Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear (4 page)

It was the dead of night, two hours before the dawn, and except for the movement of DeGroet’s men, the Plateau of Giza was silent, still. In the distance, the Great Pyramid—Egypt’s towering mausoleum for the Pharaoh Khufu, the last surviving Wonder of the Ancient World—loomed darkly against the deeper black of the sky. Around it, the smaller pyramids built to house Khufu’s wives and mother, and farther out the ones for Khafre and Menkaure, his successors, gave the plain a jagged skyline, like a giant jaw full of pointed teeth. The men, by comparison, looked tiny, insignificant, lost.

Immediately before them, facing them in its eternal crouch, blanketing them with its moon-cast shadow, was the Great Sphinx.

DeGroet and Sheba stood between the lion’s paws, Andras shining his flashlight’s paltry beam at the stone stele erected there by Thutmose IV. Other men bustled about, Hungarians in western clothing mixing with locals whose garb ranged from turban to fez to coarse burnoose, wrapped tight against the late-night desert chill. Camels stood beside cars, shivering and ducking their heads to nose at the sand. Tilting his own head back to look up, Gabriel saw the great beast towering above them all, its sculpted head as high in the air as the roof of the Discoverers League building back in New
York, its shoulders as broad as the building’s facade, and its torso stretching into the distance behind it for the better part of a football field’s length.

Its body, though eroded by thousands of years of exposure both to the elements and to mistreatment by men, still showed the muscular form of a prone lion, facing east to greet the rising sun as it ascended above the Nile. It had lain like that since before the pyramids themselves all were built. Two thousand years before the birth of Alexander the Great, one thousand years before the birth of Moses, the Sphinx had already been meeting each sunrise with its majestic stare for a century or more. Today the stare emerged from the face of a pharaoh, framed on either side by the traditional Egyptian headdress of state, his stone lips cracked and ruined, the better part of his great carved nose shattered off. But this pharaonic head looked strangely small compared to the size of the body and it was commonly thought that the statue had originally borne the head as well as the body of a lion—that it had begun its existence as a monumental statue of a cat, symbol of the sun god, and that only later, under the guidance of a despot mad with vanity, had the feline head been recarved into a man’s, making what had once been a gorgeous animal into a hybrid, a monster.

The Egyptians hadn’t called the monster “sphinx”—it had been the Greeks who’d given it this name when eventually they’d landed from across the northern seas, recognizing in its hybrid shape a resemblance to a local legend of their own, of a woman with a lion’s torso, an eagle’s wings, and a serpent’s tail. The word meant “strangler” or “one who chokes” in Greek, a reminder of how the Greek sphinx killed unlucky travelers who failed to answer her famous riddle. But the Great Sphinx of Giza had no such reputation for limiting himself to a single
method of slaughtering his prey, and in Arabic he was called simply Abul-Hôl, the Father of Fear.

“Why have you brought me here?” Sheba asked, when DeGroet’s silence had stretched on uncomfortably long. “What do you want from me?”

“You see that, Karoly? I told you she would be cooperative once we got her here.” Gabriel saw the man beside DeGroet, a short, broad fellow in black with a cigarette at his lips, nod impatiently. He looked around, intently scanning the area, and Gabriel ducked back behind the truck before Karoly’s gaze made it to where Gabriel was standing. This was DeGroet’s right hand, clearly—Andras was muscle, nothing more, dangerous only if you got within arm’s reach, but this Karoly would be dangerous at any distance.

“I didn’t say I would cooperate,” Sheba said. “I just asked—”

“Enough,” DeGroet said. “You will cooperate or I will cut that lovely dress off your body with three strokes of my sword and instruct every man here to take his pleasure with you. Do we understand each other?” He waited for a response. “Speak up, my dear. Do we understand each other?”

Sheba’s voice shook. “Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“We understand each other.”

“Do you believe I will do it or shall I give you a little taste to prove it?”

“No, I believe you.”

“Good,” DeGroet said, his voice softening again. “I regret the need to be so harsh with you, my dear, but we do have only a limited time here and there’s no telling how long it might take.”

“How long
what
might take?” Sheba said.

“Come here,” DeGroet said, and as they walked around the left paw of the Sphinx, their voices became quieter once more—enough so that Gabriel could no longer make out what was being said. He glanced around, picked a moment when no one was looking his way, then darted out from behind the truck to where a local stood with a shovel against one shoulder. Gabriel took aim carefully, then slugged him two-handed on the back of the head, catching him and the shovel both before either could land noisily on the ground. He dragged the man back to the truck, stripped him of his burnoose, and rolled him between the wheels, much as he had Stephen at the other end of the journey. Gabriel threw the burnoose on, slipped its hood over his head and crossed the layers of fabric over his chest to conceal the bandolier. He hefted the shovel and the rifle together and hastened off toward the long, low paw around which DeGroet and Sheba had disappeared.

