Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (9 page)

“Sorry, okay?” Costas took another bite from his sandwich. “Anyway, I’d also forgotten that my notebook had the full specs for the latest IMU deep-submergence Aquapod on it. That’s far worse. I must have had too much nitrogen still circulating in my head. Now it
would
have been a disaster if they’d found that.”

Hiebermeyer stared at him. “If you hadn’t been my son’s godfather…”

“And an all-round good guy,” Costas said, munching away and handing him the object he had fished out of his pocket. “You were going to say?”

“Mein Gott,”
Hiebermeyer whispered, staring at the
artifact in his hands, turning it over and letting Jack look. “It’s a fragment of gilding from a wooden panel that’s thick enough to be gold plate. It must be part of the openwork decoration on that chariot facing. Look at that poster again and you can see a shield decorated that way from the tomb of Tutankhamun that shows the pharaoh smiting a lion, and a small panel on the side containing his two first names.”

“Can you see any detail?” Jack asked,

“Just a moment,” Hiebermeyer murmured, carefully prizing away a layer of marine accretion from the gold and revealing the lower end of a cartouche with symbols inside. “We’re in luck!” he exclaimed, his voice hoarse with excitement.
“Hieroglyphs.”
He turned to Costas, his face flushed. “As the discoverer and guardian of this priceless artifact, the honor of translating it should be yours.”

“What do you mean? You’re the Egyptologist.”

“Have you seen those symbols before? In the crocodile temple on the Nile, for example? On the panel inside the sarcophagus of Menkaure in the shipwreck? At Tell-el Amarna?”

Costas stared. “A reed. That bird. A ball of string. That half-sun symbol.” He looked up. “Is this our man?”

“Neferkheperure-Waenre Akhenaten, to give him his full name,” Hiebermeyer said triumphantly. “This cartouche could have been put on a chariot only during his reign. That clinches it. We’ve not only got the lost chariots from the biblical Exodus, but we’ve pinned down the pharaoh.”

“Bingo,” Costas said, beaming at Jack.

“What do you mean, bingo?”

“I mean, Costas saves the day again. What would you do without me?” He reached across for the fragment of gilding, and Hiebermeyer gently but firmly pushed his arm away. Then he placed the artifact on a foam pad beside his computer. “I think you’ve taken care of that long enough. I need to get it cleaned up and photographed. When the time’s right, we’ve got what we need
for the biggest archaeological press release from Egypt since the time of Howard Carter.”

“When will you do it?” Jack asked.

“It’ll have to be just after we’ve packed our bags and left. Otherwise I’ll have to explain how we raised an artifact from Egyptian waters without a permit, and there will be hell to pay. I’d rather close up shop here before the thugs arrive to do it for me, and then we can leave on a high note.”

“Unless you get some last-minute find from the mummy necropolis.”

“Unless you find a way into Ahkenaten’s underground City of Light.”

Aysha put a hand on both men’s shoulders. “Now
that’s
what I like to hear. The Jack and Maurice of old. If we’re finished here, Jack, I’ve got something I want to show you.”

Jack looked at her. “You’ve done great stuff already for us, Aysha. You should get back to the necropolis with Maurice. This is your country, and you need to do whatever’s necessary to leave it in your own terms, with your own projects resolved.”

She took a deep, faltering breath. “I don’t feel that Egypt is my country anymore. I feel we’re on the verge of an exodus just like the one that Moses and the Israelites set out on more than three thousand years ago. We’ll be like so many others who have fallen back before this modern-day darkness, like the Somalis, the Afghans, the Syrians, living in exile, a modern-day diaspora. We can’t delude ourselves. Egypt will fall, and we have only a few weeks left at most, probably only days. The hours ahead are going to be the most intense of my life. Part of that is doing what I have to do for you.”

Jack stared back at her. “Okay, Aysha. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say.”

A
t that moment Jack’s phone hummed, and he glanced at it. “It’s a text from Rebecca. She’s arrived at Tel Aviv airport. Israeli security interrogated her for more than three hours.”

Aysha looked at him. “You worried, Jack?”

