Pyramid: A Novel Read online

  Costas grinned, and they both stared out the port. As Joey turned toward the sarcophagus, they could see his entire form. Unlike the box shape of most ROVs, Joey had a tapering body and an extended tail that flexed as he swam, providing improved hydrodynamics and stability while he was working on the seabed. With his second manipulator arm now extended, he looked like an outsized prehistoric scorpion. He angled gracefully through the water and came to a halt just above the protruding stone. The eye extended ever farther on its mount, snaking around and down and peering at the slab from every angle.

  “Okay,” Jack murmured. “That’s the one. Go for it, Joey.”

  The left arm reached under the carapace, drew out a tube like a vacuum-cleaner hose, and placed the end of it near the slab. Seconds later a jet of silt blew out behind the tail, and the surface of the slab was revealed. The pump sucked away sediment until all four sides had been uncovered. Joey backed away, and Jack pressed his face against the cone, staring.

  “That’s it,” he said excitedly. “I can see the fracture line. This must be the missing piece of the plaque.”

  “I can’t see any carving,” Costas said. “It must be upside down.”

  “Can Joey shift it?”

  “If I tell him to.” Joey had remained in position as the silt settled, and then looked back to them, his eye rolling sideways as if questioning. Costas pointed at the slab, made a turning motion with his hands, and then repeated it. Joey raised his finger upward and slowly shook his eye. Costas glared at him, jabbing his finger at the slab. “Come on, Marcus,” he muttered. “I know it’s him. He’s my best ROV operator, usually. He always gives Joey a little bit more personality. Now he needs to make him into a free thinker.”

  Joey looked back at the slab, then at the submersible, then back at the slab again. He suddenly jetted forward, settling again on the seabed just in front of the slab.

  “Good boy,” Costas murmured. “Good boy.”

  Stabilizing legs drove down from each corner of the carapace into the sediment. The second manipulator arm came into play, and Joey hooked both hands under the exposed edge of the slab. He heaved upward, shuddering, a fine sheen of sediment rising with each vibration. The slab slowly rose to vertical, and then Joey retracted one arm, pulled out the vacuum pipe, and sucked away the sediment from it. They saw the flash of a camera, and then Joey gently lowered the slab back to the seabed, released it in a puff of silt, and jetted back toward the submersible. He came to a halt, raised both hands as if in a gesture of uncertainty, and pointed with one of them at the screen below. It showed the surface of the slab, dazzling white with the flash, at first sight devoid of any features of interest.

  Jack stared, his heart suddenly racing. “That’s it,” he exclaimed, pointing. The ROV moved closer, and the image came more sharply into view. A line furrowed into the rock extended from the fracture to the center of the slab, where it joined another, wider line extending to either side roughly at right angles, creating something akin to a T shape. “The first line is the extension of the radiate line from the Aten symbol. The second line is the River Nile. I believe the first line shows the course of a man-made tunnel, and this map reveals where it intersects with the Nile.”

  “You think that’s a way in?”

  “I’ve got to get this to Lanowski. He can try to match it to modern coordinates. This is fantastic. It might be the best break we’ve had.”

  Joey’s screen flashed with another message, and Costas pressed his face again the viewing port to read it. He gave Joey a diver’s okay sign and then turned to Jack. “Everything’s now fixed topside, and they’re going to begin lifting us in about two minutes. The plan for raising the sarcophagus is still on schedule. Joey’s going to rig up the sarcophagus for raising, and the media can get live-stream video from his camera. Once we’re topside, they’ll drop the cable and Joey can hook it on. Macalister says that our little glitch served a useful purpose in ironing out a problem with the derrick winch. Assuming our ascent is successful, the engineers now have complete confidence in using it to raise the sarcophagus.”

  “Glad to know our little jaunt has been of some use.”

  Costas punched a finger at the viewing port. “That’s where it’s been of use. Getting Joey to perform exactly the kind of task I envisaged for him. He’s the one who should have come down here to do this job in the first place.”

  Jack waved the piece of notepaper with a sketch he had made of the depiction on the plaque fragment. “Nothing beats the Mark One human eyeball. Joey might never have found this without us to guide him.”