He almost stumbled over them. They were both squatting on the ground, looking at a cleared-off patch near the base of the paw. Gabriel stopped himself a step shy of kicking DeGroet in the side and spun swiftly to face the other way. As he turned, he saw an expression of annoyance on Karoly’s face—the short man had seen how close a thing it had been, the near collision, and clearly saw no need to conceal his contempt for a worker so clumsy. Gabriel bent his head forward humbly, apologetically, trying to expose as little of his face as possible.

“When Thutmose found the Sphinx,” DeGroet was saying to Sheba, “only its head was visible—the rest was all covered by sand. He undertook to unearth it—to unbury it, as you say. But he only got as far as uncovering the figure’s chest and paws. The rest of the animal wasn’t completely uncovered until 1925.”

“And…?”

“And, my dear, once it was completely uncovered—
that is, once the tons of sand had all been removed and the stone surface cleared—the men working at the restoration congratulated themselves on a job well done, took some photographs and went home. But the job was
not
done. There was more to be uncovered—below and within.”

“What are you talking about, ‘below’? ‘Within’?”

“Over the past dozen years, analysis with ground-penetrating radar has revealed open spaces deep within the body of the Sphinx.”

“In a figure this large,” Sheba said, “carved from a single piece of stone, that’s almost inevitable. There are open spaces in any hill or mountain, too—they’re called caves. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“Well, that’s your opinion,” DeGroet said, “and you’re in fine company, but your company is wrong and so are you. Most of the open spaces, it is true, are naturally occurring, irregular—but one is very clearly a man-made chamber. How do I know this? Simple: I was the one who commissioned the analysis, and I am the only one who possesses the full results.”

“All right, you possess the results. What’s the point?”

“The point, Miss McCoy, is that there’s a way inside the Great Sphinx and a chamber in there that no one has entered in four thousand years. And the reason no one has found it until now is that the entrance was sealed up—buried, if you will. And two hundred generations of royal sons and archaeologists and treasure hunters and historians have failed to unbury it. Until now. I am going to unbury it—with, my dear girl,
your
help.”

“Why do you need me?” Sheba said.

“Because you know how to read and interpret the instructions,” DeGroet said. “Unlike the last eight people I sent in, all of whom are now dead.”

DeGroet snapped his fingers twice, pointed to the section of the paw they were next to, and then pulled Sheba away to one side. Two of the local workers—a hardy older man with wind-weathered cheeks and extravagant gray moustaches and a younger, beefier sort in a striped robe and fez, whose angular goatee and eyebrows made him look perpetually outraged—stepped forward and bent to the task of scraping out mortar around the edges of a block of stone that Gabriel hadn’t realized was a separate block to begin with. Which was the point, of course—for this block to have remained in place undetected for all these centuries, the seam would have had to have been pretty damn well concealed.

They made short work of it, no doubt because they’d done it at least eight times before. Grunting and straining, they then levered the stone out of the way, moving it first just a millimeter at a time, then an inch, then a few inches, and then all the way. It slid smoothly, though ponderously, across the ground and the two workers left it where it lay, smacking their hands together to get rid of dust or restore circulation or both. A third local, wearing the same sort of striped turban as the older man (and looking similar enough facially, Gabriel thought, that he was likely related—a son, a nephew, something), brought a handful of torches and passed them around: one to each of the first two workers, one to Karoly. He also
held onto one for himself, but that left one extra, and behind DeGroet’s back, Gabriel stepped forward to take it. No way was he going to let Sheba go in there by herself.

The son/nephew went first, after lighting his torch with a flick of a lighter. The lighter went around from hand to hand and the torches all went alight quickly—they must have been doused in some sort of accelerant. Karoly followed the young man in, then DeGroet, pushing Sheba ahead of him, one of her bare and goose pimpled arms in his left fist, his sword in his right. The two workers who’d moved the stone looked at Gabriel then, offering him the privilege of following directly behind the boss, but Gabriel had his own reasons for not wanting to get too close to DeGroet and waved the others on ahead. They grabbed some bags of supplies from the ground and went inside. Then Gabriel ducked to squeeze through the dark entrance himself. As soon as he did, he realized that this was not just a passageway—it was a crudely carved staircase, descending steeply into the rock below the statue.

The steps were about half a foot high and Gabriel counted fifty-three of them before the descent bottomed out. So they were some twenty-five feet below the statue’s base. The passageway opened up, widening slightly, and the torchlight cast into relief a set of carved images on either side. Bordered with a double row of hieroglyphs above and below were long, narrow strips of art depicting seated deities with animal heads, men of various descriptions, what looked like scenes of court life on the left wall and of farming on the right. Sheba stopped at several points to examine a particular image or piece of writing, then continued on in silence.

