Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (20 page)

Jack stopped reading, his mind reeling. For Howard Carter, the Fatimid ring had pushed the story beyond credulity, yet it was precisely the detail that nailed it for Jack. He stared at Jeremy. “It’s the ring, isn’t it? That’s the clincher.”

“Now you know why I was so excited when Maria showed me the Halevi letter. Carter nails it for us by identifying the caliph as Al-Hakim and the ring as a signet, worn only by the caliph and his immediate family. Corporal Jones must have stumbled across his body. What he meant by his new friend pointing the way out is a little mystifying, but Jones may not have been entirely grounded at that point. He’d been underground for weeks, probably months, and may have been hallucinating. Do you remember Wilson in the Tom Hanks film
Castaway
? People alone in desperate situations make friends out of the most unlikely objects, and a skeleton at least has a semblance of humanity.”

Jack’s eyes were ablaze. “The other breakthrough is Carter’s reference to the ruined fort on the banks of the Nile, giving us a modern way marker to another entrance
to the underground complex. If those ruins can be pinpointed, then there’s a chance, a
small
chance, that we might be able to find the entrance under the river that swallowed up Jones and the French diver, and an even smaller chance that we might get in.”

Jeremy grinned at him. “A small chance is still a chance, isn’t it?”

“Damn right it is.” Jack pulled the satellite phone out of his bag, pressed the key for the secure IMU line, and waited for the connection. He turned to Jeremy. “Can you email that scan to Lanoswki, Costas, and Aysha?”

Jeremy typed quickly and tapped a key. “Done.” He shut down the computer and slipped it into his bag. “We’ve got to go. Our flight’s boarding.”

Jack peered at him. “What do you mean,
our
flight?”

“You didn’t think I’d come all the way out to Cyprus just to see you and then return, did you? I’m coming to see Rebecca too.”

“Does she know?”

“Remember, I didn’t even know myself that I was coming until this morning. I sent her a text from Heathrow but haven’t had a reply. The last I heard from her yesterday was that she was going underground.”

“That would be Temple Mount,” Jack said, pursing his lips. “I hope she hasn’t pushed the boundaries. That place is a tinderbox at the best of times. David Ben-Gurion is due to meet me at Tel-Aviv Airport and take me straight there.”

“IMU’s Israel representative?”

Jack nodded. “I’m glad you’re coming with me, Jeremy. Rebecca’s got something she really wants to show me, but it looks as if I’m going to be doing a quick turnaround. I may not have more than a few hours in Jerusalem.”

Jeremy looked at him shrewdly. “Back to Egypt?” Jack nodded.

“David’s a reserve captain in the Israeli navy. With any luck he’ll be able to get a reconnaissance flight to divert out to
Sea Venture
for a paradrop, and then it’s a short flight by helicopter to Alexandria.”

“Sounds like a return to special forces days, Jack.”

“The real test is going to be Cairo. It was bad enough when we left, but by tomorrow it could be in the grips of an extremist coup. Somehow we’ve got to get through that if we’re going to get to this ruined fort beside the Nile south of the city.”

“By ‘we,’ do you mean you and Costas?”

Jack looked nonplussed. “Of course. If he’s up to it.”

“You need to access some satellite imagery to look for the site of that fort.”

“Lanowski will be onto it the moment he reads that email.”

The satellite phone flashed green to indicate a link, and Jack quickly tapped in a number and raised it. After a few moments, a familiar voice answered.

“Jack?”

“Costas? How soon can you be in Alexandria?”

“The Embraer is due to touch down on its return flight to Valencia in two hours, and it can be refueled for Herakleion in Crete immediately. From there I’ll take the Lynx to
Sea Venture
two hundred miles due south. Twenty hours from now, maybe a little more.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it all mapped out.”

“I’ve learned to be one step ahead of the game, Jack. I knew we were going back even before we left Egypt.”

“Equipment?”

“I’ll get everything together on
Sea Venture
. E-suits, rebreathers, underwater scooters. I’ll need to score some extra oxygen off the equipment storekeeper on
Sea Venture
. We’re always somehow in short supply with them. But I’ll manage. No worries, Jack. You just do what you have to do with your daughter.”

“Bring my Beretta, Costas. You know where it is.”

“Roger that. And I’ll be visiting the armory on
Sea Venture
.”

