by Tom Bane
At the small front desk, Farouk was still fingering his worry beads.
“Hi, Farouk,” Suzy said, brightly. “I would like to book a car.”
“No car, room only,” Farouk barked. Suzy reached into her bag and produced a wad of cash. Farouk looked at her and then held out his hand with a trace of a smile.
“Good, good.” he tucked them into the top pocket of his shirt, and made her a cup of apple tea. He waved her to a corner chair behind the reception desk and then picked up the phone. After nearly an hour, Farouk took her outside as a battered old Japanese four-wheel drive stuttered to a halt at the entrance, coughing black clouds of smoke. After more haggling, Suzy handed over considerably more dollars than the wreck would have cost to buy outright, and the owner seemed happy to stand back and let her climb into the torn driver’s seat he had just vacated. She looked down. The fuel gauge was hovering just above empty.
“There’s no petrol.”
“Plenty of petrol.” The owner leaned across, tapped the dial and shrugged. “The gauge is broken. There is no problem.”
It was now late and another group of onlookers was starting to form across the street, so she decided not to argue. She waved the man out, slammed the door, ground the gears and lurched forward. Less than an hour later she was driving through the deserted ruins of Amarna in the dark.
Suzy hadn’t spotted any headlights behind her, so she concealed the four-wheel drive behind a wall and decided to catch a few hours of sleep, until there was enough light for her to look around the ruins.
She slept fitfully and uncomfortably. At the first sign of light, she climbed out and looked around, hoping to be finished before anyone else arrived. It didn’t look like there was going to be as much to see at Amarna as she had hoped.
Pulling a guidebook out of her bag she started wandering around, savoring the eerie pre-dawn stillness, trying to picture what the city might once have looked like, where now there was little more than rubble, debris and a couple of breeze block walls, most of the meaningful things having been excavated away. Despite a few palm trees on an abandoned Oasis at the outskirts, Amarna was a dustbowl. A few vestigial traces of a once great city remained, but the Las Vegas of ancient Egypt had definitely seen better days. Reams of sand, a few inch-high walls and a smattering of stone carvings were the major excitements. There was only one intact lotus-shaped column standing, which penetrated the skyline, that might have interested Sigmund Freud, but the rest of Amarna was about as stimulating as watching mud bricks dry.
But then, as she neared the epicenter, a sign of something more promising emerged; beneath the level of desert, a stone stairway swept below into subterranean caves. She made her way down, step by step, into the secrets and treasures inside. The dusty walls were brimming with hieroglyphs and montages of hunting, worship and ritual. She had found it, Suzy was in the tomb of Panehesy, the high priest of the sun. She crept on her toes, reverentially as if on hallowed ground. On the western wall, she found a decaying scene of Nefertiti and Akhenaten, Tut’s mother and father. It was difficult to make it out in the early morning light, but they appeared to be adorned with an alpha and omega sign. A third figure appeared to have a yellow halo painted round his head. Rummaging through her backpack, she found a flashlight and wandered into the deserted Royal Tomb, directing the beam along the walls. A part of her wanted to run back to the jeep and drive as fast as possible to the safety of the Israeli border, but she was determined to make the most of the opportunity. She didn’t know how long it would be before she would feel able to come back to Egypt again. In another chamber, the beam of light picked up fragments of a wine amphora. She pressed her hand into the dust, feeling with her fingertips the texture of papyrus—a papyrus docket dangled from a broken piece of the pottery. Carefully picking it up like a piece of vital forensic evidence, she knelt down with her flashlight to take a closer look. She made out a faint message in hieratic script, and translated it as best she could.
“Year 17, sweet wine of the estate of {undecipherable} of the western river, the chief of the basin …”
She would need an expert to know for sure, but she suspected it was ancient Hebrew. As she slipped the fragment into her bag, she heard a rock tumbling down the entrance steps. She froze, thinking she had been caught stealing, but there was no one there. Feeling a bit spooked, she headed back out into the daylight and looked around.