“About my nineteen-year-old daughter flying into a war zone? Of course not.”

Costas coughed. “What were you doing at that age, Jack? I seem to remember you telling me about Royal Navy diver training, and then a stint with the Royal Marines on some special forces ops in the Arabian Gulf.”

“The Special Boat Section,” Jack said. “Anyway, I wasn’t really with them, I was just trying it out. I’d already decided to go to university instead, which is more than can be said for Rebecca.”

“Given all the experience we’ve provided her with on IMU projects during her school vacations,” Aysha said, “you can hardly blame her for wanting to bypass that. Anyway, I think she’ll do it. I spotted her looking at the prospectus for Cambridge.”

“What’s she doing in Israel, anyway?” Costas asked.

“She’s been wanting to go there ever since I told her about our hunt six years ago for the tomb beneath the Holy Sepulchre,” Jack said. “She found out about the big project at the City of David site to sort and wash ancient
debris swept off the Al-Aqsa mosque platform when it was built. There are millions of sherds dating back to prehistory, and volunteers are always needed.”

Aysha furrowed her brow, looking skeptical. “Mmm. I remember Rebecca at Troy three years ago volunteering to help us clean potsherds. As I recall, it lasted about a day. Cleaning potsherds isn’t really a Howard thing, is it? Not when there’s real excitement around.”

“It did strike me as a bit odd,” Jack said. “I thought there might have been a boyfriend involved. I think Jeremy was there. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to interfere. It’s tricky being a dad sometimes.”

Aysha gave him a questioning look. “Would you ever put a girlfriend above archaeology? And remember, I’m good friends with both Katya and Maria. I know
everything
.”

Jack fidgeted slightly, tapping a pencil on his hand. Katya and Maria were two of his closest colleagues, instrumental in several of his greatest discoveries. Jeremy had been Maria’s graduate student in Oxford. He was an American who was now assistant director of her palaeography institute. “Katya’s always impossible to get hold of, always in the middle of nowhere looking for ancient petroglyphs in Kyrgyzstan, and Maria’s always up to her neck in some medieval manuscript in Oxford.”

Aysha peered at him. “When did Rebecca make the decision to visit Israel?”

“We’d been talking about General Gordon in Khartoum, about how he and the other Royal Engineers survey officers had a fascination with the Holy Land and its archaeology. I’d been telling her my theory that their quest for Akhenaten in the desert of Sudan had been spurred by something they’d found in Israel, in Jerusalem itself, something that had drawn them there repeatedly over the years right up to the time of Gordon’s final appointment as governor general in Khartoum.”

“And Israel is the one place you haven’t visited on your quest.”

“I’d been planning to go there if things in Egypt go belly-up.”

Hiebermeyer looked at him. “Did you put Rebecca in touch with IMU’s Israel representative, Solomon Ben Ezra? Sol and I have been planning a joint Israeli-Egyptian project to evaluate coastal sites at the border, something that seems inconceivable now.”

“I tried that. She wanted to go it alone. But I let him know anyway, so he can keep a discreet eye on her.”

“It had better be pretty discreet,” Costas muttered. “Otherwise you won’t hear the end of it.”

“That’s it then,” Aysha said. “Rebecca hasn’t gone to Israel to clean potsherds. She’s gone there as part of this project, to make her mark. And she’s not the only one working behind the scenes this time. You’d be surprised who else is involved, Jack, right here in Egypt. That’s what I want to talk about now. What do you know of the early caliphs of Cairo?”

Costas raised his hand. “I know about Malek Abd al-Aziz Othan ben Yusuf, son of Saladin in the twelfth century. He was the one who tried to destroy the pyramid of Menkaure, who’s responsible for all that missing masonry on the southern face above the entrance where Jack and I went in.”

“My worst nightmare,” Hiebermeyer murmured. “And he didn’t even have explosives.”

“Any more takers?” Aysha asked.

“Well, there’s Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah,” Jack said. “The one whom the Druze Christians regard almost as a god. He springs to mind because Rebecca and I talked about how he ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in the tenth century.”

“Okay. He’s the one I want. Anything more about him?”

