Diaz thought the place looked like a goddamn eyesore. As her car rolled through the freshly paved streets of Siwa City, surrounded by new blocks of hotels, apartments, casinos and shopping centers, she could practically feel her own character seeping away from her in the face of such generic, bland construction. The absence of crowds—there were bare handfuls of people out, even in the morning hours when it was cooler—didn’t help matters. It was a glistening ghost town, a representation of fervent hope awaiting a validation that might or might not arrive, for there was little else besides the calm waters of the bay to recommend the place. Waterfront property in the desert was still . . . in a desert.
“These are our IAEA badges,” Coogan said coolly as he passed out the identification to Diaz, Greene and Huntington. “We’re doing a spot inspection of the Total-Suez plant. Captain Huntington and I will play the lead investigators, which should allow General Diaz and Dr. Greene to spot anything out of sorts that might be related to their . . . past experiences.”
Past experiences. That’s an understatement, Diaz thought.
“General, you and Dr. Greene should keep your hats and sunglasses on as much as possible, in case your friend Harry’s looking out for you,” Coogan added. “If we’re found out, then the game’s up and we’ll be sent packing.”
Huntington, meanwhile, was looking up information on the area, the readout appearing in his own sunglasses. “Place was an oasis since at least Ptolemaic times,” he said. “They’ve uncovered temple ruins here that some believe is the ancient temple of Amun-Ra.”
“What’s the significance of that?” Greene said, challenge in his tone.
Huntington gave him a shrug. “The temple of Amu-Ra is where Alexander and Ptolemy visited back around 331 B.C., where Alexander was anointed a god and shown the secrets of the ancients,” she said.
“Well, he was anointed,” Greene said, flipping through his datapad; Diaz noted with some amusement that Greene was actually checking on Huntington’s assertions. “I don’t see anything about secrets.”
“Well, they are secrets,” Huntington smirked, clearly enjoying herself. “It’s probably not like he wrote them down.”
“Can it, everybody,” Diaz ordered as she tried to hide a smirk. “I don’t think Harry needs an ancient temple to make mischief.”
Huntington sat forward in her seat, showing a touch of genuine concern. “But there was a temple on Mars, ma’am. And if there’s a counterpart temple to the one here—”
“Then yes, in theory, it wouldn’t be a bad place to try to break though,” Diaz allowed. “Fine, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Facts first, guys.”
Huntington nodded dutifully and leaned back in her seat, looking out the window at a line of fast-food eateries, including the venerable Starbucks and McDonalds lines. There were a bare handful of people in each.
The Total-Suez fusion power generation plant was on the outskirts of the city, 40 kilometers to the south and east of the city’s Americanized boardwalks. It was a surprisingly innocuous structure, looking more like a warehouse complex than the potential source of electrical power for millions of people. Like many modern fusion power plants, the facility fused hydrogen atoms into helium, creating immense amounts of heat used to generate steam in order to spin highly efficient electromagnetic turbines.
“Looks like we’re here,” Diaz ordered. “Jimmy, make sure Washington knows where we are before we head in. And remember, we’re inspectors and colleagues. No ranks, first names.”
“You got it, Maria,” Huntington smirked. “Always wanted to say that.”
Diaz reached across to whack her in the arm playfully as she pulled the van up to the guard post. As she rolled down the window, a blast of hot, dry air hit her face . . . followed by the sound of a bored, irritated Arabic-speaking man a moment later.
“What the hell do you want?” he asked, the translation program in Diaz’ earpiece doing wonders to capture his tone. The HUD in her sunglasses showed that the man wasn’t similarly equipped, so she tried to pronounce the Arabic translation provided by the computer. It must have sounded awful, because after a few seconds, the burly guard held up his hand and shook his head. “You try English,” he said.
“Thank God,” she muttered. “Unannounced IAEA inspection. We’re to have full access.”
The guard took her proffered paperwork, scanning it idly. “We did not know there was inspection today.”
“That’s why it’s unannounced, chief,” she replied, which earned her a dirty look.
It took about ten minutes for the guard to scan the paperwork, call his supervisors inside and then wait for them to get authorization. Diaz wasn’t particularly worried; IAEA had long worked with intelligence communities around the world to help stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and it was the matter of a few e-mails and a hastily arranged conference call before the flight in order to set up the inspection back-story.
Finally, the guard came back. “You park there,” he said, pointing to a space near the entrance. “Go inside. Someone will be there for you.”
Diaz nodded and pulled through the gate and across the lot. Coogan and Huntington were busy on their handhelds, likely recording and filing everything they saw, while Greene recorded the proceedings with a holocam. Despite an immense facility for computing to go along with his scientific work, Greene was a bit curmudgeonly when it came to HUD technology in glasses or contacts. That officially made him the old man of the team, even though Diaz was technically two years older.
They quickly hustled out of the air-conditioned van and into the building, where they found a small lobby space that could reasonably be called industrial-corporate. There was surprisingly bad wood paneling, brand-new plastic furniture, a few ’Net access tablets on a glaringly white coffee table, and a desk with a smiling woman behind it, dressed in a modern business suit with a hijab. “Welcome!” she said, standing as they entered. “You are the inspectors, yes?”
