Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (6 page)

Jones turned to watch Guerin’s bubbles, the detonator cord still slack in his hands. The lofty intentions, the talk of taking the world by storm, of business collaborations
with Guerin, could all be a smoke screen, a play by a man who when the time was right, when the discovery was certain, could as easily sweep others aside and take all the glory for himself. Jones did not know whether the style of the man in front of him was that of a true gentleman or merely a veneer of decency. He had seen what war did to men, and civil war was the worst, war that pitted brother against brother, men who after that could plumb no greater depths. The America that Chaillé-Long spoke of was a place where ambition might know no bounds, but only in the shattered morality that was the aftershock of the Civil War. He had heard stories of latter-day robber barons carving out fiefdoms for themselves in the West with the Colt and the Winchester. It would be an easy matter on a night like this when the time was right for a man like Chaillé-Long to use that revolver beneath his cloak to dispose of them all—a British army deserter long thought dead, an obscure French inventor who seemed intent on keeping his very existence secret, a Nile riverboat captain and his boy—adding a few more to the cargo of unidentifiable corpses swept down annually by the Nile into the swamplands of the delta.

Jones too had been hardened by killing, but not at the expense of his own soldierly brand of morality. As a soldier he had been a maverick, constantly pressing against authority, an enlisted man with the wayward thinking allowed only to officers. Yet not for the first time he found himself missing the army, the moral certainty of those who worked and fought for one another. Out here, in the world beyond the army, he had discovered that the only person you could rely on was yourself, but in so doing all your flaws and weaknesses became sharply defined, and the personal demons kept at bay in the army rose up to do battle for your soul and mind when there were no others to discipline and protect you.

But he had laid a smoke screen of his own, and had not told Chaillé-Long everything. In the last eight years he had learned to move in the shadow lands, to bend the
truth to his purposes. He knew what had happened to Mayne; he had guessed who had ordered it. Chaillé-Long was right: Gordon had become a liability, but so too would be the one ordered to carry out the deed, a deed so shocking to public sentiment that word of it must never be allowed to leak out. And Mayne had not gone to Khartoum alone, but with his friend, his blood brother from their service together years earlier on the Red River expedition in Canada, a voyageur named Charrière. After Jones had left the crocodile pool with Kitchener, they had ridden out into the desert to join the route back from Khartoum to the Egyptian border, and Jones had been astonished one night to see a form he recognized as Charrière slip by, heading north. Jones followed him to Wadi Halfa, where he had seen Charrière go alone into Lord Wolseley’s tent. It was then that he knew what Charrière had done. Wolseley had been a patron and benefactor to the Mohawk Indians since he had first employed their services in Canada; Charrière would be beholden to him, and was someone who would disappear back to the forests of Canada as silently as he had crossed the desert from Khartoum, trusted never to tell anyone what he had done.

And there was something else that Jones had not told Chaillé-Long. It was not only the plaque from the crocodile temple that had given him the clue to this place. That night at Wadi Halfa he had risked all and crept into Charrière’s tent while he was with Wolseley. In Charrière’s bag he had found Gordon’s journal of his final days in Khartoum, something that he must have entrusted to Mayne, that Charrière must then have taken from him but clearly decided not to show to Wolseley. In the frantic few seconds in the tent, he had seen an incredible drawing inside the back cover of the journal, something that had etched itself on his mind. It was another clue to Akhenaten that Gordon himself had uncovered, a more detailed version of the plan on the plaque. It too showed the Aten sun symbol, the lines radiating off from the center with the cluster of three
squares showing the Giza pyramids at one corner. Jones had hastily copied down a series of hieroglyphic cartouches that Gordon had inscribed at the bottom of the page, and then packed the diary away in the bag and fled into the night.

It was Gordon’s sketch that had been his biggest revelation and had allowed him to understand the plaque. One day several years later while working with the fellahin at Giza, he realized that the three small squares exactly mapped the relationship of the pyramids on the plateau. He was then able to use the sketch and the plaque to triangulate their position at the river from the pyramids by following one of the radiating lines from the sun symbol that he believed represented underground passageways. Finding what lay beneath became an obsession for him, not because he was drawn by a promise of ancient riches but because it was about discovering a truth that seemed to give a nobility of purpose to their enterprise in the desert, something that could exonerate Mayne, even Gordon, that would stand in stark contrast to the grim reality of failure and dishonor in their avowed reason for being there. In his fevered imagination, gripped once again by the same mania that had enveloped him at the crocodile pool, he had even felt himself on the same elevated mission as Gordon in Khartoum, as someone who had thrown away all the shackles to the outside world and his past life in order to devote himself to a higher purpose.

