Firebird

by Michael Asher

  ‘So the Benben Stone was the original capstone?’

  ‘Yes, and it was probably placed on top of the pyramid for some fantastic ritual that they’d all waited for for eight thousand years. Some kind of connection between the earth and the cosmos. Adam thought that if he could find the Benben Stone he could solve the mystery of the Firebird Project. There were references in the text to a hidden chamber under the Great Pyramid where the Benben Stone was kept after the great ceremony, and that’s the point where I enter the story. Adam asked me to look for the chamber.’

  ‘This was the “Thoth’s Chamber” project.’

  ‘You read about it, right?’

  ‘Yeah, but according to what I read you only found the door, and the Antiquities Organization put the kibosh on any further exploration.’

  ‘That was the official version. Actually we did unseal the door but it turned out to be a disappointment — the Benben Stone wasn’t there. There were marks to suggest it had been there originally, but it had been moved out.’

  ‘But that’s not the end of the story.’

  ‘It was the end of my direct involvement until two months ago, when Adam rang me up from the States. He seemed very agitated, and poured out the whole account of what had happened after we’d aborted Thoth’s Chamber. First of all, he’d come across a reference in ancient Egyptian literature from the First Intermediate Period — the Admonitions of Ipuwer. Ever heard of it?’

  ‘You’re the second guy who’s asked me that in three days. Yes, I have heard of it.’

  ‘Well the quote ran something like, “that which the pyramid concealed is no longer there”. Adam was certain this was a reference to the Benben Stone vanishing. He reckoned that after the big ritual in 2500 BC, it had been hidden inside the pyramid until about 2000 BC, then for some reason it was moved somewhere else. He started to do more research and came across ancient Persian legends referring to a stone hidden out in the Bahr Bela Ma. Somehow he came into contact with Sanusi, who told him his ancestors had found something out there in 1916 — something the Germans had been very interested in. Sanusi reckoned that it was the Persian legends that had led to Cambyses’ invasion of Egypt in 525 BC, and to the expedition of a Persian army into the Bahr Bela Ma.’

  Daisy was staring at him in fascination, her features blunted in the flickering lamplight. ‘So you were right about that, Sammy,’ she said.

  For a moment Monod looked at her in surprise, then he went on. ‘Naturally I enquired if he’d found the Stone,’ he said, ‘but he only told me the project was off and advised me to lay low for a while. I’d always known there was something not quite above board about the deal — the fact that the manuscript had been kept from the public and the disinformation about Thoth’s Chamber, for instance — but I’d turned a blind eye because I was certain the Antiquities Organization knew about it. After all, they’d closed down the Great Pyramid for us and allowed us to open the chamber, even though it was officially given out that they hadn’t. I thought he was exaggerating and fobbed him off, but the very next day I got a visit from some very unpleasant characters. They said they were police, but like I told you before, I’m not sure. They said if I breathed a word about any of it, they’d slit the throats of my wife and kids. I got them out of the country and vanished into the bazaar, rented a room with a bed and a phone, and went out dressed as a woman. Next thing I heard Adam was over here on a visit, and we arranged a meeting at my digs in the Khan. He turned up looking dreadful, saying they were after him. That was the last time I saw him alive. About nine o’clock the next morning I got a call, but all I heard was “Monod, is that you?” and the sound of shooting and screaming. I was scared stiff, but determined to find out what was happening. There was a commotion in Sayyidha al-Hussayn Square and I soon found out that Adam had been murdered. I saw them bring out the fat man, and heard them saying he was to be taken to the U S medical facility. Then I saw you two and the big detective milling around, and I followed you. The rest I think you can work out yourselves.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you followed us, saw that guy at the Mena Palace give us Ibram’s briefcase. You guessed what was in it.’

