Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  “Don’t worry, Jeremy. I’m one step ahead of you.” Rebecca turned to Jack. “I brought Danny in on this. When I found the inscription, all I recognized for certain was that sun symbol and the hieroglyphs, and I knew I was going to need someone else to translate it. Danny’s got a PhD from Chicago in Near Eastern archaeology, and he’s also a reserve captain in the Israeli Army intelligence corps. He knows perfectly well the need to keep this discovery absolutely secret until the time is right. He’s the reason I’ve felt confident that nobody else would follow us down here, and he’ll see that the entry tunnel from the tomb is completely sealed up after we leave.”

  “Go on,” Jack said.

  She pulled out her phone and opened up a paragraph of text. “First, the date. You’ve probably guessed it, but this inscription is much older than the Babylonian period. The Siloam Tunnel inscription is thought to date to the eighth century BC, but Danny thinks that ours might be even earlier, ninth or even tenth century BC, right at the beginning of the Iron Age and the inception of Hebrew script. The sun symbol and the hieroglyphs are part of an earlier inscription. Danny studied the wear and patination on the inscribed lines and reckons it could be two to three centuries earlier than the Palaeo-Hebrew writing, putting it close to the time of Akhenaten and the Exodus.”

  “It’s like a palimpsest,” Jack said. “Like Yehuda Halevi’s letter that Maria and I found in the Geniza, written on a reused piece of vellum that preserved a shadow of the original text. Only here no attempt was made to erase the earlier inscription.”

  Rebecca nodded. “The Siloam inscription was made to commemorate the joining up of two tunnels, part of a complex dug to improve access to the spring. As you’ll see, this inscription served a similar purpose. The tunnel we came in through was a later cutting into this chamber, and it continues on ahead of us to the east where it joins a natural fissure that must have been the original entrance from the surface when this was a holy place. The foreman of the tunnel gang may have chosen this slab simply because there’s no other suitable flat surface inside this chamber, so it was ready-made for a new inscription. The sun symbol and the hieroglyphs already there would probably have meant nothing to him, though as you’ll see there was a memory of the earlier significance of this place.”

  Jeremy stared at the inscription. “I can see it now. There are numbers, cubits. And I recognize the word for water.”

  “Here’s Danny’s translation.” Rebecca read out from her screen:

  This is the way the tunnel was joined. As the men were wielding their pickaxes, each toward the other, and while there were yet three cubits to the breach, the foreman could see through an opening to the cavern ahead, and beyond it another tunnel. On the day of the breach, the men struck hard, pickax beside pickax, and broke through. Down below, the water flowed from the spring to the pool, a distance of one thousand cubits. In the cavern, one hundred and fifty cubits was the height of the rock above the men. I, Yeshua-hamin, foreman, made this with my team. In the days of the king Abdu-Heba, this was the place occupied by the prophet when he came from Egypt.

  There was a stunned silence. “Incredible,” Jack said. “Are we really talking about Moses?”

  “That’s what Danny thinks the word he translates as ‘prophet’ would have meant to people at the time.”

  “Abdu-Heba,” Jeremy murmured. “Wasn’t he the king of Jerusalem at the time of the Amarna letters?”

  “Precisely,” Rebecca said, her eyes lit with fervor. “The Amarna letters were cuneiform tablets found in Akhenaten’s capital that included an archive of correspondence from foreign rulers swearing allegiance to the pharaoh, and at least six of them are from Jerusalem. Listen to this one.” She read from her screen.

  To the Pharaoh, my Lord, say: thus Abdu-Heba, your servant. At the two feet of my Lord, the Pharaoh, seven times and seven times more I fall. Behold, the Pharaoh has set his name in mât urusalim, the Land of Jerusalem, forever.

  Rebecca looked up. “That’s Amarna Letter number 287, lines 60 to 64. The others are in a similar vein, obsequious, almost fawning, as if the pharaoh had threatened him. But why should the pharaoh have done so, to the extent that Abdu-Heba felt the need to swear allegiance over and over again?”

