Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  Jack looked up one last time at the sculpture. He did not know whether he had just experienced a blinding revelation, or whether the idea of the mask just pushed Akhenaten further back into mystery. It was as if the pharaoh himself were playing games with him, tempting him to take one step further into the unknown, then showing him that the trail was an illusion. It seemed to reflect everything that had happened over the last few months, of tottering on a knife-edge between success and failure, between unlocking a mystery that Jack knew lay somewhere beneath their feet and having to walk away with that ambiguity in Akhenaten’s face, that mask over reality, seared into his mind.

  His phone hummed. It was a text from Costas. He quickly read it, and suddenly coursed with excitement. The dive from Seaquest to raise the sarcophagus was on for tomorrow afternoon. The IMU Embraer jet was due at Alexandria at dawn tomorrow, and the Lynx helicopter was already waiting at Seville airport in Spain to transfer them to the ship. Rebecca would understand his trip to Jerusalem being postponed, and Maria had been right; it would have been wrong for him to jump on the first plane to Tel Aviv after receiving Rebecca’s text, as if he had been waiting on tenterhooks for a chance to watch out for her. And she was used to the last-minute change in priorities that often took place when Jack was following too many leads at once.

  As he put away his phone, he smelled the Geniza on his hand. He remembered Maria at the bottom of the chamber, eyes ablaze, voicing her passion for the project, for Jack to hold on to his vision of what might lie ahead. He felt a sudden upwelling of emotion, and swallowed hard. After reading the letter of Yehuda Halevi, he had begun to understand what it was that had overwhelmed Solomon Schechter and the other Geniza scholars, not so much the sheer quantity of material but the humanity it represented, preserved with breathtaking immediacy. It had been as if Halevi had been writing the letter to him, brimming with curiosity and a fascination with the world around him that struck right to the core of Jack’s being. He felt revitalized, more determined than ever to pursue his own quest. He remembered those last lines of Halevi, the extraordinary account of the tunnel, and he felt a burning excitement. But meanwhile he had another priority, to do all he could to secure the release of the Egyptian student who had been the first to make the discovery. The sarcophagus might give him only a small amount of leverage, but he would use it to his utmost. He needed to make contact with the outside world as soon as possible.

  He turned and walked quickly back to the entrance to the room. Aysha already had her finger on the light switch. “Seen what you wanted to see?”

  “I’ve seen it.”

  “Right. Twenty minutes to midnight curfew. We need to get out of here.”

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 12

  OFF SPAIN, IN THE WEST MEDITERRANEAN

  Jack sat back in the passenger seat of the Lynx helicopter, glanced at the helmeted figure of Costas asleep in the seat opposite, and stared out at the shimmering blue of the sea below. At Valencia airport he had turned down the pilot’s offer to take over the controls, relishing instead the half hour of downtime before they hit the bustle of Seaquest and all the demands of the day ahead. Jack knew that he would be walking off the helipad into a teleconference to discuss the imprisoned Egyptian girl, and Costas would be straight down into the engineering lab to make sure that all the equipment was as ready as it could be for the dive that afternoon.

  The sound of snoring came through his headphones, and Jack turned just in time to see the grizzled face loll forward in his shoulder straps. He leaned over and pushed him gently upright, and Costas opened his eyes and looked blearily about. “We there yet?”

  “Not yet, but you were taking a slow nosedive for the floor.”

  “Dive,” Costas mumbled. “Need to adjust the dynamo in the ADSA submersible stabilizer system. I knew I’d forgotten something on my checklist. Always think better when I’m asleep. Can’t believe I won’t have Lanowski to help me.”

  “His talents were needed in Alexandria stripping Hiebermeyer’s computers and making sure his database was secure. You’ll just have to wing it.”

  Costas crinkled his nose where Jack’s hand had been and leaned toward him, sniffing like a dog. “What’s that smell? That terrible smell?”

  Jack looked at the fingers of his right hand and saw the dark stains from the resin. He remembered the Geniza chamber. “Ah, yes. Couldn’t scrub it off.” He sniffed the tips of his fingers. “That, my friend, is a thousand years of mouse.”

