The Cult of Osiris

The chips ranged in value from a few euros to tens of thousands - and everybody immediately lunged to grab the latter. A woman screamed as the man beside her knocked her from her stool, and there was a huge crash of glass as a drinks trolley overturned. A blackjack dealer shrieked as her table toppled to the floor in another cascade of scattering chips. The two bodyguards were caught in the scrum of snatching hands.

The near-riot had also cut the security guards off from Eddie - and him from the exits. He clawed through the crowd, looking for a new escape route.

‘Get that bastard!’ Diamondback roared, barging into the room with another of Osir’s bodyguards. His gun was in his hand, anger overcoming any thought of keeping a low profile.

Eddie ploughed forward. Something solid clunked against his foot. A champagne bottle from the trolley. He bent and snatched it up - a club was better than no weapon at all - then saw a clear route out of the money-crazed mob beneath a roulette table.

He rolled under it, scrambling along on his knees as he tore off the foil and unwound the wire cage holding the cork. Shouted French from behind told him that the security guards had lost track of their target. Emerging from beneath the table, he jumped up.

A man yelled as Osir’s bodyguard slammed him out of his path. Diamondback was right behind him as the two men rounded the roulette table, coming for Eddie as he pushed his thumb against the cork—

Pop!

The cork shot from the bottle at the head of a sparking geyser and hit the bodyguard square in one eye. He screeched, clapping a hand to his face as champagne sprayed over him. Diamondback tried to push him aside, arm outstretched over the man’s shoulder as he took aim—

Eddie threw the still-gushing bottle. Its blunt end hit the revolver, smacking it from Diamondback’s hand on to the roulette table. The gun bounced off the baize and landed on the spinning wheel, the wooden butt extending out over its rim.

Diamondback snarled and shoved the half-blinded bodyguard at Eddie, who staggered as the man collided with him, then dived along the length of the table after his Colt. The gun spun out of his reach. He pushed forward on one elbow, grasping again . . .

Eddie threw the bodyguard aside and flung himself on to the table, smashing an elbow down on the other man’s spine. Diamondback howled in pain, his twitching hand just missing the gun as it came round again. Eddie dragged him bodily back down the table before punching his head and making a dive for the gun himself.

His fingers closed on empty air as the revolver continued its circuit.

A fist crashed against his skull, jarring his vision. The Python cruised past once more. Diamondback delivered another pounding blow to the back of his head, slamming his face against the cloth. Before Eddie could look up again, his opponent twisted and kicked him in the side, rolling him away from the wheel in a shower of betting chips.

Diamondback dug one cowboy boot hard into the baize and thrust himself back up the table. He slapped a hand down on the wheel, jarring it to a stop.

Eddie saw Diamondback’s hand finally clamp round the gun. The American had kicked him too far away for him to land an effective punch - he needed a weapon to extend his reach, fast.

The croupier’s rake—

He snatched it up and swung it at his adversary.

It snapped in half.

The handle was nothing more than a length of black-painted dowel. Diamondback looked at him mockingly, the blow practically painless. He flipped the gun in his hand, bringing it to bear—

Eddie stabbed the pointed, broken end of the rake into his crotch.

This time, the result was anything but painless. Diamondback’s eyes bugged wide. Eddie saw his chance, grabbing him by his scaly lapels and slamming a steamhammer headbutt into his face before wrenching the gun from his hand and standing on the table to survey the scene.

The chaos had spread to the rest of the room, some people trying to flee, others rushing in from the corners in the hope of claiming a prize before they were all gone.

Somebody screamed, seeing the gun. He looked round. More security men were hurrying in. He had to get outside. But all the exits were covered.

That left the windows.

He leapt from the table and ran towards the courtyard entrance. An attendant moved to block him, but the revolver’s muzzle swinging towards him quickly changed his mind. Eddie had no intention of shooting, though. Even if he’d had more than a puny six bullets, he wasn’t about to blast his way out of a building full of innocent tourists. He rounded a craps table, looking up at the ornate ceiling, the chandeliers hanging from it . . .

Another of Osir’s men sprang out from behind a row of slot machines. Eddie jinked sideways just in time to avoid being tackled, but the hulking bodyguard still managed to grip his waist. He bashed at the man’s head with his elbow as they ran, but the goon wouldn’t let go, intent on ramming him into the nearest solid obstacle.

Which was another slot machine, right in front of them.

Instead of trying to dodge, he hooked his arm tightly round the man’s neck and deliberately aimed for the machine. The bodyguard realised too late what he was doing and tried to stop, but now the tables were turned, Eddie pulling him towards a very painful collision—

The machine’s video screen shattered as the bodyguard smashed into it head first. Eddie reeled back as sparks exploded from the hole - and a cascade of tokens spewed into the tray, the machine chiming happily.

‘You hit the jackpot, mate,’ Eddie told the unconscious man. He was about forty feet from the nearest curtained window - and thirty-five from a trio of security guards pounding towards him.

He used the slumped bodyguard as a stepping stone to scramble up on top of the row of slot machines, then charged along it. The guards snatched at his legs as he sprinted past, but too late to stop him from making a flying leap off the last machine and grabbing a chandelier.

With a musical clash of crystal, he swung through the window.

The curtains ripped away and wrapped round him as he fell, a protective shroud against the shattering glass. Unable to see, he hit the ground hard, rolling several times. Sharp shards rained round him.

Eddie threw off the curtains and got painfully to his feet. Shocked partygoers gawped at him. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he grunted. ‘Just came to see the . . .’

His gaze landed on the green and gold car at the courtyard’s centre, its engine still idling. The driver was half standing as he looked over the rear wing to see what had happened. ‘Car,’ Eddie concluded.

He ran for the vehicle. The driver - he recognised him as a Finn called Mikko Virtanen - stared at him in confusion.

‘Sorry, mate,’ said Eddie, shoving him out of the cockpit. He pocketed the gun and jumped into the cramped compartment, sliding to a lying position almost parallel to the ground. ‘Good luck with the race!’

The team technicians snapped out of their paralysis at the sight of their star driver being carjacked and ran at him - but Eddie had already pulled the lever to engage the clutch. He squeezed the steering wheel paddle to switch into first . . . and pushed the accelerator.

The result was like nothing he had ever experienced.

Without a helmet or earplugs, the engine’s howl was almost deafening, and the jolt of acceleration smacked his head back against the unpadded roll bar so hard that he saw stars.

People leapt out of Eddie’s path as the pointed nose of his new ride speared at them, one of the huge front wheels clipping a table and sending hors d’oeuvres to the four winds. He aimed for the street, closing his eyes as he hit the lightweight barrier—

Osir ran out of the ballroom, Nina behind him, just in time to see the car smash through the cordon into Casino Square. ‘Zarba!’ he gasped. ‘Stop him, somebody stop him!’

Shaban and the bloodied Diamondback burst from the casino. Diamondback raised his second Colt and pointed it at the car, but a frantic screech of ‘No! Not here!’ from Osir stayed his trigger finger. ‘Get after him! Sebak, go!’

With an angry glare at Nina, Shaban ran after the car, Diamondback and another of Osir’s bodyguards following. Casino security staff poured into the courtyard, too late to do anything but mill in confusion. Macy appeared in the doorway, but Nina gestured for her to get back inside.

Osir turned to her. ‘Your husband just stole a million dollar racecar! ’

‘Yeah, that’s something else about him that drives me mad,’ she said, feigning infuriation, ‘his total lack of respect for other people’s property!’

He shook his head in dismay. ‘At least it’s only the spare car. And since he’s not a professional driver, he won’t get far.’

Eddie was quickly discovering that driving a racing car was vastly harder than it looked. The slightest touch of the stiff and heavy accelerator seemed to send several hundred horsepower instantly to the rear wheels, making the back end slither about wildly, and with cold tyres and not enough speed for the wings to generate downforce it felt like driving on an ice rink.

To make matters worse, even though he was now on the racing track, the road was still busy with civilian traffic - coming straight at him. He was going round the circuit the wrong way. What was more, since he was sitting so low to the ground, the oncoming headlights were at eye level, dazzling him.

He swerved, barely avoiding the monolithic nose of a Bentley - only to have one end of the front wing disintegrate into razor splinters of carbon fibre as it scraped against the roadside crash barrier. He battled with the steering wheel, ignoring the battery of furiously flashing warning lights on it as he struggled to stay in a straight line.

Back into two-way traffic as he joined the Avenue d’Ostende and descended the hill towards the harbour, but being able to go with the flow was little help as this road was even busier. The back end of a Range Rover loomed: he braked, sliding forward as the wheels locked up. The engine threatened to stall, and he pushed the accelerator again.

Too hard.

The car lunged, cracking his head another blow. The other side of the front wing shattered against the Range Rover’s rear wheel, shards stabbing into the rubber.

Eddie swerved away as the big 4×4’s tyre exploded and it crashed down on its alloy wheel rim. ‘Sorry!’

But the broken chunks of carbon fibre had also damaged his own tyre, the front wheel shuddering as he steered round another car. He was losing what little control he had.

And he could hear something else over the engine’s scream - sirens. The police were coming. It wouldn’t exactly be hard for them to pick out his car from the rest of the vehicles.

He had to get to the harbour before they caught him.

The other cars almost blocked his view of the road ahead, but he could see enough to tell that he was coming to the bottom of the hill. Which, he remembered from past races on TV, was the location of the first turn after the start.

A sharp turn.

‘Oh, shit,’ he gasped. Even in first gear, he was doing close to fifty miles an hour as he zigzagged through the traffic towards the Saint Devote corner. And the corner itself was busy, a complex intersection in its everyday guise.

He saw what he hoped was a clear line, aimed for it . . .

With a whap! of escaping high-pressure nitrogen, the damaged front tyre sloughed off the wheel rim.

The car spun out, sliding almost sideways before the back wheel bashed against a Ferrari, sending Eddie’s vehicle into a mad pirouette through the junction. The world was a blur - but he could make out a crash barrier getting closer with each revolution.

He braced himself—

The car crashed sidelong into the barrier, impact-absorbing sections of bodywork crushing flat. Still spinning, scattering debris, it bounced back out into the junction. Cars swerved to avoid the whirling wreck. A large van skidded, heading straight for Eddie’s car . . .

Both vehicles stopped at the same time - with the racing car’s nose wedged under the van’s front bumper.

Groaning, Eddie sat up. His shoulder felt as though it had taken a hit with a baseball bat where he had been flung against the cockpit’s edge. But the car’s safety features had done their job: he would be able to walk away from the crash.

Or stagger, at least. Head spinning, he clambered out and got his bearings. The long arc of the start/finish stretch led away to the south. Towards the harbour.

‘C’est James Bond!’ someone called. Eddie realised he had already attracted a crowd - considering that a man in a tuxedo had just wrecked a racing car in the middle of Monaco, that was hardly surprising.

The Ferrari’s driver stared in horror at the huge dent in its side. ‘Send the bill to Team Osiris!’ Eddie called before jogging to the nearest gap in the barriers. He pushed through the gawkers, disappearing into the crowd as the first police car arrived.

‘He crashed it?’ Osir said, appalled. Shaban had just phoned him with a report. ‘Did you find him?’ The reply was negative. ‘Then did the police catch him, at least?’ An identical response. ‘Well, that’s marvellous!’

Nina had to fight to conceal her jubilation. ‘That man destroys everything he touches,’ she sneered instead. ‘Relationships, lives . . . racecars . . .’

‘I can see why you want to be rid of him,’ he muttered, before turning his attention back to the phone. ‘I’m going back to the Solar Barque. Yes, with Dr Wilde. No, I - Sebak, I do not want to hear this again. Get as many people as you can. The police will be looking for him as well, so monitor their radios. I want him found.’ He listened to Shaban. ‘Only if absolutely necessary - I don’t want any more trouble with the authorities, not tonight. Capture him and take him to the yacht.’

‘You’re not going to kill him?’ Nina asked as he ended the call.

Osir gestured at the wreckage of the party. ‘This will be hard enough to explain. The last thing I need is to turn on the TV and see a news bulletin about Sebak being arrested for your husband’s murder!’

‘So what are you going to do with Eddie when you find him?’

‘The Mediterranean is very big, and very deep.’

‘Ah . . . great. That’ll save me having to pay for a divorce lawyer.’

Osir laughed coldly. ‘Well, I think the party is over. I don’t know if the zodiac will be ready yet, but we may as well find out. Give me a few minutes to say my goodbyes.’

He moved to speak to a group of people nearby, as full of bonhomie as if a switch had been flipped. Nina took the opportunity to go to the doorway. She saw Macy amongst the onlookers and waved her closer.

‘Where’s Eddie?’ Macy asked. ‘Is he okay?’

‘For now - he got away. In a racecar.’

Macy smiled. ‘You know, your husband’s a pretty awesome guy.’

‘Yeah, I like to think so.’ She looked back into the courtyard. Osir was still engaged in conversation. ‘Look, this might sound weird, but this is probably the safest place for you to be. Shaban and his buddy are out looking for Eddie, and Osir’s about to take me back to the yacht to see the zodiac.’

‘That’s great, but what am I supposed to do when this place closes? I won’t be able to get a hotel room even if there are any left - Eddie’s got my passport!’

‘That’s not exactly my biggest worry right now, Macy.’ Another glance back; Osir was looking for her. ‘You’ll figure something out. I’ve got to go, though. If Eddie or I can’t get in touch with you, there’s a hotel across the square - wait in the lobby, and we’ll find you.’

Macy was unhappy with the situation, but nodded. ‘Good luck, Dr Wilde. Stay safe.’

‘You too.’ Nina backed into the courtyard and went to Osir. ‘Are you ready to go?’

‘The car is coming to take us back to the harbour.’ He put on a smile for the benefit of his other companions. ‘It will have to take the long way round - it seems there has been a traffic incident at Saint Devote!’ The joke raised some gallows laughter.

Taking Nina by the arm, he went back into the casino. As the attendants backed away to let them through, Macy slipped into the courtyard, moving hurriedly away from the doors before the casino staff spotted her. The party was winding down now that its main attraction had disappeared in a cloud of tyre smoke.

Macy spotted another attraction, though: a handsome blond man in racing overalls, talking agitatedly to a couple of older guys. Guessing he was the driver, she trotted over. ‘What happened?’

Virtanen gave her a brief glance - then did a double-take as he registered that she was a young and beautiful woman who wasn’t surgically attached to the arm of a middle-aged team sponsor. ‘It was terrible,’ he said mournfully. ‘I was carjacked - a man with a gun! I tried to stop him, but he got away.’ His companions rolled their eyes, but said nothing to contradict the star of the team.

‘My God! Are you okay?’

‘Just a few bruises. I’ll still be able to race tomorrow, for sure. But I think I’ll go back to my hotel now. Unless,’ a suggestive grin, ‘you would like to share a drink with me first?’

Macy gave him a perfect smile. ‘I think I would.’

17

In the dark, Monaco’s waterfront looked like an extension of the city itself, ranks of expensive yachts lined up like gleaming buildings along the jetties.

Nina looked round anxiously as Osir brought her to the Solar Barque’s distinctively painted tender. She had hoped to spy Eddie nearby, waiting for the tender to depart so he could follow it to its mother ship. But there was no familiar stocky figure amongst the people boarding the floating palaces, nobody surreptitiously observing them from a neighbouring pier.

Had the police caught him? Or worse, Shaban?

She dismissed the latter as soon as the awful thought came to her. If Shaban had found Eddie, Osir would have been told. But his absence was still a worry - not least because without him, she would have to improvise her own escape from Osir’s yacht. With the Solar Barque being over half a mile offshore, swimming was not her preferred option.

They boarded the tender and Osir gave an order to its pilot. With a diesel rumble, the boat set off. Even though the evening was warm, the breeze over the open vessel was cold. Nina rubbed her bare arms.

‘Here,’ said Osir. He took off his jacket and draped it over her.

‘Thank you,’ she said automatically, keeping to herself that her chill was not solely down to the wind.

They passed more opulent yachts and made their way between the quays marking the boundary of the inner harbour of Port Hercule. The outer harbour’s breakwaters extended ahead, the darkness of the Mediterranean visible beyond them. The tender drifted off course from the exit, the pilot having to adjust for what seemed to be a stronger than expected current, but they soon cleared the long concrete barriers and entered the open sea.

Swimming was now an even less appealing idea, Nina decided. Past the breakwaters, the ocean was choppy, the tender bouncing through the waves with great smacks of spray. An anchor chain rattled against the hull with each impact. She looked back to shore. Monaco was aglow against the surrounding hills. It was a spectacular sight . . . but her worries made it impossible for her to appreciate it.

There were numerous other vessels moored offshore, but the Solar Barque stood out as large even by the standards of megayachts. The tender pulled up to its stern, where a mooring platform, big enough also to accommodate a pair of smaller speedboats and several jet skis, had been lowered to water level. A crewman tied up the boat, then Osir took Nina by the hand to help her on to the deck.

‘I’d like to thank you for your company,’ he said. ‘Even though things didn’t go quite as I planned.’

‘My pleasure,’ Nina replied. ‘And, ah . . . I apologise for my husband. I just wish I’d been able to persuade him to see things my way. It would have made things a lot less . . . well, expensive.’

‘You don’t have to take the blame for his actions,’ he assured her. ‘And as for the money, none of it will matter when we discover the Pyramid of Osiris.’

‘In that case,’ said Nina, ‘we’d better go see the zodiac, hadn’t we?’

They entered the yacht and went to one of the upper decks. Osir led her to a door. ‘Please, wait in my cabin,’ he said. ‘I will see if the zodiac is ready.’

The cabin turned out to be larger than her entire apartment, the adjoining bathroom and walk-in closets making it even bigger. It also boasted a mirrored ceiling above the enormous bed. The decor was every bit as playboyesque as his Swiss home, missing only a tigerskin rug to complete the picture. ‘This is - stylish,’ she managed.

Osir smiled as he went to another door at the room’s far end. ‘Make yourself comfortable. I will just be a minute.’

She perched on the end of the bed, kicking off her heels and fidgeting with the long dress as she waited. Before long Osir returned, his smile even wider. He pulled a catch above the door, folding panels back to reveal another large room beyond. ‘It is ready.’

Nina crossed the room. She looked past Osir . . .

To see, for the first time, the fully assembled zodiac.

Whoever he had employed to restore it, she had to admit they had done an absolutely exquisite job. The six-foot-diameter disc rested on a low circular stand beneath a thick protective layer of transparent bulletproof Lexan. It wasn’t until she stepped right up to it that she could see any trace of the cuts made to remove it from the Hall of Records.

Seen in its entirety, the zodiac was spectacular. Smaller than the one in the Louvre, it made up for it with its vibrant colours. Sealed within the Sphinx, protected from the elements, the paint picking out each constellation from the dark background had remained almost intact. A thick, weaving line of pale blue bisected the sky - the Milky Way, she assumed.

There were other markings: the red dot she had seen in Macy’s photo, almost certainly Mars, and circles representing other planets. But her attention immediately went to the yellow triangle near the small figure of Osiris.

A pyramid. Osiris’s pyramid.

She leaned closer. There was something barely discernible painted beside it, very small characters. Hieroglyphs.

Nina looked excitedly round at Osir. ‘Have you seen these?’

‘Of course,’ he said, going to a large table and picking up a printout from beside a laptop. ‘I had them translated when the zodiac was still in pieces. They’re directions - the problem is, I don’t know the starting point. Nobody does. Which is why I need your insight.’

He handed her the translation. ‘ “The second eye of Osiris sees the way to the silver canyon,” ’ she read. ‘ “One atur towards Mercury beyond its end is the tomb of the immortal god-king.” An atur, that’s an Egyptian unit of measurement, right?’

‘Eleven thousand and twenty-five metres.’

Nina instantly performed the mental arithmetic to convert the figure to imperial measurements: ‘Six point eight five miles.’ Osir raised an eyebrow. ‘Like I said, I’m good at math. So the pyramid is just under seven miles from the end of the silver canyon in the direction of Mercury, which is . . . one of these planets on the zodiac, I guess.’

‘Actually, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘The planets on the zodiac are Mars, Venus and Jupiter.’ He pointed them out. ‘But we used their positions to calculate Mercury’s position as well. It would have been . . . here.’ He indicated a particular spot to the right of the pyramid.

‘So, about seven miles east of the end of the canyon. Except,’ she continued, nodding at a wall mirror, ‘because the map is mirrored since we’re looking at it from above rather than below, it’s really seven miles west.’

Osir was pleased. ‘So all we need to do is find the silver canyon.’

