by Tom Bane
“Turn around!”
“Who are you?”
“MOVE!”
The second man was pressing his machine gun to the back of Ben’s head, forcing him up the steps so fast he kept stumbling and scraping his shins painfully against the stones, sending him ricocheting off the walls. What the hell was happening? This was his secret that he’d earned through dedicated years of hard, intensive work. He wasn’t just going to hand it over. Fumbling to see the tally counter, he struggled to wipe it clean, memorizing the long count using all the mental powers he had spent his life honing.
As they emerged from the Sanctuary room, one of the men snatched the tally counter from Ben before marching him back down the outside steps to the foot of the pyramid where José stood, distraught, next to a third heavily armed and camouflaged man.
“Don Sanders,” José begged, his voice quaking. “What is going on? We should never have done this.”
It seemed to Ben their captors could be narco-traffickers, a common hazard in the region, although not usually this far north in Mexico.
“We can pay you not to kidnap us,” he said, dismissively. He didn’t want them to know how scared he was. “We are here on a scientific mission.”
The men said nothing, their expressions hidden beneath their balaclavas.
“So, what do you want?” Ben continued. “What are your orders? Just tell us what you want.”
Without warning, the brutal and earsplitting crack of machinegun fire echoed round the natural amphitheater of the surrounding forest canopy. Bullets raked through José’s legs. He screamed in agony, jerking as if a thousand volts of electricity were passing through his torn body. Ben pulled the crowbar concealed inside his jacket and hurled it with all his strength at the head of the man firing the gun. It struck its mark and the man staggered back against the base of the pyramid. Recovering his balance, the man swung his gun angrily round at Ben. Another short round of rapid fire from the gun and Ben felt a bullet slice across the top of his skull followed by a rush of warmth as blood began flowing down the side of his face. Ben reached up and felt a loose piece of skin flapping across his scalp. Stunned by the speed and force of what was happening, he slumped to his knees. The attacker lunged toward Ben and yanked away the piece of partially severed flesh from the side of his head.
Ben’s scream ripped through the night, setting the howler monkey off once more.
A flock of giant fruit bats rose through the jungle canopy, startled by the explosion of noise, and swooped around their heads. Ben clung on to consciousness as his captors dragged him and José by their hands toward the opposite pyramid; the Mayan moon goddess Ixtab needed her appeasement. They scaled the rock stairway of the pyramid, unconcerned by the screams of damaged bodies smashing against each step on the way up to the ancient sky altar.
Reaching the apex, as if working to the beat of a divine metronome, the three men stopped, stripped off their balaclavas and donned jaguar skins and headdresses with feathers. Ben was still breathing, trying to hold on, his vision almost obscured by his own blood. José groaned, barely conscious.
“Stop! Stop!” he pleaded.
Ignoring his screams, they hoisted the broken bodies onto the stone altar. At the leader’s curt nod, the other two ripped back the bloodied fabric of their captives’ shirts, exposing their chests.
“Please, NO!”
Turning to the first of their two victims, the leader raised high a samurai-sharp obsidian dagger. It hung motionless for a split second, reflecting the brilliant white light of the full moon as it prepared for its deadly descent. Then, with brutal speed, it ripped through the hot evening air, plunging true and straight into the chest of its victim. Embedded deeply, the leader maneuvered the blade left and right, slicing with the cold efficiency of a butcher. The self-appointed nacom priest levered the blade around the heart, severing the aorta and vena cava. Then, drawing the knife out above the ribcage, he cut a fist-sized hole in the flesh. Sliding his hand into the cavity, he grasped the beating heart in his powerful fingers and ripped it out with a single wrench. It pulsated and jerked in his palm as it clung to its receding life force, its exit wound drenching the smooth rock altar beneath with thick, red blood. The assassins reached into the dark pool to smear the warm blood all over their bodies, faithfully following the ceremonial duties of the nacom priesthood. Finally, slicing it free from its life-supporting arteries, the priest raised the beating heart high above the altar as an offering to the full moon. The blood sacrifice was complete. The gods were satiated. Turning to the bleeding corpse, with a single heavy kick, he sent it tumbling off the altar to roll down the side of the pyramid, coming to rest in a distorted tangle of limbs at the bottom where, in ancient times, the priests would have dismembered, skinned and eaten the corpse while still fresh.
