Raiders

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

After the trip down memory lane, no one spoke for a while. The first to break the silence was Zara.

“Just what the hell is an ankh, anyway?”

“It’s what we call an ideogram,” Eva said.

Zara gave her a look. “That clears that up then.”

“An ideogram is just a symbol representing an idea,” Virgil said.

Ella said, “You mean like the time Zara drew a penis on Milo’s head that time he passed out drunk on the Miami job?”

Zara and Ella laughed and shared a high-five.

“You did what?” Milo said, shocked.

“You heard.”

“I never saw that.”

“Of course not,” Zara said. “I’m a professional. After I drew it, photographed it and put it on social media, I rubbed it off again.”

Caleb shook his head and smiled. “Sweet.”

“I’m not sure drawing things like that constitutes an ideogram,” Eva said. “Ideograms are usually symbols that represent important ideas.”

“I think the idea that Milo is a dickhead is very important,” Zara said. “And that is why I did it.”

“Perhaps we can get back to ankhs,” Mason said from the seat in front, his eyes still shut. “And a good place to start might be the important idea that the ankh ideogram represents, don’t you think?”

“Life,” Eva said bluntly. “The design of the symbol perfectly represents the joining of the male and female. The ankh is one of the oldest ideograms on Earth, and we’ve found it on excavations all over the ancient world, in sites from eastern Persia, right through ancient Mesopotamia and stretching west into Egypt.”

“So, pretty important in the ancient world then,” Ella said.

“And in Christianity, too,” Eva said. “Recently, the royal seal of King Hezekiah was uncovered in an archaeological dig at the base of the Temple Mount’s southern wall in Jerusalem.”

“King Who?” Zara said.

“You never read the Bible?” Eva said, astonished.

“Too busy getting shot at and beat up,” Zara said, turning to the academic. “You got a problem with that?”

“I guess not,” Eva said.

Mason gave her a sympathetic look. “You were saying?”

“King Hezekiah was mentioned in various books of the Bible, including Kings, Isaiah and Chronicles.”

“So a big hitter in the Bible Belt, then?” Milo said.

“Ignore it,” Mason said with a sigh. “And please continue to enlighten us.”

“Yeah,” Virgil said. “I thought we were talking about ankhs?”

“We are,” said the Texan archaeologist with a frown. She was starting to sound more like an annoyed kindergarten teacher every second. “What makes this discovery so special is that in this case the bulla was…”

“The what?” Ella said. “Now even I’m confused.”

“Bulla,” Eva repeated. “Clay bullae are a kind of seal used by kings in ancient times. They’ve been dated back to at least the 8th millennium BC in parts of the Middle East.”

Zara leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. “That’s it. Ankhs, Bulls… I’m bailing out. Someone wake me when we get to the interesting part.”

“And you say that you failed school and dropped out of the system?” Eva said.

“Hey, the system failed me, sugarpop. That’s a very different thing.”

“We were on bullas,” Caleb said, giving Eva a reassuring smile.

“The clay bulla found in Temple Mount recently — the seal of King Hezekiah — was special because it included a depiction of a two-winged sun disk which was flanked on either side by ankh symbols.”

A loud sigh from Zara’s seat. “So what?”

“So, you asked what the ankh was, and I’m telling you it’s a symbol of life used not just by ancient mystery religions, but also by kings included in the Christian Bible. Their ideography is everywhere.”

“Had to ask…” Zara muttered.

“How much of this did you tell Linus?” Mason asked. “Not too much, I hope.”

Eva shook her head. “No, not at all; I only told him what I had to, nothing more. I pretended to have more so they wouldn’t…” she paused.

“So they wouldn’t what?” Milo asked.

“We know what you’re trying to say,” Virgil said, giving Milo a sharp look.

Eva lowered her eyes for a moment as she started to open up about the kidnap. She chose her words carefully, not wanting to look weak, but also conveying to everyone the ordeal that Kyle Cage and the rest of the Spider crew had subjected her to.

Mason listened carefully as she led them through everything that had happened to her in Germany. He was proud that his extraction team had yet again pulled off another great mission and rescued her from the Spiders, but he could see how badly shaken Eva still was by the kidnapping. He was especially moved when she told them all that just knowing the Spiders and OM were still out there, and knew she was alive, felt like their slithering fingers were running up the sides of her body and wrapping around her throat.

The pilot announced that they would be arriving in Oxford in a few minutes and that everyone should buckle themselves in for the landing. Mason took his seat and started to pray that the long, black arms of the Hidden Hand hadn’t already grabbed Ambrose Lloyd by the neck.