Pharaoh (15 page)

He left Sullivan outside to operate the winch and empty the buckets as they sent them up. At each shovel stroke, the pile of debris slipped further forward, until slowly the side of the sarcophagus was uncovered. Blake was becoming increasingly excited; each time he stole a glance at the massive stone tomb, he felt as if he could perceive the awakening of a voice that had remained silent for millennia. As if a cry were about to explode out of that block of stone.

The two men working with the shovels kept up a steady rate and filled a bucket every three or four minutes.

Blake suddenly noticed something dark on the tomb floor and stopped the diggers. He knelt down, took his trowel out of his jacket pocket and started to clear away the rubble and clean the area with a brush. The object was a piece of wood, darkened by time and oxidation: a board of some sort.

He took a sample of it, then ordered the workers to continue to clear away the slide, being very careful not to damage the wooden board that lay there for no apparent reason. When it was nearly lunch time, one of the workers called him: they had found something else in the middle of the debris.

‘Let’s see,’ said Blake, coming nearer.

About halfway down the slide, as the material on top had slid forward, an indefinable object that seemed to be made of leather had come to light. Blake extracted it with wooden pincers and looked at it closely: it was what remained of a sandal! He wrapped it carefully in aluminium foil and placed it alongside the sample of the wooden board.

S
ARAH
F
ORRESTALL
remained in her trailer and kept an eye on Maddox’s movements. He finally drove off towards the north in his Jeep with Gordon, as they did nearly every day, usually not returning until shortly before dusk. The camp was practically deserted if you didn’t consider the guards posted on the surrounding hills, a couple of hundred metres away.

At about ten o’clock, Pollock walked out of the office with a copy of
Playboy,
a roll of toilet paper and a plastic bottle full of water in his hand, and headed towards the latrine.

Sarah quickly slipped out of the back door and walked along the row of trailers towards Maddox’s lodgings, hoping that Pollock hadn’t thought to lock the door. She pushed; it was open. She figured that she had between ten and fifteen minutes and took a quick look at the digital clock hanging on the wall. The computer was on and the screen displayed diagrams reporting the mineralogical analysis of the soil in the various zones of Ras Udash.

Sarah sat down and started to go through the files on the hard disk. She had taken a pair of binoculars with her and in the distance – through the window on the wall opposite the desk – she could see the latrine, and Pollock’s feet with his trousers covering his shoes. An excellent observation point.

There was a series of protected directories that obviously contained confidential documents. Sarah reached into her shirt pocket for a disk which she had previously taken from Maddox’s office and used it to launch a program to decipher the passwords. The directories began to open up, one after another, and Sarah copied them onto the mobile hard disk that she had with her, without any idea of whether one of them might contain the master of the topographical map. It was starting to get hot and the overheated trailer was giving off waves of heat.

She checked the latrine with her binoculars and saw that Pollock was pulling up his trousers. She had no more than three minutes before he walked through the door.

She restored the original display while Pollock closed the latrine door behind him and started to fiddle with the bag of quicklime. She slipped out to wait until he had returned to the office and then knocked on the door.

‘Come in,’ said Pollock.

Sarah couldn’t help but wrinkle her nose; he’d brought the stench of the latrine back in with him.

‘I see you’ve decided to stay at the camp today, Miss Forrestall’

‘That’s right. I have office work to do.’ She took a disk from her pocket and handed it to him. ‘Professor Blake gave me this. Would you email it as soon as you can; he’s written the file name and the email address on the label. As soon as you get an answer, be sure to inform Blake. I think it’s very important.’

‘You know, Miss Forrestall, that all outgoing and incoming mail has to go through Mr Maddox. As soon as he comes back, I’ll show him the message and get his authorization.’

Sarah returned to her trailer, connected the hard disk to her computer and began going through the files one by one.

B
LAKE GOT BACK
to camp just after dusk and went straight to Sarah’s trailer without even stopping to clean up. Any news?’ he asked as soon as she let him in.

Sarah shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid not. Take a look for yourself. Here’s the master of the map I showed you, but there are no references. I guess they didn’t want to run any risks.’

Blake dropped onto a chair, discouraged.

‘What about the dig? Anything new?’

Blake took a little packet out of his pocket. ‘I found a wooden board,’ he said, ‘on the floor, under the rubble. Very strange. And something else, a piece of leather sandal. We’ll have to do a radiocarbon analysis right away to date the finds.’

‘Radiocarbon? How can we do that? I don’t think anyone at the camp will know where to find a laboratory doing that kind of work.’

‘I’d know just where to find one, if only I had some idea where in the hell we were.’

Sarah lowered her head. ‘I did everything I could to try to help. It wasn’t easy concentrating on all those computer operations with so little time and worrying that Pollock might come in from one moment to the next and start asking embarrassing questions.’

Blake stood up. ‘I’m not angry with you, Sarah,’ he said. ‘It’s just that everything is crazy out here. I don’t even know what I’m doing any more. It’s like I was digging on another planet. No references, nothing to check my results against. Thanks, anyway, I really appreciate what you did. See you in a little while, at dinner.’

He opened the door and walked out. Sarah waited for a moment, as if certain that he would turn back, but Blake walked straight to his trailer and went in, slamming the door behind him.

The evening was so mild, with a hint of spring in the air, that dinner was served in the Bedouin tent. Blake sat down next to Sarah, waiting for Maddox’s usual query about how the dig had gone so that he could request a radiocarbon analysis of the material that he had taken from the tomb.

Maddox seemed embarrassed. ‘You must realize that we don’t have that kind of equipment here,’ he said. ‘But if you can tell me which laboratories do this type of work here in the Middle East, I’ll see to it as soon as possible.’

