The Deceit (41 page)

The policewoman, Trevithick, slammed the button. ‘Stop it: stop the bomb. You’re going to die first. This is suicide! Why not give us the girl?’

‘Meginah, Elinala, Gelagon.’

Rothley intoned the strange words, slowly and deliberately.

‘Stop the bomb.’

‘Magid, Akori, Happir, Haluteb.’

‘Rothley!’

‘Sagal, Apara.’

It snapped into place. In his blindness, Ryan
recognized
the words. It was the Abra-Melin death ritual,
the same ritual inscribed on the second Sokar papyrus.
Ryan knew this spell, he knew it by heart. How many times had he read it these last weeks, trying to decipher the Sokar Hoard?

And the death ritual had a counter-spell. That was also on the Sokar papyrus.

If Rothley believed he was doing magic, he would necessarily believe in counter-magic.

Ryan shouted across the lab, ‘Sizigos, Iporusu, Maregan.’

The effect was instant.

With the last of his eyesight Ryan could see Rothley’s face, puzzled, frowning, staring intently at the camera. Angry.

Ryan continued: ‘Dodim. Abala.
Darac.’

Rothley shouted back, but he was stammering now. ‘Sicafel, Sic – Sic – Iperige – Maregan—’

‘Zara, run – please run!’

‘Sizigos, KAILAH—’

‘Run, Zara, get out!’

The policewoman was yelling. Ryan squinted. The girl appeared to be stirring, her bewitchment weakening. Maybe she could sense Rothley’s faltering hold.

‘Zara! GET OUT!’

Zara was running for the door of the safe room. Yet Rothley didn’t even notice. He was staring straight ahead at the camera, his eyes wild and blazing.

‘Situk, Irape, Situk, Irape!’

Almost the last thing Ryan saw was the blonde hair of the girl,
outside
the safe room, as she ran to save her own life, ran into the arms of the policewoman – and then
everyone
was running. Ryan could hear urgent footsteps all around. The entire place was evacuating, the bomb was still ticking. But Ryan was stuck on the stretcher. For the last time, he tried to move: but he couldn’t move, and he couldn’t see. And it didn’t matter. He had saved the girl. He could die. Here. Listening to Rothley’s manic chanting.

Ryan lay back, but then he felt arms and hands – Helen, lifting him up, assisted by someone else, hauling him off the stretcher, hoisting him over their shoulders.

How much time was left? Maybe sixty seconds.

Doors slammed open, the shouts of fear echoed, as they dragged Ryan down the corridor, as they kicked open the final doors.

Fifty seconds.

Now they were in the fresh air: he could feel it, as they carried him, painfully, laboriously, to some kind of safety.

Forty seconds?

They carried him upwards, maybe up the white slopes of kaolin tailings.

Twenty seconds …

Moving higher still: surely they must be looking down at the lab?

Someone shouted: ‘
Get down!
’

The explosion was so vivid it gave Ryan a final few seconds of sight: he glimpsed a monstrous fireball surging into the air, poisoned with chemicals, hellish and glowing, then evolving into a wild tornado of smoke, and flame, and kaolin dust. Ryan stared. The policewoman was cradling the weeping blonde girl, in her arms.

And then the God Parasite sealed the last chink of light in Ryan’s mind; and it was just blackness. And silence. And infinity.

‘I never even knew there was a collection here,’ said Karen, gazing across the sunny quadrangle. They were sitting on the great stone steps, almost alone. The college was largely deserted because of the Easter holidays.

Ryan nodded. ‘It’s the third biggest collection of Egyptian antiquities in the world. Flinders-Petrie gave it all to UCL.’ He reached and fumbled for his plastic cup of coffee on the granite steps; Karen found it and handed it to him, wrapping his fingers around the cup.

With a smile, Ryan thanked her. ‘I have partial sight now. It’s no longer improving, but it’s better than total blindness.’ He gestured at the classical buildings to their left. ‘We have the earliest example of metal from all of ancient Egypt
,
two magnificent lions from the temple of Min at Coptos, and a fine pair of socks from Alexandria. Probably Roman.’

