The Third Gate jl-1

by Lincoln Child

  This time, the reply was immediate. “Mouthpiece of Horus.”

  “What is your name?”

  “One… who is not to be named.”

  Tina leaned in close to Logan, whispered in his ear. “Scholars speculate that Narmer-when he became the god-king-wouldn’t allow his royal name to be spoken aloud upon pain of death.”

  Rush bent closer to the supine figure of his wife, spoke softly. “Who was that figure-that figure guarding the tomb?”

  “Thou… hast defiled me.” The voice was not angry this time. Instead, it seemed sorrowful, almost dolorous. “Thou hast desecrated my sacred house.”

  “Who is the guardian?” Rush asked again.

  “The eater… of souls. He who dwells in the tenth region of night. Tasker of Ra.”

  “But who-”

  “He will come for thou, the defilers. The unbelievers. Thy limbs shall… be rent from thy body, and thy line broken. Geb will place his foot upon thy head… and Horus will smite thee…”

  “What was that image in the tomb painting?” Rush asked, careful to keep his voice neutral. “The, ah, ornament on the man’s head?”

  A brief silence. “That which brings life to the dead… and death to the living.”

  Rush lowered his voice still further. “What can you tell me about the second gate?”

  “Despair… thine end comes quickly, on… taloned feet.” And with this Jennifer Rush let out a long, low sigh, turned her face to the wall, and went utterly still.

  Rush turned off the recorder, slipped it into his pocket, then gave his wife a careful examination. Frowning, he turned to study the monitoring equipment at her feet.

  “What is it?” Logan asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Rush said, peering at the indicators of her vitals. “Give me a minute.”

  “ ‘Geb will place his foot upon thy head,’ ” Tina repeated. “Sounds like a paraphrase of the Pyramid Texts. Utterance three fifty-four or three fifty-six, I believe. Now, how would she know about those?”

  “The Pyramid Texts?” Logan asked.

  “The oldest religious documents in the world. They were Old Kingdom spells and invocations that could only be spoken by royalty.”

  “Narmer,” Logan muttered.

  “If so, if they date back as far as Narmer’s time, then the Texts are even older than scholars believe-by at least seven hundred years.”

  “What were the Texts about?”

  “Reanimating the pharaoh’s body after his death, protecting his corpse from despoliation, seeing the pharaoh safely into the next world-all the things that concerned the ancient Egyptian kings.”

  Logan realized they were whispering. “What was that she said about the ornament depicted on the wall?”

  “That it brought life to the dead and death to the living,” Tina replied.

  “What do you suppose that means?”

  “Perhaps gibberish. On the other hand, the Egyptian pharaohs were in fact fascinated by near-death experience, what they called the ‘second region of night.’ ”

  “The second region of night,” Logan murmured. “Jennifer mentioned a region of night, too.”

  Rush had looked up from his instrumentation and was glancing their way. “Tina,” he said, “I wonder if you would mind excusing Jeremy and me for a minute.”

  Tina shrugged and began to walk toward the door. With her hand on the knob, she turned back.

  “I hope this is the last time you put her through this,” she said. Then she left, closing the door quietly behind her.

  In the silence that followed, Logan turned to Rush. “What is it?”

  “It’s taking her longer to snap back this time,” he said. “I’m not sure why.”

  “How long does it normally take?”

  “Usually it’s almost immediate. But that last crossing, the one you witnessed-it took her almost ten minutes to rouse completely. That’s uncommon.”

  “Is there something you can give her?”

  “I’d rather not try. We’ve never had to administer anything at the Center. Propofol is such a short-acting hypnotic, she should have been fully conscious for some time already.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then Rush started, as if remembering something, and plucked a disk from the pocket of his lab coat.

  “As you requested,” he said. “The patient records, clinical trials, and test results from our work at the Center. Please treat them as absolutely confidential.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  Rush glanced back toward his wife. As if with one thought, the two men moved to the head of the bed.

