The Library of the Kings (A Tom Wagner Adventure Book 2)

by M. C. Roberts

  Steinberg was a spy. That was all the American knew. He had been a spy for a very long time, and had probably switched allegiances many, many times in his career. The American had no idea who Steinberg was working for now, and he didn’t want to know. The Agency had simply named him as the best source of information in Vienna, especially for the World War II era.

  The American wasted no time. He told Steinberg what he’d found in Brazil, naturally taking care neither to say a word about what he was really looking for, nor to reveal that he was actually on a mission personally assigned to him by the president of the United States.

  “The Nazis conducted countless interrogations. The Austrian resistance grew strong quite early, so it will be difficult to find the man you are looking for. Perhaps the Documentation Centre of the Austrian Resistance can help, or we might have to visit the Austrian Archaeological Institute.”

  “The Archaeological Institute? Why would they be involved?” The American’s curiosity had been piqued.

  Steinberg raised his hand, the Ober nodded, and within moments two cups of Wiener melange arrived at the table—arranged on a silver tray with a glass of water, naturally, as was customary in Vienna.

  The American was astounded. Steinberg smiled mildly. “Have you heard of our writer, Peter Altenberg?” he asked. “They used to say that if he was not in the Central, then he was on his way here. He actually gave out the café as his home address. It’s almost like that for me, too.”

  The American glanced impatiently at his watch, a message not lost on Steinberg, who continued: “But getting back to the topic, you said that the Capri file contained all kinds of information about occult and mystical artifacts. The Nazis, Himmler and Hitler above all, were fascinated by that stuff.” Steinberg leaned closer and lowered his voice: “They say that’s why the Austrian Archaeological Institute was annexed in 1938 and converted into the Vienna Department of the German Archaeological Institute—because it possessed many, many objects that fascinated the Nazis. I will arrange for us to visit both institutions privately.” He winked at the American, drank his melange and stood up.

  “I’ll be in touch as soon as I know more. I assume I can expect the usual fee from the Agency?”

  The American nodded, although he had no idea what Steinberg’s usual fee was. He paid for the coffee and strolled toward the open plaza at Michaelerplatz. He did not realize, as he left the Central, that he was being watched by someone who knew him only too well.

  24

  Egyptian Museum, Cairo

  The clay lid had probably been sealed with pine resin. Hellen had managed to open the first amphora quickly and had discovered a few tightly rolled scrolls inside, but the second was proving more stubborn. Was there a surprise waiting for her inside? Something big? Her excitement was almost painful.

  These containers had been used thousands of years earlier to store all kinds of things: oils and wine, but also meat, salted fish and beans were sealed and transported in them. They could be closed with lids of animal skin, cork, or clay, and made airtight with resins. To waterproof them completely, they were coated with pine resin. Embossed symbols were used to label them, identifying the contents, origin, producer or year.

  But the symbol these two clay vessels bore was not something normally found on an amphora: the ankh.

  “In the ankh symbol, people usually see the cross of life, the symbol of eternal life. But it had other meanings,” Hellen explained. “It was also known as ‘the key to the maturity of spirit and soul’ and ‘the key to wisdom and knowledge of the secrets of life.’ My father believed that it was literally the key to the secret of the library, and when I saw it on that letter, it was clear to me that, somehow, it had to be the answer.” She traced the tip of her thumb gently over the embossed symbol and felt certain that she had finally found the clue she’d been looking for. Maybe one day she would even be able to discover why her father had disappeared, but right now, she dared not dream of that. Carefully, Hellen scraped the sealing material out of the gap around the lid of the second amphora.

  “Careful!” Arno said. He was standing behind Hellen, watching anxiously over her shoulder. But Hellen was in her element. With gloved hands, she treated the fragile artifacts as she would a raw egg. She gave Arno a shove with her hip because he was standing too close, literally breathing down her neck.

  “Please, Arno. Give me a little space. Make yourself useful and see if you can find something we can use to transport the scrolls.“

  “What do you mean, ‘transport’? We can’t take them with us.”