Gabriel could only imagine what this was like for her—it was extraordinary enough for him, and he wasn’t a linguist with a specialization in ancient languages. To
someone in Sheba’s field, this corridor by itself was a lifetime’s work, handed to her on a platter. At the same time, she was twenty-five feet underground, in a claustrophobic stone corridor, breathing musty air and not enough of it, surrounded by men with torches and blades who’d already kidnapped her twice and threatened to do worse. Of course Gabriel was there, too—but she didn’t know that, and there was no way he could tell her.

They came, eventually, to another staircase, this one leading up, and from the direction they’d been walking Gabriel concluded they were now ascending into the belly of the beast, literally: by his mental calculations he’d have said they were more or less at the geometric center of the Sphinx, equally far from the right and left sides, from front and back. The steps here were taller, and Gabriel only counted thirty of them before they had reached a chamber at the top. Gabriel hung back, pulled the fabric of the burnoose around to cover his nose and mouth and held his torch away from his face so that he remained in shadow.

“Rashidi,” DeGroet said and gestured at the young man in the lead. “Show her.”

Rashidi looked to his older relative for guidance, received a nod, and then cautiously brought his torch closer to the far wall.

Gabriel noticed two things immediately—three, really, if you counted the smell. The first was a rectangular panel on the wall, similar in size to the stele outside and filled with what to his eyes looked like similar writing. The second was a hole in the wall at waist height, circular and dark, just about wide enough for a trim man to fit inside.

Then there was the smell, which was the unwholesome odor of a morgue or a battlefield, the smell of bodies that had lain out too long and been neglected. Gabriel
wondered if it was the remains of the unfortunate men DeGroet had sent in earlier that he was smelling. Even if they’d removed the bodies (and he didn’t see them lying around anywhere), this was certainly not the sort of place you could air out afterwards.

The flickering torchlight played over the writing on the wall and Gabriel saw Sheba’s face fixed in concentration. Her lips moved rapidly but without sound, as though she were talking to herself.

“You see what we are dealing with, Miss McCoy?” DeGroet said. “We’ve had the symbols translated as best we could—which was not very well, I’m afraid. But even if we knew accurately what each symbol meant, that wouldn’t tell us anything by itself, would it?”

“No,” Sheba said.

“So you tell us, please. What is on the other side of this wall, and how can we get to it?”

“It’s a…a reliquary, a storage chamber for, for…well, it says here ‘the remains of the gods,’ but the word for ‘remains’ is ambiguous, it could also refer to artifacts—artifacts depicting the gods, ritual artifacts, that sort of thing.” She paused. “There is a warning that says only priests shall enter. ‘A priest of Sekhmet may cross the threshold’—you see the lioness figure, there, that’s Sekhmet.”

“Good, good,” DeGroet said. “And how shall they enter?”

Sheba approached the wall, ran one index finger along the ancient images.

“‘Through the portal’—that’s this here, I’ve got to assume,” she said, pointing to the circular hole, “‘but,’ it says, ‘take heed the supplicant shall bear all right and proper offerings to…placate, mollify, something like that…the jealous heart of Hathor.’”

“And what does that mean?” DeGroet said.

Sheba shrugged. “There were many forms of ritual offering in ancient Egypt. Burnt offerings, bowls of grain, poured water, incantations.”

“And which form does it say is called for here?”

“It doesn’t.”

“It must,”
DeGroet shouted, and his voice echoed from the close stone walls. “It must. Read it again.”

“I already—”

DeGroet whipped his sword up. The point of the blade danced an inch away from Sheba’s throat. “Read it again, I said.”

She stepped back, turned once more to face the inscription.

“‘…all right and proper offerings…jealous heart…’” Sheba’s voice took on a quality of despair as she ran her eyes along the rows of symbols again. Then her voice changed. “Wait, hold on. Here it talks about Hathor’s role as guardian of the floods, ensurer of fertility…it says, ‘Her heart is’…gladdened?…no, no, made light, ‘her heart is made light by the vision of her holy ones loaded down with the river’s wealth.’”

“The river’s wealth,” DeGroet said.

“It’s an expression you see in inscriptions during the Early Dynastic Period,” Sheba said. “They were a desert people and depended wholly on the Nile for survival. The river’s wealth was its water—that and the red silt it left behind, the rich dirt in which they could cultivate crops.”

“So what is it telling us,” DeGroet said, a mocking tone in his voice, “that we must carry mud to enter?”

“I don’t know,” Sheba said unhappily. “All I can tell you is what it says.”

DeGroet turned aside, surveyed his men.

Gabriel hung back, kept his chin tucked down.

“Zuka,” DeGroet said, pointing with his sword at the the older man, who was loaded down with the pair of
canvas rucksacks he’d picked up on the way in. “You have canteens in those bags of yours?” The man nodded. “Mix up some mud.”

“Mud?” Zuka said. “With what?”

