On and on he drove, the daylight ebbing away around him, the shadows lengthening, until eventually, after a long, slow climb up yet another meandering valley, the tyre tracks veered to the right and disappeared into a defile between high cliffs. He slowed, stopped and killed the engine. Reaching for Samuel Pinsker’s notebook, he flicked through until he came to a faded pencil drawing. Beneath it was the legend:
The approach to the Labyrinth
. He held the book up, comparing the drawing to the view in front of him. The two were a perfect match.
He’d made it.
For a minute he sat there listening, head cocked, trying to pick up any sounds. There was nothing, unless silence itself can be thought of as a sound. Satisfied, he restarted the Landrover and drove a hundred metres further up the
wadi
where he parked out of sight in a bay beneath a rocky overhang. He got out and called Ben-Roi. Voicemail.
‘I’m at the mine,’ he said, not wasting time with explanations. ‘I’m going to take a look. I’ll come back to you in thirty minutes.’
He threw the phone back into the car – no point taking it, there’d be no signal underground – and grabbed the torch from the boot. Then, Helwan at the ready, he walked back down the
wadi
and picked up the tracks again.
The defile into which they led was narrow, little more than ten metres across, barely wide enough to accommodate a single truck. Rock walls towered above him – bulging, sail-like sheets of limestone billowing upwards towards a pale blue ribbon of sky high above. Swifts skimmed to and fro; despite the lateness of the hour, the air was still dense with heat. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted.
‘
Salaam-alaam-alaam-alaam-alaam
.’
His voice echoed down the canyon, bouncing from wall to wall, repeating for an improbable length of time before fading into silence. He called again, and again, then started walking, his finger curled tight round the Helwan’s trigger. The defile curved left, then right, then sharp left again. As it did so its walls suddenly fell away and he found himself standing on the edge of a huge open space ringed by cliffs – a vast natural amphitheatre tucked under the southern flank of the Gebel el-Shalul.
‘
Allah-u-akhbar
,’ he murmured.
High above, the
gebel
tops still glowed a warm orange in the late afternoon sun. Down here twilight was already firmly established, the colours bled to a dull yellowy-grey, the cracks and fissures plugged with shadow. Heaps of shattered rock and gravel lay piled against the base of the cliffs – the detritus, he guessed, of five centuries of mining. Directly to his left a vaguely symmetrical scatter of stone blocks suggested the remains of ancient huts. Other than that, and a lot of pottery sherds mixed with the sand of the amphitheatre floor, there was nothing – no buildings, no machinery, no equipment, no indication whatsoever that there had been any sort of industrial activity here recently.
No mine either, so far as he could see. The tracks emerged from the defile behind him, wound themselves into a tangled spaghetti across the amphitheatre floor – presumably as the vehicles that had made them turned around – then exited again. There was no obvious reason for their presence.
He surveyed the scene, trying to figure out what was going on, then walked forward, minuscule as an ant in a football stadium. He reached the centre of the space. For a brief instant he thought he caught a distant hum of machinery, a barely audible growl right out at the very edge of hearing. It was gone the moment he tried to tune into it. He dipped his head, listening. He couldn’t pick it up again and assumed he must have imagined it. Raising his eyes, he scanned the rock faces. Nothing. No doorways, no caves, no openings of any description. Just bare stone.
He rotated through 360 degrees, then trudged to the far side of the space and clambered up one of the rock heaps to give himself a better view of the ground. With the greater elevation he could see that although there were tyre marks everywhere, they seemed to be particularly concentrated around the cliff face on the northern side of the amphitheatre. He stared in that direction, peering into the thickening gloom. Still he could see nothing to explain why the trucks should be out here. A minute passed and he was about to turn away when a sudden breeze wafted across his face, funnelling in through the gorge. He caught a flicker of movement. Or at least thought he did. It only lasted a fraction of a second and then everything was still. He leant forward, eyes straining. Another waft, another flicker, right at the base of the cliff, as if the rock was shifting. Rippling.
‘What the . . . ?’
He came down off the slope and started towards it, still not certain if he had actually seen anything or it was merely the twilight playing tricks. Thirty metres from the cliff he stopped and called out.