  ‘That’s right, but —’

  ‘Get down!’ Daisy screamed, and I realized with a shock that she’d sprung into a firing position so fast and silently that I hadn’t even seen her move. A submachine gun spattered drumfire from the steps, and I ducked and jumped on Monod, shielding him. Rounds whiplashed around us, clipping fragments out of the stonework that whizzed around our heads. A sliver hit one of the oil lamps, which toppled over spreading a slick of burning oil across the floor. In its sudden flare I saw dark, hooded figures in the doorway, and I drew my Beretta. Daisy whipped off a whole clip in double taps, a solid wall of fire that filled the cellar with ear splitting noise and poisonous fumes. ‘This way!’ Monod yelled, pointing to the dark alcove above. ‘My escape hatch!’ He had half turned towards it when a bullet took him in the chest.

  34

  Monod buckled and choked blood over my jacket. I stepped into the alcove and found a narrow, crumbling staircase spiralling up out of sight. I pulled Monod after me, and a moment later Daisy backed in, still firing. I holstered my pistol and Daisy and I grabbed an arm each and half dragged, half carried the body up the dark stairs and out into the blinding sunlight of another rank alley. It was full of the hulks of rusting cars, and we dodged behind them into another derelict, roofless house, where we laid Monod down gently in the goat dung and refuse. We peered through the broken window. Figures in long, black Barbour coats — six or seven of them — were pouring out of the cellar exit and skirmishing towards us between the car wrecks. They worked in pairs, moving with the concentration of spiders, covering each other with fire.

  ‘The same guys who bumped us last night!’ Daisy said. ‘The guys Van Helsing claimed were Militants!’ She inserted a fresh mag into her SIG and began firing aimed shots through the window. After each shot she rolled back out of sight, just in time to duck the submachine gun rounds that spattered the brickwork and reduced the window frame to matchwood. Monod groaned and fought for breath. I ripped away the robe to see if I could stanch the bleeding, but I already knew what I’d find. Our clothes had sopped up litres of his blood like blotting paper, and most of the rest lay spilt in a trail along the derelict street. There was an entry wound on his right pectoral, through which air wheezed nauseatingly in and out, and I cut a section out of my T-shirt with my blade and covered it. I couldn’t reach the exit wound in the back, but I knew it must be huge, because most of the blood was coming from there. Monod gurgled and coughed.

  ‘Can’t breathe!’ he whispered.

  ‘Don’t try,’ I said, lie still. We’ll get you out.’

  A couple of bullets whazzed off the walls, fragmenting into bits of shrapnel. I bellowed as a piece took out a tiny bit of my right earlobe and blood streamed down my neck. Daisy popped up and fired a double tap. ‘Got the bastard!’ she said, throwing herself back into cover. Monod’s eyelids fluttered, and he found my wrist, curling his fingers around it like tentacles.

  ‘Inside my robe...’ he said, then he coughed and a dribble of blood ran out of the side of his mouth. ‘Ibram warned me...’

  A hail of slugs hissed past my bleeding ear and I dipped down. I felt Monod’s grip go limp and I realized suddenly that he wasn’t breathing. My mind raced through possibilities of resuscitation — mouth to mouth, heart massage — but deep down I knew it was useless. I fumbled inside his robe. Stitched into the lining was a flat package, and I ripped it out with the help of my knife. It was already badly bloodstained and my ear bled on it even more copiously before I got it inside my jacket.

  Daisy fired another double tap and rolled. ‘Look out!’ she screamed. ‘They’re here.’

  A face in shades and shamagh appeared at the window and Daisy popped up and shot it from a range of a couple of feet. The head seemed to detonate into a bloody mash of dark shards and bits of shamagh. Another face
replaced it instantly, like a hydra’s head, and almost simultaneously a third face and a body materialized at the door. The guy wore a flapping black trench coat and held a big handgun, but he opened his mouth to say something and in that moment I skewered him with my blade. It’d been a long time since I’d thrown it in anger, but I hadn’t lost my touch. The stiletto took him bang in the abdomen, and he doubled over letting the handgun slip from his grasp. I kicked him in the face, put a stranglehold on his neck, retrieved my blade in a shower of fresh blood, and slashed off his shamagh. I don’t know quite what I’d been expecting, but this guy was no Militant — not unless they’d started recruiting them from blond Nordic types. He looked more like a grizzled version of one of the U S marine corporals at the medical facility.

