The Tomb of Eternity

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

It was after midnight by the time Captain Moussa took the phone call that released them from custody and now their options were limited. Vetrov had both halves of the Map of Immortality and was still holding Mazzarro as a hostage.

On the upside, Ryan and Alex assured everyone it would take Mazzarro at least a day to decipher the map — they knew because they were busy doing the same thing with their fragment of it, so for now, they had done everything they could and it was just a matter of killing time — just one night in Luxor and then onward into whatever hell Vetrov was planning on creating in the Tomb of Eternity.

Eden had not only used his contacts in London and Cairo to have them released from Moussa’s custody, but had come through for everyone once again and booked some suites in the Luxor Hilton. The luxurious rooms overlooked the Nile and included balconies, spas and massage tables. Hawke knew Eden had money, but this was getting ridiculous.

Outside their suites, they stood on private patios with cold drinks and watched the sun set over the Nile. The desert air was still warm around them as the moon rose over the east bank of the river, illuminating the date palms and turning them into ghostly silhouettes against a black sky.

“I didn’t realize you liked roughing it,” Hawke said, turning to Eden with a cold beer in his hand and a cheeky grin on his unshaven face. For the first time since Lea was snatched in Venice, Hawke was able to stop worrying about her.

Eden, looking as ever the perfect gent in his crisp white suit with silk pocket square, took a look around him. “Oh this? Well, wealth does bring certain advantages, but of course the counterbalance is the tremendous responsibility.”

“If you say so, Rich,” Hawke said, and swigged the beer.

“I do say so,” Eden said, smiling. “And now it’s time to get back to work.” The look Eden gave Hawke left no room for interpretation as he walked inside to check on the progress Ryan and Alex were making in their studies of the image of the shield Hawke had taken back in Osiris’s tomb.

The night went on, hot outside but cool in the air-conditioned rooms. Hawke was just dozing off to sleep in the early hours when he was woken by the sound of Ryan shouting. He had done it.

“It’s all here — I can’t believe it!”

Hawke rubbed his eyes and yawned as he walked to the desk, tripping over one of Lea’s boots as he went and nearly knocking himself out on the bed post.

“Sorry, Joe!” she said, picking the boot up and sliding it on.

Hawke gave her a look and turned his attention to Ryan and Alex, around whom everyone else was congregating. All except Lexi who wanted to sleep and had explained that if anyone woke her for anything short of a full-scale assault on the hotel, she would kill them. They believed her.

“So what have you got for us, Mr Bale?” As Eden spoke, he checked his watch and sighed. “Mazzarro must have got to the bottom of it by now, but let’s just hope you’ve beaten him to it.”

“This thing — the shield in the tomb… it’s a map.”

“Another sodding map,” Hawke said.

“Doesn’t look like a map to me,” Scarlet said, confused. “Looks more like a plate or something. Are you sure it’s a map?”

“It’s a map,” Ryan repeated.

Lea screamed. “Oh sweet mother of God, anything but another bloody map!”

“And you’re sure it’s a map?” Hawke asked.

“One hundred percent. We’re definitely looking at a map of some kind.”

Lea was still unsure. “But that tomb was thousands of years old — I didn’t even know they had maps back then.”

They watched Ryan’s face as he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and sighed. There followed the mother of all face-palms. “They used maps in Egypt as far back as the Old Kingdom, which means four and half thousand years ago to you, plus we know the Map of Immortality is from basically before time as we know it. Keep up.”

“No one likes a smart-arse,” Scarlet said.

“No, but everyone needs a smart-arse,” Ryan replied, “including you, right now, so shut up and listen. What you discovered in Karnak closely resembles a famous predynastic image known as the Narmer Palette, uncovered in Hierakonpolis and around five thousand years old, which is nearly as old as Cairo Sloane.”

“Touché, boy,” Scarlet replied, raising a cigarette to her mouth.

“And it does look like a plate, in fact it almost is a plate.”

“So what was this thing used for?”

“Most often for grinding up stuff like copper carbonate for use in the manufacture of cosmetics, but something of this size — like the Narmer job — would have been for use in a temple — it’s more decorative. Either way, it’s still a map.”