‘There’s a centre at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo,’ he said. ‘And another very well-equipped lab at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the Institute of Archaeology, another at the University of Tel Aviv—’

‘Leave the finds with Mr Pollock, please, and I’ll have him make arrangements.’

Pollock approached their table and handed an envelope containing a disk to Blake, taking the little aluminium foil packets with the wood and leather samples from him. ‘This is the answer to the message that Miss Forrestall asked me to send for you this morning,’ he said. ‘I had to wait for Mr Maddox to return and OK it. The reply just came in.’

Blake put it into the pocket of the jacket he had left hanging on the back of the chair and began to talk with Sarah. He seemed to be in a good mood again.

When the coffee was served, Pollock left for a few minutes. He returned almost immediately and whispered something to Maddox, who finished his coffee quickly and got up, excusing himself to his table companions. ‘There’s a call from Houston, I hope you don’t mind my leaving. Miss Forrestall, would you please come to my office as soon as it’s convenient for you?’

Sarah got up to comply and quickly glanced over at Blake, looking perplexed: could Pollock have discovered her raid on his office?

He noticed Sarah’s jacket hanging on the back of her vacant chair. He slipped his hand into the right pocket, felt for her keys and got a sudden idea.

‘Please excuse me,’ he said to Sullivan and Gordon. ‘I left my cigarettes in the trailer and I need a smoke after the coffee. I’ll be back in a minute or two.’

Gordon gave Blake a condescending little smile, as if he’d just admitted to needing his daily dose of heroin. ‘Go right ahead, Professor, go right ahead. We’re not going anywhere.’

Blake walked quickly towards the trailers. When he got to Sarah’s, he turned around to make sure no one was watching, then opened the door, switched on her computer and began looking through the desk drawers to find the mobile hard disk. Nothing. He looked out of the door again to make sure that nobody was coming, then returned to the desk. He saw that one of the drawers was locked, checked her keys and found one that opened it. There were papers, notes, photographs. And the hard disk. He took it out, loaded it into the drive and scanned the list of files.

Blake felt his heart beating wildly. What could he say to Sarah if she walked in? Maybe it had all been a trick to trap him? Suddenly one of the file names leapt out at him: TPC-H-5A. Tactical Pilotage Chart H-5A. A topographical map put out by the Department of Defense! It had to be what he was looking for.

He copied it onto another disk, turned off the computer, closed the drawer and left, checking his watch: six minutes had gone by.

Sarah and Pollock were still in Maddox’s office. He walked back towards the Bedouin tent after checking that he had a packet of cigarettes in his pocket.

He took his seat as the waiter was pouring another cup of coffee and slipped the keys back into Sarah’s jacket pocket. He lit a cigarette and took a couple of long drags.

‘I’ve never even been tempted,’ said Gordon. ‘Every time I see a smoker going through his pockets hysterically I realize how lucky I am.’

‘You have a point there, Mr Gordon. On the other hand, consider that it is vice, and not virtue, that separates us from brute beasts. Have you ever seen a horse smoke?’

Gordon cracked a sour smile and changed the subject. ‘Ray told me about that wooden board you found on the tomb floor under that heap of debris around the sarcophagus. Funny, no? Finding an object like that in the middle of all the rubble. What do you think it could be?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it all day, but I still don’t have an explanation. However, I can easily narrow down the possibilities. Originally, that board had to be in either a horizontal or a vertical position. If it were horizontal it might have covered some sort of a hole dug in the tomb floor. But that hypothesis doesn’t work because the weight of the landslide would have caused the board to collapse into the hole it was covering sooner or later over all these years, no matter how sturdy it was. So the board had to have been upright.’

‘So?’ Sarah had just arrived and sat down next to him.

‘Well, the way I figure it, it could mean only one thing.’

‘What?’

‘That the landslide was provoked intentionally to cut off access to the tomb.’

Sarah considered this quietly. The daylight had nearly completely disappeared and the wind brought with it distant noises, echoes of mysterious activity somewhere beyond those chalky hills that bordered the plain to the north-east.

‘That seems strange to me,’ she said after a while. ‘All the Egyptian tombs were inaccessible. And we still don’t know where the entrance was, originally, or what direction it led in from.’

‘You’re right. And yet that landslide seems artificial to me. The board was vertical because it was holding back a mass of rubble. Then someone, for some reason, deliberately tipped it forwards, and the material it was holding back spilled into the tomb and covered the sarcophagus. The person who set off this landslide probably thought it would destroy everything inside, but that’s not what happened. It didn’t work out as planned.’

‘That is a daring hypothesis,’ said Sarah.

‘Not as daring as you think. Most probably, the mass of rubble had been there for such a long time that it had begun to conglomerate, which stopped the whole mass from sliding forward into the tomb. But if that were true, as I think it is, it means that someone visited that tomb long after it was closed up.’

‘But why?’

‘Don’t have the slightest idea. But I’ll figure it out, sooner or later.’

‘So now what are you going to do? Free the sarcophagus or pursue this problem of the board?’

‘If it were up to me, I’d concentrate on the board. That’s where the key to the secret lies. But I doubt that Maddox would approve. And he’s the boss here, right?’

‘Yeah,’ said Sarah.

Silence fell over the table as everyone was absorbed in their own thoughts. Maddox came out but didn’t sit down. He walked towards the parking lot and they could hear him starting up his Jeep.

Sarah glanced towards the lot and looked nervous.

Blake stood up. ‘Well, I’d better get to work,’ he said. ‘I have to read my colleague’s answer to my email. I may very well stay up all night working.’

‘I’m going to sleep,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s been an intense day.’ She shot Blake a significant look.

Blake accompanied her to the door of her trailer. ‘Where do you think Maddox is off to, alone at this hour?’