  Jeremy looked at her. “The land of Canaan was a battleground for the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the Hittites, with citadels like Jerusalem acting as pawns for one side or another. Alliances with the big powers were the name of the game for a king like Abdu-Heba.”

  “That may be true for the New Kingdom period in general,” Rebecca replied pensively. “But I’ve been listening to everything you guys have been saying about Akhenaten over the last couple of months. He bucks the trend. He’s not a bellicose pharaoh. He makes a halfhearted attempt to suppress a tribal rebellion in the southern desert, and he waves his hand in the direction of Assyria. His only fixed battle that we know of is his disastrous chariot charge against the Israelite encampment beside the Red Sea. Ramses the Great he definitely is not. So why pick on a relatively minor settlement in the Jordan Valley and insist that its ruler swear undying allegiance to him, over and over again?”

  “Because he was securing a safe haven for Moses and the Israelites,” Jack said quietly.

  “You’ve got it,” Rebecca said, putting away her phone. “And this is where they came, to a natural cave just outside the walls of Bronze Age Jerusalem, a place where they could establish their first primitive altar and store their sacred artifacts. A place that was rapidly superseded once their new religion swept through the population of Jerusalem and they built the first temple atop this site, all those cubits above us, the memory of the cave lasting long enough for the foreman of that excavation team a couple of hundred years later to know its significance, but was then sealed up and lost to history until a British officer broke his way into it more than twenty-five hundred years later.”

  Jack gazed around, breathing in the dust of ages, savoring the history. Moses had been here. He put his hand on Rebecca’s shoulder. “Congratulations. This is a phenomenal discovery. A game changer. And you’ve really put your heart and soul into this one.”

  She stared at him, her eyes passionate. “This isn’t about clues, Dad. You’ve already got what you need for the next stage of your quest. This is about the point of it all. After finding this, after sitting here beside that altar, I began to understand what drove men like Wilson and Gordon to keep coming back to Jerusalem and to seek Akhenaten in the desert. I thought back two years ago to your extraordinary discovery of the birthplace of the gods beside the Black Sea, of the first stone temples erected at the dawn of civilization. Then, the shamanism and superstitions of the hunter-gatherers were discarded, and people looked to a new spirituality. But in time that optimism was clouded by the power games of priests and priest-kings, and then one pharaoh had the courage to do away with it all and try to start afresh. I don’t think the revelation of the one god came to Akhenaten out of the blue. I think he was yearning for it. It allowed him to be human again, to discard the sham of deified kings and priests. This place, the vision it represents, the presence of the prophet who would perpetuate their shared revelation, would have represented a sea change in his world. And now three thousand years later we are again at a turning point. That’s why I wanted you to see this, Dad. Just like those Victorian soldiers fighting the Mahdi, you’re about to go into a pit of darkness where religion has again been enlisted to justify bestiality and war. Bringing you here was to remind you that there can be hope, that another spiritual awakening is possible, another cleansing. That’s what I believe Wilson and Gordon and the others caught up in their war felt too, and what they so desperately hoped to find.”

  Her eyes were red rimmed, and she looked away and wiped them. Jack felt an unexpected upwelling of emotion. Hiebermeyer was not the only one whose guard had been eroded by the events of the past weeks and months, and Jack realized that he had been on edge for too long, that his body and mind craved the resolution that
now lay ahead of him one way or another in the coming days. He thought of Rebecca’s mother, of the passion of her convictions that had attracted so many to her, and for a split second he seemed to see Elizabeth standing in the shadows behind Rebecca, the same fervor in her eyes, egging her daughter on. He blinked, and the image was gone, and Jack felt a sudden yawning emptiness that he had not allowed himself to feel in the years since her death. He swallowed hard, and nearly said something to Rebecca, but chose not to. There would be a better time. He glanced at his watch and put his hand back on her shoulder. “Time for me to go.”

  Jeremy aimed his headlamp beyond the inscription, toward the blocked-up entrance where the tunnel continued under Temple Mount. “Any thoughts about what lies beyond there?”

  Rebecca wiped her eyes again and gazed along his beam. “Danny and I think it’s blocked up. I mean seriously blocked up, not just rubble and plaster but actual shaped masonry, huge slabs of stone barring the way. To get through it would require pneumatic drills and explosives, and that would rock the foundations of the mosque. A very big no-no.”