The sun was cresting the horizon, its debut neatly captured by a notch-shaped gap in the mountains. Suzy was reminded of Piper’s comment about the summer solstice, just a few days away. As she pondered Piper’s theory of some mysterious race against time, the sun continued to rise. She inhaled sharply. The glowing globe of fire sat perfectly notched in the natural landscape, the mountains on the horizon holding it like an eye. Suzy stared. The peculiar notch between the mountains in the east was reminiscent of the hieroglyph for the Akhet. She remembered that the original name of Amarna, Akhetaten or horizon of the Akhet, meant “city of the horizon,” and whoever had given it that name must have witnessed exactly what she was seeing now.
As the sun finally rose into the fresh morning sky, against the opposite horizon the full moon was sinking. With the young sun’s rays already warming her, Suzy watched the moon’s descent, contemplating the perfect counterweight effects of the sun and the moon, the complementary opposites that, together, ensured the perpetual cycle of night and day. All of a sudden, she gasped. She was still looking toward the dying moon but no longer seeing it, her mind filled instead with a clear and vivid image of the death mask of the boy-king Tutankhamun.
That was it! It had to be. She fumbled through her bag until she found her picture of the mask. Smoothing out the creases she stared at it in disbelief. She was right! Around the neck of Tutankhamun was a thin line in the shape of the Akhet. Unmistakable but sublimely hidden, it now seemed so clear and she realized that the death mask had been hiding a secret for three millennia, a code that had never been deciphered. Suzy stood up and took a few slow steps, turning back to face the sun rising above the mountains. Hang on, she thought, she must be imagining it. Since Carter’s excavation, the death mask had become one of the world’s best known images from Ancient Egypt, examined and described in minute detail by historians. There’s no way something as obvious as this could have gone unnoticed for so long.
Sitting down again to examine the picture, Suzy traced her finger along the two golden grooves that made a line around Tut’s neck. They were continuous, linking the right and left side of the mask. They peaked when they hit the horizon but dipped below to form a perfect semicircle. There was absolutely no question about it. The shape was that of the akhet! It traced the exact shape of the akhet hieroglyph for the rising or setting sun, through the hidden doorway of the horizon. Suzy couldn’t believe it. There was a hidden akhet in the death mask of the boy king! And no one had ever spotted this before. It was as if, bewitched by the mask’s beauty, its admirers were rendered blind to the symbolic messages embedded in it thousands of years before.
Everything fell into place with complete clarity. The death mask was the representation of both body and spirit of Tutankhamun. The body was the Moon-Amun, but the mind and spirit was the Sun-Aten, above the horizon level. The old name of the boy king, Tutankhaten, meaning “living image of the sun,” now acquired a new relevance. The golden rays of the sun representing Aten above the horizon radiated outward around the face of Tutankhamun in the top part of the mask. And the longest golden ray was the only one that extended right around the neck, in the shape of the Akhet, a hidden doorway. The two grooves engraved around the golden neck of the boy king were a clever device to demarcate it. As a result, there was a subtle division of the death mask into two parts, top and bottom. The concept and the execution of the design were exquisite. The bottom part of the mask signified the moon in the dark below the horizon.
Suzy’s eyes were drawn to the golden rays radiating around the mask’s face, and her pulse began racing even f
aster as she started to count. She looked at the sides and the bottom of the mask. There were twenty-eight golden rays on the bottom of the death mask below the gold Akhet band. The explanation for this was now obvious—the traditional lunar month had twenty-eight days, the time it took for the moon to revolve around Planet Earth. That was the link in the mask to the Amun, the moon, the primary religion of the boy king. She then counted the golden rays on the top half of the death mask, this time including the horizon gold line of the Akhet.