  “We have to take them with us. I can’t simply unroll the scrolls and analyze them here. They’d fall apart on the spot. We don’t have the time or the equipment to do it properly. They have to be hydrated for a few days before you can even try to unroll them, and you need a properly equipped lab for that.”

  “But . . .” Arno started to say, but then shrugged in defeat and began searching the cupboards that lined the walls.

  “There is no other way,” Hellen said. “I’m so close, closer than ever before. There’s no way I’m leaving here without these scrolls.”

  “Found something,” Arno said, proudly holding up a cardboard roll.

  “Got it!” Hellen cried, then briefly hoped her happy outburst hadn’t been too loud. And then both of them suddenly heard a sound and fell silent. For several seconds, neither dared to move at all.

  “That came from outside,” Arno whispered.

  “Go see what it was,” Hellen said.

  Arno crept out of the room and Hellen immediately turned back to her work. She lifted the lid carefully off the second amphora and set it aside, then moved the magnifying lamp toward and looked inside. A moment later she pulled away, mystified, before peering inside again. She tried different angles, she tried adjusting the lamp, but nothing changed. At first glance, and even at the second, the amphora seemed to be empty. But something was off. Hellen rolled up the sleeve of her blouse and, with great care, reached into the opening. Yes! She had not been mistaken: the amphora looked deeper from the outside than on the inside: it had a false bottom! She ran her fingers over the inside base of the amphora and felt irregular holes. At a point on the side she felt an indentation of some sort. She looked inside again and then she saw it: a tiny ankh symbol stamped into the edge of the false base.

  A loud blast from outside shocked Hellen so much that the amphora slipped out of her hands and smashed on the floor. A gunshot, she thought, her mind suddenly blank. “Arno!” she cried. Ignoring the fact that she had just destroyed an ancient, priceless artifact, she ran out of the laboratory into the corridor. She heard voices, and they grew louder as she ran toward them.

  “Put the gun down and your hands up!” a man shouted. “Now!”

  She knew the voice, but it wasn’t Arno. Then another shot rang out just as Hellen turned the corner of the corridor.

  It took her a moment to realize what had happened. Arno had his back to her. He seemed to be standing without moving. Then a pistol slipped from his grasp and clattered to the floor. He collapsed on the spot and lay motionless on the floor.

  Hellen let out a piercing, horrified wail. Farther back she saw Tom lowering his gun.

  “Arno!” she cried in despair. She ran to her lover, sliding the last few feet on her knees. Tears already welled from her eyes. “Arno! Arno . . .” she sobbed. She turned him over, but could only stare into his dead eyes. She lifted his head onto her lap. “What have you done? Why??” she screamed tearfully at Tom.

  “I . . . he had a gun. I warned him,” Tom stammered, running his hands nervously through his hair. Cloutard, looking grim, pushed Tom aside a little, and Tom understood that it would be better if Cloutard tried to comfort Hellen.

  “I’m sorry, Hellen. I’m sorry,” Tom said. He turned away and smashed his fist against a wall.

  Cloutard knelt beside Hellen and did his best to console her. He knew it was hopeless, but he checked the fallen man’s pulse. N
othing. Arno was dead.

  Cloutard lifted Hellen to her feet, put his arm around her and walked her a few paces away from the body. Tom, who had stayed in the background until now, went to Arno’s body, knelt beside him and searched his pockets.

  Had he been mistaken? The man had been about to shoot him dead. If Cloutard hadn’t pushed Tom out of the firing line in time, the first bullet would have struck him. Another thing: the man had not reacted at all to his warning—he had been about to fire again. They had been facing each other, as if in a duel, and Tom had been left with no choice but to shoot.

  Arno Kruger, Tom read from the man’s ID card. South African. Apart from the ID card, his pockets held only a money clip with a few bills, a business card for a company that seemed to trade in diamonds, and the key to a rental car.

  “Leave him be! Get your hands off him! Why did you do that?” Hellen, in tears, screamed at Tom. Cloutard gently turned her face away and she buried her face in his chest. After a few moments, they moved slowly back toward the laboratory. Tom followed a few steps behind.