  “Huh?”

  “An ancient archive. A hole in the wall. With Maria.”

  “That sounds just like a date with Jack. Really romantic. You’re talking about the synagogue in Cairo?”

  “I’ll fill you in when I can show you my pictures. It was a fantastic discovery, a clue that pushes us one step closer to getting under the desert again. You’d have loved it. There was a sacred snake guarding the archive.”

  “No way.”

  “Only kidding. Well, nearly only kidding. Anyway, Maria thinks the curse was lifted long ago.”

  Costas looked aghast. “What curse? What snake?” He looked back into the cargo compartment at their bags. “You haven’t brought anything with you, have you?”

  Jack grinned. “Just something for you to dream about. I’ll wake you when we’re there.”

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Okay.” Costas slumped against the window, and seconds later Jack heard the low rumble again. He glanced at the text message he had received from Maria when he and Costas had landed in the Embraer from Egypt an hour and a half before. All it said was Thanks for last night. He smiled at the irony of it. “Last night” meant a dusty chamber in an old synagogue poring over a medieval manuscript, with barely a farewell embrace.

  He stared out at the shimmering expanse of the sea, his lifeblood since he had first donned a wetsuit more than thirty years before. He thought back to Rebecca’s mother, Elizabeth, to a relationship that had ended even before Rebecca was born, when they had both been graduate students. She too had been an archaeologist but had been forced by threats and intimidation back into the world of her Camorra background in Naples, to give archaeological legitimacy to their tomb robbing and antiquities dealing. When she found out she was pregnant, she decided not to tell Jack, not to allow her family to get their tentacles around him as well and destroy his dream, and she had struggled to bring Rebecca up alone and carve out a legitimate position for herself in the antiquities service. When Rebecca herself was threatened, used as a pawn to try to get Elizabeth back into the criminal fold, she sent her secretly to close friends in New York State to be brought up and educated, while she remained in Naples to do enough of what was asked of her to keep them from acting on their threats to hunt down Rebecca and bring her back into the family.

  Jack had seen Elizabeth only once more when he had gone to Naples to explore the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, and in their brief conversation she had broken down and told him everything, revealing the existence of their daughter and her wish that he take care of Rebecca if anything should happen. Elizabeth had witnessed one drug deal too many, had made some distant cousin jittery that she would go to the police, and a few days later her body was found by the seashore with a bullet through the back of her head. That had been more than five years ago, and Jack still felt the numbness, a heartache that he knew would always be behind everything that he and Rebecca did together, behind her own drive to make a mark on the world and show the same strength that her mother had in bringing her up against the odds.

  Jack knew that his seeming ambivalence toward Maria and Katya was not a consequence of juggling between the two, or of a greater love in the past that he had been unable to shake off, or of the sense of responsibility that had channelled so much of his emotional reserve toward Rebecca after her mother’s death. Rebecca had told him that he was like the great sea captains of old, brilliant at sea but directionless on land, most at home navigating his life with the prize always just beyond the horizon and the voyage t
oward it at the mercy of the elements and chance. Perhaps his relationships with women had become an analog of that. Yet he knew it did not have to be so. He had seen it work with Hiebermeyer and Aysha. He remembered Maria’s parting words in Cairo, and resolved that this time, when it was all over, he would take that step that he so often balked at, and actually give her a call.

