Raiders

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

With the Titanfort Citation racing into the sky and leaving Frankfurt far behind, Mason peered out of the window. Seconds later the world below was nothing but a sea of black, and he pulled down the shade, took a deep breath and sighed. When all this was over he was going to take long break beside a very quiet lake.

Or maybe climb Kangchenjunga. He’d always wanted to do that.

He leaned back in the leather chair and allowed his thoughts to drift. The enigmatic Eva Starling had ridden with Ezra Haven in a separate vehicle on the way back to the airport, and now she was with Ezra and Wills at the rear of the plane undergoing further tests.

Zara sat beside him. “Has anyone spoken with the Sainted Doctor Starling yet?” she asked, peering toward the back of the jet. Ezra and Evangeline Starling were now deep in conversation.

“Not yet,” Mason said.

Ella took a look and said, “She’s apologizing to him.”

“How do you know that?” Caleb said.

“Body language, the way she’s moving.”

Mason was just beginning to wonder if he would ever get to talk to her when Ezra and Eva finally walked over and joined them in the main part of the aircraft’s cabin.

“Maybe it’s time you gave us the rest of the picture,” he said firmly. “We’re all here on your plane, after all.”

Ezra ignored him with a polite smile. “All right everyone — listen up. Mat Wills has declared Dr Starling here fit and ready to brief you on the rest of the mission.”

Eva was moving cautiously, but she looked better now, and calmer. Earlier, the medic had given her a mild sedative, and now she sat down among them all and gave a weak smile. “I never thanked you for getting me out of there.”

“Think nothing of it,” Mason said.

“Sorry if I’m out of it, but Dr Wills says it looks like they pumped me with oxytocin.”

“Oxy-what-now?” Zara said.

“Oxytocin,” Wills said. “It’s being used more and more as a kind of truth serum. I suspect they gave Eva a dose to check if she was making a truthful translation.”

Ella looked concerned. “Jesus, are you all right?”

“I think so…”

Then Ezra spoke. “Mat says she’ll be fine, so now to business. You know about the Spiders and you know about the darkness that is Occulta Manu, but what you don’t know is why Eva was kidnapped.”

“About bloody time,” Mason said.

Caleb passed a weary hand over his eyes. “You said something about this secret order wanting something translated?”

“We’ll get to that, but let’s start at the beginning. A few days ago the director of the Vatican Secret Archives was murdered.”

“Wait,” Milo said. “I read about that.”

Zara turned toward him and opened her mouth theatrically. “You can read?”

“Sod off, Wonder Woman.”

“You think I’m like Wonder Woman?” she said, smiling with pride.

“Sure I do, because everyone wonders why you’re such an arsehole.”

“You wound me, Milo,” Zara said. “You wound me with this talk. Get me another coffee, would you?”

“Why me?”

Zara shrugged. “Shit rolls downhill, I guess.”

“Nice attitude,” he said. “You should be more respectful to your elders and betters.”

“Yeah, about that, Milo. 1993 called, and they want their waistcoat back.”

Milo exploded into a peel of fake laughter. “Oh, my sides; please stop before they split wide open.”

“And you’re about a year older than me, Milo, so shut up.”

Ezra cleared his throat and recaptured their attention. “As I was saying, Signor Scala was murdered.”

Virgil frowned. “But the newspapers said he died in his sleep.”

“Sure they did, but that’s not what happened. That was a cover-up ordered by the Pope. The reality is that Monsignor Bruno Scala was brutally murdered on the rooftops of the Vatican. It looked like he had been stabbed or sliced to death. The Italian Secret Service report concludes that his injuries are consistent with those caused by shuriken stars.”

“Holy shit floating in a punch bowl,” Milo added.

Ezra frowned. “Monsignor Scala’s death is directly connected with the kidnapping of Dr Starling here the next day. I’m going to stand aside now and let Eva fill in the rest.”

About fucking time… Mason considered.

Evangeline Starling stepped up and looked at each of the Raiders before starting to speak. “As we all know, Kyle Cage kidnapped me from the heart of Harvard University and before I knew it I was in the back of a van with a bag over my head. I hope I never see that man ever again.”

Eva said this with a visible shudder. “Kyle Cage is one angry individual. I saw him up close and personal and there’s nothing in his eyes except a cold, calculated cunning. Evil, I guess. They told me I was safe and would stay that way so long as I cooperated. Then they drugged me. I woke up in Frankfurt to see Linus Finn and some strange individuals dressed in black standing in front of me.”

“They would be the Hidden Hand,” Ezra said.

“Quite,” continued Eva. “Anyway, Finn was holding an ancient artefact and demanded that I translate it for the weirdos.”

“What sort of artefact?” Caleb asked. “The one we found, right?”

“Right — it’s the object taken from Scala after his murder,” Ezra said. “The Vatican has been guarding it for centuries.”

“What was it?” Mason asked. “I’d never seen anything like it before.”

“It was this,” Ezra said, and pulled it from his pocket.

“Woah!” Zara said. “Who needs the lottery?”

Eva’s eyes came to life when she saw it again. “It’s an ancient Egyptian ankh, a very rare relic from the Thirtieth Dynasty, specifically during the reign of Nectanebo II.”

“I failed history,” Zara said, crossing her arms over her chest and blowing a bubble with her gum. “Humor me.”

“Nectanebo II was the last pharaoh of the Thirtieth Dynasty, which was around three hundred and fifty B.C., so nearly two and half thousand years ago. I’d never seen anything quite like it before. As a piece of religious iconography it’s not special, but what makes it so significant is two things — first its condition. It’s damn near perfect, like it’s been made yesterday, and the second thing is the symbols.”

