The Exodus Quest (12 page)

‘Let’s see what else we have first.’ He took control of the mouse, clicked through the remaining photographs. Heavenly bodies on the ceiling, young men and women kneeling on dust sheets cleaning walls. A mural of a figure in blue kneeling before two men at the mouth of a cave, the Greek subscript just about legible. Augustin zoomed in then squinted at the screen. ‘“
Son of
David, have mercy on me
”,’ he translated. ‘Mean anything to you?’

‘No.’ Knox sat back. ‘Have you seen any of this before?’

‘No.’

‘And you would have, yes? I mean, if a reputable crew had found anything like this round here, you’d know, right? Even if they’d kept it secret from the
hoi polloi
like me, you’d have heard about it?’

‘I’d like to think so,’ said Augustin. ‘But this is Egypt, remember. Maybe I should give Omar a call.’

‘Good idea.’

There was no answer on Omar’s mobile. Augustin tried his office instead. Knox watched in puzzlement as he turned pale, his expression increasingly bleak. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

Augustin ended the call, turned dazed to Knox. ‘Omar’s dead,’ he said.

‘
What
?’

‘And they’re saying that you killed him.’

NINETEEN

I

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ asked Knox, horrified. ‘You don’t think … you
can’t
think I killed Omar?’

Augustin put his hand on Knox’s shoulder. ‘Of course not, my friend. But we must face facts. Omar’s dead. And you said yourself that you were in a car crash, you can’t remember anything about it.’ He grabbed his jacket, pocketed his wallet, mobile and keys. ‘I’ll go to the hospital and the SCA, see what I can find out. You stay here. Get some rest. That’s often the best way to get your memory back. And don’t worry. We’ll sort this out.’ And he pulled the door closed behind him, locking it on the latch.

II

Lily looked a little dizzily down at the ground beneath her feet. ‘You don’t suppose … I mean, it’s not possible that any of these treasures are still here?’

‘I doubt it,’ said Gaille. ‘This place has been pretty well searched over the years. Nothing much has been found. Some Nefertiti jewellery back in the eighteen hundreds. Some bronze temple vessels. I guess they might have been part of it. And there was something called the Crock of Gold too, a jar half-filled with ingots. They used to make them by digging grooves in the sand with their finger, then pouring molten gold into them to set. I’ve always thought that was most likely someone’s life-savings or a goldsmith’s stash of raw material, but I suppose it could be part of this.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Not that I know of. But then you wouldn’t expect to find much. Remember, this whole city was completely dismantled after Akhenaten died.’ Gaille gave a dry laugh. ‘In fact, maybe that’s
why
it was dismantled, not simply demolished or abandoned. Think about it. If the new authorities realised what the Atenists had done, maybe because they found a cache or two, or because someone talked …’

Lily nodded vigorously. ‘They’d have taken the place apart brick by brick until they’d found the lot.’ She touched Stafford’s book. ‘Does it say where these things were buried?’

Sunlight glared upon the white paper. They turned their backs until it was in shadow. ‘In the fortress in the Vale of Achor,’ murmured Gaille. ‘Forty cubits under the eastern steps. In the Sepulchral Monument. In the third course of stones. In the Great Cistern in the Court of the Peristyle, concealed in a hole in the floor.’

Lily wrinkled her nose. ‘Pretty vague, isn’t it?’

‘You’d expect it to be,’ replied Gaille. ‘If we’re right, the Atenists would have believed their eviction only a temporary setback. They didn’t need precise directions, only an
aide-mémoire
.’

‘What about these place names? Secacah, Mount Gezirim, the Vale of Achor?’

‘They’re all near Jerusalem,’ admitted Gaille. ‘But maybe that’s not so surprising, either. I mean, if our theory’s right, this is at least a double translation. Egyptian into Hebrew then Hebrew into English. And these places would only originally have been designated by a series of consonants, because neither Egyptian nor Hebrew had vowels. So when the translators came across place names that didn’t quite fit their preconceptions, wouldn’t it have been natural for them to tweak them until they did? I mean, take the Royal Wadi here. It used to be known as “Vale of the Horizon”, or “Vale of Akhet” in Egyptian. Is it really too great a stretch to imagine that being translated as the Vale of Achor? Or that Secacah might originally have been Saqqara?’

‘I thought Saqqara was near Cairo?’

‘Yes, but it got its name from Sokar, a god of the dead worshipped throughout Egypt. Burial grounds were often—’

Footsteps crunched the crusted sand behind her. She snapped the book closed, whirled around to see Stafford approaching, camera bags hoisted over his shoulder. ‘Can’t put it down, eh?’ he asked complacently.

‘No,’ agreed Gaille. ‘It’s quite extraordinary.’

‘That’s why I wrote it.’ He checked his watch, nodded at the Discovery. ‘Whenever you’re ready,’ he said, heaving the camera onto the back seat. ‘We are on a schedule, you know.’