  Cloutard sat Hellen down on a stool and gave her his handkerchief. She dried her eyes and mechanically passed the handkerchief back to Cloutard. Tom looked around inside the lab and saw the papyrus scrolls lying on the table. He stepped over the remains of the second amphora on the floor, kicking a few clay shards aside, and approached the table. He picked up the small tray holding the delicate scrolls and turned to Hellen.

  “Is this what you found?” She raised her head and nodded apathetically. Tom turned away. He picked up the cardboard document roll that lay on the table, carefully slipped the papyruses inside and closed the roll. Hellen, who had spent the entire time staring at the floor and sobbing, suddenly came back to life. She had seen something among the shards on the floor: the false bottom of the amphora.

  All at once, an ear-splitting siren cut through the silence, and Tom and Cloutard almost jumped out of their skin. The alarm!

  25

  Egyptian Museum, Cairo

  “One hour, no more. He warned us,” Hellen said disinterestedly, looking at her watch.

  “We can’t go back the same way. We have to find another way out,” Tom said. “Let’s go!”

  He grabbed the document roll, opened the lab door, glanced out into the corridor to check that they were in the clear, then moved off quickly to the left. Cloutard was right behind him. In the lab, Hellen quickly crouched and picked up the round clay disk that Tom had revealed when he kicked the shards aside. It was about six inches across, just small enough to fit into a pocket of her cargo pants. Then she followed them out of the room. Outside the door, she stopped for a moment and looked to the right, in the direction Arno lay. For a moment, time seemed to stand perfectly still. A single tear welled from her eye. She wiped it away, then turned and went after Tom and Cloutard.

  Tom stopped at a junction of corridors. “Which way?” he asked.

  Cloutard slid his backpack from his shoulder and began rummaging through it. There had been a museum plan in Ossana’s file, he remembered. “Give me a just a second,” he said, still digging in the backpack.

  Tom frowned. “Could it be that the master thief is getting rusty? In case you hadn’t noticed, the alarm is screaming its head off. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Go right,” Hellen suddenly said from behind. “Then take the stairs up and go right again at the top.” Tom and Cloutard looked around to her in surprise. Hellen’s face was lit by her phone’s display. She looked up and held it out for them to see, and they found themselves looking at a picture of the plan on the nightwatchman’s wall. They looked at each other, nodded, and headed to the right. When they turned the corner, they were suddenly confronted by two security men. The security men had their weapons at the ready, but they were just as surprised as Tom, Hellen and Cloutard.

  Unlike Cloutard, Tom was anything but out of practice. He did not hesitate for a fraction of a second. Throwing himself at the man on the left, he rammed his elbow under the man’s chin, at the same time slamming his foot into the gut of the second security guy. The second man groaned, doubled over, dropped to the floor and lost his grip on his pistol. Tom struck the first guard on the temple with a hard fist, putting him out of action. The other man was still holding his gut with one hand but was crawling toward his pistol, which lay just inches from his outstretched arm. Tom had already spotted his target. He grabbed a leg, pulled and twisted, turning the surprised guard over, then dropped on top of him and punched him hard in the middle of his face. Tom, Hellen and Cloutard all heard the unmistakable crunch of the man’s nose breaking. The pain from the blow seared through the guard, sending him into unconsciousness—the two security men were no longer a threat. Everything had happened so fast that neither Hellen nor Cloutard had had a chance to help Tom, although Cloutard had managed to screw up his face in disgust at the sound of the breaking nose.

  “Bien fait,” Cloutard said. He stepped over the two men and headed in the direction of the northwest emergency exit, where they would be able to escape the Egyptian Museum unseen.

  26

  Khan el-Khalili souk, Cairo

  The rental car, an old Mitsubishi Lancer, parked in a dark side street, away from all the noise of the city. Cloutard was at the wheel, with Tom beside him and Hellen in the back seat. She stared out the window, still in shock. Her fingers clenched the disk she had discovered among the remnants of the amphora.