‘Which means first, we need to find the second eye of Osiris. Where’s his first eye?’

‘There are two Osiris figures on the zodiac,’ he reminded her. ‘Perhaps they point the way together?’

Nina bent low to examine them. Typically for Egyptian art they were in profile, only one eye visible on each, but at the small size of the carvings they were nothing more than dots. She drew an imaginary line between the eyes of the two figures, but it neither ran near the pyramid nor seemed to point to anything in particular.

‘The Eye of Osiris is also a symbol, isn’t it?’ she asked.

Osir nodded. ‘A sign of protection. Found in temples, tombs . . . it’s supposed to help guide you through the Underworld.’

‘So fairly common, then. That won’t narrow things down.’ She stared at the zodiac, thinking. ‘Could the “silver canyon” be a clue? The ancient Egyptians valued silver above gold - were there any silver mines in the pre-dynastic period?’

‘I don’t know. You’re the historian, not me!’

‘Point taken. This’ll need more research. We need to check the archaeological databases . . .’ She tailed off, realising she was slipping into a state of professional excitement over the chance to crack the puzzle - and forgetting that doing so would help the very person she was trying to stop.

‘Are you all right?’ Osir asked.

‘I’m . . . just tired,’ she said. ‘It’s been a hectic day.’

He smiled. ‘My apologies - there’s no need to solve this riddle in one night. Besides, the race is tomorrow, and I was hoping you would join me there.’

‘Sounds cool,’ she said, the idea of watching noisy cars screaming past for a couple of hours anything but.

‘Wonderful. Then before that, perhaps you’d join me for a glass of champagne?’

‘Ah . . . I really ought to go to bed.’ Privacy would give her a chance to try to contact Eddie.

‘Just one glass, please,’ Osir insisted. ‘I have a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the next room - it would be a shame to drink it alone.’

‘What about all your . . .’ She almost said ‘bimbos’, but settled on ‘young lady friends?’

‘My followers?’ A jaded shake of the head. ‘They are all lovely, but sometimes I prefer more intellectual company. Someone with stories of her own. Like your discovery of Atlantis.’ He smiled again. ‘Just one glass.’

Three glasses later, Nina was kneeling on Osir’s bed, her dress spread out around her in a silken circle. ‘So I was stuck on this platform with Excalibur, an’ Jack was starting up the generator so he could start up a war . . . when boom! Eddie’d rigged up a hand grenade as a booby trap. After that, the whole ship started blowing up like something out of a Bond movie. We had to bail out in this sort of jet-glider thing - almost froze to death before we landed on a trawler. Man, that was a bad smell!’

‘Your life has been even more of an adventure than mine,’ said Osir, stretched out beside her. ‘And fortune is certainly on your side.’

‘If I were really that lucky, I wouldn’t have gotten shot. Check this out.’ She hitched up her skirt to reveal the circular scar of a bullet wound on her right thigh. Osir’s eyes widened at the sight of the bare leg just inches from his face. ‘I wouldn’t have had my life and my career wrecked, either.’

‘You don’t need to worry about that any more, Nina,’ he assured her. ‘Once we find the Pyramid of Osiris, your life will be . . . anything you want it to be. And very long, too.’

She drained her glass. ‘Do I get a free lifetime supply of Khalid’s Longevity Bread?’

‘You’ll get whatever you want.’

‘Glad to hear it.’ She frowned slightly, thinking back to the lab at the Swiss castle. ‘Is it safe, though? You said it was genetically modified.’

Osir chuckled. ‘Of course it will be safe. I’ll be eating it myself! No, the genetic modifications to the yeast are to make it into exactly what I want it to be.’

‘Which is? Or will your brother shout at you if you tell me?’

Another mocking laugh. ‘Sometimes it seems that Sebak thinks he is in charge of the Temple, not me! No, my brother was being overcautious, as always. The genetic modifications are partly so that we can obtain international copyrights and patents on the new organism - yeast is very easy to cultivate, after all. I don’t want everyone being able to bake their own bread of Osiris - they will have to come to the Osirian Temple for it. And also,’ his expression became more conniving, giving his handsome features an unexpectedly wolfish look, ‘I don’t want it to be too good at regenerating the body’s cells. People buying it once a year is not enough. They need to buy it once a month, or better still once a week.’

‘Sounds like you’re trying to get them hooked.’

He shrugged. ‘What is a modest amount of money every week in return for immortality? Better that it goes to the Osirian Temple than on cigarettes or drink or drugs. We give a good deal of money to charitable causes, after all.’

No doubt in countries where the Osirian Temple wanted political favours, Nina thought. ‘So that’s what you want: to choose who gets to be immortal?’

‘Fitting, don’t you think?’ said Osir. ‘Osiris decided who received everlasting life. I’m just following in his footsteps. But I think the world will think very highly of the man who brought it immortality.’ He finished his drink. ‘More champagne?’

Nina regarded her empty glass. ‘Oh. That went fast. I shouldn’t, really . . .’

‘I’ll open another bottle.’ He took her glass, then slid off the bed.

She lay down and closed her eyes. ‘Thank you, Khalid.’

‘My pleasure,’ he said, his smirk anticipating another kind of pleasure. He took another bottle from a fridge under a marble-topped bar, then crossed to the bathroom. ‘Excuse me one moment.’

He closed the door, then admired himself in the mirror before stripping to his silk boxer shorts and donning a dressing gown, also silk. A quick splash of cologne, then he stepped back into the bedroom.

To his delight, the lights had been turned down low, and an inviting shape waited beneath the expensive sheets. He climbed on the end of the bed, slowly moving up it. ‘I see you’ve made yourself comfortable.’ He gently pulled back the sheets . . . to see Eddie Chase grinning back at him.

‘Pucker up, Romeo,’ said Eddie, sticking Diamondback’s revolver into his face.

18

Osir cringed away as Eddie sat up. ‘How - how did you get in here?’ he demanded, outrage and fear battling for supremacy.

‘Yeah, I was kinda curious myself,’ said Nina from the zodiac room, where Eddie had wordlessly signalled her to hide when he crept into the cabin.

Keeping the gun on Osir, Eddie threw back the sheets and stood, his clothing sodden. ‘I looked for his boat where you told me at the harbour. Then I swam under the pier to it and grabbed the anchor chain. Just had to hang on until we got here.’

Osir blasted a glare of betrayal at Nina. ‘Then you are still with him! Sebak was right!’

‘Duh,’ Nina said. ‘Like I was really going to join up with the fruitloop religious cultist who tried to have me killed?’ She looked to Eddie. ‘Okay, now what?’

He gestured for Osir to move to the bathroom. ‘First thing, we tie him up and keep him quiet. Then we work out where this pyramid is, and then we bugger off and find it. Sound like a plan?’ She nodded. ‘All right, lover boy,’ Eddie said, advancing on Osir, ‘in there.’

The Egyptian’s eyes were fixed on Nina. ‘I really did have no desire to see anyone get hurt,’ he snarled. ‘But now I’m happy to make exceptions.’

‘Shut it, arsehole,’ said Eddie. He shoved Osir into the bathroom, toiletries clattering to the floor as the stumbling man’s elbow swept them from a shelf. ‘On your knees, head in the bog like you’re about to puke. Now!’ He pushed the revolver against Osir’s head as he knelt at the toilet bowl, then yanked loose his dressing gown’s belt. ‘Nina, tie his hands behind the pipe.’ He kept the revolver firmly in place as Nina secured the other man’s wrists to the waste pipe. ‘Then find something to tie his feet with.’

She went back into the cabin, returning with a collection of ties hanging over her arm. ‘Pick a colour.’

Eddie twisted one into a ball and pushed it into the protesting Osir’s mouth, then secured it with a second. He used a third to fasten his prisoner’s ankles together before tying the other end to a pipe beneath the washbasin. ‘Now listen, King Tut,’ he said, tapping Osir’s head with the gun. ‘One sound out of you, and I’ll flush you back to your ancestors. Got that?’ Mouth filled with the makeshift gag, all Osir could manage was an angry gurgle. ‘Good.’

He left the bathroom and locked the cabin door, then joined Nina at the zodiac. ‘So, you found the pyramid?’

‘Not yet,’ she admitted.

‘Well, how long’s it going to take?’

‘No idea.’

‘Maybe if you’d been working on it instead of getting pissed on Osir’s champers . . .’

She gave him an irritable look. ‘Don’t start, Eddie.’

‘And while we’re at it, what was going on when I came in? You were stretched out on his bed with your skirt hitched up to your knickers!’ Concern crossed his face. ‘You’re wearing knickers, right?’

‘Which part of “don’t” and “start” is so hard for you?’ Nina snapped.

‘Well, I think part of him was hard for you . . .’

She banged a hand on the Lexan. ‘For God’s sake, Eddie! I was stringing him along so I could get a look at this thing - so can you at least shut up and let me work?’ She indicated the table. ‘There are some notes his people made over there; can you get them for me, please?’

‘You’d better not be walking like an Egyptian tomorrow,’ he muttered as he collected them.

The notes revealed a great deal about the zodiac: an estimate of the date it was created based on the positions of the planets (she was amused to note that it had been calculated to the month - October, 3567 BC - and intrigued that it indirectly confirmed Macy’s theory that the Sphinx pre-dated the construction of Khufu’s pyramid), the names of the various constellations, a chemical analysis of the paints, its dimensions to the millimetre, the type of stone from which it had been carved . . . ‘Useless,’ she muttered, flicking through more pages.

Eddie had returned to the cabin to keep watch while she read; now he came back in. ‘What?’

‘These tell me everything about the zodiac - except what I need to know. The hieroglyphs tell you how to reach the Pyramid of Osiris, if you already have certain other facts. Osir’s people worked out the position of Mercury, which was one clue - but we don’t know the others.’

‘What’re the clues?’

‘A place called the silver canyon, which we have no idea how to find, and the second eye of Osiris. And we don’t even know where the first one is, never mind the second.’ She walked round the zodiac, hoping it would give her a literal new angle on its secrets. No flashes of insight came to her. ‘What am I missing?’ she wondered aloud.

‘If it’s Egyptian stuff, Macy might know.’ Eddie reached into his tuxedo jacket. ‘Did you see her?’

‘Yeah, I told her to wait for us.’

‘Hope she found a hotel - that tinfoil dress won’t keep her too warm . . . oh, bollocks.’ He had wrapped the passports and his phone in a plastic bag to protect them from the seawater, but the seal hadn’t been as secure as he’d hoped. The passports were damp but would be salvageable if given time to dry; the phone, on the other hand, released a sad little dribble of water from its casing. ‘Hope you’ve still got your phone.’

‘Yeah, but it’s with my things two decks down. I don’t want to go wandering round the ship unless I have to - especially now we’ve got its owner tied up in the john. If anyone gets suspicious, this’ll be the first place they come.’

‘Guess you’ll have to suss it out without Macy, then.’

Nina fruitlessly re-checked the notes for any clue she had missed, then turned her attention to a shelf of reference books about ancient Egypt, searching the indexes for any mentions of the silver canyon or the eye of Osiris. The former had none; the latter several, but only in the context of Egyptian symbology, nothing tied to a specific real-world location.

‘I don’t get it,’ she sighed after some time, returning to the zodiac. ‘Where’s it telling us to go? It’s got to be connected to the stars somehow - we’ve got the constellations, the Milky Way, planets - how do they all tie together? I mean, the pyramid’s marked right there, complete with directions, so what’s the starting point?’

Eddie shrugged. ‘Dunno - all I know about Egypt is what I saw in The Mummy.’

‘Which was hardly an impeccable source.’

‘Maybe not. I’ll tell you something, though - that’s not the Milky Way on there.’

She looked at the light blue line. ‘It’s not?’

‘No, it’s the wrong shape. I know what the Milky Way looks like, and that ain’t it.’

‘Okay, so if it’s not the Milky Way, what is it? What else would they put on a star map?’

An idea occurred to Eddie. ‘It’s not a star map,’ he said, going to the mirror. ‘There’re stars on it, but they’re not what it’s all about.’ He stared at the reflection, a knowing smile spreading across his face. ‘Take a look.’

He took an atlas from the shelf and flipped through it as Nina peered at the reflected zodiac. ‘What am I supposed to be seeing?’ she asked.

‘This.’ Eddie held the atlas open at a particular map: Egypt. He ran a finger down the page, tracing the course of a river from north to south. ‘Remind you of anything?’

She looked at the map, then the reflection in the mirror, the map again . . . ‘It’s the same shape,’ she realised. ‘Oh my God, it’s the Nile!’

‘Put the thing on the ceiling, and it matches the shape of the Nile if you sort of project it upwards,’ he said, nodding. ‘Make it into a normal map, though, and it gets flipped over.’

Nina hurried back to the zodiac, sweeping the notes aside so she could see the river’s path. ‘So this is the Nile delta at the north, which means the other end . . . Eddie, bring the map over here.’

‘You didn’t say the magic word,’ he said, but brought the atlas to her anyway, comparing it to the painted line. Even taking the mirroring effect into account, there were differences. ‘The delta’s not the same - there’re more rivers on the old map.’

‘The Nile used to have more mouths; some of them silted up,’ Nina told him distractedly, fixing on something much further upstream. ‘Look, look at this! This big bend in the river, where it goes round the Valley of the Kings . . .’ She tapped excitedly on the Lexan. ‘This Osiris figure, the one that wasn’t on the Dendera zodiac - look where its eye is!’

Eddie mentally flipped the zodiac to match the map. The figure’s head corresponded to a point west of the river, near a kink in its otherwise northward course. ‘So what’s there now? Some place called . . . Al Balyana.’

‘That’s not all that’s there.’ She practically skipped back to the table, dress swirling, to pick up a coffee-table book full of lush photography. ‘It used to be one of the most important places in Egypt.’ The appropriate page found, she rushed back to show him. ‘Abydos. The city of Osiris!’

The photographs showed several large ruined structures. ‘Looks like they need to get the builders in,’ Eddie joked.

‘After we get in,’ said Nina, scanning through the text. ‘There must be something pointing the way to this “silver canyon” - once we find it, we’re only seven miles from the pyramid.’

‘Find what?’

‘The second eye of Osiris. I think it’s a double clue - there’s the eye of the second Osiris here on the zodiac, which tells you to go to Abydos . . . but the hieroglyphics said the second eye “sees the way” to the canyon. The one on the zodiac’s just a dot; it doesn’t see anything. My guess is that somewhere in Abydos there’s the actual symbol of the Eye of Osiris, and the direction it faces is where we’re meant to go. I’ve got no idea where in Abydos, though - Macy might know.’

‘Then we’d better get off this boat and find her.’ Eddie eyed the zodiac.

Nina knew the look. ‘No. Absolutely not.’

‘Absolutely not what?’

‘You are not smashing the zodiac!’

‘It’ll stop Osir’s lot from finding the pyramid.’

‘They already have all the clues, they just weren’t smart enough to figure them out. If we leave it intact, it can be returned to Egypt.’

‘Only if Imhotep back there gets arrested,’ he said, jabbing a thumb at the bathroom.

‘If we beat him to the pyramid, we can expose him for what he’s done.’

‘One flap of that dressing gown and he’d have exposed himself, all right.’

‘Oh, give it a rest,’ Nina huffed. She tugged the grips from her hair and shook out the twist, fashioning it back into a ponytail. ‘I still need to get my things.’

He drew the revolver. ‘I’ll check that your boyfriend’s still praying to the great god Armitage Shanks, then we’ll go.’

Osir was still where they had left him. Eddie poked the gun into the furious Egyptian’s back, then made sure he was firmly tied to the waste pipe. ‘Okay,’ he said, returning to the bedroom, ‘let’s—’

Someone knocked on the cabin door.

Eddie whipped up the gun. ‘Shit!’ Nina whispered, frozen beside him. ‘What do we do?’

‘Shh!’ In the bathroom, Osir made muffled grunts; Eddie rushed back and kicked him. ‘You shuddup an’ all!’

‘Khalid!’ said an impatient voice from outside. Shaban. ‘Khalid, I know you’re in there. Let me in.’ The locked door’s handle rattled.

Nina stared at it - then dived on to the bed, the mattress springs creaking loudly. Before Eddie could ask what she was doing, she gasped and moaned in simulated ecstasy. ‘Oh . . . oh . . . oh, God, yes, come on, yes, harder, oh!’

The handle stopped moving, and with a clearly audible snort of disgust Shaban walked away. Nina continued her Meg Ryan routine until she was sure he was out of earshot, then jumped off the bed.

‘Fuck me,’ said Eddie, smirking. ‘And I mean that literally. I’m all turned on now!’

‘Hold that thought until we’re back on shore. And in private.’ She went to the door and listened. No sounds outside. ‘I think we’re clear.’

Eddie joined her, opening the door a crack. The passage was empty. ‘Which way?’

‘Go right, then round the first corner. There are some stairs.’

He darted out, gun at the ready. Nobody was there. To the left, smoked glass doors opened on to one of the upper decks; he could see the lights of Monaco through them. He went right, and peered round the corner. Still no one; the promised stairs were some thirty feet away. ‘Okay, clear.’

Nina followed him, acutely aware in the yacht’s insulated quiet that her long dress was rustling with every step. ‘This is why I always wear Dockers,’ she whispered.

‘If you wore miniskirts, like I keep asking . . .’ Eddie paused at the stairs. A faint conversation was audible from the deck above, but it soon became clear that the speakers were not approaching. He descended. ‘Two decks down, you said?’

They heard music when they reached the correct deck, a pop beat coming from a cabin. They crept past and headed for Nina’s room. She had left the door unlocked; they ducked inside.

Nina quickly shed the dress and changed back into her regular clothes, then gathered her few belongings. ‘Should I call Macy?’ she asked, holding up her phone.

‘Let’s get off the ship first,’ said Eddie.

‘How are we going to get back ashore?’

‘Nick a boat.’ He stepped into the corridor. ‘Okay, come on.’

They moved back to the stairs, approaching the cabin where the music was playing. Pass that, up one level, then they would be on the main deck, needing only to keep out of sight to reach the boats. Simple.

Or not.

The door opened, the music jumping in volume as a young blonde woman carrying two empty glasses stepped out - and found the revolver aimed right between her eyes. She screamed and jumped back, a man shouting in surprise.

Nina and Eddie looked at each other. ‘Leg it!’ Eddie yelled.

They ran up the stairs. An alarm bell clamoured as they reached the next deck. Nina heard more voices from above. Osir’s crew had been caught off guard by the unexpected alert, but it would only take them seconds to respond.

Eddie took the lead as they ran down the passage. Another smoked glass door ahead led to the aft deck. Someone behind them shouted.

No time to stop and open the door. Instead, Eddie fired a single shot through it. Glass shattered, dropping in a dark cascade to the floor. They crunched over the debris and ran out on to the deck.

It was empty. Ahead, more stairs led down to the mooring platform. ‘Which boat?’ Nina asked as they raced towards it.

‘Whichever’s got the keys in!’ Eddie replied, glancing back. He saw someone emerging from a door on the deck above, and fired another shot to force him back inside.

Nina hurried down the steep stairs as he crouched and took cover at the top. Not liking the look of the small, exposed jet skis, she went to the boats. The speedboats would be faster, but the Solar Barque’s tender still had its key in the ignition.

She climbed aboard. ‘Eddie, come on!’

Eddie glanced round at the burble of the tender’s engines. ‘Untie it!’ he shouted. His gunshot had made the crew more cautious, nobody wanting to be the first to put himself in harm’s way.

That wouldn’t last. As soon as Shaban or Diamondback arrived, they would order a rush on the boat dock. And with only four bullets remaining, his chances of holding it off were slim.

He looked back at Nina. She was still unravelling the ropes.

Two men ran on to the upper deck and dived in opposite directions to the floor. Eddie shot at one, but missed. Three bullets left.

‘Eddie!’ The tender was free; Nina jumped behind its wheel.

‘Get going!’ he yelled. She shook her head, unwilling to leave him behind. ‘I’ll jump on, just get the bloody thing moving!’

The engine growl rose to a roar. He turned to leap down the stairs—

Diamondback burst from the broken glass door. Eddie snapped off another shot, but it went wide as the American flung himself headlong into cover. Two bullets.

The black barrel of an MP7 poked over the upper deck’s edge, laser sight flicking on. The needle-thin red beam swept towards Eddie - then jittered in a crazy display as he shot the weapon out of the gunman’s hands.

One bullet.

‘Fucking revolvers!’ Eddie spat. Even with its ammo capacity limited by the sheer size of its .50-calibre bullets, his old Wildey handgun had still been able to manage more than a mere six shots. One bullet, and several targets - it was time to go.

