Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (25 page)

There was a stunned silence. “My God,” Jack whispered. “A
library
.”

Hiebermeyer stared at Jack, his face flushed. “I always objected to the word
palace
. A closer approximation would be monastery, a place where priests lived and worked. And just like medieval monasteries, the priestly colleges of ancient Egypt would have been repositories of knowledge. Do you remember the Temple of Sais in the Nile Delta, where Solon the Greek heard the Atlantis story? By that stage, half a millennium after Akhenaten, the old knowledge had become fragmented, parcelled among many temples, jealously guarded by the priests and passed down only by word of mouth. The first Macedonian king of Egypt, Ptolemy I, tried to rectify that with his establishment of the great library at Alexandria, though by then much of the old knowledge had died after the closure of the last of the ancient temples. But I believe that he was inspired by a memory of a great
centralized repository, a great library, that had existed far back in the glory days of the pharaohs, in the New Kingdom at the time of Akhenaten and his son, Tutankhamun.”

“And where better than at Giza,” Jack murmured. “The great center for the worship of the sun god during the New Kingdom, and before that of the earliest pharaohs. A place of continuous occupation by a priestly caste for over two thousand years, priests who could safeguard a repository of knowledge through the centuries.”

“And if this was a library, it could have been the earliest library on this scale anywhere,” Hiebermeyer exclaimed. “That mud-brick wall dates back to the Old Kingdom, to soon after the construction of the Great Pyramid, about 2500
BC
. That’s over a thousand years before the heyday of the New Kingdom, before Akhenaten. Imagine what such a repository might have contained: all the knowledge passed down from Egyptian prehistory, from the time of the first hieroglyphic texts of the previous millennium as well as the oldest writings of Mesopotamia. And we’re not just talking about funerary texts, sacred mantras, Books of the Dead, and all the familiar religious tracts, but about material that predates and transcends all that: the earliest sagas and histories, accounts of exploration and discovery, lost medicinal knowledge. Ptolemy’s library at Alexandria would have been only a pale shadow of that.”

“But like Ptolemy’s library, it could have acted as a magnet for other collections, an accumulator,” Jack said, his mind racing. “I’m thinking about something else, Maurice, about the Minoan queen of Egypt in the fifteenth century
BC
, about your theory of her legacy in the bloodline that led to Akhenaten and the other great New Kingdom pharaohs. Maybe the Minoan legacy in Egypt wasn’t just about a dynasty and a mercenary army of amazons. Maybe it was far more profound than that, a legacy of preserved knowledge that passed to Egypt after the volcano of Thera destroyed Cretan civilization
and the priests fled over the sea to the south from their ruined palaces.”

Hiebermeyer nodded. “Palaces, but not palaces. People have wondered about the function of the Minoan palaces ever since they were discovered, about the complexes of storerooms, about the labyrinth.”

Jack closed his eyes for a moment. “Imagine what that might contain.”

“But then it was all lost,” Costas said.

Hiebermeyer tapped the screen where the image showed the empty limestone plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s still there. Maybe it went
underground
.”

Jack stared, his mind racing.
Of course
. “Ahkenaten’s City of Light,” he exclaimed. “It’s exactly what Akhenaten would do. He’s a pharaoh who’s created a whole new religion, who has built himself a new capital at Amarna, who has dedicated massive new temples at Luxor and Heliopolis. Refounding the library at Giza, removing it to a more secure location from that old mud-brick complex, bringing it under the aegis of his new cult center to the Aten and putting it underground would be completely in keeping with his vision. Jacob, can we see your plan again?”

Lanowski tapped a key, and the image transformed to the Aten symbol from the plaques with the pyramids behind, transposed on the actual topography of the plateau. “It fits exactly,” Jack said. “The central sun symbol falls exactly on the plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, the place from which the rays emanate. That’s got to be it.” He glanced at Costas. “That must be what we saw down in the tunnel under the pyramid.”

Costas nodded. “Lit up by sunlight coming through those air shafts in the pyramid, reflected off polished basalt mirrors that magnified it somewhere deep beneath the plateau.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Now for the egress point of that tunnel on the Nile.”

Lanowski reeled off a twelve-figure set of coordinates.
“That pinpoints it to within twenty meters. I simply superimposed the image of the plaque on a modern map, maintaining the exact alignments of the pyramids.”

Costas peered at the map dubiously. “You really think it can be that accurate?”

