Cairo agreed with Kate that his father really should have noticed. Always good to pass the blame!
“Look on the positive side, Alex, if you had not suggested that at least one of the girls may have ‘seen’, I doubt my thoughts would have gone the way that they have. You can’t take all the credit though. It was Neferkare who really started me thinking.”
“Me? How can that be?”
“When you talked about us being here for days, possibly weeks.”
“But we could be. We are hunting for two specific grains of sand in a vast desert. We are going to have to spend time, a lot of time, hanging around. We are going to have to watch, wait, and be incredibly observant, if we are ever going to find what we are looking for, and we must, as Ankhtifi needs his papyrus. We all benefit from the peace that Ankhtifi brings to his time.”
“Not hours and not days, Neferkare. We would be here for weeks! Months! As what we are looking for isn’t here, and it never has been!”
Neferkare looked shocked. “You cannot seriously think that I am leading you all astray. I would never–”
“I know that you wouldn’t, and so does Kate … we all do.” Cairo nodded in agreement with Alex.
Kate didn’t: “Is that one of your hunches, one of your wild guesses, or have you based that on a particular fact?” Three faces now peered angrily at Kate. “Okay, sorry Neferkare, I don’t believe that you are anything but a friend, but I had to throw in the question.”
“I can’t really see why.” Alex was annoyed.
“Oh, you will, because if I am correct … though I really don’t want to be … but if I am, we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. We are where our enemies want us to be, not where our family needs us to be.”
Alex told Kate to get it off her chest. To just say it as she saw it; which she did. And she did it with much finger pointing, as well as emotion.
“Everything that has happened has drawn us away from Ramses. How many times have we heard that he can’t help us, because he knows nothing of Ankhtifi’s period? We haven’t sat with them and chatted like we usually do. You, Alex, you spend day after day with either Ramses or Gadeem, often with them both. You, Cairo, you are off with Ropet and Sanuba every spare moment, when of course you are not sorting out ancients with Emmy.
“Don’t you both look at me like that, because I’m coming to myself. Yes, I spend a lot of my time with Rose; I think she’s great. Though I haven’t since all this started. The more we have become involved in the search for Ankhtifi’s papyrus, the more we have pushed them away. The few times we have been with them, we have all been glad when they left. You and I,” Kate gestured towards Alex, “have had our heads stuck in books. You even phoned your father! You phoned your father for help! You never phone your father!
“Have you, Cairo, discussed any of this with your father?” He hadn’t. “See, we have been manoeuvred away from our family.”
“We have talked to them,” Alex said without real conviction. He could see, or at least he thought he could see, where Kate’s thoughts were leading her.
“Of course, we have, but not like we usually do.”
He had to agree that they had not. “I think you are really on to something, but why do you think that we are in the wrong place?”
“My birthday.”
“What?”
“You said it, Alex, the twenty-seventh of July is the day that you expect all hell to break out.”
“I never said that it definitely would. I was just trying to get you to link Leonie to Leo to Sekhmet.”
“But I think that you could well be right. Things have been nagging at me, like that article in The Add, those girls booking into the Winter Palace, of all the available hotels, it’s like they are directly taunting us. We have been fed clues which have sent us searching for a papyrus in a period of time that our family cannot help us with. And now, where do we find ourselves, isolated here in the past.”
“Isolated?”
“Yes, Alex, isolated, or does that new super phone of yours work here?”
“It’s not a super phone, it’s just one that cannot be broken quite so easily.” He slipped it from his pocket, only to stare at a blank screen. The flashlight button worked – no app needed for that anymore – but apart from that, nothing else did, it didn’t even show the time.
Cairo became excited. “The daggers. We must find priest and he here. So, we need to be here. That one clue we know for sure.”
“No, Cairo, I’m not so sure that it is.” Kate looked at him almost apologetically. “I’m really not sure about the priest. Okay, Alex stole his gold thingy–”
“Borrowed it, Kate … I borrowed it!”
“Whatever, but back in our library, remember, you said that it makes no sense at all for him to chase you through time for taking his bling… well it doesn’t!”
It made even less sense after Neferkare told them that she had returned it.
“No … no … no … the daggers are a red herring. The priest isn’t after me, not anymore.” It came to Alex in a flash of logic. “Yes, of course, it makes sense.”
“Do enlighten us.” Kate wanted to hear this because it was something she had not been able to work out. She knew that it did not make sense, she just did not know why!
“Whoever was monitoring us through that Sekhmet shabti would have known about the priest, so they would have had those daggers made to force us to come back here. Why didn’t I see it before? Any priest would have blunt, unsharpened, ceremonial daggers. They would possibly carry one, perhaps two, with short fat blades, to defend themselves with. Those would carry his mark. What we have are long thin-bladed assassins’ daggers.”
“But they priests daggers, it says so.”
“You know how much you like watching Colombo?”
Cairo agreed that he did, as he loved the old American detective series.