On each side of the upper part of the mask there were just thirteen golden rays, thirteen on the right and thirteen on the left. Most people would simply count twenty-eight on the bottom of the mask and be convinced that Tut worshipped Amun, but the hidden horizon and the two grooves around the neck showed a different truth; thirteen was the hidden number. Why? Had all the superstition and mystery surrounding the number through the ages emanated from the death mask and not from superstitious folklore? Perhaps there was more divine provenance to the number thirteen, Amarna and the life and death of Tutankhamun. There were a multitude of references to the number buried in religion and folklore. There were thirteen attendants at the Last Supper, thirteen steps to the gallows and the Magi visited Baby Jesus on the thirteenth day. There were thirteen stripes on the US flag, not to mention the dollar bill and the great seal of the United States, which had thirteen arrows and thirteen stars and a pyramid containing thirteen levels on the reverse.
Suzy had forgotten all her fears in the excitement of her discovery. Sacred numbers were hidden in the death mask! The mysterious Akhet split the mask in two—a hidden doorway to the truth of the boy Pharoah? It was pure magic, but she would have to prove it. This puzzle was still a long way from being cracked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
It was early afternoon by the time Suzy returned to the rental car. She started up the clattering engine, tapping on the broken fuel gauge, hoping it would spring into life. As she drove, she dialed Piper’s number, desperate to share her excitement with someone who would understand.
“It’s Suzy,” she blurted as soon as he picked up. “I’ve been to Amarna, and now I’m driving up to the Israeli border.”
“Is Tom still with you?”
“No, he had to go back. His father has been murdered.” She was ashamed how matter of fact she sounded.
“Murdered? Logan?”
“You knew Tom’s father?” Suzy asked. There was a long silence before Piper choked out a reply.
“We were students together at Princeton. He was such a distinguished scholar. We hadn’t spoken for many years. His research had gone down a different avenue. Murdered …” Piper’s voice trailed off.
“Professor,” she was shouting over the noise of the car’s engine. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got something to tell you. Tut’s death mask has the number twenty-eight encoded into it, signifying the moon.” She explained her theory like an excited schoolgirl, deciding not to tell him about the hidden akhet for now; aware he might react badly to the suggestion of the two sets of thirteen golden bands encoded into the upper part of the mask. Piper perked up.
“Beautiful, Suzy,” he said when she’d finished. “A hidden reference to the lunar cycle in Tut’s mask? That is a magnificent find. You know, I really feel you can bridge the gap between my kind of archaeology and today’s. Now listen,” he said, his voice becoming more urgent, “I’ve got to be quick. I have asked my contacts in Israel to meet you in Jerusalem. I think you’ve been looking in the wrong tombs.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m convinced the message suggests that the secrets you need to unlock belong to a tomb. And I think it means the tomb of Jesus.” Suzy almost dropped the phone.
“You think so?” She took a deep breath. “OK. And I think I have found some more evidence of the link between Ancient Egypt and the Hebrews in Israel as well—”
The line went dead.
That evening, well into the three hundred-mile journey to the Israeli border crossing at Quesima, Suzy couldn’t shake off the feeling that she was being followed. Although, if anything, she thought, she was being led. Every tomb she visited seemed predestined, each email and text scripted, and each revelation designed by someone to lure her further. Piper’s earlier warning about the approaching summer solstice was preying on her mind. She needed to solve this mystery fast, before it was too late.
She pressed the accelerator to the floor but the car merely belched more smoke and refused to go any faster. At least the petrol hadn’t run out. Glancing in her mirror, she studied the vehicle behind her. It had been there for several miles now. Speeding up wasn’t an option; all she could do was to change course. Peering ahead of her into the darkness, she realized this could be just as dangerous. There didn’t seem to be any other roads.
She looked in the mirror again. The lights were still there, but the vehicle wasn’t gaining on her. It seemed content to maintain its distance. Perhaps it was just a farmer in a truck, another ancient vehicle with a rubbish engine. She concentrated on the road ahead, praying for a turnoff or a garage, anything to offer her escape or refuge.
