by Rob Jones
He laughed. “I got that, yeah.”
“Quinn puts on a show of being tough, but she’s just playing. She’s an enigma all right, and no one really knows anything too deep about her, but with Jodie it’s no act. She got burnt when her dad walked out on her and going to juvie baked the rage into her, hard.”
“I can see that.”
Blanco got up and slammed a hand down on the Londoner’s shoulder. “I love her and she’s a great girl, but don’t expect miracles, Max. She’ll open up to you when she’s ready.”
“Thanks, Sal.”
“No problem, friend.”
Hunter waited until he was alone and tipped his head up at the sky. The crescent moon hung there like a model, surrounded by stars. Tomorrow was going to be one of the most important days of his life. He got up from his chair and walked back to his room.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Next morning, they drove out of the city, crossing the Nile on the Luxor Bridge and following the west bank through the Model Village. Here, the oil police guard at the Qurna checkpoint stopped their car and asked them about their intentions. The West Qurna-1 oilfield operated by ExxonMobil was in the vicinity and anti-terror suspicions were running high.
Turning west and heading out into the desert, they made good time and soon found themselves approaching the border between the Luxor Governate and the New Valley Governate. The desert grew more mountainous as they drove south into the world-famous Valley of the Kings.
“We pull up here,” Hunter said, bringing the SUV to a stop. “This is the car park.”
“Parking lot,” Amy said.
“Car park.”
“Hey,” Blanco said, pointing through the windshield. “Whatever you call it, at least it’s not too far from where the action is, right?”
“That’s right,” Hunter said. “It’s a short walk down that slope and then we’re almost where we want to be.”
“Almost?” Quinn asked. “I’m not too big on desert sand and dust, so almost isn’t filling me with confidence.”
“Yeah,” Jodie said. “I thought the Valley of the Kings was right here?”
“It is,” Hunter said. “But we’re not going to the Valley of the Kings, are we? Julian’s clue told us that the actual tomb of Ramesses X is up on the Horn, not down in the valley. The wadi is made up of two valleys, the West and the East. Most of the tombs are in the East Valley, but the Horn is up there to the west. That’s where we’re headed, at least it is as soon as Omar gets here.”
“Would your friend go in for jaunty linen jackets, bright silk pocket squares and felt fedoras by any chance?” Amy asked.
Hunter’s eyes widened. “Where?”
“Check your mirror.”
“Omar!” Hunter said, and climbed out of the car into the desert heat.
“Good morning, Dr Hunter, you old horse thief!”
The Egyptian archaeologist waved at them and walked briskly over to their car. He was wearing white chinos and a blue shirt, his face shaded by a broad-rimmed, battered fedora with a small tear in the front of the crown.
“Morning, Omar.”
“I couldn’t believe it when you called me.”
“I couldn’t believe what I had to say,” he said as a woman walked up behind Omar. “Hey, Jehan. How are you?”
“I’m good, Max. You look well.”
“As do you. When are you going to leave this guy and marry me?”
They all a laughed and Omar waved a fly away from his face. “I am a very lucky man, I know. My wife is more beautiful than Nefertiti herself.”
“Stop it, Omar,” Jehan said, clearly enjoying the compliment.
“I take it the men I told you about aren’t on site?” Hunter asked.
Omar shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
“Maybe Julian held out.”
Amy stepped over to them. “Aren’t you going to introduce us? I’m starting to feel like an unwanted cousin.”
“My apologies,” Hunter said. “This is Dr Omar Salem, and this is his wife, Queen Nefertiti.” Another chuckle. “But you can call her Dr Jehan Salem. They are both distinguished archaeologists specialising in Ancient Egypt’s Twentieth Dynasty and we’re very lucky to have them on board.”
“If for no other reason than to organize the paperwork,” Omar said with a sly smile. “You owe me, old friend! You will never guess what we found when we started digging at your coordinates this morning.”
“In that case you’d better tell me.”