“We are,” Huntington said, smoothly taking charge and shaking the woman’s hand. “Chief Inspector Margaret Huntington. Pleasure to meet you.”
The two exchanged pleasantries and pertinent information for a few moments, leaving Diaz to marvel at how lucky she was to find such a talented field officer. Huntington had spent time doing both infantry and intelligence work, and knew her way around computers, too. She was the kind of Swiss-army-knife body Diaz loved to work with. Coogan was the one who set things up, but Huntington specialized in getting them done on the ground.
A few minutes later, they were walking through the outermost parts of the plant, with the Egyptian woman providing a very adept tour of the facilities; Diaz figured she had done this dog-and-pony show dozens of times already. The place was spotlessly clean, and if there was such a thing as “new fusion power plant smell,” it had it.
As they walked, Diaz saw an IM pop up in her HUD:
SHOWING POWER FLOW BENEATH THE PLANT. –C
She turned to Coogan, who had sent the message, and shrugged. With a subtle but visible roll of his eyes, he resumed typing on his handheld. A moment later:
POWER FROM GENERATOR SHOULD ALL FLOW OUT, NOT INTO THE BASEMENT!
Damn if he didn’t have to be a dick about it, Diaz thought. She tapped out an order to the team:
START OPENING DOORS. NEED BASEMENT ACCESS.
“Hey, wait a sec. What’s that over there?” Huntington said a moment later, pointing to what for all the world looked like a broom closet.
“That?” their guide replied. “That is maintenance.” Nonetheless, Huntington was already striding over. She opened the door to find several mops, a slop sink and a shelf of cleaning chemicals. With a grin and a shrug, she fell back into the group.
The next several hours were ripped straight from a holocomedy, with the team opening nearly every door in the complex. All they discovered were various hallways, monitoring stations, closets, restrooms, locker rooms and the occasional office. The main control room was of partic
ular interest, and Coogan spent at least forty-five minutes scrolling through every permutation of the plant’s holographic controls and peeking into every available file.
“Anything?” Diaz asked Greene and Coogan sotto voce while Huntington prodded the woman for details about the plant’s emergency containment systems.
Both men shrugged. “Sensors are definitely showing the flow of power into the basement,” Coogan said. “The rest of the lines run straight out of the building. It could be nothing, but most plants of this type siphon power off an outgoing trunk line; they don’t dedicate a line to loop back in.”
Diaz turned to Greene. “Blue?” It was their shorthand for Cherenkov radiation.
“Only where you’d expect,” Greene said. “Could be that when we got the hit off BlueNet, they had a power spike of some kind.”
“But what about Harry?” she asked.
“Hey, I agree it stinks. But whatever we’re looking for, it might not be here.”
“Jimmy, give us a map. Where haven’t we been?” Diaz asked.
A moment later, a map of the facility popped up on their HUDs and screens. The plant was connected by a corridor to an office complex about fifty meters away. That was the only place left to search.
“All right, let’s go to the office, then,” Diaz said.
With an increasingly confused tour guide now in tow, the “inspectors” made their way toward the office building, a two-story affair that seemed as generic as the rest of Siwa City. On the bright side, the décor was markedly improved, reflecting Total-Suez’ wealth and influence as a global purveyor of electric power, water and petrochemical energy sources.
As they did in the plant, the team helped themselves to every available door, and there were considerably more of them in an office than in the power generation facility. It was a Friday—a fortuitous turn of events, given that most of the lower-level employees had the day off, as was Muslim custom. Still, there were more than a few people still there, primarily Europeans and Chinese. And most were surprised to see a team of inspectors probing their offices with sensors.
One office on the second floor stopped all of them in their tracks. The name on the door read: HARRY YU.
“What do you think?” Greene asked.
Diaz shrugged. “Maybe he took the day off,” she said. “If not, he’s not in a hurry to say hi.” She turned to the tour guide. “This one, too.”
The guide opened the door, and Harry Yu looked up from his desk, then immediately went wide eyed. “What the hell?”
Diaz turned to Greene. “Or, you know, he could be sitting there the whole time like a spider in the center of a web, but that would be really cliché.”
Harry narrowed his eyes, then looked at the group’s tour guide. “Who are these people?”
The now-nervous Egyptian woman bowed slightly as she addressed Harry. “IAEA inspectors, Mr. Yu. Their papers are in order.”
Harry leaned back at his desk, scanning holocopies of the fake IAEA documents forwarded by their tour guide. “Huh. Pretty impressive. Scanned through cleanly, too,” he said with a growing smile before turning back to the woman. “Why don’t you leave these folks here with me for a while. I’m sure they have questions.”
The woman nodded, bowed and quickly left, and Diaz heard the door close behind them with a click.
Then all her tech went blank.
A quick look at Coogan and Huntington confirmed it—they were cut off from the rest of the world.
“C’mon in. Have a seat,” Harry said, motioning toward a conference table in the corner of the room, overlooking the brand new city off in the distance. “You can tell me what the fuck you’re doing here.”