  Costas was barely listening as he watched Joey uncoil the hawser strap from a basket beneath the ROV that he would feed beneath the sarcophagus. “You think Joey’s impressive, you should see Little Joey. Almost thinks intuitively.”

  “I remember his predecessor. Got stuck inside a volcano.”

  Costas looked suddenly crestfallen. “Don’t remind me. But all his technology has gone into the new one, and more. He’s truly pocket-sized.”

  They strapped themselves back into the seats of the submersible, and Jack gazed one last time at the sarcophagus in situ, Joey alongside. “That’s how I want to remember it,” he said. “I’m glad I won’t be here to see it being raised. Do you remember seeing the Egyptian sculptures raised from the harbor of Alexandria, where they’d fallen when the ancient lighthouse collapsed? They seem diminished on land, like rusty old cannon raised from shipwrecks. Some artifacts are just better left on the seabed, where they have much more power and meaning. If I had my way, the sarcophagus would go to the British Museum just as Colonel Vyse intended, only in a way he could never have envisaged, not as an actual artifact but as a virtual exhibit. The HD multi-beam sonar scan and terrain mapper could produce a CG model of the wreck in incredible detail, and we’ve got enough imagery to simulate a real-time submersible dive to the site. Leaving the actual sarcophagus here on the seabed would mean that you retain the power and mystique of an object in the darkness of the abyss, in a place where no human could survive. That’s what would really fire up people’s imaginations, not being able to inspect the finer points of Old Kingdom architectonic sculpture close-up.”

  “We’re caught in a political game, Jack. Ownership is always going to be an issue with an artifact like this, and where there are conflicting claims of ownership, the winner is always going to want to trumpet their prize. And now there’s the added factor of the leverage it might give us in Egypt with the antiquities people.”

  “That’s the one plus for me. But I still feel uncomfortable playing the media game and seeing archaeology used as a pawn like this.”

  “Chances are you won’t even see it being raised. The instant we’re on deck, you’ll be whisked off to the sick bay for a complete checkup, and then you’ll probably have a spell in the recompression chamber. After that my guess is you’ll be out of here as soon as the medicos allow you to fly, if not sooner. Heading toward the Holy Land.”

  Jack stared for a moment at the sarcophagus, his mind back on the Cairo Geniza and the Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, on the extraordinary letter that he and Maria had read only the evening before in Cairo. Heading toward the Holy Land. Halevi too had travelled from Spain to the land of the Old Testament, certain that after a lifetime of searching, the answers to his questions lay there, that revelation for him could come only in the land of the Israelites. Jack had begun to feel the same too, now even more strongly with the discovery of the missing fragment of the plaque, that he was being driven back to the only place where he could find his own personal redemption, the resolution to a quest that had come close to costing him everything.

  Costas nudged him. “By the way, thanks.”

  Jack stared at him, his mind already focused on Jerusalem, on seeing Rebecca again. “Huh?”

  “For the rescue. Thanks.”

  “Oh, yeah. No problem. You would have done the same for me.”

  Costas tapped the casing. “Yeah. Probably. Wouldn�
��t have been able to live with myself afterward. Would have hated to lose a good submersible like this.”

  He grinned at Jack, and then made a whirling motion at Joey and gave a thumbs-up. The eye peered closely at them and cocked sideways, and then the manipulator arm pivoted upward on its elbow and the hand extended palm outward toward them, as if blowing them a kiss.

  “Now that was weird,” Jack said.

  The submersible shuddered, and they both lay back and braced themselves. They felt it rise and swing sideways, free of the seabed. After a few seconds hanging motionless, Jack saw the depth readout slowly but surely begin to reduce, meter by meter. As they rose above the cloud of silt created by their departure, he looked out the viewing port beside him and saw Joey bustling around the sarcophagus, feeding the hawser beneath it and then jetting over to the other side to pull it through. A pool of light in the darkness became smaller and smaller until it was no more than a smudge of yellow, and then it was gone entirely. All Jack could see was blackness, the utter void of the abyss, as if the wreck of the Beatrice and their extraordinary discovery had been no more than a phantasm of the night, as quickly dispelled as it had been conjured up.

