Havoc - v4 (40 page)

He swiveled the screen to show them what the computer had created. It looked exactly like the chunk of stone, only the computer had rendered it in green. Jacobi made a few adjustments and the digital rock turned gray. “There.”

“So now what?” Booker asked.

“Now I scan every piece of stone into the computer. When I’m done I will tell it the approximate shape of the object and it will digitally put it all back together.” He waited for a reaction. “Ah, now’s the time you say ‘Wow.’ The fuzzy logic algorithms alone took me the better part of three years to perfect. I’m asking the computer to make tens of millions of decisions by itself as to how to reassemble the digital pieces. This is cutting edge stuff.” Jacobi laughed. “What did you think, I was going to glue this mess back together or something?”

“No, not at all,” Mercer said to hide the fact that that’s exactly what he thought would happen. “A digital image is perfect. How long will it take?”

“I’ll get a couple of post docs in here to do the scut work of imaging the fragments. That’ll take some time because the imagers are slow and we have to number each piece if you want to reassemble the real thing.” His voice rose in pitch as he finished his sentence, as if asking if his team could avoid the tedium of cataloguing every fragment.

“No, I think you should number them. We might need the actual artifact.” Mercer just wanted the rebuilt stele. He thought it would look great in the bar.

“You got it then.” Jacobi shrugged, knowing he wouldn’t be doing the work anyway. “You passed a cafeteria on your way to this building. Why don’t you give us a couple of hours and we’ll see what we come up with.”

Mercer and Book Sykes returned to Jacobi’s lab at eleven thirty.

“Perfect timing,” the young scientist said to greet them. “We’re just about finished with the last small pieces.” The bits of the stele were lying on workbenches and atop equipment. All of them were in individually numbered glassine envelopes like the police use for collecting evidence.

“Well done.” Mercer smiled.

“I forgot to ask what this thing looked like originally. I was told it was a stele but I have no idea what that is.”

“A small obelisk. It was about seven feet tall.”

“The computer
can
do the digital reassembly without knowing the parameters since there’s only one way the bits and pieces fit exactly, but knowing its size and shape will save a whole lot of computing power and time.”

“I’m finished with the last one,” a post doc said, removing a chip of stone from the digital imager and slipping it into a clear envelope numbered eight hundred and sixty-three.

Mercer decided he’d hire someone to rebuild the stele for him.

“Okay then,” Jacobi said from his desk. He drew an obelisk using a wireless pen. “Like that?”

“A bit skinnier.”

“Got it.” He typed in the size. “Seven feet. And here we go.”

Mercer blinked and a realistic representation of the stele was on the screen in front of him. He could plainly see the hieroglyphs covering all four sides as the image rotated in space. “Holy shit. How long would it have taken if you didn’t know what it looked like?”

“Oh, God, at least a minute,” Jacobi replied smugly.

As Jacobi zoomed in on the stele’s surface, Mercer could see where Ahmad and his men had smashed it. There were a few chips missing that either Book didn’t find or that had been powdered by the blows. Still there was more than enough to work with from what Jacobi had been able to reconstruct.

Mercer shook his hand. “Thank you. You did an amazing job. I can see how this could help doctors map out how to rebuild broken bones and archaeologists to put ancient pottery back together. Truly remarkable.”

“I wish I could tell you why the government wanted something like this in the first place, but it’s classified.”

Booker Sykes smirked. “Only reason is to put blast zones back together after an explosion, to determine what type of bomb was used.”

Jacobi went pale. “How did you, I mean that’s, you couldn’t…”

Sykes clamped a big hand on the scientist’s shoulder. “Don’t sweat it, man. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Mercer and Booker drove straight to the Smithsonian. Mercer had called while Jacobi’s people were imaging the stele, and used his White House credentials to arrange for one of their top Egyptologists to be waiting. He’d also left a voice mail for Cali at NEST, telling her the hunt was on again.

A small woman in her sixties wearing a threadbare cardigan despite the rising heat was pacing the steps outside the Museum of Natural History, where she’d said she’d meet them.

