Pyramid

CHAPTER 12

Jack sat back in the passenger seat of the Lynx helicopter, glanced at the helmeted figure of Costas asleep in the seat opposite, and stared out at the shimmering blue of the sea below. At Valencia airport he had turned down the pilot’s offer to take over the controls, relishing instead the half hour of downtime before they hit the bustle of Seaquest and all the demands of the day ahead. Jack knew that he would be walking off the helipad into a teleconference to discuss the imprisoned Egyptian girl, and Costas would be straight down into the engineering lab to make sure that all the equipment was as ready as it could be for the dive that afternoon.

The sound of snoring came through his headphones, and Jack turned just in time to see the grizzled face loll forward in his shoulder straps. He leaned over and pushed him gently upright, and Costas opened his eyes and looked blearily about. “We there yet?”

“Not yet, but you were taking a slow nosedive for the floor.”

“Dive,” Costas mumbled. “Need to adjust the dynamo in the ADSA submersible stabilizer system. I knew I’d forgotten something on my checklist. Always think better when I’m asleep. Can’t believe I won’t have Lanowski to help me.”

“His talents were needed in Alexandria stripping Hiebermeyer’s computers and making sure his database was secure. You’ll just have to wing it.”

Costas crinkled his nose where Jack’s hand had been and leaned toward him, sniffing like a dog. “What’s that smell? That terrible smell?”

Jack looked at the fingers of his right hand and saw the dark stains from the resin. He remembered the Geniza chamber. “Ah, yes. Couldn’t scrub it off.” He sniffed the tips of his fingers. “That, my friend, is a thousand years of mouse.”

“Huh?”

“An ancient archive. A hole in the wall. With Maria.”

“That sounds just like a date with Jack. Really romantic. You’re talking about the synagogue in Cairo?”

“I’ll fill you in when I can show you my pictures. It was a fantastic discovery, a clue that pushes us one step closer to getting under the desert again. You’d have loved it. There was a sacred snake guarding the archive.”

“No way.”

“Only kidding. Well, nearly only kidding. Anyway, Maria thinks the curse was lifted long ago.”

Costas looked aghast. “What curse? What snake?” He looked back into the cargo compartment at their bags. “You haven’t brought anything with you, have you?”

Jack grinned. “Just something for you to dream about. I’ll wake you when we’re there.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Okay.” Costas slumped against the window, and seconds later Jack heard the low rumble again. He glanced at the text message he had received from Maria when he and Costas had landed in the Embraer from Egypt an hour and a half before. All it said was Thanks for last night. He smiled at the irony of it. “Last night” meant a dusty chamber in an old synagogue poring over a medieval manuscript, with barely a farewell embrace.

He stared out at the shimmering expanse of the sea, his lifeblood since he had first donned a wetsuit more than thirty years before. He thought back to Rebecca’s mother, Elizabeth, to a relationship that had ended even before Rebecca was born, when they had both been graduate students. She too had been an archaeologist but had been forced by threats and intimidation back into the world of her Camorra background in Naples, to give archaeological legitimacy to their tomb robbing and antiquities dealing. When she found out she was pregnant, she decided not to tell Jack, not to allow her family to get their tentacles around him as well and destroy his dream, and she had struggled to bring Rebecca up alone and carve out a legitimate position for herself in the antiquities service. When Rebecca herself was threatened, used as a pawn to try to get Elizabeth back into the criminal fold, she sent her secretly to close friends in New York State to be brought up and educated, while she remained in Naples to do enough of what was asked of her to keep them from acting on their threats to hunt down Rebecca and bring her back into the family.

Jack had seen Elizabeth only once more when he had gone to Naples to explore the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, and in their brief conversation she had broken down and told him everything, revealing the existence of their daughter and her wish that he take care of Rebecca if anything should happen. Elizabeth had witnessed one drug deal too many, had made some distant cousin jittery that she would go to the police, and a few days later her body was found by the seashore with a bullet through the back of her head. That had been more than five years ago, and Jack still felt the numbness, a heartache that he knew would always be behind everything that he and Rebecca did together, behind her own drive to make a mark on the world and show the same strength that her mother had in bringing her up against the odds.

Jack knew that his seeming ambivalence toward Maria and Katya was not a consequence of juggling between the two, or of a greater love in the past that he had been unable to shake off, or of the sense of responsibility that had channelled so much of his emotional reserve toward Rebecca after her mother’s death. Rebecca had told him that he was like the great sea captains of old, brilliant at sea but directionless on land, most at home navigating his life with the prize always just beyond the horizon and the voyage toward it at the mercy of the elements and chance. Perhaps his relationships with women had become an analog of that. Yet he knew it did not have to be so. He had seen it work with Hiebermeyer and Aysha. He remembered Maria’s parting words in Cairo, and resolved that this time, when it was all over, he would take that step that he so often balked at, and actually give her a call.

A rocky headland came into view, the limestone reduced to the jagged, sun-bleached form characteristic of the northern Mediterranean shore, and his heart leapt as he saw Seaquest in the bay beyond. He knew that the Lynx pilot would need to hold off before getting permission for landing, and he had been relishing the chance to inspect Seaquest properly from the air for the first time since her refit in Falmouth earlier that year. On the stern she was flying the Spanish flag, a courtesy to the country that had agreed to allow the search within their territorial waters, and below that the IMU flag bearing the anchor on a unicorn, the crest of Jack’s seafaring ancestors and a recognition of the donated land from the Howard estate that formed the main IMU base beside the Fal Estuary in Cornwall. She was the second IMU vessel to bear the name, the first having been lost almost ten years before to a battle with a warlord in the eastern Black Sea during their search for Atlantis. The second Seaquest and her sister ship, Sea Venture, were multirole scientific research vessels, in keeping with IMU’s expanded brief over the last decade not only to be at the forefront of archaeological exploration but also to spearhead other aspects of oceanographic research. Like the Royal Navy’s latest Echo-class vessels, she was equipped for full hydrographic survey, including multibeam echo sounders, a side-scan sonar, and a sub-bottom profiler, as well as an integrated navigation system of bow and azimuth thrusters and propellers within a swivelling pod that allowed her to hold a precise position over the seabed in all but the worst weather conditions. Her defensive capability was also closely based on the Echo-class vessels, with a retractable twin 20 mm Oerlikon pod set below her foredeck and two 7:62 mm general-purpose machine guns, an essential provision given the fate of her predecessor and namesake and the threat of piracy when she was conducting operations in unpoliced international waters.

In other respects Seaquest and Sea Venture formed a unique class with many features designed from the bottom up by Jack and his team. At a little over 6,000 tons and 120 meters in length, they were larger than her naval counterparts, with a top speed of 25 knots and a range of up to 12,000 nautical miles, which made them capable of extended deep-ocean voyages. Behind the bridge lay an extended accommodation block for up to thirty researchers and technicians, including state-of-the-art labs for the conservation and analysis of finds and below that an engineering facility custom-designed by Costas for the maintenance of the ship’s remote- and autonomous-operated vehicles and manned submersibles. The submersibles hangar opened out on to a unique internal docking facility on either side of the propeller shaft toward the stern, allowing divers and vehicles to enter and exit safely even in extreme weather conditions.

The Lynx banked low, its rotor kicking up a halo of spray as it held position some five hundred meters off the ship’s port side, allowing Jack to see her more closely. Behind the accommodation block lay the helipad and the aft operations deck, the focus of most activity when they were working on a site. Jack cast a critical eye over the equipment visible in the stern. The main purpose of the refit had been to install an upgraded derrick for raising and lowering Zodiacs and submersibles, and he could see it extended over the starboard side, the cradle they had made for the sarcophagus sitting on the deck beside it. The derrick had passed its sea trials off Cornwall with flying colors, but it was having its first proper outing here. Jack remembered years before watching the Tudor warship Mary Rose being raised from the Solent, and the terrifying moment as the hull surfaced and the cradle slipped. That had also been in the glare of the world’s media, and he knew that Captain Macalister would be putting the derrick through every possible safety check to try to ensure that there was no brush with disaster this time around.

Jack watched a group of technicians in IMU overalls and safety helmets begin to release the derrick from its deck restraints and roll out the winch. IMU’s greatest assets were not equipment but personnel, and he knew he had the best. Over the years he had assembled a crack team, a mix of old friends and fresh talent, many of them bridging the divide between commercial and military experience and the strong focus on scholarship and research that drove all Jack’s projects forward. Unlike those of treasure hunters, their jobs were not on the line every time they embarked on a new quest, counting the cost hour by hour, holding out for prize money that rarely came. IMU operations were financed entirely from an endowment that released Jack from ever having to raise funds or satisfy investors. It had been a dream of his from the time when he ran student expeditions from a battered old van and an ex-navy inflatable, a dream realized when one of his most stalwart expedition divers, Efram Jacobovich, had ridden the wave of the software boom that was making huge fortunes when they had been students. Fifteen years later he backed Jack’s budding institute with an operating budget far larger than that of any other oceanographic institute in the world. Jack still had to answer to a board of directors. But with their criteria being scientific merit and feasibility rather than financial profit, he was in a unique position among undersea explorers able to mount multimillion-dollar projects. Above all, he was freed from ever having to consider selling artifacts; all their finds went on museum display or were part of the cycle of travelling exhibits that had brought their discoveries to audiences around the world. It was one commitment that Jack shared with Colonel Vyse, the British officer who had extracted the sarcophagus from the pyramid and dispatched it on its ill-fated voyage to the British Museum in 1838. Jack was determined that it should go to the best possible place for display as well as for its own security, and if that meant reneging on their offer to return it to Egypt, then so be it.

Beyond the rotor downdraft, the sea was millpond calm, and it took an effort to imagine the storm winds on that December day in 1838 and the abyss that lay beneath. Since their find of the chariots in the Red Sea, and touching the manuscript fragments from the Geniza in Cairo, biblical phrases had been running through Jack’s mind, snatches of verse he had remembered from chapel at boarding school. And darkness lay on the face of the deep. Far below them, unimaginably deep, in the place that creation had forgotten, lay the wreck of Beatrice, the ancient sarcophagus in its hull standing stark above the silt like the tomb of a long-forgotten sea god. That was temptation enough for any archaeologist, but it was not just the sarcophagus itself that had brought Jack back here. It was what Colonel Vyse had packed inside, a surprise for the museum, perhaps a sweetener to persuade the trustees to continue to sponsor his excavations. It was something that he himself had not recorded and was lost to history until that dive when Jack and Costas had brought it back to light.

When Jack had swept the silt from the plaque, he had been astonished to see the sun symbol of Akhenaten, a pharaoh who had lived over a thousand years after the mummy of Menkaure had been sealed within the sarcophagus. It was only after they had found a second Akhenaten plaque in the desert, one with a depiction showing the pyramids, that Jack had made sense of it, realizing that Akhenaten had taken over the pyramid as a portal into the underground complex beneath the Giza plateau that he and Costas had glimpsed for a few precious moments three months ago far below the burial chamber. Inside that chamber, perhaps mounted above the portal, Colonel Vyse had unwittingly found a clue to what might have been the most extraordinary discovery ever made in Egyptology. His decision not to mention the plaque and its loss in the wreck — perhaps to avoid criticism for not having recorded it — was to keep the world in ignorance until now. Jack had been clutching at straws since them, desperately hoping for clues to another entrance into the complex, a discovery he might make before Egypt shut down on him entirely. Coming back to the wreck was part of that trail. The plaque had been missing a section from one side, and he was hoping against hope that the lost fragment would be buried in the silt nearby.

The pilot’s voice came through his headphones. “Jack, we’re holding off for another fifteen minutes or so while a helo ahead of us delivers a film crew. As soon as they’ve cleared the helipad, we’re good to go.”

“Roger that, Charlie,” Jack replied. “I’ll use the time to get up to speed on the site. I don’t think I’m going to get much chance for that once I’m on board. And our colleague could always use a little more beauty sleep.”

“Roger that,” the pilot said. “I’ll advise you.”

A noise like a snorting water buffalo came through the intercom, and Jack pushed Costas up again and wedged him beside the window. He took out his iPad, attached the keyboard, propped it on his knees, and opened a ghostly image of the sarcophagus as he and Costas had first seen it from the submersible three months before. There was no indication that any other antiquities had been on board the ship, and the decision had been made not to excavate the site any further than was required to clear a large enough space to feed the cushioned winch cables beneath the sarcophagus preparatory to lifting it. He touched the screen and opened up the image that had brought them to this spot in the first place, a previously unknown watercolor that had appeared in an auction a few months earlier showing Beatrice in the harbor of Smyrna in Turkey. On the back had been a pencilled note made years later by the captain of the ship — George Wichelo, a man thought to have died in the wreck — giving its location in this bay a few nautical miles north of Valencia, resolving a mystery that had led undersea explorers on numerous false trails over the years in the hunt for the fabled lost sarcophagus.

The artist had accurately shown Beatrice as a brig, with foremast and mainmast and the boom for a spanker over the stern. Despite being on the cusp of the Victorian era, only a generation away from the transformation to steam power, Beatrice was indistinguishable in appearance from her forbears of the Napoleonic Wars period. She still bore the checkerboard “Nelson pattern” of gunports that merchantmen in the Mediterranean retained against Barbary pirates from North Africa, still a threat in the early 1830s when the painting had been made. He tapped the screen again and brought up a three-dimensional visualization of the wreck that Lanowski had completed a few days before, based on weeks of survey using a high-precision multibeam sonar array mounted on a remote-operated vehicle flown a few meters above the seabed.