“If you say so,” Scarlet said.

Ryan sighed again. “All right — it’s not a map in the way we would understand it but it is a two dimensional representation of a geographic space, and for its time it was pretty groovy. At the bottom of the smiting side of the Narmer Palette you can see what basically looks like just another hieroglyphic, but in fact it’s a bird’s eye view of what is probably a walled garden, so that is pretty much a map. Well, we can see that on your palette, if you want to use the word, we have a similar style of glyph, so…ergo, this is a map. More than that, along with the famous scorpion macehead also discovered in Hierakonpolis in the temple of Horus, it gives us a very early image of an Egyptian king.”

“King who?” Lea said.

“Narmer of course,” replied Ryan.

“Oh, sorry… I thought Narmer was the name of the dude who found it or something.”

“Narmer, was the successor to the Scorpion King during the Early Dynastic Period. Seriously, Lea, what did they teach you in school?”

“Well… not that, that’s for frigging sure, but I did learn what happens if you spray shaving foam in the exhaust pipe of the geography teacher’s Fiat or what happens if you go behind the bike sheds with Ronan Murphy…”

“All right,” Hawke said, “I think we’re drifting from the point a little. Ryan, just how does all of this help us?”

“I was waiting for someone to ask that,” he said, clearly beginning to enjoy himself again. “None of you can see it?”

“See what?” Eden asked, leaning in to the computer.

“No?” Ryan repeated, zooming in on the image of the shield.

“Ryan,” Scarlet said in a whisper. “My boot is hurtling toward your nuts. You have half a second to tell us what’s going on before it’s Deep Impact time between your legs.”

“I’ve already told you. This is the map.”

“Yes,” Eden said. “I think we just established that.”

“No, not a map, but the map.”

“I don’t understand…”

“This is a copy of the original Map of Immortality — the one torn in half by Poseidon and Osiris.”

“Eh?” Hawke looked confused.

Ryan explained. “You can see here that it’s clearly a representation of the map we took from Poseidon’s tomb, but with the other half in addition — the hieroglyphic similarity is undeniable — it’s not exact like a rubbing or something, but a copy in the sense Osiris must have ordered to be made from the original at some point.”

Hawke looked at Ryan, impressed once again with his determination to get to the truth. “So basically, Osiris must have double-crossed Poseidon and made a copy of the map before they tore it in half?”

“Pretty much, only we could never have found it without Poseidon’s half of the map because only on that was there a reference to Osiris. Poseidon probably had no idea he’d been duped by Osiris.”

“Wow,” Lexi said, walking over to them and yawning.

“Quite, and when you consider just how old this thing is — so old it had Osiris and Poseidon arguing over it and tearing their map in half — I think it really deserves a double wow.”

“Double wow,’ Snowcat said, her words drifting into the stunned silence.

“But there’s one thing that bothers me,” Ryan continued. “I was poring over Lexi’s picture of the Poseidon half of the map when I noticed there was a slight discrepancy with the Osiris copy on the palette.”

Eden looked concerned. “What sort of discrepancy?”

“It’s not much — just a few simple glyphs, but they seem to be referring to something that doesn’t make much sense to me.”

“Great,” Scarlet said. “If it doesn’t make much sense to you then the rest of us are properly fucked.”

“So what doesn’t make sense?” Lexi asked.

“It just seems incongruous in the context of the other details, which are basically a treasure map. It reads… let me see if I’ve got this right… the golden mean is your measure.”

“Any idea what it means?” Snowcat asked, moving closer to Ryan.

He shook his head. “Not really, and the thing is I’m struggling to see the relevance of it to be honest. It’s not got anything to do with the location of the source, whatever it is, and was clearly added much later after Osiris had made his copy.”

Eden cleared his throat and straightened his shirt. “If you’re happy that it has no relevance, then it’s time to ask the big question.”

Everyone stared at Ryan. They knew what Eden was about to ask him, and they knew Ryan already had the answer.