“Better that you see for yourselves, and we must hurry. We only have access to this area for today, and after that the authorities will close it off once again. Knowing Egyptian bureaucracy, it might be another three thousand years before they get around to allowing us back in.”
Laughing at his own joke, Omar led them out of the beating sun and up the mountain slope toward the shady tomb entrance. Inside, they walked down a shallow gradient, untouched by the countless tourists who visited the valley below every year, until reaching a tunnel carved into the rock on their right. It was a perfect vertical rectangle of smooth limestone, so precise it looked like it had been created with modern stone-cutting equipment.
“This is spectacular,” Hunter said, gently rubbing his palm along the stone. “How the hell did they get such a fine finish, Omar?”
The Egyptian shrugged. “When you told us to dig up here, I thought you were insane. Imagine the look on my face when I found this tunnel. And no, I have no theories about why it is so smooth.”
“Keep moving, Omar,” Hunter said. “I can’t wait to see what you found.”
“I’ll say one thing for him,” Jodie said from the back. “He sure starts acting like a little kid when there’s an unexplored tomb around.”
“Don’t we all?” Omar said. “If we really have discovered the tomb of Ramesses X, including possibly the preserved mummy of the pharaoh himself, we have made one of the greatest archaeological and historical discoveries of the century.”
“Then let’s speed it up,” Quinn said. “I’ve got some serious Em Em Oh gaming to get back to when this is over. That’s the real world, to me. I’m not really into dirt and dust and gravel and flies and heatstroke and mosquito bites. Call me crazy.”
Omar and Jehan looked at her, confused. “Huh?”
“Forget about it,” Amy said. “Quinn’s world is mostly online.”
“That explains the complexion,” Hunter muttered. “Shall we go and take a closer look at what lies ahead?”
Amy gave him a sly smile as they followed in the Egyptian’s hurried footsteps, down the tunnel and around a ninety-degree bend into another long passageway. As they turned the corner, Omar stopped and pointed at the end of second passage to a solid gold door.
“Holy crap,” Jodie said. “That can’t be real gold.”
Omar burst into a childish chuckle which he struggled to control. “It most certainly is real gold, and by the sound it makes when you knock on it, I would say it is at least two or three inches thick.”
Hunter examined the magnificent sight of the giant golden portal. Beside it, a small alcove carved into the limestone hosted a miniature pyramid. He stared at it for a few seconds and made some calculations. “There must be at least fifty square feet of gold in that thing. That’s sixty thousand pounds of the stuff.”
“At current gold prices,” Quinn said, “that makes this the million dollar door.”
“I’m more worried about its weight,” Hunter said. “If we’re right and it really is sixty thousand pounds of gold, then that’s around thirty tons. We’re not just going to push this thing open and walk inside.”
“Probably why they made it of gold,” Amy said. “Just another line of defense.”
“I agree,” Omar said. “But the primary reason must be as a sign of great respect to the pharaoh who was buried behind it.”
Hunter dropped to his knees and placed his face in the dirt, looking in the direction of the door.
�
�What the hell is he doing?” Jodie said.
“He’s feeling for a breeze,” Omar said. “I already did that, Max, and there is none. The door goes right down to the floor of the passageway and I’m presuming there is nothing but an enclosed tomb behind it.”
“Yeah.” Hunter clambered back to his feet and dusted his hands off. “I think you’re right, but the question is how the hell do we get it open? There’s no obvious handle and it’s too heavy to push anyway, plus brute force is out of the question. This door is already one of the most precious objects I ever saw in my entire career. I’m not throwing a load of dynamite at it just to see what it’s hiding from the world.”
“So what do we do?” Blanco asked.
Hunter took a step back and stared at the door.
“Immovable,” Amy said.
Omar sighed. “Impassable.”
“Impossible, more like,” said Quinn.
“You’re all wrong,” Hunter said. “Someone pass me the winged statue we got in El Salvador.”
Blanco pulled it from the bag and handed it to him.