He was barely out of this state, in the grips of the deep melancholia that followed, when he had been begging near Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and had overheard guests mentioning Chaillé-Long and his law practice in Alexandria. Jones had already realized that he was going to have to enlist the help of others with money if he were ever going to get to the bottom of the mystery. Then, less than a month ago, he had experienced another astonishing revelation. He had learned hieroglyphics specifically to translate the cartouches that he had copied from Gordon’s journal. He had learned to recognize the royal cartouche
of Akhenaten, one of the three in the journal, but the other two had defeated him. And then he had a blinding revelation. The symbols for the Aten, for sun and light, did not mean sunlight after all but something more down to earth and far more astonishing. This place he was searching for was not just a holy sanctum of a new religion; it was a treasure-house, yet a treasure that few Egyptologists would ever have imagined possible even in their wildest dreams.

Jones had not yet told Chaillé-Long because he could not calculate the effect that such a revelation might have on the man—and the actions he might take as a consequence. He was fearful also of word leaking out. Cairo eight years after the war was seething with men of loose purpose drawn by tales of ancient riches to be discovered; they had subverted their passion for war by an obsession with tombs and pharaohs. Until Guerin returned from his dive with word that they were in the right place, his revelation would remain a secret known to him alone, preserved only on a crumpled piece of paper concealed in his belt and in a journal that he presumed by now had disappeared with Charrière beyond knowledge, somewhere on the far side of the world.

Chaillé-Long stood up and consulted his fob watch. “He’s been down half an hour now,” he said. “He must be up soon.” Jones stood up as well and scanned the water. He realized that he was now able to see more clearly. Looking over the riverbank, he could just make out the distant triangles of the pyramids at Giza caught in the first red glow of dawn.

His heart began to pound.
This was it
.

T
he boat lurched and then trembled again, as if something were bumping along the side. “What’s that infernal knocking?” Chaillé-Long said. The boy ran over to look, and Jones followed his gaze. Something big was floating just under the surface, heaving upward and bobbing in the current, its form indiscernible beneath the muddy water. Whatever it was had caught the boat and was pulling it out into the current, forcing the captain to push bodily against the tiller to keep the vessel beam-on to the shore. Jones felt the detonator line tighten, but there was still no sign of Guerin’s light coming up in the water. The captain shouted at the boy in high-pitched Arabic, gesturing frantically with one free hand at the long wooden pole lying just inside the gunwale. The boy picked it up and lowered the end with the iron hook over the side, holding it upright and walking it along to find the obstruction. The boat veered farther into the current, its deck angled down amidships on the port side; the captain was fighting a losing battle with the tiller. He waved wildly with his free hand for Chaillé-Long and Jones to remain where they were on the starboard side to keep the port rail from going under.

The boy stopped, and then heaved the pole with all his might. Suddenly the boat lurched upright, its deck now
level, and the pole angled back to horizontal. The hook had caught in a tendril that had pulled up from the main mass of the object, which was now detached from the boat and floating free. The boy stumbled forward and fell to his knees as he tried to free the pole. The captain shouted again in Arabic, and Jones saw the danger of the boy being pulled overboard. He leapt on him, still holding the detonator cord, pinned the boy’s legs against the deck, and grasped the pole. He tried to yank it backward and forward to release the hook, but to no avail. As he made one last desperate attempt, the object reared up and became visible in an eddy. It was pitching and rolling as the water swirled around it.

Jones stared in horror, transfixed. The boy had gone white, and the captain had dropped to his knees wild eyed, sobbing, and beseeching Allah. A smell, suppressed by the river while it was underwater, now rose from the object as it rolled on the surface. The smell was of colossal, all-encompassing decay. Jones felt sick to his stomach; it was his worst nightmare come true.
It was a crocodile
. Or rather, it was the putrefied, long-dead carcass of a crocodile, its giant skeleton flecked with tendrils of white and gray, just enough organic matter to have kept it afloat on its final voyage from whatever pool it had inhabited somewhere far upriver.

“God protect me.”
Jones’ breathing quickened, and he grasped his hands around the detonator cord, trying to stop them from shaking.
Chaillé-Long must not see
. He flashed back to his state of mind beside the crocodile temple eight years ago. He must not sink into that madness again. He had convinced himself that his obsession with the Leviathan had been delirium brought on by his head wound, something he had snapped out of with the arrival of Kitchener and his camel troops. But suddenly that rationality disappeared, and he felt as if he were being drawn back there again. With all the fiendish contraptions he had devised, all that his engineering knowledge could spirit up, the dynamite, the trip-wire guns, had he truly killed the sacred crocodile of the pool, a
crocodile whose long-dead carcass had now caught up with him? A fear began to grip him, a fear that he knew could become panic, spreading to all his other dark places, to the fear of confined spaces, of being trapped underground, a fear that he had last felt in the gloomy basement rooms of the Cairo Museum among the rows of decaying mummies. It was as if the demons of his own underworld were released again, clawing at him and beckoning him down into the portal that lay somewhere beneath them now, the entrance to a world of the dead that lay just below the riverbank.