Eden raised his chin and spoke without emotion. “Mr, Bale, where is the elixir of eternal life?”

“Beyond Upper Egypt, without a doubt.”

Lea cursed. “Damn it, we just came from there, right?”

“Eh?” Ryan said, perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

“Cairo — we just came from the Upper Nile.”

“Upper Egypt means the south,” Ryan said patiently, trying to suppress a second face-palm.

“But north is more up on a map,” Lea said. “That’s just obvious, right?”

“To you, maybe, but upper and lower are references to the Nile, not which way up Lea Donovan is holding an iPhone.”

“I miss this kind of pillow talk, Ry.”

“Yes, thank you both for that,” Eden said. “But ‘beyond Upper Egypt’ is not precise enough, Mr Bale. Where, exactly?”

Ryan flicked on Google Earth and zoomed in on an area he’d already marked with a pin. He spun around in the chair and grinned at his audience before speaking.

“The source of eternal life, Sir Richard, is there.”

He pointed the tip of his pen at the laptop screen.

The Ethiopian Highlands.

After the revelation they had been waiting to hear for so long, they decided the best thing to do was get some sleep before loading the choppers and heading south. It was dawn now, and they were exhausted. The journey from the British Museum to here had been long, demanding and dangerous. Their three dead colleagues were a testament to that, not to mention the narrow escape Lea had endured back in the Moscow fire.

They went back to their rooms, Hawke leading Lea by the hand. It was a strange and unusual moment of quiet the two of them rarely enjoyed together, and neither really knew what to say.

She went to draw the curtains but he stopped her. She watched him as he drew closer, the way the sun struck the thick stubble on his chin and wide jaw line. She felt like she fell in love with this man all over again with every new day, and now it was happening once more. Times like this, she thought, are when we get to forget about the killing and carnage. Times like this, she thought, are when I can really lose myself, just for a moment in time.

He stood in front of her, his broad shoulders blocking the Egyptian sunlight which shone low over the city behind him. He lifted his hands to her face and brushed her cheek. She had seen those big hands in a fight, and sometimes struggled to believe he could be so gentle with them.

“Don’t stop,” she whispered, and moved closer to him.

He made no reply, but simply lifted her off her feet and carried her back to the bed, lit soft amber by a flickering candle in the dawn’s low light. She felt his heavy, scarred body press down on her. He lowered his head and kissed her neck and her eyes widened with pleasure. Now, he ran his fingers trough her tangled hair and she closed her eyes.

Hawke opened his eyes and woke to feel Lea beside him, still asleep. She was resting her head on his chest and using it as a sort of pillow, the way she did sometimes. The morning sun was higher now and streamed through the thin voiles. Everything looked different in the daylight.

He smiled as he recalled the day they met in London, and when they had shared the ski chalet in Switzerland that night. Just one solitary night with each other beside the fire. When all this was over, he promised himself, the two of them really had to get away from it all.

Beside him, Lea awoke.

“Hot or cold?” he said quietly.

She turned to face him, her hair bunching up on the pillow. “What?” She smiled.

“When all this is over,” he said, turning onto his side so they were face to face. “We should get away somewhere. Where do you fancy — somewhere hot or cold?”

“After Egypt, I’m going to say somewhere cold. Maybe we could get back to our little ski chalet in Zermatt?”

“Why are you grinning?”

She shrugged. “No reason. It’s just that was the place you seduced me…”

“You seduced me, more like!”

Hawke smiled and turned on his back. The ceiling fan whirred slowly above them. He didn’t care which way around it was. He hadn’t been this content for years, not since the second before his wife’s murder. Yes, it was true he had unfinished business — James Matheson would pay the ultimate price for his crimes, but it wouldn’t be easy — Eden was right. Matheson was the British Foreign Secretary and had some of the chunkiest and best trained security in the West. No, Hawke knew he would have to bide his time on that one… but in the meantime, he had Lea, and that was enough for him.

He turned to her but she had fallen back to sleep.

Rangers he thought, with a smile.

He climbed out of bed and started to get dressed. Today was the day he ended this war. Today was the day he found the elixir of life.