  “I think I’ll have a session with her myself,” Logan said. “Tomorrow, if that’s okay with you.”

  “The sooner the better,” Rush replied.

  36

  The communications room was deep within Red, down the hall from the power substation where Perlmutter had received his near-fatal shock just days before. It was a relatively small space, crowded with arcane electronic equipment whose purpose Logan couldn’t even begin to guess at.

  Jerry Fontaine, the communications chief, was a heavyset man in faded khakis and a pink short-sleeved shirt. The white cotton handkerchief in his right hand was never permitted to rest: either it was nervously being squeezed in Fontaine’s bearlike paw, or it was being wiped across his forehead, onto which beads of sweat kept reappearing.

  “How’s Perlmutter?” Logan asked as he opened a notebook and took a seat in the room’s only unoccupied chair.

  “The doctor says he can come back to work tomorrow,” Fontaine replied. “Thank God.”

  Logan pulled a folder from his duffel and opened it. “Tell me about these phenomena you’ve observed.”

  More dabbing of the handkerchief. “It’s happened twice now. Always late at night. I hear equipment coming to life, beeping and blinking, when everything should be turned off. The comm room is a daytime operation only, see.”

  “Why is that?” Logan asked.

  “Because there’s just me and Perlmutter manning it. And we operate it almost like a telegraph office-Stone’s orders. Any requests for Internet searches, for calls back to the main office, have to go through us. No night operation except in emergencies.”

  Stone and his habitual secrecy, Logan thought. “Which machines are, ah, waking up, exactly?”

  “One of the sat phones.”

  “One of the sat phones? You mean, there’s more than one?”

  Fontaine nodded. “We’ve got two. An NNR GlobalEye, for the geosynchronous satellite, and then the LEO.”

  “LEO?”

  “Low earth orbit satellite. Terrastar. Good for the high-bandwidth stuff.”

  Logan scribbled in his notebook. “Which one was it you heard?”

  “The one linked to the LEO.”

  Logan gazed around at the incomprehensible, knob-encrusted facades of equipment. “Can you show it to me?”

  Fontaine pointed to a rack-mounted device at his side. It was of brushed gray metal, with an embedded keypad and an attached headset. Logan reached into his duffel, pulled out the air-ion counter, held it before the sat phone, then examined the readout.

  “What are you doing?” Fontaine said.

  “Checking something.” The reading was normal; Logan put the counter away.

  He glanced back at Fontaine. “Give me the details, please.”

  Another swipe of the handkerchief. “The first time was-let me see-almost two weeks ago. I’d forgotten something in the communications room and I came back here to get it just before going to bed. There

  was a beeping, then a bunch of electronic noise from the LEO.”

  “What time was this?”

  “One thirty in the morning.”

  Logan made a notation. “Go on.”

  “The second time was the night before last. With Perlmutter in Medical, I had to do everything myself. There was a backlog of jobs, so I came here after dinner to finish up. It took me longer than I expected. I was just doin
g the final log entries when there was that beeping again, and the LEO woke up. Scared the dickens out of me, I can tell you.”

  “And what time was this?”

  Fontaine thought a moment. “One thirty. Like the first time.”

  Awfully punctual for a mechanical gremlin, Logan thought. “How does the phone work, exactly?”

  “Pretty straightforward. You establish the satellite link, check the upstream and downstream numbers. From there, it depends on what you’re transmitting. You know, analogue or digital, voice, URL page, e-mail, and so forth.”

  “And I assume, from what you’re telling me, the phone has no built-in timer-it can’t wake itself to send or receive a message.”

  Fontaine nodded.

  “Do you maintain a log of all sat phone use?”

  “Sure do. Dr. Stone insists on logs of everything-who made the request, where the transmission was sent, what was included.” He patted a row of thick black binders that resided on a shelf behind him.

  “Does the phone maintain an internal log as well?”

  “Yes. In flash RAM. You have to manually erase it from the front panel.”

  “When was the log last erased?”

