01 Babylon Rising (34 page)

“Rome and Byzantium.”

“Right. So, four world empires. Just four. No one since the Romans—not Napoleon, not Hitler—has managed to set up a fifth.”

She looked puzzled. “So what’s the prediction that hasn’t come true yet?”

“There’s one part of Nebuchadnezzar’s statue left. The ten toes. Prophecy experts believe the toes—made of clay and iron—represent an unstable form of government that will take over from today’s nation-states in the near future. Probably ten kings or rulers of some kind, paving the way for the Antichrist.”

She looked away, taking a moment to try to absorb what he was saying. They were cruising comfortably now as they took the Corniche al-Nil, the main thoroughfare that paralleled
the east bank of the Nile, and the opulent mansions of the embassy district streamed past the window in a stately procession.

“And you think the secret, the mystery, Dakkuri was talking about might have something to do with that?”

He shrugged. “My gut tells me it has something to do with Daniel’s predictions, yes. Something was nagging away at the back of my mind, and it took me a while to figure out what it was. The word you just used:
mystery
. In the Book of Revelation, that means Babylon. Dakkuri said the mystery would return.”

“I don’t understand. Babylon’s going to return?”

He nodded. “The power of Babylon, yes. When the Antichrist sets up his one-world government.”

She ran her hands through her hair. “Now you’ve lost me. Let’s go back to the Serpent for a moment. If what we saw in the sewers was anything to go by, people have been worshiping it—or at least the middle piece of it—in secret for years, possibly thousands of years. Heaven knows how many innocents have been sacrificed along the way.”

“I know. It’s incredible. Horrifying.”

“But has this cult got anything to do with what you were talking about—the return of Babylon?”

He scratched his jaw. “Let’s just say there’s a strong underlying connection. The forces of darkness. Evil. In the end it’s all the same.”

“And you and I are heading straight into the jaws of the dragon, aren’t we?”

He struggled for something to say, some way of reassuring her, but at that moment the taxi pulled up at the main
building of the American University, and a tall, white-suited man with a broad, brilliant smile was opening the door, ushering them into the blast-furnace heat.

“Murphy, you old dog! Welcome back to Cairo.” Ten minutes later Jassim was sitting back in an uncomfortable-looking steel-backed chair that somehow seemed to perfectly accommodate his gangly frame. He sipped appreciatively from his martini glass.

“You’re sure you won’t?”

“Are you kidding? I know what you put in that stuff. The alcohol is the least of it.”

Jassim laughed his rich, mellifluous laugh. “Same old Murphy.”

“Same old Jassim.” Murphy raised his glass of lemonade.

“Yes, sadly, I am a very bad Muslim.”

“I don’t know about that, but you’re still a very good man in my book. Your letter after Laura died really helped.”

Jassim’s ebullient expression sobered. “I’m sure it didn’t, but I had to tell you what was in my heart.”

They drank in silence for a while, lost in memories of Laura.

Eventually Jassim said, “Dr. McDonald is okay? She was very pleasant, but perhaps a little distracted.” Isis had made her excuses and gone straight to the lodging Jassim had arranged for them both in the campus complex for visiting professors and their families.

“She’s got a lot on her mind,” Murphy said.

Jassim didn’t pursue it. “Well, I hope she is fit and well tomorrow. We have a big day ahead of us.” He shifted in his chair, beaming like a kid on Christmas Eve.

“So, Professor Hawass went for it?”

“In a big way. When they X-rayed the tomb of Queen Hephrat back in the sixties, it was totally empty. The tomb robbers had beaten us once again.”

“By a couple of thousand years, probably,” said Murphy.

Jassim laughed. “All that was left was a deep, dark, empty hole at the bottom of the pyramid. So the notion that there is something still in there, something the robbers may have missed—something a Chaldean priest from the time of Nebuchadnezzar may have hidden there—the head of Moses’ Brazen Serpent, no less! That would be quite an amazing story. Professor Hawass was delighted to put all of our humble resources at your service.”

“Could we start by storing the middle section of the Serpent here? Given what happened at Washington, I would understand if you said no.”

Jassim waved his hand. “We do not scare easily here. We will guard the piece with honor and discretion.”

