Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) (32 page)

Costas examined the star, fingering the crescent on the clasp. “Ironic that British soldiers for years to come would have worn the symbol of Islam and the caliphate on their chests, after having fought a war that many would have seen as a latter-day crusade against the jihad.”

Jack put the Egypt Medal back, carefully laying the ribbon as he had found it. “That’s history for you. Never quite what it seems. Officially the British were fighting for the Khedive of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, the largest Islamic state the world has ever seen. And some among the officers, particularly those who had spent years in the Arab world, were sympathetic to aspects of Islam. Gordon and the Mahdi would have been an interesting meeting of minds, philosophically not that far apart.”

“Well, it’s pretty clear where Jones was coming from,” Costas said, pointing to the wall just to the right of the shelf with the medals. “Take a look at that.”

Jack shifted around and stared. The lower part of the wall was covered in an inscription, written in the neat, precise hand taught to all Victorian schoolchildren, with the subject matter that was often their sole source of simile and metaphor. Jack slowly read it out loud: “ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.’ ”

“ ‘I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever,’ ” Costas murmured. “The Twenty-third Psalm. He must have been awestruck by the appearance of the pharaoh, by the crossed rod and staff on the sarcophagus. Those medals with their images of the sphinx and the pyramids must have seemed like offerings to him, meant for this place.”

Jack took a few steps farther toward the open tunnel heading in the direction of Cairo, stepping over fragments of plaster that Jones must have dug out of the wall over the days it probably took him to open it up. Beneath the plaster he saw something else, a skeletal form. He stared at it and then gestured to Costas. “I think we might just have solved another mystery.”

Costas came over and then stopped abruptly. “I see bones. Don’t tell me. Not Jones’ final mummy feast.”

Jack shook his head. “This is the skeleton of someone who has lain down to die, or been placed in this position. Look at what he’s holding. It’s a little Arab dagger,
beautifully engraved on the blade and embellished with gold. I think this is where Jones got his souvenir, that ring.”

“Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah,” Costas murmured. “We knew he’d be in here somewhere. Do you think he was trying to escape too? Do you think Jones found his body, and then laid him out like this?”

Jack stared at the skeleton. “The medieval accounts suggest that he went alone at night into the desert on many occasions before disappearing for good, clearly faking his own death. I think after finding that entrance we passed in the tunnel, the partly collapsed ventilation shaft, and exploring this place, he eventually found the light shaft we came through and got into this chamber. Maybe seeing the sarcophagus did it for him, and he decided next time to come in here for good, never to go back.”

Costas sifted the dust on top of the bones. “Maybe he had delusions of grandeur. He could have been the one who tried to open the sarcophagus, not Jones. Look at the way he’s lying, with his arms crossed like that. Maybe he wanted to lie down inside the sarcophagus, to be Akhenaten.”

“Being a caliph was not that much different from being a pharaoh,” Jack murmured. “And Akhenaten isn’t the only ruler in history to want to get away from it all.”

Costas peered down where he had been sifting. “Look at this, Jack. He’s got something in his hands. It’s a small wooden frame containing a piece of papyrus, with text in hieroglyphs.”

Jack knelt down and peered at it, feeling a sudden rush of satisfaction.
He had found his piece of text
. “I don’t know what it is,” he said. “But it must have some special significance to have been framed like that. Let’s make sure we both have detailed images.”

Costas followed after him, leaned over the hieroglyphs, and panned his camera slowly over the papyrus. “Okay,” he said. “That’s done.”

Jack gestured at the open tunnel in front of them. “Our time is nearly up.”

Costas nodded. “There’s one thing left to do. Little Joey.”

“You can’t take him with us.”

“I know. I’ve been dreading this. But I
can
switch him off. I can’t have him going mad in here like Jones.”

He made his way back to the shaft, and Jack turned to the nearest alcove and put his hand on one of the sealed jars. Costas came back and stood beside him. “Think of yourself as a caretaker of knowledge, Jack, just like those priests of Akhenaten who sealed this place up after he’d left. They were protecting it against Akhenaten’s enemies of the old religion who might have destroyed it, and now we’re protecting it against the modern-day forces of darkness. Akhenaten must have ordered this place to be sealed up in the hope that it would be discovered and revealed some time in the distant future, when the time was right. He left clues in those plaques that have taken all our combined intelligence and even a little bit of genius to work out. It’s almost as if he anticipated a time like ours when exploration like this would be possible, when people would be driven to seek the truth about the past. But the time’s not yet right, Jack. Akhenaten would not have wanted his legacy to be consumed by the fires that are raging above. Maybe the time will come in our lifetimes, or maybe this will be our legacy to pass on to Rebecca and her generation. But right now we’ve got the present to deal with. There’s a girl in Cairo who needs to be rescued, and a lot of people depending on us. It’s time to go.”