She saw them mounting the steps and descended toward them with quick birdlike movements. “Do you have it?” she asked breathlessly. “You’re sure it was placed by Alexander the Great. Do you know what a find this is? I must study the actual stele.” She said all this in a rush, her words blending together in her excitement. “You are Dr. Mercer and Mr. Sykes, right?”

Mercer smiled. “That’s right. You’re Emily French?”

“Yes. I’ve already accosted two sets of tourists coming into the museum, hoping they were you. I just can’t believe this. There are so few new discoveries in Ptolemaic Egyptology anymore, at least that the Egyptians don’t publish themselves first.”

“Ptolemaic?”

“Yes, the time when Egypt was ruled by the Greeks, 331 to 30 B. C. It ended with Cleopatra, who was actually Cleopatra VII but no one would make movies about the first six. Oh, listen to me. I’m babbling. Let’s go to my office and take a look, shall we?”

“How can this possibly be a matter of national security?” she asked as she led them through the public part of the museum and into a warren of offices on the third floor. “This is an ancient artifact, not the plans for a nuclear bomb or something.”

Mercer almost gasped at how closely she’d guessed.

“We’re not at liberty to discuss that, ma’am,” Book replied in his deepest baritone.

“Oh, my.” She led them into her cramped and cluttered office, making an apology for the mess as if it wasn’t always so chock-full of books, stacks of papers, and knickknacks.

“And, Mrs. French,” Mercer added, “you are not allowed to discuss this matter with anyone. What I believe is written on the stele could change history and lead to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries since Tutankhamen. If I am correct and these findings are made public you will receive all due credit, I assure you.”

Her enthusiasm waned until Mercer slipped the computer disc into her laptop and the stele appeared on the screen. She plucked a pair of large glasses from her desk and settled them on her tiny nose. Mercer showed her how to use the mouse as Jacobi had taught him, to manipulate the image and zoom in on specific spots.

“It’s magnificent,” she breathed. “Look there, that’s the sign for battle. Here’s something about a burial, a king perhaps.” She kept changing her point of view, peering at the computer with her face only inches from the screen. “Some of this is in ancient Greek but here’s a cartouche. Let me see. It
is
about a king’s burial. That’s…Oh my Lord!” She looked across her desk at Mercer and Book, her eyes wide and owlish behind her glasses.

“Alexander the Great,” Booker said. “We know.”

“We believe the stele reveals the location of his tomb. It was placed near an old mine in Central Africa after Alexander’s death.”

“His tomb?” Her enthusiasm peaked again. “His actual tomb? Do you know how many people have searched for it over the years?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Can you do a full translation of the stele?” Mercer asked.

“Of course. It will take me some time, hieroglyphs are open to interpretation. They tell a story more than lay out words like a sentence.”

Mercer handed her a business card from a gold-and-onyx case he’d gotten as a gift years earlier from a petroleum heiress he’d dated for a short time. The number on the card was an answering service, so he scribbled his cell and home numbers on the back. “You can call me day or night.”

For dinner Cali cooked Mercer, Book, and Harry pasta carbonara, which she claimed was her best recipe and which made the men fear her worst. Her disappointment that she couldn’t be alone with Mercer had given way to excitement when he explained what they’d done that day and showed her a copy of Jacobi’s disc.

After the meal they settled in the bar with brandies, still talking and speculating about the possibilities. Beyond the alembic, Alexander’s tomb was rumored to be the richest, most magnificent in history. His crystal-and-gold sarcophagus was said to be the greatest work of art ever produced in the ancient world.

Mercer was on his second snifter when his phone rang. The conversation died with words still poised on lips. “Hello.”

“I have good news and bad news,” Emily French said without preamble.

“Okay,” Mercer said, drawing out the word, hoping but trying not to.

It took her five minutes to explain her findings. She summed up by telling him she’d e-mail the entire translation. He gave her the address, set the cordless back on the coffee table, and roared with laughter. The others stared at him, but soon his laughter caught on and they started to chuckle and laugh along with him, until Harry finally said, “Are you going to let us in on the joke?”

Mercer actually had to wipe tears from his eyes and take several deep breaths, and still the laughter was in his voice. “It was there all right.”

“The tomb’s location.”