“You wouldn’t need Colombo if the murder weapon had the murderer’s name emblazoned upon it; now would you?”
Cairo didn’t think that this would make much of a program. He went to say so, but then thought a little more. Standing, whilst attempting his best Colombo impersonation, he said, in an American accent as he walked with a stoop and smoking a pretend cigar: “I know that you all think it is the priest, but this is a frame-up.”
Neferkare suggested that Cairo should come and sit down, and this time he should sit well out of the sun.
Kate and Alex could not help but laugh. Despite the seriousness of their thoughts, the worry of events to come, they felt more connected than at any time in the past. Along with Cairo, their strengths were pulling them together.
There was a short period of reflection. Yet again it was Kate who broke the silence.
“Whoever is doing this … whatever it is that they are really doing … knows the family too well … us too well.”
“They would, because, from the time we left Ankhtifi’s tomb with that shabti, we didn’t have a secret.” Alex thought that he would have to speak with Gadeem to see if there was a spell that could detect magic. Getting Kate to throw everything out of the window, just to see if any piece returned, seemed to be rather extreme.
“I might be reading too much into this, but do you think that they needed Bast to be out of the way?”
This time Alex and Cairo were unable to see where Kate’s thoughts were taking her.
“Ankhtifi suggested that we should ask Bast, remember, as she was a daughter of Sekhmet?”
The boys did, but as they were trying to solve a problem that had been in the time of Ankhtifi, potentially with his Hathor, his Sekhmet, it would have been his Bast that they would have needed to speak to. Now that things appeared to be moving so much closer to the time of Ramses, it was a different story.
Rose asking Bast to go to Cairo Airport, to find out what had happened to Celina and Leonie, not only took Bast away from the family, her findings had confirmed to Kate, Alex and Cairo that they needed to go back into the past. I
f Rose had been manipulated to do so through information gained by listening into their conversations, then that could only mean one thing: somebody at the heart of the family was working against them.
This point was discussed and, much to the relief of them all, resolutely discarded. Bast, as a goddess, could reach Cairo airport quicker than any of them. In a country that loves cats, she would be able to move freely, even in restricted areas. Bast was the obvious choice.
“As I was saying, I think that our family is going to come under attack, and for that attack to succeed we had to be gotten out of the way.”
Alex and Cairo agreed with Kate to such a degree that it was no longer ‘I think’ the family will come under attack, but where, when and why. Kate’s birthday had been mooted as a possible day for all hell to break out, but this was not based on any solid fact and she said so.
“Why my birthday? Why not the …” She stopped to work out a date which, with her mind spinning, she failed to be able to do. “My horoscope says that the period of Leo runs from the twenty-second of July to the twenty-second of August, with Leo being at his strongest in the middle of this period.” Her use of ‘his’ confused her, because Leo was obviously a lion, whilst Sekhmet was a lioness. Alex did not give her time to dwell on this point.
“Meaning that Sekhmet would be at her most destructive around the sixth of August.” He could see that attacking the family at that time would make sense. It was always better to mount any battle from a position of maximum strength. “If you are right, then that would help us, as it will give us a longer time to find out what is actually going on.”
Cairo could not help adding: “This not horoscope, this horror-scope!”
Chapter 19
-
Burner Phone
The exit back to the present day was less than two-hundred metres away, but they all knew that they could not use it. Kate had been quite correct when she said that they were trapped in the past. If either Kate, Alex or Cairo stepped out into the present day, they would be immediately arrested. Both the cameras and their Russian operatives would be too good to overlook one, let alone two or three people, appearing out of nowhere.
In a few months, when the training period had finished, when the Russians had departed, leaving Egyptians to monitor the system, then there would be a better than average chance that one of them might get back without being noticed … they just did not have a month or two to wait.
Their only option was to head for the Nile. Once there, they could take a boat to Luxor, where they would be able to step back into the current day without experiencing any problems. The trouble for them was that travelling under sail, against the flow of the Nile, took far too long. Even with the great river offering less resistance than usual, due to its low level, the last time it took them somewhere around a week to reach Luxor. On that occasion Neferkare had a boat ready and waiting. This time it would need to be organised.
“You could get out, go back through there, then raise the alarm.” Kate was correct. Neferkare, being an ancient, could step back into the modern day, appear on the airport monitors, and still escape. As she would be walking on the land as it was in ancient times, effectively, she could walk through walls.
This would leave Kate, Alex and Cairo without the only person who could speak the ancient language of the time that they were in, the only person who could negotiate for a boat on which they could travel in safety, and, far more importantly, the only person who not only knew where all the ancient checkpoints were but also how to avoid them.
Without Neferkare their journey back to Luxor would be far more perilous, and, if they did actually all make it back, it would have taken them many days more to do so. Without her to guide them they would be unable to move quickly. They would have to be cautious, possibly only travelling short distances each day, whilst being forced to take longer, safer, routes, moving only after sunset.