Karen said, ‘You like working here.’

‘Yes I do. And of course, this is where I attended Sassoon’s lectures, which is poignant.’

Karen gazed at him. It was four months since the explosion. ‘Obviously you’re not going to go back to Egypt?’

‘Even if they’d let me in? No. I couldn’t function anyway.’

‘And Helen?’

‘She’s fine, she’s great. She looks after me. We have very little money, but we are OK.’

‘That’s good.’ Karen hesitated, then pressed on. ‘The blindness. It was meant to be irreversible. And terminal. You were meant to die?’

Ryan sipped his coffee. ‘Yes, but we worked this out. Acts, Chapter Nine.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Saul, the persecutor of Christians, is visited by a flaming vision of God. “And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight …” But then a few days later he is visited by the Holy Ghost. “And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.”’ Ryan shrugged. ‘It seems the blindness of the conversion experience can be temporary, even reversible. Or maybe it really is a miracle? Maybe God
works
through the God Parasite. How can we know?’ He acknowledged her expression of surprise. ‘Yes. The irony of it all is that I
do
believe. The parasite has done its work. And belief is good. I like it.’ He sighed, but not unhappily. ‘Anyway, Herzog
lied
. Guess he just wanted me in his lab to test his parasite-killer, the parasiticide, the one he intended to use against the faithful.’

The traffic of Bloomsbury rumbled beyond the railings. Ryan added, ‘What’s more, I can use disabled parking bays. So it’s not all bad, not at all. Especially when you consider the alternative.’

Karen gently smiled. ‘I suppose that’s true.’ She reached in her bag. ‘By the way, I mustn’t forget this: it’s one reason I wanted to see you.’

He was gazing at her, frowning; she hurried on.

‘You know we are still sifting the evidence at Rescorla, at the site of the explosion? Well, we found this digital camera. It was in the burned remains of Helen’s bag. It looks quite intact, and it seems to work. We’ve finished with it, certainly for the moment.’

She handed it over, placing it carefully in his hands. Ryan squinted at the camera, with an astonished expression.

The pause was slightly awkward. Perhaps it was time to go.

Ryan threaded his arm through hers, and they strolled towards the gates of the quad.

‘Eleanor is good?’

‘She is. We’re going down to Cornwall, for Easter.’ Karen checked her watch. ‘I’m picking her up from the childminder’s, we’re meeting the cousins down there. Should be a nice break.’

Ryan smiled. ‘I’d like to have kids one day.’

‘I hope you do. They are the very worst and very best thing that can happen to you. At the same time.’

For a few moments, the two of them chatted about families and children. Then Ryan frowned. ‘By the way, how is Zara Parkinson?’

‘She’s fine. Considering. Traumatized of course, but alive.’

‘That’s good.’

‘She owes her life to you.’

Ryan shook his head. ‘No, she doesn’t … I just … did what I could. I still wonder why Rothley didn’t try and escape, once he’d lost the girl.’

Karen nodded. ‘It is a bit strange. Best guess is he was just crazy, in the end – handling all those parasites, it must have got to him. We’d have liked to test his body for antigens, but there isn’t a lot to go on; in fact, nothing. He was vaporized. It happens with big explosions.’ Another silence. Less awkward, but a silence. It really was time to leave.

They said their goodbyes and Karen stepped into the urban melee of Gower Street. Her car was parked very close, by the university library. Turning the ignition, she drove to the childminder’s, collected an excited and chirruping Eleanor, and they began the five-hour journey to Cornwall.

Leaving the day before Good Friday meant the traffic was not too bad. So they arrived at twilight, cresting the hill at Carbis Bay just in time to see the sun setting over St Ives, where she and Eleanor – and Alan and Julie and the twins – had all rented a holiday apartment.

The following day dawned blue and fine. Ideal weather for a picnic on Maenporth Beach.

The children played on the sands in the sun, writing their names with big sticks. Karen sat on the blanket and chatted with Alan and Julie. As the kids chased the surf, Karen turned and gazed at the cliffs behind, where a small Cornish chapel, ancient and humble, stood in its seaside graveyard.