Jack pushed off from the jar, took one last look around, and put his hand on Costas’ shoulder. “Roger that. We move.”

Almost half an hour later Costas stopped jogging and bent down, his hand on his knees, panting hard. “We must be getting close to an exit, Jack,” he said, his face
streaming with sweat. “It’s getting warmer. And I can smell it.”

Jack stopped beside him, wiping the sweat off his own forehead, and breathed deeply. He realized that he felt stronger, revitalized. Costas was right: They must be close to a source of fresh air. And the smell was unmistakable, a cloying tang of burning, a sharp reminder of what lay in store for them outside. They must be at least three kilometers beyond the Giza plateau by now, but the fire on the pyramids would send heat and the reek of burning fuel far over the desert, a smell that by now would be commingling with the reek and ash of fire from Cairo itself.

They began jogging again, and after a few minutes came to a rockfall that completely blocked the tunnel ahead. Costas crawled up the slope, pulling aside blocks of stone, working feverishly until he reached the top. A cascade of sand came down, and a new kind of light appeared, not the suffused red glow from the tunnel but a flickering darker red that bathed Costas’ face in a luminous glow. He disappeared upward and then reappeared, sliding down the sand until he was back beside Jack.

“Okay. We ditch our E-suits here. Keep your hydration pack, and give me your camera microchip. We’re in the desert maybe a kilometer away from the edge of the southern suburbs, and I can see a road to the west with abandoned vehicles. We might get lucky and find something still with gas.”

Jack unzipped the front of his E-suit, ducked his head and shoulders through, and quickly pulled the rest off. He straightened his jacket and trousers and then removed his headstrap and dismembered the camera. He watched as Costas took out one of the satellite beacons, activated it, and then pointed up. “We’ll have to block this entrance.”

“No problem. A shove of one rock up above and the whole thing will come tumbling down, followed by
about ten tons of sand. Nobody walking by would ever guess.”

“What does it look like topside?”

Costas kicked off the feet of his E-suit, took out the Glock from its holster, checked it, and gave Jack a grim look. “You know those medieval images of hell? They always have it underground. Well, they got it wrong. Prepare yourself for just about the worst thing you’ve ever seen.”

J
ack stared in horror at the western horizon. The Pyramid of Menkaure was engulfed in flames, lighting up the Giza plateau like a vision of hell. Those who had been threatening it had finally gotten their way, picking up where the son of Saladin had left off in the twelfth century, only with powers of destruction that no medieval caliph could ever have envisaged. Jack felt the anger well up inside him, a rage against those who had orchestrated this. They claimed to be acting in the name of the one god, but in truth they represented no god. He looked down at the form that had followed him out of the tunnel entrance. He and Costas had just carried out one of the most extraordinary dives of their lives, and had uncovered the greatest treasure that any civilization could offer. He glanced at the flames again, this time feeling only a cold determination. He would not let the forces of darkness destroy the truth of history. He turned back and helped Costas to his feet. “This place is about to implode. If we don’t get out of here, nobody will ever know what we’ve found. Let’s move.”

A little over an hour later, they crouched behind a wall just outside Fustat, the Old City of Cairo, a stone’s throw from the Ben Ezra synagogue. After leaving the tunnel they had jogged in the darkness along a dusty
track toward the lights of the city, both of them soon drenched in sweat in the humid air of the night. The smell of burning had been all around them, an acrid, cloying smell that became worse as they entered the outer sprawl of the city, making them cough and slow down. Partway along they had found an abandoned car with the key still in the ignition and had sped along a highway toward the Nile. They left the car once they had found a motorboat, which they used to cross the river to the eastern shore beside Fustat. The journey had been an eerie one, with hardly any other cars on the roads and only a few people to be seen, the rest probably cowering in their houses or caught up in what was going on in the city center. As they had come closer, the noise had become louder—chanting and wailing, shrieks and screams, long bursts of gunfire, and above it a constant call from the minarets around the city, their recordings sounding as through they had been put on a continuous loop by the extremist junta, who by now must have swept aside the last residues of legitimate government in Egypt.

Jack tried to ignore the noise as he stared along the alleyway ahead toward the entrance into Fustat, watching for gunmen and gauging the best time to enter. He took out his Beretta from the holster beneath his jacket, pulled back the slider partway to confirm that a round was chambered, and put the gun back in its holster. With the two extra magazines, he had forty-five rounds, hardly enough to put a pinprick in the side of the coup but giving him the option of self-defense if it came to it. He watched Costas check his Glock and then pull out the second transmitter beacon and place it behind the wall where it would be concealed from view but the satellite signal would be unimpeded. “Okay,” he said quietly. “It’s activated. That means
Sea Venture
will know we’re here.”