He jumped, landing on the dock with a bang. The tender was pulling away, but Nina was still reluctant to gun the throttle until he was aboard. He straightened, turned, launched himself into a sprint to make a running jump—

A searing pain exploded in the side of his head.

The flash of agony was so overwhelming that he fell, crashing down just short of the dock’s edge. He clapped a hand to the wound. It stung viciously, and he felt blood on his palm - but not the torn meat and bone of a direct bullet impact against a human skull. The revolver shot had grazed him, slicing a gash just above his left ear.

If he had started his run on the other foot, if he had thrown his weight left rather than right, he would be dead.

And his wife would be a widow. Eyes tight with pain, he saw Nina looking back at him in horror. He waved desperately at her. ‘Get out of here! Go!’

It took her a moment to fight through her fear for him - a moment too long. A laser spot swept across the boat, zeroing in on her chest.

Very carefully, she moved her hand away from the throttle.

Eddie heard the clip-clop of cowboy boots approaching. He painfully turned his head, seeing that he had dropped the revolver a couple of feet away. A hand reached down to collect it. ‘I think this is mine,’ said Diamondback.

‘You’re welcome to the fuckin’ thing,’ Eddie groaned. ‘There’s only one bullet left.’

‘It’s all I need.’ A faint clicking as the trigger was pulled back, the cylinder rotating to bring the last bullet under the raised hammer . . .

‘No!’ someone almost screamed. Osir. ‘You idiot, people will see!’

Eddie heard Diamondback mutter ‘So? Fuck ’em . . .’ but with a soft clink the hammer lowered back into place. The Solar Barque was not the only expensive craft moored off Monaco; the sound of gunfire had probably already caught the attention of people on other yachts.

‘Get them out of sight. Quickly!’ Osir ordered.

Shaban joined his brother. ‘We have to kill them. You should have listened to me.’

‘I know, I know. We will. But not here. If the Monaco police come to investigate the gunshots, and we have a ship full of corpses . . .’

The boat was quickly secured, and Nina was brought back on to the dock at gunpoint. Osir gave her an especially disgusted look. ‘I didn’t want to do this, but you’ve left me no choice. When this ship leaves Monaco tomorrow, after the race . . . you will both die.’

19

‘You know, mate,’ said Eddie, voice echoing, ‘I really don’t like your hospitality.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ Nina said, looking up at Osir. ‘At least he flushed first.’

The cult leader had, with mocking irony, opted to tie up Nina and Eddie where they had tied him - his cabin’s bathroom. Nina’s hands were secured to a pipe beneath the washbasin, while Eddie ended up in the same position as Osir, wrists fastened to the lavatory’s waste pipe and his head over the bowl. They were bound with rope rather than neckties; their legs had been left free, but with a guard watching them all night as Osir and his associates studied the zodiac they had been given no opportunity to turn that to their advantage.

‘Aren’t you comfortable, Chase?’ asked Osir. ‘Too bad.’

Shaban stood beside him, rubbing his eyes. ‘We are getting nowhere with the zodiac, Khalid. We’re wasting time.’

‘The answer is there,’ Osir said. ‘She found it - so can we.’

Shaban sneered at Nina. ‘A shame you weren’t listening when she did. If they know how to find the pyramid, we should have tortured them for the information.’ Another sneer, this time directed at Osir. ‘If you weren’t so worried about getting blood on your silk sheets . . .’

Osir’s face flashed with anger. ‘Shut up, Sebak! We will find the pyramid ourselves. There’s no need for any unnecessary pain.’

‘What do you know about pain?’ said Shaban, moving almost nose to nose with his brother. The scar tissue across his cheek twisted with his snarl.

An uneasy silence hung between the two men before Osir backed away slightly. ‘We will find the pyramid ourselves,’ he insisted. ‘These two we’ll . . . bury at sea. But we have other business first - the race.’

‘You go,’ said Shaban dismissively. ‘I’ll stay here and,’ a cruel smile, ‘politely discuss the pyramid’s location with Dr Wilde.’ Nina tensed.

Osir shook his head. ‘You’re expected there with me.’

‘Then tell them I’m ill.’

‘Sebak! This is for the Temple - you are coming with me.’ He stared at Shaban. This time, it was the younger brother who backed down, though the tendons in his neck were tight. Osir addressed the guard. ‘Watch them until we get back.’ The guard nodded, and sat down on a chair facing the bathroom doorway as Osir and Shaban left.

‘When does the race finish?’ Nina asked.

‘Four o’clock,’ Eddie told her. ‘What time is it now?’

She shifted to check her watch. ‘Coming up on ten.’

‘Hey!’ the guard shouted, raising his MP7. ‘Keep still. And no talking!’

Nina knelt back down, watching the guard. After a few minutes, his attention began to wander, the gun drifting away from the prisoners as he looked round the opulent cabin.

She used his distraction to glance over her shoulder. In a corner was a pair of nail scissors, one of the items Osir had scattered when Eddie pushed him into the bathroom. She had spotted them when she was first tied up. But with her hands firmly attached to the pipe, the only way to reach them was with her feet - and she couldn’t do so without the guard noticing.

Six hours to find a way . . .

An opportunity took close to four uncomfortable hours to arrive.

The guard was also a racing fan. With the start imminent, he had switched on a large plasma TV. Its position on one wall meant he had to move the chair further away to see both the screen and his captives, dividing his attention.

‘You okay?’ Nina whispered, her voice covered by the noise of the starting grid.

‘My knees are fucking killing me,’ came the hollow reply. ‘One good thing, mind - I’m not thirsty.’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘Gross, Eddie.’ A look at the guard; he glanced into the bathroom, but was clearly more interested in the race. ‘Listen, there’s a pair of scissors here. I’ll try to kick them to you when the guy outside isn’t looking.’

He turned his head as far as he could. ‘If you can get them to my legs, I can try to knock them behind the bog with my knee. But I can’t move my hands much. If they end up too far away, we’re fucked.’

‘Then we’ll have to get it right first time, won’t we?’ She gave him a half-hearted smile; he returned it.

‘Do it when the race starts,’ he said. ‘There’s usually a prang in the first corner at Monaco - the crashes are what most blokes are really watching for.’

‘I’ll only need a few seconds.’ Nina watched the guard; bar the occasional glance, he was fixated on the TV. The commentary was in French, but she understood enough to know that the cars were performing their formation lap before the start of the race proper.

Very slowly, she shifted her weight to one knee and slid her other leg out from under her body. Her muscles prickled painfully. The guard looked at her; she froze, afraid that he had seen what she was doing, before exaggeratedly cricking her neck to one side as if relieving stiffness. He frowned, then turned back to the TV.

The commentators became more excited as the cars took their places on the grid. Nina moved her leg out as far as she dared.

‘Ready?’ she whispered. Eddie raised himself slightly on his toes.

The racers were in position. The guard leaned forward, watching the screen intently. Engines revved as the starting lights came on. ‘Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq . . .’ The commentator paused in anticipation. ‘Allez!’

The engine noise rose to a multi-tonal scream as the cars leapt away from the grid. ‘C’est Virtanen, Virtanen!’ the commentator cried. The guard was almost out of his seat with excitement as Team Osiris’s star driver took the lead. ‘Oh! Oh! Mollard s’est écrasé!’

Someone had crashed going into the first corner. The guard jumped up - and Nina jerked her leg, kicking the little scissors.

Even with all the activity on the big TV, the guard couldn’t miss the sudden movement in his peripheral vision. He whipped round, gun raised - as Eddie dropped his legs, covering the scissors. Pointing the MP7 at Nina, he rushed into the bathroom. ‘I told you not to move!’

‘Cramp!’ Nina gasped, not lying, as she flexed her leg. ‘I’ve got cramp, it hurts! Don’t shoot me, don’t shoot!’

‘Get back down!’ She complied. Pressing the gun against her, the guard bent to check that she was still tied, then leaned down to look at Eddie’s bonds. All were still secure. ‘Keep still,’ he ordered, returning to the cabin. After a few suspicious glares into the bathroom, he turned back to the race.

‘Did you get it?’ Nina whispered.

Eddie lifted his right leg, revealing the nail scissors under it. Slowly, carefully, he lowered it again and dragged the scissors a few inches forward, then raised his leg and moved it back to its original position before repeating the move. After a minute, the scissors were just in front of his knee.

‘This is the tricky bit,’ he muttered. He angled his leg out to one side. ‘Okay, here we go . . .’

He jerked his knee forward.

The scissors slithered across the polished floor, clacking against the back wall. Eddie winced, but the TV had drowned out the faint noise. He reached for them with his fingertips.

They fell short by mere millimetres.

‘Bollocks!’ he growled. The rope tying his wrists to the pipe was already pressed against a protruding joint; he couldn’t slide his hands any closer. And if he tried to raise his body higher for leverage to push his wrists further through the loops of rope, the guard would see.

He had to take the chance. He levered himself upwards, lifting his backside into the air.

It was undignified, but it worked. The extra weight pushed his wrists little by little through the rope as he wriggled. Hairs were ripped out and friction burned his skin, but his fingers were getting closer to the scissors, closer . . .

‘Hey!’ The guard ran into the bathroom - just as Eddie’s fingertips reached the scissors. The Englishman snatched them up and clenched them in his fist. ‘Get back down!’

‘Ow, for fuck’s sake!’ Eddie gasped as the man kicked him. ‘I’ve been like this all day, I’m bursting! I need a piss!’

The guard laughed. ‘You’re in the right place!’ Still chuckling, he checked the ropes again. Satisfied they were still tightly fastened, he went back to his seat.

‘Are you okay?’ Nina asked quietly.

‘He didn’t help my backache, but I’ve got the scissors.’ He fumbled them round in his hand, opening the blades as wide as they would go and pressing one against the rope. ‘Might take a while, though.’

He began sawing. The small blade and the cramping of his hand made it slow going, but the rope’s strands eventually started to fray and split. Ten minutes passed; twenty. The guard remained engrossed in the race, Virtanen involved in a close battle to hold the lead. Half an hour gone. The race was over a quarter done, Osir and Shaban’s return drawing closer . . .

Eddie let out a small grunt. ‘Eddie?’ whispered Nina. ‘Did you do it?’

‘Yeah,’ he replied, keeping the scissors hooked on one finger as he tugged at the rope with his thumb. The severed loop came loose; he slipped his wrist free, then quickly unfastened his other hand. ‘Problem is, we’re still trapped in a toilet by a man with a gun. Can you get him in here?’

‘I’ll try.’

Nina lifted her leg again, letting out a strained gasp. The guard stood, annoyed by the interruption. ‘I told you to stay still!’ he said as he entered the bathroom.

‘Please,’ she said through a mask of pain, ‘my leg hurts so much, I can’t stand it any more!’

‘You won’t have to for much longer,’ he said with a sardonic smile, shoving her back into a kneeling position. He examined the ropes round her wrists, then bent to check Eddie’s bonds.

They weren’t there.

Eddie’s hand shot up with savage force and stabbed the scissors point first into his eye.

That the blades were less than an inch long below the hinge didn’t matter - the entire length of the scissors disappeared into the guard’s skull. The pain and shock froze him in place - long enough for Eddie to roll sideways and grab him by his shirt, yanking him downwards. There was a horrible crack as the man’s head struck the flush lever, and he collapsed twitching on to the lavatory.

Eddie pushed the guard face first into the swirling bowl. Collecting the MP7, he quickly untied Nina. ‘Flushed with success,’ he said, grinning.

She rolled her eyes. ‘Is he dead?’

‘After all that? I hope so.’ The flush cycle ended, the water turning pink round the man’s part-submerged head. Eddie watched for several seconds to make sure no bubbles rose from his mouth or nose, then checked the MP7. It was fully loaded: twenty rounds. ‘This is more like it - no pissing about with revolvers like we’re still in the fucking nineteenth century.’

Nina gratefully stood, rubbing her aching legs. ‘What’s the plan?’

‘Same as last night. Get back to shore, find Macy, find this pyramid. And shoot anybody who gets in our way. Sound okay?’

‘I’d prefer it without the shooting part, but otherwise, yeah.’ She went into the cabin, retrieved her possessions from the desk where they had been dumped, and was about to go to the door when she changed her mind and instead crossed to the zodiac. Osir and others had been working on it through the night; more notes were scattered about. She picked up a photo of the entire relief and shoved it in a pocket. ‘Just in case,’ she told Eddie, who had recovered his own belongings and was now waiting impatiently near the door. ‘I don’t think Osir’ll give us another chance to look at it.’

‘Still think we should just smash the thing,’ he said, checking the corridor. ‘Okay, the quickest way down’ll be jumping off the balcony to the rear deck. Are you up for that?’

‘I’ll be okay,’ she said, touching his head. The only treatment he had been given after being shot was a large adhesive bandage stuck roughly over the cut; it was now dark with dried blood. That at least meant the bleeding had stopped, but the wound still needed attention. ‘What about you?’

‘I’ll live. Good job it didn’t hit my face - it would’ve ruined my good looks.’ A grin creased his battle-worn visage; she smiled back. ‘You ready?’

She nodded. Eddie entered the corridor, quickly moving to the glass door. A couple of Osir’s bikini-clad girls were sunbathing below, a trio of the yacht’s crew with them, watching the race on a flatscreen TV. Two of the men were armed. ‘Well, strolling casually to the boats is out.’ He raised the gun. ‘On three, we both jump. Soon as you land, run for whichever boat’s in the water, start it, and do not stop for anything. They’re going to kill us anyway - if they catch us again we won’t get a second chance. All right?’

‘All right,’ Nina reluctantly agreed. ‘I’ll tell you something, though.’

‘What?’

‘I’m not depressed any more.’

‘Yeah, nothing like a death threat to pep you up, is there?’ They kissed, then Eddie pushed the door open. ‘Okay, one, two, three - go!’

They burst out into the hot Mediterranean sun and vaulted the railing.

The drop was almost nine feet; Nina’s landing was painfully hard, making her fall. Eddie fared better, dropping into a frog-like crouch before springing back up. One of the women shrieked, the other staring at him with dull surprise. The men jumped up, the armed ones fumbling for their guns.

Eddie’s MP7 clattered, two silenced bursts stitching lines of bloody holes across the pair’s chests.

Noise from behind—

He spun and fired another burst at another man beneath the balcony, a gun spinning from his hands as he was thrown back against the blood-splattered bulkhead.

Nina got up. ‘You okay?’ Eddie asked. She nodded. ‘Good. Get to the boats.’ As she set off, he covered the remaining people. The shrieking woman had progressed to full-blown screams, her companion still regarding him with blank-eyed bewilderment. The unarmed man was eyeing the dead crewmen’s guns. ‘Can you all swim?’

The responses from the trio were in the affirmative. ‘Good. You’ve got three seconds to start!’ He waved his gun at the yacht’s side. They got the message and jumped overboard.

He ran after Nina, pointing the gun back at the yacht’s superstructure as he reached the stairs to the dock. Another green-jacketed man appeared, pulling the charging handle on his MP7 - only to take a burst from Eddie’s gun and crash over a lounger. Knowing his weapon was down to its last few rounds, Eddie dropped it and snatched up one of the dead men’s guns as he went past.

Nina checked the boats, not liking what she found. Both speedboats had been winched out of the water, the only floating options for escape being jet skis. ‘Eddie, I hope you know how to ride these things, ’cause I don’t have a clue!’

‘Just start one!’ He fired a few shots to force a crewman back into the ship, then jumped down to join Nina. ‘I’ll drive!’

She started the engine, looking in concern at a prominent warning sticker about the danger from the little craft’s powerful underwater jet blast. ‘It says we should be wearing wetsuits.’

‘Yeah, and we should be wearing life jackets too, but we’ll have to make do!’ He vaulted aboard in front of her. ‘Take the gun, and don’t fall off!’

She clutched the MP7 and gripped his waist tightly as he twisted the throttle, sending the jet ski blasting away from the yacht in a plume of spray.

20

Osir stood at the window of the VIP box, face almost pressed against the glass as the race leaders screamed past - with Mikko Virtanen fronting the pack. ‘Yes!’ he cried, pumping his fist. It was only OIG’s second year as primary sponsor of what had previously been the second-tier Monarch team, but the results already spoke for themselves - and with a win at Monaco, the most prestigious race of all, the publicity boost for the Osirian Temple would be beyond measure.

Shaban was seated behind him, barely paying attention. His phone rang and he listened to the frantic voice on the other end of the line for several seconds before jumping up. ‘Khalid!’

‘Not now,’ said Osir, waving a dismissive hand.

‘Khalid,’ Shaban repeated, the anger in his voice drawing his brother’s attention from the race. ‘The yacht.’

‘What is it?’

Shaban ushered him away from the box’s other occupants. ‘Wilde and Chase have escaped.’

Osir looked stricken. ‘What?’

‘They killed some of our men, then stole a jet ski.’

‘When - when did this happen?’

‘Seconds ago - they just left.’

Osir tried to devise an authoritative course of action, but all he could manage was, ‘We have to stop them.’

‘I’ll take care of it.’ Shaban turned away, raising the phone.

Osir touched his shoulder. ‘Discreetly. No trouble. Not here,’ he said, almost pleading.

‘That depends on them.’ He spoke to the Solar Barque’s captain. ‘Send every man you have after them. Get the tender to intercept them in the harbour. Chase them in the yacht if you have to - they must be stopped. At any cost.’ He snapped the phone shut, giving Osir a disapproving look before hurrying out.

The open sea off Monaco was choppy enough to make things bouncy for any craft not large enough to ride it out - and for something as small as a jet ski, it was practically a roller coaster. ‘Jesus!’ yelped Nina as their Kawasaki crested a wave and was airborne for a moment before smacking down heavily in the trough beyond. ‘Can’t you keep it in the water?’

‘Only if you want them to catch us,’ Eddie answered. He looked back. A jet ski had already left the Solar Barque in pursuit, one of the speedboats had just been dropped into the water to follow them - and the yacht itself was powering up, froth boiling beneath the bow as it used its thrusters to turn round. ‘Oh, great! The guy’s got his own private navy!’

A wave tossed them skywards again, Eddie battling to keep the jet ski from tipping over as it landed. Another large yacht loomed ahead; he turned sharply round its stern, aiming for the harbour entrance beyond the flotilla of expensive pleasure craft.

Nina glanced round. The pursuing jet ski was gaining fast, and the speedboat was also rapidly closing the gap. ‘I think this guy’s a better driver than you,’ she said as the other jet ski carved cleanly through a swelling wave without losing speed.

‘I bloody hate show-offs,’ Eddie growled, seeing that the other rider would quickly catch up - and that he was armed.

A flash of fast-moving colour beyond a line of anchored yachts. Even from a momentary glimpse he knew what it was, and turned towards it. ‘What’re you doing?’ Nina asked nervously as the harbour entrance swung away. Their pursuer changed course to intercept them, drawing closer.

‘When I say duck, duck. And I mean really, really duck!’

They were heading almost straight at the lead yacht’s bow. ‘You’re going to hit it!’

‘No, I’m aiming close - but we’re gonna be even closer to something else.’

‘What do you—’ A red and white powerboat shot into view from behind the yacht, thundering along parallel to the line of vessels. ‘Holy shit!’

The man on the other jet ski raised his gun—

‘Duck!’ Eddie screamed, dropping as low as he could behind the handlebars. Nina followed suit.

The jet ski zoomed past the yacht, barely missing the powerboat’s stern as it crossed behind it - passing under the tow-rope hauling a waterskier along in its wake, the line slicing an inch over their heads.

The other rider swerved to follow them past the powerboat. The tow-line was partly hidden by spray, and by the time he saw it, it was too late—

The line caught him just below the chin. His speeding jet ski kept going as he was snatched from it with a crack of shattering vertebrae, spinning back over the rope to splash into the water. The waterskier hit the corpse, taking off as if hitting a ramp before tumbling to a waterlogged stop.

Eddie turned back towards the harbour entrance. The Solar Barque’s speedboat swerved through the anchored boats after them.

Another vessel, green and gold, burst out of the harbour. The yacht’s tender, two men aboard. It made a hard turn as it cleared the outer breakwater, coming right at them.

They were cut off.

Eddie made a split-second decision and brought the jet ski back into the millionaires’ armada. The larger boats were more powerful, but his Kawasaki had the edge in manoeuvrability. If he could weave through the stationary yachts, he might gain enough of a lead to run for the harbour . . .

Shit!

