Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (21 page)

“Later General Sir Charles Wilson,” Rebecca said. “I worked that out too, and I looked him up. He was intelligence chief during the campaign to rescue Gordon from Khartoum in 1884, and a close personal friend of Gordon himself.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Abdullah said, holding up one hand and counting off the names. “Wilson. Warren. Gordon. Kitchener. All of them British officers who came to Palestine to map the land for Queen Victoria, but who became
obsessed with antiquities and the ancient past. Men little different from you and me, Jack Howard.” He turned the artifact over in his hands as he eyed Jack. “You wish to purchase this? For your museum? It did not come to my family cheap. But for you, a bargain price.”

Jack raised his hands. “Not this time.”

Abdullah considered it again, and then handed it to him. “Accept this as my gift. In hopes of future business, inshallah. If you ever wish to sell the artifacts from your shipwreck finds, I offer myself as your agent. My clients include the richest Russian oligarchs, those of Jewish background who now have interests in Israel and can ship antiquities unseen back to the mother country. You could be a rich man, Jack Howard. You could reclaim the Howard family fortunes. Think of your daughter’s education. Of her future.”

Jack placed the object firmly back in the Abdullah’s hands. “I’m grateful for your offer and your hospitality. But you know my position.”

“Ah, yes. Archaeology versus treasure hunting. Artifacts consigned out of sight from an excavation to a museum store, or artifacts made available for anyone to own and enjoy. But there is a bridge, my friend, and we can meet in the middle.”

“You know I can’t be associated with an unprovenanced artifact acquired from an antiquities dealer. All our museum exhibits are finds from our own excavations.”

“We could photograph it,” Jeremy said.

Abdullah wagged a finger, suddenly looking less amiable. “No photography.”

Jack turned to Rebecca. “Do you have anything more you want me to see?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Maybe. But you might not think it’s safe for me. Without an escort.”

Abdullah cackled and twisted his hands in the air. “Fathers, daughters, eh? I have four of them. Two are doctors, one is a police colonel, and one is in my business. One day the women will rule Jerusalem, eh? It is
the men who have made such a mess of this place over the last two thousand years. Men of the Roman army, of the jihad, of the Crusades; the British, the Zionists, and the fundamentalists today. Look at the Al-Aqsa mosque. The authorities prevent Jews from worshipping at their holiest site, the platform of the temple. Jews must crowd against the edges, praying at the Western Wall, digging tunnels into the rock to get as close as they can, but no farther. If women were in charge, they would be more accommodating, eh? As accommodating as you and I could be in our business, Jack Howard. Think of my offer. You know how to contact me. Inshallah.”

“Thank you for helping my daughter.”

Abdullah waved his hand dismissively. “Go now. Follow your daughter. She has a good nose for treasure. My son will show you out.”

Ten minutes later they were again hurrying through the labyrinth of the Old City, along streets and alleys that Jack recognized as leading toward the Western Wall and the site of the Temple Mount archaeological project. Rebecca slowed down and gave him a piercing look. “I still can’t believe you had me followed.”

“David Ben-Gurion’s team is the best there is. They’re all ex–Israeli special forces surveillance experts, several of them Palestinian Arabs who know how to blend in.”

“Not very well if Abdullah knew about your guy.”

“David would have wanted them to see him. Abdullah can puff himself up like a caliph, but he knows perfectly well that with any hint of trouble, David could shut down his entire business. He’s allowed to carry on only because there’s a delicate balance to be maintained. The authorities stand back from business activities that they know are shady but have been part of the culture of this place for hundreds of years. And what Abdullah didn’t know is that three of the Arabs squatting in the street outside were David’s men. David had guessed where you’d be taking me from his earlier surveillance
and had provided me with a phone with an emergency beacon. If I’d activated it, the response would have been instantaneous.”

Rebecca looked away. “I just wish you’d told me.”

“That would have defeated the purpose, wouldn’t it? You would have tried to shake him. That’s probably what I would have done at your age.”

“The difference between us is that my mother was from one of the oldest Camorra families in Naples. I know how to handle myself with these kinds of people. Remember how my mother died? They thought she was about to shop them to the police, and she suddenly became one family member too many. I know about boundaries and what happens if you cross them.”

