The Pyramid of Doom_A Novel

by Andy McDermott

Eddie gave her a look. “Wait, you talked to Mikko Virtanen?”

  She grinned. “I did more than just talk to him.” Seeing Nina’s and Eddie’s expressions of dawning realization, she went on: “What? I wasn’t going to walk around the streets all night after the casino closed. Where did you think I got this?” She showed off the expensive soft leather jacket in Team Osiris’s colors she was wearing over her shimmering dress.

  “You didn’t nick it off him, did you?” Eddie asked.

  “Of course not!” she said, offended. “It was a gift. You know, he’s fast on the track, but in bed—”

  “Okay, heard enough,” said Nina hurriedly.

  “Nice work in the casino, by the way,” Eddie told Macy. “That big bugger would’ve tackled me if you hadn’t tripped him.”

  Macy smiled. “I just remembered what you said about always being ready for action—and I figured that with you two, there’s always action.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Nina, grimacing. “But never mind that. There are more important things.” She took the photo of the zodiac from her pocket and showed it to Macy. Though crumpled, the picture was still clear enough to show the details of the painted relief. “I think I figured out where the pyramid is. It’s somewhere near Abydos.” She quickly explained her reasoning.

  Macy regarded the picture in wonderment. “That’d make sense. Abydos was supposed to be the site of Osiris’s tomb—nobody’s ever found it, but the Egyptians definitely believed it was near there. All the First Dynasty pharaohs were buried there so they could be close to Osiris. You think the pyramid’s to the west?” Nina nodded. “That fits, too. The western desert was supposedly where the dead went to enter the Underworld, where the sun went down.”

  “What about the ‘second eye of Osiris?’ Does that ring any bells?”

  Macy frowned, thinking. “The second eye? I dunno. Unless …” Her dark eyes opened wide. “Unless it’s something in the Osireion!”

  “The what?” Eddie asked.

  “The Osireion—it’s a building, it’s meant to be a copy of Osiris’s tomb.”

  “A second tomb,” Nina realized. “A second eye. And if it looks in the direction of the silver canyon …”

  “ … we’ve found the pyramid,” Eddie finished. “So, back across the Med, then!”

  “Rest assured, I will be cooperating with the authorities to find out who was responsible for this catastrophe,” Osir told the news crew. “It’s been a terrible day for the sport, for Team Osiris, for Mikko Virtanen—and for myself personally, as you can imagine.”

  “What about the reports of a shootout on your yacht?” asked the newsman, thrilled to have a story juicier than sports reporting.

  Osir needed all his acting skills to keep a neutral face. “I don’t know anything about that, only what the Monaco police have told me. Thank you, and excuse me.” He retreated into the VIP box, the newsman still firing questions as he closed the door.

  Shaban and Diamondback were waiting. “Well?” Osir demanded.

  “Wilde and Chase must have gotten away,” Shaban said grimly. “The Monaco police haven’t caught them, and since it takes only ten minutes to reach the border I doubt they will.”

  “What about the yacht? Did the zodiac survive?”

  “Yes, so we still have that, at least. I’ve arranged for it to be shipped to Switzerland once the police clear the scene.”

  “My God,” said Osir, shaking his head as he sat. “How did they escape?”

  “Because you were soft,” Shaban snapped. Osir was startled by the fury in his brother’s voice. “I warned you! You fell for that woman, and she betrayed you. I told you to kill her, but you refused—and now look what has happened!”

  Osir jumped up again, stabbing a finger at Shaban. “You do not speak to me like—”

  “This is your fault!” Shaban roared, making Osir flinch. “Everything I do, I do to protect the temple—but this has gone too far for you to tie my hands! If you want to find the Pyramid of Osiris—and keep it for yourself—then it will take blood. It has taken blood. And because you didn’t let me do what needed to be done, the blood is of our own followers instead of our enemies!” His voice softened, slightly, as he put a hand on Osir’s shoulder. “Don’t you see, Khalid? If we don’t get everything, we will be left with nothing … and I will not let that happen. Let me do what needs to be done. We have to find Dr. Wilde before she finds the pyramid—and kill her. You know I’m right.”