“Mohammed won’t be able to get his felucca this far south,” Jack said. “You can see that the river ahead of us is jammed with burning feluccas, and chances are the
gunmen have gotten hold of the police patrol vessels and are raking any boat they see. We’ll have to rely on Aysha to get us out through the city to a rendezvous point farther to the north.”

“That could be like walking through the fires of hell,” Costas said.

“We haven’t got any choice.” Jack checked his watch. “It’s three fifteen. There’s about two hours of night left. We’re going to be far better off trying to do this under cover of darkness than waiting for the day, and we need to get to the rendezvous point at the synagogue. Let’s move.”

They got up and walked quickly to the entrance through the medieval wall into Fustat, and then ducked inside and came within sight of the synagogue precinct. There were more people now in the streets, clustered fearfully in doorways and dark alleys, and the gunshots were close enough in the still air to sound like sharp hammer blows, but still there were no gunmen to be seen. Jack stared at the synagogue and pursed his lips. “Aysha should have had our first beacon signal relayed to her by now, but I don’t see her there. It was always going to be a gamble, and maybe we just ran out of luck. All I can see is that Sufi sitting in front of the wall.”

A truck filled with jeering gunmen suddenly lurched into view on the cobbled street, roared past them in low gear and disappeared down another dark alley. Jack had flattened himself against the wall, and he felt his heart pounding. They had been in full view of the gunmen but had been ignored. “I think they’ve got other fish to fry,” he said, standing forward again and looking around. “Most of the noise is coming from the direction they were heading, where the alley opens out in front of a big mosque.”

“My God,” Costas whispered, his eyes glued on the synagogue. “The Sufi. It’s Lanowski. Only we would recognize him. I mean,
instantly
recognize him. He’s in double disguise, disguised as Corporal Jones disguised as a mystic. Genius, or mad.”

“I told him to stay with the felucca,” Jack muttered. “Something must have happened.” He turned to Costas, straightened his shirt and patted his hair. “We’re going to have to walk in the open now. We’ve got no choice, and we need to be confident about it. There are still going to be reporters and die-hards of the expat community here, and we need to look like them, as if we know what we’re doing.”

Jack felt himself beginning to sweat again in the tepid air. He took out the hydration pack that he had kept from his E-suit and offered it to Costas, who shook his head. “Still got some in my own,” he said. They both drank the remainder of the water pouches and discarded them. Jack peered at Costas. “Still got the camera microchips?”

“They’re zipped into my side pocket.”

Jack looked down, forcing himself to accept reality. “If it comes to it, you have to promise me that you’ll destroy them, right? If the bad guys get hold of those images and work out where we came from, then the world really will never know what we found. Maurice was right. There are going to be terrible scenes of destruction across Egypt, not only what we’ve already seen happening at Giza but also at Luxor, at the Valley of the Kings, scenes to make even the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas pale by comparison. The world had better get ready to weep.”

Costas straightened his jacket. “Let’s do it.”

They stepped out into the street and walked toward the mystic, stopping close enough to be heard. “Jacob,” Costas said quietly. “We see you.”

“Walk toward the alley where that truck went,” Lanowski replied, without moving or looking at them. “It might attract attention for me to join you, a Sufi with two Westerners, so I’ll be shadowing you. I had to come here to warn you that Aysha’s been delayed, but she will find us if we head slowly west. You’re conspicuous enough for her to see, Jack, because of your height.”

“Be careful, Jacob,” Jack said. “We’ll be going into a death zone.”

“I’ve seen it, Jack. I had to walk through it when Mohammed let me off from the felucca. Prepare yourselves for the worst. Now get moving. With any luck we’ll meet again at the felucca within the hour, and be out of here.”

Jack glanced left and right, and then hurried ahead as Lanowski had instructed. He led Costas through a dark cobbled alley about two hundred meters long and out into another square. This one was packed full of people, large milling groups with black-hooded gunmen sauntering among them, occasionally raising their Kalashnikovs into the air and firing a deafening blast. Jack held Costas back, unsure what to do. Ahead of them a cluster of women dressed in burkhas stood on the pavement, swaying and ululating, their heads covered except for a slit for their eyes. One of the women was frantically stripping off her tights beneath her burkha, the others closing in around her protectively. A gunman spotted her and rushed in, pulled her out screaming and sobbing, and dragged her toward an open area where three other women in Western dress lay sprawled in the dust surrounded by men with Kalashnikovs. Beside them an acacia tree in the middle of a small garden had been hacked down to a man-sized stump, and a few yards in front of it boys with wheelbarrows were dumping building debris brought from a structure that Jack could hear being demolished somewhere beyond. One of the men slung his rifle, picked up a brick, and hurled it with huge force at the stump. Jack stared at the scene, feeling a cold dread. “My God,” he said hoarsely. “It’s a stoning ground. They’re going to force those other women to stone those three to death.”

