The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  ‘How?’

  ‘You know as well as I do how skilled the ancient Egyptians were in toxicology, Jamie. The Eye used soba, a poison derived from a hallucinogenic fungus whose use had been shrouded in mystery for centuries. The poison varies in its effects, sometimes brings on horrific visions, sometimes the symptoms of illness, fever, cramps, heart failure. In small doses it can cause deep depression over a number of years. Thing is, it leaves no trace; that’s what mystified the medics in every case. Carnarvon got a horse’s dose of the stuff.’

  ‘Why didn’t they kill Carter?’

  ‘Carter knew what was going on, but he cooperated — agreed to keep quiet and work for them. But they insured against him changing his tune by administering the poison in tiny, cumulative doses over a long period, causing periodic bouts of depression. Only the Eye had the antidote, so they had Carter by the short and curlies until he died.’

  ‘So I was right. The Eye was behind the deaths linked with Tut’s tomb.’

  ‘Yes, we tracked them down and killed them, some in Egypt, others in London, Paris and other places. Walter Morrison, the Reuters man who’d seen the anachronae, for example, was slipped a massive dose of soba in a drink at his club in Piccadilly. Carter’d originally persuaded him to lie in his report, but he’d decided he was going to write another one telling the true story. We had to nip that in the bud very quickly. Of course, there were the awkward ones who couldn’t be tricked into taking the poison, like Ali Fahmi Bey. The Eye had him shot outside Tut’s tomb. Needless to say, the gunman was never found.’

  ‘What about Julian and Nikolai?’

  ‘Julian’s obsession with Zerzura and Nikolai’s cupidity proved a fatal combination for them both. Julian nosed about with Nikolai’s text until he came across Wingate’s little hoard. When he brought me the ushabtis, I guessed what had happened and that it would only be a short time before he got his intuition into gear and worked the whole thing out. I sent a couple of boys round to put the frighteners on him, and they abducted him and kept him hidden for a few days, while you were scouring Cairo and chatting with our man Renner. When they let him go, he came straight round to my place and told me the whole story. He was an incredible man, Julian. Brilliant really. Within a few short weeks he’d worked out that there was some long-term conspiracy that connected Tut, Carnarvon and Wingate. I realised things had gone too far. I tried to get the whereabouts of Wingate’s souvenirs out of him, but he wouldn’t budge on that. So I spiked his whisky with a few milligrams of soba and when he collapsed I had him taken to Giza by night. I got the police to stay out of the way, got hold of a ticket and had an expert cover up the tracks. I admit it didn’t occur to me that the absence of his own tracks would look odd. Hammoudi noticed but wisely he kept quiet about it.’

  ‘What about Julian’s body? I saw him alive!’

  ‘Renner requested the body, then disposed of it. There were no relatives, as you well knew. We didn’t want anybody poking around with it. As for Cranwell’s “appearances”, we had an out-of-work actor on our books who posed as Cranwell. If you thought he was alive you wouldn’t waste much time searching for the body. Our Cranwell look-alike also dealt with Nikolai, and rolled a grenade into his flat.’

  ‘Nikolai!’ Elena shrieked. ‘You bastards...you killed him too!’

  ‘That was a regrettable business. Nikolai was so wary after Julian’s death that we couldn’t get near enough to give him the poison. We had to resort to more primitive methods. The Eye on the mirror in blood was a nice touch though, added by our actor-friend. No, I’m sorry, but Nikolai knew too much. He had to go.’

  ‘Why?’ Elena said, tears in her eyes, ‘What was so important that they had to die? What was it they found in the tomb?’

  Rifad scowled. ‘We shouldn’t be wasting time talking to this scum, Master,’ he said. ‘Let’s kill them and be done.’

  Master. The word sounded strange coming from someone as arrogant and egocentric as Rifad. It was almost as if Rabjohn had some profound power over him — some deep-seated means of control.

  Rabjohn looked at him as if a flea had spoken. ‘I want to explain it all to Jamie,’ he said, petulantly, ‘I’d like him to know why he and all his family have to be liquidated.’

  Elena bit her knuckle and gasped.

  ‘So?’ I said.