The program allowed a virtual fly-around of the site, and Jack swept his fingers across the screen to get as many angles as possible. The wreckage had been rendered in metallic gray to distinguish it from the sediment in which it had been partly buried. He could clearly see the lines of protruding frames and the regular mounds that were all that was left of her iron deck knees, the results of a refit that provided the only concession to modernity in a hull otherwise built in time-honored fashion using timbers and copper nails. The sarcophagus and the ship’s sixteen guns had been rendered in white, highlighting the elements with the greatest inert weight that might have affected the ship’s freeboard and stability. In a way that Jack had not appreciated on the seabed, the visualization showed how all the starboard guns had shifted to the port side and how the sarcophagus was also off center, as if straining on the cordage that must once have held it in place.

There was little doubt in Jack’s mind what had caused the wreck. Lanoswki’s simulation had shown that even with extra compensating ballast, she would have been dangerously unstable with the sarcophagus on deck, three tons of granite that would have unbalanced a ship of little more than 200 tons deadweight. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to imagine the sea as it must have looked on that winter’s day when the ship had come to grief in the bay. Her last known ports of call had been Valetta in Malta and then Leghorn, modern Livorno, far up the Italian coast. At that time of year, Wichelo may have encountered strong northeasterlies all the way from Alexandria, and decided to claw his way up the western shore of Italy rather than attempting to sail due west from Malta with the risk of being blown into the North African shore and any awaiting corsairs. From Leghorn it would have been plain sailing with a northeasterly mistral behind him across the Gulf of Lyons, an exhilarating run when all went well, with the hope of rounding the southern coast of Spain into the Strait of Gibraltar. For some reason, perhaps because the wind became a gale, perhaps because the recent refit had given the vessel more leeway than the captain had been used to, perhaps because the lading of his cargo had made the ship less maneuverable — probably a combination of all these factors — his course and the coast of Spain converged just north of Valencia. Had they rounded the next headland, they might have made Valencia. As it was, the bay where they came to grief offered no shelter and only a jagged rocky shore dropping off to great depth, so there was little hope of grounding the ship or saving its cargo.

The sarcophagus had been lashed down and wedged with beams but would still have been vulnerable to a sudden roll. The captain would have done his best to avoid broaching to — coming beam-on to the waves — knowing that a roll could cause the sarcophagus to strain against its lashings and break free. Although the ship’s guns were only lightweight six- and nine-pounders, they still weighed over half a ton apiece and must have been part of the problem in her final moments. The eight guns on her starboard side broke free of their carriages and crashed to port as the ship heeled over, adding to the displaced weight of the sarcophagus and making recovery impossible. But then as the port gunwale became submerged, she took on such a weight of water so quickly that she came upright again as she sank, keeping the sarcophagus from tumbling overboard and providing enough cushioning in the hull structure to protect it from damage when the ship hit the seafloor.

The sudden swamping had been fortunate for the preservation of the sarcophagus, but less so for the crew. As always Jack reflected on the human cost, on the terror of those final moments. It probably took only seconds for the ship to sink, taking with it anyone belowdecks and sucking down the others in the vortex. It was a minor miracle that anyone should have survived, and more so that it should have been Captain Wichelo himself, a man assumed to have gone down with the ship but whose pencilled note years later on the back of the watercolor had shown otherwise. Jack felt certain that his survival was an accident of fate; there would have been no time for anyone deliberately to abandon ship. He remembered the time he had spent in the crow’s nest of a cadet training ship when he had learned to sail, and imagined that Wichelo might have scrambled up to the maintop in the search for a safe anchorage and then been thrown clear when the ship heeled over and the masts dipped into the waves.

Wichelo’s disappearance after coming ashore was not difficult to fathom. He was an experienced captain who had taken Beatrice many times across the Atlantic and through the Mediterranean, who must have looked death in the face before. He would have been bound by the immemorial custom of the sea that a captain is always the last to leave his ship. That custom was so deeply embedded in the seafarers’ code that even a hint of suspicion among friends and colleagues that he had put his own life before others might have been too much for him to bear. He might also have been doing a favor to his beneficiaries, knowing that the insurance claim would stand a better chance of succeeding if he were not there to give evidence of unsafe lading that as an honest man he might have been unable to conceal. He would have known that he had taken a risk in accepting the cargo, and that the price of failure was absolute.

Jack imagined the scene with Colonel Vyse on the docks at Alexandria, a stone’s throw from Qaitbey Fortress and the place where the Geniza poet Halevi had landed from Spain in the twelfth century. Wichelo would have been a good captain for Vyse to approach, one with an established reputation who perhaps had taken antiquities before for clients to England. Vyse might have been less concerned with the suitability of the ship itself for his particular cargo, his blunderings in the pyramid suggesting that he lacked a good eye for the logistics of transport. But he was a wealthy man who would have offered Wichelo a handsome remuneration, perhaps enough to secure a comfortable retirement capped by the small fame of being the man who had brought the centerpiece of the British Museum’s collection safely from Egypt. If Wichelo had declined, there would have been others eager to accept. He would have known that his ship was not ideal and that the summer sailing season was coming to an end, but he was swayed by the rewards. It was always a precarious business being a ship’s captain, with the lion’s share of the glory if a venture succeeded but a quick fall to ignominy if things went wrong.

Jack touched the screen to bring up Lanowski’s second CGI, an animation that he had not wanted to see until he had worked it through in his own mind. He smiled as he saw the ghostly image of the ship, exact in every particular of a brig’s standing and running rigging. The attention to detail was just like Lanowski. He had shown Wichelo gambling on a full spread of canvas, with the rudder hard over to port in an attempt to steer parallel with the coast. As the bay loomed, the topsails were furled and the ship suddenly broached on to the waves, heeling over and swamping. As if in an X-ray through the hull, he could see the sarcophagus shift and the starboard guns break free and tumble to port, and then the ship submerging, coming upright again, and hitting the seabed almost a thousand meters below in a cloud of silt before sliding to a rest.

Jack stared at the screen. “Bingo,” he said quietly. He now felt fully prepped for what lay ahead. He took the iPad apart and slotted it into his backpack, and then brought his mind back to the present and to Captain Macalister on Seaquest. He was as embedded in nautical tradition as Wichelo had been. As captain he had final say on all operations carried out on board, not just navigation but also diving and exploration.

Since finding the wreck three months previously, the work to map and evaluate the site had been in the hands of a highly experienced project director, and Jack had no intention of taking over. His role with Costas was to be on the seabed to secure the cradle and look for anything that might be revealed as the sarcophagus was lifted free. Jack knew the pressure that Macalister would now be under, with the countdown into its final phase and the focus on safety for the equipment operators as well as for the divers in the water.

Jack watched the other helicopter rise from the ship, swoop low over the bay, and then disappear beyond the rocky shoreline. He thought back to Egypt, to Hiebermeyer and his desperate race against time to complete the necropolis excavation before the forces of darkness descended. At least here they were working in full cooperation with the Spanish authorities, and the only political dimension was one created by IMU itself, to use the raising of the sarcophagus as leverage with the Egyptian authorities to allow Hiebermeyer to finish his work and to secure the release of the student in Cairo. With prime-time media across the world prepped for the event this afternoon, and with the return of the sarcophagus to Egypt hardwired into the story, the pressure on the antiquities director in Cairo would be considerable. That had been their gamble in letting in the film crews, but with the additional situation with the girl, it had seemed a gamble worth taking. He drummed his fingers against the side of the seat. If the weather held. If the new derrick cooperated. If there was no other glitch. He shut his eyes, mouthing the words that had become his mantra: Lucky Jack.

The pilot came over the intercom. “Jack, we’re going in now.”

“Roger that.”

Costas suddenly shot awake, blinking hard, his face beaming with excitement. “I’ve got it, Jack. I’ve got it. I know how to fix Little Joey. And I’m starving. Take us home, Charlie.”

CHAPTER 13

Twenty minutes later Jack opened the door of the conference room on Seaquest to a blaze of camera flashes and shouted greetings. He held up a hand, smiling, and scanned the room. He counted at least twenty-five journalists, some of them familiar faces who had followed his projects for years, others big-name foreign correspondents who had been attracted not only by the drama of the sarcophagus but also by the political dimension of its return to Egypt.

There was a large contingent of Spanish reporters, and as Jack made his way behind the table at the head of the room, he quickly shook hands with the two representatives of the Spanish Ministry of Culture who were sitting there. Beside them was James Macalister, a short, dapper man with a white beard, immaculate in his uniform with the braid of a captain on his shoulders. Space had been left for Jack between Costas and the project manager, and as he sat down Macalister leaned back and spoke to him. “We’ve done the background on the Beatrice and the sarcophagus, and run through the logistics. You’re just here for a quick meet and greet.” Jack nodded, and Macalister stood up, addressing the room.

“All of you will be familiar with Jack Howard, who has just arrived on board Seaquest with Dr. Kazantzakis. They’ll be on the seabed supervising the raising of the sarcophagus, and you’ll be getting broadcast-quality live feed from them. There’ll be plenty of opportunities after that for interviews. Right now this is just a chance to say hello.”

A woman in the front row raised her hand, waving it in the air. “What were you doing in Egypt, Jack? You were spotted at the airport at Sharm el — Sheikh.”

Jack groaned inwardly but kept his cool. The journalist who had asked the question was one of his most ardent fans, but also a blunt instrument as far as the politics were concerned. She was one of the main reasons why he preferred to avoid any kind of press conference before a project was over, but he knew that to try to deny his presence would only stoke up her interest further. “Just checking out the dive resorts. Dr. Kazantzakis tells me that with IMU it’s all work, no play, so I was looking into doing something about it.”

There was a titter of amusement from the others, but the woman persisted. “We had a round-robin in the office guessing what mystery Jack Howard would be trying to solve in the Red Sea. The best we could come up with was the biblical Exodus, the story of Pharaoh’s lost chariot army.”

Jack look at her unblinkingly and smiled broadly. “Now that would be a find. If I ever make it, you’ll be the first to know. Meanwhile, I’m delighted that you’re all here for this afternoon’s show. Captain Macalister and his team have been working around the clock to get everything ready. I’m looking forward to spending time with you later.”

Macalister held up his hand. “That’s it. There will be another briefing here with the project manager at 1430 hours, and then if all goes according to plan you will be allowed on the starboard bridge wing with your cameras to film the recovery. Meanwhile you are required to remain in this room or your quarters, with the deck strictly out-of-bounds for your own safety. Thank you for your attention.”

Jack and Costas quickly got up and followed Macalister out of the room, past the two security men stationed there to enforce the captain’s instructions. Macalister turned to Jack.

“That was close.”

“Let’s hope we can keep this operation on track to give them what they’re expecting. I won’t answer any more questions from journalists about Egypt until everything is resolved there.”

Macalister pushed open the door to his day cabin and ushered them in. The room was already occupied by IMU’s security chief, Ben Kershaw, a former Royal Marine who had also worked for MI6, the British secret intelligence service. He was standing at the window with a satellite phone, but lowered it as the others entered. He quickly shook hands with Jack and Costas and then sat down with them at the conference table at one end of the room. Jack poured himself a glass of water and leaned forward, his eyes steely. “Okay, Ben. Tell us what you’ve got.”

“I followed our plan not to involve diplomatic channels except as a last resort. I used personal contacts from my intelligence days in Egypt. I now know exactly where she’s being held, in the lower ground floor of the Ministry of Culture building in Cairo, where the conservation labs have been converted into interrogation chambers.”

“Archaeology meets the modern world,” Costas said grimly.

“Our plan was to go to the antiquities director to see if he could exert leverage to get the girl released. I couldn’t get any response, and then Professor Dillen intervened. As chair of the IMU board of directors, he was in on this from the start.”

Jack took a sip of coffee. “I know why. About ten years ago, Ibn Afar tried to obtain an archaeological qualification in Britain, when he had his eye on the top job in the Egyptian ministry. He showed up in Cambridge thinking he could bribe his way into a master’s degree by promising future excavation permits to anyone who helped him. Dillen was the only one who didn’t dismiss him outright but sat down and explained how things work in the West and then arranged for him to start off as a volunteer at the British Museum. That didn’t last long, predictably, but I know that once he was back in Egypt working his way up the greasy pole, he often contacted Dillen to ask for references and endorsement, seeing him as a kind of patron.”

“They had a phone conversation this morning,” Ben said. “Dillen told him that the offer to return the sarcophagus to Egypt still stood, and that Ibn Afar would have all the limelight. But he also told him that there would be no movement until the girl was released. Dillen and I had already agreed that we should give him a two-day ultimatum. With the sarcophagus being raised today, Ibn Afr was told that the press would be clamoring to know its destination and that the Spanish authorities would reinstate their claim to ownership if it looked as if there was uncertainty. Of course, we all know that the Spanish government, UNESCO, and IMU will no longer condone the plan to return the sarcophagus to Egypt given the present political circumstances, but Ibn Hafr is in Cairo cocooned from reality and won’t necessarily guess that. But he’s wily enough to know a veiled threat when he sees one. If he fails to come up with the goods, three days from now he suffers international humiliation and opprobrium when it’s revealed that the decision to return the sarcophagus has been revoked and his name is linked with the arrest of the girl.”

“So what was his response?” Jack said, finishing his drink.

Ben leaned forward, clasped his hands together, and stared at Jack. “There’s a trial due in two days’ time. She’ll be in the dock with a hundred or so others. The accusation is read out, and they are convicted and sentenced to death.”

“A death sentence?” Jack exclaimed. “That’s outrageous. For being accused of stealing a scrap of medieval manuscript?”