CHAPTER TWO
The first rays of morning sunshine bounced over the banks of the River Isis as it flowed through the cloistered environs of Oxford University. Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess of magic, had worked her spell on the town and its inhabitants alike, her waters sweeping through the meadowlands and oxbow lakes, past misty banks and mute swans shaking the sleep from their feathers as they warmed themselves beneath the bridge at Magdalen College, while the city’s traffic roared over them, modern vehicles and rusty student bicycles equally oblivious to the ageless band of wild green that swept beneath them.
The same rays wandered gently through the arched stone window and dusty air, across the floorboards as Suzy slept, her head resting sideways on the English oak study table. It was 8:30 am in the ancient New College, official name, College of St Mary. A sharp knock at the door startled her awake. Her right arm swung like an elephant’s trunk across the table top, knocking a nearly full mug of black coffee to the floor. Suzy stared for a moment at the mess, as she tried to gather her thoughts. The knocking at the door became more urgent.
“Come in!”
“Morning,” Kathy chimed. Then, noticing the black puddle splattered across the rug, she laughed, “Need any help?”
“Just one more stain,” Suzy muttered, getting up and throwing a grubby towel across the rug, stamping hard over it in the hope it would soak up all the evidence. “I fell asleep; I’ve been up since five doing my research on Akhenaten, the father of King Tut.” She rubbed her eyes. “I thought caffeine was supposed to keep you awake.”
“There’s a limit to what even caffeine can do,” Kathy said, gently pushing her friend to one side and taking over the mopping up. “Honestly, I despair sometimes. You work far too hard. You’ll burn out. You never have any fun, never relax. You even copped out of the May Ball!”
“But there’s so much to do,” Suzy complained, “so much to learn. How on earth do other people fit it all in?”
“You can’t worry about that now, babe, it’s already eight thirty-five; you need to get dressed.”
“Oh, shit.”
Suzy hauled off the jacket she had been wearing since the early morning and pulled a black t-shirt over her head. Flinging the jacket to one side, she hoisted on a pair of slim, calf-length jeans that had been lying in a crumpled heap on the floor. Slip-on canvas shoes completed the outfit.
“How do you do that?” Kathy demanded, dropping the coffee-soaked towel on top of a pile of dirty laundry.
“Do what?”
“Just pull on any old thing and look like you’ve stepped off the cover of Vogue. It’s so bloody unfair.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Suzy said, distracted by her hunt for a hairbrush. “You look gorgeous and you know it.”
Kathy was, as usual, impeccably presented. She disguised her height of nearly six feet with flat gold sandals and loose linen skirt at one end, and a neat blond bob at the other. A flash of lipstick and a selection of glass and bead jewelry completed her trademark look of casual glam.
“You have no idea how long it takes me to look even half human at this time of the morning,” Kathy replied.
Finding the brush,
Suzy turned toward the light, pulling the brush violently through her long, shining black hair. She checked her face and eyes in the half silvered pane of glass that was a poor excuse for a mirror on the reverse of her wardrobe door, but with her mind still wrestling with Akhenaten she barely noticed her reflection. It sometimes seemed that Suzy was totally unaware of the simple but extraordinary beauty she had inherited from her Brazilian mother. She carried her slim five-foot-eight-inch figure with childish ease, her naturally bronzed skin, dark almond eyes and deep, lustrous, ebony hair requiring no further adornment. The only piece of jewelry Suzy ever wore, a simple silver locket, was strictly for sentimental reasons.