She recalled the comparison she had once made, between chapels and tin mines, both remnants of an exhausted industry, the ruins of what was no more.

But was that true?

This morning she had read in the local paper a report that claimed there was, supposedly, more tin under Cornwall still waiting to be mined than all the tin taken out so far. It was just inaccessible.

But one day they might find a way to tap into the seams.

Graham Moffat almost dropped his rooibos tea as he stared at his laptop screen. There was no disputing it. The white detritus recovered from the air-conditioning units of the Rescorla laboratory was indeed TS.

Dead, but TS.

So far he and his superior had discussed this odd white detritus with no one, not even the Met police. There hadn’t been any reason: the entire forensic analysis of the murder site in Cornwall had produced no real surprises; indeed, as the months had gone by what had initially felt like an interesting parasitological assignment had turned into a bothersome chore, and Graham had openly questioned – in staff meetings – whether Imperial College should be wasting valuable laboratory time in this way, even if they were assisting the police, and even if they were pretty well remunerated.

But this discovery? This changed everything.

He leaned forward, and tapped a few keys. The image enlarged, until the stained, purple, dried-ou
t larva of the cyclophilid cestoid
Taenia solium
was several inches wide, like a lurid bruise.

It was unmistakable: Graham Moffat knew his parasites, he knew his chagas from his giardiasis, his loa loa from his pinworm. And this was
Taenia solium
. In some strange, new, aerosolized or even weaponized form.

Of course, Graham mused, sipping his cooling tea, they’d have to get this startling result confirmed. Perhaps they could take blood samples from anyone who was in the laboratory on the day of the murder, look for antigens or antibodies that signified brief exposure to this parasite. But he reckoned these would simply confirm what he was seeing.

Someone had introduced this mind-altering parasite into the air-conditioning unit, probably just before the laboratory had exploded. Someone with access to these parasites in weaponized form. That probably meant Rothley. And the presence of these parasites meant that all eye-witness reports from inside the laboratory were unreliable. They could all have been hallucinating. A brief but intense mass delusion. Anything could have happened. Anyone could have escaped.

Graham picked up his mobile phone. He could get a better signal outside. It was time to call his boss, and then they would have to call the police.

The door slammed angrily shut as he exited the lab, making the table shake. And the purple larva on the laptop screen seemed to shiver, as if it were alive.

I have read many books for the purposes of researching this novel. My thanks therefore go out to all the authors: Robert Sattin, Jan Assmann, Nicholas Reeves, Georg Dehn, Andrew Smith, Erik Hornung, D M Murdock, Burton J Bogitsh, Thomas Cheng, Paul Newman, Lawrence Suttin, Claude Combes, Richard Wilkinson and Carl Zimmer. I must thank Glenys Roberts for allowing me to use her excellent essay on Crowley, and the estate of John Heath-Stubbs for allowing me to quote his verse about West Penwith; a particular debt of gratitude is owed to Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith for their marvellous and mind-blowing
Ancient Christian Magic, Coptic Texts of Ritual Power
.

Thanks are also due to my tireless agent Eugenie Furniss, and my erudite and indispensable editor Jane Johnson.

Mostly, I want to thank the many people of Egypt – Muslim and Christian, Arabs and Nubians – who have shown me so many corners of that fascinating country, and for being so hospitable every time I came visiting – even when Egypt was in violent political turmoil.

I am grateful to Al-Tayyeb Hassan, who drove me to the remotest parts of Middle Egypt. I am also grateful to Ethar Shalaby, who showed me around the home of the Zabaleen in Moqqatam, Cairo. Finally, I am enormously indebted to the Zabaleen themselves for allowing me a glimpse of their lives.

This book is dedicated to the nuns of the fourth-century Coptic monastery of St Tawdros, near the Valley of the Queens, Luxor.

Tom Knox is the pseudonym of the author Sean Thomas. Born in England, he has travelled the world writing for many different newspapers and magazines, including
The Times
, the
Guardian
and the
Daily Mail
. His first thriller was translated into twenty-two languages; he also writes on art, politics and ancient history. He lives in London.

For more information visit tomknoxbooks.com

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