The Seven Seals of Egypt

CHAPTER TWELVE

Hayden Jaye finished her call and threw the cell on the table. The room was cramped. To the left Kinimaka twitched at the gap in the curtains, checking out the street below. Every three minutes he gave a shake of his head, signaling all was quiet. Drake and the rest of the team sat or stood around the small area, drinking water and coffee, checking and cleaning weapons which they would now keep with them at all times.

“That was Claudia from the DC office. Old friend. She says Lauren arrived safely.”

The team immediately took note, sitting up and focusing.

“What else did she say?” Smyth asked, his voice thick with anxiety.

“Not much. Lauren’s being questioned right now. The buzz is that she’s in the clear, but they’re taking no chances.”

“As we thought,” Kinimaka rumbled. “Everyone involved covering their ass.”

“Yeah. Lauren played it just right though. Another few days and she can get started.”

Smyth coughed. “Maybe.”

Hayden tried a commiserating look, realized it wasn’t working and gave up. Lauren had indeed done the right thing in her opinion, but everything she did from here on in — at least for a while — would be under scrutiny. She was intelligent, street-smart, and hopefully working with a crew like theirs for the last few years would have a positive effect on her.

Lauren would come through.

Hayden stretched her weary muscles, opened a bottle of water, and took a long gulp. The room was stifling. Sweat ran freely down her face. Outside, the streets were noisy and packed, just another day for the locals. She wondered what had happened to the mercs.

“Let’s get this done,” she said. “Then we can get the hell out of this oven. First, this ransom demand from a new group calling themselves FrameHub. Opinions are divided. Some say it’s a childish prank, others that the countries involved should be placed on the highest alerts.”

Drake looked interested but Hayden held up a hand. “That’s the kind of job Team SPEAR would have been given,” she said. “We’re not Team SPEAR anymore. At least not in the eyes of the government.”

An air of despondency settled across the room. Dahl wiped sweat from his brow. “We may still want to monitor it.”

Crouch drained a bottle of water. “I can do that,” he said. “My people at Interpol and other European agencies will be watching closely.”

Hayden accepted with a nod. “All right. If you can… gather something together. One of the countries involved is Egypt so it could affect us all.”

Crouch nodded. “Speaking of Egypt, what do we do next?”

“Hey, you’re the boss,” Alicia said. “You tell us.”

“I thought Hayden was the boss,” Kinimaka spoke up.

“Shit,” Drake looked around innocently. “I thought I was.”

Hayden laughed. “Nobody’s the boss here, guys. It’s just a family now.”

“We have to be the oddest family in all of history.” Mai looked around. “From the mad, the bad and the incredibly ugly to the pretty, the witty and the ultra-dumb. What a motley crew.”

“Umm,” Alicia frowned. “Which is which?”

Mai laughed. “Oh, I’m sure you can work it out.”

Kenzie put an arm around Dahl. “The mad and the bad are sitting right here.”

Dahl shrugged it off. “Back to business. What do we know about the second tomb, Michael?”

Crouch took a breath. “As I said before, finding the second tomb and locating or not locating the second symbol will confirm if the so-called curse is real. If there’s a second clue then we have to work on the theory that we’re really searching for the actual capstone and that the ancient doomsday machine exists.”

“More tombs? More buried treasure?” Alicia looked gloomy. “More running from the authorities? I’m sick of going underground.”

“Nice. The clue I found back at Amenhotep’s tomb was a depiction of the capstone along with a drawing of a tomb. I recognize the sculptures depicted, with the three pillars outside, but haven’t been able to place it in my memory. But that’s not a problem — we can look it up. The problem is this… we’re not the only ones chasing this.”

“Not by a long shot,” Mai said.

Hayden listened for a moment, taking in the mood of the team. In so many ways this was different for them — a guard at the window, a back-street hotel, and a cramped little room, limited tech support, having to look out for authorities rather than encourage them, always worried they may be spotted — but they were now relying on each other more than ever before and the actual mission parameters were the same. Of course, due to intense situations such as theirs, personal issues were sidelined.

Not necessarily a bad thing.

Time away from private relationships helped put them into perspective, it seemed. Her position as leader removed her from deeper feelings. Now that they were all on a par, she saw how badly she’d upset Mano. Whatever words she’d said had been purely manufactured to give her space — but the friendly Hawaiian didn’t know that. She watched him now as he watched the street, wondering if there was any way back.

Crouch continued: “We have to be fast and faultless. If others found that capstone symbol they could be heading to the second tomb as we speak.”

“We have to assume they did,” Kenzie said.

“Definitely. So let’s break out that laptop.”

Mai took it from a backpack and handed it over to Alicia.

The Englishwoman regarded it with horror. “What the hell are you doing? Don’t bring that thing near me.”

“You can’t type, Taz?”

“I don’t do geek. Yogi, my boy? C’mere. Wrap your mitts around this.”