‘
Salaam-alaam-alaam-alaam!
’
His voice ricocheted around the amphitheatre. It drew no response. No more movement either, although now he was close he did notice that a rectangular-shaped section of wall down at the foot of the cliff seemed to have a slightly different hue to the rest of the stone. A slightly different texture as well. As if someone . . .
‘Clever.
Very
clever.’
Slipping the Helwan into the back of his trousers, he marched over. He surveyed the cliff. Then, reaching up, he closed his hands around the rock and yanked. There was a heavy fluttering sound as a canvas tarpaulin detached from its mounts and tumbled to the ground at his feet. Behind, crudely but effectively concealed – viewed from anywhere other than up close, the yellowish material would have been indistinguishable from the surrounding rock – was a pair of large steel doors secured with a chain and padlock. On the rock face above, deeply incised, was a single-word inscription. Khalifa’s hieroglyphs weren’t what they had once been, but this wasn’t too difficult. Particularly with the god determinative.
Wesir
. Osiris.
‘Gotcha,’ he whispered.
He gave the doors a tug, then pulled out his gun, aimed and shot the lock off. The retort thundered around the rock walls, causing half a dozen swifts to lift skywards in alarm. For a brief moment he thought he caught the sound of machinery again. Or a motor. Something mechanical. It was impossible to tell where it was coming from, if indeed it
was
coming from anywhere and wasn’t just his imagination playing games with him. He listened, but couldn’t pick it up again. Imagination. Had to be. He shook his head, grasped one of the door handles and pulled.
The steel panel rolled back and the Labyrinth opened before him.
J
ERUSALEM
Ben-Roi had been on the phone to Sarah when Khalifa called, asking if she wanted him to pick anything up on the way over for dinner.
The moment he got the Egyptian’s message, he hit callback. Now it was Khalifa’s phone that was on voicemail. The greeting was in Arabic, a female voice – Khalifa must have borrowed the handset. A satellite phone, Ben-Roi guessed, if it was getting a signal in the middle of the desert. He left a message of his own, expressing concern that Khalifa had gone out to the mine alone, urging him to be careful and not take any unnecessary risks.
‘Call me as soon as you get this,’ he concluded. ‘As
soon
as you get this. I’ll be waiting.’
He rang off. Across the room Dov Zisky had broken from his inquiries into Dinah Levi and swivelled to face him.
‘What was all that about?’
Ben-Roi explained. Zisky’s eyebrows lifted.
‘You think he’ll be all right?’
‘I hope so. He’s a good friend and I’d hate to think . . .’
Ben-Roi didn’t say what he’d hate to think. He glanced at the wall clock – just past six – and folded his arms. He wasn’t due at Sarah’s for another hour and a half, and was expecting to hear back from Khalifa long before then.
Across the room Zisky turned away, reached for his cell and started thumbing in a text.
G
EBEL EL
- S
HALUL
Khalifa stepped into the mine. Clicking on his torch, he played the beam around.
He was in a large chamber. An
enormous
chamber, deep and cave-like, although the tell-tale ripples of ancient chisel marks on the ceiling and walls indicated that the space was man-made rather than natural. Bat guano caked the floor; there was a strong smell of ammonia. Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he held it to his nose and walked forward a few paces.
Tunnels opened to left and right, half a dozen on each side – for-bidding tubes of blackness fanning out from the central core of the chamber as though gigantic maggots had gone burrowing off into the rock in search of food. Some were at ground level, others higher up. Beneath one of the upper tunnels, an ancient access ladder was still propped against the wall. Khalifa ran the torch across its leather-bound rungs. They looked as sturdy as the day three millennia previously when the last feet had trod them. Dropping the beam, he speared the passage below. There were doorways in there, a lot of doorways – he counted nine before the beam was swallowed by the gloom. According to Pinsker’s diagrams, they gave into a warren of rooms and cells where the mine’s slave workforce had been housed. A nightmarish troglodytic existence where life expectancy would have been numbered in months, if not weeks. Khalifa circled the torch, picking out scrawls of ancient graffiti on the walls, a row of earthenware storage jars, an upturned wicker basket. Then, withdrawing the beam, he aimed it across the chamber towards the gaping rectangular hole on the far side.