III

Peterson was still on watch outside Augustin Pascal’s apartment block when a pair of sixth-floor balcony doors opened abruptly and Knox walked out, looking weary and dismayed, as though he’d just had bad news. The building’s front doors banged open a few moments later and a man in jeans and a leather jacket emerged. Pascal. It had to be. Pascal took a deep drag from his cigarette, flicked it away across the concrete, then straddled a black-and-chrome motorbike, raising an arm in acknowledgement to Knox as he pulled away.

Knox leaned far out over the balcony railing to wave him off. Watching him, Peterson experienced a most intense waking dream: Knox overbalancing, trying vainly to claw himself back, plunging to his death. Such visions weren’t new to Peterson. He took them with great seriousness. Faithless people and the weak of spirit considered prayer as their way to beseech the Lord to give them things they coveted. But true prayer wasn’t like that. True prayer was how the faithful found out what the Lord wanted from them.

A man overwrought by the death of a close
friend, a death for which he blamed himself. Yes.
People would understand if such a man threw
himself to his own destruction
.

He waited for Knox to go back inside the apartment, then got out of his Toyota and walked calmly over to the front doors.

He always felt calm when he had the Lord’s work to do.

IV

‘I thought you people weren’t in a rush,’ remarked the pathologist, leading Naguib through gloomy hospital corridors to his small office.

‘Is that what you heard?’

‘Yes. That’s what I heard.’

Naguib shrugged. ‘My boss thinks this isn’t the best moment for an investigation like this.’

‘You don’t agree with him?’

‘I have a daughter.’

The pathologist nodded seriously. ‘So do I.’

‘Have you … begun yet?’

‘She’s scheduled for this afternoon. I could bring her forward if you wish.’

‘I’d be grateful.’

‘There is one thing,’ said the pathologist. ‘Not related to cause of death, but you may find it interesting.’

‘Yes?’

‘My assistant found it while he was bringing her in. A pouch on a string around her neck.’

‘A pouch?’ frowned Naguib. ‘Anything inside?’

‘A small statuette,’ nodded the pathologist. ‘You can take it with you if you like.’

TWENTY

I

Knox caught a whiff of himself as he came in from the balcony. Not a pleasant experience. He went into the bathroom, stripped off. His bandages were looking tired and grey, much how he felt. He washed around them with soap and a flannel, flinching every few moments, less from pain so much as from the dreadful news about Omar.

He went back out. He’d slept here a hundred times, after late nights putting the world to rights, and had never thought twice about borrowing a clean shirt in the morning. But Augustin’s bedroom door was closed. And now that Knox thought about it, he recalled how Augustin had stopped on his way out of the apartment, turned back, vanished into his room for a minute, and how he’d closed his door carefully again after he’d emerged. So maybe he had someone in there. He often did. And while Augustin wasn’t coy about such things, maybe the person in there was.

Knox hesitated, unwilling to intrude. But then he remembered how bad his shirt had smelled. No way was he putting
that
back on. He knocked gently. No answer. He knocked louder, called out. Still nothing. He opened the door a short way, peeked inside, pushed it wide open and stood there in surprise. Augustin’s flat had always been a tip, particularly his bedroom. Somewhere to bring women back to, as he put it, not somewhere they’d want to stay. It wasn’t like that any more. Morning sunlight poured through dazzling clean windows onto deep-pile maroon carpet and a gleaming new brass, king-sized bed. The walls had been stripped of their ragged wallpaper, beautifully refinished and painted royal blue. Lithographs of Egypt’s great monuments on the walls. Cornices, skirting and ceiling glowing white. A fitted wardrobe of gleaming mahogany. A matching dressing table and chair. And now that he’d noticed the bedroom, he belatedly realized the main room had been redecorated and re-carpeted too, though less extravagantly. He’d simply been too disorientated to notice before.

He opened the wardrobe.
Bloody hell!
Jackets and crisply ironed shirts on wooden hangers. Shelves of neatly folded underclothes. He flipped through a stack of T-shirts, spied the corner of a purple folder. His heartbeat instantly began to accelerate. He knew instinctively that this was why Augustin had come in here, to hide this. He knew too that he shouldn’t look, yet also that he was going to. He took the folder to the window, opened the flap. There were photographs inside. He pulled them out, leafed through them in gathering disbelief, a knot tugging tight in the pit of his stomach as he wondered what it meant. But it was obvious what it meant, and there was nothing to be done about it, not now at least, except to return the photographs to the folder, replace them as he’d found them.

He still needed a fresh shirt, so he peeled one from its hanger, hurried out, closed the door behind him. Then he sat at the kitchen table, brooding on what he’d just discovered, the uncomfortable realization that perhaps he couldn’t entirely trust his closest friend any more.

II

Farooq arrived at his desk to find Salem standing there, bleary-eyed from his night’s sentry-duty outside Knox’s hospital room. ‘Yes?’ asked Farooq.

‘He escaped, boss,’ mumbled Salem.

