The Lost Testament

35

Abdul sat outside a small café on one side of Tahrir Square, near the centre of the city on the east bank of the Nile and looked across at his next objective. Over a coffee and a sweet cake, he glanced through the guidebook he’d picked up and considered the potential problems the museum posed for him.

The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, more commonly known as the Egyptian Museum or sometimes just the Cairo Museum, is the largest museum in Egypt and one of the most popular in the country. The guide claimed that it was visited by over one and half million tourists every year, as well as about half a million Egyptians, the main attraction being the Tutankhamun exhibition, especially the celebrated death mask of the boy-king, an image which has become virtually synonymous with the glory days of Ancient Egypt. This exquisitely fashioned solid gold mask, arguably the most beautiful ancient treasure ever recovered, weighs almost twenty-five pounds, and was placed on Tutankhamun’s shoulders almost three and a half millennia ago, before his corpse was conveyed to its final resting place in the Valley of the Kings. The tomb had been discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon, and the array of treasures and artefacts, relics of incalculable value and outstanding historic importance, have since then resided in their new home on the upper floor of the Cairo Museum.

What Abdul didn’t know, and didn’t actually care about, was that the body of the boy-king himself was once again lying in the Valley of the Kings, in his burial chamber, having been taken back there in November 2007, exactly eighty-five years to the day after the discovery of his tomb. He was laid to rest there for the second time after his death in about 1323 BC, this time for eternity, but instead of the warm darkness of the original chamber in which he lay, surrounded by some three and half thousand artefacts intended to assist him in the afterlife, his wrapped mummy is now on display in a climate-controlled glass box, a move intended to reduce the rate of decomposition of his body.

The guide also pointed out that it wasn’t just Tutankhamun’s treasures that made the museum a popular destination. The building also housed the mummies of eleven Egyptian kings and queens in a single hall, and there was a huge array of statues, jewels, coins, papyrus, sarcophagi, scarabs and a host of other relics covering the entire span of time from the pre-dynastic and Old Kingdom periods right up to the Greek and Roman eras, a total of some 120,000 items, all contained within the museum’s hundred-plus chambers, either on display or in storage.

Abdul closed the section of the guide he’d been reading and looked again at the museum. Getting inside the building wouldn’t be a problem: he would simply have to buy a ticket at the door. Getting through the metal detectors could be a little more difficult.

But Abdul had a solution, intended for just such a situation. In fact, he had two solutions, one elegant, the other less so. A couple of years earlier, he had received a small package through the regular mail, sent from a mail-order firm in America to one of his post office boxes in Egypt. Inside the package were three knives of a most unusual type. They were almost entirely ceramic in construction, the only metal piece being the hinge pin on the clasp knife, but the other two knives, with fixed blades, contained no metal whatsoever. They were just as sharp and lethal as steel-bladed weapons, but were guaranteed to be invisible to metal detectors, and virtually undetectable by X-ray scanners as well. They were a gift to terrorists, and Abdul had been surprised just how easy it had been to purchase them.

Once inside the museum, he would have to get into the man’s office or laboratory, which would presumably be in a part of the building to which the public had no access. But the more elegant option would ensure he could walk into the building carrying both his pistol and one of his knives, and be told exactly where Ali Mohammed worked.

And that was the option he was going to take, despite one obvious disadvantage. But he knew he could do something about that.