  ‘Sammy!’ Daisy yelled, and I glanced up to see her struggling with another foot soldier who’d launched himself through the window. The cry only distracted me for an instant, but it was long enough for my grizzled veteran to flex himself up, shrug off my stranglehold and grab his weapon. He pointed it at me shakily, holding his guts together with his left hand as blood pulsed through his fingers.

  ‘Son-of-a-bitch!’ he grunted in English, ‘you’re gonna die real slow for this.’ He choked and blood dripped from his nose. ‘You got something we want, asshole, and guess what? It’s handover time. Dead or alive, it’s all the same to me.’ He’d lowered the weapon slightly for a nasty shot in my balls, when there was a crack as a brilliant red aureole developed in the side of his head. Half his grey matter splattered over the wall.

  A second later Hammoudi torpedoed himself across in front of me and grabbed the guy Daisy was wrestling with round the throat. He dug the .44 into the guy’s back and pulled the trigger, breaking his spine instantly. The foot soldier slumped like a broken doll and Hammoudi pulled Daisy out of the way and ducked as another hail of bullets chopped up the window frame.

  I threw myself down next to them. ‘I thought you were dead,’ I said.

  Hammoudi tried to wink, but his chest was heaving and his breaths came in sobs. ‘Told you, boy,’ he panted, ‘I’ve been round a long time. You got what you came for?’ I nodded. ‘Then get out. You and the girl. Now!’ He slapped a set of car keys into my hand. ‘There’s a four wheel drive Daihatsu at the end of the street — the escape car — and it’s kitted out. Take it. You know where to go.’ He gestured to the hole he’d come in by, then spun round and fired at another face that had popped up behind the window. ‘Jesus and Mary!’ he said. ‘How many of these creeps are there?’

  He braced himself against the door jamb and punched another clip into the .44. ‘Go!’ he bawled, but this time I didn’t know whether he was speaking to us or himself, because the next I knew he’d dashed out in the street into a hail of gunfire. I grabbed Daisy by the hand and we belted out through the back of the ruined house and down a parallel street. I was ready for sentries, but these guys had evidently been so sure of themselves they hadn’t bothered to post them. That was their mistake. It took us only seconds to reach the compact little silver grey car and within a minute Daisy had the key in the ignition and the turbo roared into life. A second later we were racing through the tight alleys towards Shari’ al-Azhar and my seat was already slippery with blood — most of it someone else’s. Peasant faces in turbans and skullcaps glared at us. Some shouted curses and waved their fists. Daisy swerved around a narrow corner, almost colliding with a hand cart full of fruit, and its owner jumped out of the way, screaming abuse. Dogs barked at us, and someone threw a stone that bounced feebly off the bonnet.

  These streets had been built for a less frenetic world than the one we lived in — for camel caravans and donkeys, not motorcars moving at sixty kilometres an hour. One alley was full of hundreds of porcelain baths and toilets, and Daisy ploughed through several ambitious displays, the bull bars on the front of the car smashing or shunting them aside. There were more strings of curses, and men in gallabiyyas and vests shambled after us, gesticulating. Daisy steered us down an alley of one room workshops caked in grease, where men waved welding torches at us threateningly. At last we shot out of the bazaar into the main road by the Azhar — a university that had stood here since before the American continent was even discovered. There were crowds on the streets and the skyway was full of traffic. Daisy ran serenely down the gears as if she was driving in a funeral cortege, and worked her way into the slow moving stream of cars. She looked at me and giggled, showing off her white teeth.

  ‘You look like an extra from Nightmare on Elm Street,’ she laughed, ‘your shirt is cut to pieces and you’re soaked in blood.’

  ‘I hope Hammoudi left me a change of clothes.’

  The traffic speeded up as we drove through Opera Square and into the heart of modern Cairo. There were cops on traffic duty, and I sank down in my seat to keep my bloody face out of view. The only real wound I had was a nick on the ear, but that had bled profusely.

  ‘What did you take from Monod?’ Daisy asked.

  I felt inside my jacket and came out with the package I’d found stitched inside his robe. The wrapping paper was soggy with blood — mine and other people’s — but inside was a sheet of crumpled parchment that seemed relatively untouched. I opened it out and studied it carefully, then I opened the packet Hammoudi had given me. They were two halves of the same map, and they fitted together with perfect precision.