  “Yes,” Osir said reluctantly. “Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry. I should have listened to you, my brother.”

  Shaban nodded, satisfaction on his scarred face. “Then we’re agreed. We find them, and kill them, and take the pyramid for ourselves.”

  “Agreed,” said Osir.

  “Just one minor problem,” Diamondback said, voice heavy with sarcasm. “We don’t know where they’re goin’ and we don’t know where the pyramid is either.”

  “We need an expert,” said Shaban. “Someone who knows the entire history of Egypt.”

  “Hamdi?” asked Osir.

  Shaban shook his head. “Hamdi is a glorified librarian. We want someone world-class …” He smiled malevolently as an idea came to him. “And someone with a grudge against Nina Wilde.” Raising his phone, he selected a number: the Osirian Temple’s Swiss headquarters. “This is Sebak Shaban. I need you to contact the International Heritage Agency in New York, and tell them … tell them I want to speak to Dr. Logan Berkeley.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Egypt

  What initially seemed like a simple trip back to Egypt quickly turned into a far more stressful experience. An attempt to book a flight from Nice was stymied when Macy discovered—to her mortification—that her credit card had been canceled. Her parents had pulled the plug.

  An angry phone call home made it clear that her line of credit would only be restored if she agreed to go straight back to Miami. Nina’s suggestion that, now they knew Abydos was the key to finding the Pyramid of Osiris, her work was done and she could return to the United States did not go down well.

  Eddie managed to defuse the tension between the two women by cobbling together an itinerary that was—just—manageable on his and Nina’s strained finances, flying from Nice to Athens on a no-frills budget carrier, then on to Cyprus, and from there a plodding ferry to Egypt’s Port Said. Following that was a slow and draining overland journey south by rail to the town of Sohag. Tempers frayed, they traversed the last miles in a rented 4 × 4, finally reaching their destination three days after leaving Monaco.

  If Cairo had been uncomfortably hot, then Abydos, three hundred miles farther south on the edge of the Sahara, was almost agonizing. The temperature was well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and what breeze there was provided little relief, being laden with gritty, astringent sand. Nina was already on her second bottle of water, and it was still only morning.

  As usual, Eddie barely seemed to notice the conditions, still wearing his leather jacket; his only concession to the burning sun was a floppy cloth hat to protect his balding scalp. “Could be worse, love,” he offered. “At least it’s a dry heat.”

  “Hilarious,” Nina snapped. Her pale skin had forced her to cover up, and unlike her husband she was sweltering. “God, I hate deserts. Why are the best ruins always in such godawful places?”

  But despite her foul mood, she was still impressed by what awaited them. The remains of the ancient city of Abydos sprawled over a wide area, the majesty of the temples in stark contrast with the ugly little village nearby. But when they stood before the structure they had come to see, the modern world was figuratively and literally behind them; nothing was in sight beyond the partially buried remains of the Osireion except the bleak wastes and distant cliffs of the Western Desert.

  They had the place almost to themselves, a coach party there when they arrived having left for the next destination on its whistle-stop tour of Upper Egypt. A couple of policemen had been lurking nearby—unescorted visit
s to the ruins were discouraged—but a bribe persuaded them to wander back into the village for a few hours.

  “So, what are we looking for?” Nina asked Macy. “You’re the expert.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call myself that,” she said, falsely modest.

  “You’re the nearest we’ve got,” said Nina dismissively. “So, what’s the deal?”

  Macy turned to the much larger, more intact structure behind them. “That’s the Temple of Seti, or Sethos, there,” she said, “which was built by his son Ramesses the Second sometime around 1300 BC. The cool thing about it is that it’s totally unique architecturally. All the other Egyptian temples run in a straight line, yeah? You go in through the entrance, and each hall comes one after the other. But this one”—she pointed out a section to their right—“is kinked.”

  “I like a bit of kinkiness,” said Eddie.