  Tom took out the flip phone he’d got from Ossana and called the only number on it. After a few moments, Ossana picked up.

  “You’re certainly fast,” she said. “You must really miss your crippled friend. Don’t you trust me to take care of him?”

  “Where do we make the handover?” Tom asked, never one for niceties.

  “Well, well. All business. I can appreciate that. Be at Bab al-Ghuri, by Khan el-Khalili bazaar, in one hour. Come alone,” Ossana said and immediately hung up.

  “She certainly picked a nice public spot for it. Ideal for disappearing,” Cloutard said, when Tom had told him where the handover was to take place.

  “What are you talking about?” Hellen asked quietly. “What are you even doing here in Cairo?” Tom and Cloutard looked around to her.

  “Noah’s been kidnapped. The amphoras are the ransom,” said Tom bluntly.

  Hellen sat up straighten. “What? Noah’s been kidnapped? By whom?” Hellen was slowly coming back to life. “What’s going on here?” she demanded.

  Tom took out his phone and played Noah’s message for her to hear.

  “I didn’t recognize the number, so I only heard it the next day. An hour later, Ossana dropped by my hotel for a visit. She told me she had Noah and what I had to do to get him back. And here we are.”

  “Ossana? What does that bitch want with the Library of Alexandria?”

  “What do you mean, the Library of Alexandria?” Cloutard said, eyebrows raised. “That was destroyed centuries ago.”

  “I found those amphorae in the Anfushi Necropolis in Alexandria two days ago,” Hellen began, and she told Tom and Cloutard the whole story. She ended with: “Arno bribed the night watchman and . . .” The thought of Arno was like a hand clenched around her throat, cutting off her words.

  “. . . and then we came along,” Cloutard finished Hellen’s sentence.

  Tom looked at the time. “I have to be at that souk in less than fifty minutes to hand these scrolls over to Ossana. It’s that, or we never see Noah again.”

  Hellen wanted to protest the loss of the scrolls, but then she recalled the disk hidden in her pocket. Could she risk keeping it a secret from Tom and Cloutard? Would she be risking Noah’s life? No, impossible—no one could possibly know what was inside the amphorae. She decided to keep the disk to herself, at least for now.

  “Time to go,” Tom said, and Cloutard started the engine.

  27

  Midan Hussein, Cairo

  A few minutes later they arrived at Midan Hussein, where t
wo huge mosques faced each other across a plaza. The smaller and more modern of the two, the Sayyidna el-Hussein Mosque, perched directly beside the entrance to the bazaar. On the opposite side of the plaza stood the Alexandria-Azhar Mosque, over a thousand years old. It was the second mosque ever built in Cairo, and ever since its construction the city had been nicknamed “city of a thousand minarets.” Today, it is recognized as the second-oldest continuously operated university in the world.

  Cloutard pulled over to the right to let Tom out. It was late in the evening, but many people were still out and about in the area around the mosques. Tourists strolled, admiring the old buildings. The mosque looked radiant in the glow of white and yellow floodlights that showed the impressive architecture in its best light. Tom trotted across the square to the eastern entrance to the bazaar, beside the tallest of the el-Hussein mosque’s minarets. He only had a few minutes left until Ossana’s deadline.

  “Check. Check,” said Tom, testing the earpiece he’d planted in his ear before getting out of the car. He was grateful that his brief return to his old job gave him access to high-grade equipment like this, at least temporarily. Once he’d returned Chancellor Lang to the embassy safely, he had made a quick detour down to the equipment room.

  “Coming in loud and clear,” Cloutard replied.

  Tom was picking his way through the narrow street known as Sekat al Badstan. It was lined with small shops and open stands offering spices, artfully contrived lanterns, pots and jewelry, the wares shimmering in the golden light of the gas lamps. Tourists bought souvenirs, trinkets and T-shirts for friends and family at home, while Egyptian men sat at outdoor tables drinking tea or coffee and smoking their aromatic shisha pipes.