“Ibn Hafr says that he’ll try his best to get her off. My intelligence source says that as things stand he will probably succeed. Antiquities theft was of more concern to the old regime than to the extremists, and they’re more interested in cases of apostasy or adultery. If there are actually going to be executions, those will be the ones to go first. My source says that Ibn Hafr will make a big show of the difficulty and how he’s putting himself on the line, and that we should go along with that; it’s all part of the game. But we should hold him absolutely to the deadline, which stands at 1030 hours two days from now.”

“To the second,” Jack said coldly.

“There’s one big if in all this,” Costas interjected. “If things stay as they are. If there’s a meltdown and the extremists take over in two days’ time, then we’ve lost her.”

“She won’t be the only one,” Ben said. “If there’s a takeover, the hundreds awaiting execution now will be joined by thousands more. My source is expecting a complete purge of government ministries.”

Costas shook his head. “Roll on the Dark Ages.”

“We have to try to be optimistic,” Jack said. “Egypt isn’t like Iraq or Afghanistan, brutalized by dictatorship or decades of war. We’re talking about a civilized and decent people who will not allow themselves to be taken to the cage without a fight.”

Macalister looked grim. “Not so easy when your oppressors are psychopaths who have been building up a head of steam for over a hundred years.”

“There’s always the military option,” Ben said.

Jack stared at him. “Are you suggesting that we invade like the British did in 1882, and again in 1956? With the right force you might push the extremists out of Cairo, but then you’d be likely creating an insurgent war like the one the coalition fought in Iraq, with the same cocktail of terrorism, suicide bombings, and an enemy who disappears and rematerializes as soon as you think you’ve scored a success. The civilian population would soon become too weakened and demoralized to resist. And any Western intervention in Egypt now would be seen by hard-liners elsewhere as tantamount to an alliance with Israel. Any radicalized regime not yet in open conflict with Israel would soon join in. We’d be stoking up World War Three.”

Ben leaned over the table and looked at him intently. “You know the other military option, Jack. You’ve been in special forces.”

“You mean targeted assassinations?” Jack pursed his lips. “I was involved in two ops against leadership targets in the Middle East. I was just a ferryman, a temporary naval officer who happened to be good at driving Zodiacs. One op was a success, the other an abort. But if you want to hear about the tit-for-tat consequences of those ops, go no further than Engineer Lieutenant Commander Kazantzakis of the U.S. Navy Reserve, who won his Navy Cross rescuing seamen blown into the water from his ship in a copycat attack of the terrorist assault on USS Cole, provoked by a similar U.S. special forces assassination attempt.”

Costas looked at Ben. “I was at the debrief with the SEAL team who did the op. That was back before 9/11, and the conclusion even then with targeted assassinations was that you cut off one head, and another one grows in its place. Since then the bad guys have become very good at creating the infrastructure to absorb punishment. Kill one Taliban commander, and five others are there to take his place. The extremists in Egypt must have a tight command structure, but they’ve been very careful not to publicize their leadership. Assassination is useful only if the target is a known quantity and a big name.”

Jack tapped his pencil on the table. “Which brings us back to archaeology, and to the people of Egypt. Archaeology is the greatest weapon we have against extremism. Egypt more than any other country in the world has become dependent on archaeology for its livelihood. From the lowliest camel driver on the Giza plateau to the hotel owners and the tour guides, archaeology provides the lifeblood of the nation. That’s what we’ve got to marshal in this battle. It could be the first time that archaeology — the place of archaeology in the modern world and people’s lives — provides the critical groundswell for a popular uprising. Right now, that’s what we’re in this game for. We’re talking about saving people’s lives.”

Ben nodded. “Let’s hope it happens in time for a frightened girl and her family in Cairo.”

Jack stared bleakly around the table. He knew what Aysha would say: inshallah. He took a deep breath. “Okay. We’re done here. Thanks for everything, Ben. Keep me in the loop.”

Costas stood up. “I can finally get to the engineering lab. No time for Little Joey, but I want to run some final diagnostics on the gimbal in the submersible. There’s something I need to adjust. And I haven’t had a go with the new derrick yet.”

Macalister glanced at his watch. “Meet on deck at 1500 hours, dive at 1530. Let’s try to keep to the schedule.”

Jack pushed his chair back. “Roger that. On deck one hour from now. Enough time for me to get some shuteye. See you then.”

Ten minutes later Jack closed the door of his cabin and lay back on his bunk, suddenly realizing how tired he was. His cabin was just below the bridge, its portholes looking out over the foredeck and to starboard. He glanced around at his most treasured belongings — the cases of old books, the battered old chest first taken to sea by an ancestor of his on an East Indiaman three hundred years before, the artifacts and photographs that covered the walls. More so than anywhere else, more than his rooms in the old Howard estate in Cornwall, his cabin on Seaquest was where he felt most at home, anchored by familiarity. This was where he dreamed of new discoveries, and yet it was also where the reality when he wakened and felt the tremor of the ship’s engines was more hard edged and exciting than anything he could imagine.

He stared at the wall opposite, at the hanging brass gauntlet from India in the shape of a tiger and above that a painting that Rebecca had done of the Jewish menorah from the temple in Jerusalem, the lost ancient treasure that had taken him on a quest halfway around the world when she was just a child. He was now only a flight away from seeing her, and yet when he closed his eyes it was not her he saw but the immediate task ahead of him, the inky darkness a thousand meters below and the extraordinary scene that he and Costas had seen three months before when they had discovered the wreck of the Beatrice and the ancient sarcophagus. He tried to relax, thinking of nothing but the sensation of being underwater, but his mind kept returning to the nagging question that had driven him to return here. Was the missing fragment of the plaque of Akhenaten still inside the sarcophagus? Did it contain the clue that he so desperately wanted, the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle that would justify a return to Egypt and their unfinished quest beneath the pyramid?

“Dr. Howard. Time to go.”

Jack opened his eyes, sat bolt upright, and stared at the chronometer beside his bed. He had been out for almost half an hour. He stood up and took a swig of water from a bottle on his desk, and then the coffee proffered by the crewman. He quickly drank half the cup. “What’s the state of play?”

“Costas is already in the water.”

“What? In the sub? He’s supposed to wait for me.”

“He wanted to get it submerged to check the gimbal, to make sure it’ll keep the sub trim and level. He realized that the only way he could do it was to have it in the water for a shallow-water trial. All’s going well. He should be finished and on the surface by the time you get on deck.”

Jack drained the rest of the coffee and handed back the mug. “Thanks. Two minutes to change into my overalls and I’m there.” The crewman ducked away down the corridor, and Jack stripped off his outer clothes and pulled on the orange IMU overalls that had been hanging behind his door. They were more comfortable in the confined space of the bathysphere, and cooler if the heat ramped up. He had to steel himself to spending the next few hours cooped up inside a metal and Perspex ball barely big enough to fit the two of them crouched down, something that preyed on a lingering claustrophobia he had battled since a near-death experience diving in a mine shaft when he was a boy. He splashed some water on his face, wiped it on his sleeve, and stooped out the door into the passageway. He kept his own personal demon at bay by focusing his mind on the objective. This was not just about the plaque, about his burning personal quest. It was also about ensuring that the sarcophagus was successfully winched to the surface, a huge achievement in itself but also a carrot to dangle in front of the egomaniacal tyrant in charge of the Egyptian antiquities service who might thus be persuaded to save a young woman from an appalling fate.

Jack slid on his hands down the rails of the stairway to the main deck level, swung open the hatch, and stood in the full glare of the sunlight on the foredeck below the bridge, cursing himself for having forgotten his sunglasses. In front of him the new red derrick was swung off to starboard, its cable taut where the submersible was held over the side of the ship. Jack grabbed a hard hat from the bin beside the hatch and went over to the rail. Looking down he could see the submersible awash in the azure blue of the Mediterranean. Out of the water it was ungainly, its manipulator arms making it look like some giant insect, with racks of compressed air cylinders and piping on either side. In the water it was another story entirely. A streamlined yellow carapace covered the pressurized bathysphere and double-lock chamber, a crucial feature that allowed divers to enter and egress. The vectored-thrust propellers allowed an extraordinary precision of movement and position holding, perfect for archaeological work and the task ahead of them almost a thousand meters below on the seabed.

Macalister came alongside him, and they both watched as the submersible rose higher and Costas came into view through the Perspex viewing dome. Jack glanced at his watch. The journalists would be having their second briefing now, and soon afterward be expecting to set up their cameras. Before that the submersible would have to be raised out of the water and placed on its cradle on the deck in order for Jack to get inside. Then it would be winched out again. If this was going to be in full view of the world’s media, they needed everything to run as smoothly as possible and not allow filming until they were in the water again and certain that everything was good to go.

Macalister pressed the earphone he was wearing and bent down to listen more clearly and then straightened up, gave a thumbs-up, and made a whirling motion with his hand, looking back at the derrick operator. He turned to Jack. “That was Costas, and he’s ready to come up. He said it was crucial to trial it, and the issue’s resolved.”

“You mean he got itchy feet, and just couldn’t resist taking it for a joyride.”

Macalister grinned, and signalled again to the derrick operator.

The cable creaked, and the motor screeched. There was a sudden lurch, and the cable began paying out rapidly from the derrick, coiling in the sea around the submersible. Jack glanced back in alarm and saw the derrick operator frantically pulling the emergency hand brake. Jack looked at the submersible. At least it was buoyant, not dependent on the winch to keep it afloat. But as he watched, the top of the submersible dipped beneath the waves, and then was submerged. Jack’s heart began to pound. Something was wrong.

“It’s the cable,” Macalister shouted. “The coils have fallen on top of the submersible, weighing it down.”

Jack stared at the cable. At least fifty meters had been paid out. If the weight of the cable forced the submersible down to a depth of ten meters, then the volume of air in its ballast tanks would be halved and it would sink of its own accord. It would come to a halt only when it reached the maximum extent of the cable. Jack tossed off his hard hat, grabbed another intercom headset from its stand, and put it on. “Costas, do you read me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Blow the ballast tanks. There’s a malfunction in the derrick, and about fifty meters of coiled cable has dropped onto you.”

“No can do, Jack. Something’s jamming the valve.”

Jack stared at the wavering form of the submersible just beneath the surface. He could just see where a coil of cable had caught around the manifold linking together the rack of compressed air cylinders on one side. The submersible suddenly sank deeper and the coil disengaged, swirling around with the rest of the cable in the water below the derrick. “Okay,” Jack said. “A coil of cable was caught around it. Try now.”

“Still no good. The drag from the cable must have somehow closed the external valve.”

Jack turned back to the derrick operator. “Can you hold it?” he shouted.

The man gave a thumbs-up, his other hand still on the brake. “I should be able to hold it once it reaches the maximum extent already paid out. That’s fifty-seven meters from the top of the derrick. But I can’t guarantee for how long. After that, it’s a thousand-meter payout.”

Jack turned back to the water. The submersible was nearly out of sight now, sinking more rapidly, the cable unwinding and straightening out above it. Two men with tool kits rushed up to the derrick, removed the panel over the electronic controls, and tried to isolate the problem.

Beside Jack the two safety divers were quickly finishing kitting up. Jack cupped his hand over the mike so that Costas could hear against the noise. “You’re going to come to a halt at about fifty meters depth. The divers should be able to free the valve. Failing that, you can do an emergency egress through the double-lock chamber, and they’ll escort you to the surface. You copy that?”

“Copy, Jack. But there’s another problem. It’s also cut off my breathing air. The carbon dioxide levels in the bathysphere are already in the red. I’ve only got a few minutes before blackout.”

Jack stared at the two safety divers, his mind racing through the options. They had just zipped up their E-suits and were donning air cylinders. The cable suddenly became taut, and the derrick jolted. “Okay,” he said into the mike. “The divers are less than a minute away from entry. Do you copy?”

There was a pause, and Costas’ voice when it came through sounded distant. “Copy that. I’m on the way out, Jack. My legs and arms are tingling.”

Jack stared at the cable, watching the water shimmer off it. In the space of a few minutes, a routine equipment check had turned into a deadly crisis. He felt his breathing and heart rate slow, as if he were making time itself slow down to stretch out the seconds so that he could run through all the options. The divers had only the compressed air tanks they used for shallow-water safety checks and maintenance. It would take too long now to rig them up with mixed gas or rebreathers. With compressed air, they were limited to fifty meters, maybe twenty meters beyond that in an extreme emergency, but no more. If the cable ran free again and the submersible plummeted beyond that depth, there was only one option left for rescue, one that he would never allow another member of his team to take.

And then it happened. The derrick screeched and the cable began to feed out again. Jack ripped off the headphones and glanced back to the derrick operator, seeing where the others had leapt forward to help him try to hold the brake, their tools cast aside. The cable was falling fast, dropping the submersible far beyond air-diving depth now. Jack turned, feeling as if he were in slow motion. His vision tunneled, his metabolism slowed as if he were already in dive response, his system anticipating what his brain was telling it and doing all it could to maximize his chances of survival. He blew on his nose to clear his ears, keeping his nose pinched, and with his other hand scooped up the weight belt of one of the divers, holding it tight and bounding to the edge of the deck beside the cable. He was barely conscious of those around him, of Macalister’s shocked face, of the two divers too stunned to move, of voices behind yelling at him not to do it.

He stared into the abyss. All he thought of was the darkness, and Costas.

He breathed fast, gulping in the air, took a final deep lungful, and jumped.

CHAPTER 14

Jack had just enough time to cross his ankles and arms to present minimal resistance before he hit the water, his right hand pinching his nose ready to equalize the pressure in his ears and sinuses and his other hand wrapped around the diver’s weight belt he had grabbed just before leaving the deck. He knew that the cable from the derrick to the submersible was only a few meters away, and with the dead weight of the belt he would plummet directly on target without having to angle sideways.