Hiebermeyer and Lanowski both turned and stared at him. Jack put a hand on his shoulder, grinning. “You want to watch what you say. We’re outnumbered by Egyptologists here.”

“I think,” said Lanowski slowly, eyeing Costas, “given that the ancient Egyptians were able to align a pyramid with geometrical precision, if they really intended this to be a map, then we can trust them.”

Costas raised his hands. “I was only asking. Mea culpa.”

Lanowski tapped a key, and a satellite image of Lower Egypt came into view. The Nile Delta and Cairo were clearly visible above the belt of green that marked the course of the river through the desert. He tapped repeatedly, coming closer and closer to a point on the Nile to the south of Cairo. “Google Maps is still down for Egypt, but I kept open the link to Landsat that my friend at Langley sent me when I was researching the Red Sea chariots site. Take a look at this. My coordinates come out almost exactly on this ruined structure half fallen into the Nile. Aysha?”

“My research shows that it’s early nineteenth century, thought to have been built by Napoleon’s forces when they took Egypt,” she said. “It would have been a ruin by the time Corporal Jones and Chaillé-Long and the French diver undertook their foray in 1892. There’s nothing else like it on that stretch of the west bank of the Nile. There’s no doubt that this is the fort they saw and that Howard Carter mentioned in his diary entry. The entrance to Akhenaten’s tunnel should lie somewhere very close to that spot.”

“Bingo,” Lanowski said quietly.

Jack’s excitement was mounting. “Good work, Jacob.
Now let’s do some geomorphology on this. We need to be thinking about the water level.”

“I’m already there,” Lanowski replied, his eyes gleaming. “Obviously, there’s the issue of changes in the course of the Nile over three thousand years. But this is one of those places where the position of the bank has been almost static, as we can infer from the discovery of the tunnel entrance apparently below the modern bank of the river.”

“It might not have been chance,” Costas said thoughtfully. “Akhenaten’s engineers must have known their river intimately. If they were going to build a tunnel entrance, they’d have chosen somewhere stable.” He glanced at Jacob. “After all, these were the guys who built the pyramids. You said it.”

Lanowski turned to Costas, his face suffused with pleasure. “
Very
good, Costas. You’re learning.”

“What about the river level?” Jack asked.

“The latest sedimentological research suggests that the New Kingdom floodplain was lower than has generally been believed, though of course we have to factor in the annual flooding and lowering of the Nile that’s now controlled by the Aswan Dam. My calculations suggest that a tunnel built into the bedrock at that point could have been dry for part of the year, and partly flooded for the remaining months when it might have been navigable.”

“You mean an underground canal,” Jack said. “Something that would have allowed barges to be poled or wall-walked right up to the pyramid plateau.”

“Exactly. We’ve already seen a precedent for it in the canals and artificial harbors dug for each of the pyramids when they were constructed, only they were aboveground.”

“But our tunnel doesn’t lead to a mortuary temple,” Hiebermeyer added.

“What about the present water level?” Jack asked.

“My model suggests that the tunnel will be completely submerged, though it may well rise once it reaches the
plateau. It will connect with passageways and chambers that have always been above the water level and remain dry today. Ground-penetrating radar survey in the past has revealed nothing like this under the plateau in front of the Pyramid of Menkaure, but that may only reflect the limitations of the technology. It would be possible for the roof of the chambers to be many meters deep, beyond the range of the radar, but for the chambers still to be above the water table. And there’s no doubt that they exist. You and Costas saw through to some kind of space when you were under the pyramid.”

“I just hope you can break through from the Nile,” Lanowski said. “When that French diver blew his way in over a hundred years ago, he may have caused a rock slide.”

“We can’t know that until we get there,” Jack said, squinting at Costas. “And my colleague usually has a few bits and pieces up his sleeve.”

“C5,” Costas said. “A diver’s best friend. I used it to liberate a few slabs from
Sea Venture
’s armaments store.”

Hiebermeyer was still staring at the screen. “Do you really think you can make it? I mean, more than three kilometers through that tunnel, completely underwater?”

Costas nodded. “Physically, yes. As long as the tunnel is clear beyond the entrance, as long as our scooters work, and as long as our rebreathers hold out.”

“But?”

“I can’t help thinking of those who have gone before us. The only ones we know about were the Caliph Al-Hakim and Corporal Jones. The first is apparently dead somewhere down there, and the other one was seriously unhinged by the experience. And our first foray under the pyramid was hardly auspicious. We saw the light once, but maybe that’s all the pharaoh will allow us.”