Murphy clapped his old friend on the shoulder. “Great. That’s a relief. So you got a Pyramid Crawler for me?”

“Oh, yes. And I am very much looking forward to seeing it in action. The tomb robbers sometimes used young children or even midgets to get into these narrow passages.” He shook his head. “Sadly, those unfortunates were often unable to get out again. Hopefully with the Pyramid Crawler we will be able to penetrate our pyramid’s deepest secrets without any loss of life!”

“I hope so, Jassim, old friend,” said Murphy, his face darkening. “I very much hope so.”

WHEN THEY MET
up early the next morning, ready to drive out to the pyramid in Jassim’s equipment-laden Land Rover, Murphy got a sense that Isis had settled something in her mind. She didn’t say much, but the measured, businesslike way she went about checking that they had everything they needed suggested an inner calm he had never seen in her.

As they took the Rodah Island bridge across the Nile and into the Shar’a al-Haram, running straight through the Giza district to the desert’s edge, he wondered why he didn’t feel the same way. After a few fretful hours tossing and turning in the grip of feverish dreams, he had given up on sleep and had spent the rest of the night pacing the garden at the back of their lodging.

Murphy had been hoping for something—a sign, perhaps, that he was doing the right thing, that it was part of God’s
plan for him to be there. But dawn had broken leaving him unrested and no wiser than before.

He looked at the Sphinx-like smile on Isis’s face as she listened to Jassim’s ridiculous stories of mummies’ curses and haunted scarabs, and wondered if God had chosen to give her the sign, not him. Perhaps, like the prodigal son, she was the one God had favored. Not that he begrudged her. As long as
someone
knew they were on the right road.

Pyramid Road. He remembered that’s what they called the approach to the desert. And when he had first driven along it in an old tin can of a Citroën with Laura, there had still been traces of the lush acacia, tamarind, and eucalyptus groves that had now totally disappeared beneath a tidal wave of urban sprawl.

As the concrete apartment buildings finally gave way and the three Giza pyramids appeared on the horizon, bringing a gasp of amazement from Isis and an accompanying chuckle from Jassim, Murphy wondered if the remarkable juxtaposition of ancient and modern was perhaps the sign he had been waiting for.

Here in Cairo, people rushed headlong into the future while the monuments of mankind’s deepest past looked on, unchanging, as if to say,
If you want to know what really lies ahead, look behind you
.

The road climbed to the top of the square-mile plateau and curved around the Sphinx, with its thousand-year stare, and then the three awesome pyramids were there before them, housing respectively a royal father, son, and grandson. Clustered around the Big Three, the much smaller pyramids of queens and princesses only added to the sense of majestic scale.

As the Land Rover continued on, circling to the northeastern edge of the plateau, the great pyramids started to shrink into the distance again. Isis craned her neck, trying to fix every fleeting detail of the extraordinary panorama in her mind, until Jassim tapped her on the shoulder and pointed dead ahead.

Standing aloof in this empty corner of the plateau, The Pyramid of the Winds could have been built yesterday, so perfect was its ancient geometry. Smaller than its more famous cousins, it was in its way just as impressive, its sheer walls of smoothly fitting stone blocks a testament to the timeless genius of its creators.

“It’s amazing,” Isis said, scrambling out of the Land Rover and squinting through the fierce haze.

“One of the world’s great feats of engineering,” Jassim agreed.

“It helps if you have thousands of slaves to drag the stone blocks into place,” added Murphy.

“Of course. That is why our modern buildings are so puny in comparison,” Jassim laughed. “You just cannot get the slaves these days.”

Isis unrolled the three-dimensional map of the pyramid’s interior while Jassim and Murphy checked that the Crawler’s systems were in working order. “Perfect,” Jassim pronounced finally as a crystal-clear image of the pyramid appeared on the screen of the laptop balanced on his knees. “And she seems to be responding correctly to all my commands.” He patted the Crawler like a faithful dog and pointed toward the pyramid. “Go, fetch,” he said sternly.

Tucking the Crawler under his arm, Murphy started clambering over the huge limestone blocks toward the entrance of
the first air shaft. “The prevailing wind is from the south,” Isis explained to Jassim, “so this shaft is likely to have the strongest inflow. It seemed like the most logical place to start.”