Jack thought for a moment. “Odd behavior. Took to wandering alone at night in the desert, disappearing for days on end. Murdered, I think.”

“And what do you know about the Cairo Geniza?”

Jack stared at her. “Arguably the greatest treasure
ever found in Egypt, greater even than Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.”

Hiebermeyer shot bolt upright. “You’re treading on thin ice there, Jack.
Very
thin ice.”

Jack grinned at him. “I thought that would get you going.
Intellectually
, I meant. Tut’s tomb may have contained the greatest physical treasure, but the Geniza has drawn us into the detail of the past like no other archaeological find except perhaps Pompeii and Herculaneum. And studying it hasn’t been just a matter of cataloguing and conservation, but immediately involved some of the greatest scholars of recent times, not just of Jewish religion and literature but also of medieval history and historiography, of the very meaning of history and why we study it.”

Costas peered at Jack. “You’d better fill me in, Jack.”

“Genizot were the storerooms in synagogues where worn-out sacred writings were deposited. In Jewish tradition any sacred or liturgical writing in Hebrew was considered the word of God and therefore couldn’t be thrown away, but the Cairo Geniza was unusual in containing a huge amount of other material related to the medieval Jewish community in Egypt as well. It was found in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, the Old City of Cairo, the synagogue of the Palestinian Jews. When the Ben Ezra Geniza was opened up in the late nineteenth century, the bulk of it—over two hundred thousand fragments—was shipped to Cambridge under the care of Solomon Schechter, reader in rabbinical studies at the university. I was fortunate to be able to study the archive firsthand when I was researching for my doctorate. I was looking at Jewish involvement in maritime trade in the Indian Ocean.”

Aysha peered at him. “So you’ll know that it also contains a huge amount of incidental detail on early medieval Cairo, and not just on Jewish life.”

“ ‘The unconsidered trifles that make up history,’ as one Geniza scholar put it,” Jack said.

“Including references to the caliphs, and to ancient
parts of Cairo that have since been demolished or lie buried beneath the modern city.”

“Where are you heading with this, Aysha? Fustat was the main settlement of Cairo when the Fatimids arrived from Tunisia to take over control of Egypt, and much of the Geniza dates to about the time of Al-Hakim and the two centuries or so that followed. Is that the connection?”

“I don’t want to tell you more now because what we’ve found is being translated as we speak. You need to see it for yourself at the actual place where it was discovered. Today may well be our last chance. Cairo is still open to us, but a midnight curfew has already been imposed, and the city will very likely be a no-go zone within days. I’ve arranged for transport to get us there this evening.”

Jack thought for a moment. “All right. If you think it’ll be a good use of my time here. The clock’s ticking.”

“Believe me, it will.”

Hiebermeyer gestured down the corridor. “Before you go, there’s another friend here who wants to see you. A genius-level physicist with a penchant for computer simulation and Egyptology.”

“Uh-oh,” Costas said, raising his eyes theatrically. “Here we go.”

“What on earth is Lanowski doing here?” Jack asked.

“He flew in from
Seaquest
late last night. You know that
Seaquest
is still over the wreck of the
Beatrice
off Spain? They were making the final preparations for raising the sarcophagus of Menkaure, but there’s been some kind of hitch. He’s come to consult Costas.”

Jack nodded. “I know Captain Macalister’s been trying to get in touch with me. Costas took the call before we came in.”

Costas grinned. “Lanowski comes all the way across the Mediterranean to consult with me? We must
really
be friends.”

“You and me both,” Hiebermeyer said. “His brain is like an analog of ancient Egypt. Every measurement,
angle, and coordinate is in there. I can’t keep up with him.”

Jack pursed his lips. “They weren’t supposed to raise the sarcophagus without me being there. I don’t like being out of the loop.”