His plan would fail. The Solar Barque was powering for the harbour entrance. If he wasted time trying to escape the two smaller boats, it would block their path.

The speedboat was gaining fast from behind. The tender was also accelerating, smacking hard through the waves.

Every escape route was closed - unless he made a new one.

Nina clung harder to Eddie as he turned the jet ski again and headed straight for the tender. ‘Whoa, whoa!’ she cried, jabbing a finger at the rapidly approaching boat. ‘Bad guys!’

‘I know!’

‘Then go away from them!’

‘Trust me!’ He jinked from side to side, searching for the perfect wave.

A man in the tender stood up, one hand clutching the windscreen for support as he aimed his gun with the other.

Eddie saw a deep trough in the water ahead, a steep breaking wavecrest beyond it. Right in line with the tender. ‘Hang on!’

He swept into the dip, turning the throttle as far as it would go as the jet ski shot up the crest.

And out of the water.

The gunman was about to fire when the jet ski momentarily dipped out of sight beneath his boat’s prow - then flew up over it, smashing down on the bow.

Gripping the handlebars with all his strength, Eddie leaned over, pulling Nina with him and tipping the jet ski as it skidded sidelong over the decking. The little craft’s underside smashed through the windscreen and ground along the tender’s side - in the process crushing the driver against his seat back and catching the gunman with a jet blast that struck him like a blow from a baseball bat.

The jet ski flew off the stern and slammed back into the water, only Nina’s near death-grip on Eddie keeping her from being flung off. The jet spluttered and coughed before drawing more water into its impeller, sending the Kawasaki surging forward again.

The tender ploughed onwards at full power, the driver dead. The gunman fumbled for the controls, catching the steering wheel and knocking the boat into a turn—

Directly into the speedboat’s path as it swung to avoid a head-on collision.

The speedboat ripped through the tender’s side, both boats exploding in a storm of shattered wood and fibreglass. Blazing debris rained over the surrounding yachts.

Nina looked back at the cartwheeling wreckage, but Eddie’s attention was fixed on what lay ahead. The Solar Barque was almost at the harbour entrance. ‘Hold on!’

She saw green-jacketed men on the yacht’s main deck - all armed. ‘They’re gonna shoot us!’

He brought the jet ski parallel to the breakwater. ‘Shoot them first!’

‘I’ll never be able to hit them!’

‘You don’t have to - just keep their heads down so they can’t hit us!’

Nina pointed the MP7 up at the rapidly approaching ship. ‘Oh, God, I’m so not a gun person,’ she said, wincing as she pulled the trigger.

The gun bucked in her hand, the bolt’s rapid clacking almost as loud as the hissing thwat of the suppressor with each shot. Firing one-handed from a bounding vehicle, it was almost impossible for her to aim, but against a target the size of the yacht it didn’t matter. Black spots pockmarked the Solar Barque’s pristine white superstructure, a window shattering. The men dived to the deck.

‘Stop, stop!’ said Eddie. ‘Save some!’ The end of the breakwater was coming up fast. He hauled the jet ski round in a savage left turn, clearing the concrete by inches.

The harbour opened out before them, Monaco shimmering under the sun on three sides. Eddie aimed for the inner harbour; the outer harbour’s high quays were built for commercial ships and liners, not tiny pleasure craft. They needed to find a lower pier to get ashore.

Nina looked back. ‘Oh, crap!’ The Solar Barque was right behind them, its prow a giant knife blade slicing through the water. Gaining. ‘Faster, faster! Seriously, go faster!’

‘It’s a jet ski, not a jet fighter!’ Eddie complained. ‘If anyone sticks their head over the side, blow it off!’

Nina awkwardly turned in her seat, pointing the gun up at the looming bow. She saw a man lean over the port side, spotting the jet ski. He hurriedly ducked out of sight as she fired a couple of shots.

They entered the inner harbour, Eddie turning to make landfall at the northwestern corner - and saw a new threat powering towards them. Not from Osir’s people; this was a police boat, siren wailing. The chaos outside the harbour had inevitably attracted attention. An officer shouted commands over a megaphone, ordering both vessels to stop. ‘Buggeration and fuckery!’

‘Any friends in the Monaco police department?’ Nina asked hopefully. The absence of an answer was enough. ‘Thought not!’

More figures appeared at the bow railing, guns pointing down—

Nina fired first. One man retreated sharply; the other was hit in the shoulder. He spun backwards, finger convulsively tightening on his trigger . . .

Sending a stream of armour-piercing bullets up the front of the superstructure.

The bridge window blew out - and the captain, at the wheel behind it, was hit square in the forehead. He collapsed over the instrument panel, dead. The throttle control was pushed to full beneath him - and with the other crew members all on deck trying to shoot Nina and Eddie, there was nobody to take over . . .

The police boat altered course to cut off the chase. Eddie darted behind it, the jet ski leaping out of the water as it crashed through its wake. He glimpsed an officer in the stern raising a rifle. ‘Down!’ he warned Nina, looking back to see when the man was going to fire.

He wasn’t. Instead, he was leaping desperately out of the boat, his companions diving off the bow.

A moment later, the Solar Barque ploughed over the smaller craft, ripping it in half. The smashed boat’s fuel tanks exploded, the yacht carving through the fireball as it blindly pursued the jet ski. One of Osir’s men flung himself into the harbour as flames rolled across the foredeck.

‘Jesus!’ Nina cried. ‘Are they insane?’

Eddie turned again, aiming for a small slipway between the crowded quays. The yacht didn’t follow. ‘I don’t think anyone’s driving.’

‘What? But I only winged that guy!’

‘I’m not complaining!’

The Solar Barque surged past behind them, any thoughts amongst its crew of shooting the fugitives replaced by simple survival instinct as they dived overboard. The yacht was powering straight for a clutch of smaller but still hugely expensive vessels in the corner of the harbour, their occupants’ attention suddenly diverted from the racing before them to the rapidly approaching behemoth behind. People fled screaming down the gangways.

‘Get ready to run,’ Eddie told Nina. ‘Soon as we hit land, we leg it, and don’t stop until we’re half a mile away!’

The jet ski shot up the slipway, keel scraping noisily along the concrete. Crash barriers rose ahead: the racing circuit ran right along the harbourfront. Eddie yanked at the controls, but out of the water there was no way to steer the Kawasaki. It hit the corrugated metal, flinging both passengers painfully against the handlebars.

A race marshal nearby saw the unexpected collision and started to run to them - then froze in shock as the Solar Barque, smoke billowing from its scorched bow, rammed into the harbour at close to thirty miles an hour.

The smaller yachts disintegrated into fireballs of multi-million dollar debris as it smashed through them. A larger vessel was flipped on its side - and the megayacht ran up over it to crash down on the quay, its mangled prow ripping apart the crash barriers. The Solar Barque skidded across the track like a steel wall, beaching itself in front of a grandstand as it screeched to a stop.

Mikko Virtanen was still in the lead, powering out of the chicane on the harbour’s northern side - to find a towering white barrier where he expected to see a corner. The marshals came to their senses and frantically waved warning flags, but it was too late for the Finn.

He stamped on the brakes, his car skidding past Nina and Eddie’s position and spinning out before crashing tail first into the hull. Another million dollars of Team Osiris hardware was reduced to shrapnel, what was left of the body whirling back along the track and grinding to a standstill. Again, the car’s designers had done their job perfectly; dazed but unharmed, Virtanen shakily opened his visor and blinked up at the people staring at him over the barrier.

Nina nudged Eddie. ‘You know you said to run as soon as we got to land?’

‘Yeah? Oh, right.’ They sprinted away as more marshals hurried to the scene.

‘You did that?’ said Macy in amazement, indicating a helicopter shot of the beached yacht on a TV screen. ‘Wow! That must be like a hundred million dollars in trashed boats!’

‘I told Osir it’d cost him,’ Nina said, looking warily round the hotel lobby. The fences surrounding the circuit were designed to keep spectators out; exiting hadn’t been hard, but there had been the constant worry that the police were hunting for them as they made their way back to Casino Square. So far, nobody had recognised them - the cameras were focused on the race, not the harbour, until moments before the Solar Barque crashed spectacularly ashore - but she still wanted to get out of the principality as soon as possible. At the very least, there would be several angry insurance companies after their heads.

‘Sucks for Mikko, though. Poor guy. He really thought he was going to win.’

Eddie gave her a look. ‘Wait, you talked to Mikko Virtanen?’

She grinned. ‘I did more than just talk to him.’ Seeing Nina’s and Eddie’s expressions of dawning realisation, she went on: ‘What? I wasn’t going to walk around the streets all night after the casino closed. Where did you think I got this?’ She showed off the expensive soft leather jacket in Team Osiris’s colours she was wearing over her shimmering dress.

‘You didn’t nick it off him, did you?’ Eddie asked.

‘Of course not!’ she said, offended. ‘It was a gift. You know, he’s fast on the track, but in bed—’

‘Okay, heard enough,’ said Nina hurriedly.

‘Nice work in the casino, by the way,’ Eddie told Macy. ‘That big bugger would’ve tackled me if you hadn’t tripped him.’

Macy smiled. ‘I just remembered what you said about always being ready for action - and I figured that with you two, there’s always action.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Nina, grimacing. ‘But never mind that. There are more important things.’ She took the photo of the zodiac from her pocket and showed it to Macy. Though crumpled, the picture was still clear enough to show the details of the painted relief. ‘I think I figured out where the pyramid is. It’s somewhere near Abydos.’ She quickly explained her reasoning.

Macy regarded the picture in wonderment. ‘That’d make sense. Abydos was supposed to be the site of Osiris’s tomb - nobody’s ever found it, but the Egyptians definitely believed it was near there. All the First Dynasty pharaohs were buried there so they could be close to Osiris. You think the pyramid’s to the west?’ Nina nodded. ‘That fits, too. The western desert was supposedly where the dead went to enter the Underworld, where the sun went down.’

‘What about the “second eye of Osiris”? Does that ring any bells?’

Macy frowned, thinking. ‘The second eye? I dunno. Unless . . .’ Her dark eyes opened wide. ‘Unless it’s something in the Osireion!’

‘The what?’ Eddie asked.

‘The Osireion - it’s a building, it’s meant to be a copy of Osiris’s tomb.’

‘A second tomb,’ Nina realised. ‘A second eye. And if it looks in the direction of the silver canyon . . .’

‘. . . we’ve found the pyramid,’ Eddie finished. ‘So, back across the Med, then!’

‘Rest assured, I will be co-operating with the authorities to find out who was responsible for this catastrophe,’ Osir told the news crew. ‘It’s been a terrible day for the sport, for Team Osiris, for Mikko Virtanen - and for myself personally, as you can imagine.’

‘What about the reports of a shootout on your yacht?’ asked the newsman, thrilled to have a story more juicy than sports reporting.

Osir needed all his acting skills to keep a neutral face. ‘I don’t know anything about that, only what the Monaco police have told me. Thank you, and excuse me.’ He retreated into the VIP box, the newsman still firing questions as he closed the door.

Shaban and Diamondback were waiting. ‘Well?’ Osir demanded.

‘Wilde and Chase must have got away,’ Shaban said grimly. ‘The Monaco police haven’t caught them, and since it would only take them ten minutes to reach the border I doubt they will.’

‘What about the yacht? Did the zodiac survive?’

‘Yes, so we still have that, at least. I’ve arranged for it to be shipped to Switzerland once the police clear the scene.’

‘My God,’ said Osir, shaking his head as he sat. ‘How did they escape?’

‘Because you were soft,’ Shaban snapped. Osir was startled by the fury in his brother’s voice. ‘I warned you! You fell for that woman, and she betrayed you. I told you to kill her, but you refused - and now look what has happened!’

Osir jumped up again, stabbing a finger at Shaban. ‘You do not speak to me like—’

‘This is your fault!’ Shaban roared, making Osir flinch. ‘Everything I do, I do to protect the Temple - but this has gone too far for you to tie my hands! If you want to find the Pyramid of Osiris - and keep it for yourself - then it will take blood. It has taken blood. And because you didn’t let me do what needed to be done, the blood is of our own followers instead of our enemies!’ His voice softened, slightly, as he put a hand on Osir’s shoulder. ‘Don’t you see, Khalid? If we don’t get everything, we will be left with nothing . . . and I will not let that happen. Let me do what needs to be done. We have to find Dr Wilde before she finds the pyramid - and kill her. You know I’m right.’

‘Yes,’ Osir said reluctantly. ‘Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry. I should have listened to you, my brother.’

Shaban nodded, satisfaction on his scarred face. ‘Then we’re agreed. We find them, and kill them, and take the pyramid for ourselves.’

‘Agreed,’ said Osir.

‘Just one minor problem,’ Diamondback said, voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘We don’t know where they’re goin’, and we don’t know where the pyramid is either.’

‘We need an expert,’ said Shaban. ‘Someone who knows the entire history of Egypt.’

‘Hamdi?’ asked Osir.

Shaban shook his head. ‘Hamdi is a glorified librarian. We want someone world-class . . .’ He smiled malevolently as an idea came to him. ‘And someone with a grudge against Nina Wilde.’ Raising his phone, he selected a number: the Osirian Temple’s Swiss headquarters. ‘This is Sebak Shaban. I need you to contact the International Heritage Agency in New York, and tell them . . . tell them I want to speak to Dr Logan Berkeley.’

21 Egypt

What initially seemed like a simple trip back to Egypt quickly turned into a far more stressful experience. An attempt to book a flight from Nice was stymied when Macy discovered - to her mortification - that her credit card had been cancelled. Her parents had pulled the plug.

An angry phone call home made it clear that her line of credit would be only restored if she agreed to go straight back to Miami. Nina’s suggestion that, now they knew Abydos was the key to finding the Pyramid of Osiris, her work was done and she could return to the US did not go down well.

Eddie managed to defuse the tension between the two women by cobbling together an itinerary that was - just - manageable on his and Nina’s strained finances, flying from Nice to Athens on a no-frills budget carrier, then on to Cyprus, and from there a plodding ferry to Egypt’s Port Said. Following that was a slow and draining overland journey south by rail to the town of Sohag. Tempers frayed, they traversed the last miles in a rented 4×4, finally reaching their destination three days after leaving Monaco.

If Cairo had been uncomfortably hot, then Abydos, three hundred miles further south on the edge of the Sahara, was almost agonising. The temperature was well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and what breeze there was provided little relief, being laden with gritty, astringent sand. Nina was already on her second bottle of water, and it was still only morning.

As usual, Eddie barely seemed to notice the conditions, still wearing his leather jacket; his only concession to the burning sun was a floppy cloth hat to protect his balding scalp. ‘Could be worse, love,’ he offered. ‘At least it’s a dry heat.’

‘Hilarious,’ Nina snapped. Her pale skin had forced her to cover up, and unlike her husband she was sweltering. ‘God, I hate deserts. Why are the best ruins always in such God-awful places?’

But despite her foul mood, she was still impressed by what awaited them. The remains of the ancient city of Abydos sprawled over a wide area, the majesty of the temples in stark contrast to the ugly little village nearby. But when they stood before the structure they had come to see the modern world was figuratively and literally behind them, nothing in sight beyond the partially buried remains of the Osireion except the bleak wastes and distant cliffs of the Western Desert.

They had the place almost to themselves, a coach party there when they arrived having left for the next destination on its whistle-stop tour of Upper Egypt. A couple of policemen had been lurking nearby - unescorted visits to the ruins were discouraged - but a bribe persuaded them to wander back into the village for a few hours.

‘So, what are we looking for?’ Nina asked Macy. ‘You’re the expert.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t exactly call myself that,’ she said, falsely modest.

‘You’re the nearest we’ve got,’ said Nina dismissively. ‘So, what’s the deal?’

Macy turned to the much larger, more intact structure behind them. ‘That’s the Temple of Seti, or Sethos, there,’ she said, ‘which was built by his son Ramesses the Second sometime round 1300 BC. The cool thing about it is that it’s totally unique architecturally. All the other Egyptian temples run in a straight line, yeah? You go in through the entrance, and each hall comes one after the other. But this one,’ she pointed out a section to their right, ‘is kinked.’

‘I like a bit of kinkiness,’ said Eddie.

Nina shushed him. ‘Why’s it that shape?’

Macy looked back at the Osireion. ‘Supposedly, the Temple of Seti and the Osireion were built at the same time. That’s what most of the books say, anyway. So did my professor. But it didn’t really make sense to me, and it turns out some archaeologists think so too. I mean, why would you bend your temple in half to avoid another building if they were being built at the same time? It’s not like they were short of space to put the second one farther away.’ She indicated the empty desert past the ruins.

‘So there’s another theory?’ asked Nina.

She nodded. ‘Some people think the Osireion was already here way before 1300 BC. It’d been buried by sand, but Ramesses discovered it when the Temple of Seti was being built. Things were too far along for him to stop work on the temple, but he didn’t want to knock down the Osireion either . . . so he changed the plans to make the new temple go round a corner.’

‘Why’d he want to keep it so much?’ said Eddie.

Nina knew. ‘Because it was a copy of the tomb of Osiris himself. They’d lost the location of the original tomb centuries earlier, but they realised they had the next best thing.’

‘And if we’re right,’ said Macy, ‘somewhere inside it is the Eye of Osiris.’

‘Which points the way to his pyramid. So all we have to do . . . is find it.’

They crossed the stony sands to the Osireion. The site was practically a pit, a series of stepped walls leading down to the excavated structure. Compared to the ornate elegance of the Temple of Seti, the exposed ruins were almost brutalist, made of unornamented blocks of pale granite. The hall’s floor, some ninety feet long, was hidden beneath a stagnant green pool.

Eddie screwed up his face in distaste. ‘I didn’t expect to come into the bloody Sahara to go wading. I would’ve brought my wellies.’

‘It’s not that deep,’ said Nina, descending the steps into the building proper. ‘I hope.’ She cautiously dipped a boot into the turgid, algae-coated water, finding it was about an inch in depth. ‘Ugh. At least we didn’t come in the rainy season.’ She turned as Macy and Eddie joined her, noticing a dark passage beyond an opening at the northwestern end. ‘Where does that go?’

‘It’s a tunnel that went to the northern entrance,’ Macy told her, examining a diagram in her guidebook.

Eddie squinted inside. ‘Doesn’t go anywhere now - the other end’s buried. Hope this eye thing’s not in there.’ He splashed to the other end of the hall. ‘I just thought of something. If this eye’s supposed to be looking towards the pyramid, and the pyramid’s out to the west somewhere, then it’ll be on one of the east walls, right?’

‘The man in the funky hat makes a good point,’ said Macy, exchanging smiles with him.

Nina unslung her backpack, taking out a flashlight, then waded to an opening in the wall. A ramp rose from the water; the small chamber inside was dry. She entered, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Like the hall outside, the walls were plain, unadorned.

Eddie and Macy followed. ‘See anything?’ Eddie asked.

‘Not yet.’ Nina carefully scanned the walls for any indications of carvings or markings. Macy, meanwhile, took out a flashlight of her own and conducted a much less methodical examination of the chamber, sweeping the beam around at random. ‘Will you cut that out?’ Nina demanded. ‘You won’t find anything just by waving the light about. We need to do a section-by-section search—’

‘Ah-ha! Found it!’ Macy interrupted. She fixed her torch beam on one particular spot, high on the back wall. ‘See? One Eye of Osiris. I rock!’

‘That’s more like it,’ said Eddie, seeing a symbol carved into the stone. ‘Archaeology without all the boring farting around.’

Nina’s patience finally snapped. ‘Will you both goddamn take this seriously!’ she shouted, voice echoing round the chamber. ‘It wouldn’t be boring if you had even the slightest interest in what I do,’ she said to Eddie, before rounding on Macy. ‘And you, if you really want to be an archaeologist, then start acting like one. Or acting like an adult, even!’

Eddie made a sarcastic face. ‘Oh, the schoolmistress voice. I love hearing that.’

Macy, on the other hand, was shocked by the attack. ‘But - but I still found it,’ she said, pointing up at the symbol.

‘By sheer fluke!’ snapped Nina. ‘And because you weren’t being methodical, you did exactly what Logan did at the Sphinx, which was rush straight for the obvious prize and completely overlook anything else that might be important.’

Eddie indicated the plain walls surrounding them. ‘There isn’t anything else.’

‘That’s not the point!’ she protested, before turning back to Macy. ‘You’re treating this like a high school field trip - and you’re acting like one of the cheerleaders giggling on the back seat of the bus with the jocks!’

Macy’s dark eyes narrowed angrily. ‘I suppose you always sat up front with the teachers.’