October 10, 1798
Never was a setting sun more welcomed than on the road to the temple of Amun-Ra. Finch smiled at the thought of lamplight in the cities of Europe, or the chill of winter nights upon Ganymede. In rural areas, sunset was a time to lock doors against the night’s predators. And certainly, the Libyan Desert had its predators, animal and human alike. Yet the sun’s rest was cause for celebration, for Finch could finally stop sweating for a few hours.
And Finch was perhaps the one man most acclimated to the desert climate, except for young Jabir. The French, certainly, were perhaps even more relieved—bordering on rapturous—to see the light fade. It would make their night’s journey that much more bearable.
There were a half-dozen savants in the caravan, mostly younger scholars who served as Berthollet’s assistants, along with another dozen servants and a platoon of soldiers wearing the finest French wool uniforms. It took Berthollet, the caravan’s nominal commander, only a single day and two deaths to realize that marching in the heat of the afternoon sun would result in a severely foreshortened journey. Thus, they marched from roughly five in the afternoon to seven in the morning, taking their breakfast before marching two hours in the lingering day and the rest under the Moon and stars. And in the chill of the desert night, the wool uniforms were actually useful.
Their first two weeks saw them march to Alexandria along the banks of the Nile, followed by another three weeks of travel along the coast. This was not, of course, the exact route depicted in the mosque’s hidden map, but rather seemed to be the safest route to get to its destination. For all their political posturing—the caravan’s soldiers and scholars still shared a great deal of revolutionary fervor nearly ten years on— Finch trusted the French when it came to geometry and geography. Now, they were well into the desert, ideally less than a week away. Travel was excruciatingly slow among the dunes of the desert, especially with all the water the caravan had to carry. Prior to leaving, Finch had argued for a smaller group, one that might travel more quickly, but Berthollet insisted upon the soldiers, given the encounters the French already had with the Bedouin tribes of the desert whilst marching on Cairo.
The mornings before sleep had been most convivial for Finch, engaged in conversation with Berthollet, Dolomieu and the other savants. Berthollet was, of course, a premier alchemist, on a par with Finch’s ability and—if he were being completely honest with himself—perhaps surpassing him in certain areas, especially those related to the materia school, something modernists had taken to calling chemistry. This complimented Finch’s own strengths in the energia and vitalis schools, and both men had a keen interest in the burgeoning mechanica school of thought. Both spoke fondly of the late alchemical master Benjamin Franklin, for Berthollet had once met the genial Ganymedean just prior to his departure from Paris, where he served as the United States of Ganymede’s ambassador. Finch, for his part, had his own fond memories of Dr. Franklin, but these had less to do with alchemical mastery and far more to do with simple humanity.
“Another lovely night, is it not?” Berthollet said as he rode his horse up to Finch’s side. Finch had been offered a horse as well, but preferred the surer footing and languorous pace of a sturdy camel. Given that the drovers guided the camels, this perch also gave Finch more time to brush up on his reading; most of his investigations into Egypt’s past had to do with kingdoms four and five millennia old. He had paid little attention to the Ptolemaic dynasties, much to his chagrin now.
“It is, monsieur,” Finch agreed, though he personally found the nights somewhat monotonous, despite the clarity of the Void above that seemed to entrance the French. Then again, the British weren’t letting too many French ships out of Earth’s grasp of late, whereas Finch could point to a planet above and describe conditions upon them from first-hand knowledge. “I have been disappointed with the quality of my collection, I fear. There is very little regarding Alexander, and most of it has to do with the Pillar of Hermes, which of course, may not exist at all.”
Berthollet smiled and nodded sagely. “I agree, doctor. If anything, I believe the Pillar of Hermes is something of a ruse to throw the scholar off the scent.” He handed Finch a piece of paper. “One of our savants has been translating a variety of scrolls while we journey, and just finished one such work. It is, sh
all we say, interesting reading. Perhaps you might enjoy it?”
Finch took the paper and scanned the first few lines, then looked up at Berthollet in shock. “Where did you get this?”
The Frenchman’s smile grew wider. “We have engaged in much scholarly research amongst the Mohammedans since we arrived in Cairo,” he said. “This was among the papers of an old mosque, though I can’t remember which at the moment.”
Finch frowned at this, for he knew that the parchments kept safe among the imams of Cairo were considered part and parcel of the history of Islam itself and of Egypt before it. Some scrolls, it was rumored, could trace their origins back to the burned Library of Alexandria, if not before. And Finch knew, from his own repeated and respectful inquiries, that most imams were exceedingly reluctant to let any Westerner, even a respected murshid, view their troves. Finch feared that Berthollet’s research collaborations were likely conducted at musket-point.
Nonetheless, the translation was in his hand, and it was not as though not reading it would somehow set things aright.
The document in question was an account of Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt, which had occurred more than 330 years before the coming of Christ. Apparently part of a larger narrative, the papers in Finch’s hand dealt with Alexander’s near-legendary pilgrimage to the Temple of Amun-Ra—which made sense, of course.
There were two things, however, that stood out as Finch quickly skimmed over the translator’s work. One, the narrator seemed to be none other than Ptolemy, Alexander’s chief deputy and the future pharaoh of Egypt and founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty.
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