Lanowski glanced at him. “You’re in the wrong movie, Costas. This isn’t the one with the curses, the flesh-eating scarabs, and the zombie mummies. Akhenaten ditched all the old religion, remember? He was above all that.”

Costas gave him a wry look. “Yeah, and this is the one with the extremist fanatics, the public executions, and impending Armageddon. Given the choice, I think I’d take swarms of locusts and come-alive mummies over that.”

Aysha’s phone hummed, and she took it out of her pocket. “We’ve got reception back. It won’t last, so let me check on the latest.” She tapped the screen, waited, stared at the image that came up, and then scrolled quickly down. “You need to see this, all of you. It’s on the news, now. Our time may be tighter than we thought.”

A
ysha propped her phone on the computer so they could all see the screen, and Hiebermeyer sat forward. He gripped the armrests of his chair, his knuckles white with tension. “It’s from Al Jazeera, their Arabic service,” Aysha said. “It’s live.”

Jack leaned over and stared. Above the footer with breaking news was a scene that looked like the aftermath of a terrorist attack, the foreground filled with flashing lights and emergency vehicles in front of a high perimeter fence. The headline said “Giza, live.” The camera zoomed in beyond the fence to the looming forms of the three pyramids. Suddenly there was a white flash in front of the smaller of the pyramids, and then another. “That looks like white phosphorus, probably grenades,” he murmured. “Phosphorus won’t bring anything down, but if they use it on the pyramids, it’ll blacken the stone and make them seem as if they’re on fire.”

“It’s a portent of what’s to come,” Hiebermeyer muttered. “Next time they’ll pack the burial chambers with high explosive.”

“Isn’t that our pyramid?” Costas said. “The Pyramid of Menkaure?”

Hiebermeyer nodded. “The one that Saladin’s son tried to dismantle in 1196, so they’re taking up where he
left off. Look what the new report says. They’ve been chanting ‘Saladin, Saladin.’ They may be threatening to do this to the smaller pyramid now, but next time it’ll be the Great Pyramid.”

Aysha switched on the speaker and listened intently to the report, in Arabic. “Apparently it’s the same militant cleric who’s been threatening this ever since the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001,” she said, switching the sound off again. “It seems that his thugs managed to break their way through the perimeter fence about an hour ago in a convoy of pickup trucks, and now they’re in an armed standoff with the police at the entrance to the plateau. The police have no interest in a firefight, and anyway their senior officers have been infiltrated by the extremists, just like the army. As for our beloved antiquities director, Al Jazeera has managed to track him down at home halfway through packing to leave. He was a political nobody before the current regime came into power, and I expect right now he’s bitterly regretting having accepted the position. With the media spotlight on him, he’s been forced to return to the ministry in Cairo, where I don’t imagine he’ll last long.”

“I’ve read the Qur’ān right through,” Lanowski said, shaking his head. “There’s nothing in there about ordering the destruction of monuments or statues just because they predate Mohammed.”

“The glory of Allah shines through everything from creation to the present day, including all the marvels of ancient Egypt,” Aysha said quietly. “To suggest that it does not do so for history before Mohammed is wrong. These people are the enemy of true Muslims.”

The TV camera refocused to show the shady figures in front of the trucks that were parked in a line just inside the entrance to the Giza plateau. “Take a look at the gunmen,” Costas said. “They’re all wearing black headbands.”

“They call themselves the new followers of the Mahdi,” Aysha said. “Al Jazeera says they’ve been training in
secret camps in Sudan and Somalia for months now. Many are veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, with close ties to the extremists now operating in Syria against Israel. For the first time since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, since Yemen and Somalia, we’re looking at an extremist group about to stage a coup to take over a country. They’ve been planning this for over a century, ever since Lord Kitchener desecrated the Mahdi’s tomb outside Khartoum after he’d defeated the dervish army at the Battle of Omdurman. Intelligence analysts at the time knew that Omdurman was a hollow victory, and now it’s come back to haunt us.”

“And archaeology is being used as the tinderbox,” Jack said.