Hiebermeyer peered up at him. “Well, Jack, you
have
been out of the loop. You’ve been incognito in the Gulf of Suez for the last four days, with instructions that nobody from IMU should try to make contact. The board of directors decided to bypass you and authorize the
Seaquest
team to raise the sarcophagus in your absence. It was a way of deflecting attention from everything that’s going on in Egypt, from the possibility that the antiquities people here might rumble your diving escapade and create a huge stink. Better to get the sarcophagus in the public eye before anything like that happened, and to make a huge splash in the media: Taken from the pyramids at Giza in the 1830s, lost in a shipwreck on the way to the British Museum, recovered by IMU. The board went public about the discovery yesterday, and there are now a dozen reporters and film crews on board waiting for the recovery. The press release has even included your promise that if the protection of the sarcophagus can be guaranteed by the Egyptian authorities and overseen by a UNESCO monitoring team, then it goes back to the pyramid. That’s what we all agreed upon from the get-go.”

Costas snorted. “From the look of what’s going on here, it’s more likely to be hacked to pieces by the extremists.”

“The new antiquities director is aware of that,” Hiebermeyer said. “He may be a political stooge who cares nothing for archaeology for its own sake, but he’s also a pompous egotist who would like nothing better than to be associated with the return of the sarcophagus. He’s been in the job for only six months, but he’s shutting down foreign excavations across Egypt to keep his xenophobic masters in the new regime happy. But at the same time he’s resisting the extremists, who want a
repeat of the Taliban nightmare in Afghanistan, the desecration of anything they perceive to be non-Islamic. If the extremists get their way, he knows he’ll be out of a job and just as dispensable as the monuments that are supposedly in his care.”

“It sounds like a losing battle,” Costas said.

Hiebermeyer looked at them grimly. “With the press release the board of directors has been buying us time, dangling a carrot in front of the antiquities director, which results in our own projects in Egypt remaining off the hit list for the time being. We have to pray that the current director remains in power long enough for us to complete our main excavation at the mummy necropolis.”

“And that scenario could crumble to dust at any time,” Costas muttered. “Someone from the extremist faction holds a knife to his throat, or the expected coup takes place and the extremists oust the moderates. Then Egypt winds back to year zero and archaeology goes to hell in a handbasket.”

“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Hiebermeyer said.

“Were you in on the decision-making about the sarcophagus?” Jack asked him. “Did the board consult you?”

“From the very outset,” Hiebermeyer said. “They weren’t going to go public without my approval.”

Jack took a deep breath. “Okay. You did the right thing. You’d think by now I’d have learned to let IMU sail on without my hand always at the helm, but sometimes it throws me. Now, where’s Lanowski? If the
Seaquest
team is on hold with the sarcophagus and I can hitch a lift back with him after visiting Cairo, I might even get a look-see at the raising after all.”

Hiebermeyer gestured with his thumb. “Down the corridor. He’s set up his simulation computer in my office.”

“What on earth is he doing with that?” Jack said.

Hiebermeyer gave a tired smile. “You know Lanowski.
He says that when his feet hit Egyptian soil, he gets so wired that he can fly through the past and see every detail as if it’s laid out in front of him. I told him what you and Costas have been up to in the Gulf of Suez. I’ve never seen anyone so hyped. He’s simulating the Bible.”

Costas coughed. “Say again?”

“Simulating the Bible.”

“Simulating the Bible,”
Costas repeated, shaking his head. “Isn’t that flying a little close to the sun? You know, the big guy in the sky?”

“That’s Lanowski for you,” Hiebermeyer said. “Boundaries are there to be crossed.”

“God help us,” Costas muttered.

Aysha stood up, glancing at her watch. “No more than an hour. Maria’s expecting you in the Old City of Cairo at 1900 hours.”

“Maria,”
Jack exclaimed. “So that’s who you mean about people working behind the scenes. What’s she doing here?”

“I was going to mention it before we left, of course,” Aysha said. “Remember, she’s director of the Institute of Paleography at Oxford. Who better to study a new document from the Cairo Geniza?”

“And Jeremy too?”

She shook her head. “He’s just been appointed assistant director, so he holds the fort while she’s gone. Anyway, he’s in London at the British Museum doing some other research for this project that you don’t yet know about.”

Jack put up his hands. “I surrender. It sounds as if my world really has spun out of my control.”

Costas slapped him on the shoulder. “It’s what friends are all about, Jack. Sometimes you just can’t manage it all on your own.”