The Russian looked confused but grabbed the laptop anyway. Following Crouch’s descriptions, he began to trawl a path through images.

“All this talk about curses,” Alicia said. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? I remember Tutankhamun’s tomb was said to be cursed.”

“Well, a curse is pretty much all-encompassing over here. Any person that disturbs an Egyptian body, be it a mummy or a pharaoh, can be affected. There are no differentiations. Thieves, kids, archaeologists, holidaymakers. You name it. You’re all fair game. Some Egyptian tombs contain curses, some don’t. Most commonly, the mistaken one is Tutankhamun’s. His resting place contained no curse.”

Dahl grunted. “A curse can be distorted into anything you want,” he said. “They’re usually rather vague.”

“And it normally mentions disease,” Crouch said. “Which, when one disturbs a corpse, is not out of the question.”

“No seven plagues then?” Alicia threw a glance at the window as if expecting hordes of flies and locusts gathering there.

“No, and that was different, as you know. That was God’s wrath. But the whole ‘curse’ commotion was thrown back into the light when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun. Carter’s canary died in the mouth of a cobra, thus inciting the locals to fear the onset of a curse. Later, Lord Carnarvon died, after becoming infected by a mosquito bite. A letter was written two weeks prior to his death, and published in the New York World magazine, in which Marie Corelli asserted that ‘dire punishment’ would fall upon anyone that desecrated a tomb. Mussolini, who some time before had accepted a mummy as a gift, ordered it removed. Next, and incredibly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became entangled in it, suggesting that ‘elementals’ created by ancient priests were involved and had caused Carnarvon’s death.”

Alicia shivered in the heat. “You can stop there if you like.”

But Crouch was on a roll, in his own element and talking about the very thing he loved most in the world. “Soon after, a man called Sir Bruce Ingram, who had been gifted by Carter a mummified hand with a bracelet that bore the inscription ‘cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come water, fire and pestilence’, saw his house burned down and then, after it was rebuilt, suffered a flood.”

“Shit, you couldn’t make this up.” Kenzie laughed.

“Surely you have come across curses in your line of work?” Crouch asked her.

“My line…? Well, I guess as a relic smuggler you’d think so,” Kenzie was taken a little aback by the direct question. “But believe me, the only curses I come across are those I speak and those uttered by my men when I make them work.”

Alicia looked over. “Yeah, Drake’s like that.”

“Hey!”

“Howard Carter himself was hugely skeptical of the curse,” Crouch went on. “But he did write about an unsettling occurrence — when in the desert he saw jackals of the same type as Anubis for the first time in almost forty years.”

Alicia gulped. “And you want us to go out there?”

“Of the fifty eight people present when Carter opened the tomb, only eight died in the following years. Six of those could be attributed in some way to disease.” Crouch shrugged. “You make your own theories, my friends.”

“I’m more interested in mummies to be honest,” Alicia said. “Those guys always seem to be angry.”

“Yeah, so Hollywood tells us,” Hayden said. “But if your internal organs were removed, your body washed out with spices, your brain liquefied, all over a period of forty days, and then your dried-out body was wrapped in linen, you wouldn’t exactly be feeling perky now, would you?”

Alicia screwed her face up. “Uh, nope.”

“I have it,” Yorgi said, swiveling the laptop around to face the room.

Crouch stared and then nodded. “That’s it. Meritamun’s tomb, discovered in the nineteenth century. It’s small, insignificant, and came with all the usual objects. Sarcophagi. Canopic jars for internal organs. Amulets. The Book of the Dead. Household furniture of a sort. Ushabti figurines to work for the dead in the afterlife. Food. Wall paintings. Statues and carvings. And, of course, wall-painted spells. Nothing out of the ordinary. Over sixty tombs have been found and most are similar, not unremarkable, but nothing on the scale of Tutankhamun and just a few others. The tomb of Nefertiti has never been found.”

“What are you saying?” Hayden broke in, sensing Crouch might wander off on still another tangent.

“That this tomb, in this place, will have been largely forgotten over the last couple of centuries. It’s dry now. Protected yes, but forgotten. If we looked hard enough we might even find an inventory of tomb photographs online, but I strongly suggest we attend in person.”

“There’s no suggestion about it, pal,” Drake said. “We’re going.”

Hayden watched the team rise up and make ready, and a feeling of pride swelled in her chest. Beaten down as they were, hunted by the most powerful nation on earth, they were still trying their best to work together to save it.

Team SPEAR would never die. Do to it what you would.

“You okay, Hay?” Mano was beside her, looking a bit worried. “You seem out of it.”

“No, no.” She snapped out of it. “Just thinking how, despite everything that’s happening, there are no other people on earth I’d rather be standing in this sweaty room with right now. That’s it.”

Kinimaka smiled. “Me too, Hay. Me too.”

She grinned up at him.