Another woman in a burkha came alongside them. “Don’t do anything, for God’s sake,” she said in a low voice. “If you try to intervene, you will be shot and I will be the next one to be put against that post.”

Jack stared at her.
“Aysha.”

She said nothing, but steered them around a corner into another dark alley, quickly looking around. “Follow me,” she said urgently. “We haven’t got much time.”

“What’s going on?” Jack asked, hurrying after her.

“You’ve been incredibly lucky. About an hour ago the junta issued a fatwa against all Westerners except accredited journalists. Evidently the news hadn’t quite reached the gunmen who’ve seen you so far. Apparently it still matters to the junta for the world to see what they’re doing, though that won’t last long. Here, take these.” She steered them down the passageway and handed them each a ziplock bag. “Passports, press documentation. Take out the cards and hang them around your necks. You’re CNN journalists. The Cairo bureau chief is an old friend of mine, and he’s issued bogus accreditation to help some friends get out. These are the last two cards he had.”

“They’ll rumble that soon enough if Cairo is suddenly swarming with CNN journalists.”

“Hopefully we’ll be out of here by then. When I came to Cairo two days ago, I had to ditch the institute’s Land Rover in the northern suburbs, as it was too dangerous for me to be seen in it. The way to Alexandria is clogged with people fleeing the city. I’ll be coming out with you by river from a rendezvous point I agreed upon with my uncle about half a mile north of here.”

“Mobile phone networks? WiFi?”

“Everything’s down. The only contact with the outside world is by satellite phone, and I couldn’t risk being caught with one. They’re searching everyone. I was lucky to get here with those documents.”

“What’s the situation with Sahirah?” Jack said.

Aysha looked grim. “She’s still being held in the Ministry of Culture. They cleared out all the remaining staff yesterday. There have been mass trials and convictions of government people through the night. A lot of good people are going to die, Jack, a lot of good friends. Once they’ve dealt with that, they’ll turn their attention to
Sahirah and any other prisoners still alive in the interrogation rooms.”

“Your cousin Ahmed, the ex–special forces man and his team?”

Aysha nodded. “It’s out of our hands now, Jack. If they can spring her, they’ll do it. If not, they’ll die trying.”

“What about Lanowski?” Costas said, jerking his head to the shuffling mystic following them a discreet distance behind.

“He volunteered to be your point of contact at the synagogue after I’d heard about the impending crackdown and knew I was going to be delayed getting those documents. I could only get two CNN passes. But he’s the least of my worries; he blends in just fine.”

“You won’t believe what we found,” Costas said.

“Don’t tell me. I don’t what to hear anything, just in case I’m interrogated.”

They came to the end of the alley and peered into another, much larger square with a columned structure in the center. The square seemed a maelstrom of activity, with eruptions of fire, the sound of falling masonry and bursts of automatic gunfire, and lines of black-clad men with Kalashnikovs encircling the perimeter.

“That’s the mosque of Amr ibn al-As,” Aysha said. “It’s the oldest mosque in Cairo, founded in
AD
642. The extremists have taken it over as their spiritual focus. The original mosque where Abn al-As pitched his tent was made of palm trunks and leaves, and they’re planning to re-create that. The present mosque is made of reused columns and blocks from ancient Egyptian sites that they regard as non-Islamic. And beyond that they’ve created an execution ground. The gunmen have already begun dragging people there from the government buildings, the Ministry of Culture first. They seem to have the greatest contempt for the Antiquities Service.”

“It’s a cold calculation,” Jack said. “They’ve used the moderate regime as a stepping-stone over the last months, sweet-talking men like our beloved antiquities director and promising him big rewards, but now that the coup
has happened it’s a different story. They want moderates to see that only a strict regime is possible and that any who fail to follow them will pay the price.”

Aysha peered out at the square. “You’re going to see some terrible sights, but you must keep your cool. Do not, I repeat,
do not
try to intervene.”

“You mean we’re going through
that
?” Costas said, sounding horrified.

“You’re reporters, right? Reporters don’t slink around in back alleys. They go to where the action is. You’re going to walk right past that crowd and then on toward Salah Salem Street beyond. I’ll make my own way and rendezvous with you there.”

“Won’t you be safer sticking with us?” Costas said.

She shook her head, replacing her head veil so that her face was concealed except the slit for her eyes. “From now on any Egyptian seen helping reporters is going to be targeted, especially a woman. They’ll assume I’m using you as a means of escape.”

An ear-piercing shriek rent the air behind them, followed by the sound of wailing. There was another shriek, cut short by a burst of gunfire. Jack remembered the face of the young woman he had seen sprawled on the ground. That girl had a father and a mother somewhere; she could have been Rebecca, anyone. Aysha saw him staring, and touched his arm. “I call on all Muslims in Egypt and all other faiths to defeat this evil and bring an end to it,” she said. “In Egypt the people will prevail.”