‘Escaped?’ said Farooq icily. ‘What do you mean, escaped?’

‘He left his room. He jumped out a window. He got into a taxi.’

‘And you just let him?’

Salem pulled a face, as if he was about to cry. ‘How could I know he’d jump out a window?’

Farooq waved his hand angrily to dismiss him. But in truth, he felt excited rather than dismayed. Vindicated. His instincts had proved right. Car-crash victims didn’t flee hospitals for no reason, not even Egyptian ones. They certainly didn’t leap out of windows. Only a man with blood on his hands would go to such lengths.

He sat back in his chair, joints creaking beneath the strain, considered what he knew. An archaeological dig. An unannounced visit by the SCA. A return visit under cover of darkness. A Jeep crashed in a ditch. One man dead. An important man too. He bit a knuckle in thought. Was it possible there was something on Peterson’s site? Something
valuable
? It would certainly help explain things, including his strong sense that it wasn’t just Knox who was up to no good, but Peterson too.

He pushed himself to his feet, grabbed his car keys. He needed to go check out this site for himself. But then he hesitated. He had no idea what to look for, after all. And if Peterson did have anything to hide, he’d no doubt try to bury it beneath mounds of jargon. Farooq loathed jargon. It always made him feel uneducated.

He checked his watch. He should go visit the SCA anyway, notify them of the crash, try to find out more about Tawfiq and Knox, why they’d gone to Borg el-Arab in the first place. And maybe, if he asked nicely, they’d lend him an archaeologist to go out there with him.

III

The high sandstone walls of the Royal Wadi made little impression on Captain Khaled Osman as Nasser drove them out along the new road to Akhenaten’s Royal Tomb. He’d escorted dozens of tourists this way these past few months, but he’d never felt anything like this nervous before. Perhaps it was because these were TV people, and he knew to his own cost what damage TV people could do.

They reached the generator building. Half a million Egyptian pounds they’d just spent on the new generator!
Half a million!
He felt slightly queasy at the thought of all that money as Nasser drove the short distance down the side-spur that housed the tomb and parked next to the Discovery. He opened his door, jumped down. The sun was still low enough that the spur was in shade. He gave a little shiver. There were ghosts in this place. He put a hand on the holster of his Walther and felt a little better.

His childhood friends had bitterly resented the prospect of conscription into the army, being ripped away from home and family. Only Khaled had looked forward to it. He’d never envisaged any other life for himself. He liked the discipline, relished the cold authority of a weapon, savoured the way women looked at a handsome man in uniform. He’d breezed through basic training, had volunteered for Special Forces. Officers had murmured of him as the coming man.

He walked over to the tomb entrance, unlocked the door, pushed it open, revealing the sloped shaft of steps leading down to the burial chamber below, floor-lamps glowing either side with their soft insect buzzing. He watched sourly as the TV people made their way inside and then down.

His army career had died one afternoon in Cairo. A street urchin had spat at his driver window as he’d been escorting his commanding officer to a meeting at the Ministry. It was a level of disrespect that simply couldn’t be tolerated, not with his CO watching. A passing tourist had filmed what had happened next, then passed on the footage to some do-gooder journalist who’d tracked the kid down, had filmed him lying wrapped up like some mummy in his bed. His CO had stepped in, saved him from the courts. But he’d had to agree to a transfer out of the army. He’d had to agree to join these wretched tourist police, be stationed here in the arse-end of nowhere. Six months, he’d been promised. Just until the dust settled.

That had been eighteen months ago.

The TV people reached the foot of the steps, crossed the wooden walkway over the sump into the burial chamber. Khaled turned his back on them. What they got up to down there meant nothing to him. It was only up here they needed watching.

Six months ago, Amarna had been struck by the fiercest of storms, as if the end of the world had come. He and his men had driven around the site the morning after. It had been Faisal who’d spotted her, lying face-down on the rocks a little way from here, one arm flung out above her head, the other bent grotesquely back, her matted hair glued with congealed blood to a blue tarpaulin.

Khaled had knelt beside her, touched her cheek. Her skin had been waxy and cool, speckled with sand and grit. He’d heard stories about local kids scouring the wadis after storms, hoping that the rains had broken open some undiscovered tomb, or more realistically looking for fragments of pottery in the sand, the characteristic Amarna-blue gleaming brightly after the spray-clean of violent rain.
Poor stupid thing. To risk so much for so
little
.

‘Captain!’ Nasser had said. ‘Look!’

He’d glanced up to see Nasser pointing at a narrow black slash in the sandstone wall high above their heads. His heart had clenched tight as a fist as he’d realized that the girl hadn’t died in pursuit of mere pottery fragments after all. She’d been after bigger quarry.

Men chose their destiny in such moments. Or perhaps they simply learned who they truly were. Khaled had known his duty, that he should report this at once to his superiors. It might even win him a reprieve, a return to soldiering. But not for a moment had he considered it. No. He’d walked straight over to the cliff-face and begun to climb.