“Yup. He wasn’t buried in Alexandria or the Sawi Oasis as some scholars speculate. They took his body south along the Nile and buried him in a cave at the very head of a valley they called Shu’ta.”

“So we go find this valley, grab the alembic, and put an end to this nightmare,” Cali said.

“Not so fast.” Mercer chuckled again. “Emily French did some research on our behalf and discovered the exact location of the Shu’ta Valley. In the process she learned that in 1970 it was submerged under about a hundred feet of water when they built the Aswân High Dam. I still want to go see it for myself but she says the area is totally inaccessible.” The irony of it all made Mercer break out in laughter all over again.

Mercer couldn’t help but recall the last time he was in Egypt. It had been a couple years earlier and he had spent two weeks cruising the Nile with an Eritrean diplomat named Salome. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since, making her memory just an enigmatic smile.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Cali said. They were seated by the pool of a luxury hotel on Elephantine Island right in the middle of the sluggish Nile. Between them and the town of Aswân, tourist boats and lateen-rigged feluccas plied the waters.

“I was here once with somebody,” Mercer replied, refusing to cover the truth with a white lie no matter the consequences.

“Lucky girl,” Cali said. “She comes here for a romantic getaway and I’m stuck chasing old tombs and dirty bombs.”

He should have known Cali didn’t have a jealous bone in her body.

Booker approached their table. In a black tank top and khaki cargo pants cut off at the knee, he made an imposing figure. He eased himself into a seat, mindful of his still-tender back. “We got us a boat.”

“Terrific.”

When Mercer had told Ira Lasko about the tomb’s location, the admiral had reported the findings to the President. Two hours later Ira phoned Mercer back, telling him that they didn’t want to involve the Egyptian government just yet. In truth they didn’t want to involve them at all if they could help it. By the terms of international law the tomb and everything within it belonged to Egypt. No one in the administration wanted to see another Middle Eastern nation with nuclear capabilities. Relations with Cairo were good but that didn’t mean they couldn’t deteriorate in the future. Like so many other Arab nations they had a minority population of fundamentalists eager to turn their country into a theocracy.

It was decided that Mercer, Cali, and Booker would travel to Egypt as tourists and reconnoiter the sunken valley first. If possible the President wanted them to snatch the alembic. A guided missile cruiser was being diverted from a courtesy call to Cyprus and would transit the Suez Canal. If they could get the alembic, they could meet the vessel on the deserted coast of the Red Sea. At that point the location of Alexander’s tomb could be revealed in such a way to politically benefit the United States. If they couldn’t retrieve the alembic covertly then it would be up to the diplomats to figure out the best solution.

Although the head of the Shu’ta Valley was only a half mile from the shoreline of Lake Nasser, Mercer decided to use a boat rather than an aircraft to reach the sunken tomb. They needed to bring a lot of equipment and he didn’t trust any of the charter flight companies to keep their activities secret.

Booker had gone out first thing this morning to find them a suitable vessel.

“What is it?” Mercer asked.

Booker smiled broadly. “Hope you’re keeping a running tab on what the government owes you ’cause the only thing that would work for us is a Riva.”

Mercer was familiar with the Italian luxury boat builder and could just imagine the rental price. “How bad?”

“She’s a sixty-foot Mercurius. Sleeps four and has a compressor for refilling scuba tanks, provided extra, of course. According to the lease agent she has a top speed of forty knots and was only available because the German couple who had rented it this week ran into a little difficulty when the husband found the wife in bed with his business partner. And because we don’t want to use the owner’s crew, the price is a paltry two grand a day.”

Cali winced. “Admiral Lasko will need to be awfully creative explaining this during his next budget hearing.”

Mercer slipped on his sunglasses. “When can we leave?”

“They’re topping the tanks right now.”

They checked out of the hotel, putting the three rooms on Mercer’s Amex, and took the ferry to Aswân’s riverfront corniche, where hawkers immediately tried selling them statues, postcards, T-shirts, and assorted tourist geegaws. There was a taxi stand near the main post office. Ten minutes later they were passing the Aswân High Dam, a two-mile-long concrete behemoth that held back the waters of the Nile.