  “Must be something pretty significant for it to have been blocked up like that.”

  “Danny’s done some basic geometry and reckons is leads directly under the central part of the temple site.”

  “Where you might expect there to be a repository,” Jack said.

  “A treasure chamber,” Jeremy added.

  Jack looked at Rebecca. “This one’s all yours. For the future.”

  Rebecca gave him a wry look. “I’m not really sure about being an archaeologist. Too much dust and dead old stuff.”

  Jack raised his eyes and grinned at Jeremy. “Right.”

  Rebecca suddenly looked serious, and held Jack’s arm. “Aysha sent me a text yesterday about the Egyptian girl, Sahirah. Jeremy and I took her around when she came to England last year to study with Maria.” She pulled out her phone and showed Jack a photo taken in front of the lions in Trafalgar Square, with Rebecca on the left and beside her an attractive, well-dressed girl with a computer bag slung over her shoulder. Jack had never met Sahirah, and this was the first time he had seen a picture of her. He stared at the dark eyes and Egyptian features, imprinting them in his memory. It was like looking at the exquisitely lifelike portraits that Hiebermeyer had found painted on mummy coffins from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, images that gave sudden humanity to the distant past. Sahirah’s face was like a beacon of light in the darkness that was enveloping Egypt, a darkness that Jack knew would soon be streaked with fire and running with blood.

  Rebecca put away the phone. “You will get her out, won’t you, Dad?”

  Jack looked at her, silent for a moment. He thought of Sahirah’s parents, of her father, of the anguish they must be going through, seeing their daughter trapped in a tide of history that must seem to them unstoppable. He gave Rebecca a steely look. “That’s really why I’m going back to Egypt. And Aysha is doing everything she can.”

  He gave her a quick embrace and shook hands with Jeremy. “My advice is that you photograph every square inch of this place and leave as soon as you can. If I don’t see Danny on the way out, give him my warmest regards and an invitation to IMU to discuss the future of your find. He’ll know that if word of this discovery under the mosque leaks out, the extremists of both sides will be at each other’s throats. It sounds as if he’ll be able to wrap things up for you here. David’s men will be waiting outside the Western Wall to take you away to a safe house, and after that you’ll be put on a flight out of Tel Aviv back to London. Under no circumstances should you make contact with Abdullah the antiquities dealer or his men, who will also be somewhere outside waiting to induce you back into his lair. As far as they know, we’ve just been visiting the Israeli excavation.”

  “Don’t worry, Dad. I’m on it.” Rebecca took out her DSLR camera, set the controls, and began photographing. Meanwhile Jeremy knelt down and began sketching the inscription. Jack started to make his way out through the tunnel, but then thought for a moment and turned back. “And Rebecca.”

  She glanced back at him, camera poised over the altar. “What is it?”

  “Look after Jeremy.” He flashed her a smile and turned back to the tunnel. A few minutes later he was out of the tomb and walking quickly past the Israeli excavators toward the shafts of sunlight he could see coming through the entrance from the Western Wall. He saw Danny on a photo gantry above the excavation and gave him a quick wave. His mind was already on the task ahead, on the trip from the coast of Israel to Sea Venture and then to Alexandria. He would be going back to the brewing firestorm that he hoped against hope had not yet ignited, that would still allow him and Costas the time they needed to complete their quest.

  He strode into the dazzling light of the afternoon, and immediately spotted David and two of his men waiting beside a car on the far side of the square.

  This was it.

  PART 4

  CHAPTER 18

  ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT

  Jack stepped out on to the helipad beside Qaitbey Fort a little over six hours after leaving Rebecca in Jerusalem. The paradrop from the Israeli Air Force Hercules had gone without a hitch, and minutes after being picked up from the Mediterranean by a Zodiac from Sea Venture, he had been strapped into the Lynx helicopter for the eighty-mile flight due south to Alexandria.