Mason leaned forward in his seat. Despite his earlier resistance to the mission, he was now totally absorbed by what the American archaeologist was saying. “Symbols?”

Eva nodded. “Yes, along both the front and back of the flat part of the ankh are a series of symbols — look.”

Ezra handed it around. The jewels sparkled in the low light.

“They’re very strange hieroglyphics that are unlike anything I’ve seen before. It soon became clear that the weirdos in black had hired Linus Finn and his thugs to kidnap me and force me to translate these symbols.”

The jet shook slightly as it plowed through a stretch of turbulence. For a moment the only sound was the gentle hum of its two powerful engines roaring away outside the cabin.

“And could you translate them?” Milo said.

“Yes, she could,” Ella said.

“How do you know that?” Eva said.

“She’s a mentalist,” Zara said. “She can read micro-expressions as easily as you can read a newspaper.”

She gave Ella a wary glance. “Well, I could translate them, yes.”

Mason saw she had started to pale. “What do they say?”

“They say that the Book of Thoth is real.”

“The Book of Thoth?” Ella asked. “What’s that?”

Eva raised an eyebrow. “You mean you can’t tell by reading my micro-expressions?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Ella said sharply.

“Shame,” Eva said smugly. “Anyway, up until today I believed the Book of Thoth referred to a series of ancient Egyptian texts all written by Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge and writing. Right from way back in the Ptolemaic period, there have always been rumors of a single magical text called the Book of Thoth which is supposed to exist and contain two specific spells. The first is supposed to let the reader of the spell communicate with animals.”

Zara turned in her seat. “Shit, Milo — we could use that to understand you.”

“Oh Lord,” Milo said. “The Raiders’ gain was stand-up comedy’s loss.”

“You said there were two spells in the book,” Mason said. “What was the second?”

“The second spell is supposed to contain magic that will allow whoever reads it to see the gods. It may be that the Book of Thoth is a kind of ultimate Book of the Dead, or Book of Spells, but whatever you call it, it’s supposed to contain magical texts and pictures.”

“To help see the gods?” Virgil asked.

Eva gave a non-committal shrug and Ezra slipped the ankh back into his jacket pocket.

“Do you know who carved the symbols?” Mason asked.

Eva nodded. “I think so. His name was Parennefer. He was a priest, vizier and prophet in the first century, most probably named after the famous High Priest of the 18th Dynasty who advised Akhenaten.”

The short silence was ended by Zara Dietrich. “What a load of bull crap.”

“Maybe,” Ezra said, “but maybe not. As I said, we have always understood the magical Book of Thoth to be nothing more than a fictional idea, but since the discovery of the ankh we now think it’s worth pursuing. Remember, the Vatican has been sitting on this for centuries, but now the secret’s out, and worse than that Linus Finn and his puppet masters in the Hidden Hand are onto it. If they want it, I want it.”

Mason closed his eyes and ran through everything he had just heard. Ancient spells and Egyptian magic and secret orders… it was a far cry from his normal meat-and-potatoes work of asset recovery. Kidnapped people, stolen jewellery yes; mystical texts that allowed you to see gods, a big no.

“I refuse to believe in magical spells,” he said at last.

“And you’re probably right to,” Eva said.

“So why is the Hidden Hand after it?” Milo said.

“Just about everything in our Western society is based on ancient Rome and before that, ancient Greece. Much of these cultures was shaped by ancient Egypt so if there really is a Book of Thoth, or Book of Spells, it might contain information that could change everything we know about our history.”

“And that’s why OM want to get their hands on it,” Ezra said flatly. “They want to control the flow of history and shape everything to suit their agenda.”

“And where do we find this ancient book?” Mason said.

“The Book of Spells itself should be in Egypt somewhere, but Egypt’s a big place. Beyond that, this is where the ankh became cryptic,” Eva said. “It made a reference to Nectanebo II and how he would take the secret into the heavens via a mystical codex. My speculation is that Parennefer detailed the location of the Book of Thoth in some kind of codex, and that this codex is hidden inside the old king’s sarcophagus. I think the ankh is some kind of key to access it.”

“And that’s why we’re going to London?” Caleb said.

Eva nodded. “Indeed — the sarcophagus is in the British Museum. It was taken there in 1802 as a condition of the Treaty of Alexandria. Napoleon had already taken the sarcophagus during his famous expedition to Egypt, but it was handed over to the British after the capitulation of Alexandria when they besieged the French troops there. After that it went to London and it’s been there ever since.”

After a long pause, Ezra said, “So are you in on it or not?”

“I don’t know,” Mason said, his words heavy with a genuine uncertainty.

“Things have been getting kind of stale recently,” Ella said.

“That’s true,” said Milo. “And we’re not just talking about Zara’s t-shirts either. Work has also been getting kind of boring.”

Zara shook her head and smirked. “Oh, Milo — one day I’m going to use your ass as a free-standing punch bag until my goddam foot falls off.”

“Please, Zara,” Caleb said. “There’s no need to tell them about what foreplay you two engage in. This is private and between you and Milo.”

“Oh, funny man makes funny,” Zara said. “You want your butt kicked too?”

Mason looked at Ezra and Eva Starling and how they were watching the Raiders as they sparred. “I bet you’re regretting asking us to do this right about now, right?”

“Not at all,’ Ezra said. “I’ve seen you scale the Istanbul Sapphire and now break into a safehouse in Frankfurt. I know you can handle this.”

Mason couldn’t resist smiling. “Fine, count me in.”