‘Hey, Mohammed Sariya told me a good one the other day,’ he said, trying to lighten the mood, draw her out of herself. ‘Mubarak, Gadaffi, Ben Ali and a camel are all in a balloon together, and a storm suddenly blows up—’
The mobile went off. Zenab stiffened.
‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’
Laying aside the mouthpiece, he pulled the phone from his pocket. It wasn’t their home number. Wasn’t any number he recognized. He showed her the display to reassure her, then answered. A blare of static crackled into his ear.
‘Hello?’
More static.
‘Hello?’
Nothing. Wrong number. Or one of those automated cold calls trying to sell him something. He gave it a third try, and still getting no response was about to ring off when suddenly:
‘. . . to us about gold-mining. Said it was urgent.’
The voice – a woman’s – came through loud and clear, the static receding to a vague background hiss. Khalifa unwound his arm from Zenab’s shoulder.
‘Miss Raissouli?’
‘Please, call me Salma.’
‘And I’m Hassan.’ A man’s voice echoed down the line. ‘Sorry it’s taken a while to get back to you.’
On the contrary, said Khalifa, he hadn’t been expecting to hear from them so soon.
‘Normally we keep the phone switched off,’ came the woman’s voice again.
‘To conserve the battery,’ put in the man.
‘But we needed to arrange a food drop –’
‘– which is how we picked up the message from Yasmina at the faculty.’
They seemed to talk interchangeably, the line of conversation passing seamlessly from one to the other and back again. Khalifa pictured the two of them sitting side by side holding the handset between them, each leaning into it in turn to have their say.
‘So how can we help you?’ they both asked simultaneously.
Covering the phone, he turned to Zenab.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I need to speak to these people. Do you mind?’
She waved a hand, indicating that he should continue with the call.
‘Sure? I could ask them to call back.’
She shook her head and again motioned him to carry on. He felt bad about it, knew he should defer the conversation, but hopefully it wouldn’t take long, and he really did want to know about that gold mine. He touched her forearm, mouthed that he’d be quick, then swivelled away from her and filled the Raissoulis in on the situation. Not the murder – just the Samuel Pinsker stuff. When he told them about the Howard Carter letter one of them gasped and the other whistled – it was hard to tell which was doing which.
‘There’ve long been rumours that someone had tracked it down,’ said Salma, ‘but to be honest I didn’t believe them. I’ve never even heard of this Pinsker man.’
‘But you have heard of the Labyrinth?’
‘Absolutely. It’s one of the few ancient gold mines to have been known by a specific name rather than simply the generic
bia
.’
‘The ancient word for a mine,’ put in her brother.
After the initial interference, the line was crystal clear. Hard to believe he was talking to people out in the middle of the desert.
‘And the mine definitely existed?’ asked Khalifa.
‘Oh yes,’ said Salma. ‘The Greek historians all mention it, although admittedly they were writing five hundred years later –’
‘Closer to a thousand with Diodorus,’ chipped in her brother.
‘– but there are a good few contemporary references as well. Including a couple of inscriptions we ourselves turned up.’
Digby Girling had mentioned something to that effect. Khalifa threw a look back at Zenab – she was sitting with her hands in her lap, gazing at the revellers in the pleasure garden across the street – then asked for more information.
‘One was a graffito near the bottom end of the Wadi el-Shaghab.’
Hassan again. ‘The language is slightly obscure –’
‘When is it ever clear?’ his sister’s voice echoed from the background.
‘– but basically it records the passing of a gold convoy from the mine down to the Nile Valley. Probably left by one of the soldiers guarding the convoy. There’s a Ramesses VII cartouche –’
‘Or possibly Ramesses IX.’
‘– which suggests that even at the very end of the New Kingdom the mine was still going strong.’
Over the way a chorus of screams erupted as a giant hydraulic fun-wheel levered itself into the air and started spinning. Khalifa clamped a hand over his ear to block out the sound.
‘The other inscription?’
‘That one’s on a cliff face above the Wadi Mineh,’ said Salma. ‘We only found it last year so it’s not even published yet. It’s particularly interesting because to date it’s the earliest known reference to the mine.’