  A rocky headland came into view, the limestone reduced to the jagged, sun-bleached form characteristic of the northern Mediterranean shore, and his heart leapt as he saw Seaquest in the bay beyond. He knew that the Lynx pilot would need to hold off before getting permission for landing, and he had been relishing the chance to inspect Seaquest properly from the air for the first time since her refit in Falmouth earlier that year. On the stern she was flying the Spanish flag, a courtesy to the country that had agreed to allow the search within their territorial waters, and below that the IMU flag bearing the anchor on a unicorn, the crest of Jack’s seafaring ancestors and a recognition of the donated land from the Howard estate that formed the main IMU base beside the Fal Estuary in Cornwall. She was the second IMU vessel to bear the name, the first having been lost almost ten years before to a battle with a warlord in the eastern Black Sea during their search for Atlantis. The second Seaquest and her sister ship, Sea Venture, were multirole scientific research vessels, in keeping with IMU’s expanded brief over the last decade not only to be at the forefront of archaeological exploration but also to spearhead other aspects of oceanographic research. Like the Royal Navy’s latest Echo-class vessels, she was equipped for full hydrographic survey, including multibeam echo sounders, a side-scan sonar, and a sub-bottom profiler, as well as an integrated navigation system of bow and azimuth thrusters and propellers within a swivelling pod that allowed her to hold a precise position over the seabed in all but the worst weather conditions. Her defensive capability was also closely based on the Echo-class vessels, with a retractable twin 20 mm Oerlikon pod set below her foredeck and two 7:62 mm general-purpose machine guns, an essential provision given the fate of her predecessor and namesake and the threat of piracy when she was conducting operations in unpoliced international waters.

  In other respects Seaquest and Sea Venture formed a unique class with many features designed from the bottom up by Jack and his team. At a little over 6,000 tons and 120 meters in length, they were larger than her naval counterparts, with a top speed of 25 knots and a range of up to 12,000 nautical miles, which made them capable of extended deep-ocean voyages. Behind the bridge lay an extended accommodation block for up to thirty researchers and technicians, including state-of-the-art labs for the conservation and analysis of finds and below that an engineering facility custom-designed by Costas for the maintenance of the ship’s remote- and autonomous-operated vehicles and manned submersibles. The submersibles hangar opened out on to a unique internal docking facility on either side of the propeller shaft toward the stern, allowing divers and vehicles to enter and exit safely even in extreme weather conditions.

  The Lynx banked low, its rotor kicking up a halo of spray as it held position some five hundred meters off the ship’s port side, allowing Jack to see her more closely. Behind the accommodation block lay the helipad and the aft operations deck, the focus of most activity when they were working on a site. Jack cast a critical eye over the equipment visible in the stern. The main purpose of the refit had been to install an upgraded derrick for raising and lowering Zodiacs and submersibles, and he could see it extended over the starboard side, the cradle they had made for the sarcophagus sitting on the deck beside it. The derrick had passed its sea trials off Cornwall with flying colors, but it was having its first proper outing here. Jack remembered years before watching the Tudor warship Mary Rose being raised from the Solent, and the terrifying moment as the hull surfaced and the cradle slipped. That had also been in the glare of the world’s media, and he knew that Captain Macalister would be putting the derrick through every possible safety check to try to ensure that there was no brush with disaster this time around.

  Jack watched a group of technicians in IMU overalls and safety helmets begin to release the derrick from its deck restraints and roll out the winch. IMU’s greatest assets were not equipment but personnel, and he knew he had the best. Over the years he had assembled a crack team, a mix of old friends and fresh talent, many of them bridging the divide between commercial and military experience and the strong focus on scholarship and research that drove all Jack’s projects forward. Unlike those of treasure hunters, their jobs were not on the line every time they embarked on a new quest, counting the cost hour by hour, holding out for prize money that rarely came. IMU operations were financed entirely from an endowment that released Jack from ever having to raise funds or satisfy investors. It had been a dream of his from the time when he ran student expeditions from a battered old van and an ex-navy inflatable, a dream realized when one of his most stalwart expedition divers, Efram Jacobovich, had ridden the wave of the software boom that was making huge fortunes when they had been students. Fifteen years later he backed Jack’s budding institute with an operating budget far larger than that of any other oceanographic institute in the world. Jack still had to answer to a board of directors. But with their criteria being scientific merit and feasibility rather than financial profit, he was in a unique position among undersea explorers able to mount multimillion-dollar projects. Above all, he was freed from ever having to consider selling artifacts; all their finds went on museum display or were part of the cycle of travelling exhibits that had brought their discoveries to audiences around the world. It was one commitment that Jack shared with Colonel Vyse, the British officer who had extracted the sarcophagus from the pyramid and dispatched it on its ill-fated voyage to the British Museum in 1838. Jack was determined that it should go to the best possible place for display as well as for its own security, and if that meant reneging on their offer to return it to Egypt, then so be it.