‘Well - yes,’ said Nina, taken aback by the challenge, ‘but this isn’t about me, it’s about the work. If we want to find the pyramid, we’ve got to be professional about it.’

‘And you think I’m not, is that it? Excuse me, Dr Wilde, but you wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me. I was the one who found out about the other entrance to the Hall of Records, I was the one who got us into the Sphinx compound—’

‘By flashing your boobs!’

Macy looked offended. ‘You think I’m just some bimbo, don’t you? Because I’m hot and I don’t get straight As in everything, you don’t take me seriously!’

‘You’re not taking this seriously!’

Eddie stepped forward, moving between them. ‘ “This”?’

‘All of this!’ Nina cried, waving her hands at the ancient structure around them. ‘Everything! It’s all important, but sometimes I feel like I’m the only person in the world who actually cares about it!’

Macy’s tone became withering. ‘Oh, I see - the entire world of archaeology revolves around you! Dr Berkeley was right, you really do have to be the centre of attention all the time.’ She pulled out the folded magazine pages and flapped them at Nina. ‘You know, when I read this I thought you were so cool and so smart - that you were somebody really special. But you’re just like everyone else.’ She stalked to the entrance and threw the pages outside. Disappointment overcame her anger. ‘Everything’s about you.’

‘That’s not true,’ insisted Nina, now on the defensive. ‘I don’t care about taking the credit.’

‘You enjoyed it, though.’

‘Of course I did,’ she admitted after a moment. ‘But that’s not why I do what I do. I do it because . . . because I have to!’

There was an almost confessional tone to her voice. Eddie raised an eyebrow. ‘You have to?’

‘Yeah. It’s . . . it’s who I am. My parents spent their lives trying to reveal the truth about the past to the world - not so a few people could profit from it, but for everyone. That’s what I do, too.’ She paused, almost afraid to confess her feelings. ‘And if I can’t do it, then what else can I do? What else have I got?’

‘You’ve got me,’ said Eddie.

‘I know. But . . .’ For a moment she couldn’t face him, before giving him a sad, shameful look. ‘But what if that’s not enough?’

An awkward silence filled the chamber. Macy stared uncomfortably down at her feet, while Nina again found herself unable to meet Eddie’s gaze.

‘Well, you know,’ he finally said, managing a faint smile, ‘I never really did see you as the stay-at-home housewife type.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Nina said quietly.

He put his arms round her. ‘No need.’

‘You’re not mad at me?’

‘Only that you didn’t get this out into the open ages ago!’ He smiled again, more broadly. ‘That’s what was wrong all this time? You thought there was nothing else you could do except archaeology?’

Nina nodded. ‘Pretty much.’

‘Well, that’s just fucking daft!’ he said, laughing. ‘You’re the smartest person I know, you could do anything you want. Even dance.’ He gave her a pointed look. ‘You’ve just got to want to want.’

‘I guess . . .’

‘So what do you want, right now?’

She didn’t answer at first, then one corner of her mouth creased upwards, very slightly. ‘I can think of something,’ she said, ‘but we can’t do it in front of Macy.’

He grinned. ‘She can join in if she wants - I could handle a threesome!’

‘Eddie!’ Nina cried, batting his arm. Macy’s eyes widened.

He cackled. ‘For fuck’s sake, you’re so easy to wind up. We’re married, and you still can’t tell when I’m taking the piss.’

Nina harrumphed. ‘Just for that, we’re going to do the other thing I really want to do right now. Which is find the Pyramid of Osiris.’ She looked first at the symbol carved on the wall, then to Macy at the entrance. ‘But if we’re going to do that, we need to be a team again. I’m sorry I blew up at you like that, Macy. I shouldn’t have done - that was unprofessional. Besides, you were right, we couldn’t have done this without you. Any of it.’

Macy still looked sulky, but accepted the apology. ‘And maybe I got a bit pissy. So . . . sorry, Dr Wilde.’

‘Thanks. And it’s Nina,’ she added, after a moment. ‘Call me Nina.’

The young woman’s expression brightened a little. ‘Okay. Nina.’ She walked back into the chamber.

‘So,’ said Eddie, ‘what’ve we got?’

At first glance, what Macy had discovered seemed nothing special, a symbol less than two inches high carved into the stone just below the ceiling. It was a stylised eye - the same one featured in the logo of the Osirian Temple.

Eddie checked a compass. ‘Okay, so it’s looking . . . towards two hundred and ten degrees.’ He took out a map and spread it on the stone floor. ‘So we’re after a canyon on that heading, right?’

‘The silver canyon, yeah,’ Nina confirmed.

He used the compass to align the map with the real world. ‘There’s a fair few canyons out in the desert that way,’ he said. ‘What did the zodiac say, exactly?’

‘Just that the second Eye of Osiris sees the way to the silver canyon. To its start, presumably, because the rest of the hieroglyphs said where to go once you reached its end.’

‘Okay, so we want a canyon mouth.’ He looked more closely at the contour lines, bunched tightly where streams had cut their way down from the desert’s relative highlands. ‘Here,’ Eddie continued, tapping a spot on the map. ‘This canyon leads up to a big open plain, and it starts right in line with where the eye’s looking. It opens out here,’ another tap, ‘so going seven miles west takes you to . . . here.’

Nina leaned closer. The point Eddie indicated on the map contained nothing. Literally nothing; the contours were so widely spaced as to make the region practically flat. ‘If that’s the right canyon.’

‘It’s about fifteen miles from here, and the terrain’s not too bad. We can drive out there, if we’re careful.’

Nina gazed at the expanse of emptiness on the map. It didn’t seem likely that an unknown pyramid could possibly be out there, but she had discovered other incredible sites in equally barren environments. ‘We’ll check out the canyon first - and if it seems to be the right place, we’ll follow it and see if it really leads to the Pyramid of Osiris.’

‘It must do,’ Macy said excitedly, standing up. ‘Everything fits. It’s got to be there!’

‘Let’s actually find the bloody thing before we start celebrating,’ Eddie cautioned.

‘We will, I know it! Oh, my God! We’ll be famous! Okay, you’re already famous, but I’ll be famous too!’ She hurried outside, pausing to collect the scattered pages with a slightly embarrassed look back at Nina. ‘If the canyon’s only fifteen miles away we’ll be there in no time!’

‘She’s never driven in the desert, has she?’ said Eddie as Macy splashed back across the hall. He noticed Nina staring after the younger woman with an expression somewhere between wistful and jealous. ‘What?’

‘I used to be that enthusiastic once,’ she said. ‘I kinda miss it.’

‘You are still that enthusiastic,’ he told her, folding the map. ‘Christ, once you start on about something I can’t shut you up.’

‘No, I mean . . .’ She sighed again. ‘I’m only twelve years older than her, but it feels like a lot more. Where the hell did the time go?’

‘You’re not going to get all depressed again, are you?’ said Eddie, mock-chiding. ‘I’ve had enough of that recently.’

‘Yeah, thanks for the sympathy.’

‘No, really, if anybody should be getting depressed, it’s me. I’ll be forty in a couple of years. Forty! That’s all old and grown up and stuff.’

‘I don’t think you’ll be growing up any time soon.’

‘Tchah!’ They followed Macy out of the chamber.

Their battered Land Rover Defender picked its way across the sun-seared desolation. Even with the windows open and the blower on at full blast, the cabin was sickeningly hot, the elderly 4×4 lacking air-con. Eddie, at the wheel of the right-hand-drive vehicle, dealt with the heat with frequent sips from his water bottle, while Nina tried to move as little as possible.

Macy, between them on the centre seat, seemed unaffected by the temperature, almost bouncing with anticipation. ‘Are we there yet?’ she asked, peering at the GPS unit on the dash.

‘Another mile,’ said Eddie. ‘And if you say that one more time, you’re walking the rest of the bloody way.’

Through the shimmering air ahead, something took on form - a cliff stretching from one horizon to the other, cut by Nile floods over millions of years. But as they drew closer, Nina picked out a dark slash gouged into it, something shadowed from the pitiless sun. ‘Eddie, you see that? Could be our canyon.’

‘Could be,’ he agreed, heading for it.

They stopped at the canyon mouth. Nina exited and donned a baseball cap, glad to be out of the draining heat of the Land Rover even if it meant exposing herself to the sun’s full fury. Something in the canyon wall caught her eye. ‘Take a look at this.’ The rockface was a pale yellow-grey, sunlight glaring off the sandstone - but in places the reflected light was brighter still, glinting.

‘Is that silver?’ Eddie asked, making out very fine threads running through the stone.

Macy lowered her sunglasses for a better view. ‘Guess that explains the name. You think there’s more of it?’

‘There must be,’ said Nina. ‘It’d justify the effort of coming all the way out here. Egypt’s got almost no silver deposits, which is why it was considered so valuable back then. Anyone who found a seam would be very rich.’

Eddie looked up the canyon, which rose at a shallow angle. The sandy floor was easily wide enough for the Land Rover, only occasional fallen rocks presenting any likely obstacles. ‘Think there might be any left? Maybe we could scrape up enough for a silver egg cup or something.’

Nina grinned at the odd image. ‘We can see.’

They returned to the 4×4. Eddie carefully guided the Defender up the canyon, dropping them into shadow. Before long the ascent steepened, the turns becoming tighter.

Nina spotted something to one side and told Eddie to stop. ‘I think that’s our silver mine.’ Several roughly rectangular recesses had been dug into the cliff. ‘You’ll have to live without your egg cup, though. All the best stuff ’s been taken.’

‘Well, arse. Must be the right place, though.’

‘I told you,’ said Macy. ‘We just have to follow the direction of Mercury from the zodiac and we’ll find it.’

‘I dunno,’ Eddie said, sceptical. ‘A temple being buried by sand I can go for, maybe even something the size of the Sphinx . . . but a pyramid? They’re not exactly hard to miss.’

He started the Land Rover again. The ground became even steeper, the walls closing in. The Defender rounded another turn, and entered a tight channel, beyond which was visible nothing but open sky. They had reached the far end of the ravine.

Eddie stopped as they came out of the canyon, checking his compass and the GPS before pointing. ‘That’s the way the zodiac said to go. Macy, there’re some binocs in my rucksack - can you get them for me?’

Macy handed him the binoculars. ‘Can you see the pyramid?’

‘I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with . . . S.’

‘Syramid?’

‘Sand,’ was Nina’s more realistic guess.

Eddie nodded. ‘Shitloads of sand, I was going to say, but near enough. How far away is it meant to be?’

‘One atur,’ said Nina. ‘Six point eight-five miles.’

He checked to each side, still finding nothing. ‘There’s definitely nothing pointy.’ He entered new co-ordinates into the GPS. ‘If it’s there, this should take us right to it.’

They set off again, the vast empty plain opening out all round them. Nina kept watch on the GPS, its display counting down the distance. Four miles, three, two . . . There was still nothing visible ahead, no lost monument rising from the dunes. She looked at Macy. The eagerness on the young woman’s face was visibly fading with almost every foot they travelled.

One mile. Still nothing in sight. Eddie gave Nina another glance, his expression warning of impending disappointment. Half a mile. Less. The landscape ahead was indistinguishable from what they had already covered.

The GPS bleeped. ‘This is it,’ said Eddie, stopping the Land Rover. ‘We’re here.’

Macy jumped out, turning to see only endless empty desert. ‘I . . . I don’t get it,’ she said, running to the other side of the 4×4 as if expecting to find a different view. ‘We followed all the clues, we found the silver canyon . . . why isn’t it here?’

Nina put a sympathetic hand on her shoulder as Eddie clambered on to the Land Rover’s roof to survey the surrounding plain. ‘Hey, it’s okay. There might still be parts of it under the sand.’

‘Only parts of it?’

‘This is what archaeology is usually about - it’s very, very rare that a completely new site is found intact.’

‘They’re intact when you find them, though.’ To Nina’s surprise and dismay, Macy seemed on the verge of tears.

‘Hey, hey, what’s wrong?’ she said. ‘We haven’t even started checking the area yet. We might still find something.’

‘No we won’t,’ Macy stammered. ‘There’s nothing here. I’ve wasted your time - I’ve wasted everybody’s time, I almost got you both killed, and for nothing! Oh, my God, I’m sorry!’

‘What - why are you sorry?’ Nina asked helplessly. ‘Macy, why are you so upset?’

‘Because . . . because Dr Berkeley was right about me! And so was my professor, and so were my teachers at high school . . . and so were you.’

‘Right about what?’

Macy couldn’t look at her, tears trickling down her cheeks. ‘I’m-I’m-I’m worthless,’ she managed to say.

‘No, you’re not,’ said Nina, shocked by the young woman’s sudden and total collapse of confidence. ‘Why would you say that?’

‘Because I am. I’ve never had to work for anything in my entire life. I always got whatever I wanted just because I was rich and pretty and popular, and people did things for me.’ She bowed her head miserably. ‘And the one time, the one time, when I really, really try hard to prove I can achieve something myself . . . I completely fail and let everyone down! I let you down.’

‘You didn’t,’ said Nina. ‘Really, you didn’t. You said it yourself - if it hadn’t been for you, Osir would have gotten away with the zodiac and nobody would ever have known. And you have achieved things for yourself. You got a place on the dig.’

‘Only ’cause my mom called in a favour. Oh, God . . .’ She finally raised her head. ‘I wanted to be like you because I thought you were cool. I never realised how hard you worked, how much you went through. I thought that if I tried to be like you, everything would just come to me like it always did . . . but I was wrong, and now we’re in this fucking horrible place with nothing to show for it. Nothing!’

Nina couldn’t think of anything to say. Instead, she put her arms round the sobbing woman, trying to provide some comfort.

‘I’m sorry,’ Macy mumbled. ‘I really am.’

‘You don’t have to apologise for anything,’ Nina assured her. ‘And we should still search the area. Maybe there’s something to find.’

‘There won’t be,’ she said miserably.

‘Oi!’ said Eddie, jumping down from the Land Rover. ‘Enough with this fucking defeatism, okay? I just got my wife through one bout of it; I’m not having someone else start.’

Nina was about to berate him for his insensitivity when she realised his attitude had changed; his obnoxiousness was a deliberate set-up for something. ‘What is it?’ she asked instead. ‘I know that face - you’ve got something.’

‘Yeah, I’ve got something. It’s not a pyramid, but it’s man-made.’ He pointed northwest. ‘Over there.’

Nina saw nothing except more sand and rocks. ‘Where?’

He gave her the binoculars and pointed again. ‘Those rocks, the ones in a sort of L-shape?’

‘Yeah?’

‘They’re not rocks.’

The magnified view revealed something new. Two large stones, one flat on the ground touching the base of another poking up from the sands.

Stones . . . with straight edges. Not rocks.

Blocks.

The same size and colour as the ones used to construct the Osireion.

‘My God,’ Nina gasped. ‘It’s a building!’

‘What’s left of one, anyway,’ said Eddie.

Macy looked back and forth between Nina and Eddie, wondering if they were playing some cruel joke, before realising they were not. ‘Wait, you - you’ve found something? There’s really something here?’

‘We were just a bit off course,’ Nina told her, giving her the binoculars and pointing out the ruin. Macy gave a little gasp when she saw it. ‘See? I told you not to give up, didn’t I?’

Macy wiped her eyes. ‘Well - well, what are we waiting for?’ she said, her hesitant attempt at a smile quickly becoming genuine. She climbed into the Land Rover. ‘Come on, let’s go!’

‘Wow,’ said Nina, amused. ‘Wish I could bounce back that quickly.’

Eddie put an arm round her shoulders. ‘You do all right.’

The two stones revealed themselves as the remains of a small structure, roughly twelve feet by twelve, the other walls barely protruding above the sand. The thickness of the blocks meant the interior was even smaller. If it had once been a dwelling, it would have made a prison cell seem spacious.

Nina had another theory, though. ‘It’s a marker. There aren’t any natural landmarks, so they had to build one. But what’s it marking?’

Macy examined the blocks for further clues. ‘Maybe there’s another set of directions here.’

Nina shook her head. ‘The zodiac text said that after you come out of the silver canyon, the next stop is the actual pyramid.’

‘So where is it?’ Eddie asked. ‘It can’t have been buried, can it? I mean, this thing’s still sticking up, so unless it’s the world’s tiniest pyramid we should be able to see something.’

‘Unless it was buried deliberately.’ But she dismissed the idea. The amount of sand needed to completely bury even a small pyramid would be unimaginable.

It was the right place, though. Finding the canyon required specialised knowledge of the Osireion, which would have been limited to a small number of people, and the astronomical calculations needed to deduce the direction of the journey’s final leg were the province of even fewer. The pyramid had to be here.

So why couldn’t they see it?

It all came back to the zodiac. Nina took out the stolen photo of the ancient relief.

‘Doing a bit of astrology?’ said Eddie.

‘There must be one more clue on here, I’m sure of it.’ Macy hopped down to join her as she perused the image. ‘Which way’s north?’

Eddie checked his compass and pointed. Nina aligned the zodiac with it . . . then flipped the paper over and held it above her head. ‘This is how you were meant to view it,’ she said. ‘Looking up at it - and facing north. The clue’s here, it’s on the map, it’s . . . here!’ She brought the chart sharply down, keeping it oriented so that north, which had been ahead of her, was now at the bottom of the page. ‘The pyramid marking! Do you see it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Eddie, ‘but what about it? It’s just a triangle.’

‘Maybe, but which way is it pointing?’

‘Down,’ said Macy, the implications sinking in a moment later. ‘No way!’

Nina smiled. ‘Way.’

Eddie frowned at the map. ‘Okay, what am I missing?’

‘The pyramid on the zodiac, it’s upside down,’ she told him. ‘Don’t you see? It’s an inverted pyramid - and the people who made the map meant it literally. They were representing what was actually here.’

Macy was also caught up in her excitement. ‘Some tomb paintings, like Ramesses VI’s, show the Egyptian Underworld as a mirror world right underneath ours - like a reflection in the Nile. Maybe they built Osiris’s pyramid upside down to be an Underworld version of the real ones . . . no, wait, that doesn’t work. If the zodiac inside the Sphinx is older than Khafre, it would have to be older than any of the other pyramids.’

‘The Pyramid of Osiris isn’t an inverted copy of the other pyramids,’ Nina realised, breathless. ‘The other pyramids are inverted copies of the Pyramid of Osiris - they were built above the surface to imitate Osiris’s tomb in the Underworld! That’s why they put so much effort into matching the shape.’

‘Hang on,’ said Eddie. ‘You’re saying they built this pyramid upside down?’

Nina scooped a handful of sand from the ground, leaving a roughly conical depression. ‘They dug a hole and built the pyramid inside it, with the point at the bottom and working upwards. Or maybe they dug out each new layer below the one they’d just built and filled in the pyramid’s core once the outer walls were in place, I don’t know. But it wouldn’t be any harder than building the Great Pyramid. It might even have been easier - they didn’t need to lift any of the stones up, just lower them down. Gravity was on their side.’

‘So we’re standing on it?’

‘One way to find out.’ She went back to the Defender and took out three shovels. ‘Let’s get to work.’

‘Where?’ Macy asked.

Nina indicated the ruin’s interior. ‘In there. I don’t think it’s just a marker - it’s an entrance.’

They started digging. It was slow going under the baking sun, requiring frequent breaks for water, but after a while Eddie’s spade struck something hard. ‘Let me see,’ Nina said, sweeping away sand with her bare hands. A flat stone slab was revealed.

‘Might just be this building’s floor,’ Eddie cautioned.

‘I don’t think so. Come on, let’s get the rest of it clear.’

They set back to work, Nina now too eager to take any more breaks. By the time they were done, a space just over six feet to a side had been mostly cleared. Nina brushed away more of the gritty covering, finding a narrow crack about a foot in from the wall. She traced its path with her finger; it formed a square. ‘It could be a cover stone for the entrance.’

Macy found something else at the slab’s centre. ‘Look familiar?’ she said, wiping away more sand. Revealed in the stone was a carved symbol.

The Eye of Osiris.

‘Guess we’re in the right place, then,’ said Eddie. ‘So what now?’ The women looked at him. ‘Oh, right,’ he sighed. ‘I get to lift up a two-ton stone block. Bloody marvellous.’ But he climbed out of the newly dug pit and returned to the Land Rover for more equipment. ‘You,’ he said, pointing at Nina as he jumped back down with a long crowbar, ‘drink some water. I’m not having you keeling over, all right?’

‘All right,’ grumbled Nina, who had all but forgotten the heat. She retrieved her water bottle as Eddie examined the slab’s outline.