Suzy had also inherited the studious Arab heart of her Egyptian scholar father. The mix was shocking for anyone who, on first meeting her, couldn’t believe such a serious brain was at work behind this youthful, beautiful face. Suzy, however, gave neither her appearance nor her intelligence much consideration, which made her all the more remarkable among the vain and strutting high achievers of Oxford.
She grabbed her leather backpack from where it lay under the old porcelain hand basin. “Come on then, let’s go.”
“You’ve forgotten your pad!” Kathy laughed, tossing it across the room to her. “You’re never going to get a PhD if you don’t take notes!”
“Hmmm, I only got a C for my last essay. I don’t think Piper likes my ideas much.” Suzy deftly caught the notebook and crammed it into her bag.
“Are you kidding? He thinks the sun shines from your every orifice. The rest of us might as well be invisible when you’re around. He’s only marking you down because he is expecting amazing things of you, goading you on to ever greater heights.”
“That’s such crap!” Suzy protested. But it was sometimes embarrassing how much attention the professor paid to her in lectures. She valued the intellectual jousting they shared but not the inquisitive audience.
“We’ve also got that guest lecturer from America again today,” Kathy said as they made their way out of the room and down the spiral staircase, “as an adjunct to the main class.”
“Which one? Not that boring guy who drones on and on about the pyramids?”
“Oh, come on! He’s so fit! And American, too! Must be a rower or something like that with those big arms. And did you see how blue his eyes were?”
“My God, Kathy, you’re really showing your desperation this morning. Looks aren’t everything, you know.”
“He’s hardly stupid! He’s a Rhodes Scholar.”
“Last time, I seem to remember he was explaining at incredible length how the Great Pyramid is perfectly aligned to true north.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” Kathy wondered if she had missed something. “It is, isn’t it?”
“Duh! It’s hardly new. In fact, I think they first noticed it about four thousand years ago.”
“Don’t be mean. I do think he’s really smart in his own way and he really goes through all the evidence to test things, you know, some of the freaky, outlandish theories. Remember that one about the great Pyramid being a power plant? He disproved that conclusively.”
“What sort of idiot would think such a theory had any validity to start with?” Suzy laughed. “He might as well have proved that it was never a supermarket.”
“Well, I want to look at him again, so you have to come too, in case I seem too obvious.” Suzy grinned at her friend.
“OK, OK, I’ll come, if only to make sure you don’t make a complete fool of yourself.”
The chapel bells were ringing out from the white stone tower at the corner of the quadrangle as they raced along the crisp gravel path and out underneath the “Bridge of Sighs” that arched like a Venetian masterpiece over the narrow road, past the Sheldonian Theatre and across the cobbles of Broad Street toward their destination, the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the oldest museum in the world and home to the Griffith Institute for Egyptian Studies.
One minute later, they were scaling the steps through the towering Doric columns at the entrance to the vast museum. If they were hoping to enter inconspicuously, it didn’t work.
“Time waits for no man,” Professor Henry Piper boomed at them above the heads of the already assembled group of thirty of so postgraduate students. “Please, try to be prompt.” He peered over his half rimmed-spectacles at them. “Come closer, please.”
All eyes turned as the girls made their way to the front with averted eyes and embarrassed, apologetic smiles. Piper stared at them in silence and the atmosphere grew uncomfortable as everyone waited for what was going to come next.
“Now the stragglers have finally arrived,” he clapped his hands flamboyantly, making them all jump, “King Tut’s tour shall commence. And,” he added peering closely over his glasses, “we have over a thousand years to cover this morning, so no more dawdling, please!”
With his pink bow tie, beige corduroys and loudly striped but somewhat stained jacket, the plump, wild-haired Piper was almost a caricature of an Oxford don. His sense of theatricality had earned him the nickname among his more humorless colleagues of “Hollywood Piper.” He was better known by the students as “Scrooge Marky” for his mean grades on exam papers.
Confident that he now had the full attention of his nervous young audience, Piper slid back several steps toward the entrance of the museum in a parody of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk, an act he had spent many hours practicing while rehearsing his lectures in the privacy of his own quarters. A few of the students sniggered while others raised their eyes heavenward.