  The city was still under its elected administration but now close to anarchy, and they had decided to fly in at night under the radar screen in order to minimize the chances of interference from any Egyptian police or coastal surveillance units that might remain functional. As Jack ducked away from the rotor downdraft, he saw a small stack of crates beside the edge of the helipad. He knew from the pilot that they contained the final batch of material from the institute, and that the next scheduled flight of the helicopter out of here would be its last. It would carry Hiebermeyer and Aysha to safety with their last precious records from Egypt.

  Across the harbor, the first glow of dawn silhouetted the disk shape of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and the streaks of pastel red lit up the water and the bobbing rows of fishing boats moored across the basin. It seemed a timeless scene, yet Jack knew it was an illusion. He walked through the fort entrance into the courtyard and saw Costas, who had preceded him from Sea Venture by several hours and was crouched over several large kit bags. He gestured for Jack to come over.

  “Everything’s ready. Two E-suits, and two oxygen rebreather backpacks with double cylinders, giving us about five hours’ endurance. We also have the first two prototypes of my new UPD-4 underwater propulsion device, able to go underwater or skim along the surface. It’s the only way we’re going to get three kilometers underground from the river edge to the pyramid plateau, assuming we can even get through the tunnel entrance.”

  “Has Lanowski gotten us some coordinates?”

  “He’s inside waiting to tell us.”

  “And the kit bags?”

  Costas jerked his head toward the harbor. “Aysha’s uncle Mohammed has a motorized felucca. He and his son are coming any time now to take the bags and stow them out of sight. He’s going to take us up the Nile past Cairo to our insert point. We’ll be travelling in daylight, but that means we’ll be less conspicuous among the other daytime traffic on the river than we would be at night. It’ll give us a chance to get some rest before the night ahead.”

  “What’s our departure time?”

  “He wants to leave at 0800. That’s two hours from now. The Lynx is scheduled to leave later in the morning to give Maurice and Aysha a chance to do a final shutdown on this place, but that might be ramped forward if things heat up.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “There’ve been shootings and explosions through the night. Mostly it’s been gangs of local men taking on the extremists who have been embedded here and making their presence known over the past few days. But there are additional gunmen poised to take over in the event of a coup. I’ve just spoken to Ben on the satellit
e phone, and the latest intel is that there’s a forward camp just inside the Libyan border comprising several hundred men with pickup trucks, almost certainly tasked to take Alexandria. They’ll be joined by much larger groups heading up from Sudan toward Cairo. The Egyptian military has been so extensively infiltrated by extremist sympathizers that it’s no longer an effective defensive force for the government. Once the gunmen arrive, all resistance will crumble and this place will go over to the dark side. It could happen at any time.”

  “Did Ben say anything about the situation with the girl in Cairo?”

  “He hasn’t been able to raise the antiquities director or his intel contact in Cairo. The deadline for a response is 1230 this morning Egyptian time. It doesn’t look promising, Jack, but we have to hold on until then. I know that Aysha’s got another option.”

  Jack grunted. “Okay. Let’s hear what Lanowski has to say.”

  Costas took a swaddled package from the top of one of the kit bags and handed it to Jack. “Three extra magazines loaded personally by me, and the Beretta stripped and oiled. I’ve got a Glock and a few other goodies from Sea Venture. If we’re caught out, we can’t surrender to these people, Jack. By the time the coup’s in full swing, they won’t be taking any prisoners.”

  Jack strapped on the holster, took out the Beretta, ejected and then replaced the magazine, pulled the slide to the rear and released it to chamber a round, and then replaced it in the holster. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s move.”

  —

  Fifteen minutes later they stood with Aysha and Hiebermeyer behind Lanowski, who was sitting in front of the last remaining computer console in the operations room. Everything else was bare, the books and files and posters gone. All that remained beside the computer on the desk was an open briefcase and a satellite phone. Jack leaned over and stared at the image of the radiating Aten symbol from the plaque that Lanowski had just opened up on the screen. It showed the additional fragment with the line running to a point where the depiction showed the River Nile. “We’ve got a little over an hour before the felucca is ready,” he said. “I want everything you’ve got on those Nile coordinates, but before that I want a full operational briefing, everything we know about the archaeology under that plateau. This is the last chance we’ve got.”