  ‘There were three things in the tomb. There was a papyrus and a map, just as your newspaper said, but it was no ordinary map and no ordinary papyrus. The map was the original of the Piri Reis portolan. Are you familiar with that, Jamie?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘It was a navigation chart discovered in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace in 1929 showing part of the southern hemisphere — bits of Africa, South America and Antarctica. It was only after the U S Hydrographic Office had studied it that it was realised the map actually showed Antarctica before it was covered in ice. That caused a sensation. For a start, the map was dated 1513, while Antarctica wasn’t discovered till 1818. But more important, the Antarctic hasn’t been ice-free since 4000 BC, which meant that the chart had to be based on something at least six thousand years old, and would thus precede the accepted era for the invention of writing. Actually, the Hydrographic Survey never knew that the original had been found in Tut’s tomb in 1923. It was made of a synthetic polymer so strong it was indestructible even by fire, and so fine that the whole map, covering the entire globe, fitted into a large pocket. Moreover, those who studied it later proved conclusively it could only have been made by a culture capable of flight, probably space-flight. So you see, you were almost on the right track from the beginning, Jamie. You just didn’t have the data.’

  ‘Where is the map now?’

  ‘Why the hell should we tell him?’ Rifad said.

  ‘Shut up. I want to tell him. It’s kept with the other artefacts at a secret research site called Area 51 in the New Mexico desert.’

  ‘What about the papyrus?’

  ‘That was an artefact made by Akhnaton himself to record the location of his star-ship in the desert. The Eye wanted to find the ship, but the map system Akhnaton used was too difficult and they never cracked it. It was also made of some indestructible material that is still being studied.’

  ‘What was the third thing?’

  ‘The third thing was pieces of a very ancient machine — our technicians believe it was a teleportation-drive of some kind, dating back to at least twelve thousand years ago. It wasn’t functional, of course — it had been kept by the Ra priesthood as a sacred object until Akhnaton came along. After Tut’s execution they buried it with the other things in his tomb. Horemheb was aware the artefacts couldn’t easily be destroyed, and he didn’t want anyone else to know about them — ever. That’s why the people who broke into the tomb were silenced.’

  ‘And I suppose that fragment of ancient machinery is not on display at any public museum either.’

  ‘Such secrets are not for the masses, Jamie. Surely you under-stand that.’

  ‘What about the star-ship? Why didn’t you study that?’

  ‘We couldn’t. It was guarded by some kind of protective field which had the power to destroy it if its integrity was threatened. Wingate found it by intuition, like you did, but unlike you he failed to get the Message. We had his party ambushed at the quicksands on their return in January 1933, and whacked the lot — your grandfather included, though I didn’t know that at the time.’

  ‘But Wingate and Hilmi escaped.’

  ‘Yes, Wingate was another brilliant man. He gave us the slip with Hilmi, and made it to al-Maqs, where he had the ushabtis hidden in a place even we didn’t know about. We soon traced him there, though. Hilmi was a mental case, so no one was going to believe him, anyway — but we were worried about Wingate. We interrogated him, and from his description we figured out that the star-ship’s instruments couldn’t be operated except by someone with special telepathic ability.’

  ‘And then you bumped him off, of course.’


  ‘Of course. He was always unstable. In 1944, he started threatening to let the cat out of the bag, so we put a bomb in his plane. Lost the pilot and co-pilot too, of course, but that couldn’t be helped.’

  Rifad was looking more and more impatient. ‘Why bother with these fools, Master,’ he said again, ‘let’s do them now. If I’d had my way I’d have squashed you like a roach years ago, Ross, just like I had that interfering fool Izzadin squashed when he tried to dig up the dirt on Carter. I disliked you from the start. I knew it was only a matter of time. I wanted to have you killed when you found the Sirian Stela, but I was overruled.’

  ‘There would be chaos if people found out what’s really out there,’ Rabjohn said solemnly. ‘Imagine it! We have a duty to protect the human species from such a threat.’

  ‘You’re lying, Rabjohn! I’ve seen the leeches you’ve got working for you. People like Renner and Rifad here. I can see how concerned you are about the human species — so concerned that you’re willing to murder me and my entire family just to protect it. The Eye of Ra is all hocus-pocus. Who are you really, Rabjohn?’