  He shut his eyes, and was instantly, dreamlessly asleep.

  CHAPTER 15

  LARNAKA, CYPRUS

  “Jeremy! Good to see you. We haven’t got much time.”

  Jack stood up and extended a hand as the tall young man loped through the airport concourse toward him. He was wearing a T-shirt and khaki trousers and carrying a compact backpack. He shook Jack’s hand, sat down at the coffee table, quickly opened the rear of his pack, and took out his computer. He glanced at the people milling around the terminal. “Is there anywhere more private?”

  Jack shook his head. “This is as good as it gets. Rule number one of travelling incognito is to be part of the crowd, not apart from it.”

  “You worried about being spotted?”

  “The last thing I want is for one of my journalist fans to tweet about how they’ve just seen me in Cyprus checking in to a flight to Israel only two days after the world saw me off Spain raising the sarcophagus. Reminding the extremists in Egypt that we also have a research presence in Israel might be the final card that brings everything crashing down around Maurice. We’re walking on a knife-edge as it is, and I don’t want to provoke the Egyptian regime any further.”

  “I heard that the medicos on Seaquest wanted you to wait three days for observation before flying,” Jeremy said.

  “That was just precautionary. I didn’t breathe any compressed gas at depth, so there was no problem with excess nitrogen. I had some soft-tissue rupture in my sinuses and air passages but no lung collapse. Even the twenty-four hours I agreed to stay was pushing it. The Israelis banned incoming private and commercial aircraft other than El-Al three hours ago, meaning that the Embraer had to put me off here in Cyprus. The latest threat of an all-out terrorist attack from the extremists in Syria means that they’re probably on the cusp of halting incoming flights altogether, which would cut me off from seeing Rebecca. And then to cap it all, I’ve just had a text from Aysha saying that Maurice and the rest of his workers are on their way back to Alexandria from the Faiyum this afternoon. That can mean only one thing—that they’ve been booted out. Events could be coming to a head very quickly.”

  “At least the delay gave me the chance to come out and see you,” said Jeremy.

  “We could have Skyped.”

  “Not when you see what I’ve got to show you. When I saw the image you sent us yesterday of the plaque, I knew you’d want everything I could fire at you.” Jeremy glanced up at the departures board in front of them. “We’ve got forty-five minutes to final boarding. That should be exactly enough time.” He flipped open the computer and began typing.

  Jack took a deep breath, trying to forget his frustration over the lost day, and watched Jeremy. He had grown a thick black beard but still looked as boyish as he had eight years before when he had joined Maria as a graduate student in her palaeography institute in Oxford. It was hard to believe that he now had a doctorate as well as a prestigious research fellowship from his Oxford college under his belt, and had just returned from a six-month sabbatical at Cornell University, his alma mater, where he had turned down a faculty position in order to remain as assistant director of Maria’s institute. For IMU he had become an invaluable complement to Maria where ancient writing and textual analysis was concerned, and for Jack no small part of his role had been the friendship he had developed with Rebecca since she had joined her first IMU project while she was still in high school.

  Jeremy stopped tapping and looked at Jack. “You ready?”

  “Fire away. About Howard Carter.”

  “Right. After what Maria told me about the Halevi letter from the Geniza, you’ll see how this fits. Carter was born in London in 1874, the son of a painter. He went out to Egypt at the age of seventeen as a draftsman. Within a year he was working under Sir Flinders Petrie at the excavation of El-Amarna, Akhenaten’s capital, and by the age of twenty-seven he was inspector general of monuments for Upper Egypt. But then he resigned after a dispute, spent four years as a painter and antiquities dealer, and only gradually got back into archaeology proper. He eventually found patronage from Lord Carnaervon to begin his exploration of the Valley of the Kings. In 1924 he chanced on the tomb of a little-known boy pharaoh, and the rest is history.”

  “So somewhere along the way, he heard the story of the mad Sufi claiming to be an English soldier in the Old City of Cairo. Aysha told me about the article she’d found.”