‘Early Eighteenth Dynasty,’ came her brother’s voice. ‘Reign of Tuthmosis ll.’
‘Again the language is pretty garbled,’ said Salma, ‘but so far as we can make out it’s some kind of a royal proclamation announcing the mine’s re-dedication. If you hang on a moment I’ll –’
There was a rustling of pages being turned, presumably as she consulted a notebook.
‘Here we go.’ She started reading. ‘
The mine-land of gold that was revealed to my father and that was in the domain of Hathor is now in the domain of Osiris, and the gold is His, and it is He who has ownership of its many ways so that it shall now be spoken of as the
shemut net wesir –
Passages of Osiris
.’
A muted slap as the notebook, or whatever it was, was closed.
‘Obviously there are a number of possible interpretations,’ she continued, ‘but what we think it’s saying –’
‘Are
sure
it’s saying –’ chipped in her brother.
‘– is that a mine that was started in the reign of Tuthmosis l –’
‘Or possibly Amenhotep l –’
‘– has now gone so deep that patronage of it has passed from Hathor, the traditional Egyptian deity of mining, to Osiris, God of the Underworld. Which if we’re right is absolutely extraordinary. I mean, most ancient Egyptian gold works were nothing more than open-cast trenches. Even the ones that did go underground never went further than a few dozen metres.’
‘And this is right at the beginning of the mine’s life, remember,’ came in her brother. ‘It’s got another – what? – four hundred years of digging to go. Even allowing for periods when it wasn’t being worked, the potential size of the thing still beggars belief. No wonder they also referred to it as
bia we aa en nub
.’
‘The greatest of all gold mines,’ translated Salma.
Khalifa fumbled for the mouthpiece of his
shisha
and took a puff. Interesting as all this was, he was still struggling to trace any clear line between a three-thousand-year-old gold mine and a woman getting garrotted in a church in Jerusalem. Sure, Barren Corporation were involved in gold-mining. And in his experience gold and violence were never that far apart. Even so, it all seemed pretty tenuous. Doubly so when you factored in the sex-trafficking angle. He took another puff, checked on Zenab – she was still staring straight ahead, lost in her own thoughts – then asked the obvious question:
‘And the mine was definitely exhausted in ancient times?’
There was some whispering, then:
‘It’s a slightly moot point,’ said Salma Raissouli.
Not quite the unequivocal answer he’d been anticipating.
‘How do you mean, moot?’
‘Well, Herodotus is very clear about it,’ came Hassan’s voice. ‘He says the mine was abandoned at the end of the New Kingdom because all the gold had been dug out. But then Diodorus Siculus, who seems to have been working from a different source to Herodotus –’
‘And on this particular subject is generally considered to be the more reliable of the two –’ cut in his sister.
‘– Diodorus merely says that the whereabouts of the mine was forgotten in the chaos at the end of the New Kingdom. The implication being that it wasn’t exhausted, just lost. There are certainly no contemporary references to it being worked after the end of the Twentieth Dynasty—’
‘Although there
is
a Late Period papyrus that describes an expedition to try and locate the mine again,’ said Salma. ‘Which they obviously wouldn’t have launched unless they’d believed there was still something there worth mining. Unfortunately the expedition got lost in the desert and they all died of thirst so they never got the chance to find out.’
‘The simple fact is, nobody knows.’ Hassan again. ‘Personally, I lean towards Herodotus. Salma, being my sister, takes the opposing view. It’s impossible to say for sure.’
‘And will be until someone actually finds the mine,’ added Salma.
‘Which Samuel Pinsker seems to have done,’ murmured Khalifa, taking another thoughtful pull on his
shisha
. Beside him a young man came up and started tweezering glowing charcoals on to the pipe’s foil, replacing the original ones, which were starting to burn out. Khalifa barely even noticed him. He was getting another of those tingles in his spine. Not strong, but definitely there. He shuffled forward on his seat.
‘Apparently Herodotus says something about the mine being so rich in gold you could –’
‘– slice it off the wall with a knife.’ Hassan finished the sentence for him.
‘Any truth in that?’
Laughter. From both of them.
‘You obviously don’t know much about gold-mining,’ said Salma.
Khalifa acknowledged that that was certainly the case.
