by Adam Palmer
‘Have you got a better theory?’
‘Well yes, as a matter of fact I have. Who says the papyrus had to have been found at an archaeological dig?’
‘What else is there?’
‘I was thinking about it while I was cooling my heels in the police cells. I was wondering if it might have been found accidentally during some building project.’
‘Which building project?’
‘Only one of the biggest in the world! The Aswan High Dam.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, maybe one of the workers was operating a bulldozer? Or clearing out the rubble that the bulldozer had dug up.’
Gaby’s mind drifted back.
The bulldozer… moving forward… forward…
Get out of the way!
‘Gaby?’
‘What?’
‘You were miles away.’
‘Sorry.’
He wouldn’t have been so worried if it wasn’t for the fact that it was Gabrielle who was driving.
‘I’ve just thought of something, Daniel. Aswan is just across the river from Elephantine…’
‘…And Elephantine was the site of a huge discovery of papyri, dating from the fifth century BC, connected with the Jewish community that lived in the area when it was under Persian control – the so-called Elephantine papyri.’
‘How much do you know about that?’ Gabrielle asked.
‘Quite a lot, actually,’ said Daniel. ‘This is right up my street. When the Kingdom of Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians, they brought most of the Jews as captives to Babylon. But when the Babylonians were defeated by the Persians, Cyrus of Persia allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem, and also tolerated them in other parts of the Persian Empire, including Elephantine, where they grew into a flourishing community.
‘And were any of these Elephantine papyri in Proto-Sinaitic?’
Daniel pursed his lips. ‘That’s the downer. They were written in a variety of languages: hieratic and demotic Egyptian, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Coptic. But not Proto-Sinaitic. The majority of those that specifically concerned the Jews were in Aramaic, using the old Aramaic script that developed round about the eighth century BC.’
‘Is it possible that they were still using the Proto-Sinaitic in the fifth century BC?’
Daniel thought for a moment. The answer, dictated by his scholarship, was not encouraging.
‘It’s highly unlikely.’
Daniel was disappointed. Gabrielle’s question had brought him right back down to earth. They had arrived at his house and Gabrielle parked the rented car in the driveway.
When they got inside, Daniel put his suitcase in the master bedroom while Gabrielle went to the kitchen to put the kettle on. He was about to unpack when he heard a cry from Gabrielle. He raced into the kitchen to see her holding her mobile phone to her ear, listening to something.
‘What is it?’
‘You’ve got to hear this!’
She handed him the phone and pointed to the button to play the message again. It was from Mansoor.
‘Hallo, Gabrielle, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this before, but there are some things happening here that we need to talk about. I heard about Harrison Carmichael being killed and I understand that Daniel has fallen under some sort of suspicion. I have explained to the British authorities that I invited him here. I do not know if this helps, but in the meantime, I have to tell you that I have not been completely honest with you. There was no food poisoning epidemic at the dig site, but there was some sort of outbreak of disease which we think may have had something to do with the site itself. We are looking into this but in the meantime we have put the volunteers into quarantine. However, the first one to become ill was at another hospital and he has since died. The reason I am calling you is that a nurse in the hospital wing where he was being treated was murdered. It is unclear if the two things are connected, but I just want you to know that we have concerns on a number of fronts. Please call me as soon as you can.’
‘You’d better call him,’ said Daniel, handing back the phone.
‘I don’t think you should bother unpacking,’ Gabrielle responded.
He looked at her in shock.
‘I can’t leave now. I’m on bail.’
‘I’ll talk to Mansoor, but I think we’ve got more important things to worry about than you being on bail.’
At the back of Daniel’s mind, he was thinking about the outbreak at the dig site and remembering Harrison’s words about the resurgence of the plague. Harrison had said that he knew the plague could return based on his translation of an old manuscript in Proto-Sinaitic script. Mansoor had shown him such a manuscript. Could that be the one that his mentor had translated?
Yet there was still one obstacle in his way.
‘They’ve got my passport.’
A smile lit Gabrielle’s face.
‘What about your US passport – the one you had when you were married to Charlotte?’
Chapter 20
Sarit arrived in Cairo from Cyprus, entering the country using her Irish passport under the name Siobhan Stewart, after they had tracked down Goliath via the Urim telecommunications monitoring unit, the same unit where Sarit had served.
The unit functioned like a well-oiled machine. Anything that was flagged by the system as important was then sent for human analysis to ‘Unit 8200’, the Signals Intelligence centre in Herzliya. Any intercepts that were found to be encrypted were also sent there. From there, the messages were deciphered or simply analysed for relevant content and disseminated to the appropriate department or organization, such as the Mossad – based in the same building – or military intelligence.
In this case, the key word that they had picked up on was the name ‘Joel Hirsch’ that Audrey Milne had given them. This had given the monitors at Urim both the number of Goliath’s cell phone and the means to track him in the future.