In the seconds it took him to leave the deck, his mind had flashed through the physiology of free diving: the possibility of middle ear and sinus rupture if he failed to equalize, and the inevitability of lung barotrauma and blood shift into the capillaries as his chest cavity was squeezed. Yet there was also the reflexive response of the body to being underwater, the reduction of metabolic rate that could allow him to remain conscious for the crucial few extra seconds he might need to reach the submersible and open the air-tank manifold to give Costas a chance of survival.

Below him lay almost a thousand meters of water to the wreck of the Beatrice. At that depth without a pressure suit, his organs would be crushed, but he would have been dead a long time before that. With every ten meters of depth from the surface, his lungs would halve in volume, so that at fifty meters the air that had filled his lungs would occupy only one-fifth of that volume, at a hundred meters one-tenth. By a hundred and fifty meters, lung barotrauma was a near certainty. The constricting volume of his chest cavity would cause the membranes to rupture, and he would begin to drown in his own blood. By then, perhaps two minutes or two and a half minutes into the dive, he would be reaching the limit of his breath-holding endurance. At that point he would either give way and breathe in water, or black out because the increased carbon dioxide level in his body would trigger unconsciousness. Either way meant death. All he knew for certain was that the maximum free-diving depth ever achieved had been a little over 250 meters, less than a quarter of the depth of the water below him now and representing almost superhuman physiological endurance. If the submersible had dropped any deeper than that before he reached it, there could be only one possible outcome, for him as well as for Costas.

He was instinctively prepared for a shock of cold, but as he sliced into the water he felt the warmth of the Mediterranean envelop him. He knew that the cold would come, a rapid, numbing cold as he passed through the thermocline, and that the oxygen saturation in his brain was inducing a mild sense of euphoria, something that would wear off quickly as the oxygen was depleted. As he felt himself plummet, he concentrated on equalizing his ears, his eyes shut tight. To open them in the pellucid water would be to reveal the enormity of the darkness beneath him, something that would make even the strongest diver balk. He would do so only once he had passed the point of no return, once he knew that bailout was impossible.

Less than ten seconds after entering the water, he passed the first big thermocline, at this time of year at a depth of about thirty-five meters. Even if he dropped the weights, he knew that without fins he would stand no chance of returning to the surface now. The cold increased his sense of speed, his skin more sensitized to the water rushing past. Equalizing became easier as the pressure differential decreased, each halving of the air spaces in his body every ten meters now involving smaller and smaller volumes of gas. He was deeper than he had ever free-dived before — eighty, perhaps ninety meters — far beyond the safe depth for compressed-air diving, well into the death zone, where the chances of sudden unconsciousness increased dramatically with every meter of descent.

He felt a searing pain in his lungs, as if a clamp were compressing his chest from all sides, tightening with every second that passed. Even if there had been air to breathe, he felt that his chest could never bear the expansion. The cold was shocking now, as cold as the Arctic Ocean, further paralyzing him. He knew he had little time, maybe half a minute, no more. He opened his eyes. For a few seconds he was distracted from the agony in his body as he concentrated on trying to see. He looked down, blinking against the blur. Directly below him it was pitch dark, an absolute darkness like he had never seen before. He had the sense that he was sinking into it, that he had plummeted below the final gloom of natural light. He knew that meant he was at least 120 meters deep, probably closer to 150 meters. For an instant the pain seemed to leave him and he felt himself holding Rebecca tight, a memory of a moment when he had felt that his life had been most worthwhile, a moment of utter contentment. He forced himself out of it, back to reality. He needed to remain focused for his final seconds, even if it meant excruciating pain. Costas.

And then he saw it. A few meters below him, a suffused glow appeared, the emergency lighting of the submersible. He hit the cable and slid down it, the metal cutting into his exposed forearm. He crashed into the carapace of the submersible like an astronaut out of control on a spacewalk. He let go of the weight belt, which spun a crazy dance into the depths, disappearing out of sight below. He saw the recumbent form of Costas watching him through the viewing port of the bathysphere, his face distorted by the thick Perspex. He pulled himself over to the manifold linking the air cylinders together and found the wheel that opened the valve, seeing where it had been bent over by the cable falling on it. He pulled it anticlockwise. Nothing. He tried again, using every fiber of his being, every ounce of energy he had left. Still nothing. He suddenly felt the overwhelming urge to breathe, and began gagging, each reflex sending a jolt of pain through his lungs. He caught sight again of the face in the porthole. He could not give up now. He heaved one last time, and suddenly it gave way, cracking open. He spun the wheel around several times and pulled himself frantically down to the wheel that opened the double-lock chamber, spinning that too, feeling the hatch open inward and pulling himself inside, pushing it shut and slamming his hand down on the handle that opened the valve to fill it with air.

A deafening hiss filled his ears, and the water in the chamber became a raging maelstrom, lit up by the orange glow of the emergency lighting. Seconds later his head was above water, and he was gasping, taking in huge lungfuls of air, shuddering as the oxygen coursed through him. He coughed hard and saw a fine mist of red, evidence of some respiratory tissue damage but not enough to indicate major barotrauma. He saw blood drip from his nose, and he tipped his head up. He glanced at his watch; it had been a little over four minutes since he had last looked at it on the deck of the ship just before jumping. The depth gauge on the casing of the chamber showed 275 meters, and was increasing rapidly. In the course of tangling with the submersible, he had dropped through the threshold of possibility for free diving. Another ten meters and he would probably have been gone. He had been lucky.

The chamber emptied of water, the hissing stopped, and the hatch from the bathysphere clanged open. Costas’ head appeared through it. “Jack. Good of you to drop in.”

Jack coughed again, his voice hoarse, distant sounding. “Don’t mention it.”

“You okay?”

Jack tipped forward, a finger pressed against his nose. “Could use a tissue.”

Costas fumbled in the pocket of his overalls, leaned in, and passed over a scrunched ball of white. Jack took it, holding it cautiously. “Pre-used?”

“Tried and tested.”

Jack wet it, tore off a chunk, shoved it up his nostril, and held it there. He cautiously tipped forward again and saw that the bleeding had been stemmed. His breathing had nearly returned to normal, and he edged forward, noticing for the first time the gash like a deep rope burn on his left forearm where he had slid down the cable. Costas handed him a towel, a fleece, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms. “My spare clothes. A little short and a little wide, but who’s looking. Once we get into the bathysphere, we’ll dig out the first-aid kit for that arm.”

“You okay?”

“I was nearly gone, Jack. Seeing stars.” He jerked his head at the emergency oxygen bottle attached to the casing beside him. “Couldn’t risk using that because the air cutoff meant there was a pressure buildup inside the bathysphere, enough to make pure oxygen toxic. But it’s back to normal now.”

Jack rubbed the towel on his hair, feeling the ache in his head from the cold. “What’s our status?”

“We’re going to the bottom, Jack. When you opened the valve, it filled the bathysphere. We’ve got enough air for at least six hours. But there’s still a problem with the pipes to the ballast tanks. Right now I just have to concentrate on maintaining life support and keeping the sub stable and upright. Once we get within fifty meters of the seabed, I’ll activate the vertical water thrusters to soften the landing. If the vectored thrusters work as well, they might give us enough power to hop around like a big bug on the seabed, but not to rise more than a few meters without draining the battery.”

“How close will we be to the sarcophagus?”

“We should be dead on target.”

“Comms?”

“Dead as a dodo. The fiber-optic cable was severed. We have no way of communicating with the surface.”

“But they could still brake the cable before we hit the seabed.”

Costas shook his head. “Too much of it has been paid out. The weight of that amount of cable as well as the dead weight of the submersible would be too much by now for them to be able to halt the fall. The only way of repairing the winch will be to let the cable uncoil completely after having secured the upper end with the old derrick, and then attempt to repair the fault in the winch machinery. I was never happy with that new derrick, Jack. Too many corners were cut to get this show ready in time for the media, who now look as if they might not get a show at all. But we’ve got the best people topside, including the engineer from the shipyard who installed it, and with any luck we’ll be back on track soon. The biggest danger is the cable spooling off entirely and falling on us, two tons of metal dropping a thousand meters at about fifty meters a second, like a gigantic whip. If that happens, this submersible will become the second sarcophagus down there.”

“Meanwhile they’ll be sending down an ROV.”

“It’ll be on its way as we speak. My guys in the engineering lab will be onto it.”

“Okay.” Jack eased out of his wet clothes, realizing that he was shivering uncontrollably. He had hardly noticed it in the euphoria of survival, but now he felt the cold ache all over his skin, adding to the residual pain he felt in his chest. He towelled himself down as well as he could, pulled on Costas’ clothes, and followed him through the hatch into the bathysphere, sliding down into the copilot’s seat beside Costas. He leaned back, closing his eyes for a moment. “I never thought I’d be happy to be in a confined space, but this is that time.”

“Seat belts on, Jack. Brace yourself.”

Jack strapped himself in and watched Costas activate the thrusters. The three portholes in front of them showed pitch black. The external lights were still off. The depth gauge showed 820 meters, then 840. The thrusters came to life, slowing down the submersible and forcing Jack up in the seat against his belt. Costas activated the multibeam sonar, and a high-definition image appeared on the screen in front of them as it swept the seabed some eighty meters below. It revealed undulating sediment and then the familiar outline of the shipwreck, the scatter of guns clearly visible and the sarcophagus standing stark in the center, where the pit had been dug around it preparatory to lifting.

Costas flicked on the external strobe array, revealing a shimmer of reflected particles through the portholes, and then he took the joystick in his right hand while keeping his left on the water jet throttles. “Easy does it,” he muttered to himself. “I need to pull us a fraction off the vertical of the cable to avoid landing right on top of the sarcophagus. The vectored thrusters aren’t responding, but I should be able to do it by reducing the flow through the port-side vertical thrusters while keeping the starboard ones on full throttle.”

Jack could feel the vibration of the water jets on one side of the submersible, and watched the altitude gauge, measuring their height above the seabed. At twenty-two meters he could see a hint of something through the forward viewing port, and suddenly he was seeing the shipwreck, the dull green of brass guns covered with verdigris poking out of the sediment. Above the breech of one of them, he could see the distinctive heart-shaped bale mark of the East India Company, a little detail he had not noticed before when he had studied photos of the wreck. It opened up a small unexplained byway in the history of the ship that sent a frisson of excitement through him. And then with a soft explosion of sediment they came to a halt, 934 meters beneath Seaquest and the surface of the Mediterranean.

“The eagle has landed,” Costas said, releasing the controls.

The veil of sediment dropped, and the white form of the sarcophagus came into view only a few meters in front of the strobe array. Jack could clearly make out the architectural style of the carving, a geometric pattern that made the sarcophagus one of the greatest exemplars of sculpture from the Egyptian Old Kingdom, at the time of the building of the pyramids. For almost two hundred years, the only image that the world had seen of the sarcophagus had been a woodcut in Colonel Vyse’s account of his excavations. It showed the sarcophagus inside the burial chamber of the Pyramid of Menkaure. Now it was in front of them, looking almost as if it had been designed to be in this place, unaffected by the forces of nature that were steadily eroding and crumbling the wreck around it.

Costas tried the controls again. “They’ve gone dead. I can’t move them. That coil must have caused more damage than I thought.”

“So we’re not going anywhere. No big bug hopping on the seabed.”

Costas shook his head and lay back, stretching. “All we can do now is wait.” He reached down into a paper bag on his side. “Brought lunch with me. Didn’t have time topside. Sandwich?”

Jack felt as drained as he had ever felt, bone tired and aching all over, and he knew that when they surfaced, the medicos on Seaquest would want to give him a thorough road check. But meanwhile he was famished, and the idea of a picnic with his best friend trapped inside a submersible almost a kilometer deep in the abyss did not seem such a bad plan at all. He took the sandwich, and they ate together, occasionally swigging from a water bottle that Costas had placed between them. As Jack sat there munching, staring at one of the greatest archaeological discoveries they had ever made, he knew there was nowhere at this moment that he would rather be.

It felt good to be alive.

Twenty minutes later Jack finished wrapping a bandage around his forearm and stared out the front viewing port at the sarcophagus. Inside it he knew lay the plaque they had discovered on their dive to the wreck three months previously, something that Colonel Vyse must have found inside the pyramid and included as an added extra for the British Museum when he consigned his cargo to the Beatrice that day in 1837 in Alexandria harbor. It was not the plaque they had seen that had spurred Jack to come back here, as they had been able to record all the surviving carving three months earlier, but rather the hope that they might find the fragment a meter or so across that had been missing from one corner, the sharp edges suggesting that the break had been recent rather than ancient and might have taken place during the wrecking. The plaque had shown the Aten sun symbol superimposed on a plan of the pyramids at the Giza plateau, with the orb of the Aten in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure and the radiating lines extending eastward toward the site of modern-day Cairo and the Nile. There was a chance, just a chance, that the missing fragment might show the intersection of the thickest radiating line with the river at a point just south of modern Cairo, the clue that Jack needed to the location of another entrance into the underground complex that he and Costas had seen from beneath the pyramid.

Jack glanced across at Costas, who was absorbed in a mass of wiring that he had disengaged from the upper casing of the bathysphere. Jack tapped the viewing port. “Come and look at this. Tell me I’m seeing things.”

Costas grunted, left a pair of miniature pliers dangling from a wire, and slid over beside Jack. “What are you looking at?”

“About two meters in front of us, at eleven o’clock, nearly abutting the sarcophagus. Just visible sticking out of the silt.”