Jassim nodded. “Let us hope the wind has not blown it full of sand.”

Murphy jogged back over the sand and Jassim started the Crawler on its journey up the shaft. Over his shoulder, Murphy and Isis watched the grainy images slowly fill the screen.

“It seems to be clear. The Crawler’s moving without any problem. I estimate it should reach the end of the shaft in about three minutes. So far there don’t seem to be any objects in its path.”

Three minutes seemed like thirty as they huddled in the Land Rover’s air-conditioned interior, trying to interpret the shadowy pictures the Crawler was transmitting from its miniature cameras. Finally Jassim pressed a key and brought it to a halt. “Far enough, I think. It must be near the lip of the shaft. We don’t want to lose her. If there was anything in the shaft, we’d have seen it by now.”

Murphy wondered when the Crawler had become a
her
. “Just let her go a few more feet, Jassim.” He peered intently at the screen. “What’s that? I can see something moving.”

Jassim reluctantly moved the Crawler forward. “It could be a small animal, a rat perhaps, though I doubt there is much worth nibbling inside the tomb now.”

“Okay, stop. There it is again. There’s definitely something moving at the end of the shaft.”

Jassim adjusted the focus of the twin cameras. “Let me see, is that any better?”

Murphy nodded. “It must be something beyond the air shaft. Something inside the great chamber.”

“Like the head of a bronze Serpent floating in midair?” Jassim laughed.

Murphy gave him a steady look. “Only one way to find out.”

While Jassim maneuvered the Crawler back down the shaft, muttering under his breath, Murphy checked that he had everything he needed. Rope, flashlight, utility knife. And his bow.

Jassim looked at him as if he’d gone mad. “What on earth do you need that for?”

“The last time I went down a hole looking for a piece of the Serpent, I could have used it. I’m not making that mistake again.”

Isis didn’t say anything as they walked over to the base of the pyramid, but as he prepared to climb to the entrance of the shaft, she put a hand on his arm. “Be careful.”

He looked into her eyes. “I always
try
to be careful.” But the devil-may-care grin he tried for wouldn’t come.

“I mean it,” she said.

With the bow strapped tightly to his body, and knees, shoulders, and elbows all wedged tightly against the walls, Murphy was beginning to understand why the tomb robbers had left it to children and midgets to negotiate the pyramid’s air shafts. But a summer of caving in Mexico had taught him that even an average-sized man could worm his way through a surprisingly tight space if he could control his nerves. More often than not it was panic that made you stuck, not the physical dimensions of the hole you were squeezing through. He took a moment to slow his breathing, tried to relax his muscles, and inched forward,
feeling the warm air being sucked past him.
I may never make it out of here, but at least I’m not going to suffocate
, he thought.

After ten minutes his knees and elbows were scraped raw and he was starting to wonder if taking the cumbersome bow with him had been a mistake. Without it, he’d have reached the lip of the shaft by now. He closed his eyes, knowing from experience that total darkness would paradoxically lessen his sense of claustrophobia, and slid forward again.

A few minutes later his fingers closed over the edge of the shaft and he opened his eyes. Pulling himself forward, he looked down at the abyss below. Somewhere in the darkness was the tomb of Queen Hephrat, but the incline of the pyramid’s walls ensured that scaling them would be an impossible feat. He couldn’t imagine how the orginal tomb robbers had managed it.

He squeezed out and rolled onto a narrow ledge. When he was sure he could stand safely without toppling into the dark, he raised his eyes. The winds were swirling all around him, seemingly from all directions. The power of the winds was not strong enough to blow him from his perch on the landing, but his hair and clothes began to whip every which way in the shifting air currents.

As he began to get used to the winds, he noticed that he was not standing in total darkness. A thin stream of light from one of the air shafts at the top of the pyramid shone straight down into the abyss. That light seemed to have been designed purposefully to produce the incredible spectacle that Murphy now found himself watching.

Probably no more than one hundred feet across the shaft from where he stood, high over his head, there was an object
tumbling about miraculously in the void. The stream of light brought out a dull shine on what appeared to be a fist-sized lump of metal rolling about in midair. Just the right size, Murphy guessed, to be the head of the Brazen Serpent.