But Sarit’s initial instructions were to proceed to the hospital and find out what was going on on the ground. When she arrived, she saw several police cars, and police milling about, along with dozens of onlookers both outside the building and in the reception area.
‘What happened?’ she asked a nurse in Arabic.
‘A nurse was killed.’
‘How?’ She made sure to sound surprised.
‘By a madman. A big man. He ran away.’
‘How did he kill her?’
‘With his bare hands. He broke her neck.’
The nurse seemed to be enjoying herself as she told the story. But at the back of Sarit’s mind, a question was nagging away: had he got the sample of Joel’s clothes? She went to the reception desk.
‘I’m here to find out about a patient called Joel Hirsch.’
The receptionist looked mildly alarmed.
‘Are you related to him?’
She had to think carefully. If she said yes and it didn’t check out, she’d have some explaining to do. She knew why he had been brought in and she understood the panic. She decided to use it to her advantage.
‘No. I’m a journalist. I heard that he was ill. I was just wondering if it was contagious?’
‘We have no evidence to suggest he was contagious.’
The receptionist’s tone was defensive, and her left hand looked like it was itching to reach for the intercom.
‘Was contagious?’
‘He died last night.’
‘From what?’
‘I’m afraid we don’t know that yet. There’ll have to be a post-mortem.’
‘Yes, but I mean it was from the illness, right? He wasn’t killed or anything?’
The receptionist looked puzzled.
‘Why do you ask?’
Sarit knew that there was no backing down now.
‘Well, I just heard about a nurse being killed. I was wondering if there’s any connection.’
‘I’ll have to refer you to my superiors,’ said the receptionist, reaching for the intercom. ‘Wh
at did you say your name was?’
Sarit turned sharply on her heel and left.
Chapter 21
‘I still don’t like it,’ said Daniel, feeling self-conscious as they walked into Heathrow Airport from the car park.
‘Would you prefer that we just sat around doing nothing?’
‘I can’t help thinking I should be trying to clear my name instead of running off in pursuit of academic glory.’
‘And how do you propose to do that? Do you have the investigative resources of a police force? Their authority to arrest people? Access to a forensic lab perhaps? A computer to co-ordinate all the information?’
Daniel sighed. ‘No, but I can try and find out what Harrison was talking about… about the plague and the fiery snakes and all that.’
‘And how are you going to find out? Are you planning on consulting a medium?’
He looked at her in shock. She was being surprisingly cold and heartless considering that it was her uncle who was dead – the uncle with whom she had spent so many summers as a child and later as a teenager. But he sensed that she was using aggression to keep her grief at bay.
‘If I leave now I’m breaching my bail conditions. That’ll make me a more credible suspect in their eyes.’
Gabrielle was shaking her head.
‘I don’t think it’ll make a difference one way or the other.’
‘What if they stop me when I try and pass through to airside?’ he asked nervously.
‘You think they’ve got a list of everyone who is out on bail?’
‘In this day and age? It wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘Well, you can quit worrying. They may have a list of people who have jumped bail or people who have outstanding warrants against them. But they wouldn’t have a list of everyone on bail. If they did that, they wouldn’t have needed to hold on to your passport.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘I am right. Now stop worrying. Let’s check in and get airside. Then we can see if we can track down a copy of Uncle Harrison’s paper. If he sent it to an American journal, someone must know about it.’
What Daniel didn’t realize was that now that he had switched on his mobile phone, it was transmitting his location again. That meant that someone thousands of miles away was tracking him.
Chapter 22
The curator was sweating, but it wasn’t just from the heat. It wasn’t such a warm day and the air conditioning was on. It was something on the inside and he felt like he was going down with flu. And it had started soon after that visit from Gabrielle Gusack.
It must be swine flu. Damn!
He decided to check the symptoms online. Fever, sweating, headache, aching muscles, limb and joint pain, tiredness. On the other hand there was no diarrhoea, no sore throat, no runny nose and no sneezing. And there was something else. He was itching all over his torso, like he had measles or even chickenpox. But he had had both of those as a child.
He opened his shirt and looked at his torso only to be confronted by a frightening sight. His body was covered in red marks – not streaks but more like the elongated letter S or several such letters strung together. He touched one and his mind shrieked with pain, like he was burning. But now he realized that with this fever, his whole body felt like it was burning. The touch only made it worse.
A wave of fear swept over him. His mind panicked as he wondered what it could be. He had come into contact with people from a foreign country where hygiene standards are not so high and now he was going down with something that produced these S-shaped marks and a fiery pain on his flesh.
He felt his legs going weak.
Is that just fear or the disease itself?
Whatever it was, he knew that he had to act quickly. He leaned over to grab the phone and called 999.
‘Emergency services, which service do you require?’
‘Ambulance,’ he rasped as he felt the heat rise up in his stomach. He wanted to say more, but he felt his vision go blurry and could no longer support himself.
The last thing he remembered before passing out was his body slumping to the floor.