In the vehicle behind her, Getsu reached over from the passenger side and turned down the air conditioning. The night temperature had dropped like a stone once the sun had gone down. The germanium nano transmitter he’d placed into Suzy’s neck in Luxor was working perfectly, he smiled, glancing down at the bleeping red light on the radar screen, enabling them to stay far enough back to avoid being identified. He didn’t want to panic the girl, just keep her within range. He leaned over to check the fuel gauge: three-quarters full. Nothing to do now but keep a steady five hundred meters behind her. He told Rakuta to ease off the gas and maintain the distance.
Up ahead, Suzy was puzzled. The vehicle behind had been following now for at least twenty miles but hadn’t come any closer. Surely if someone wanted her dead, they would have taken advantage of the empty, pitch black desert by now. She tried to relax into the old seat with its broken springs. She looked at the odometer. Assuming it was working, she only had another hundred miles or so. She switched on the radio, but it was broken, only yielding a hissing static noise, so she switched it off again and drummed her fingers on the rim of the steering wheel to a samba rhythm. It was better than nothing, a bit like this car, she thought, with a wry smile.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The manicured lawns of Camp Peary draped the military base with a respectable veneer of civility, sprinkler heads swept the grass from edge to edge, but the covert training facility was hidden from the outside world by several miles of dense woodland. On the entrance lawn at the top-secret site, the tactical weapons instructor, Keshav Ghani, drew the C-shaped blade of his karambit dagger across the t-shirt of the Special Forces trooper.
“Whoa,” the trooper jumped back. “Too close.”
“Blueworm cut number two,” Keshav commanded, holding the dagger against the trooper’s abdomen, staring through him like he wasn’t there, still as a hawk. A circle of men stood around them, unsure what was coming next.
“Why is it called a Blueworm cut?” Keshav asked, pressing the dagger up to his chosen victim’s flesh. No one spoke so he answered his own question. “Because it rips through the abdominal wall and causes the opponent’s large intestine to fall out.”
“Would that terminate him, sir?” one of the men asked.
“No. The opponent’s response to the Blueworm cut is what kills him. As soon as the large intestine falls out, the opponent will always grip it with both hands. Trying to push it back in to save himself. It is a reflexive response. So, both hands come down to grasp the intestine, leaving the neck completely exposed. The next cut is to the throat, right carotid artery.” Keshav demonstrated by bringing the dagger up across the young man’s clean-shaven throat.
Keshav was a master of the art of Filipino Kali knife fighting, a technique that had been added to Special Forces training after the vicious cave fights of Tora-Bora on the Afghan
border. Back then, beyond the cold white mountains of the Khyber pass, some troops had gone into battle with catheters already inserted into a vein in their arm, wrapped tight in tape, to allow medevac to administer life-saving fluid immediately in the caves. It was a black chaos, and the enemy’s desperate measures to survive the onslaught forced them to engage with knifes and machetes. This was the point when the firefight turned into what is known proverbially in the military as a “gang fuck;” many of the Special Forces operatives carried the traditional “K Bar” knife but hundreds died or became casualties, as none of them had been trained to fight properly with a blade.
The allies had issued a complete denial of the near-total destruction they experienced at Tora-Bora. And the ultimate irony was that the mountain cave fortress had been originally built by the CIA to protect the Mujahideen, when it had suited the United States to be friends with its now fierce enemy. In fact, it was Christie herself who had supervised the construction of the massive cave complex. She had won the coveted Intelligence Star medal for it but now she kept the medal hidden away in its wooden box, ashamed of how she had earned it.
General Christie Hyder watched the soldiers and their instructor from her office window overlooking the lawns and frowned. This knife-fighting course was symptomatic of a new wave of thinking that had swept through the CIA. The rationale now was that assassins should be trained to a level of fanaticism to match the opposition. It worked on the principle that assassins could be expendable. The men on the lawn were “lost” assassins rather than “safe” ones, dispensable at a moment’s notice. But her main worry was that the training was generating overconfidence, creating a misplaced sense of invincibility in the troops. There had been a lot of mistakes recently and she had serious reservations.
