“At this hour?” the driver asked.
“Yes. I like it when it’s quiet,” Max said, hoping to settle the matter.
The driver grumbled something which Max didn’t understand and drove on. Through the open window, Max caught the sounds and smells of Cairo, the city he loved so much. He thought about the darkness that he now knew lurked in its shadows; the images from the monitor, the terrible groan getting lost in the stone corridors. The angel face with the emerald eyes, next to the black statues of ancient gods, under the glass dome of the British Museum. Rows of books, rivers of hand-writing. Green eyes in a dark, dark place. The next thing he knew, the driver was shaking him awake.
They had arrived.
They had stopped on a dirt lot that lay between the two biggest pyramids. He handed the driver the fare along with a generous tip. He also showed him a twenty dollar note and asked, “Can you wait for me? I will be an hour, at most.”
The driver nodded. Max handed him the money.
Joe was already waiting for him, just as Shiriko had promised. Joe was a Japanese amateur climber, barely twenty years old, with his jet black hair cut into a mohawk. As soon as they shook hands, Joe began talking in an excited, rapid-fire patter.
“I met them three days ago. I was up with a friend,” he said as he pointed up at the higher reaches of the pyramid closest to them. “And we were checking out the city, you know, like the wildest views and all. I looked down at the ground for a moment and saw this guy come out of nowhere. He comes out of the ground, like some kind of, how do you say, like a mole? And then, another one comes out at the same place. I told my friend, and he told me I smoked too much weed, but I wasn’t stoned, I swear. Okay, I was maybe a little stoned, but, like, my mind was clear. Know what I mean? Anyway, I said, like, let’s go check it out, there's a tunnel down there! But my friend, well, let’s just say he likes to play it safe, so I went on my own and I met those guys. Actually, they’re kind of cool.”
“So you can take me to them, these people that came out of the ground?”
“Sure,” Joe said. “Anything for Shiriko. But err,” Joe pointed to Max’s crutch and his leg in its plastic cast. “She didn’t mention that you were only firing on one cylinder. It’s going to be tough, man, even for someone with two good legs.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Max told him. “Just lead the way.”
They walked across the plain to the south of the two pyramids, and away from the road that led back to the city. After about three hundred yards, they paused. The only light was coming from the headlights of the distant cars, and so they sensed, more than saw, the small group of figures approaching them.
Joe greeted them warmly and introduced Max.
One of the figures snapped at a cigarette lighter, and in the flame that lingered, Max was able to see the features of three young men. None were older than eighteen, and all were covered in a thick layer of grey dust.
And the tallest of them carried a pistol.
The gun was so ancient that Max doubted whether it still worked, but he had no intention of finding out. He spoke a few words of Arabic. This seemed to relax them a little. Only one spoke bad English.
“How far does your tunnel go?” he asked the one with the pistol.
“Right up to the pyramid, the big one,” boasted the smallest of the figures, as he too lit up a cigarette. In the feeble light, Max noticed that he had a small diamond-shaped tattoo on the inside of his wrist. A Copt.
“There are a lot of tunnels here, but ours is the only one that goes to the pyramid.” He took a long drag of his cigarette and looked Max over. “They call me Spidey, like Spiderman.”
“Okay, Spidey, and once you get to the pyramid, what happens?”
“We were drilling, but yesterday, we hit some harder stone, like granite, so we stopped.”
Max thought quickly. He wondered if the youth could tell granite from limestone. If they were digging into the base of the pyramid, it was unlikely that they would encounter granite: this type of stone was only used in the inner reaches of the pyramids as a means of securing the most critical access points against robbers. He wondered at the competence of the small band of looters. He thought about his aching leg and the four hundred yards of crawling in a tight, dusty tunnel. He knew that if he waited any longer, courage might very well fail him.
“Can you take me there?”
“If the price is right,” the tall guy with the old gun said.
They settled on fifty dollars. As they counted out the notes under the light of the cigarette lighter, Max asked, hoping his voice didn’t betray him, “Do the tunnels ever collapse?”
“Sure!” Spidey exclaimed. “One collapsed the day before yesterday.” The boy’s teeth glinted as he smiled. “But the guys who dug it were total idiots. It seems like anyone with a shovel wants to give it a go these days.”
His friends sniggered and high-fived each other while cursing their less fortunate competitors. Joe announced that he was returning to his hotel, leaving Max alone with the three looters. Max looked one last time in the distance, to check his taxi was still waiting. He was.
Every fiber of his being, and especially that part of him that was strapped into an orthopedic boot, told him to follow Joe’s example. There was still time to turn back. But hadn’t he waited for his chance all his life?
One thing also kept coming back into this mind: the green-eyed woman he had made a promise to.
The three teenagers helped him down a wooden ladder threaded down a narrow hole about fifteen feet deep. At the base of the shaft was an entrance to the horizontal tunnel, wide enough for a man to squeeze through but only high enough to crawl on hands and knees. The looters all had LED lamps attached to bands around their heads, and each carried a small pick. A large coil of rope was piled at the entrance to the tunnel. Spidey explained that the lead tunneler would take the rope with him into the tunnel, while one of the three would remain at the entrance to act as a lookout. The tunneling party would communicate with the lookout by pulling on the rope, using a series of prearranged signals.