Jeremy coughed. “It’s a pity we don’t have photos of that artifact.”

Rebecca sighed, dug in her trousers pocket, and pulled out her phone and held it up so they could see as she scrolled through a series of images that showed the golden sheet from numerous angles in close-up. “You didn’t think I was going to leave without that, did you? As Abdullah said, he’s the father of four daughters, and I know how to tug on those strings. During my previous visit, I told him I felt faint and asked for a glass of water. His son wasn’t at his beck and call because he was at school, so Abdullah left me alone in the storeroom for a few minutes.”

Jeremy gave Jack a rueful glance. “Nice one, Rebecca.”

She held the phone up to Jack. “Well? What do you really think?”

Jack’s mind had been in a tumult since they had left Abdullah’s lair. “The last time I saw anything like that was on the floor of the Red Sea with Costas five days ago.”

“You’re certain it’s genuine?” Jeremy asked.

Jack nodded. “Absolutely. And more than that, I’m sure that Maurice would confirm that it comes from the golden facing of an Egyptian war chariot. After our
find in the Red Sea, I spent enough time looking at the chariot fragments and depictions with Maurice to be certain of it.”

“Any theories?”

“About how a piece of a chariot of Akhenaten mentioning the Israelites ends up in Jerusalem?” Jack ducked sideways under an awning to avoid a passing army patrol, and the other two stopped beside him. “Well, it’s most likely to have been contemporary, brought here at the time of Akhenaten’s reign or soon afterward. Maurice told me that a pharaoh’s cartouche and any other identifying features were often beaten out of armor and other military embellishments after his death, to be replaced by those of his successor. The one way you might expect an artifact like this to survive is on the battlefield, as a consequence of an Egyptian defeat where the spoils were picked up by the victor. Akhenaten wasn’t a great campaigning pharaoh, and in fact we know of only one major set-piece encounter, though it is one that can be counted as a resounding defeat, perhaps the worst disaster an Egyptian army ever suffered.”

“The loss of the chariot army in the Red Sea,” Jeremy said.

“It’s the only plausible scenario.”

“But if the Israelites had already fled from their cliff-top encampment, how do you account for the recovery of this object?”

“Somebody stayed behind to watch,” Jack said. “Moses would have wanted confirmation that the deed was done, that his people could continue their trek northeast toward the Holy Land without the risk of further Egyptian attack. We know there must have been Israelite eyewitnesses because of the account of the destruction of the chariot army in the Book of Exodus, something we now know is based closely on fact. Lanowski’s study of the Landsat imagery suggests that there could have been an old path leading down to the beach that Costas and I explored between our dives, immediately below the point where the chariot army had careered off the
cliff and brought down a landslide with it. Imagine a couple of Israelite spies making their way down among the carnage afterward and finding a decorated wrecked chariot in the shallows, maybe that of a general. They could have recognized a hieroglyphic reference to the Israelites and wrenched that off to take back to Moses as evidence, an artifact that might later have been treasured as one of the small number of objects brought from Egypt to the Holy Land.”

“Where it remained secretly buried somewhere until Wilson got his hands on it,” Jeremy said.

Jack turned to Rebecca. “Did he tell you anything more about its source?”

Rebecca shook her head. “One of Mamma’s uncles told me that in the antiquities black market, asking any kind of question about artifact origins is a big taboo and will see you ending up like she did with a bullet in the back of your head. But I believe Abdullah’s story. I’ve studied Gordon’s
Reflections in Palestine
. He spent the best part of a year here in 1883, carrying out some very exacting exploration in and around Jerusalem but also undergoing something of a religious epiphany. He’d resigned from his governorship in the Sudan in a state of dismay about the lack of government support for his initiatives to help the people there. He never suspected that he’d be invited back the following year or end up where history has immortalized him. He was a close friend of Wilson, of Warren, and of the young Kitchener and the other British engineer officers who had worked on the survey of Palestine. I believe that this artifact might have been one of a number that he collected from them to take back to Jerusalem as part of his attempt to unlock the mysteries of this place, a project he could immerse himself in after his perceived failure in Sudan. I believe that following his abrupt recall to Sudan, he may have entrusted them to someone here, and after his death with nobody to claim them they were dispersed and sold. This one ended up in the hands of Abdullah’s great-grandfather, also an antiquities dealer.”