  Jeremy nodded. “It was in an issue of the Cairo Weekly Gazette from 1904. The Gazette was less a newspaper than a social and entertainment journal for the British community in Cairo, with a travel section mainly aimed at ladies disposed to explore Old Cairo while their husbands were away doing frightfully important things like drinking gin in their club. One of the columns was a whimsical offering by an anonymous lady who described how the Sufi had become something of a tourist attraction. He evidently played up to the ladies, who were fascinated by him. It was hot and steamy, and they were bored and frustrated. I think there might have been a bit of the Rasputin effect.”

  “But none of them believed his story.”

  “They might not have, but somebody else did. What Maurice remembered when Aysha found that article was Howard Carter’s journal from his so-called lost years, between his resignation as inspector general in 1903 and the beginning of his exploration in the Valley of the Kings some ten years later. Because that period has less bearing on the lead-up to the discovery of Tut’s tomb, it hasn’t received as much attention from biographers, so some of his papers from that time haven’t been thoroughly studied. But trust Maurice to have done so, while he was researching some of Carter’s manuscripts held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford when he was a student.”

  “I remember him going there,” Jack said. “He was trying to trace the whereabouts of a sculpted head of Akhenaten that had been sold in Egypt before the First World War, and he remembered Carter’s period as an antiquities dealer. Back then the distinction between archaeologist and antiquities dealer was less clearly defined, with some eminent scholars being both. Carter was forced into it as he had no private means and felt his career as an archaeologist was over.”

  “It took a lot of ferreting about, but eventually I found the diary that Maurice had seen for 1908,” Jeremy said. “It makes for fascinating reading, and is a spotlight on the period. It shows that Carter really had his nose to the ground, like any good dealer. Cairo was awash with antiquities at the time, with mummies falling off the back of camels brought in by hopeful Bedouin from the desert, and every street urchin hawking a pocketful of scarabs and little bronzes. Carter had his trusted network of informants, including former Egyptian employees of his in the antiquities service who had also fallen on hard times. They were unable to find legitimate work because Carter himself had been blacklisted. It was a world of pat
ronage and corruption, with some senior officials up to their neck in it.”

  “Plus ça change,” Jack murmured. “So he came across the Sufi, and his tall tales of treasure?”

  “Actually, he’d come across him a lot earlier than 1904,” Jeremy enthused. “And this is what makes the story that bit more plausible, because there is a consistency between the accounts. When Carter first arrived in Egypt as an impressionable teenager in 1891, he threw himself into Cairo, lapping up all the history and mystique he could find. It was then that he first saw the man, begging outside the Ben Ezra synagogue. He wasn’t yet the mad mystic of the Weekly Gazette seventeen years later, but simply one of innumerable filthy and emaciated beggars on the streets of Cairo. Carter tried practicing his beginner’s Arabic on the man, who became frustrated and replied in English. He swore Carter to secrecy and showed him a battered Royal Engineers cap badge. It was only a few years after the failed Nile expedition, and the human detritus of war was also very visible in Cairo at the time. Destitute and maimed veterans of the Egyptian army as well as miscreant British soldiers were scraping a living however they could in the backstreets of the city. Some of them were mentally unbalanced by their experiences fighting the dervishes. But the Mahdist threat from Sudan was still very real, and Kitchener’s promise to avenge the death of General Gordon rung in everyone’s ears, so to be fingered as a deserter risked the harshest penalty.

  “Howard seems to have kept to his word, though, and the man, a former sapper called Jones, began to tell him an incredible story of being trapped underground for months on end. But just as Carter was planning to return to hear more, he was whisked off to Amarna by Petrie, and it was only in 1904 with the downturn in his fortunes that he came back to look for the man.”

  “Who by then was the mad mystic,” said Jack.

  “Self-styled, with an appearance to match: bald with a skullcap, a huge gray beard, sun-blackened skin. He lived by selling gullible European ladies restorative balms that he claimed to have been given by Osiris himself during an underground journey to the afterlife. He was evidently quite a character, theatrical with a deep, booming voice, speaking a strangely accented English as well as Urdu and Arabic. Local children flocked to hear his tales. He’d become something of a celebrity.”