“Rendezvous Alexandria, twenty-four hours from now?”

“You got it. Over and out.”

Jack quickly replaced the phone in his bag and got up just as the announcement came on for final boarding.
He strode alongside Jeremy to the departure gate, his mind filled with what he had read.
A great chamber with many lidded jars on shelves, tall jars, hundreds of them, filled with papyrus
. He was on a knife-edge still, but coursing with excitement. If all went well, a little over a day from now he would know whether the soldier’s story was the key to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made. He glanced at his watch, wishing the hours forward. He could hardly wait to tell Rebecca.

J
ack had arranged to meet Rebecca outside the Jaffa Gate into the Old City of Jerusalem. He saw her there now, in the shade of the ancient wall chatting to two Israeli soldiers who were guarding the entrance. In the last year since turning nineteen, she had grown into a self-confident young woman, her slender limbs and height coming from Jack but her dark hair and complexion reflecting her mother’s Italian background. She was wearing khaki trousers, a T-shirt, and sturdy hiking boots and had on a small backpack. Jack knew that she had spotted him but had not wanted to attract attention, so she was waiting for him to come to her.

He quickly led Jeremy across the busy street and the pedestrian square and reached her, nodding at the soldiers and giving her a kiss on the cheek. She embraced Jeremy and turned back to Jack. “Good trip?”

“We were met at Tel Aviv Airport by a friend of mine who dropped us off just up the hill.”

“I watched the live stream of the sarcophagus being raised on CNN on my iPhone. It seemed to go without a hitch.”

Jack nodded. “It was a relief to get it on deck. Now the politics begin.”

She peered at him. “Uncle Costas sent me a text just
before you arrived at the airport. Said he’d thanked you but had forgotten to say he owes you. Usually, when he sends me a message like that to pass on to you, it means that something bad happened, but the unspoken hallowed code means you can’t thank each other directly because if you do, then the next time it won’t work out so well. Am I right? And what about that bandage on your arm?”

Jack cleared his throat. “Okay. There was a small hitch, but everything worked out fine in the end, and we’re all in one piece. I’ll tell you about it later. The crucial thing is that we found the missing fragment of the plaque that was inside the sarcophagus, and it seems to give us a location for getting into the underground complex from the Nile.”

“So you’re definitely going back to Egypt?”

“The friend who dropped us here is going to pick me up again in the early evening and take me to the coast south of Tel Aviv, where I’m taking a ride on an Israeli naval reconnaissance plane out to
Sea Venture
.”

“You doing a paradrop?”

“Yep.”

“You
promised
me. Do you remember? Almost two years ago.”

“I said I dropped out of planes only when it was absolutely necessary and not for the thrills. Anyway, you’re your own boss now. You can arrange a paradrop with the IMU training director.”

“Yes,”
she exclaimed, putting an arm around Jeremy. “We can do it together, Jeremy. Our first proper holiday, just the two of us.”

Jeremy looked more studious than usual as he stroked his beard. “Not really my scene. Diving, yes, maybe, but jumping out of planes? No. I was thinking we could spend a week back in Naples with your mother’s family to give me a chance to get up to speed with the conservation work on the scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum. Some amazing new texts are being revealed. You could help me piece them together.”

Rebecca looked aghast and pushed him away. “I’m talking
holiday
, Jeremy, not work.”

Jack cracked a grin. “Remember what Maria has in store for you. She asked me to tell you that the trip to look at the monasteries on Mount Athos is all fixed.”

“You been seeing Maria, Dad?”

“In Cairo. She came out to look at some new manuscript finds in the Ben Ezra synagogue.”

“I know about the Geniza. You mean you’ve been seeing her at the bottom of a hole in a wall.”

“Something like that.”

She shook her head. “You’re the one who needs a holiday with Maria, Dad, not me.”

Jack smiled at her. Ten years of schooling in New York had given Rebecca not only her distinctive accent but also a candor that he found refreshing, even if it sometimes presented him with awkward truths.

He glanced at the Jaffa Gate, at the medieval crenellations and stonework that seemed to rise unperturbed above the tides of humanity that swept beneath it, the countless pilgrims and warriors, merchants and prophets who had come to Jerusalem in its long history. The last time he had stood at this spot had been more than twenty years before, on the eve of the first Gulf War, when Jerusalem had been devoid of tourists and the air-raid sirens were sounding. Standing here then, with his khaki bag slung over his shoulder and his camera poised, he had felt like a diver about to plunge into the unknown, and he felt that same frisson now. The crisis that again loomed over Israel and the Near East lent the same sense of danger to the place. He turned to Rebecca. “Okay. I’ve told you about my latest find. Now it’s your turn to show us yours.”