Hunter fitted the complex inverted ziggurat in the base of the statue over the top of the miniature pyramid in the alcove beside the door. A deep clunking noise was followed by a puff of dust belching out into the tunnel from all around the outside of the door. Without comment, Hunter waited as the door slid down into a slot in the floor, slowly revealing a room behind it, dark and cold and untouched for thousands of years.
“What are we waiting for?” Quinn said. “Because right now, this is kind of a waste of my time.”
Amy shrugged. “She makes a solid point, Max.”
“Youth,” Hunter said, shining his flashlight into the chamber, “is wasted on the young. Let’s go.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Passing the door, he stepped inside the chamber and after sweeping his flashlight over the area directly in front of him, he whistled in disbelief. The flashlight had illuminated the base of a giant golden statue and as he angled the beam up to the top and saw the face of Ramesses X staring back at him, he knew he had found the missing pharaoh.
“We did it,” he said, shining the beam around the statue and lighting up an enormous mural behind it. “This is the final tomb and resting place of Ramesses X. I can hardly believe I’m seeing it with my own eyes.”
“Me neither,” Omar said.
“Where’s the sarcophagus?” asked Quinn.
“Must be further in.”
“What makes it so special?” Jodie asked.
Hunter was walking around the tomb with his flashlight. “The original tomb of Ramesses X was found not far from here but there was no body in it. The same thing happened with Ramesses II. They buried him here in the Valley of the Kings but later moved his body to the royal cache, also right here in the Theban Necropolis. The only difference is they found Ramesses II and moved everything to the Louvre.”
“Like the giant statue?”
“Right. We know a great deal about him for that reason. We can see from his mummified body that Ramesses II clearly had red hair, which means he came from a family with red hair. This was important because in ancient Egypt, red hair was strongly linked to the powerful god Set.”
“Who killed Osiris,” Omar said.
“Precisely.”
“But we know very little about Ramesses X, until now. Check this place out! Treasure, records, funerary objects. There’s even an original chariot! It’s the jackpot.”
“You can say that again! Look at all this stuff,” Jodie said in awe as she passed her flashlight over the floor. “I’m talking about gold, silver, diamonds, sapphires, rubies… there’s treasure everywhere you look. There must be billions of dollars down here.”
“When do we fill our boots?” Quinn said.
“We don’t fill our boots,” Hunter said, looking disapprovingly at the young gothic upstart. “We’re not thieves and smugglers, Quinn. I’m an archaeologist and you’re a… whatever it is you do.”
“Keep disrespecting me like that and you’ll find out.”
“Looks like a lot of old pottery is in here too,” Amy said, changing the subject. “I’m guessing that has more than historical value, too.”
Omar laughed. “You could say that. The 4500 year-old Sekhemka statue sold for twenty-five million dollars to an anonymous Qatari millionaire. It’s seventy-five centimetres tall. Just a quick glance tells me most of the treasures in this cache are equally as valuable, if not more so.”
With Blanco and Lewis standing watch at the tomb’s entrance, Hunter lifted the chariot by the shaft, wheeled it out of the way, and prised the lid off a wooden and copper chest. Inside, he saw flared copper cauldrons and bronze urns, ornate golden holders for plant reed candles, canopic jars and some small paintings, but nothing resembling a map of Atlantis.
“Anyone like to see a genuine ushabti?” he said.
Quinn arched a curious eyebrow. “And that is?”
Hunter lifted a small clay statue from the chest. “It’s a funerary figurine.”
Quinn took the statue and turned it over in her hands. “Looks like a mini-mummy.”
“Or as we say in the trade, mummiform.”
“No, I’ll stick with mini-mummy. Is it expensive?”
“Why, looking to retire in your twenties?”
“Are you kidding me? I could have done that when I hacked the Bank of America.”
“It’s not particularly expensive, no, but it shouldn’t be here so maybe that might up its value to a serious private collector of this sort of thing. They’re the ones with all the money, not the museums.”
“What do you mean?” Amy asked.
“Ushabtis are usually found in excavations and tombs from the Old Kingdom. Ramesses X is much later than that, by over a thousand years.” He was still rummaging around in the chest when he stopped suddenly and gasped.