But before entering the tunnel, Max slid his bag off his shoulder and retrieved three small plastic cylinders, each with their own aerials, and which he carefully arranged around the base of the hole. Together with a small handheld device which he strapped to his belt, the battery-powered GPS relays would enable him to track his location underground, something that would otherwise have been impossible.
Without further delay, they proceeded into the tunnel. The first hundred yards were bearable, but almost immediately Max noticed an increase in temperature and as the air became scarcer.
His anxiety levels also began to build.
He started to see things in the light of his headlamp as he crawled along the narrow shaft. Bone fragments, bits of textile, pieces of broken pottery. Sometimes Spidey, who was at the front of the party, would grab something, pause to inspect it, and then put it in his backpack. What he did not keep he would discard behind him. Max recognized one of the objects he had rejected:
A small child's skull, with its hair still tied by a length of decayed fabric.
Max calculated that the tunnel would have run through the mastabas, the cemeteries of the workers who had built the pyramids. He suppressed the urge to throw up.
Despite the pain in his leg, accentuated by the lack of oxygen and the claustrophobic closeness of the walls, he carried on. Glancing down at his GPS, the small trail of dots, like dropped breadcrumbs, told him they were not far away from their destination. Finally, Spidey stopped. The tunnel had reached its end, blocked by a dark stone wall.
“We have arrived at the pyramid,” Spidey said triumphantly.
The young looter hacked at the stone, but apart from scratching its surface, the material did not yield to his pick. Despite his calculations, Max had to agree that it was granite after all. He inspected the walls of the tunnel: to get this far, they first had had to hack through a wall about three feet deep,
made of the softer limestone that was more common in the pyramid’s construction.
But why was the stone there at all?
He took out his GPS and calculated that they were only ten feet into the volume of the pyramid. And yet they had stumbled onto masonry that should have been much deeper in. He checked his calculations again and almost gasped at the error he had made: they were not ten feet into the pyramid, but fifty yards short of where it began.
“This stone doesn’t belong to the pyramid,” Max wheezed, his breath coming in short gasps.
“What are you talking about? Of course it's the pyramid! What else could it be?” Spidey hissed back.
Max had trouble thinking. He needed time and fresh air to make sense of all this. He had seen enough. “Well, we aren’t going to figure it out here,” he said curtly, “so let’s get back, okay?”
The two young men muttered and cursed, and pulled twice on the rope to signal to their comrade at the mouth of the tunnel that they were coming back. The second looter was still grumbling, but Spidey suddenly held up his hand for silence.
He repeated the signal, pulling twice, hard on the rope.
No response.
“Why doesn’t he answer?” Max asked nervously.
He received no reply, but instead was pushed roughly aside, as Spidey’s partner took the rope himself and tugged urgently at the line. For the second time, Max felt a wave of nausea, this time from pain.
“This is bad. We have to get out of here,” Spidey said.
The trio set off, and Max soon fell behind, the light of the other two headlamps growing dimmer and dimmer as they stretched out their lead.
“Wait for me!” Max called out to them, but the only reply to his panicked plea was a loud rumbling sound, like muffled thunder, followed by a cloud of choking dust that blocked out his light. Using the neckline of his shirt as a makeshift filter over his nose and mouth, Max tried to slow his breathing and regain his composure, but his lungs screamed for oxygen.
As he slumped to the floor, gasping and choking, his light was knocked off his head, and he was plunged into a deep and utterly silent blackness.
40
“Hello, you've reached Max Hausmann's phone. I am not currently available–“
Florence hung up, her stomach tightening into a knot. Despite leaving several messages, he hadn’t returned her calls.
Everything was falling apart.
Night had long since fallen, and Florence’s cubicle was one of the last still inhabited in the anonymous glass and steel blocks that were the BBC’s White City offices. As she stared at the screen in front of her, she refused to believe that the story of Tutankhamen’s mask was dead. She had tried calling Franklin, but there had been no answer there either.
As bleak as things were, she tried to look for the faintest shred of a silver lining. She had already started to write another pitch for Jim and Gayle. Only by replacing that which was lost with something new could she keep her professional dignity intact and avoid total humiliation in the eyes of her peers. But her pervasive sense of unease would take more than a new pitch to cast off. It had begun with the big meeting and her showdown with Jane, but the awkward conversation at Max’s flat the day before had not helped either.
She kept telling herself that if only Max found the secret passage to Room X, he would surely be grateful to her for her contacts in the media. With her help, Max Hausmann would become the star of a critically-acclaimed documentary; and the money he would receive would allow him to continue his research, to travel, to live better. Wasn’t she like a fairy godmother, granting him the wishes he didn’t yet know he had?
Yes, despite what he had said, she was confident that he would thank her for it. But then where, she wondered, did that bitter taste at the back of her throat come from, whenever she thought of him? And what if he never found the passage?
“Hey, Mornay.”
Andrew had swooped into the cubicle next to her.
“Hey,” Florence said, not looking up from her computer.