  Rabjohn glanced around at the desert horizon. ‘You’re going to die here, Jamie, so you might as well know. M J -12 — Majesty — and its predecessor the Jason Scholars infiltrated the Eye of Ra when it was reactivated in 1922 as a result of Carter’s find. We soon realised what this was all about — not lost tombs or mummies, but technology so advanced we couldn’t even imagine it. We wanted that technology, and we wanted it before anyone else got it. Majesty’s original objective was to gain access to the star-ship and to contact the aliens who constructed it. The Zerzura Club was formed through Majesty’s proxies, the British Secret Intelligence Service. Unfortunately they didn’t find it, so Karlman fed the idea to Wingate, who did.’

  ‘Who was Karlman?’

  ‘Karlman was another failed illuminatus, whose genius was tempered by an unfortunate desire to watch young boys having sex, which eventually obliged him to leave his order. Originally he was a Benedictine, and as a young man, in the forgotten library of a monastery in Cairo, he’d come across the lost Books of Thoth, the accumulated wisdom of the Ra brotherhood over ten thousand years.’

  ‘Good Lord!’

  ‘Yes. The set wasn’t complete, but the texts gave Karlman an inkling of what had really been going on behind the scenes. He became fascinated and formed a little ring of like-minded clerics, which is still going. Our Father Mikhaelis was a distinguished member until you murdered him.’

  ‘He had it coming.’

  ‘So do you, Ross,’ Rifad spat.

  ‘Karlman orchestrated the search for Zerzura, which came to an end when Wingate found the star-ship. When we realised we couldn’t use it, we tried other methods. Our first contact was made at Roswell in New Mexico in 1947. Things went wrong: neither side understood the other and the alien shuttle-craft crashed. We picked up a couple of the crew, but they weren’t much use to us dead. They’re now at Area 51 with the Piri Reis Map and the Akhnaton Papyrus. We realised that we had a communications problem. We needed a sort of “interpreter”, if you like. We’d found out about the psi-gene, and we guessed that to talk to the aliens we needed an individual with this gene — an illuminatus as the ancient books called it. They were very rare. Karlman had a touch of it. Wingate had had it a bit but not enough, and by then he was dead anyway. I knew that it ran in the Hawazim, and that one facet of it was precognition, so when I heard the stories from your father I wondered if you had it. Of course, it was pure chance that you turned up like that, and at first I saw you as a threat. That’s why we bombed your room in the hotel. Then I realised you were Calvin’s son, and remembered the stories about your childhood. Anyway I decided to give you a little test — your experience at Nikolai’s. You passed.’

  ‘It’s like a game to you, isn’t it, Rabjohn?’

  ‘I admit it’s amusing.’

  ‘What about the Barringtons?’

  ‘You really do like to dot the “i”s and cross the “t”s don’t you?’

  ‘Let’s blast them now, Master!’ Rifad said.

  ‘I said shut up!’ Rabjohn snapped. ‘Ronnie Barrington was just what I said he was — one of those plodders who seem dopey on the surface, but who never let go once they get their teeth into something. He realised what the Zerzura Club had been up to, and then he found out their Eye of Ra Operation file had been transferred to MJ-12. Fortunately he reported it to a superior who was one of us, and we arranged to have his brakes tampered with. By the way, the same happened to Lynne Regis, the Space-Shuttle analyst, in California. Your friend Evelyn — such an amusing lady. Of course, when she came to visit us at the Eye of Ra Society, I knew who she was from the start; I just played along to find out how much she was aware of. Luckily she’d never seen me, so she didn’t know I was “Rabjohn”. As soon as she’d gone I called Renner and Rifad, who got rid of her and made it look like suicide.’

  ‘Why did you try to persuade me to leave the country?’