‘It’s a good story, but total fantasy,’ said Hassan. ‘The Egyptians extracted most of their gold from seams of auriferous quartz – basically white quartz with minute flecks of gold locked inside it. To get at the gold they had to hack chunks of quartz out of the hillside, then crush it to a powder and then wash the powder through with water to extract the precious stuff. So not quite as simple as Herodotus suggests. Diodorus Siculus gets much closer to the reality.’
‘Although there’s no question the ancient deposits
were
uniquely rich,’ put in Salma, ‘and all the sources agree that the Osiris deposit was the richest of them all. So maybe there’s a germ of truth in Herodotus. Analyses we’ve done of ancient slag heaps suggests that even the poorer mines were getting fifty or even sixty grams of gold per ton of ore, which is about double what the most productive modern mines achieve. And the purity was exceptional. As much as twenty-three or even twenty-four carats.’
The technical terms went over Khalifa’s head, but he got the gist. The tingle was still there, nagging its way up and down his spine. Something was coming out of all this, he could sense it. Coalescing. Trying to reveal itself. Whether that something had any relevance to Ben-Roi’s case – that was a different matter.
‘And all we can say for sure about the mine’s location is that it was out in the Eastern Desert somewhere?’
‘We can probably narrow it down slightly,’ replied Salma. ‘The two
wadis
where we found the inscriptions – El-Shaghab and Mineh – both seem to have been used as primary routes to the mine, El-Shaghab from the west and Mineh from the north. And there are a couple of other graffiti that mention it over at Bir el-Gindi. So triangulating those three would put the mine somewhere in the central uplands of the desert. Which is still a very big area –’
‘And an extremely remote one,’ added Hassan. ‘Might as well be the moon for all the signs of life.’
Khalifa seemed to remember someone else using that analogy recently. He couldn’t recall the precise context and didn’t waste time trying to do so. Instead:
‘Would it be valuable, this mine? If someone did find it?’
The question popped out of his mouth almost of its own accord. The unspoken corollary being: valuable enough to kill for?
‘I suppose that all depends on how you define value,’ said Hassan. ‘Archaeologically it would be an amazing discovery. Particularly if the mine had retained any sort of integrity and not collapsed in on itself.’
‘I was thinking more in financial terms,’ said Khalifa. ‘Assuming there was still gold down there.’
‘Well, that’s a very big assumption,’ said Hassan. ‘Whatever Diodorus might imply, I really can’t see there being anything left of the original deposits. Not after five centuries of continuous mining.’
‘But if there was?’
‘Then yes, of course it would be valuable. I mean, gold’s gold. People covet it.’
‘Although there’s a bit more to it than that,’ interjected Salma. ‘Like we said before, it’s not simply a matter of marching out there with a pickaxe and hacking a load of gold off the walls. It’s a complex process extracting the gold from the ore, and given the extreme remoteness of the area, you’d be needing to do it on an industrial scale to make the whole thing economically viable. Which the pharaohs could obviously do because they had an army of slave labour at their disposal. These days there are a few more overheads. So to answer your question, yes, it would be valuable, but not to your average Joe on the street. It’s only really the government, or else a large mining conglomerate, that could deploy the resources necessary to actually realize the value.’
A conglomerate like Barren Corporation
, thought Khalifa.
He sat back, blowing tendrils of smoke out of his nostrils, sifting through it all, sensing he was on to something, but still struggling to make the leap from a gold mine in Egypt to a corpse in Israel via a sex-trafficking industry straddling both countries. A few moments passed. Then, aware that the Raissoulis were waiting on him, and so was his wife, and that ultimately it wasn’t his responsibility to make the leap anyway, merely to do what he could to help Ben-Roi get across, he thanked the brother and sister for their help, said he’d be in touch if he needed anything more and ended the call. He gave himself another couple of seconds, allowing the interview to settle in his mind, then turned.
‘I’m sorry that took so . . .’
Zenab’s seat was empty. He looked around, assuming she must have gone into the café to get something, or perhaps to look in the window of one of the neighbouring shops. No sign of her. He stood, running his eyes up and down the street, trying to pick her out in the crowds, concern rapidly giving way to alarm.