Costas pressed his face against the middle of the glass. “Doesn’t look like ship structure or fittings. Looks like it might be stone.”

“That’s what I thought. It’s off-white, like marble.”

“The missing fragment of the plaque?”

“Any chance of getting the manipulator arm to work?”

Costas jerked his head back toward the dangling mass of wires. “Not a chance, Jack. We’ve got life support, that’s all. Somehow when that coil hit the sub, it short-circuited the main electronics board. It’s more than I can fix down here.”

Jack stared at the few centimeters of white stone visible in the silt. So near, yet so far. It was close enough that he felt he could almost reach out and grab it, yet he may as well be trying to touch ice on Mars. He took a deep breath, feeling the ache in his lungs. He would have to wait and see where they stood with the excavation, whether the backup submersible or remote-operated vehicle could examine his find, something that would take precious time that he could ill afford if he were to return to Egypt before the country went into meltdown.

A swirl of sediment filled his view, and in the distortion through the left side of the port he saw a commotion on the seafloor. Apart from a few diaphanous fish, he had seen little sign of life in the desolation outside, and he peered with some curiosity, expecting something larger. Suddenly an eye appeared only inches away, staring directly at him, luminous, blinking, the size of a baseball. He jumped back, startled, and then saw the flexible metallic neck. “Costas, we’ve got a friend.”

Costas slid back alongside him. “Joey!” he exclaimed excitedly, putting his hand against the Perspex. “I knew he’d come. Good boy.”

The eye retracted, looking down, and a manipulator arm came into view and pivoted at the elbow and wrist. It had five metallic digits just like a human hand. Behind it Jack could see the yellow carapace covering the batteries and electric motor that powered the water jets, and an array of tools that Costas and his team had built into it, all of it operated from the surface via a fiber-optic cable that was just visible trailing off above. The forefinger of the hand pointed down at a tablet-sized LCD screen on the front of the ROV just below the manipulator arm, and Jack could just make out letters appearing on it, distorted through the Perspex cone of the viewing port. Costas pressed his face against the center of the cone, where there was the least distortion, and after a minute or so he rolled over and turned back to Jack.

“Joey’s inspected the manifold, and everything looks okay. They can’t reconnect our communications cable, so it’s going to have to be done the old-fashioned way, with written messages. The problem with the derrick was an electronic switch override, which the engineer has replaced. They’re currently recoiling the cable on the spool and expect to be ready to retrieve us in about twenty minutes. The recompression chamber is prepped and the medical team is waiting. You’re supposed to breathe pure oxygen.”

“I’m fine,” Jack said. “Tell them there’s no evidence of barotrauma.”

“You know what the medicos are like. And Joey’s watching.”

Jack grunted, pulled the oxygen mask from the emergency bottle beside his seat, cracked the valve, and pressed it against his mouth and nose. “Okay?” he said, his voice muffled.

Costas turned back to read the screen. “Meanwhile, Joey’s going to carry on snaking the hawser under the sarcophagus, the job we were meant to be doing. Now that they know we’re safe and sound, they’re going to carry on with the plan. As soon as we’re back on deck, the cable will be dropped again for Joey to attach to the hawser. Fortunately the media people haven’t yet been allowed out, so they’ll have no idea what’s happened, other than a small delay. They’ll be told that the decision was made to use the ROV rather than the manned submersible because Joey’s manipulator arm was better up to the task than the arms on the submersible. Which happens to be true.”

Jack stared out of the viewing port beside him at the white form of the sarcophagus. The fragment of stone protruding from the silt was only about a meter from Joey. He sidled over to the main port beside Costas, and pointed exaggeratedly at it. The eye looked at him and cocked sideways, and the hand twisted around with the palm up, as if questioning. Jack dropped the oxygen mask, picked up a pencil and notepad and quickly scribbled on it, and then pressed the pad up against the window. The eye slowly scanned the paper, and Jack turned to Costas. “If we’ve got twenty minutes, that might be just enough time for Joey to see whether that slab is the missing fragment.”

The screen on the ROV began scrolling out letters again, and Costas pressed his face against the Perspex to read it. “The ROV operator is under strict orders from Captain Macalister to focus on the task at hand. Under no circumstances is he to let Dr. Howard divert Joey to dig a hole somewhere else.”

“You try. Doesn’t Joey have a mind of his own?”

Costas scribbled on the pad and pressed it against the window. Joey read it, flexed his hand, looked up and around as if to check that he was not being watched, and then backed off slowly. “I think I got a result,” Costas said. “I told him he wouldn’t get a treat unless he obeyed you.”

“You mean the ROV operator, or Joey?”

Costas grinned, and they both stared out the port. As Joey turned toward the sarcophagus, they could see his entire form. Unlike the box shape of most ROVs, Joey had a tapering body and an extended tail that flexed as he swam, providing improved hydrodynamics and stability while he was working on the seabed. With his second manipulator arm now extended, he looked like an outsized prehistoric scorpion. He angled gracefully through the water and came to a halt just above the protruding stone. The eye extended ever farther on its mount, snaking around and down and peering at the slab from every angle.

“Okay,” Jack murmured. “That’s the one. Go for it, Joey.”

The left arm reached under the carapace, drew out a tube like a vacuum-cleaner hose, and placed the end of it near the slab. Seconds later a jet of silt blew out behind the tail, and the surface of the slab was revealed. The pump sucked away sediment until all four sides had been uncovered. Joey backed away, and Jack pressed his face against the cone, staring.

“That’s it,” he said excitedly. “I can see the fracture line. This must be the missing piece of the plaque.”

“I can’t see any carving,” Costas said. “It must be upside down.”

“Can Joey shift it?”

“If I tell him to.” Joey had remained in position as the silt settled, and then looked back to them, his eye rolling sideways as if questioning. Costas pointed at the slab, made a turning motion with his hands, and then repeated it. Joey raised his finger upward and slowly shook his eye. Costas glared at him, jabbing his finger at the slab. “Come on, Marcus,” he muttered. “I know it’s him. He’s my best ROV operator, usually. He always gives Joey a little bit more personality. Now he needs to make him into a free thinker.”

Joey looked back at the slab, then at the submersible, then back at the slab again. He suddenly jetted forward, settling again on the seabed just in front of the slab.

“Good boy,” Costas murmured. “Good boy.”

Stabilizing legs drove down from each corner of the carapace into the sediment. The second manipulator arm came into play, and Joey hooked both hands under the exposed edge of the slab. He heaved upward, shuddering, a fine sheen of sediment rising with each vibration. The slab slowly rose to vertical, and then Joey retracted one arm, pulled out the vacuum pipe, and sucked away the sediment from it. They saw the flash of a camera, and then Joey gently lowered the slab back to the seabed, released it in a puff of silt, and jetted back toward the submersible. He came to a halt, raised both hands as if in a gesture of uncertainty, and pointed with one of them at the screen below. It showed the surface of the slab, dazzling white with the flash, at first sight devoid of any features of interest.

Jack stared, his heart suddenly racing. “That’s it,” he exclaimed, pointing. The ROV moved closer, and the image came more sharply into view. A line furrowed into the rock extended from the fracture to the center of the slab, where it joined another, wider line extending to either side roughly at right angles, creating something akin to a T shape. “The first line is the extension of the radiate line from the Aten symbol. The second line is the River Nile. I believe the first line shows the course of a man-made tunnel, and this map reveals where it intersects with the Nile.”

“You think that’s a way in?”

“I’ve got to get this to Lanowski. He can try to match it to modern coordinates. This is fantastic. It might be the best break we’ve had.”

Joey’s screen flashed with another message, and Costas pressed his face again the viewing port to read it. He gave Joey a diver’s okay sign and then turned to Jack. “Everything’s now fixed topside, and they’re going to begin lifting us in about two minutes. The plan for raising the sarcophagus is still on schedule. Joey’s going to rig up the sarcophagus for raising, and the media can get live-stream video from his camera. Once we’re topside, they’ll drop the cable and Joey can hook it on. Macalister says that our little glitch served a useful purpose in ironing out a problem with the derrick winch. Assuming our ascent is successful, the engineers now have complete confidence in using it to raise the sarcophagus.”

“Glad to know our little jaunt has been of some use.”

Costas punched a finger at the viewing port. “That’s where it’s been of use. Getting Joey to perform exactly the kind of task I envisaged for him. He’s the one who should have come down here to do this job in the first place.”

Jack waved the piece of notepaper with a sketch he had made of the depiction on the plaque fragment. “Nothing beats the Mark One human eyeball. Joey might never have found this without us to guide him.”

Costas was barely listening as he watched Joey uncoil the hawser strap from a basket beneath the ROV that he would feed beneath the sarcophagus. “You think Joey’s impressive, you should see Little Joey. Almost thinks intuitively.”

“I remember his predecessor. Got stuck inside a volcano.”

Costas looked suddenly crestfallen. “Don’t remind me. But all his technology has gone into the new one, and more. He’s truly pocket-sized.”

They strapped themselves back into the seats of the submersible, and Jack gazed one last time at the sarcophagus in situ, Joey alongside. “That’s how I want to remember it,” he said. “I’m glad I won’t be here to see it being raised. Do you remember seeing the Egyptian sculptures raised from the harbor of Alexandria, where they’d fallen when the ancient lighthouse collapsed? They seem diminished on land, like rusty old cannon raised from shipwrecks. Some artifacts are just better left on the seabed, where they have much more power and meaning. If I had my way, the sarcophagus would go to the British Museum just as Colonel Vyse intended, only in a way he could never have envisaged, not as an actual artifact but as a virtual exhibit. The HD multi-beam sonar scan and terrain mapper could produce a CG model of the wreck in incredible detail, and we’ve got enough imagery to simulate a real-time submersible dive to the site. Leaving the actual sarcophagus here on the seabed would mean that you retain the power and mystique of an object in the darkness of the abyss, in a place where no human could survive. That’s what would really fire up people’s imaginations, not being able to inspect the finer points of Old Kingdom architectonic sculpture close-up.”

“We’re caught in a political game, Jack. Ownership is always going to be an issue with an artifact like this, and where there are conflicting claims of ownership, the winner is always going to want to trumpet their prize. And now there’s the added factor of the leverage it might give us in Egypt with the antiquities people.”

“That’s the one plus for me. But I still feel uncomfortable playing the media game and seeing archaeology used as a pawn like this.”

“Chances are you won’t even see it being raised. The instant we’re on deck, you’ll be whisked off to the sick bay for a complete checkup, and then you’ll probably have a spell in the recompression chamber. After that my guess is you’ll be out of here as soon as the medicos allow you to fly, if not sooner. Heading toward the Holy Land.”

Jack stared for a moment at the sarcophagus, his mind back on the Cairo Geniza and the Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, on the extraordinary letter that he and Maria had read only the evening before in Cairo. Heading toward the Holy Land. Halevi too had travelled from Spain to the land of the Old Testament, certain that after a lifetime of searching, the answers to his questions lay there, that revelation for him could come only in the land of the Israelites. Jack had begun to feel the same too, now even more strongly with the discovery of the missing fragment of the plaque, that he was being driven back to the only place where he could find his own personal redemption, the resolution to a quest that had come close to costing him everything.

Costas nudged him. “By the way, thanks.”

Jack stared at him, his mind already focused on Jerusalem, on seeing Rebecca again. “Huh?”

“For the rescue. Thanks.”

“Oh, yeah. No problem. You would have done the same for me.”

Costas tapped the casing. “Yeah. Probably. Wouldn’t have been able to live with myself afterward. Would have hated to lose a good submersible like this.”

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

“Now that was weird,” Jack said.

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

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

CHAPTER 15

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

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

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

“You worried about being spotted?”

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

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

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

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

“We could have Skyped.”

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

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

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

“Fire away. About Howard Carter.”

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

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

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

“But none of them believed his story.”

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

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

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

“Plus ça change,” Jack murmured. “So he came across the Sufi, and his tall tales of treasure?”

“Actually, he’d come across him a lot earlier than 1904,” Jeremy enthused. “And this is what makes the story that bit more plausible, because there is a consistency between the accounts. When Carter first arrived in Egypt as an impressionable teenager in 1891, he threw himself into Cairo, lapping up all the history and mystique he could find. It was then that he first saw the man, begging outside the Ben Ezra synagogue. He wasn’t yet the mad mystic of the Weekly Gazette seventeen years later, but simply one of innumerable filthy and emaciated beggars on the streets of Cairo. Carter tried practicing his beginner’s Arabic on the man, who became frustrated and replied in English. He swore Carter to secrecy and showed him a battered Royal Engineers cap badge. It was only a few years after the failed Nile expedition, and the human detritus of war was also very visible in Cairo at the time. Destitute and maimed veterans of the Egyptian army as well as miscreant British soldiers were scraping a living however they could in the backstreets of the city. Some of them were mentally unbalanced by their experiences fighting the dervishes. But the Mahdist threat from Sudan was still very real, and Kitchener’s promise to avenge the death of General Gordon rung in everyone’s ears, so to be fingered as a deserter risked the harshest penalty.

“Howard seems to have kept to his word, though, and the man, a former sapper called Jones, began to tell him an incredible story of being trapped underground for months on end. But just as Carter was planning to return to hear more, he was whisked off to Amarna by Petrie, and it was only in 1904 with the downturn in his fortunes that he came back to look for the man.”

“Who by then was the mad mystic,” said Jack.

“Self-styled, with an appearance to match: bald with a skullcap, a huge gray beard, sun-blackened skin. He lived by selling gullible European ladies restorative balms that he claimed to have been given by Osiris himself during an underground journey to the afterlife. He was evidently quite a character, theatrical with a deep, booming voice, speaking a strangely accented English as well as Urdu and Arabic. Local children flocked to hear his tales. He’d become something of a celebrity.”