  ‘I wanted to get you out of the way, where we could examine you more closely, but since you were determined to go to al-Maqs, I decided to let you find the ship. It would be a good test of your abilities, I thought, and we’d learn something if you were able to operate the instruments. I was right; you succeeded where Wingate had failed and brought out a message, twelve thousand years of data. The ship was destroyed, of course, but we still had you and your message, and a great deal of what we wanted to know about technology would be in it. After we’d got that, the question was what to do with you. We still needed someone to help us communicate with the aliens, but you proved uncooperative. So now we’re here.’

  ‘Let me kill him and get it over with, Master,’ Rifad said.

  Master. That word again. For a second I let my senses go out of focus. I removed my glasses and took three deep breaths. I summoned up all the mental energy I could and concentrated on. Rabjohn. Then suddenly I saw it: the photo of Carter and Carnarvon in the Valley of the Kings in 1923. The third person in the picture — it was Rabjohn, looking exactly as he looked now. But if Rabjohn had been seventy in 1923, that would make him over a hundred and forty years old! It was impossible. But it was him all right. Then in a flash of intuition, I saw the whole thing. It was a lie from beginning to end. I slapped my glasses back on my nose and grinned triumphantly. Rifad raised the gun. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘maybe I’m going to die, but before I do I want to tell you that you haven’t fooled me, Rabjohn. At least one human being saw through you, and even when I’m gone, someone else will too. They’ll get you in the end.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was you from the beginning, wasn’t it. You’re stuck here just like they were. Ha! ha! What cosmic bloody fools you must be! Twelve thousand years and in the same predicament! There was no Eye of Ra, not this century. You killed the lot, set up cranks like Montuhotep, created Majesty for your own purposes, set up the Zerzura Club. You have a special skill in persuading people to do what you want — some kind of mental control. Look at Rifad here — “Master” . I suppose that’s what Akhnaton had; that’s how he was able to handle an entire population of humans alone. You thought you could control me in the same way, but I was too strong for you. You collected all the remnants of the old technology and all the debris of the psi-gene programme like me and Wingate, everything you thought might give you that vital little piece of knowledge to allow you to escape, but none of it helped. At least you managed to get your act right since Akhnaton’s time and actually appear to be human. I feel sorry for you, Rabjohn, or whatever it is you really call yourself, you dirty shape-shifter!’

  ‘Damn you to eternity!’

  ‘About time!’ Rifad said, raising the gun. I watched his lids narrowing, and felt for my blade, too late. There was a whistle and a thud, and his eyes suddenly opened very wide indeed, his face creased in agony, and a gout of blood spurted from his mouth. As he collapsed forwards, I saw Ahmad’s stiletto growing out of his solar plexus. I s
natched the pistol from his stubby hand and turned it on Rabjohn, catching a glimpse of Ahmad out of the corner of my eye, lurching towards us holding his bloody thigh, roaring, ‘That’s for my father and my grandfather!’

  After that it seemed I was watching the whole sequence of events from somewhere above my own head. I saw the third crewman emerging from the back of the chopper with a submachine-gun, saw Elena catch the pistol that Ahmad threw to her, aim with both hands, fire twice, three times, saw the wisp of smoke, smelt the powder, saw the crewman fall into the sand. I saw Rabjohn ducking down to pick up the fallen sub-machine-gun, saw myself squeeze the trigger, saw how Rabjohn’s arm twisted and shattered, splashing blood on the fuselage. I saw Rabjohn squirm with anger, saw him shaking, shaking, shaking, until his whole body was vibrating so fast that it seemed to go out of focus, until I could no longer make out his features or even his figure. It seemed that he’d gone into a sort of cocoon of vibration, his whole body disintegrating and spinning in a wild vortex. There was a terrifying howl, like the howl of an injured animal and suddenly the vibration slowly wound down until a creature with a feral, ferocious face, an unnaturally elongated cranium, an ape-like body that was neither a man’s nor a woman’s, screeched once and, with a last terrified glance at me, leapt up and ran off into the desert. I will never forget the last glimpse of that face. The eye-sockets were large but narrowed to slits, and behind the slits the eyes looked yellow, like the eyes of a cat.

  58

  Elena had the pilot in her sights with his hands up, but his attention was not on her weapon, it was on the desert and the creature that had just disappeared into it. ‘God protect us from the devil!’ he said under his breath. ‘What was that thing?’