Finding the widest part of the gap, he inserted the crowbar. Straining, he pushed at it. There was a crunch, and the slab shifted slightly. ‘Not as heavy as I thought - it’ll only give me a little hernia,’ he said. ‘Nina, there’s some metal spikes in the Landie. Bring ’em, will you?’

Nina found them. As Eddie levered the slab open little by little, she pushed the tapered spikes into the gradually opening crack so it couldn’t fall back down. Before long, a thin line of darkness appeared beneath its lower edge. Eddie moved the Land Rover closer and used the 4×4’s winch to raise the slab higher. It rested on an inner lip of stone; grunting, he pushed it up to its tipping point and let it fall back against the wall with a bang.

‘There we go,’ he said, theatrically wiping dust from his palms. ‘Piece of piss.’

‘A bit too . . . piss piece-y,’ said Macy, looking down the hole. ‘The entrances to the other pyramids were all hidden.’

Nina had the same thought. ‘Either they reckoned the only people who would ever find it were supposed to be here . . . or that’s not the only obstacle.’

‘You’d better not be saying what I think you’re saying,’ Eddie growled.

‘Afraid I just might be, hon.’

Macy was confused. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We’ll find out soon enough,’ Nina said.

They collected their equipment, then, exchanging wary looks, lowered themselves into the hole . . . to become the first people in over six thousand years to enter the Pyramid of Osiris.

22

The floor of the entrance chamber was about eight feet beneath the hole. Sand had seeped through directly below the opening, but beyond it everything was clean.

Almost too clean. There was a stagnant feel to the air. Nothing had moved here since the tomb was sealed, time standing still - or pausing, poised, waiting for someone foolish enough to disturb the eternal silence.

Macy shone a flashlight across the walls, revealing the chamber as somewhat larger than the structure above. ‘Hieroglyphics,’ she said, stepping closer. ‘Huh.’

‘What?’ Nina asked, joining her. ‘Can you read them?’

‘Just about, but they’re weird-looking. They must be really old.’

‘They’re beautiful, though.’ Nina slowly moved the beam of her own light along the white wall. The hieroglyphs were as clear and colourful as the day they had been painted, figures from Egyptian mythology standing amongst the text. She recognised some of them as gods: Ra, the sun-god, creator of all things; Nut, goddess of the sky, her naked body arched to form a vault over the entire earth.

But there was one god missing. ‘No Osiris.’ The key figure of ancient Egyptian religion was conspicuous by his absence.

‘No Horus, either,’ Macy added. ‘Or Set, or Isis. Not even Anubis, and since he’s the god of tombs, you’d kind of expect him to be here.’

‘They were all contemporaries of Osiris, or his children,’ Nina reasoned. ‘They hadn’t been deified yet. Which means this place really does pre-date the Old Kingdom - Osiris and the others were already worshipped as gods by 3000 BC.’

‘I was right,’ said Macy. ‘Yay me!’

Eddie explored another part of the chamber. ‘Got a doorway here.’ A pair of decorated pillars marked the exit. ‘There’re some stairs. Pretty steep.’

‘Let’s hold on - this room might tell us something useful.’

Macy examined the texts. ‘Freaky,’ she said. ‘They’re lists of all the trials that newlydeads have to go through in the Underworld. Like the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts.’

‘They sound cheerful,’ Eddie commented.

‘Earlier versions of the Egyptian Book of the Dead,’ Nina told him.

‘Oh, perfect bedtime reading. By Stephenkingmun, was it?’

Macy giggled, then returned her attention to the walls. ‘What I don’t get is that in the other texts, all this stuff is basically prayers telling you how to get through each arit, each land, of the Underworld. Like instructions - if you haven’t sinned and you do what it says in the texts, you’ll get through all the trials to meet Osiris. This is written differently, though.’

‘How so?’ Nina asked.

Macy pointed out one section. ‘This is talking about the first arit of the House of Osiris. When you go in, you have to face the Lady of Tremblings, one of the guardians of the Underworld. But it only really says that she’s bad news, “the Lady of Destruction”. In the Book of the Dead it also says that she’ll deliver the person going through the Underworld from destruction if they’re doing things right - I remember it, because I thought the idea of being the Lady of Destruction was neat. Kinda metal.’

Eddie nudged Nina. ‘You know all about being the Lady of Destruction, don’t you?’

She huffed. ‘Only accidentally. But the second part’s not in this text?’

‘Not that I can see,’ Macy said. ‘It’s more like a warning than a prayer. There’s nothing about how to actually get through the arit.’

‘Oh, man!’ Nina complained, looking at Eddie. ‘You know what that sounds like, don’t you?’

‘Booby traps,’ they said together.

Nina put a hand to her face. ‘Just once, just goddamn once,’ she moaned, ‘I’d like to find an incredible archaeological site that’s not filled with Rube Goldberg death machines. Is that too much to ask? No collapsing ceilings, no crushing devices, no frickin’ cherubims waving swords at me!’

Macy was intrigued. ‘Cherubims? As in angels?’

‘Long story,’ said Eddie. ‘Okay, so we’ve got to get past the Lady of Tremblings. What else?’

Macy spent several minutes searching through the hieroglyphics. ‘The Lake of Fire - or Devourer by Fire, it’s talking about the same thing,’ she reported. ‘The Lady of Rainstorms. The Lady of Might, who “tramples on those who should not be here”, sheesh. The Goddess of the Loud Voice—’

‘Nina, they wrote about you!’ Eddie put in.

‘Well, yeah, I am a goddess.’

‘I can just leave, if you like,’ Macy said peevishly, before turning back to the ancient text. ‘So we’ve got the Goddess of the Loud Voice, the Hewer-in-Pieces in Blood, and then the last thing before you reach Osiris is the Cutter-off of Heads. Real subtle. They’re all mentioned in the Book of the Dead, but these descriptions are a bit hinky.’

‘It’s the other way round,’ said Nina thoughtfully. ‘The prayers in the Book of the Dead came from these - this was the source. The booby traps built to protect Osiris’s tomb eventually became part of the religion.’

‘We might need more than prayers to get past something called the Hewer-in-fucking-Pieces,’ Eddie said, shining his light down the sloping passage. ‘There’s nothing helpful?’

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Macy replied. ‘The other text’s mostly “Osiris is awesome!” kinda stuff. Lots of curses, too. “Desecrate the tomb of Osiris and suffer a thousand agonising deaths”, yadda yadda.’

‘I don’t want to suffer one agonising death,’ said Nina, joining Eddie. The passage was also decorated, more Egyptian gods ominously watching anyone who dared traverse it. ‘Think we can make it through?’

‘Depends what state the traps are in,’ Eddie said. ‘Doesn’t look like anyone’s been here before us, so there’s no chance Indy or Lara’ll have set them off already - but after this long, they might not still be working.’

‘Right, like we’re ever that lucky.’ Nina looked back at Macy. ‘What do you think?’

She seemed surprised to be asked. ‘Me? I dunno, it’s your decision.’

‘It’s your life,’ Nina countered.

Macy considered it. ‘I came this far,’ she said. ‘And you’ve both kept me in one piece, so let’s do it!’ She was about to start down the steps when Eddie grabbed her.

‘Just one thing,’ he said, pulling her back. ‘Stay behind us, okay?’

The passage descended into the inverted pyramid, making two ninety-degree turns before a pair of ornate pillars marked the entrance to another chamber. ‘It’s the first arit,’ said Macy, nervous.

Eddie directed his torch beam into the darkness. ‘It’s big,’ he said. ‘Deep, too.’

‘A shaft?’ Nina asked.

‘Right on.’ He cautiously advanced on to a little ledge. The shaft’s ceiling was about thirty feet overhead, and below it dropped out of sight beyond the range of his light. Two large pipes made from hand-beaten sheets of oxidised copper ran down the height of the far wall, on which was painted a giant female figure, but he was more interested in another object - a long stone beam, extending across the shaft to another ledge on the far side.

‘That doesn’t look safe,’ said Nina. The beam was less than a foot wide, and precariously perched.

Eddie moved to get a better look at the slab’s sides. ‘You’re not kidding. Look at them.’ He illuminated the far end, revealing thick carved protrusions and also mechanisms built into the opposite ledge - two large stone cogwheels.

Metal shone dully in Nina’s flashlight beam as she directed it above the cogs. ‘They’re connected to something up there.’ A large cylindrical piece of stone hung on a chain from a pulley.

‘Think we found our Lady of Tremblings,’ said Eddie. ‘The weight drops down on the chain and turns the cogs - and they bang against those lumps on the bridge and make it shake.’

‘So what sets it off?’ Macy asked.

Nina smiled grimly. ‘We do. There must be a trigger on the bridge - too much weight, and there’s a whole lotta shakin’ going on.’

‘How do we get across, then?’

‘By holding on really tight,’ said Eddie, taking a rope from his pack. ‘There’s only so much chain, so once the weight gets to the end, it’ll stop. If I tie myself to the bridge, I should be okay.’

Nina wasn’t so sure. ‘And what if the entire bridge falls and takes you with it?’

‘Then I’ll die like Captain Kirk!’ Seeing that she was still unhappy, he went on, ‘It’s either that or stand here wishing we’d brought a twenty-foot plank.’

‘You’d better hold on really, really tight, okay?’

Eddie looped the rope’s end round the bridge, then tied it to his body. ‘Okay, here we go,’ he muttered, putting a wary foot on the slab.

Nothing happened. It seemed secure and solid. Kneeling, he pushed the rope a couple of feet across the span before crawling to catch up, then repeating the process. Nina watched nervously.

Halfway across, three-quarters . . .

The slab shifted.

‘Oh, shit,’ he gasped, clinging tightly to the stone as the chain rattled—

And stopped, the links chinking before falling silent.

‘What happened?’ an anxious Nina called.

He raised his head. ‘Dunno, but I’m happy about it!’ He quickly crossed the last few feet, then untied himself and looked round. A large crack ran up one wall. Several chunks of stone had broken loose, and one had come to rest wedged beneath a cogwheel’s tooth, preventing it from turning. He tested the stone to see if it was secure. It moved slightly, but the weight bearing down on it held it in place.

‘Crawl across one at a time,’ he said. ‘And slowly.’

Nina crossed first, followed by Macy. ‘Earthquake damage?’ Nina mused, examining the crack. ‘Or maybe it’s just structural stress.’

‘Egyptian builders,’ Eddie joked, helping Macy up.

‘As opposed to British builders?’ she said indignantly. ‘What have you got that’s stood up for thousands of years?’

‘Stonehenge?’

She pouted. ‘Okay, I’ll give you that. But it’s still not as cool as the pyramids!’

Nina saw another descending passage beyond the exit, this one with a sloping floor rather than steps. ‘What was in the next arit?’

‘The Lake of Fire,’ Macy remembered. ‘Or the Devourer by Fire.’

‘Either way, fire,’ said Eddie. ‘Great. Just what we want in a confined space.’

‘The last trap was broken,’ Nina said, indicating the rock jamming the mechanism. ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky again.’

He groaned as he started down the slope. ‘Why’d you have to say that? You’ve just jinxed it!’

The incline was steep enough to be awkward, slowing their progress. The passage made more ninety-degree turns; Nina realised their descent followed a roughly spiral path, making her wonder if the copper pipes in the shaft were connected to another chamber below. Eventually, more ornate pillars marked another room.

Eddie sniffed the air. ‘Funny smell. Not sure what, but I don’t like it.’

He illuminated the chamber. It was large and rectangular with another exit at the far end, the walls sloping inwards to the roof about fifteen feet above. There were several holes in the ceiling. One of them was large and chimney-like, but it was the smaller ones that immediately made him suspicious: something was clearly supposed to drop out of them.

Except for a relief of a greyhound-faced god watching from one wall, the only objects in the room were several large globe-shaped copper bowls near the entrance. Directly ahead was a square hole in the dusty floor, about three feet across, which turned out to be a pool of some liquid; there was a matching pool by the far doorway. The rest of the floor between the two pools was fractionally lower than the section where they were standing, the perfectly flat expanse stretching the entire width of the chamber.

‘Oh, something is so wrong with this picture,’ Nina said. It was obviously another booby trap, but she couldn’t see the danger. ‘Where’s the fire?’

‘Maybe it went out,’ Macy offered hopefully, advancing for a better look at the snarling god.

‘Stay still,’ Eddie warned as he crouched by the pool and hesitantly dipped a finger in the liquid. ‘Just water.’ He shone his torch into it, noticing that the pool was only walled on three sides.

‘Four feet deep, maybe. Looks like it connects to the hole at the other end.’

‘A tunnel?’ said Nina. ‘Weird. Why not just walk across?’

‘You really think it’s going to be that easy?’

‘Not even for a second. What’s that?’ She turned her flashlight to something between the hole and the lowered area, a bow-taut length of fine black twine running from floor to ceiling.

‘Something I’m not planning on touching,’ said Eddie. He directed his light into the tunnel. ‘It’s threaded across it. You want to go through, you’ve got to break it.’

‘Which I think would be an extraordinarily bad idea, don’t you?’ Her attention switched to the expanse at the room’s centre, where she noticed more threads reaching up to the ceiling - and an absence of something. ‘You see what’s missing?’

‘What?’ Macy asked, moving to the edge of the small step.

‘Gaps. There aren’t any lines marking the edges of different slabs. It’s like one giant block of stone.’

Eddie examined the walls. ‘Biggest blocks here look about six feet by ten. But that floor’s easily thirty feet long. It can’t be all one slab, can it?’

‘I don’t see how.’ Nina looked round - to see Macy about to take an experimental step. ‘No, wait—’

Macy put her foot down on the floor - and it went through it.

She yelped, almost pitching forward before Nina grabbed her. ‘What the hell?’ Macy gasped as she hopped back, glutinous strands stretching from her boot’s sole to the sluggishly rippling ‘hole’ in what a moment ago had looked like solid stone. She tried to scrape the substance off. ‘Gross! What is this?’

‘Oil,’ said Eddie, coming over. He dipped his hand into what was now revealed as a large pool, disguised beneath a layer of sand. The same thick goo dripped slowly off his fingers when he lifted them out. ‘This crap’s floating on top of the water, and then they sprinkled all this sand over it to make it look like part of the floor.’

Nina looked up at the holes in the ceiling. ‘And I bet if you break those threads, something up there catches light and drops into the oil. Whoomph! Roasted robbers.’

Macy rubbed her sole across the floor, disgusted. ‘So how do you get across without setting off the trap?’

‘Swim under it,’ said Eddie, pointing at the water pool, which was clear of the oil. ‘The fire’ll only be on the surface.’

‘It can’t be that easy,’ Nina said, regarding the faux floor with suspicion. She looked round at the odd copper bowls, and shone her light into one. ‘Aha.’

‘What is it?’ asked Macy.

‘There’s something inside.’ Nina reached into the globe and gripped a handle fixed to its bottom - or, she realised as she lifted it up, its top. ‘Know what I think this is?’ She lowered it over her head until it touched her shoulders. ‘It’s a diving helmet!’ she announced, voice echoing.

Eddie knocked on it, drawing a yip of complaint. ‘You won’t get much air in there.’

She lifted it again. ‘You don’t need to. Just enough to get across.’ She gestured at the pool. ‘I don’t think the holes are connected by a tunnel - they’re just ways to get in and out of the pool without touching the oil. Once the rim of this thing is under the surface there’ll be air trapped inside it so you can breathe, and then as long as you don’t raise it high enough to let in any oil you won’t get burned. Then you go through the tunnel into the water hole at the other end, climb out, and hey! You’re across.’

Eddie sceptically examined another globe. ‘It’s too thin to keep the heat out for long.’

‘It’s the only way to get across without being fried. I’m pretty sure there’ll be something to stop people just swimming straight there under the oil.’ She held up the primitive helmet. ‘I don’t think we have a choice.’

Eddie made an aggrieved noise as he shook his head, but acquiesced. ‘Okay. But I’ll go first.’

‘No, I will,’ Nina insisted. ‘If there are any obstacles under there and I bang into them, I’ll need you to tell me which way to go.’

‘Are you sure about this?’

‘No,’ she admitted, going to the water pool. She hesitantly dipped a foot under the surface, then steeled herself and slipped all the way in. ‘Oh, ew. I just realised this water’s been sitting here for thousands of years.’

‘Just don’t drink it,’ said Eddie. ‘Although you could say that about any water in Egypt!’

Nina carefully crouched until her head was just above the surface, then reached up to take the helmet from Eddie, gripping the internal handle firmly.

‘Last chance to let me go instead,’ Eddie said.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she replied as he gave her the globe. ‘Hopefully.’ Bringing it down to rest on her shoulders, she submerged.

The helmet took a surprising amount of effort to hold down, wanting to float. The water level rose alarmingly as the air inside was compressed, but stopped just short of her nostrils. Acutely aware of her limited oxygen supply, she dropped as low as she could and shuffled into the tunnel. The helmet scraped against its ceiling.

Something tugged across her chest, a momentary resistance . . . then it was gone.

She had broken the thread.

Eddie and Macy reacted in alarm as a scraping sound echoed from overhead. ‘What is it?’ Macy asked, trying to pinpoint the source.

‘Sounds like a lighter,’ Eddie began, before the sound’s meaning struck him. ‘Shit! Nina, you’re going to have a fire any second!’

He stared at the ceiling in horror as the sound spread, ancient rollers grinding against metal, producing sparks . . .

Lights flared in the small holes.

Something dropped from one, a wad of cloth trailing a thin line of grey smoke. Only a small piece of it had caught light, the glow barely more than an ember . . .

But it was enough.

The cloth hit the surface, the dusty oil rippling around it. For a moment nothing happened - then a flame leapt up, rapidly expanding outwards. More pieces of cloth fell. Many were unlit, the sparks not having caught the material, but it only needed a few for the surface of the entire pool to erupt.

A lake of fire, just as the hieroglyphics had warned.

And Nina was in it.

She emerged from the short tunnel. The echo of her breathing and the almost total darkness were unnerving . . . but not nearly so much as the sudden light. The pool’s floor lit up in rippling orange as the floating oil ignited - and she almost immediately felt the heat, the handle she was clutching warming with alarming speed.

‘Oh, shit. Big mistake. Huge,’ she gasped. Forced to crouch, the best she could manage was an awkward waddle, the water slowing her movements to a slow-motion nightmare.

But this was no nightmare. It was real.

Eddie watched, appalled, as fire surrounded the slowly moving globe. Oil had stuck to it when Nina surfaced, and that too caught light, turning the helmet into a spherical torch. ‘Jesus! Nina, turn round! Get back in the tunnel!’

But she could barely hear him, the crackle of flames consuming all other sounds. Filled with fear, she pressed on. The pool was only thirty feet long. It wouldn’t take long to cross.

Would it?

Another step, then another. Water lapped at her nostrils, making her splutter. Glancing through the globe’s open bottom, she noticed markings on the floor. Hieroglyphs, the Eye of Osiris among them. They almost certainly served a purpose, but she had no time to think what it might be.

The heat coming through the handle was becoming uncomfortable. Not painful, yet - but it wouldn’t take long—

The helmet clanged against something.

Shocked, Nina almost let go of the globe. She tugged it back down and groped ahead with her other hand, finding a stone block that rose almost to the surface. As she’d feared, the pyramid’s builders had ensured that nobody could simply swim straight across below the fire.

She moved crab-like to the left, feeling for the block’s edge. Her fingers found nothing but flat stone. Another couple of steps. Still nothing. She forced herself to slow her breathing, trying to conserve her limited air.

Oh, God, what if the Egyptians had built a maze? If she went into a dead end . . .

There had to be a way through. If the builders had wanted to stop anyone from ever reaching Osiris’s tomb, they could have filled in every tunnel. The ‘right’ people, the priests who turned a king into a god, would have known the path. She just had to find it.

Quickly. Very quickly.

The hieroglyphs . . .

Holding her breath, she tipped her head down into the water. The markings on the floor shimmered in the hellish light from the surface. She had no idea what they said, but the Eye of Osiris was a repeated symbol, its dark iris staring blankly back at her from each.

Except for one.

That iris looked to the left, along the length of the stone slab.

She followed it, hand still outstretched. The handle was now on the verge of actual pain. She flexed her fingers, trying to stave off the moment when it became too hot to bear.

Her other hand was still rubbing against flat stone, stretching on, and on—

A corner!

She gripped the edge, pulling herself round it. A look down revealed another Eye of Osiris, this time gazing ‘up’ towards the chamber’s far end. She went in that direction, quickening her pace. A second upward-looking eye, then one pointing her back to the right.