“Urdu is plausible for an ex-soldier who might have served in India, and he could have accented the English to disguise his true origins,” Jack said.

“Carter noted that the man he met in 1891 was lucid enough when he was in full flow, but he was physically weak and fearful of being caught,” said Jeremy. “He said he had been a corporal in the Royal Engineers and had been with the river expedition to relieve General Gordon in Khartoum in 1884. But after a particularly savage battle, he had been knocked unconscious and lost track of time and place. After a long period of wandering and a terrifying encounter with a crocodile, he found himself in Cairo, where his extraordinary underground adventure took place. He had clung to Carter in desperation as he told the story, clearly tottering on the edge of sanity, babbling about the crocodile and mummies. It was the Royal Engineers cap badge that convinced Carter that there might be some element of truth in the story.”

“Royal Engineers,” Jack muttered, thinking hard. “How extraordinary. He must have gone up with the river expedition past the crocodile temple, the one that Costas and I discovered on the Nile. And the battle can only have been Kirkeban, the one major encounter with the Mahdi army for the river column. The expedition pretty well disintegrated after that, so it’s plausible that a man left for dead on the battlefield or lost in the river might have ended up that way.”

Jeremy positioned the computer screen so that Jack could see it. “I know all this because Howard summarized it in his diary entry for the day in 1904 when he rediscovered Jones. He wrote an account of what Jones told him next. I’ve scanned it so you can read it in its entirety.”

Jack stared at the screen. It showed a single notebook page of handwriting, neat and legible. He began to read:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Does she know?”

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

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

“IMU’s Israel representative?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Jack?”

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

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

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

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

“Equipment?”

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

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

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

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

“You got it. Over and out.”

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

CHAPTER 16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You doing a paradrop?”

“Yep.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You been seeing Maria, Dad?”

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

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

“Something like that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Really?”

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

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

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

“I’d guessed you might be.”

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

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

“What tunnel?” Jack said.

“Patience, Dad. Here first.”

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

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

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

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

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

Rebecca turned and glared at Jack. “You had me followed?”

Jack continued to hold the man’s gaze. “Precisely for this reason.”

The boy returned with a tray of little glasses of tea, which he offered around. Jack took one, dropped a sugar cube into it, and sipped the strong liquid. He replaced it on the tray. “So, I take it you are an antiquities dealer?”

The man opened his arms expansively. “I am Abdullah al-Harasi. My shop is one of the best known along the Via Dolorosa. I am licensed by the antiquities authority, and everything I sell in my shop comes with an export permit. Every day I sell to tourists: coins, lamps, little pottery vessels, mementoes of antiquity that bring them closer to whichever prophet or messiah they hold dear, inshallah. I sell to them, that is, when there is not another war looming. Business has been difficult these last months.”

“And this is your storeroom?” Jack said.

Abdullah opened his arms wider. “This is where I keep my prize items, for select customers.”

Jack knew that those words were a thinly veiled code for artifacts excavated illegally and sold to those who could get antiquities out of the country without a license. He hoped that Rebecca had not gotten herself in too deep. The uninitiated could easily be seduced into an agreement over a glass of tea. If some kind of deal had been struck, it might be difficult to extract themselves without things getting ugly. The antiquities black market was a murky underworld that only those experienced in its ways could negotiate without coming to serious grief. Even David’s surveillance team could not prevent what might go on behind closed doors. For a moment Jack felt culpable, responsible. His decision to let Rebecca come to Jerusalem at this time might have been more fallout from his quest in Sudan and Egypt, preoccupying him when better judgement might have prevailed.

Rebecca finished her tea and replaced the cup. “Abdullah brought me here after I’d visited the antiquities dealers asking if anyone had Egyptian antiquities that might have been found in Jerusalem.”

Abdullah reached under the table next to him and took out a square object about twice the width of his hand. “By good fortune I had just what she wanted, eh?” He held the object up so that Jack and Jeremy could see. It was like a miniature icon, an ancient frame of hardwood surrounding a plaque of beaten gold about ten centimeters across. Abdullah held it under the bare light-bulb that lit up the room. To his astonishment, Jack saw the Aten sun symbol in the upper right corner, the radiating arms with upturned hands extending from it.

“Akhenaten,” he murmured, moving for a better view. “It can only be Akhenaten.”

“There’s a hieroglyphic cartouche below,” Rebecca said. “And you can see partial clusters of hieroglyphs on the left-hand side that show that this plaque was actually cut out of a larger sheet of gold, a decorative cover for a curved surface.”

Jack’s mind was racing. He had seen something like this before, only a few days ago. And the hieroglyphs in the complete cartouche were identical to those that Hiebermeyer had found in the tomb of the general in the mummy necropolis, on the wall painting that recounted his achievements: a sheaf of corn, two half circles, two birds. “That’s the Egyptian word for the Israelites,” he exclaimed. “This is incredible.”

“Turn it over, Abdullah,” Rebecca said.

He did so, and on the back Jack saw an inscription in black ink, like a museum acquisition label. He immediately felt a cold shiver down his spine. If this was a stolen antiquity from a museum, then they were in even deeper waters. He peered at it and read it out. “Jerusalem, 27 April 1864, CRW, RE.”

“This was once a possession of General Gordon of Khartoum,” Abdullah said.

Jack looked at him in disbelief. “Gordon of Khartoum? How do you know?”

“Because my great-grandfather got it from him.”

Jack stared at the letters again, racking his brain. Of course. “CRW. That’s Charles Richard Wilson, surely. RE means Royal Engineers. Wilson was employed by the Survey of Palestine in the 1860s. He surveyed extensively in Jerusalem and had an abiding interest in archaeology.”

“Later General Sir Charles Wilson,” Rebecca said. “I worked that out too, and I looked him up. He was intelligence chief during the campaign to rescue Gordon from Khartoum in 1884, and a close personal friend of Gordon himself.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Abdullah said, holding up one hand and counting off the names. “Wilson. Warren. Gordon. Kitchener. All of them British officers who came to Palestine to map the land for Queen Victoria, but who became obsessed with antiquities and the ancient past. Men little different from you and me, Jack Howard.” He turned the artifact over in his hands as he eyed Jack. “You wish to purchase this? For your museum? It did not come to my family cheap. But for you, a bargain price.”

Jack raised his hands. “Not this time.”

Abdullah considered it again, and then handed it to him. “Accept this as my gift. In hopes of future business, inshallah. If you ever wish to sell the artifacts from your shipwreck finds, I offer myself as your agent. My clients include the richest Russian oligarchs, those of Jewish background who now have interests in Israel and can ship antiquities unseen back to the mother country. You could be a rich man, Jack Howard. You could reclaim the Howard family fortunes. Think of your daughter’s education. Of her future.”

Jack placed the object firmly back in the Abdullah’s hands. “I’m grateful for your offer and your hospitality. But you know my position.”

“Ah, yes. Archaeology versus treasure hunting. Artifacts consigned out of sight from an excavation to a museum store, or artifacts made available for anyone to own and enjoy. But there is a bridge, my friend, and we can meet in the middle.”

“You know I can’t be associated with an unprovenanced artifact acquired from an antiquities dealer. All our museum exhibits are finds from our own excavations.”

“We could photograph it,” Jeremy said.

Abdullah wagged a finger, suddenly looking less amiable. “No photography.”

Jack turned to Rebecca. “Do you have anything more you want me to see?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Maybe. But you might not think it’s safe for me. Without an escort.”

Abdullah cackled and twisted his hands in the air. “Fathers, daughters, eh? I have four of them. Two are doctors, one is a police colonel, and one is in my business. One day the women will rule Jerusalem, eh? It is the men who have made such a mess of this place over the last two thousand years. Men of the Roman army, of the jihad, of the Crusades; the British, the Zionists, and the fundamentalists today. Look at the Al-Aqsa mosque. The authorities prevent Jews from worshipping at their holiest site, the platform of the temple. Jews must crowd against the edges, praying at the Western Wall, digging tunnels into the rock to get as close as they can, but no farther. If women were in charge, they would be more accommodating, eh? As accommodating as you and I could be in our business, Jack Howard. Think of my offer. You know how to contact me. Inshallah.”

“Thank you for helping my daughter.”

Abdullah waved his hand dismissively. “Go now. Follow your daughter. She has a good nose for treasure. My son will show you out.”

Ten minutes later they were again hurrying through the labyrinth of the Old City, along streets and alleys that Jack recognized as leading toward the Western Wall and the site of the Temple Mount archaeological project. Rebecca slowed down and gave him a piercing look. “I still can’t believe you had me followed.”

“David Ben-Gurion’s team is the best there is. They’re all ex — Israeli special forces surveillance experts, several of them Palestinian Arabs who know how to blend in.”

“Not very well if Abdullah knew about your guy.”

“David would have wanted them to see him. Abdullah can puff himself up like a caliph, but he knows perfectly well that with any hint of trouble, David could shut down his entire business. He’s allowed to carry on only because there’s a delicate balance to be maintained. The authorities stand back from business activities that they know are shady but have been part of the culture of this place for hundreds of years. And what Abdullah didn’t know is that three of the Arabs squatting in the street outside were David’s men. David had guessed where you’d be taking me from his earlier surveillance and had provided me with a phone with an emergency beacon. If I’d activated it, the response would have been instantaneous.”

Rebecca looked away. “I just wish you’d told me.”

“That would have defeated the purpose, wouldn’t it? You would have tried to shake him. That’s probably what I would have done at your age.”

“The difference between us is that my mother was from one of the oldest Camorra families in Naples. I know how to handle myself with these kinds of people. Remember how my mother died? They thought she was about to shop them to the police, and she suddenly became one family member too many. I know about boundaries and what happens if you cross them.”

Jeremy coughed. “It’s a pity we don’t have photos of that artifact.”

Rebecca sighed, dug in her trousers pocket, and pulled out her phone and held it up so they could see as she scrolled through a series of images that showed the golden sheet from numerous angles in close-up. “You didn’t think I was going to leave without that, did you? As Abdullah said, he’s the father of four daughters, and I know how to tug on those strings. During my previous visit, I told him I felt faint and asked for a glass of water. His son wasn’t at his beck and call because he was at school, so Abdullah left me alone in the storeroom for a few minutes.”

Jeremy gave Jack a rueful glance. “Nice one, Rebecca.”

She held the phone up to Jack. “Well? What do you really think?”

Jack’s mind had been in a tumult since they had left Abdullah’s lair. “The last time I saw anything like that was on the floor of the Red Sea with Costas five days ago.”

“You’re certain it’s genuine?” Jeremy asked.

Jack nodded. “Absolutely. And more than that, I’m sure that Maurice would confirm that it comes from the golden facing of an Egyptian war chariot. After our find in the Red Sea, I spent enough time looking at the chariot fragments and depictions with Maurice to be certain of it.”

“Any theories?”

“About how a piece of a chariot of Akhenaten mentioning the Israelites ends up in Jerusalem?” Jack ducked sideways under an awning to avoid a passing army patrol, and the other two stopped beside him. “Well, it’s most likely to have been contemporary, brought here at the time of Akhenaten’s reign or soon afterward. Maurice told me that a pharaoh’s cartouche and any other identifying features were often beaten out of armor and other military embellishments after his death, to be replaced by those of his successor. The one way you might expect an artifact like this to survive is on the battlefield, as a consequence of an Egyptian defeat where the spoils were picked up by the victor. Akhenaten wasn’t a great campaigning pharaoh, and in fact we know of only one major set-piece encounter, though it is one that can be counted as a resounding defeat, perhaps the worst disaster an Egyptian army ever suffered.”

“The loss of the chariot army in the Red Sea,” Jeremy said.

“It’s the only plausible scenario.”

“But if the Israelites had already fled from their cliff-top encampment, how do you account for the recovery of this object?”

“Somebody stayed behind to watch,” Jack said. “Moses would have wanted confirmation that the deed was done, that his people could continue their trek northeast toward the Holy Land without the risk of further Egyptian attack. We know there must have been Israelite eyewitnesses because of the account of the destruction of the chariot army in the Book of Exodus, something we now know is based closely on fact. Lanowski’s study of the Landsat imagery suggests that there could have been an old path leading down to the beach that Costas and I explored between our dives, immediately below the point where the chariot army had careered off the cliff and brought down a landslide with it. Imagine a couple of Israelite spies making their way down among the carnage afterward and finding a decorated wrecked chariot in the shallows, maybe that of a general. They could have recognized a hieroglyphic reference to the Israelites and wrenched that off to take back to Moses as evidence, an artifact that might later have been treasured as one of the small number of objects brought from Egypt to the Holy Land.”

“Where it remained secretly buried somewhere until Wilson got his hands on it,” Jeremy said.

Jack turned to Rebecca. “Did he tell you anything more about its source?”

Rebecca shook her head. “One of Mamma’s uncles told me that in the antiquities black market, asking any kind of question about artifact origins is a big taboo and will see you ending up like she did with a bullet in the back of your head. But I believe Abdullah’s story. I’ve studied Gordon’s Reflections in Palestine. He spent the best part of a year here in 1883, carrying out some very exacting exploration in and around Jerusalem but also undergoing something of a religious epiphany. He’d resigned from his governorship in the Sudan in a state of dismay about the lack of government support for his initiatives to help the people there. He never suspected that he’d be invited back the following year or end up where history has immortalized him. He was a close friend of Wilson, of Warren, and of the young Kitchener and the other British engineer officers who had worked on the survey of Palestine. I believe that this artifact might have been one of a number that he collected from them to take back to Jerusalem as part of his attempt to unlock the mysteries of this place, a project he could immerse himself in after his perceived failure in Sudan. I believe that following his abrupt recall to Sudan, he may have entrusted them to someone here, and after his death with nobody to claim them they were dispersed and sold. This one ended up in the hands of Abdullah’s great-grandfather, also an antiquities dealer.”