The entrance to the mine’s main gallery.
Aside from the sliding doors, he had so far seen nothing to suggest any modern activity in the mine. Here at the gallery mouth, there was clear evidence, although not the sort he was expecting. Still with the handkerchief pressed against his face, he walked across the chamber, the torch held out in front of him, puffs of guano lifting around his feet.
Most of the opening was taken up by a large steel platform. Some sort of loading dock was his immediate thought, since it was about the height of the back of a lorry, and the tyre marks ran through the mine doors and right up to it. Bolted to the top of the platform, a couple of metres apart, was a pair of L-shaped tracks. They sloped down on to the gallery floor – like a slide without a bottom – and from there ran off into blackness.
Khalifa swayed the torch beam around, then ducked underneath the platform into the gallery itself, standing in the gap between the tracks, which ran close to the gallery walls. Something, it seemed, was being brought up from below. Rolled or winched along the rails on to the platform, and then loaded on to lorries and driven away. Ore? Gold? He had no idea. He went forward a few paces. Blackness smothered him – a blackness so dense he could actually feel it, as though he was pushing his way through cobwebs. Shapes skimmed and fluttered below – bats, startled by the sudden illumination. The tracks kept on going. He took another few paces. Still the tracks went on. Pinsker had paced the gallery and estimated it went down almost a mile. Did the tracks go all the way to the bottom? He had no idea, although something told him they did. That whatever was being brought up was coming from the mine’s deepest levels. And to find out what it was, he was going to have to go down there.
He backed up. His heart was pounding, his breath coming in short, fast gasps.
He didn’t spook easily. Darkness, confined spaces – they’d never fazed him. Numerous times he’d gone off on his own exploring the more obscure tombs in the hills around the Valley of the Kings – tombs that no tourists ever visited and that you had to go down on your hands and knees, if not your belly, to get into. He enjoyed the excitement.
Not today. Today he was badly spooked. As spooked as he’d ever been. There was something forbidding about the blackness, about the weight of rock all around, the bewildering catacomb of tunnels with their lingering air of human misery. More than forbidding. Threatening. The whole mine felt . . . malevolent.
He backed away further, right out of the gallery and into the mine’s entrance chamber. And then all the way across to the doors.
In the ten minutes he’d been inside it had grown noticeably darker outside. It still felt bright compared to the blackness he’d just experienced. He gulped air.
He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t go down there. Not on his own. Five metres had been bad enough. To descend a mile – impossible. He’d go home, return another day. With colleagues, backup. He knew where the mine was now, knew how to get here. Rivka Kleinberg, Barren Corporation, Zoser Freight – the answers could wait. Would have to wait because there was no way on God’s earth . . .
He went back in. Crossing to the platform, he ducked underneath and into the gallery again. If anything the darkness felt even more malign, as if the air itself was warning him away. He swished the torch back and forth, slashing at the gloom, wondering how the hell Samuel Pinsker had coped – what sort of obsessive madness it was that had not only drawn the Englishman into the mine, but kept him down here alone for weeks on end, creeping round in pitch blackness painstakingly mapping and recording the place. The idea of it made Khalifa feel sick.
He swished the torch some more. Slices of wall and ceiling momentarily revealed themselves before sinking back into impenetrable shadow. A minute went by, two, the only sounds the laboured rasp of his breathing and the occasional flutter of bat wings below. Then, wincing, as if he was about to thrust his hand into the middle of a flame, he pocketed the handkerchief, pulled his gun from the back of his trousers and started forward between the tracks.
‘Allah protect me,’ he chanted, ‘Allah watch over me, Allah be my light.’
He went cautiously to start with, taking it a few steps at a time, shuffling reluctantly down the gallery’s sloping incline. He turned frequently, looking back up at the barely discernible whisper of light coming in from the mine entrance. Every cell in his body urged him to turn and sprint back up to it. He fought the urge and kept going. When, after a couple of hundred metres, the light disappeared, he upped his pace, anxious to get to wherever the tracks were leading and out again as quickly as possible.