CHAPTER TWENTY

Ryan increased the air-conditioning in the Cairo hotel room and moaned all the way back to his desk. They’d been working on the translation since first getting their hands on the notebooks back in Venice but were still getting nowhere fast.

From looking at the complex notes, Alex was beginning to realize just how little information Mazzarro had given her when they had worked together over the past few weeks. Now she was able to see the full extent of his and his father’s research, she could see that the Italian had remained guarded and suspicious of her, and the information he had given her was very limited in its nature. Now, she and Ryan were side by side with their laptop screens flickering as they desperately sought anything that might point them in the right direction.

Across the room, Sir Richard Eden was calm and in control, reassured by his visit to the British Ambassador. He’d known Peter Henderson since their days in the Paras together and trusted him to deliver the news of their progress, or lack of it, to the relevant authorities in the British Government. Henderson had been the Ambassador in Egypt for over ten years now and knew the place like the back of his hand. If Vetrov touched down anywhere in the country, he would know about it in short order and tell Eden at once.

Scarlet and Lexi, meanwhile, were arguing about whether or not they should have gone with Hawke as back-up when he went to meet the Russian Agent Snowcat. Lexi thought yes, that he would need the help, Scarlet said no, that Joe wasn’t a big girl’s blouse and could handle it himself. She had won the argument, but it was a Pyrrhic victory because Lexi had now made her start to worry about her old SBS friend.

She knew that despite his denials, Hawke had never really got over the murder of his wife and the deaths of Sophie and Olivia in the Far East would be taking their toll on him, however much he tried to fight through it. Now his mind was divided at a dangerous time, with part of him desperately trying to rescue Lea while another part of him was trying to lay the ghost of Liz to rest. She just hoped he could keep it together at such a critical time for the mission.

Ryan was still unhappy that he couldn’t be more specific than Egypt, but it was the best he could do in such a short time. He thought about the broken fragments which helped him lead the others to the vault of Poseidon, and the stolen portrait in Hong Kong which had given him the clues to help the team find the map itself in the tomb of Emperor Qin in Xian. They were both child’s play compared with this nightmare, and he knew he had the time it took Hawke to track down this Snowcat woman to come up with something better.

“How you going?” Lexi asked at last, brushing past Sir Richard as she walked over to the desk. She sat up on the desk and tied her hair back.

Ryan sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Hard to say. Mazzarro’s notes are all over the place and almost illegible in some places — and yet… some of the drawings he’s done in here remind me of something, but I just can’t work out what it is….”

Alex leaned forward and handed him some more notes. “Show them this stuff, Ryan.”

“Oh yeah… shit. Forgot about this.”

“What is it?”

“Seems like this Mazzarro was a big fan of Jean-François Champollion.”

Eden stepped forward, coffee in hand. “Who?”

“He was a French scholar who specialized in ancient Egypt. He spent half his life exploring Egypt back in the nineteenth century — the Giza pyramids, the Karnak Temple, the Necropolis, the Valley of the Kings — you name it, he went there.”

“He liked sunny holidays then?” Lexi said.

Ryan rolled his eyes. “Champollion was a specialist in hieroglyphics — in fact it’s broadly accepted that back in his day he was the only person in the whole world who could read them.”

“Talk about a skill in demand.”

Ryan ignored her. “It all started with the Dendera Zodiac, a famous carving found on the ceiling of an ancient chapel. Today, the carving is in the Louvre in Paris, but it originated in Dendera, a small town on the Nile in central Egypt. Its function was to map the sky, and in fact even today it remains the only full portrayal of an ancient sky.”

Fascinating,” Lexi said, “but… what all started with this zodiac thing?”

“Ah, yes. Champollion was the only man to date the thing correctly. When everyone else said it belonged to the New Kingdom, he claimed it was much earlier in the Greco-Roman period, and he was able to do this because of his incredible understanding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. As I said, he was pretty much one of a kind. He discovered a cartouche which proved Egyptian civilization predated the Biblical flood story.”