Ten minutes later Jack hurried with Jeremy through a maze of alleyways and narrow streets in the Coptic quarter of Jerusalem. They were trying to keep up with Rebecca as she led them deeper into the city. Apart from
army and police patrols and local men who eyed them as they passed, there were few people to be seen, the usual bustle of activity reduced to the minimum as people stayed indoors with the threat of missile attack. Rebecca stopped at a poky hole-in-the-wall street vendor, greeted the woman behind the counter like an old friend, and waited while she squeezed her a fresh orange juice. She took a bread roll as well. “Breakfast,” Rebecca said apologetically. “Didn’t have time earlier.”

Jack shook his head when she offered to buy him one. “You came here to volunteer for the Temple Mount archaeological project. How’s pot washing going?”

She finished the roll and wiped her mouth. “Yeah. Good.”

“Really?”

“It was fun. For about ten minutes.” She gave Jack a glum look. “They’ve got twenty metric tons of the stuff, Dad. I did a quick calculation as I was sitting in front of my first tray. With each sherd averaging five centimeters across, that means fifty million sherds.”

“Each one a precious link to history. And one day one of them might just provide a clue to something bigger.”

“I know. I get that. It’s kind of a privilege. And it is special to a lot of the volunteers who’ve never done archaeology before. But I’ve been spoiled, haven’t I? I was digging at Troy at the age of fourteen, and hunting for Ghengis Khan’s tomb in Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan the year after that. Anyway, I’ve been finding my own links to history.”

“I’d guessed you might be.”

She swerved into an alleyway lined with dingy metalworking shops, swerved again into a smaller alley with men squatting along the side, smoking and talking in low voices, and then came to a halt in front of a decaying wooden doorway in the shadows beneath a balcony. The man squatting in the alley beside the entrance nodded at her, peered suspiciously at Jack and Jeremy, and then unlocked the door and pushed it open.

“That’s my friend Abdul,” Rebecca said quietly, leading
them into a gloomy passageway. “He’s the one who showed me the way to the tunnel entrance.”

“What tunnel?” Jack said.

“Patience, Dad. Here first.”

They reached another door, and Rebecca knocked. A small boy opened it, grinning broadly when he saw Rebecca. He ushered them in, and then locked and bolted the door behind them. The room looked like a living room, with shoes lined up beside the door, a table covered with schoolbooks and papers, and the typical furnishings of a well-appointed Arab household. The boy went over to the far wall and pushed aside an ungainly looking wooden bureau, the base sliding easily on rollers. Behind it was another door, and the boy beckoned them through. The space beyond was dark, with only a crack of light visible at the far end. He flicked on a light switch, led them to a door with a lit space beyond, and ushered them in.

Jack had already guessed where they were going from the smell. It was the same smell he remembered from the storerooms of the Cairo Museum and the Geniza chamber: the smell of ancient artifacts and decay, of millennia-old dust and the organic matter that built up in long-sealed tombs. It was as if he were entering an Aladdin’s Cave of antiquities, with artifacts of every description filling every available space: pottery vessels of all types and periods, oil lamps, metalwork, bronze armor, and weapons, much of it intact and in spectacular condition. It was as if all the top museums of the world had been shorn of their best exhibits of Near Eastern and biblical antiquities, and yet Jack knew that none of this material had ever seen the light of day in a museum, that it had all been spirited out of tombs and dark places unknown to archaeologists and destined for the international black market in antiquities.

A small wizened man appeared, white bearded and wearing a robe and a tatty red fez. His bloodshot eyes lit up when he saw Rebecca, and he took her hands, clasped them between his own, and shook them. Then he let her
go and clicked his fingers at the boy, who went off the way they had come. He turned to the other two, and his eyes alighted on Jack. “So, you must be the famous
Jack Howard
,” he said, rolling the words slowly, his English thickly accented. “You think you know what happened to the temple menorah, eh? Well, I know where the rest of the treasure lies. Maybe you give a little, I give a little, and I will tell you.” He laughed, a low cackle. “You have a fine figure of a daughter, eh? She has the makings of a tomb raider. I think nobody messes with her.”