  ‘What is it?’ Daisy asked, trying to squint sideways and cope with the traffic at the same time.

  ‘It’s the other half of Ibram’s map,’ I told her, ‘only this one’s got the scale and coordinates on it.’

  ‘And you recognize the place?’

  ‘No, but I’d bet money it’s the Sea Without Water, the Bahr Bela Ma. You remember that circle thing you spotted on the torn edge of Ibram’s map? Well Monod’s bit has the rest of it, and it contains the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the Firebird. Ten to one poor old Monod just handed us the location of the Benben Stone.’

  PART II

  WESTERN DESERT OF EGYPT,

  DECEMBER, 1999

  35

  The story goes that when the god Ra became senile a group of human beings plotted to overthrow him, but someone snitched and he decided to rub out the whole race. At a celestial council, though, the elder god, Nou, advised him to convene a proper court, so that the conspirators could be proved guilty. Ra ignored this advice, because he guessed that if summoned to the court, the rebels would abscond into the Red Land — the desert — which was beyond the reach of the guardian gods of Egypt. Instead he sent his Eye — the wild beast Sekhmet — on a rampage, and she didn’t stop tearing people apart until the land was red with blood. In fact, Ra — who’d regretted his decision — had to trick her into swallowing thousands of barrels of beer to get her canned enough to lay off. For me, the moral of that story had always been that if human beings had reached the desert they would have found the ultimate sanctuary from Sekhmet. There in the wilderness they would lie beyond even the power of Ra.

  We mingled with the traffic in the city centre, and crossed the Nile by Tahrir Bridge, heading for Giza. ‘Where the hell are we going?’ Daisy asked.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ I said, ‘trust me.’

  As she diced with the jams on Sudan Street, I searched the glove compartment and found the spare shirt and the false ID card and driving licence Hammoudi had left for me. This was my escape kit. It wasn’t much, but it would get me where I wanted to go. I wriggled into the new shirt, put on my shoulder rig and jacket, and dropped my bloody T-shirt out of the window, then sealed my ear with a Band Aid and used some tissues to get the rest of the stuff off my hands and face. Daisy drove along Shari’ al-Ahram, past the pyramids at Giza and out along the road to the oases, where the black land gave way abruptly to the desert. The pyramids loomed over us like vast direction pointers, and ahead of us the traffic slowed down for a military police road block.

  ‘Shit!’ Daisy said. ‘They’re on to us.’

  ‘No,’ I
said, ‘it’s just routine. Let me take the wheel. You get in the back. Cover your face with the veil and pretend to be asleep.’

  There was a heavy duty red and white striped barrier across the road, in front of a concrete blockhouse with a radio aerial sticking out of the roof. A robust corporal with a red armband and a scarlet beret, almost bursting out of his khaki, was checking the outgoing cars, while another MP raised and lowered the barrier. On both sides there were sand bag emplacements protecting sentries in flak jackets and steel helmets, and a Russian made jeep and two Suzuki motorcycles were pulled up near the blockhouse. When our turn came at the barrier I had my false papers ready for the corporal. He glanced into the back window. ‘Who’s that?’ he demanded.

  ‘Just my wife,’ I said, ‘she’s tired.’ I rounded my hands across my stomach. ‘You know.’

  The corporal studied the picture on my ID card and glanced back at me with flinty eyes. He walked round to the front of the car and read the number plate.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked, still holding my documents.

  ‘To Kharja,’ I said, ‘to see my relatives.’

  The corporal handed the papers back to me reluctantly, and kept his eyes fixed on my face. He gave the signal to lift the barrier, and I put the car in gear. Just then another MP came trotting out of the sentry post waving a clipboard. He shouted something to the corporal, who held up his hand to stop me, but the car was already moving and I was through the barrier. I rammed the accelerator as far down as it would go and the Daihatsu’s turbo roared as the car exploded forwards. There were staccato shouts of ‘Gif! Gif!’ and in the mirror I saw that the corporal had drawn his revolver. We rushed past the sentry in the sandbag emplacement, and there was a volley of cracks as he opened up with a Kalashnikov.