Scarlet sniffed. “I bet that went down well.”

“Actually, no one ever knew — he kept it a secret for the rest of his life rather than publicly challenge the entire Christian belief structure.”

“Heavy stuff.”

“It gets better — Giovanni Mazzarro claims to have discovered some previously unknown work by Champollion about the City of the Dead at Saqqara, which was where they buried their dead in Memphis.”

“We’re not talking about Elvis here, are we?” Scarlet said.

“Hardly. We’re talking about the place where the first pyramid was ever built — constructed by Imhotep.”

“Oh — the guy from The Mummy?”

“If you must, Scarlet… Anyway, what really interests me now though is that according to Mazzarro he also found previously unknown information in the Valley of the Kings written in Coptic on a vase dedicated to Osiris.”

Lexi leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. “And Coptic is what?”

“Oh, sure… It’s the last version of the ancient Egyptian language. Anyway, as you know, the Valley of the Kings is basically the biggest graveyard in the world — all of the tombs of the pharaohs were put there to keep them safe from tomb raiders.”

Scarlet sighed. “We tomb raiders always get such a bad press.”

“So what was this new stuff Mazzarro claims to have found?” Lexi said, ignoring Scarlet’s remark.

Ryan ignored her and pointed at the notes again, turning to Alex. “This one here is very similar to akhmet, the hieroglyph for the horizon, see?”

Alex nodded enthusiastically. “I see, yeah! Old Mazzarro must have spent forever on this.”

“Ryan!” Scarlet said. “Lexi asked you a question.”

“Oh sorry, Lexi — what did you say?”

“I asked what’s the new stuff Mazzarro claims to have found?”

Ryan shook his head. “I’m not sure yet, but it could be the key to everything. He claims Champollion’s undiscovered work contained similar glyphs to the ones on the map and that they seem to be referring to the death of Osiris and something called the Tomb of Eternity.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“Going by the sketches in the notes, the hieroglyphs in Champollion’s mysterious, unknown work are definitely different from the rest of his stuff and Mazzarro claims that they predate the oldest glyphs ever found in Egypt.”

“Impressive stuff,” Eden said.

“That’s only half the story — he makes a reference here, if my Italian is correct, to how the glyphs in question could well be older than Sumerian cuneiform.”

Eden’s eyes widened. “Hand it over.”

Ryan gave him the notes and Eden read them for a few seconds. “Good God… the implications of this are astounding… and yes, your Italian is perfectly correct.”

“And what are the implications?” Lexi asked.

Ryan took the notes from Eden and replied to Lexi. “The entire history of humanity is based on the fact that we started written communication around ten thousand years ago. It all started when the ancient Sumerians began making simple pictographs on clay tablets in order to communicate messages about trade goods. By around five thousand years ago they were using a reed stylus to make the symbols and this left a very particular wedge shape in the clay. Cuneiform is from the Latin cuneus, which just means wedge.”

“Interesting, boy, but Lexi asked what the implications are. She wasn’t just giving you a chance to prattle on aimlessly about old bits of pottery.”

“I would have thought,” Ryan replied haughtily, “that the implications for humanity were easily inferred.”

“He means, I think,” Alex said, stepping in to diffuse the tension once again, “that if the glyphs Champollion found are older than those found in ancient Sumer, all of human history just changed right before our eyes.”

“Quite,” Eden said coolly. “If it’s true, then that raises further questions, not least of which who wrote them? What civilization were they from?”

Ryan took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Well…whatever they are and whoever made them, they look like they’re pointing to this Tomb of Eternity, anyway.”

“And that sounds like a good place to avoid,” Scarlet said. “The Tomb of Gold, I could get excited about, or even the Tomb of Emeralds, but the Tomb of Eternity… not so much. I can’t sell eternity on the black market.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Alex said. “I think maybe this tomb has the greatest treasure of all within its walls.”

“As far as I can tell,” Ryan said, “it’s called that because some kind of ancient god predating even Osiris and Poseidon was buried in secret there. They called it the Tomb of Eternity because the buried god would be launched into eternity from it into the night sky — the same principle as the pyramids.”