“Cast your eyes at this,” he said pointing at a nondescript three-meter round stone on the wall near the entranceway. “Can anyone tell me why it has, at its center, a square hole?”
He stared straight at Suzy as he talked. She opened her mouth to reply but he didn’t bother to wait.
“It’s because it was turned into a giant millstone by an Arab farmer, until archaeologists reclaimed it for the higher purpose of Egyptology.”
Now that she looked more closely, Suzy could see that the block was dotted with faint hieroglyphics that she guessed must have been worn away by the thousands of loaves of manna bread the farmer had produced.
“Look here!” Piper said, beckoning Suzy to come closer as the others craned their necks to see past her. “It says that Shabakah, ‘our Nubian King,’ found an ancient text and had it carved on this slab, but the real story starts here with the god Ptah.” He swung around to direct their attention to the opposite vertical stela of hieroglyphs. “It says that in the beginning, the god, Ptah, ‘said words and the world came into existence.’” He paused dramatically, staring hard at Suzy, as if waiting for her to say something. “Does that sound at all familiar to you?” he eventually prompted.
“The Bible?” Suzy ventured, wishing he would share more of his attention with the rest of the group.
“Exactly!” Piper threw his arms in the air in mock exultation. “In the first verse of John, it says, ‘In the Beginning was the word and the word was with God.’ That means that centuries before the Christian Bible came into existence, a pious Nubian King was writing the same belief on this stone.”
Suzy, knowing the professor’s fondness for presenting lectures as cryptic puzzles, concentrated hard on the fragmented clues he dangled in front of his young audience. She knew that the Nubians were a race of black Africans and it was rumored that many of their beliefs predated the Egyptians, but that there was not a great deal of hard proof for this, only glimpses into a great culture.
Piper gave them only a few seconds to drink in his words before sweeping their attention toward a display of photographs of rock cliffs and small, pointed pyramids.
“The Nubian rulers were thinkers interested in Egyptian ritual and religion, but, when their time came to be buried, they returned to their beloved Nubia and to their sacred mountain. A mountain unlike any other, in the ancient language it was called Jebel Barka. It was the home of the god, Amun, ‘the hidden one.’ Tim
e has not been kind to Jebel Barka, which is why you have probably not chanced upon it in your studies. It’s a shadow of its former self, but it is where the Nubian pharaohs would first build their own pyramids. And, did you know, there are more pyramids in Nubia than in the whole of Egypt?”
Like all the students in the group, Suzy knew little about the Nubian pyramids, apart from the fact that they were located south of Egypt in modern day Sudan. Confident that he had their attention, Piper strode on down the row of photographs, declaiming as he went.
“The sacred mountain at Jebel Barka,” Piper pointed to one of the photos. “Why would you think it was sacred? Doesn’t look like much, does it? Just a bunch of hungry vultures hovering over a rocky cliff and a few old ruins! So why this mountain?”
Suzy carefully avoided catching his eye, although she was aware that he was still directing most of his questions at her. But none of the others spoke up either, waiting for her to respond.
Growing impatient, Piper continued: “Look at the shape of this stone column. Look closely and you can see it resembles a cobra.”
As Suzy followed his finger, she was startled by how clearly she could see what he meant. The column seemed almost to come alive in the rock. Having made his point, Piper was off down the hallway again, talking over his shoulder as he went.
“Think about that hooded cobra some more; we will come back to it in the context of Tutankhamun, and the hungry vultures! Now look at the pyramids of the kings and queens of Nubia.” He pointed at some bigger photos of the pointed pyramids. “What is different about them?”
“They are steeper and smaller than the Egyptian pyramids, like stone teepees,” Suzy suggested.
“I think perhaps the May Ball has worked its toll on your fine mind, young lady. Look again at the Queen’s pyramid. What is extraordinary about it?”
The pyramid looked exactly the same as all the others. After a few seconds’ silence Piper lost patience and answered his own question.