Her colleague was eating potato crisps foraged from the vending machine. He sat on a corner of her desk, noisily licking his fingertips. “So, your guy over there in Cairo, the star of the Tutankhamen affair. It’s Franklin G. Hunter, right?”
As he spoke, half-chewed crisps landed on Florence’s desk.
“Uh-huh,” she said, taking a tissue and wiping her desk surface, while silently hoping that her blatant lack of interest would be enough to make him leave.
“Okay,” he said, digging away at the last remaining crumbs at the bottom of the foil bag.
Florence pretended to work, but eventually, she gave in. She had other things to worry about, and the sooner she was rid of Andrew, the sooner she could get back to working out how she was going to fix everything.
“What, Andrew? What is it? Spit it out. Actually, don’t spit.”
“Yeah, about that,” Andrew said leaning back as he poured the last of the crumbs into his mouth. He tossed the empty bag towards a dustbin, and did not bother to pick it up off the floor when it missed its target. “What I wanted to tell you is that I was talking to one of DeBok’s cronies the other day.”
“You got an interview with DeBok?”
“Not yet. I really think you put the wind up him with the shrew thing.”
“Surely your formidable powers of persuasion wouldn’t be hampered by such a trifling thing as a shrew,” Florence said, still focusing on her screen.
“Yes, well, as I say we were chatting and I mentioned your chap Hunter. And, you know, the oddest thing happened.”
Florence could tell that Andrew was building up to something. From the glint in his eye, she didn’t think that she was going to like it. But she was damned if she was going to give him any satisfaction, so she maintained as best she could an air of only the slightest interest at his story.
“He said to me, ‘Well, old boy, you got screwed alright,’ and do you know, he began to laugh! Like actually laugh. And you know me, I always like to give credit where credit is due.”
Florence almost choked, but let Andrew carry on unhindered.
“So I told him right away that he was actually your contact. After the meeting, he was kind enough to send me an e-mail, which he said should shed a little more light on things.” He took out his phone, and his greasy fingers slid across the screen. “There we are, I’ve just sent it to you.”
He leaned over, the smell of beer and onions thick on his breath. “The guy is a total fraud, Mornay, and if I were you, I would run away real fast.”
He sidled away from her desk, and walked the length of the entire office. Then he turned and said loud enough so that even the last remaining workers could hear, “And as for the secret chamber? Let me know when you plan to sell tickets to the grand opening, I wouldn’t want to miss out on all that excitement!” He whooped with laughter and then, mercifully, disappeared.
Florence gritted her teeth as she clicked on Andrew's email.
She read every word and scanned all the attachments. She had to hand it to him, the research was thorough. When she was done, she closed her eyes and put her head in her hands, willing herself not to scream out loud.
41
Sixtine climbed the steps of the Museo Nacional de Anthropologiá two at a time.
The name of Thaddeus di Blumagia opened doors like a magical Sesame. One of them led to a late-night meeting with the curator in charge of the exhibition advertised on the poster. A few minutes later, Sixtine was following the dapper and polite Carlos Moctezuma through the deserted corridors of the museum, towards the Aztec Hall of Antiquities.
As they walked out across the central open-air courtyard, Sixtine was greeted by the sound of falling water cascading down from the top of El Paraguas, the monumental carved column supporting the roof that floated above the courtyard, and whose bronze reliefs depicted various creatures and allegorical tales from Mexico’s rich mythology. In the main exhibition room, carefully directed be
ams of light revealed a large stone disc that was hung from a wall. The curator explained that the Sun Stone weighed twenty-five tons and was an icon of Aztec culture. It represented not a calendar, as once supposed, but the history of the universe in five creations, each with a beginning and an end. But Sixtine’s eyes lit up when she spotted a modest display case at the center of the room.
The red headdress.
“The headdress,” started the curator, “is made of the red quetzal feathers, a tropical bird of South America and Central America. Extremely rare today, but once very popular with the Aztecs. The feathers are usually golden green, so the scarlet ones are especially rare. Our experts estimate that it required two-hundred and fifty birds. And we believe that this particular headdress belonged to Nezahualcóyotl, king of Texcoco in the fifteenth century. He was also a poet, an architect and a philosopher, and history has retained his name as one of the most refined representatives of classical Mexican culture. These feathers were part of the tribute paid by the cities under the influence of his empire.”
Sixtine braced herself for the impending rush of half-claimed memories that had so buffeted her senses before when she had first set eyes on the scarlet artifact. But nothing happened. After a few moments, she was forced to admit that the magic had somehow passed. She did not feel anything. The curator cleared his throat and seemed about to continue his speech, but Sixtine cut him off abruptly. “I’m sorry, Professor Moctezuma, but will you allow me a very personal question?”
The man nodded his head and smiled graciously.
“Do you remember me?”
The curator furrowed his brow and seemed about to step back. “Should I?”
“What about a couple of Americans?” pressed Sixtine. “Mr. and Mrs. Pryce. They came here four months ago. The woman was blonde, with blue eyes. Pretty, I am told.”
“I’m afraid that my work means that I seldom meet with visitors. Perhaps you should ask at the ticket office.”
The Pyramid Prophecy Page 21