  Beyond the rotor downdraft, the sea was millpond calm, and it took an effort to imagine the storm winds on that December day in 1838 and the abyss that lay beneath. Since their find of the chariots in the Red Sea, and touching the manuscript fragments from the Geniza in Cairo, biblical phrases had been running through Jack’s mind, snatches of verse he had remembered from chapel at boarding school. And darkness lay on the face of the deep. Far below them, unimaginably deep, in the place that creation had forgotten, lay the wreck of Beatrice, the ancient sarcophagus in its hull standing stark above the silt like the tomb of a long-forgotten sea god. That was temptation enough for any archaeologist, but it was not just the sarcophagus itself that had brought Jack back here. It was what Colonel Vyse had packed inside, a surprise for the museum, perhaps a sweetener to persuade the trustees to continue to sponsor his excavations. It was something that he himself had not recorded and was lost to history until that dive when Jack and Costas had brought it back to light.

  When Jack had swept the silt from the plaque, he had been astonished to see the sun symbol of Akhenaten, a pharaoh who had lived over a thousand years after the mummy of Menkaure had been sealed within the sarcophagus. It was only after they had found a second Akhenaten plaque in the desert, one with a depiction showing the pyramids, that Jack had made sense of it, realizing that Akhenaten had taken over the pyramid as a portal into the underground complex beneath the Giza plateau that he and Costas had glimpsed for a few precious moments three months ago far below the burial chamber. Inside that chamber, perhaps mounted above the portal, Colonel Vyse had unwittingly found a clue to what might have been the most extraordinary discovery ever made in Egyptology. His decision not to mention the plaque and its loss in the wreck—perhaps to avoid criticism for not having recorded it—was to keep the world in ignorance until now. Jack had been clutching at straws since them, desperately hoping for clues to another entrance into the complex, a discovery he might make before Egypt shut down on him entirely. Coming back to the wreck was part of that trail. The plaque had been missing a section from one si
de, and he was hoping against hope that the lost fragment would be buried in the silt nearby.

  The pilot’s voice came through his headphones. “Jack, we’re holding off for another fifteen minutes or so while a helo ahead of us delivers a film crew. As soon as they’ve cleared the helipad, we’re good to go.”

  “Roger that, Charlie,” Jack replied. “I’ll use the time to get up to speed on the site. I don’t think I’m going to get much chance for that once I’m on board. And our colleague could always use a little more beauty sleep.”

  “Roger that,” the pilot said. “I’ll advise you.”

  A noise like a snorting water buffalo came through the intercom, and Jack pushed Costas up again and wedged him beside the window. He took out his iPad, attached the keyboard, propped it on his knees, and opened a ghostly image of the sarcophagus as he and Costas had first seen it from the submersible three months before. There was no indication that any other antiquities had been on board the ship, and the decision had been made not to excavate the site any further than was required to clear a large enough space to feed the cushioned winch cables beneath the sarcophagus preparatory to lifting it. He touched the screen and opened up the image that had brought them to this spot in the first place, a previously unknown watercolor that had appeared in an auction a few months earlier showing Beatrice in the harbor of Smyrna in Turkey. On the back had been a pencilled note made years later by the captain of the ship—George Wichelo, a man thought to have died in the wreck—giving its location in this bay a few nautical miles north of Valencia, resolving a mystery that had led undersea explorers on numerous false trails over the years in the hunt for the fabled lost sarcophagus.

  The artist had accurately shown Beatrice as a brig, with foremast and mainmast and the boom for a spanker over the stern. Despite being on the cusp of the Victorian era, only a generation away from the transformation to steam power, Beatrice was indistinguishable in appearance from her forbears of the Napoleonic Wars period. She still bore the checkerboard “Nelson pattern” of gunports that merchantmen in the Mediterranean retained against Barbary pirates from North Africa, still a threat in the early 1830s when the painting had been made. He tapped the screen again and brought up a three-dimensional visualization of the wreck that Lanowski had completed a few days before, based on weeks of survey using a high-precision multibeam sonar array mounted on a remote-operated vehicle flown a few meters above the seabed.