These were points which were not lost on Neferkare. “You need me to stay and guide you. I cannot leave you alone in this time. It really is not safe for me to do so.” She urged them to pick something from the bag she had just retrieved. Their plan having changed, they needed to change into their new clothes quickly, so that they could blend in with the locals, as they headed home after a day working in the fields. “If we can get through one major checkpoint, which should be pretty straightforward, if we go through with the rest of the workers, it would make getting to the Nile, and a boat, far quicker.”
“Why don’t you go and warn Ankhtifi that someone close to him is working against him? You could also let Ramses know what we think is going on. We will wait here until you come back, then we can all head to Luxor.”
“I seriously doubt that I would get through.”
“Of course, you would.” Kate was really trying to push her into going.
“I’m not so sure,” Alex said.
“Why not? We are safe here for a day or two. It’s hot enough to sleep outside. We now have food and water. We will be okay.”
“I’ll ask you one question, Kate. Do you think that this whole thing has been very well planned?”
Kate answered Alex without hesitation: “Yes.”
“Then do you really think that if we stepped back into our own time, and were lucky enough to avoid being picked up by the Russians, that we would not be captured by ancients?”
Kate could see Alex’s point. “Yes, okay, they would have people in place to block any of us from exiting.”
“Exactly!”
“This get worse,” Cairo said, though he had an idea which was met with universal approval.
“Get ready to pull me back,” Alex said as he went to lie face down on the ground.
“We will, Mr Alex.”
“Don’t worry, we have you.” And Kate was correct, they did have him. Cairo wrapped himself around one leg, whilst she grabbed hold of the other. Neferkare stood close by.
Stretching an arm out as far as he could, Alex’s left hand, the one holding his mobile phone, reached through to the present, to the time they had just left. Whilst waiting for his phone to turn on, willing it to do so quickly, he kept one eye on the phone, whilst looking out for anybody who may be approaching. He could see his hand, could see his phone, he could even see the airport pavement and buildings. He just did not want anyone to see him.
Cairo’s thought had been that a hand with a phone in it might not instantly be noticed, allowing Alex the time he needed to get a message to the family. Non-ancient members only of course. That had been wishful thinking on Cairo’s part.
Alex had only managed to type a single word when he was forced into to pressing ‘send to all’. The ancient appeared out of the wall in front of him at full run. Diving on Alex he joined him in the past.
Whilst working out possible scenarios, they had always considered that Alex would be dragged through to their present, hence Kate and Cairo keeping hold of his legs. It never occurred to them that an ancient would be joining them in the past.
Alex moved quickly away from the window back to their time, allowing it to disappear. Had they been able to see, they could have watched a whole new meaning be given to the term ‘burner phone’. As a Russian security officer picked it up, it burst into flames, melting away into nothing, whilst leaving the man screaming.
“You,” Neferkare said.
“You,” came the reply. The ancient was not dressed as a soldier, though he was waving around a three-quarter length sword in one hand, whilst his other gripped a dagger which was so small that it looked as though it would only be of any use to clean fingernails. In terms of menace, this ancient was sadly lacking.
Kate, Cairo and Alex, having sorted themselves out, saw Neferkare signal for them to stay standing where they were.
“This is my half-brother. Well, I think that he is, as that is what his mother always told us. An honest woman. She really was. The only lies she ever told where whenever she spoke, whenever any word left her lips!”
&nb
sp; They were moving around each other in a large circle, Neferkare ensuring that she kept at least two sword lengths away from him at all times. Whilst obviously having no respect for her half-brother’s ability with the weapons to hand, any sword swing or lunge could do serious damage even when in inexperienced hands.
“What is it that your mother says about you?”
“Shut up.”
“Do you want to tell them, or shall I?”
“Shut up.”
“Okay, so you want me to tell them. His mother says that he is my half-brother, though, being so immensely proud of him, as all mothers are, she likes to add that he is only a quarter of a man.”
He lunged at Neferkare in an angry, reckless way. She sidestepped, spinning around quickly enough as he passed to land a foot firmly on his backside. He went flying. His only skill, if you could indeed call it a skill, was to retain hold of both his sword and his dagger as he crashed to the ground. He was definitely no swordsman.
Neferkare was unarmed, yet the youngsters were not worried for her safety as they watched her half-brother struggle to his feet.
“You never could beat me, so why would you expect to beat me now?”
“Because this time it will be different. In effect, we have already won. Regrettably, for you, you will miss the best part. By the time you reach Luxor, if you ever do, there will be no Ramses the Great. I will be king.”
“What has your mother been feeding you all these years?”
“You leave my mother out of this.” He lunged again, only to end up face down in the dirt yet again.
Neferkare glanced over to the youngsters. They responded with nods of understanding. It was clear to see that she was attempting to draw as much information out of her half-brother as she could; getting him angry was the way to do it. Nobody in their right mind would make him Pharaoh, though, sadly for him, nobody insane would make him pharaoh either, and, Neferkare knew for certain, his mother was certifiable.
Ankhtifi's Papyrus Page 16