The smoke from the burning oil swirled up the chimney, but the room’s temperature was rising. Arms raised to shield his face from the heat, Eddie watched the globe slide through the flames on a seemingly random path. It was over halfway across, but there couldn’t be much air left.

Nina was now fixated entirely on following the trail of eyes. The air was becoming foul - and hot.

Another eye. Forwards. Pain rose in her fingers. How much further? Her chest felt tighter with every breath, a groggy sensation washing over her.

Still another eye, directing her to the right. Her fingers were burning, her trembling hand shaking the globe. A bubble of air escaped from the rim, water rising to replace it.

The next eye looked up - and she caught a glimpse of shadow ahead.

The other tunnel!

She pulled the globe back below the surface, ducking as low as she could to force herself through the low passage. The helmet clanged like a bell as it bumped against the stone. Just a few more steps . . .

The air in the globe popped it sharply upwards as Nina cleared the tunnel and her burned fingers lost their grip. Stagnant water hit her face. She coughed, trying to stand. Her legs had turned to rubber. She fell against one side of the little pool, hands scrabbling weakly for the edge above.

They found it. She pulled herself up, whooping for breath as she cleared the surface.

‘She made it!’ Macy cried.

‘Thank Christ,’ Eddie said. ‘Nina! Are you okay?’

She made out his voice over the rumble and snap of fire. ‘Super fine,’ she croaked, giving him a weak thumbs-up. ‘There’s a path on the bottom of the pool. The Eyes of Osiris look in the direction you’ve got to go - just follow them!’

Eddie rubbed an ear. ‘Did you get that?’

‘Follow the direction the Eyes of Osiris are looking on the pool floor,’ Macy paraphrased. ‘Couldn’t you hear her?’

‘My ears are getting a bit dodgy,’ he admitted. ‘Too many explosions.’ He surveyed the pool. Nina’s path was clearly visible, a weaving line of disturbed oil. ‘I’ll go next,’ he told Macy, giving her one of the helmets. ‘You get in right behind me, and keep hold of my jacket.’

He lowered himself into the pool, took several deep breaths to get more oxygen into his system, then submerged and duck-walked into the short tunnel. Macy hesitated, then slipped in behind him and took hold of his jacket’s hem.

Knowing what to look for allowed them to make the crossing more quickly than Nina - though the handle inside Eddie’s helmet was still painfully hot by the time he reached the other pool. He stood and tossed the globe aside, breathing deeply as Nina helped him out. ‘Ow, bugger,’ he said, swishing his scorched fingers in the water. ‘And that was my wanking hand, too.’

‘Oh, Eddie,’ Nina chided. ‘Anyway, I should be enough for you.’

‘Well, we’ve got a fire, we just need a rug . . .’

Macy burst out of the water. ‘Oh, my God!’ she gasped, glowering at the lake of flames. The floating oil had now been mostly consumed, the fire dying down. ‘What kind of twisted bastard would think up something like that?’

‘You have to wonder,’ said Nina as she checked that her waterproof flashlight had lived up to its advertising. ‘But you know what’s really worrying me?’

‘What?’

‘There are five more arits to go.’

‘I can’t wait,’ Eddie said sarcastically, running his hands over his clothes to squeeze out the water. ‘So what’s next?’

‘The Lady of Rainstorms,’ said Macy, following his example.

‘Great. Like we’re not wet enough already.’ Dripping, they entered the next sloping passage.

23

The tunnel spiralled deeper into the pyramid. More Egyptian gods adorned the walls, warning of certain death for intruders.

Nina was less concerned about supernatural threats than physical ones. Experience had given her painful first-hand lessons that the more grand and important an ancient edifice, the more sadistically ingenious the traps protecting it.

And the Pyramid of Osiris was very grand and important.

Pillars marking the next arit appeared in her flashlight beam - but there was no new chamber beyond them, the steep passage continuing. ‘I just realised something,’ said Eddie. ‘This’ll take us underneath the room we were just in.’

Nina mentally backtracked through the turns. ‘Think it’ll be a problem?’

‘Well, the next trap’s about rainstorms, and we’ll have a big pool of water right over our heads.’

‘Good point.’ She directed her light at the ceiling. Unlike the painted walls, it was just blocks of plain stone. ‘I don’t see any holes.’

Eddie performed his own examination. ‘Ceiling looks okay . . . but these are new.’ He turned his light to the floor. On each side against the wall were recessed channels, about four inches wide and somewhat deeper.

‘They look like gutters,’ Macy observed.

‘Nothing like ’em up there,’ said Eddie, looking back past the pillars. ‘Yeah, I think we’re going to get wet again.’

‘But what’s it going to do?’ Nina asked. ‘Turn the place into a giant waterslide of death?’

‘Don’t give them ideas,’ said Macy, with a nervous glance at the watching gods.

‘This is the only way down,’ said Eddie, ‘so we’ll find out sooner or later. Unless you want to turn round - ah, who am I kidding? I shouldn’t even bother asking.’

‘It would be a waste to give up after getting this far,’ Nina pointed out with a smile. ‘Besides, the first trap was broken, and we got through the second one without too much trouble.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ he snorted, holding up his reddened hand, ‘wading through a lake of fire was a doddle!’

‘Okay, a little trouble. But we’ve been through worse. So long as we keep our heads, we’ll be fine.’

Macy raised a finger. ‘You remember that the final trap was called the Cutter-off of Heads, right?’

‘Then we’ll duck!’ She shone her flashlight down the slope. The passage continued in a straight line for some distance. ‘We’ll just be really careful and take things slow, okay?’

Eddie put a hand on her damp shoulder. ‘Okay, squishy. But I’m definitely going first, okay?’

‘Lead on, squashy,’ she replied, clapping a hand to his butt.

‘Get a room,’ Macy muttered. ‘Or get a tomb! Ha!’ Nina and Eddie both groaned. ‘What, he’s the only one allowed to make jokes?’

‘That’s ’cause all mine are good,’ said Eddie as he started down the slope.

Nina followed. ‘That’s a matter of opinion, honey.’

‘Tchah.’ His expression became more serious as he went on, alternating his torch beam between the floor and the roof. Something caught his eye, and he stopped. ‘Ay up,’ he said, indicating part of the ceiling. ‘The gaps between the blocks are getting bigger.’

Nina ran a fingertip along the joint. Fine dust trickled out. ‘The mortar’s crumbled.’

Macy bit her lip. ‘Just what you want when you’ve got giant stone blocks right above you, huh?’

‘Definitely take it slow,’ Nina suggested as Eddie set off again.

He nodded, noticing that the apparent shoddy workmanship continued along the ceiling - and also the floor. ‘Whatever this Lady of Rainstorms business is,’ he said, ‘I think she’s about to piss down on us any sec—’

The paving slab beneath his foot dropped slightly.

Everyone froze. From behind the walls came a faint clicking, a domino effect working upwards to knock out a final trigger . . .

A hollow clonk, wood being hit with metal - then an unmistakable rushing noise.

Water.

‘Bollocks,’ Eddie just had time to say before streams gushed from the cracks in the ceiling.

The downpour emerged from about a thirty-foot stretch of the roof, growing in strength - but not nearly enough to sweep anybody away down the slope. ‘I don’t get it,’ Nina said. ‘This couldn’t hurt anyone.’

‘This isn’t the trap,’ Eddie said with alarm. He pointed down the passage. ‘That’s the trap!’

She saw the cracks in the floor widening rapidly as the water rushed over them. ‘Oh, crap. Forget taking things slow - run!’

The substance binding the blocks together wasn’t mortar or cement. It was a mixture of sand and finely crushed limestone, just barely strong enough to hold everything in place . . . and now being rapidly eaten away as the limestone dissolved and the sand was washed out by the flowing water. The slabs shifted, clonking against each other as the trio raced over them, sinking—

And falling.

With the fragile binding disappearing, the floor did the same. Slabs dropped away into a deep pit below.

And as each slab plunged, the remainder became even weaker.

Eddie realised the gutters were staying intact, but they were too narrow to traverse - especially at a run. ‘Get ahead of me!’ he yelled. He was the heaviest of the group - if he went through the floor, they all would.

‘I can’t!’ Nina shouted from behind. ‘Just go, go!’

With a colossal boom, the entire upper end of the sabotaged floor collapsed into the pit. The flood turned into a waterfall, dropping after it, but the damage had already been done. The remaining stones tumbled one after the other into the void, a ripple gaining rapidly on the running figures.

‘There!’ Eddie shouted. The water sweeping down the slope had revealed the last line of weakened blocks - and beyond them, the floor was reassuringly solid. ‘Just a few more yards, come on!’

He dived as the blocks under him shifted, landing hard just past the corroding section. Nina also made a flying leap, barely staying on her feet as she bounded over her husband.

Behind her, Macy started to jump—

The last slabs fell away under her.

She screamed - then the scream was knocked out of her as she fell short and slammed against the newly exposed edge of the pit.

Her torch rolled down the passage as she clawed at the wet floor, unable to find a foothold on the sheer wall. Her elbows slipped over the brink, wrists—

Eddie grabbed her hand just as she lost her grip. ‘Nina!’ he gasped as Macy’s weight crushed his knuckles against the stone edge. ‘Get her other hand!’

Nina scrambled back up the slope, seeing Macy flailing below. She reached out for her other hand. ‘Macy! Here!’

The young woman looked up at her, terrified. ‘Please don’t let me fall!’

‘You’re not gonna fall,’ Nina promised. Their fingers touched - then slipped apart.

Eddie was losing his hold. ‘Nina, come on . . .’ he begged.

Nina dropped to her knees, leaned out over the abyss - and lunged.

This time, she caught Macy’s wrist. Straining, almost overbalancing, she hauled her up - taking just enough pressure off Eddie for him to bring round his other arm. ‘Got her!’ he barked. ‘Pull!’

Leaning back, Nina pulled with all her strength. Eddie forced himself upright and dragged her up. She cleared the edge, and all three fell over, Macy landing on top of Eddie.

Nina sat up. ‘You okay?’ she asked Macy, who nodded. ‘Good. Now get off my husband.’

Macy’s chest was on Eddie’s face. ‘I’m fine with it,’ he joked, muffled, before helping her off him.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered, shaking.

A low, crackling rumble made them all look up. ‘Don’t thank us yet,’ said Nina. She aimed her flashlight at the ceiling, and saw water leaking from more cracks above them. ‘Come on!’

They jumped up and ran down the slope—

An entire section of ceiling smashed to the floor where they had just been - and thousands of gallons of water followed, the remaining contents of the pool above bursting out. The deluge exploded down the passage after them.

No way to outrun it—

Macy was scooped off her feet as the churning maelstrom caught her, crashing against Nina and Eddie as they too were swept down the passage. They bounced painfully off the walls and floor, pieces of shattered stone pummelling them.

And there was a new sound audible even over the frothing thunder - a rhythmic pounding, growing louder . . .

Macy’s flashlight had been caught by the wave’s leading edge, a glowing point spinning ahead of them. Eddie saw movement, something rising up past another set of pillars - then the light vanished, crushed flat as the object slammed down with a monstrous boom. ‘Shit!’ he yelled as they were carried inexorably towards it. ‘Grab on to me!’

Nina clutched his arm, Macy a leg as he jammed his other heel into a gutter. The force of the torrent was too great for him to stop them, but he could slow them just enough to pass through the pillars while the crusher was moving upwards.

If his brief glimpse had been enough for him to judge its timing . . .

Another echoing slam of impact. He raised his foot—

They whipped between the columns, hitting a flat floor. Something huge plunged at Eddie’s head—

The crusher smashed down an inch behind him as the water flung him into the chamber beyond. The room was much wider than the passage, the wavefront quickly spreading out and losing its power. The three unwilling watersliders were deposited on the floor, coughing and flapping like beached fish.

The crusher kept pounding, slowing down. Nina retrieved her flashlight and shone it at the source of the noise. It was a stone block, painted with the figure of a woman raising her feet as if stamping on ants. The gutters had channelled the flood into a pair of water wheels; not large enough to power the crusher itself, but capable of tripping some mechanism. ‘I guess that’s our Lady of Might,’ she said, wiping wet hair off her face. ‘She really does try to “trample on those who should not be here”.’

‘Women with big feet, not my thing,’ said Eddie tiredly. The heavy tools in his pack had bashed against his back, bruising him. ‘Is everyone okay?’

Macy stood as the crusher juddered to a standstill. ‘Not feeling so good,’ she admitted. She held up her hands, unable to stop them shaking. ‘Oh, God, I think I’m gonna puke.’

Eddie stood in front of her, resting his hands on her upper arms. ‘Hey, you’re okay. And you’re not going to puke. Know why?’

She looked into his eyes, uncertain. ‘No?’

‘ ’Cause you’d puke on me! And then we’d have to have words, and that’d be bad all round. So you’re going to be fine.’ He smiled. It took a few moments before Macy managed to respond in kind, and then only faintly, but it was at least genuine.

Nina smiled as well. ‘It’s okay, Macy. We beat this trap - two traps, actually.’

‘Yeah, but there’re another three to come,’ she glumly reminded them.

‘Four-nil to us, so far,’ said Eddie, searching for the next exit. Another passage, this one stepped, led downwards. ‘And I bet we can make it seven-nil. This Osiris bloke can shove his traps right up his mummified arse!’ A grin broke through on to Macy’s face.

‘Okay, so the next arit was the Goddess of the Loud Voice, right?’ Nina asked. Macy nodded. ‘Let’s see if we can shout her down.’

At the entrance to the inverted pyramid, nothing moved except for sand drifting in the breeze. The Land Rover waited silently for its passengers to return, no sound disturbing the emptiness of the desert.

Then . . . a noise came from the northeast.

Growing louder.

A cloud appeared on the horizon, dust swirling through the shimmering heat haze. But it was not a sandstorm. It was too small - and moving with purpose. Heading directly for the ruins.

Something became visible through the rippling air, a slab-like grey and black shape. The noise increased, a roaring thrum of powerful engines and the rasp of whirling propeller blades.

But this was no aircraft.

Sebak Shaban gazed through the bridge windows of the massive hovercraft, a Zubr class assault vehicle designed to carry tanks and other armoured vehicles over almost any terrain. After observing the abilities of the four Zubrs bought by the Greek navy, the Egyptians had recently decided to follow the example of their friend/rival across the Mediterranean and purchase two of the enormous craft from Russia.

Officially, this Zubr was currently undergoing trials before entering full service. That it was almost one hundred kilometres from the isolated desert range where said trials were supposed to be taking place was down to one of the other men on the bridge. ‘I like this a lot,’ said Shaban to General Tarik Khaleel. ‘When the plan is successful, perhaps you could loan one to the Temple. Though I’m not sure where we would park it.’

‘Anywhere you want, my friend!’ laughed Khaleel. ‘And if anyone complains, it has rocket launchers and Gatling guns.’ He nodded at the turrets on the foredeck below. ‘It’s amazing how quickly people shut up when you point a six-barrelled cannon at them.’

‘The threat of death is always persuasive, isn’t it?’ Both men shared sly, knowing smiles. ‘How much further?’

‘Just under two kilometres,’ said the pilot.

‘Good.’ Shaban entered the weapons room behind the bridge. ‘We are approaching the co-ordinates,’ he announced. As well as a member of the Zubr’s crew, the room contained Osir, Diamondback, Dr Hamdi . . . and the group’s newest addition.

‘Dr Berkeley,’ Osir asked the IHA archaeologist, ‘are you absolutely sure they’re correct?’

‘As sure as I can be,’ said Logan Berkeley, annoyed at being doubted. ‘The inverted pyramid on the zodiac, the marking representing the Nile, the symbol in the Osireion, the position of Mercury relative to the end of the canyon - it all fits together.’ He indicated his laptop, which in one window displayed a satellite image of the desert overlaid with lines marking distances and directions, a photo of the Eye of Osiris inside the Osireion pulled from the IHA’s massive Egyptian database in another. ‘Either the Pyramid of Osiris is here, or it’s somewhere that’ll never be found.’

‘I hope it’s the former,’ said Shaban, with a menacing undercurrent.

Berkeley’s annoyance increased. ‘I’ll do what I’m being paid for,’ he snapped, ‘so there’s no need to threaten me.’ He looked at Osir. ‘It’s funny. If you’d tried to buy me off a week ago, I would never have accepted. Now? I just want to get something out of the whole fiasco at the Sphinx.’ His face clenched with anger. ‘I should have been on the front page of every newspaper in the world, but that bitch Nina Wilde turned me into a joke. At least the money will make up for some of that.’

The weapons officer called Khaleel into the room to point out something on a monitor. Osir raised an eyebrow. ‘Funny that you should mention Dr Wilde.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I think she’s beaten you again.’ The screen displayed an image from one of the hovercraft’s targeting systems; the Land Rover would have been unmissable against the blank plain even without the cursor the weaponry computer had locked on to it.

‘What? God damn it!’ Berkeley glared at the monitor. Diamondback sniggered.

‘Who is this Dr Wilde?’ Khaleel asked.

‘A competitor,’ Osir told him. He looked more closely at the ruins. ‘But she may have done us a favour. There’s nobody there, so she must have found a way in. We won’t need to use all those bulldozers and diggers we brought after all!’

He went into the bridge, Khaleel, Shaban and Diamondback joining him. Ahead, the faded yellow void of the desert was broken by the spot of colour that was the Defender. The pilot eased back the throttle to slow the 500-ton hovercraft, the three huge propellers above its stern losing speed. ‘Your men,’ Osir quietly asked Khaleel. ‘Are they totally reliable? If one word of this gets back to the government . . .’

‘I will vouch for Tarik,’ said Shaban firmly. ‘I owe him my life.’

‘And I will vouch for my men,’ added Khaleel. ‘We only have a skeleton crew, but I hand-picked them. They will keep your secret . . . for the price you’re paying, certainly.’

‘Good.’ Osir looked back at the ruins as the Zubr wallowed to a stop, settling on its huge rubber air cushion in a cloud of billowing sand. ‘Let’s find Osiris . . . and Nina Wilde.’

24

‘Wow,’ said Nina, aiming her flashlight upwards and finding no end to the black void above. ‘That’s tall.’

‘You know where we are?’ Eddie said, indicating the two pipes running down the far wall. ‘Right under that bridge. If the trap’d been working and we’d been chucked off, this is where we would have ended up. It’s at least a two-hundred-foot drop. Splat.’

Nina tried to picture the whole pyramid in her mind’s eye. ‘Jeez. This place must be as big as the Great Pyramid. Maybe even be bigger.’

‘That’d explain why nobody tried to out-do Khufu’s pyramid,’ said Macy thoughtfully. ‘If the Great Pyramid was almost, but not quite, as big as Osiris’s, no other pharaoh could make their monument bigger than Khufu’s without insulting Osiris. And nobody would dare do that.’

‘So the pyramids were really just giant dick-waving exercises?’ asked Eddie. ‘People haven’t changed much over five thousand years, have they?’ He turned his attention to the pipes. They were connected, one narrowing considerably at its base before widening out conically below a broad horizontal slot. A woman’s face had been painted around it, the opening forming her mouth.

‘It’s like a church organ,’ Nina realised. ‘They must blow air through it somehow - and that’s where the loud voice comes from.’

‘If they dropped something down the other tube, it’d work like a piston.’ There was another passage near the pipes, this one blocked by a barred metal gate. ‘Let me guess. Try to open the gate, the trap goes off, and the whole room gets as loud as a Led Zep concert.’

‘The who?’ Macy asked.

‘No, Led Zep.’ Ignoring her blank look, he moved towards the opening.

‘Careful, Eddie,’ Nina warned.

‘Don’t worry, I’m not gonna move it. I just want to find the trigger.’

‘No, I meant the gate might not be the—’

A slab shifted beneath his foot.

‘—trigger,’ Nina concluded.

‘Get into the other tunnel!’ Eddie shouted, turning back the way they had come—

A second gate slammed down inside the entrance, making Macy jump. No sooner had its echo faded than another sound began to rise, a deep, mournful note, quickly becoming louder.

And louder.

Air gusted from the slot, the sound resonating up the pipe’s length and bouncing back, amplified. The whole room vibrated, dust dancing from the floor, paint and plaster cracking off the walls.

And the chamber’s occupants were also affected. ‘Jesus!’ Nina gasped, a nauseating sensation rising in her chest cavity. Her own organs were vibrating in sympathy with the booming bass note. She tried to lift the fallen gate, but it refused to budge.

Eddie had no more luck with the other gate. He turned to the pipes. ‘Block it! Shove something in it!’