Hiebermeyer shook his head. “Not just as a tinderbox. Look at what’s happening. The West proved powerless to prevent the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and now we watch helplessly while the greatest antiquities of Egypt are threatened. The forces behind this are about to pull off an extraordinary publicity stunt. How better to show the weakness of the West? Archaeology, the West’s fascination with ancient Egypt, is about to become a pawn in the hands of the extremists. What we are seeing is a gesture of contempt, not only to the West but also to the people of Egypt who have made archaeology their livelihood and the basis for their sense of national identity. A little over two centuries after Napoleon arrived with his team of cartographers and scholars, Egyptology is about to be extinguished.”

Lanowski put a hand on Hiebermeyer’s shoulder. “Not for you it won’t be. Not for any of us here, or for the millions around the world who follow your work. You’ve got a lifetime ahead of you putting together everything you’ve gotten out of Egypt. There will be books, films. The whole incredible story of Akhenaten, for a start, when we finally get to the bottom of it.
I’ll
be there with you.”

Aysha put a finger to her lips and gestured toward Hiebermeyer, who had turned away from them. She
leaned down and whispered to him, kissing his forehead and brushing his cheek. As she did so, the image on her phone changed from the pyramids to another view, the headline reading “Cairo Museum under threat.” The live streaming showed the museum behind a line of bonfires; in front of them men in black headbands were chanting and praying.

Hiebermeyer turned, took a deep breath, and stared at the image.
“Mein Gott,”
he said. “It truly begins.” He got up and turned around, his face drained.

“Jacob was right,” said Jack. “You may have to hang up your trowel for a while, but now is the time for ideas. After all, a few days ago, after your find of that carving in the tomb in the mummy necropolis, you handed me the best proof I could want that the Egyptian New Kingdom came about as a result of influence from Minoan Crete.”

Hiebermeyer suddenly bristled. “I did
what
? I said nothing of the sort. A gaggle of bare-breasted Minoan amazons cavorting around in chariots in the desert does not amount to cultural influence.”

“Prove it. And prove to me that the Egyptians travelled farther than the Greeks, in the Mediterranean, around Africa, even across the Atlantic. Go out and find the sites. That is, if they exist.”

“Oh, they exist.” Hiebermeyer was positively glaring at him now. “You
know
they exist. I’ll prove it to you. Just wait.”

Jack gripped his shoulder. “That’s the Maurice I know.”

Lanowski scuffed the floor with his feet and raised his hand, coughing.

“What is it, Jacob?” Costas asked cautiously.

“Permission to join the team,” he said.

“You’re already part of the team,” Jack said. “And a highly valued member. You’ve proved it yet again today.”

“No, I mean the real team. The
expedition
. You and Costas.”

“Come again?”

“You’re going to need someone else topside. Mohammed and his son will have their work cut out for them managing the felucca. I’ve already been out with them in the harbor and seen what it’s like. You’ll need someone else to manage GPS position finding and to help with equipment. And Mohammed’s English isn’t that great. I speak pretty reasonable Arabic.”

“You speak Arabic?” Costas murmured. “
Of course
you speak Arabic. I should have guessed.”

Jack eyed him. “There’s a big risk factor. You know that.”

Lanowski raised his arms in the air, looking exasperated. “The last big risk I took was when I turned down a tenured professorship at MIT for what amounted to a technician’s job at IMU. My friends thought I’d finally flipped. All hope of the Nobel Prize went out the window. What attracted me to IMU was the chance to combine my, well, genius with hands-on archaeology, something I’d dreamed about since first being fascinated by Egyptology as a kid. And I’ve been part of this project from the get-go. And show me a Jack Howard project that doesn’t involve big risks.
Real
risks.”

Jack glanced at Costas, who cracked a smile. “I guess we could use the odd genius.”

Jack pursed his lips. “You’d be our man on the felucca. Shore excursions are strictly off-limits. Okay?”

Lanowski punched the air. “Thank you, Jack. You won’t regret it.”

“One question,” Costas said, putting up his hand. “About
our
shore excursion. Assuming we make it out alive, how do we get picked up?”

Lanowski took a black object the size of small alarm clock out of his pocket. “Obviously you’ll be on your own underground, and the mobile network around Cairo will probably be completely dead by then. You’ll have a satellite phone, but the most reliable device is going to be this little gizmo.”

Costas peered at it. “A beacon?”

“You got it. Switch this on anywhere, and your GPS coordinates will be transmitted instantly via satellite to
Sea Venture
.”

Costas looked uncertain. “Our people won’t risk flying in a helicopter to pick us up on land. One thing the extremists have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan is how easy it is to shoot down helicopters. You can see shoulder-launched SAMs among those trucks in the Al Jazeera report, some of them looking very like Stingers.”