Jack looked at him coldly. “Nobody messes with her,” he repeated.

The man peered at Jack, and then waved an arm in the air dismissively. “Yes, yes, we know all about that. She has a bodyguard, yes, your man Ben-Gurion? We could have made him disappear, but we are all friends, yes? You are in the business of antiquities, Jack Howard, and I am a businessman too, and we can help each other. It has been this way in Jerusalem for more than a thousand years, ever since my ancestors began selling pieces of the holy cross to the Crusaders.”

Rebecca turned and glared at Jack. “You had me
followed
?”

Jack continued to hold the man’s gaze. “Precisely for this reason.”

The boy returned with a tray of little glasses of tea, which he offered around. Jack took one, dropped a sugar cube into it, and sipped the strong liquid. He replaced it on the tray. “So, I take it you are an antiquities dealer?”

The man opened his arms expansively. “I am Abdullah al-Harasi. My shop is one of the best known along the Via Dolorosa. I am licensed by the antiquities authority, and everything I sell in my shop comes with an export permit. Every day I sell to tourists: coins, lamps, little pottery vessels, mementoes of antiquity that bring them closer to whichever prophet or messiah they hold dear, inshallah. I sell to them, that is, when there is not another
war looming. Business has been difficult these last months.”

“And this is your storeroom?” Jack said.

Abdullah opened his arms wider. “This is where I keep my prize items, for select customers.”

Jack knew that those words were a thinly veiled code for artifacts excavated illegally and sold to those who could get antiquities out of the country without a license. He hoped that Rebecca had not gotten herself in too deep. The uninitiated could easily be seduced into an agreement over a glass of tea. If some kind of deal had been struck, it might be difficult to extract themselves without things getting ugly. The antiquities black market was a murky underworld that only those experienced in its ways could negotiate without coming to serious grief. Even David’s surveillance team could not prevent what might go on behind closed doors. For a moment Jack felt culpable, responsible. His decision to let Rebecca come to Jerusalem at this time might have been more fallout from his quest in Sudan and Egypt, preoccupying him when better judgement might have prevailed.

Rebecca finished her tea and replaced the cup. “Abdullah brought me here after I’d visited the antiquities dealers asking if anyone had Egyptian antiquities that might have been found in Jerusalem.”

Abdullah reached under the table next to him and took out a square object about twice the width of his hand. “By good fortune I had just what she wanted, eh?” He held the object up so that Jack and Jeremy could see. It was like a miniature icon, an ancient frame of hardwood surrounding a plaque of beaten gold about ten centimeters across. Abdullah held it under the bare light-bulb that lit up the room. To his astonishment, Jack saw the Aten sun symbol in the upper right corner, the radiating arms with upturned hands extending from it.

“Akhenaten,” he murmured, moving for a better view. “It can only be Akhenaten.”

“There’s a hieroglyphic cartouche below,” Rebecca
said. “And you can see partial clusters of hieroglyphs on the left-hand side that show that this plaque was actually cut out of a larger sheet of gold, a decorative cover for a curved surface.”

Jack’s mind was racing. He had seen something like this before, only a few days ago. And the hieroglyphs in the complete cartouche were identical to those that Hiebermeyer had found in the tomb of the general in the mummy necropolis, on the wall painting that recounted his achievements: a sheaf of corn, two half circles, two birds. “That’s the Egyptian word for the Israelites,” he exclaimed. “This is incredible.”

“Turn it over, Abdullah,” Rebecca said.

He did so, and on the back Jack saw an inscription in black ink, like a museum acquisition label. He immediately felt a cold shiver down his spine. If this was a stolen antiquity from a museum, then they were in even deeper waters. He peered at it and read it out. “Jerusalem, 27 April 1864, CRW, RE.”

“This was once a possession of General Gordon of Khartoum,” Abdullah said.

Jack looked at him in disbelief. “
Gordon of Khartoum?
How do you know?”

“Because my great-grandfather got it from him.”

Jack stared at the letters again, racking his brain.
Of course
. “CRW. That’s Charles Richard Wilson, surely. RE means Royal Engineers. Wilson was employed by the Survey of Palestine in the 1860s. He surveyed extensively in Jerusalem and had an abiding interest in archaeology.”