Lexi sighed. “The pyramids? I thought that was all still a mystery.”

“Nope. The pyramids were basically like giant submarine torpedo tubes aimed at the stars. They built tunnels leading from the burial chamber at the heart of the pyramid all the way to the outside wall where they were lined up with the Indestructibles.”

“The what?”

“Ikhemu-Sek in Egyptian — it means ‘those who do not know destruction’ and referred to what today we call the circumpolar stars, as in those stars around the Little and Big Dippers.”

“Why those stars?” Scarlet asked with genuine interest.

“Because the other stars revolved around them, which is why we call them the circumpolar stars. The ancient Egyptians believed that because the other stars circled these particular stars that they must be heaven itself.”

“I see… now it’s beginning to make sense.”

“Right — and that’s why they built the pyramids to align north in this way — so the ka, which was what they believed was the soul, or the vital spark, could be reunited with the ba, or personality, and transmute into the akh, and enter the afterlife as a kind of reincarnated, or immortal being.

“Is he still speaking English?” Lexi said.

Alex smirked. “Sorry, but yes.”

Scarlet stepped up, less amused. “So what does all this mean, Ryan? You’re starting to give me a headache.”

“Sadly… it means we still don’t know enough about these glyphs to translate them properly.”

Alex sipped her coffee. “But it also means that we’re probably talking about Thebes.”

Lexi looked confused. “Was Thebes another god or something?”

Ryan offered a condescending smirk. “Hardly, Thebes is a place — or was a place, more like.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Today it’s called Luxor,” Alex said.

“Luxor is a city in Upper Egypt, and back when it was Thebes it was the capital. It’s where they buried the kings during the New Kingdom.”

“I know where Luxor is, Ryan,” Lexi said.

“Sorry, but you don’t look like you’d know,” he said, straight-faced.

Lexi looked at him sharply. “You want a slap, is that it?”

“Hey!” Scarlet said. “No one talks to Ryan like that except me.”

Ryan ignored the comment. “Our only clue so far is the reference to Osiris. Over the last few years there have been several tombs discovered supposedly connected to him, one in Giza at the turn of the century, and one more recently in Thebes where they found a large underground complex with a wall relief of a knife-wielding demon and an impressive carving of Osiris himself.”

Lexi looked concerned. “Demons?”

“They’re to protect the body.”

“Body? So Osiris really was real, just like Poseidon?” Scarlet asked.

Ryan nodded. “Ancient Egyptian legends have long told of Osiris having a tomb, and the one located in Thebes is a miniature version of the temple dedicated to the god in Abydos. Considering all available evidence, I would say Thebes — or Luxor was our best bet, but first we need to know what we’re looking for when we get there, and that means back to the drawing board with these damned glyphs.”

“But this tomb you say they found,” Scarlet asked. “that’s not our place?”

Ryan shook his head. “Nope — it was actually just a kind of initiation chamber.”

“What about the Temple of Osiris at Karnak?” Alex asked. “That’s in Luxor.”

Ryan sighed and shook his head. “Sorry, but I don’t think so — this glyph here specifically says tomb not temple — I don’t think it can be referring to the temple you’re talking about.”

“So like you say, back to the drawing board, right?”

“Sorry, but yeah.”

Eden sighed and ran his hands through his hair. “We need to go faster on this, everyone. We don’t know what the hell Vetrov is doing to Lea or Brad at the moment and the only way we can get to them is by getting to the tomb before those bastards get there.”

The words hung in the air like smoke. Everyone knew what Vetrov had done to Alex, and now he had Lea and Karlsson. The pressure to save their lives was building.

“I’m sure Lea’s fine,” Scarlet said. “She can look after herself. She’s probably already killed Vetrov and is escaping as we speak. Pretty soon she’ll just be hanging around somewhere, chilling, and waiting for us to pick her up.”

“Let’s hope you’re right,” Eden said. “But she hasn’t made contact, so I don’t share your optimism.”

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