“Then how come he still has it?” Jeremy said. “It’s a long time for a dealer to sit on something that would have considerable value, even as gold bullion.”

“That happens,” Rebecca replied. “In Naples, artifacts are sometimes cached away for years, even decades, waiting for the right time for a sale, for the right person or an upturn in the market.”

“Abdullah may have been waiting for something more,” Jack said pensively, looking at Rebecca. “He may have been waiting to dangle it in front of someone who might be tempted to go where he was unable to go, to find the place where Wilson had actually discovered the artifact and to see what else might lie there.”

Rebecca suddenly seemed distracted, and looked back down the alley. “Are we still being followed?”

Jack nodded. “By David’s men, and probably Abdullah’s. Everyone’s always watching everyone else here. It’s a place you can’t disappear into, unless you really know where you’re going.”

“Underground,” Rebecca said. “That’s where you need to go. Everything’s just under the surface here: war, the truth behind religion, the reality of history. Jerusalem’s riddled with natural caves and man-made tunnels, a honeycomb beneath your feet almost everywhere you step. Some archaeologists I’ve spoken to say there’s nothing more to be found here, that every last fissure has been scraped clean by treasure hunters over the centuries. Others believe that the ban by the mosque authorities on exploration beneath Temple Mount has concealed untold treasures, the sacred relics of the temple and much else besides.”

“The stuff Abdullah really wants to get his hands on,” Jeremy said.

“Abdullah was being disingenuous when he lamented the ban. For him, the possibility of undiscovered treasure boosts the mystique of the place and keeps his customers coming back for more. Buy a coin or an oil lamp from Jerusalem and you buy into that dream. And there may be a blanket ban on official exploration beneath the
Temple Mount, but those who supply him with antiquities operate outside the law and will always be trying to find a way in. Once they’ve gotten there, it would be a free-for-all, but with Abdullah poised to stake the biggest claim.”

Jack peered at Rebecca. “And he’s canny enough to know that someone like you might be able to go to places along the temple precinct that would be denied to his people, and that you might be able to unlock vaults that would make him richer than his wildest dreams. That’s what those Russian oligarchs really want—the real treasure, not pots and coins—and they’d compete with one another to own it. Abdullah truly would become the new caliph of the Jerusalem underworld, and you would have been his unwitting pawn.”

“But I’ve used him, not the other way around. Let’s move. We’ve only got a few hours until you have to leave.”

They came out in front of the Western Wall precinct, the midday sun after the gloom of the alleyways reflecting blindingly off the white surface of the rock and making Jack squint and shade his eyes. A pair of Israeli Air Force F-16s shrieked overhead, banking right in the direction of the southern border with Gaza and Egypt. The police and army presence was stronger than he had ever seen it before, and the worshippers were limited to a few groups of Hasidic Jewish men with black hats and long hair who were bobbing and praying in front of the wall. Jack found himself hoping that the twelfth-century poet Yehuda Halevi of the Geniza letter had gotten here, that he had broken the Crusader ban on Jews entering the city and had touched the wall before he died, and had found the spiritual revelation that had eluded him in his life in Spain. The wall itself seemed impermeable, as if the shaped masonry were a natural extension of the bedrock, and Jack had to remind himself that like the mosque above it the wall was an accretion on a rock that had a far older history of human occupation than either of the two religions that claimed it.

Rebecca veered to the left to head back toward the city and the conjunction between the Western Wall and the medieval structures that abutted it. Jack followed, and caught up with her. “Isn’t the Temple Mount excavation to the right, at the City of David site?”

Rebecca waved her hand dismissively and flashed him a smile. “Been there, done that. I’ve got a new project.”

Jack stared at the wall ahead. He remembered what Rebecca had said:
underground
. He had an ominous feeling, but one tinged with excitement. He had guessed where she might be taking them. Any political storm that he might have provoked by transgressing on forbidden territory in Egypt and Sudan would be nothing compared to the one Rebecca might be risking now.