Nina could barely hear him over the thunderous din, but got the gist. She shrugged off her pack and tipped out its contents, balling up the nylon. Macy followed suit. Eddie was already at the pipe, face screwed up in discomfort as he jammed his jacket and his own empty pack into the slot. The note’s pitch changed slightly, the escaping air screeching shrilly as its exit was obstructed.

The women staggered across the trembling floor to him. He grabbed their balled-up packs and stuffed them into the gap. Nina dropped her flashlight and clapped both hands over her ears, but it made no difference; the sound was inside her, trying to shake her apart from within.

It was doing the same thing to the pyramid. Pieces of masonry fell down the shaft and shattered on the stone floor - small lumps at first, but the cracks spreading across the walls warned that there would be larger ones coming.

Unable to shield his ears, Eddie was finding the noise agonising - but it eased slightly as he twisted the makeshift bungs to block the gaps. Pipe organs were closed at the top, air only able to escape through the slot. If he could completely seal it . . .

The vibration began to die down. All he had to do was hold everything in place and endure the noise for as long as it took for the machine to run out of air—

A clanging shudder ran up the length of the pipe as the pressure rose - then rippled back down it. A blast of compressed air hit the mouth like a sledgehammer blow, firing the blockage out of the slot and bowling Eddie to the floor. With a ground-shaking whump like the clearing of the world’s mightiest throat, the terrifying bass note resumed - at full volume. Plaster splintered from the walls, even the paving cracking.

The noise was so overpowering that Nina could barely think. The beam of her dropped flashlight illuminated the bottom of the pipes. Blocking the mouth had failed, but there had to be another way . . .

Something Eddie had said forced its way through the disorientation.

Two pipes, a piston in one, forcing the air ahead of it as it dropped. The air itself acted as a cushion slowing its fall - there was only one relatively small hole through which it could escape, and the hourglass-shaped pinch at the bottom of the organ pipe restricted it further.

She knew what to do.

She grabbed a mallet from Eddie’s discarded gear. With her ears exposed, the sound became unbearable - she screamed, but couldn’t even hear it. A piece of falling stone hit her arm. More debris crashed around her, a crack leaping up the wall—

She swung the mallet.

It hit the pinch, tearing the metal. A piercing shriek escaped from the rent. Nina hit it again, and again - and the pipe ripped apart.

Air blasted out, the awful bass note dropping in volume. She whacked the pipe again, trying to close off the section producing the sound. The metal bent across the torn hole.

The note faded.

Head ringing, Nina stepped back. The escaping rush of air was still roaring like a jet engine - and there was another sound, a metallic clung-clung-clung rapidly getting louder—

Eddie threw her backwards as the bottom of the other pipe blew apart, something inside it hitting the ground so hard that it smashed a crater into the flagstones. The piston. With air now freely able to escape from the pipe, there had been nothing to slow it, and it had plunged downwards as fast as gravity could take it.

A last few fragments from high above hit the floor, then the rain of debris stopped. The quiet and stillness was almost shocking. Nina brushed dust from her face, then looked at Eddie. His mouth moved silently.

Oh, God, she was deaf—

‘Just kidding,’ he said, grinning.

She hit him. ‘You son of a bitch!’

‘Hey, we’re okay. I think.’ Concern crossed his face as he clicked his fingers beside one ear. ‘Shit, that doesn’t sound right.’

‘You’re surprised, after that?’ She retrieved her flashlight, finding Macy. ‘Are you okay?’

Macy slowly took her hands from her ears. ‘Jeez. My mom and dad were right - you can play music too loud.’

Nina helped Eddie up. ‘Let’s try those gates.’

He went to the exit and strained to lift the gate. It was heavy, but it moved. When they had recovered their gear, he hauled the gate up high enough for Nina and Macy to get underneath, then they supported it as he slid through. He looked back at the wreckage of the trap. ‘Five down, two to go.’

‘Yeah, but the last two sound really nasty,’ Macy pointed out. ‘The Hewer-in-Pieces and the Cutter-off of Heads? Not good.’

‘We can beat them,’ said Nina, oddly buoyed by their survival. ‘And then . . . we’ll meet Osiris.’ They set off down the next passage.

Over two hundred feet above, Osir led his expedition to the Lady of Tremblings. Dust drifted through the room, stirred up by the sound from the massive pipe. ‘I think we’ve found where that noise came from,’ he said, directing a powerful torch beam across the shaft.

The rest of his group followed him on to the ledge. Although there were several men in military-style uniforms, wearing equipment webbing and carrying weapons, they were not soldiers: Khaleel, though accompanying Osir out of curiosity, had chosen to leave his men aboard the hovercraft. The troopers were members of the Osirian Temple, Shaban’s personal security force.

Shaban gazed at the long drop below. ‘Some sort of trap. Wilde and Chase, and the girl - they must have triggered it.’ He smirked malevolently. ‘I’m in two minds, brother. It would be amusing if they died setting off a trap that we then walked through safely, but I’m also hoping they survive - so I can kill them myself.’

‘All that matters is that they can’t get out,’ said Osir. He turned to Berkeley. ‘What do you make of this room?’

‘The hieroglyphs in the entrance chamber definitely suggested that each arit is booby-trapped.’ Berkeley pointed at one of the large cogwheels. ‘This would be the Lady of Tremblings, at my guess. Wilde and the others must have activated it when they crossed - and survived.’

‘They didn’t fall?’ asked Hamdi.

‘That noise? I think it’s safe to assume that was the Goddess of the Loud Voice, which is the fifth arit. They got that far, at least.’

‘Which means they’ve cleared the way for us,’ said Osir. He stepped on to the bridge.

‘Are - are you sure it is safe?’ said Hamdi nervously.

Osir took another step. The bridge stood firm. ‘Either the trap has been sprung, or it’s broken.’

‘Lead on, Khalid,’ said Shaban as his brother negotiated the crossing. Once he reached the other ledge, he signalled the others to follow.

The cogwheel creaked, the stone jamming it shifting slightly, but nobody noticed.

Another set of columns marked the sixth arit.

‘Okay,’ Nina said, pausing outside. ‘Hewer-in-Pieces in Blood, huh? I think we’ll need more than a few Band-Aids if this goes badly, so let’s figure out how to make it not go badly.’

She and Eddie directed their lights through the opening. The level passage ahead was decorated with the now-familiar disapproving Egyptian gods and grim warnings of the fate awaiting intruders . . . but there was also something new.

Something ominous. Set into the walls were numerous horizontal slots, lined top and bottom with rust-red plates of iron.

Eddie aimed his torch into the nearest slot. There was something within, another long piece of metal on a hinge at one end . . . but this was considerably thinner along its edge. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Blades inside the holes. I get it. We go down the tunnel and they spring out and chop us into chunks.’

‘They’re kinda rusty,’ said Macy. ‘Maybe they won’t work.’

‘You want to bet your life on that?’ Nina asked. Each slot was almost as long as the passage was wide, leaving no room to escape the blades by pressing against the opposite wall - though the sheer number of slots on both sides made finding any kind of hiding place almost inconceivable. ‘How the hell are you supposed to get through?’

Eddie took out the mallet, crouching with his arm outstretched to tap the floor just past the columns. Nina winced in fearful anticipation of a blade’s slicing out from the wall, but nothing happened. He edged closer and tried again, still with no result.

‘Trigger’s probably somewhere further along,’ he said, standing. ‘So you’re right in the middle when it goes off.’ The far wall was a good forty feet away - and even then it only marked a corner rather than the end, the tunnel continuing to one side.

‘There’s got to be some way through without setting it off,’ said Nina.

Eddie hefted the mallet. ‘Let me try something.’ He tossed it through the columns to land a few feet inside the entrance. The blades remained in place. ‘Okay, so that far’s safe, at least. Probably.’ He stepped forward to retrieve it.

‘Don’t say “probably” and then walk right into it!’ Nina yelled as he returned with the heavy hammer. ‘And what are you planning to do, throw it a foot farther along each time? There’s no way to guarantee you’ll hit the trigger - and unless you’ve got some mad boomerang skills I don’t know about, you can’t get it round that corner either.’

‘Okay, so what do you suggest?’ he demanded. ‘We can’t just walk into the bloody thing and think light thoughts so we don’t set it off.’

‘We don’t walk,’ said Macy, looking more closely at the hieroglyphs. ‘I think we’re supposed to run. This text here’s another warning that horrible death awaits, yadda yadda, but it finishes with something like “hurry to Osiris”. Or “hasten”, maybe. “Hasten to Osiris.” ’

‘They left a clue?’ Nina said, surprised. ‘None of the other arits had them.’

‘It’s only a few extra characters.’ Macy pointed them out at the bottom of a block of text. ‘Everything else is the same as we’ve been seeing all the way down. Easy to miss. There might have been others, but we just didn’t notice them.’

‘So we’re meant to peg it down the corridor, then?’ Eddie said, illuminating the passage again. ‘Bit of a risk - we don’t know what’s round that corner.’

‘The Cutter-off of Heads, probably.’

‘Yeah, that’s reassuring.’ He returned the mallet to his pack, steeling himself. ‘All right. So we have to run like an Egyptian.’ He looked at Nina. ‘Ready?’

‘Let’s do it,’ she said.

‘If I get chopped into Oxo cubes I’m going to kick your arse in the afterlife. Macy?’ Macy nodded at him. ‘Okay. Three, two, one . . . go!’

They ran across the threshold.

The blades remained stationary.

Nina’s light swept along one side of the passage, Eddie’s the other, as they ran with Macy just behind. Ten feet along, twenty, their clattering footsteps echoing. Thirty, the corner coming up fast—

A dusty crunch as a block shifted beneath Nina’s foot.

Her heart clenched with fear - but there was still no movement from the walls.

There was a sound behind them, though. A hollow clonking, some mechanism turning and repeatedly knocking metal against metal.

Counting down.

‘Definitely run,’ Eddie gasped, slowing at the corner to let the women get ahead of him. Torch raised, he glanced back—

Kshang!

Ranks of rusty blades shot out from the slots at the entrance, some swinging forward and others back to dice anyone unlucky enough to be caught between them. Corrosion and time had taken their toll, some swords snapping or wrenching themselves from their hinges to clash against the opposite wall - but the result was still as lethal as its creators had intended.

And it was getting closer.

‘Shiiiiit!’ Eddie burst back into a sprint after Nina and Macy as more blades sprang out one after the other, a wave of death chasing them down the tunnel. ‘Runrunrun!’

Nina didn’t need to see what was happening to be spurred on; the rapidly approaching sound was terrifying enough. In her torch beam she saw what she at first thought was the end of the passage - before realising the ornate columns marked the entrance to the next arit.

The Cutter-off of Heads.

Out of the frying pan—

The advancing blades reached the corner, rounded it, continued after the running trio without pause. Gaining.

Nina saw something on the walls beyond the columns. More slots - but only one on each side, at about neck height.

And they were running straight at them.

She didn’t even have time to shout a warning to Eddie and Macy - they were almost at the columns, and the iron wave was upon them—

She swept up her arms to grab the surprised pair round their shoulders - and yanked her feet off the floor. The extra weight made Macy trip, Nina in turn dragging Eddie down as they tumbled through the next entrance - just as two large spinning discs burst from the walls ahead of them, swinging back and barely clearing their heads as they fell.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Nina spluttered, scrambling out from under the whirling serrated blades. ‘They weren’t kidding about the name!’

Eddie waited for the two discs to grind to a halt before rising and returning to the entrance, experimentally pushing one of the swords. He expected resistance, but it moved freely, if noisily, on its rusted hinge; the force of its release after six millennia had broken the mechanism. ‘Least we’ll be able to get back out.’

‘We made it,’ Macy said, panting. ‘We got through - that was the last trap!’ She hesitated. ‘Right?’

‘If the hieroglyphics were telling the truth, then yeah,’ Nina assured her. Even so, she still stood with a degree of caution. Ahead was another bend, the passage angling downwards.

She looked round the corner. Steps led down a short distance to another set of columns.

But these were not the kind that marked each arit. These were something altogether different.

And magnificent.

‘Oh, you’ve got to see this,’ she said softly, barely breathing despite her recent exertion.

Macy gasped at the sight, and even Eddie was impressed. ‘Pretty flash.’

The columns were carved in the form of an Egyptian god, mirror-images facing each other. But they were not any of the figures that had watched their descent into the heart of the pyramid. This was another, a man in a tall headdress, bearing a crook in one hand and a flail in the other. His body was encased in tight bindings, like those of a mummy, but his face was exposed, skin an oxidised copper-green. Both figures were liberally adorned with gold and silver leaf.

Osiris.

Between the twin statues was the entrance to a dark chamber. Nina raised her flashlight. More gold and silver glinted within, treasures stacked round the walls, but her gaze was fixed on what lay at the centre of the large room: a bulky, rounded-off object, its skin pure silver.

A sarcophagus.

Nina slowly advanced, checking the two figures for any sign of some last, sneaky trap. There was none. They had reached their goal, the final chamber.

‘We found it,’ she said, looking at Eddie and Macy in wonderment. ‘We found the tomb of Osiris.’

25

They entered the chamber, a match to the Osireion in dimensions and form, torch beams flashing over the artefacts and treasures inside. They ranged from the astounding to the prosaic - gleaming statues of pure gold beside simple wooden chairs; a full-sized boat bearing a silver and gold mask of Osiris upon its prow against which had been propped bundles of spears. It was a find to exceed even the tomb of Tutankhamun. The famed pharaoh had been a relatively unimportant ruler of the New Kingdom, less than three and a half thousand years ago, but Osiris was a myth given flesh, a foundation stone of Egyptian civilisation dating back almost twice as far.

And they were the first to reach him.

Nina examined the sarcophagus. The lid was a larger than life representation of the man within. The sculpted silver face gazed serenely at the ceiling, kohl-lined eyes wide.

‘The craftsmanship’s absolutely incredible,’ she whispered. ‘All of this is.’ She gestured at the objects surrounding them. ‘I never imagined the pre-dynastic Egyptians were this advanced.’

‘It’s just like Atlantis,’ said Macy. ‘They were really advanced for their time too, but nobody knew about them. Until you found them.’

Nina smiled at her. ‘Y’know, this is really more of a joint discovery, Macy.’

Macy beamed. ‘Not bad for a C-student, huh?’

Eddie took a closer look at a set of painted wooden figurines, symbolic representations of the servants who would attend their king in the afterlife, then eyed a cruder statuette carved from an odd purple stone before moving to the other side of the sarcophagus. ‘All right, so what do we do now we’ve found all this?’

‘Normally I’d say photograph, catalogue, then examine,’ said Nina, ‘but this isn’t exactly a normal case. First thing we need to do is secure it. We’ll have to contact the Egyptian government, go to Dr Assad at the SCA.’

‘So what about this bread Osir was after?’ He looked for anything resembling food. On a small wooden table was what might once have been loaves, but they had long been reduced to mouldering dust. ‘Don’t think he’ll get any sarnies out of them. Is there anything else?’

‘Look down.’ Eddie did, seeing a recess set into the coffin’s base, a pottery jar about ten inches high inside it. ‘Canopic jars. The Egyptians used them to store the body’s vital organs after they were removed during mummification. Osir thinks there’ll be yeast spores in his digestive system.’

Macy saw another jar on the floor by Nina, then went to the head of the sarcophagus to find a third. ‘There’s one here, too - and there should be another down by his feet.’ Eddie checked, and nodded. ‘One for each compass point. This one’s got a monkey head, a baboon - it’s the god Hapi. That means it’s got Osiris’s lungs in it.’ She was about to pick up the jar when she realised what she had just said and flinched away. ‘Gross.’

‘Which jars are which?’ Nina asked.

‘Hapi represented the north, so . . .’ She worked out the compass directions. ‘The one on your side should be a jackal - that’s Duamutef.’

Nina shone her light on the jar, revealing that the painted cap was indeed in the long-eared shape of a jackal’s head. ‘Yep.’

‘So that’ll be the stomach. The one opposite’ll be a falcon, that’s Qebehsenuf. Or is it Qebehsunef? That’s what you get for having a language with no vowels, I guess. Anyway, that’ll have his intestines inside.’

‘Lovely,’ said Eddie. ‘A jar full of guts.’

‘And the one at the south end, under his feet, that should look like just some guy because Imseti was a human god. That’ll be Osiris’s liver.’

He smacked his lips. ‘That’s more like it. Anyone got any fava beans?’

‘It’s six thousand years old, Eddie,’ Nina warned with a grin. ‘And we didn’t bring any Pepto-Bismol.’

‘I’ll give it a miss, then. So if Osir’s after these jars, what should we do with them? Smash ’em?’

‘I’d really rather you didn’t,’ said Osir from the entrance.

Nina jumped in shock, and Macy yelped as they spun to see him leaning almost casually against one of the Osiris figures. Beside him, Shaban’s stance was anything but casual as he covered them with a gun.

Osir stepped forward, revealing that more people, Diamondback and Hamdi among them, had crept down the steps. ‘It’s more incredible than I imagined,’ he said, taking in the chamber’s contents. ‘And now, it all belongs to me.’

‘No, it absolutely does not,’ snapped Nina.

‘We were here first,’ said Eddie. ‘Finders keepers.’

Shaban gestured for them to move away from the sarcophagus. ‘I have something else you can keep. A bullet.’

Osir went to the silver coffin, picking up the canopic jar from its foot. ‘And the organs of Osiris himself are here. Just as I said, Dr Wilde.’

Nina was about to reply when someone else entered. ‘Logan?’ she gasped. ‘Oh, you son of a bitch. You’re working for these clowns now?’

Berkeley regarded her coldly. ‘This is a habit of yours that’s starting to piss me off, Nina. I make a big find, but you’ve beaten me to it. At least this time you’re not making me look like a complete jackass on live TV.’

‘Oh, boo hoo,’ Nina sneered, pretending to wipe away a tear. ‘Poor little Logan, someone stole his thunder - so he’s going to go against everything I thought he believed in and sell out to a bunch of wack-jobs from some stupid bogus religion.’

Shaban’s scarred face twisted angrily and he aimed the gun at Nina, but Osir shook his head. ‘Not in here. I don’t want the tomb despoiled.’ He put down the jar and slowly circled the sarcophagus. ‘Four jars - the liver, intestines, lungs . . . and stomach.’ Almost reverentially, he raised the jackal-headed jar. ‘This holds the key to eternal life, Dr Wilde. In this jar are spores of the yeast used to make the bread of Osiris. All I need is one sample, and the secret will be mine. I will cultivate it, I will own it, and I will control it.’

‘That’s assuming there are actually any spores in there,’ said Nina. ‘Maybe Osiris hadn’t eaten any bread before he died. Maybe it was overcooked and the yeast cells were killed. You might have gone through all this for nothing.’

‘Not nothing,’ said Osir, shrugging. ‘I’ll still have the tomb, no matter what. But that’s why I brought Dr Kralj.’ He waved for a bearded man to join him. It took Nina a moment to identify him: one of the scientists working with the yeast cultures in the Swiss laboratory. ‘There are two canopic jars that can say which of us is right, Dr Wilde - the jar of Duamutef,’ he held up the jackal-headed container, ‘and the jar of Qebehsenuf. I’m willing to sacrifice one to learn what is in the other. Dr Kralj, which would be better for your test? The intestines, or the stomach?’

‘Anything in the intestines would have been through the digestive process,’ said the Serbian scientist. ‘If there are spores present which survived that, there are likely to be more in the stomach. So the intestines, yes.’

‘Then do it.’

Kralj collected the falcon-headed jar. ‘No, wait,’ pleaded Nina. ‘That jar’s an incredibly valuable artefact. If you open it, you might as well be destroying it.’ She looked at Berkeley. ‘Logan, you’ve got to have some feelings about this.’ She knew she had struck a nerve - he couldn’t keep a conflicted expression off his face - but he said nothing. ‘Is however much he’s paying you worth this?’

‘Dr Berkeley knows a good deal when he is offered one,’ said Osir, as Kralj set up a small folding table and placed the jar on it, taking more equipment from a case. ‘It’s a shame you didn’t. If you hadn’t betrayed me, we would still have been in this room together - only you would be in charge, not a prisoner.’

Shaban kept Nina, Eddie and Macy at gunpoint, two of his troopers joining him with their MP7s raised. Everyone else watched as Kralj worked on the jar. After laying out a line of small bottles containing colourless liquids, some test tubes and a portable microscope, he examined the carved lid, then used a metal pick to peel away the black resin sealing it. Once it was clear, he looked up at Osir, who nodded.