Chapter 23
‘It couldn’t have come from the Aswan High Dam excavations,’ said Mansoor.
‘Why not?’ asked Daniel, defensively.
‘Because I’ve been thinking about why the jar and papyrus are undocumented and I think I know the reason.’
In Mansoor’s office at the SCA, Daniel and Gabrielle sat forward.
‘Which is?’ Daniel prompted.
‘The most likely cause of an artefact not getting recorded would be if it were found round about the time when the museum moved to a new location. The museum was built in 1835 and has moved twice, first to the Boulaq district in 1858 and then to its present location at Tahrir Square in 1902. But the High Dam wasn’t constructed till the 1960s.’
Daniel thought for a moment about Mansoor’s comment. But then a thought came to him.
‘What about the old dam?’
‘The Low Dam?’ Mansoor considered this. ‘It was initially constructed between 1898 and 1902 and then raised twice after that.’
‘So maybe it was found when they were nearing completion… in 1902.’
Mansoor was shaking his head.
‘They would have been more likely to find an artefact during initial excavations than when they were finishing construction. Besides, the Elephantine papyri date from the fifth century BC. There’s no way they’d still be using the script then, when they already used the Aramaic alphabet!’
Daniel felt frustrated. He and Gabrielle had already considered this objection, but hearing it now from Mansoor reminded him how far off the mark that particular theory had been.
‘What about Deir el-Medina? Could it have been found there?’
‘None of the papyri that survived from there were in Proto-Sinaitic.’
‘I guess that puts paid to both those theories,’ said Daniel with a wry smile.
‘I’m sorry to put the dampener on it,’ said Mansoor. ‘Especially after you came back here to help out.’
‘Actually, what really prompted me to come back here was your message about that outbreak of illness.’ He preferred not to mention what Harrison Carmichael had said about the plague at this stage. ‘Any more news on that front?’
Mansoor looked tense.
‘It’s not looking good. We’ve had four more deaths. Most of the rest are on the road to recovery. But we still don’t know what caused it and we’re having a hard time keeping the lid on it. They are foreign citizens after all.’
‘Why are you trying so hard to keep it a secret?’
Mansoor looked at Daniel as if he were an idiot.
‘My country thrives on the tourist business. Can you imagine what it’ll do to the trade if it leaks out?’
‘You’re right, I’m sorry. I just wish I understood what was causing it.’
‘We have our best doctors working on it. They’re checking dust samples from the site. They sent teams there to conduct chemical and radiological analysis, but so far they haven’t turned up anything.’
Daniel was on the verge of mentioning Carmichael’s cryptic words, when Gabrielle changed the subject again.
‘I just had a thought about what you said about the public works projects, Daniel. Could it have been found in some other public project?’
‘Like what?’ asked Mansoor. ‘A road? A bridge?’
‘Yes,’ said Gabrielle.
‘Holy shit!’ Daniel blurted out.
‘What?’ asked Mansoor, ignoring the vulgar language and latching on to Daniel’s contagious excitement.
‘I think Gaby may be on to something – sorry, Gabrielle.’ He looked at Mansoor. ‘When was the Suez Canal constructed?’
‘Between 1859 and 1869.’
‘And you said the museum moved to Boulaq in 1858?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So the jar and papyrus might have been found during the initial Suez C
anal excavations.’
‘Quite possibly,’ Mansoor replied, approvingly. ‘And the chief engineer of the Suez Canal project was Linant de Bellefonds. He was a close friend of William John Bankes. He would have made sure that it was handed over to the authorities!’
‘Then we’ve cracked it!’ said Daniel, his voice rising with elation.
‘But why is that so exciting?’ asked Gabrielle, confused. ‘If it was found by workers excavating the Suez Canal?’
‘You don’t understand, Gaby. If this papyrus was found during the Suez Canal construction, then we don’t just know where it was found. I know what it is!’
‘What?’ Mansoor and Gabrielle said in unison.
‘The Song of the Sea!’
Chapter 24
‘What could it possibly be?’ asked the consultant.
‘It’s nothing I’ve ever seen before,’ the toxicologist replied.
The curator was in an isolation unit at University College Hospital as the experts discussed and debated what he was suffering from. They had ruled out swine flu, bird flu and pretty much any other form of flu. But that didn’t tell them what it was.
They were treating him with a cocktail of antibiotics in case it was bacteriological and antipyretics to bring down the fever. They were awaiting the results of toxicology and blood sample tests and they had asked his colleagues what he had eaten and drunk recently and if any of them had experienced similar symptoms.
So far they had drawn a blank on every one of their speculations. They were further hampered by the fact that he alternated between unconsciousness and delirium, making it impossible to glean any useful information from him.
Right now, he was just emerging from unconsciousness and apparently trying to speak. They couldn’t enter the isolation chamber because that would be a contagion hazard, but there was a microphone by the bed and they were pointing to it and telling him to speak into it. He half sat up and struggled to move his lips close to it.