“Then how come he still has it?” Jeremy said. “It’s a long time for a dealer to sit on something that would have considerable value, even as gold bullion.”

“That happens,” Rebecca replied. “In Naples, artifacts are sometimes cached away for years, even decades, waiting for the right time for a sale, for the right person or an upturn in the market.”

“Abdullah may have been waiting for something more,” Jack said pensively, looking at Rebecca. “He may have been waiting to dangle it in front of someone who might be tempted to go where he was unable to go, to find the place where Wilson had actually discovered the artifact and to see what else might lie there.”

Rebecca suddenly seemed distracted, and looked back down the alley. “Are we still being followed?”

Jack nodded. “By David’s men, and probably Abdullah’s. Everyone’s always watching everyone else here. It’s a place you can’t disappear into, unless you really know where you’re going.”

“Underground,” Rebecca said. “That’s where you need to go. Everything’s just under the surface here: war, the truth behind religion, the reality of history. Jerusalem’s riddled with natural caves and man-made tunnels, a honeycomb beneath your feet almost everywhere you step. Some archaeologists I’ve spoken to say there’s nothing more to be found here, that every last fissure has been scraped clean by treasure hunters over the centuries. Others believe that the ban by the mosque authorities on exploration beneath Temple Mount has concealed untold treasures, the sacred relics of the temple and much else besides.”

“The stuff Abdullah really wants to get his hands on,” Jeremy said.

“Abdullah was being disingenuous when he lamented the ban. For him, the possibility of undiscovered treasure boosts the mystique of the place and keeps his customers coming back for more. Buy a coin or an oil lamp from Jerusalem and you buy into that dream. And there may be a blanket ban on official exploration beneath the Temple Mount, but those who supply him with antiquities operate outside the law and will always be trying to find a way in. Once they’ve gotten there, it would be a free-for-all, but with Abdullah poised to stake the biggest claim.”

Jack peered at Rebecca. “And he’s canny enough to know that someone like you might be able to go to places along the temple precinct that would be denied to his people, and that you might be able to unlock vaults that would make him richer than his wildest dreams. That’s what those Russian oligarchs really want — the real treasure, not pots and coins — and they’d compete with one another to own it. Abdullah truly would become the new caliph of the Jerusalem underworld, and you would have been his unwitting pawn.”

“But I’ve used him, not the other way around. Let’s move. We’ve only got a few hours until you have to leave.”

They came out in front of the Western Wall precinct, the midday sun after the gloom of the alleyways reflecting blindingly off the white surface of the rock and making Jack squint and shade his eyes. A pair of Israeli Air Force F-16s shrieked overhead, banking right in the direction of the southern border with Gaza and Egypt. The police and army presence was stronger than he had ever seen it before, and the worshippers were limited to a few groups of Hasidic Jewish men with black hats and long hair who were bobbing and praying in front of the wall. Jack found himself hoping that the twelfth-century poet Yehuda Halevi of the Geniza letter had gotten here, that he had broken the Crusader ban on Jews entering the city and had touched the wall before he died, and had found the spiritual revelation that had eluded him in his life in Spain. The wall itself seemed impermeable, as if the shaped masonry were a natural extension of the bedrock, and Jack had to remind himself that like the mosque above it the wall was an accretion on a rock that had a far older history of human occupation than either of the two religions that claimed it.

Rebecca veered to the left to head back toward the city and the conjunction between the Western Wall and the medieval structures that abutted it. Jack followed, and caught up with her. “Isn’t the Temple Mount excavation to the right, at the City of David site?”

Rebecca waved her hand dismissively and flashed him a smile. “Been there, done that. I’ve got a new project.”

Jack stared at the wall ahead. He remembered what Rebecca had said: underground. He had an ominous feeling, but one tinged with excitement. He had guessed where she might be taking them. Any political storm that he might have provoked by transgressing on forbidden territory in Egypt and Sudan would be nothing compared to the one Rebecca might be risking now.

They came to a halt in front of a stone archway, and Jeremy walked up alongside. “Any hints, Rebecca? Any special equipment needed?”

She hitched up her rucksack, kicked back on the heel of one boot, and stared determinedly at a man-sized crack in the wall in front of them. “All I can say is, you haven’t seen anything yet. Follow me.”

CHAPTER 17

Jack squeezed sideways through the crack in the masonry and came out on a boardwalk that ran the interior length of the wall, at least twenty meters in either direction. They were inside a cavernous enclosed space between the outer medieval wall they had just penetrated and a continuation of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount. Its huge blocks were visible some ten meters in front of Jack and disappeared to the left under accretions of later structure.

On the ground in front of the wall was the exposed rock that formed the edge of Temple Mount, an area previously covered over with paving slabs of Roman appearance that were now stacked around the edges. Pockets of the rocky ground were under excavation, with hard-hatted archaeologists visible where the dolomite had been cut in prehistory to form tombs and underground dwellings. Rebecca beckoned Jack and Jeremy forward along the walkway to a table covered with files and cameras. A bearded man with a skullcap was working at a laptop. He smiled when he saw Rebecca, and then sprang to his feet when he saw Jack following. Rebecca quickly kissed his cheeks and took his hand. “Shalom, Danny. My friend, Dr. Jeremy Haverstock, and my father.”

Danny shook their hands, and spoke quietly to Jack. “It’s an honor to meet you. Let me know if I can help in any way.” He watched them as they each took a hard hat and a torch from the table and Rebecca led them along the final length of the boardwalk. She turned to Jack. “Danny’s the assistant director, in charge for today. I told him I wanted some time alone with you in my excavation, and he agreed not to broadcast your presence. It’s a good thing the director’s not around as he’d have been all over you. The rest of the team would have been clamoring to meet you, and we’d never have gotten anywhere.”

The boardwalk ended where the outer wall and Western Wall began to converge, and the area of exposed bedrock reduced in width to less than five meters. They were a good twenty meters from the nearest excavator and well beyond the temporary lighting that had been set up over the main area. Rebecca led them out of sight behind a rocky knoll and then down an ancient rock-cut staircase some fifteen steps into the gloom. They passed several burial niches, rectilinear recesses cut into the rock, and then turned a corner in the passageway and came to a halt in front of a hole in the lower side wall only a little wider than Jack’s body. Rebecca sat down, poked her legs inside, and then switched on the headlamp on her helmet. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes.”

She disappeared down the hole, followed by Jeremy. Jack eased himself behind, holding the rim of the rock with his fingers and feeling for the floor with his feet. “Another six inches, Dad,” Rebecca called up, her voice resonating in the chamber. Jack let himself slide down, twisting sideways to prevent his spine from being scraped, and landed in a low crouch. He looked around, his headlamp beam joining the other two, and could see immediately that they were inside an ancient rock-cut tomb, the walls showing some erosion from rainwater percolation but overall in a good state of preservation. One wall was partly covered by a hanging sheet and still had large sections of its plaster facing intact. A foldable plastic chair lay in front, and an array of cleaning tools and brushes were set alongside as well as a bucket half-filled with debris. The opposite wall from the entrance tunnel, in the direction of the Western Wall, was not rock-cut but instead was made up of a precarious-looking jumble of rubble, more like a rockfall than a deliberate construction.

Jack looked at Rebecca. “Okay. Fill us in.”

Rebecca nodded, and knelt beside the rubble wall. “When I saw those initials on that artifact in Abdullah’s storeroom and identified them as Charles Wilson, I immediately thought of Wilson’s Arch, the feature abutting the Western Wall that was above us when we came into this place. It’s named after Wilson because he uncovered it in 1867. If he was working there then, this seemed a good place to begin my search for places underground where he might have found that artifact, places dating to the later second millennium BC. By good fortune the Israelis have been carrying out extensive excavations and clearance as far as they can along the length of the Temple precinct at this point, so my next step was to get myself on the excavation team.”

Jack cleared his throat. “Let me see, that would normally take a degree in archaeology, probably a master’s, a track record of several years, and impeccable references, not to speak of several months coming up the hard way washing potsherds and pushing wheelbarrows.”

“Not if you’re Jack Howard’s daughter. Not if you’ve been seen on our films excavating at Troy and at Herculaneum. Two days after being accepted on the team, I had my own special hole in the ground, one that I’d selected myself.”

“And how did you manage that?”

“I took a page out of Uncle Hiemy’s book. Maurice once told me that the best way to get to grips with an excavation is to go there at night when nobody else is around. So I sweet-talked my friend Doron, the night watchman, into letting me stay here one evening, and I spent the entire night searching every cavern and tunnel I could find in this place. I was looking for somewhere near the arch that looked as if it might once have led deeper into the rock, actually beneath the Western Wall. I finally broke my way into this tomb. That far wall of rubble was plastered over, but the plaster looked to me to be relatively recent, within the last couple hundred years rather than ancient. It might have been put there by an excavator in the nineteenth century to seal up a discovery. That was nearly good enough for me to have a go breaking through, but I wanted some more definitive indication that this might have been Wilson’s hole. So I looked carefully around, and I found this.”

She reached up to a ledge and took down an old smoke-blackened tobacco pipe. She passed it to Jack, who turned it over in his hands. “Intriguing,” he said. “Probably Victorian, pretty high-quality ebony. The kind of thing that British officers smoked.”

“Take a look at the initials on the bowl.”

Jack turned the pipe over and wiped away the dust. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed. “CRW. It’s Charles Richard Wilson.”

“That’s what clinched it for me,” Rebecca said, her voice taut with pent-up excitement. “I can just see him sitting here after he’d plastered up that hole, contemplating his golden find and the explorations he’d just undertaken beneath the Temple Mount. Smoking a pipe would have been a very British thing to do. Later he realizes he’s left it inside on that ledge, but by then he’s sealed up the entrance to the tomb as well and decides not to bother trying to retrieve it. He was probably having to act covertly as well, wary of men like Abdullah’s great-grandfather and the other tomb robbers and shady characters trying to dig under Temple Mount at that time. He’d found something he wanted to conceal, and he was successful in doing that. What I found in there hadn’t been disturbed since he left it.”

“So how did you make this tomb your own?” Jeremy asked.

“I rediscovered it — so to speak — the next day, after I’d asked to explore this corner of the excavation site, an area that hadn’t yet been cleared. The night before, I’d also discovered this.” She leaned over and carefully lifted the hanging sheet, revealing the remains of an ancient plastered wall with fragments of red fresco adhering to it. “This was once a painted tomb, probably late prehistoric. I played up the fact that wall paintings were my specialty. The excavation director had seen me on TV helping Professor Dillen uncover the painting of the lyre player at Troy. I insisted that if I were to take this on, I’d need to do it alone and without disturbance because of the fragility of the fresco, and he agreed. I even insisted that there should be no electrical extension here, as the light might damage the painting. As a result I was able to break through Wilson’s plaster and rubble fill without being seen, to get beyond and then to rebuild the rubble after returning.”

“And you’re going to take us through there again?” Jeremy asked.

She turned to the rubble face, put her hand on a protruding rock, and glanced at them. “Stay back.” They shifted to the rear of the tomb, and Rebecca gingerly pulled at the stone. Nothing happened, and she tried again, this time more forcibly. Suddenly the entire wall shimmered and collapsed in a grinding roar, narrowly missing Rebecca as she leapt back in a cloud of dust. They all put their shirts to their mouths until the dust settled, and then stared at the black hole left in the wall where the rubble had been. Rebecca looked apologetically at them, her face white with dust. “Whoops.”

A voice called down. “Rebecca. Are you all right?”

“Fine, Danny,” Rebecca shouted back. “Just spilled my bucket.” She turned to Jack, whispering. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. I thought I’d balanced the rocks so they’d fall inward.” She scrambled over the rubble, coughing in the dust, and peered through the hole in the wall. “Okay. Everything looks stable beyond here. Headlamps to maximum.”

Jack replaced Wilson’s pipe on the shelf and brought up the rear, crawling forward behind Jeremy and bending to avoid a jagged rock sticking down from above. Any of his old discomfort about enclosed spaces was eclipsed by his concern that Rebecca might be taking them on a reckless adventure, but he was committed now and there was little sense in trying to hold her back unless the way ahead was clearly too dangerous. He came out at the beginning of a tunnel where Rebecca and Jeremy were crouched. “What about the entrance?” he said to Rebecca. “We could be followed.”

“The site director is away until tomorrow, and none of the other excavation teams come down my hole without being invited. It would take too long and be too noisy to rebuild that barrier, and we’d only have to take it down again when we go out. But Danny will see to it that we’re undisturbed. And we don’t need to be in here for more than twenty minutes.”

Jeremy aimed his torch high, revealing an immense block of masonry above their heads. “Are we where I think we are?”

Rebecca nodded, her eyes ablaze. “Directly beneath the Western Wall of Temple Mount.” She pointed back the way they had come. “That way is present-day Jerusalem. This way, we’re crawling into three-thousand-year-old history.”

“That way, we’re legal,” Jack said. “This way, we’re transgressing the strictest religious laws on the planet.”

Rebecca peered at him. “I’ve never known laws of any description to put off Jack Howard.”

He paused for a moment, giving Rebecca a long appraising stare, and then nodded. “Okay. Just this time. We’ll talk about boundaries later. You lead.”