  Nina shushed him. “Why’s it that shape?”

  Macy looked back at the Osireion. “Supposedly, the Temple of Seti and the Osireion were built at the same time. That’s what most of the books say, anyway. So did my professor. But it didn’t really make sense to me, and it turns out some archaeologists think so too. I mean, why would you bend your temple in half to avoid another building if they were being built at the same time? It’s not like they were short of space to put the second one farther away.” She indicated the empty desert past the ruins.

  “So there’s another theory?” asked Nina.

  She nodded. “Some people think the Osireion was already here way before 1300 BC. It’d been buried by sand, but Ramesses discovered it when the Temple of Seti was being built. Things were too far along for him to stop work on the temple, but he didn’t want to knock down the Osireion either … so he changed the plans to make the new temple go around a corner.”

  “Why’d he want to keep it so much?” said Eddie.

  Nina knew. “Because it was a copy of the tomb of Osiris himself. They’d lost the location of the original tomb centuries earlier, but they realized they had the next best thing.”

  “And if we’re right,” said Macy, “somewhere inside it is the eye of Osiris.”

  “Which points the way to his pyramid. So all we have to do … is find it.”

  They crossed the stony sands to the Osireion. The site was practically a pit, a series of stepped walls leading down to the excavated structure. Compared with the ornate elegance of the Temple of Seti, the exposed ruins were almost brutalist, made of unornamented blocks of pale granite. The hall’s floor, some ninety feet long, was hidden beneath a stagnant green pool.

  Eddie screwed up his face in distaste. “I didn’t expect to come into the bloody Sahara to go wading. I would’ve brought my Wellies.”

  “It’s not that deep,” said Nina, descending the steps into the building proper. “I hope.” She cautiously dipped a boot into the turgid, algae-coated water, finding it was about an inch in depth. “Ugh. At least we didn’t come in the rainy season.” She turned as Macy and Eddie joined her, noticing a dark passage beyond an opening at the northwestern end. “Where does that go?”

  “It’s a tunnel that went to the northern entrance,” Macy told her, examining a diagram in her guidebook.

  Eddie squinted inside. “Doesn’t go anywhere now—the other end’s buried. Hope this eye thing’s not in there.” He splashed to the other end of the hall. “I just thought of something. If this eye’s supposed to be looking toward the pyramid, and the pyramid’s out to the west somewhere, then it’ll be on one of the east walls inside, right?”

  “The man in the funky hat makes a good point,” said Macy, exchanging smiles with him.

  Nina unslung her backpack, taking out a flashlight, then waded to an opening in the wall. A ramp rose from the water; the small chamber inside was dry. She entered, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Like the hall outside, the walls were plain, unadorned.

  Eddie and Macy followed. “See anything?” Eddie asked.

  “Not yet.” Nina carefully scanned the walls for any indications of carvings or markings. Macy, meanwhile, took out a flashlight of her own and conducted a much less methodical examination of the chamber, sweeping the beam around at random. “Will you cut that out?” Nina demanded. “You won’t find anything just by waving the light about. We need to do a section-by-section search—”

  “Aha! Found it!” Macy interrupted. She fixed her beam on one particular spot, high on the back wall. “See? One eye of Osiris. I rock!”

  “That’s more like it,” said Eddie, seeing a symbol carved into the stone. “Archaeology without all the boring farting around.”

  Nina’s patience finally snapped. “Will you both goddamn take this seriously!” she shouted, voice echoing around the chamber. “It wouldn’t be boring if you had even the slightest interest in what I do,” she said to Eddie, before rounding on Macy. “And you, if you really want to be an archaeologist, then start acting like one. Or acting like an adult, even!”

  Eddie made a sarcastic face. “Oh, the schoolmistress voice. I love hearing that.”

  Macy, on the other hand, was shocked by the attack. “But—but I still found it,” she said, pointing up at the symbol.

  “By sheer fluke!” snapped Nina. “And because you weren’t being methodical, you did exactly what Logan did at the Sphinx, which was rush straight for the obvious prize and completely overlook anything else that might be important.”

