won’t care less about the sarcophagus returning to Egypt. That is, if there’s even a Ministry of Culture left. It’s already halfway to being an interrogation block.”

Jack gave her a steely look. “I’m going to insist on her release by midday tomorrow Egyptian time. If there’s no response, I’ll be meeting with the IMU security director and assessing all options.”

Maria stood, arms folded, and looked up at Jack. “Congratulations on your chariots discovery in the Red Sea, Jack. But it makes me think of lines from Yannai, another poet in the Geniza, on the burning bush in the Book of Exodus. ‘Omens of fire in the chariot’s wind, Pillars of fire in thunder and storm.’ Take care of yourself, Jack. Don’t stretch that envelope too far; otherwise, it’ll be Rebecca coming to find you, not the other way around.”

Jack looked at her with concern. “Will you be all right here alone?”

Aysha turned to him. “That beggar you gave money to at the entrance to the synagogue precinct? He’s ex-Egyptian special forces, a cousin of mine, Ahmed. He has a Glock 17 concealed in those rags. He won’t let Maria out of his sight until she’s sitting on the plane for Heathrow tomorrow morning.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want to be coming back here to rescue Maria.”

“You wouldn’t need to. I’d be here first.”

Maria paused, and then quickly kissed him on the cheek. “See you in Oxford when this is over.”

Aysha gave them both a wry smile. “Inshallah.”

Half an hour later Jack ducked out of the Land Rover into a back street and followed Aysha quickly down a passageway behind the museum. While they had been in the synagogue, Cairo had erupted again, the low cloud over the city reflecting the orange glow of fires and the roar of the traffic punctuated by the wail of sirens and bursts of gunfire. Aysha spoke to the two armed guards at the entrance, showed her pass, and waited as one of them unlocked the door. Moments later they were in a long, ill-lit corridor and then ascending a staircase that came out at the rear of the ground-floor exhibits hall. The entire museum seemed sepulchral, with many of the cases shrouded with sheets.

“The last antiquities director ordered this, the last archaeologist, that is, before he was ousted by the new regime,” Aysha said as they hurried on. “Everyone here was fearful of a repeat of what had happened to the museums in Iraq and Afghanistan, and covering the exhibits at least buys some time, keeping them out of the eye of the extremists, who see virtually everything in here as un-Islamic. Here we are, Room Three, the Amarna Room. The sculpture you want is in the far left corner under the shroud. I’ll wait here in case a guard comes by and I have to explain what we’re doing. You’ve got ten minutes, maximum.”

She switched on the light, and Jack left her pacing the entrance to the room. The air smelled musty, tomblike, and Jack had the chilling sensation of being at the end of an era, with the mummies and sculptures and other priceless artifacts celebrated the world over about to be entombed again, swallowed into the ground or smashed to pieces within the ruins of this place. He passed the famous unfinished sculpture of Nefertiti, her beautiful face looming out of the darkness, and then he saw her again in a relief sculpture, no longer so beautiful, with the same elongated profile and same bulbous features as her husband. He stopped at the far corner in front of a shrouded form that towered over the rest of the room, and he carefully pulled off the sheet. The sculpture rose above him just as he had remembered it in the travelling exhibition in London, only here the features were even more deeply accentuated by the shadows. It was a representation utterly unlike that of any other pharaoh from ancient Egypt, with the extended chin, the thick, half-smiling lips, and the bulbous eyes, as if it were from another place and another time altogether.

He had not known for certain why he wanted to see this statue again, but now he realized why. Before she had left for Jerusalem, Rebecca had talked to him about Baldwin the Fourth, the Crusader king who had ruled the city with his Frankish barons in the twelfth century, soon after the Geniza poet Halevi had met his end there. Together they had watched the Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven, in which Baldwin is portrayed in a golden mask, concealing the leprosy that had ravaged his face and would eventually kill him. Jack had remembered the wooden Burundi face masks with their hooded eyes that he had seen in Sudan, ceremonial masks with a history that may have extended back thousands of years to the time when the pharaohs had tried to conquer the desert. It was there that Akhenaten had experienced his revelation of the Aten, had cast off his priestly role and pushed aside the old religion. Had the tribesmen seen his extraordinary features and created their masks in his image? Or had he seen their masks, the masks of those who lived under the radiance of the Aten, and then had he and Nefertiti adopted them for their own, symbols of their own allegiance to the new religion? How else to explain the transformation of Nefertiti in the sculptures? Instead of signs of illness, as many had suspected, was Akhenaten instead portraying himself like the Burundi, seeking the anonymity that a mask gave him in the light of God?

Jack looked up one last time at the sculpture. He did not know whether he had just experienced a blinding revelation, or whether the idea of the mask just pushed Akhenaten further back into mystery. It was as if the pharaoh himself were playing games with him, tempting him to take one step further into the unknown, then showing him that the trail was an illusion. It seemed to reflect everything that had happened over the last few months, of tottering on a knife-edge between success and failure, between unlocking a mystery that Jack knew lay somewhere beneath their feet and having to walk away with that ambiguity in Akhenaten’s face, that mask over reality, seared into his mind.

His phone hummed. It was a text from Costas. He quickly read it, and suddenly coursed with excitement. The dive from Seaquest to raise the sarcophagus was on for tomorrow afternoon. The IMU Embraer jet was due at Alexandria at dawn tomorrow, and the Lynx helicopter was already waiting at Seville airport in Spain to transfer them to the ship. Rebecca would understand his trip to Jerusalem being postponed, and Maria had been right; it would have been wrong for him to jump on the first plane to Tel Aviv after receiving Rebecca’s text, as if he had been waiting on tenterhooks for a chance to watch out for her. And she was used to the last-minute change in priorities that often took place when Jack was following too many leads at once.

As he put away his phone, he smelled the Geniza on his hand. He remembered Maria at the bottom of the chamber, eyes ablaze, voicing her passion for the project, for Jack to hold on to his vision of what might lie ahead. He felt a sudden upwelling of emotion, and swallowed hard. After reading the letter of Yehuda Halevi, he had begun to understand what it was that had overwhelmed Solomon Schechter and the other Geniza scholars, not so much the sheer quantity of material but the humanity it represented, preserved with breathtaking immediacy. It had been as if Halevi had been writing the letter to him, brimming with curiosity and a fascination with the world around him that struck right to the core of Jack’s being. He felt revitalized, more determined than ever to pursue his own quest. He remembered those last lines of Halevi, the extraordinary account of the tunnel, and he felt a burning excitement. But meanwhile he had another priority, to do all he could to secure the release of the Egyptian student who had been the first to make the discovery. The sarcophagus might give him only a small amount of leverage, but he would use it to his utmost. He needed to make contact with the outside world as soon as possible.

He turned and walked quickly back to the entrance to the room. Aysha already had her finger on the light switch. “Seen what you wanted to see?”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Right. Twenty minutes to midnight curfew. We need to get out of here.”