Five minutes later they came out of the tunnel into a cavern at least five meters across, their headlamp beams dancing across the walls. Jack had noticed that the tunnel was scored with the marks of picks, whereas the cavern walls were irregular in shape, with cracks and fissures that rose out of sight and showed no obvious signs of being hewn by human hands.

“It’s a natural cave,” Rebecca said, echoing his thoughts. “The rock beneath Jerusalem is riddled with them, where water has eroded away layers of softer rock within the dolomite. I read everything I could about the geology and archaeology of underground Jerusalem in the weeks before I came out here. But this cave is unusually large and well proportioned, the kind of place that could have served as a refuge for several dozen people or as a storeroom. The first thing I noticed was how smooth that outcrop of dolomite is in the center, like the sacred omphalos you showed me inside the Diktaean Cave in Crete. You can see that many hands must have worn it smooth, and that it has enough of a flat surface for objects to be placed on it.”

“It must be an altar,” Jeremy said.

Rebecca nodded excitedly. “That’s what I thought. And if you look around you can see apertures and fissures in the walls that could have served as niches for displaying sacred objects. But what really made my heart leap was seeing a patch of the wall that had been plastered over, with plaster of exactly the same color and composition as the plaster that Wilson used to seal the rubble wall that he put in place in the tomb after he left this area for the last time.”

“Can you be certain he was here?” Jeremy asked.

Rebecca nodded vehemently. “This is where he found that piece of golden chariot decoration. I’m absolutely sure of it. I think he dug around in here and that’s all he found, perhaps concealed in one of those niches. But I’ve no doubt that three thousand years ago there were more — many more — artifacts of similar age and origin, all of them of sacred significance to the people who stored them here. This was their holy of holies.”

“What about the plaster?” Jack asked. “What did that conceal?”

She beckoned them over to the far side of the chamber as she lit up a polished section of wall about a meter wide and half a meter high. Jack could see that it was covered with several dozen lines of written inscription, the letters alphabetic but spidery and difficult to discern. “Fantastic,” he exclaimed. “I’ve seen something similar to this before, in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, taken from Jerusalem when the Ottomans ruled Palestine. It was found in the Siloam Tunnel near the Gihon Spring.”

“Look closer, Dad.”

Jack made his way past the altar stone, and as he did so he saw something else on the stone, faint lines and symbols that appeared to underlie the inscription. He stared, hardly believing what he was seeing. “My God, Rebecca. Now I get it.”

“It’s the Aten sun symbol, the radiating arms,” Jeremy exclaimed, coming alongside.

“And the symbols at the bottom are hieroglyphic cartouches,” Rebecca said. “You can barely make them out, but I’m sure they’re identical to the groupings of symbols that Aysha showed me, one for Akhenaten and the other for Israelites.”

“Of course,” Jack murmured, looking around. “Of course.”

Jeremy peered closely at the words of the inscription. “It’s Palaeo-Hebrew,” he said. “That puts it before the Babylonian period, before Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the first temple in the early seventh century BC. I think I recognize some of the words, but I haven’t done Old Hebrew since I was an undergraduate. I’d need some time and some reference material.”

“Don’t worry, Jeremy. I’m one step ahead of you.” Rebecca turned to Jack. “I brought Danny in on this. When I found the inscription, all I recognized for certain was that sun symbol and the hieroglyphs, and I knew I was going to need someone else to translate it. Danny’s got a PhD from Chicago in Near Eastern archaeology, and he’s also a reserve captain in the Israeli Army intelligence corps. He knows perfectly well the need to keep this discovery absolutely secret until the time is right. He’s the reason I’ve felt confident that nobody else would follow us down here, and he’ll see that the entry tunnel from the tomb is completely sealed up after we leave.”

“Go on,” Jack said.

She pulled out her phone and opened up a paragraph of text. “First, the date. You’ve probably guessed it, but this inscription is much older than the Babylonian period. The Siloam Tunnel inscription is thought to date to the eighth century BC, but Danny thinks that ours might be even earlier, ninth or even tenth century BC, right at the beginning of the Iron Age and the inception of Hebrew script. The sun symbol and the hieroglyphs are part of an earlier inscription. Danny studied the wear and patination on the inscribed lines and reckons it could be two to three centuries earlier than the Palaeo-Hebrew writing, putting it close to the time of Akhenaten and the Exodus.”

“It’s like a palimpsest,” Jack said. “Like Yehuda Halevi’s letter that Maria and I found in the Geniza, written on a reused piece of vellum that preserved a shadow of the original text. Only here no attempt was made to erase the earlier inscription.”

Rebecca nodded. “The Siloam inscription was made to commemorate the joining up of two tunnels, part of a complex dug to improve access to the spring. As you’ll see, this inscription served a similar purpose. The tunnel we came in through was a later cutting into this chamber, and it continues on ahead of us to the east where it joins a natural fissure that must have been the original entrance from the surface when this was a holy place. The foreman of the tunnel gang may have chosen this slab simply because there’s no other suitable flat surface inside this chamber, so it was ready-made for a new inscription. The sun symbol and the hieroglyphs already there would probably have meant nothing to him, though as you’ll see there was a memory of the earlier significance of this place.”

Jeremy stared at the inscription. “I can see it now. There are numbers, cubits. And I recognize the word for water.”

“Here’s Danny’s translation.” Rebecca read out from her screen:

There was a stunned silence. “Incredible,” Jack said. “Are we really talking about Moses?”

“That’s what Danny thinks the word he translates as ‘prophet’ would have meant to people at the time.”

“Abdu-Heba,” Jeremy murmured. “Wasn’t he the king of Jerusalem at the time of the Amarna letters?”

“Precisely,” Rebecca said, her eyes lit with fervor. “The Amarna letters were cuneiform tablets found in Akhenaten’s capital that included an archive of correspondence from foreign rulers swearing allegiance to the pharaoh, and at least six of them are from Jerusalem. Listen to this one.” She read from her screen.

Rebecca looked up. “That’s Amarna Letter number 287, lines 60 to 64. The others are in a similar vein, obsequious, almost fawning, as if the pharaoh had threatened him. But why should the pharaoh have done so, to the extent that Abdu-Heba felt the need to swear allegiance over and over again?”

Jeremy looked at her. “The land of Canaan was a battleground for the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the Hittites, with citadels like Jerusalem acting as pawns for one side or another. Alliances with the big powers were the name of the game for a king like Abdu-Heba.”

“That may be true for the New Kingdom period in general,” Rebecca replied pensively. “But I’ve been listening to everything you guys have been saying about Akhenaten over the last couple of months. He bucks the trend. He’s not a bellicose pharaoh. He makes a halfhearted attempt to suppress a tribal rebellion in the southern desert, and he waves his hand in the direction of Assyria. His only fixed battle that we know of is his disastrous chariot charge against the Israelite encampment beside the Red Sea. Ramses the Great he definitely is not. So why pick on a relatively minor settlement in the Jordan Valley and insist that its ruler swear undying allegiance to him, over and over again?”

“Because he was securing a safe haven for Moses and the Israelites,” Jack said quietly.

“You’ve got it,” Rebecca said, putting away her phone. “And this is where they came, to a natural cave just outside the walls of Bronze Age Jerusalem, a place where they could establish their first primitive altar and store their sacred artifacts. A place that was rapidly superseded once their new religion swept through the population of Jerusalem and they built the first temple atop this site, all those cubits above us, the memory of the cave lasting long enough for the foreman of that excavation team a couple of hundred years later to know its significance, but was then sealed up and lost to history until a British officer broke his way into it more than twenty-five hundred years later.”

Jack gazed around, breathing in the dust of ages, savoring the history. Moses had been here. He put his hand on Rebecca’s shoulder. “Congratulations. This is a phenomenal discovery. A game changer. And you’ve really put your heart and soul into this one.”

She stared at him, her eyes passionate. “This isn’t about clues, Dad. You’ve already got what you need for the next stage of your quest. This is about the point of it all. After finding this, after sitting here beside that altar, I began to understand what drove men like Wilson and Gordon to keep coming back to Jerusalem and to seek Akhenaten in the desert. I thought back two years ago to your extraordinary discovery of the birthplace of the gods beside the Black Sea, of the first stone temples erected at the dawn of civilization. Then, the shamanism and superstitions of the hunter-gatherers were discarded, and people looked to a new spirituality. But in time that optimism was clouded by the power games of priests and priest-kings, and then one pharaoh had the courage to do away with it all and try to start afresh. I don’t think the revelation of the one god came to Akhenaten out of the blue. I think he was yearning for it. It allowed him to be human again, to discard the sham of deified kings and priests. This place, the vision it represents, the presence of the prophet who would perpetuate their shared revelation, would have represented a sea change in his world. And now three thousand years later we are again at a turning point. That’s why I wanted you to see this, Dad. Just like those Victorian soldiers fighting the Mahdi, you’re about to go into a pit of darkness where religion has again been enlisted to justify bestiality and war. Bringing you here was to remind you that there can be hope, that another spiritual awakening is possible, another cleansing. That’s what I believe Wilson and Gordon and the others caught up in their war felt too, and what they so desperately hoped to find.”

Her eyes were red rimmed, and she looked away and wiped them. Jack felt an unexpected upwelling of emotion. Hiebermeyer was not the only one whose guard had been eroded by the events of the past weeks and months, and Jack realized that he had been on edge for too long, that his body and mind craved the resolution that now lay ahead of him one way or another in the coming days. He thought of Rebecca’s mother, of the passion of her convictions that had attracted so many to her, and for a split second he seemed to see Elizabeth standing in the shadows behind Rebecca, the same fervor in her eyes, egging her daughter on. He blinked, and the image was gone, and Jack felt a sudden yawning emptiness that he had not allowed himself to feel in the years since her death. He swallowed hard, and nearly said something to Rebecca, but chose not to. There would be a better time. He glanced at his watch and put his hand back on her shoulder. “Time for me to go.”

Jeremy aimed his headlamp beyond the inscription, toward the blocked-up entrance where the tunnel continued under Temple Mount. “Any thoughts about what lies beyond there?”

Rebecca wiped her eyes again and gazed along his beam. “Danny and I think it’s blocked up. I mean seriously blocked up, not just rubble and plaster but actual shaped masonry, huge slabs of stone barring the way. To get through it would require pneumatic drills and explosives, and that would rock the foundations of the mosque. A very big no-no.”

“Must be something pretty significant for it to have been blocked up like that.”

“Danny’s done some basic geometry and reckons is leads directly under the central part of the temple site.”

“Where you might expect there to be a repository,” Jack said.

“A treasure chamber,” Jeremy added.

Jack looked at Rebecca. “This one’s all yours. For the future.”

Rebecca gave him a wry look. “I’m not really sure about being an archaeologist. Too much dust and dead old stuff.”

Jack raised his eyes and grinned at Jeremy. “Right.”

Rebecca suddenly looked serious, and held Jack’s arm. “Aysha sent me a text yesterday about the Egyptian girl, Sahirah. Jeremy and I took her around when she came to England last year to study with Maria.” She pulled out her phone and showed Jack a photo taken in front of the lions in Trafalgar Square, with Rebecca on the left and beside her an attractive, well-dressed girl with a computer bag slung over her shoulder. Jack had never met Sahirah, and this was the first time he had seen a picture of her. He stared at the dark eyes and Egyptian features, imprinting them in his memory. It was like looking at the exquisitely lifelike portraits that Hiebermeyer had found painted on mummy coffins from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, images that gave sudden humanity to the distant past. Sahirah’s face was like a beacon of light in the darkness that was enveloping Egypt, a darkness that Jack knew would soon be streaked with fire and running with blood.

Rebecca put away the phone. “You will get her out, won’t you, Dad?”

Jack looked at her, silent for a moment. He thought of Sahirah’s parents, of her father, of the anguish they must be going through, seeing their daughter trapped in a tide of history that must seem to them unstoppable. He gave Rebecca a steely look. “That’s really why I’m going back to Egypt. And Aysha is doing everything she can.”

He gave her a quick embrace and shook hands with Jeremy. “My advice is that you photograph every square inch of this place and leave as soon as you can. If I don’t see Danny on the way out, give him my warmest regards and an invitation to IMU to discuss the future of your find. He’ll know that if word of this discovery under the mosque leaks out, the extremists of both sides will be at each other’s throats. It sounds as if he’ll be able to wrap things up for you here. David’s men will be waiting outside the Western Wall to take you away to a safe house, and after that you’ll be put on a flight out of Tel Aviv back to London. Under no circumstances should you make contact with Abdullah the antiquities dealer or his men, who will also be somewhere outside waiting to induce you back into his lair. As far as they know, we’ve just been visiting the Israeli excavation.”

“Don’t worry, Dad. I’m on it.” Rebecca took out her DSLR camera, set the controls, and began photographing. Meanwhile Jeremy knelt down and began sketching the inscription. Jack started to make his way out through the tunnel, but then thought for a moment and turned back. “And Rebecca.”

She glanced back at him, camera poised over the altar. “What is it?”

“Look after Jeremy.” He flashed her a smile and turned back to the tunnel. A few minutes later he was out of the tomb and walking quickly past the Israeli excavators toward the shafts of sunlight he could see coming through the entrance from the Western Wall. He saw Danny on a photo gantry above the excavation and gave him a quick wave. His mind was already on the task ahead, on the trip from the coast of Israel to Sea Venture and then to Alexandria. He would be going back to the brewing firestorm that he hoped against hope had not yet ignited, that would still allow him and Costas the time they needed to complete their quest.

He strode into the dazzling light of the afternoon, and immediately spotted David and two of his men waiting beside a car on the far side of the square.

This was it.