Aysha looked at him. “Our plan is for you to get out the way you got in. Mohammed and his son, and now Jacob too, will be waiting on the Nile in the felucca. Wherever you egress, your plan should be to make your way to the nearest point on the riverbank and activate the beacon.
Sea Venture
will pass on your GPS coordinates via satellite phone to Jacob. After they pick you up, the felucca will sail north of the Nile Delta far enough out to sea for the Lynx to extract you without danger of attack.”

“We may well have to go through Cairo to get back to the river,” Costas said.

“That’s a risk you’ll have to take,” said Aysha. “There are still going to be Westerners there: journalists, some diplomats, the usual vultures who show up during a coup thinking they’ll be in pole position to score lucrative deals with a new regime. But the first target for the extremists is likely to be members of the existing government, many of them Muslims. They might even want Western journalists there to report on it. It’s afterward when there are gangs of blood-crazed gunmen roaming the streets that you’d be in the most trouble. We’ll just have to hope that they’re still preoccupied with the purge when you arrive. You’ll never succeed in being inconspicuous, so you need to look self-confident, assertive. I take it you’d strip off your E-suits to the clothes you’ve got on now. And I may be on the ground to help.”

Jack stared at her. “What do you mean, on the ground?”

Aysha gave him a steely look. “It’s about Sahirah, the Egyptian girl. The deadline Ben set on
Seaquest
for a response from the antiquities director is only a few hours away. We’ve just seen on the newscast that he’s more concerned with saving his own skin right now. But something else has happened, Jack. One of the extremists who now effectively runs the judiciary saw that Sahirah had been arrested in connection with a visit to a synagogue. As a result he’s had the charge against her changed from the lesser one of antiquities theft to the worst crime of all in their books, apostasy. She won’t be given a chance to deny it. And even if the antiquities director were to intervene, there would almost certainly be no clemency.”

Jack pursed his lips. “I take it you have a contingency plan.”

“Do you remember the beggar outside the synagogue when we went in to see Maria? I told you that he was in fact my cousin Ahmed, the former Egyptian special forces soldier. What you weren’t to know is that he’s also Sahirah’s boyfriend. He and several of his former army friends think that in the confusion of the coup they’ll be able to get into the ministry building and find her. I’m going to Cairo to meet up with them.”

“You mean they’re planning to shoot her out?” Jack said.

“There may be no other choice.”

“Good people are going to get killed.”

“It’s going to be a bloodbath anyway, Jack. All we can do is try to save a few lives.”

“What’s our rendezvous point in the city to meet up with you?”

“The synagogue. If you have to come through Cairo and can’t safely get to the river, make your way there and activate the beacon. I’ll be in satellite phone contact with
Sea Venture
as well. I can help to guide you.”

Jack looked at Lanowski. “Make sure you keep that beacon safe.”

“I’ve got two of them. One for me, the other for you.”

Costas peered closely. “Why didn’t you tell me about this, Jacob? I tell you about everything I’m working on.”

Lanowski looked hesitant. “Well, it was going to be a birthday surprise for you. For today. Rebecca told me.”

Jack looked at Costas. “For today? Today is your birthday?”

The building vibrated from an explosion somewhere near the harbor, the detonation followed by the ripping sound of machine-gun fire. Costas jerked his head toward the door, his face grim. “I don’t think today is one for any kind of celebration.”

Jack pointed to the fragment of ancient masonry beside the computer, the find that Hiebermeyer had made years before in the sewage pipe excavation beside the pyramids. “Don’t forget that, Maurice,” he said. “If Costas and I get nowhere tonight, those hieroglyphs could be the only real proof we have for what lies under the plateau.”

“Maurice and I have everything,” Aysha said. “The First World War diary I found in the museum archives, the Geniza letter of Halevi, all the images and data from the mummy necropolis, everything.”

Jack reached out and shook Hiebermeyer’s hand. “Do you remember our old school motto? ‘Quit ye like men, be strong.’ We used to joke about it, but now is one of those times.”

Hiebermeyer tapped his head. “It’s all up here, Jack. I’m taking Egypt with me. I won’t let it go.”

The phone hummed, and Aysha picked it up and read a text. “That was my sister near Tantur, about eighty kilometers south of Alexandria. She says she’s just seen a convoy of trucks with gunmen racing up the highway. If Cairo falls, Alexandria won’t be far behind.”