“You have a sandbag?” DeGroet said, and Zuka nodded again. “Use that.”

“But—”

“Use it,” DeGroet snapped. He turned to Rashidi. “You will carry it in.”

The young man’s face went pale, and Zuka’s head snapped up. “Not my son, please,
effendi,
” he said. “I will go. I will carry it.”

“You?” DeGroet growled. “Do you think you could fit inside that hole, you fat ox? Or Hanif—” he waved at the man with the goatee “—or Karoly?”

Karoly frowned at this.

“Send the woman,” Zuka said.

“I do not trust the woman,” DeGroet said. “Your son will do it.”

“But he will die,
effendi.
”

“He most certainly will die if he doesn’t go, since I will kill him, and you with him. Now make your mud.” Zuka miserably returned to mixing water from one of his goatskin canteens with the contents of a heavy sandbag.

“You,” DeGroet said, turning back to Sheba. “You will tell us what he is to do with this mud.”

“I don’t know!”

“Figure it out,” DeGroet snapped. “You have one minute.” He turned to Karoly. “It is like pulling teeth, sometimes. Getting anything done.”

Sheba went back to the writing, searching it for any further indication of how the offering was to be presented. Zuka remained kneeling on the floor, taking the sand and dirt that had filled the bag and mixing it with water in a loose, wet pile on the chamber’s floor. Rashidi
stood alone in the center of the room, visibly trembling.

Gabriel’s hand tightened on the grip of the rifle in his hand. He would have to act—he had to do something. The only question was when. He could pull his guns now, grab Sheba, try to escape, but even assuming he didn’t get them both killed, the best he could hope for was to make it out alive—he’d never know what lay beyond the hole, what the ancient reliquary held. If there was any chance Sheba could coach Rashidi into opening it successfully…

“Inside the hole,” Sheba said, “there should be a basin, some sort of recessed area. He should put the offering in that. You’ll need to fill it completely,” she said to Rashidi. He nodded furiously, desperately. “Make sure you bring enough.”

The pile on the ground had grown considerably—Zuka had split open a second sandbag and emptied a second canteen. Anything to ensure his son’s success.

DeGroet flipped a metal pail into the air with the tip of his sword. Hanif caught it. “He can use that,” DeGroet said. “Go on, fill it.” Hanif fell to the task, scooping handfuls of the mud into the container.

When it was filled, he exchanged a glance with Zuka and handed the pail to Rashidi.

“Go slowly,” DeGroet told the young man. “You don’t want to end up like the others, do you?” Rashidi violently shook his head. “Then for god’s sake, be careful. You understand what you are going to do?” Rashidi nodded. “Then tell me.”

“I am going to pour the mud into a basin.”

“It may not be an actual basin,” Sheba said. “It might just be a, a, a depression, a shallow area. Or a hole—there could just be a hole.”

“A hole,” Rashidi said.

“Enough,” DeGroet said. “In with you.” And he struck
Rashidi smartly on the backs of his legs with the flat of his blade.

The young man took off his cloak and crawled into the hole, pushing the container of mud before him. It was a tight fit. He wriggled to get his shoulders and head inside, then his torso, and finally his legs. For a moment, his feet remained, sticking out of the hole, but one at a time they vanished inside, too.

A moment later they heard his voice, muffled and echoing in the enclosed space. “I can’t see anything,” he said.

“Feel for it,” Sheba called out. “On the bottom.”

Silence.

“Do you feel anything?” she shouted.

“Rashidi?” DeGroet said. “She asked you a question.”

“I do,” his voice came. “It’s like a bowl, with sloping sides.”

“Good,” Sheba said. “Are you filling it?”

“Yes,” came the voice. And a moment later: “It’s full.” And then: “What should I do now?”

DeGroet looked at Sheba who had nothing to offer but a look of grave uncertainty. “Keep going,” he shouted.

“No,” Sheba said, “don’t, it could be booby-trapped—”

They all heard a sound then, a terrible sound, the sound of stone moving against stone deep within the wall, rapidly gathering momentum, like a heavy boulder as it topples off the side of a cliff, gaining speed as it sweeps past; and then the sound of a collision, but only briefly, as though the object in the stone’s path had offered only token resistance and been plowed through.

“No!” Zuka shouted, and he ran forward, dived head-first into the hole himself. DeGroet had been right—he could not fit past his shoulders, but he knelt with his head and arms inside, reaching for something, groping,
then finally grasping and pulling, extracting. Gabriel saw Zuka’s head pop out of the hole first, then his arms emerged, and in each hand one of his son’s boot heels. Zuka pulled at his son’s body and it came, shins and thighs and lower torso—but where his upper torso should have been there was nothing. He’d been sliced neatly in half at the breastbone.

Zuka fell back, howling.

“Of
course
it’s trapped,” DeGroet said, disgusted. “Whatever did you think you were here for?”