“What it is?”
“Something’s off,” he said. “This one has a false bottom.”
They heard a clunking sound and then he straightened himself up to his full six-feet-two-inches. “It gives way to a ladder. Looks like we might have found something after all.”
“After you,” Quinn said.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
He carefully stepped inside the chest and climbed down the ladder. Shining his flashlight around the cavity at the bottom, he gasped loud enough for all to hear.
“What is it, Max?” Amy asked.
“If I said the gaping jaws of a giant black marble sphinx, would you believe it?”
“Only coming from you.”
“Then you’re in luck. Want to keep me company?”
*
They gathered around the base of the ladder and took in the sinister sight of a giant sphinx’s head with wide-open jaws. Through the mouth was a corridor leading to a dark cache fifty yards beyond.
“It’s Akhenaten,” Hunter said.
Jehan swept her beam over the smooth marble jaw. “I can confirm that. Very strange.”
“For us plebs,” Quinn said. “Who was that?”
Hunter said, “Akhenaten was one of the first pharaohs to suggest there might be only one god instead of many. Before his dynasty, there were endless numbers of gods and origin myths, but he began the idea of the one true god. He was so serious about there being only one sun god, he had the names of other gods chiselled off stonework all over Egypt.”
“Are we going to see what’s inside, or what?” Blanco said.
Hunter was already stepping up over the lower jaw. “Wild horses couldn’t stop me.”
They walked through the jaws and down the corridor to the cache. The small space was stuffed with treasure piled up around a giant marble sarcophagus, and a single hole was in the floor. “We found him,” Hunter said in a whisper.
“Nice,” Quinn said.
Ignoring the sarcophagus, Hunter dropped to his belly and shone the flashlight inside the hole. “Hold on a minute, I think I mi
ght have found something else.”
Lewis peered down over his shoulder. “What’s lurking down there in the cobwebs, Doc?”
“Looks like we’re getting somewhere.” Hunter turned and grinned. “I just found what looks a hell of a lot like a map room. Wait here, I’m going down.”
He stuffed the flashlight inside his belt and lowered himself carefully down inside the hole. Holding onto the edges, he extended his arms fully and still had around a foot below him. He dropped to the floor with a gentle thud and kicked up a small cloud of dust.
“It’s incredible!” he called up, spellbound in wonder. “You have to see this place, Omar. You too, Jehan.”
Sweeping the beam of light from side to side, he took in the breathtaking sight of an intricate model of a city. In the center was a giant pyramid, closer to the one he had seen in El Salvador than the Great Pyramid at Giza and he realized he was looking at an Atlantean city, probably the capital. He felt his heart quicken. Rows of futuristic buildings on neat semi-circular grids of streets reminded him of Amsterdam, and rivers and canals criss-crossed the roads. Behind it on the wall was a line of glyphs similar to those he had seen on the base of the Ramesses statue in Scorpion Ravine.
“Damn it,” he said. “Looks like we’re going to need Julian to decipher these.”
“Then you’re in luck!”
His blood turned to ice when he heard the voice. It echoed down the hole and bounced off the rock walls of the underground map room, almost stabbing a hole in his heart.
“Brodie?”
He heard Amy scream.
“That’s me, Max. Always late to the party.”
“And never welcome.”
“Aww, don’t be like that old friend. Why not climb up out of that little hidey hole before I put a bullet through your girlfriend’s head?”
He heard a scuffle, then a hefty punch and the sound of Blanco gasping for breath. He considered smashing the glyphs at the end of the map room and trampling over the model, but he had no photos of any of it and didn’t trust his memory.
Halfway up through the hole, he felt hands grab him by the shoulders and haul him back up into the cache. The disciples who had pulled him out pushed him toward McCabe who was shining a bright light in his face. A badly winded Blanco was on the floor in the corner and the rest of the team were standing against a wall with their hands on their heads, disciples of the Creed pointing guns at them. The winged statue they had found in El Salvador was now in a bag over one of their shoulders.