  “It hasn’t been. Not since the site’s been live. To do so requires a password.” Fontaine frowned. “You don’t think…” His voice trailed off.

  “I think,” Logan said quietly, “that we should take a look at that internal log. Right now.”

  37

  When Logan was called to a meeting in Conference Room A to review the previous day’s initial penetration of the tomb, he assumed the group would be as large as the first conference he’d attended, when they’d assembled to discuss the generator accident. Instead, he found the big room to be relatively empty. There were Fenwick March with one of his assistants, Tina Romero, Ethan Rush, Valentino, one or two others he didn’t recognize.

  Looking around at the small group, Logan decided that perhaps he could bring up his discovery, after all.

  Stone entered, his personal secretary following in his wake. Closing the door, he walked past the two circles of chairs to the front of the room and took up position before the whiteboard.

  “Let’s begin,” he said briskly. “Please keep your reports brief and to the point. Fenwick, I’ll start with you.”

  The archaeologist shuffled some papers, cleared his throat. “We’ve already begun to put together an inventory, based on the video analysis of chamber one. Our epigrapher has begun recording the inscriptions. And once Dr. Rush has given the okay, we’ll send the surveyor down to begin making a detailed survey of the room’s dimensions and contents.”

  Stone nodded.

  “Our art historian has been analyzing the paintings. Her opinion-based for now only on the video evidence, of course-is that they are among the oldest known of Egyptian tomb paintings, almost as old as those at Painted Tomb One Hundred at Hierakonpolis.”

  “Very good,” said Stone.

  “While on visual inspection the artifacts appear to be in excellent shape, considering their age, there were several that could clearly benefit from careful stabilization and restoration. The black-topped jars and some of the beaded amulets, for example. When can we begin the process of tagging and removal?”

  This prompted an angry chirrup from Romero.

  “First things first, Fenwick,” Stone told him. “The chamber needs to be gridded, mapped, and pronounced safe. Then we can proceed to the actual artifacts.”

  “I don’t need to remind you that our time is growing short,” March said.

  “No, you don’t. That’s why we’re going to press on with all speed. But we are not going to rush things, risk either the tomb or ourselves with undue haste.” Stone turned to Romero. “Tina?”

  Romero stirred. “It’s a little early to get into specifics. And of course I still need to examine the tablets and papyri more closely. But what I’ve found so far is somewhat confusing.”

  Stone frowned. “Explain.”

  “Well…” Romero hesitated. “Some of the inscriptions seem to have been carved and painted a little crudely-as if they were rushed.”

  “You forget we’re dealing with the archaic period,” March sniffed. “The First Dynasty. Egypt’s skill with the decorative arts was still in its infancy.”

  Romero shrugged, clearly unconvinced. “In any case, many of the items and inscriptions are unique to Egyptian history. They speak of gods, practices, rituals, and even beliefs that are at odds with the conventional wisdom; with what followed in later periods-the Intermediate Periods, the New Kingdom.”

  “I don’t follow,” Stone said.

  “It’s difficult to describe, because everything’s so new and unfamiliar, and I’ve just begun to analyze it. But it’s almost as if…” She paused again. “When I first looked at the inscriptions, at the names of the gods evoked, gender, sequence of ritual, that sort of thing, it almost seemed as if… Narmer got it wrong. But then of course I realized that was impossible. Narmer was the first: this is clearly the oldest tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh ever found. So I can only assume that, well, the transfer of Narmer’s beliefs and practices to future generations was faulty. It’s as if his descendants didn’t understand what Narmer was trying to do, and so they aped it, ritually, without fully fathoming it. See, there are certain things about ancient Egyptian ritual that we still don’t comprehend, that seem self-contradictory. It’s entirely possible that-if we reexamine these now, in light of the Narmer ‘original’-we’ll be able to pinpoint the differences and articulate them. I’ll know more once I’ve analyzed things further. Any way you look at it, though, this is going to turn Egyptology on its head.”