The detonator cord suddenly yanked him back to his senses. Chaillé-Long was lifting up the underwater lamp, its power virtually expended. Guerin had surfaced on the side of the boat opposite the carcass, his mask and hood stripped off. He was panting and wheezing.
“Préparez le plongeur,”
he gasped. “The charge is laid.” Jones lurched over and gripped the handle of the plunger, winding it hard to generate enough electricity to set off the charge. Something inside him, a voice from his army training long ago, told him that this was wrong, that he should prepare the plunger only an instant before setting it off. They still had to hear from Guerin about what he had found. But the winding focused him, and gave a reason for his shallow breathing. He left the plunger ready and crawled over to the side of the boat. Guerin was fumbling with something in his suit, but he looked up at the other two, his eyes feverish and bloodshot. “I found it. Half an hour of digging, and I exposed the lintel. It bears this inscription.” He heaved up a wooden slate with a hieroglyphic cartouche scratched on it. Jones took it, his hands shaking now with excitement. “My God,” he said hoarsely. “Look, Colonel. I was right. It’s the royal cartouche of Akhenaten.”

Chaillé-Long raised himself up and stood above the two men, one thumb hitched in his fob pocket, the ivory grip of his pistol clear to see. “I do believe, gentlemen, we have come up trumps.”

“There’s a stone door below the lintel, and it’s closed,” Guerin gasped, grimacing in evident pain. “And the
charge is laid against it. But,
mes amis
, I should warn you…” He coughed violently, swallowed, and coughed again. “I should warn you,” he said, wheezing, “if the tunnel beyond is not flooded, there will be
un vortex
, and if we blow open the door, there may be something of, how do you say, a whirlpool.”

Chaillé-Long looked disdainfully at the captain, who was sitting huddled with the boy beside the tiller, apparently still praying. “Well, I understand that people are used to whirlpools along this part of the river. A little disturbance might knock some sense into those two. And at any rate,” he said, picking up a distended pig’s bladder, which was normally used as a fishing float, “I for one am prepared for a swim if it comes to that.”

The boat lurched again. Jones could not bring himself to look back over the other side. Guerin reached up with one hand and held the gunwale. “What was that?”

Chaillé-Long shrugged. “Some more floating debris in the water, no doubt. Nothing to concern yourself about, my friend.”

Jones knelt over the plunger, protecting the handle from any knocks, and looked at him. “There’s something more I should tell you. About what’s down there. I mean what’s
really
down there. What Akhenaten built under the pyramids.”

“I know enough,” Chaillé-Long said imperiously, glancing again at his watch. “We have found what we came for.” The boat seemed to rise slightly and then slide out into the river current, tightening the detonator cord. “You must detonate that charge now, Jones.”

Guerin looked up. “Do it,
mon ami
. I’m far enough away to be safe.”

Jones shook his head. “You know nothing about explosives, Guerin. About underwater shock waves.”

Guerin coughed. A great gob of blood came up, and he retched. He gasped over and over again, bringing up a bubbling red froth each time. “He’s had an embolism,” Jones exclaimed, peering up at Chaillé-Long. “The shock wave would surely kill him now. We need to get him on board.”

“Depress the plunger, Jones. The boat is pulling the detonator cord and the charge away from the riverbank, and this is our last chance.
Your
last chance.” Chaillé-Long was behind him, his voice cold. Suddenly a huge lurch rocked the boat, and he was thrown sideways. As he spun around, he saw Chaillé-Long lose his balance, stagger backward and then fall forward, landing heavily on the plunger. The boat swung into the current, pulling the detonator cord and plunger into the water, leaving Guerin floating in a bloody froth toward the shore. Suddenly the river in front of him erupted in a boiling mushroom of water, sending ripples of shock through the boat and across the river. Seconds later it was followed by a dull boom, and then an extraordinary sound, quite unlike any underwater explosion Jones had ever heard, seemingly coming from far off under the riverbank. He remembered Guerin’s warning, and suddenly realized what it was: an echo coming from a hollow chamber, a dry passage running deep under the desert. Whatever lay beyond that portal was no simple chamber but a long passage, large enough to consume a giant torrent of water if the charge had succeeded in blowing open the stone entrance.

For a moment all was calm. Guerin was floating in the water, unconscious or dead. Chaillé-Long lay sprawled on the deck, groaning and clutching his makeshift pig-bladder float. The captain and his boy were nowhere to be seen. And then, slowly at first but with increased violence, the water in front of him started to swirl around like a giant sinkhole, taking the boat with it. Jones could do nothing but kneel in horror at the gunwale, watching the center of the swirl as it plummeted deeper and deeper into the vortex, seeing the boat drop below the surface of the river. He saw Guerin’s body swirled out of sight, sucked down. And then for a fleeting moment he saw what Guerin had seen, a stone portal, a flashing image of pillars and a hieroglyphic inscription, and a dark passage beyond. Then he felt the boat splinter around him, and he himself was hurtling forward on a torrent of water, unable to breathe or hear, seeing only blackness beyond.