  Eddie indicated the plain walls surrounding them. “There isn’t anything else.”

  “That’s not the point!” she protested, before turning back to Macy. “You’re treating this like a high school field trip—and you’re acting like one of the cheerleaders giggling on the backseat of the bus with the jocks!”

  Macy’s dark eyes narrowed angrily. “I suppose you always sat up front with the teachers.”

  “Well—yes,” said Nina, taken aback by the challenge, “but this isn’t about me, it’s about the work. If we want to find the pyramid, we’ve got to be professional about it.”

  “And you think I’m not, is that it? Excuse me, Dr. Wilde, but you wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me. I was the one who found out about the other entrance to the Hall of Records, I was the one who got us into the Sphinx compound—”

  “By flashing your boobs!”

  Macy looked offended. “You think I’m just some bimbo, don’t you? Because I’m hot and I don’t get straight A’s in everything, you don’t take me seriously!”

  “You’re not taking this seriously!”

  Eddie stepped forward, moving between them. “ ‘This?’ ”

  “All of this!” Nina cried, waving her hands at the ancient structure around them. “Everything! It’s all important, but sometimes I feel like I’m the only person in the world who actually cares about it!”

  Macy’s tone became withering. “Oh, I see—the entire world of archaeology revolves around you! Dr. Berkeley was right, you really do have to be the center of attention all the time.” She pulled out the folded magazine pages and flapped them at Nina. “You know, when I read this I thought you were so cool and so smart—that you were somebody really special. But you’re just like everyone else.” She stalked to the entrance and threw the pages outside. Disappointment overcame her anger. “Everything’s about you.”

  “That’s not true,” insisted Nina, now on the defensive. “I don’t care about taking the credit.”

  “You enjoyed it, though.”

  “Of course I did,” she admitted after a moment. “But that’s not why I do what I do. I do it because … because I have to!”

  There was an almost confessional tone to her voice. Eddie raised an eyebrow. “You have to?”

  “Yeah. It’s … it’s who I am. My parents spent their lives trying to reveal the truth about the past to the world—not so a few people could profit from it, but for everyone. That’s what I do too.” She paused, almost afraid to confess her feelings. “And if I can’t do it, then what else can I
do? What else have I got?”

  “You’ve got me,” said Eddie.

  “I know. But …” For a moment she couldn’t face him, before giving him a sad, shameful look. “But what if that’s not enough?”

  An awkward silence filled the chamber. Macy stared uncomfortably down at her feet, while Nina again found herself unable to meet Eddie’s gaze.

  “Well, you know,” he finally said, managing a faint smile, “I never really did see you as the stay-at-home housewife type.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nina said quietly.

  He put his arms around her. “No need.”

  “You’re not mad at me?”

  “Only that you didn’t get this out into the open ages ago!” He smiled again, more broadly. “That’s what was wrong all this time? You thought there was nothing else you could do except archaeology?”

  Nina nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “Well, that’s just fucking daft!” he said, laughing. “You’re the smartest person I know, you could do anything you want. Even dance.” He gave her a pointed look. “You’ve just got to want to want.”

  “I guess …”

  “So what do you want, right now?”

  She didn’t answer at first; then one corner of her mouth creased upward, very slightly. “I can think of something,” she said, “but we can’t do it in front of Macy.”

  He grinned. “She can join in if she wants—I could handle a threesome!”

  “Eddie!” Nina cried, batting his arm. Macy’s eyes widened.

  He cackled. “For fuck’s sake, you’re so easy to wind up. We’re married, and you still can’t tell when I’m taking the piss.”

  Nina harrumphed. “Just for that, we’re going to do the other thing I really want to do right now. Which is find the Pyramid of Osiris.” She looked first at the symbol carved on the wall, then to Macy at the entrance. “But if we’re going to do that, we need to be a team again. I’m sorry I blew up at you like that, Macy. I shouldn’t have—that was unprofessional. Besides, you were right, we couldn’t have done this without you. Any of it.”