  Stone rubbed his jaw. “Fascinating. Any thoughts as to the-the tomb guardian?”

  “At first I thought it was a representation of Ammut-the Swallowing Monster-who-in later Egyptian belief systems, anyway-sends unworthy souls to the Devourer of the Dead. But then I realized the morphology was wrong. It’s only conjecture, but I think it may be a very rough and primitive rendering of the god that, in the Middle Kingdom, would come to be known as Aapep. In later years he would be depicted as a crocodile, or a serpent. This is in keeping with the figure we saw. Aapep was the god of darkness, chaos, the eater of souls, the personification of everything evil. Interesting choice of babysitter.” She paused. “We may be seeing an extremely early version of this god, before Amemit and Aapep developed fully individual identities.”

  Logan saw Rush catch his gaze. The eater of souls, Logan thought. This was the god Jennifer had referred to, as well. How could she have known that, he wondered, unless a voice from the ancient past told her? The doctor looked tired-and Logan wasn’t surprised. It had taken Jennifer almost two hours to revive from the previous day’s crossing.

  “Of course,” Romero went on, “we don’t yet know exactly how this god figures in Narmer’s theogony-or what he represented at such an early period.”

  “What about the primary tomb painting?” Stone asked. “The one that appears to represent a punishment of some sort?”

  “I don’t know any more than I did yesterday. Sorry. It’s completely foreign to my experience.”

  “And the second gate?”

  “From what I can tell by visual inspection, the royal seal appears to be similar to the first.”

  “Thank you.” Stone turned to Dr. Rush. “And you, Ethan?”

  Rush shifted in his seat, cleared his throat. “My analysis of the atmosphere, dust from tomb surfaces, and grit from the plaster is complete. Everything appears to be inert. There’s a relatively high concentration of mold spores and pollen, but nothing to be alarmed about if exposure times are kept limited. A careful cleaning, of course, will take care of that. I found no evidence of harmful bacteria, viruses, or fungi. Until the decontamination process is complete, I’d recommend N-ninety-five facepiece respirators be worn for particulate filtering, along with latex gloves, but you would mandate that as standard procedure, anyway.”

>   “Poison?” Stone asked.

  “Nothing came up on my tests.”

  Stone nodded his satisfaction, then turned to one of the others. “GPR report?”

  A thin, nervous-looking young man sat forward and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Ground-penetrating radar, targeting the second chamber, shows a very large mass-apparently a single object-approximate dimensions four meters in length and two in height. Arranged before it are four smaller, identical objects.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “A sarcophagus,” March murmured.

  “And its four canopic jars,” Romero added.

  “Perhaps.” Stone frowned. “But in the second chamber-not the third?”

  “There appear to be several other objects,” the young man said, “but the back-scatter makes them difficult to distinguish effectively.”

  “Very well.” Stone thought for a moment. “We’ll spend the rest of the day securing, stabilizing, and decontaminating chamber one. Then, first thing tomorrow, we’ll proceed to the second gate. Meanwhile, if in your analysis any of you discover anything particularly unusual, let me know at once.”

  He turned to Logan. “Speaking of that, is there anything you’d like to add, Jeremy?”

  “Yes. Last evening, I spoke with Fontaine. He’d reported that one of the electronic devices under his care had been acting strangely-turning on at unexpected times, working when it wasn’t supposed to, operating by itself.”

  Very softly, Romero whistled the Twilight Zone theme.

  “The machine in question was one of the satellite phones. When I learned that both these incidents had occurred at one thirty a.m., I asked Fontaine to check the flash memory of the sat phone.”

  “And?” Stone said.

  “Its internal log showed a total of four unauthorized satellite uplinks, each made at precisely 1:34 a.m. local time. The uplinks were encrypted e-mails, each sent to an Internet remailing service, rendering them untraceable.”

  The room fell into a shocked silence.

  Stone had gone ashen. “How is that possible? Nobody has access to the sat phones; they can only be used by the communications officers.”