by Ed Kovacs
“What’s going on?!”
As Daubert fumbled for his cell phone, an SUV pulled up behind the car. General Klaymen and the two operators sat watching as the winch chains were hooked to the front undercarriage of the luxury vehicle.
“My cell phone’s not working!” gasped Carol.
“Nor mine!” Daubert panicked, banging the driver’s window with his fist, to no avail.
The jerk of the powerful winch whiplashed them backwards and within a few seconds the Citroen disappeared into the dark trailer.
###
Four uniformed members of the Tourism and Antiquities Police carrying FN P90 sub-machine guns waved the Chevy Suburban to stop. Michelle Stark, who spoke excellent Arabic and Egyptian Arabic, got out of the vehicle along with another DSS man who carried an HK-MP7A1 sub gun. Stark inquired after Dr. Fakhry to no avail, then insisted they be allowed to pass. With the First Lady having been shot, Stark and the American security people were edgy, to say the least.
Stark’s questioning turned into an argument with the obstinate Egyptians, who didn't care for dealing with a woman, and an American one at that. Wilder, Diana, the driver, and another Embassy security man watched from inside the Suburban.
“I don’t like the way this looks. I’m going to see if—” Sky didn’t have a chance to finish the sentence.
One of the Egyptian guards lost his temper and fired three rounds at Stark’s feet. The DSS man next to her reacted with hair trigger reflexes, brought his subgun to bear and fired rapid three-round bursts, killing all four guards in exactly four seconds, one second per life.
###
Daniel Pratt looked over toward the sound of the gunfire a couple hundred meters away. He calmly spoke into his comm-link, “All personnel regroup at the vehicles, now.” He walked to the Mercedes as Forte's six bodyguards jogged up. “You all heard the shots. Anyone who wants to stay here and get arrested or die for Simon Forte, be my guest. Anyone else can come with me.”
Pratt hopped behind the wheel and all six men got in with him. The first six employees of the empire he planned to build. With Forte and Bailey out of the picture and with databases he had clandestinely invaded, Pratt knew he could transfer at least $1.5 billion of S.E.T.'s assets into his own accounts. The Mercedes spewed sand as he gunned it, headlights off, across the Giza Plateau, making his own road, in more ways than one.
###
“Somebody’s getting away in that sedan!” From inside the Suburban, as they turned onto the narrow drive, Wilder, Hunt, and Stark saw the Mercedes scurry over the sand like a black dung beetle avoiding a boot.
“I don’t believe that’s Forte. He can’t be finished yet, it’s too soon,” Wilder said, checking his watch.
“Ray, drop the three of us at the building, then you guys nail that car,” exhorted Stark.
Wilder, Hunt, and Stark piled out, and the Suburban with the other DDS agents then raced off across the desert in pursuit of the Mercedes. Stark carried an MP7 and handed her 9mm Glock 19 sidearm to Wilder, who promptly gave it to Hunt.
“We want Fakhry’s office,” said Wilder, as they hurried inside. A short hallway led them there. He kicked the door open and Stark went first with the heavy artillery, but no one was there.
“So much for your theory. He’s in the sedan.”
“I don’t think so, Michelle. He’s somewhere below us. I just have to find the way down.” Sky scanned the room, looking for the obvious places to search for a hidden doorway. He knew full well the long, proud Egyptian history of using secret doors. A quick process of elimination brought him to some bookcases. “Okay, where’s the button?” Sky dumped the contents of two shelves onto the floor, finally finding a recessed button. He pushed it and a set of filing cabinets right next to him swung aside, astounding Stark much more than Diana.
“Michelle, you mind holding down the fort here?”
“Until the cavalry shows up. Then I’m coming down and arresting everyone, including you and your friend, here.”
“Fair enough,” said Sky.
The stairway descended dimly and he hesitated before taking the first step in. He had no flashlight, only a small torch-style cigar lighter. Diana put her hand reassuringly on his shoulder, then they stepped into the cool musty air.
###
Wilder counted to himself the twenty-eight steps down, proceeding as quietly as he could. At the landing he peered cautiously into the room and saw Fakhry slumped against a wall, a streak of blood on the stone showed he’d been shot a few feet from where he now rested. He and Diana stepped into the room. “Doctor Fakhry, it's been a long time. How many years since you kicked me off the Giza Plateau?”
Wilder smiled to cover the contempt he felt toward Fakhry, who'd long been a stumbling block into research into the Sphinx and Pyramids. Fakhry and his minions had too much invested in status quo beliefs to tolerate radical thinkers such as Wilder and others, scholars who might turn their world and hence their credibility upside down.
Fakhry looked up contemptuously. Critically wounded, he’d lost a lot of blood. “Go to hell.”
“I think we’re halfway there,” Sky said looking around the chamber.
Diana bent down to see if she could help.
“You! Get away, don’t touch me.”
“You need medical attention,” she softly intoned.
“Let me die.”
Sky barely listened, as his eyes darted over the stelae and carvings of the Ennead, the nine ancient Egyptian gods: Isis, Osiris, Set, Nephthys, Geb, Nut, Atum, Shu and Tefnut. They comprised an Egyptian cosmology dating back to around the twenty-eighth century BC.
“Where did Forte go, doctor?” inquired Sky.
Fakhry said nothing.
“I can guess what you must be thinking. You thought you were going to become immortal, but instead, you're losing everything you had. Want to tell me where the entrance is to the real chamber so I can stop Forte?”
Diana looked up surprised. “This isn’t the chamber?”
“This is a phony chamber to fool the inquisitive and the not terribly bright. Like the fake tombs the great architects would construct to trick the grave-robbers.” He smiled at her. “And I should know.”
“You all think you’re so smart. Soi-disant Egyptologists from every country except Egypt. You come here with your stupid theories and your arrogance—” Fakhry coughed and spit up blood.
Sky looked on with concern; the man didn’t have long to live. “I believe the ancient monuments located within your borders are a gift, a teaching for all humanity. I don’t need to be Chinese to cook good Chinese food and I don’t need to be Greek to translate The Iliad into English.”
“Sky, I know Doctor Fakhry. From a long time ago.”
Surprised, Wilder looked at her.
“Doctor, what I helped do to you was wrong, and I apologize. I was young and in love with Simon. He convinced me to do it.”
Wilder silently watched the exchange.
Diana continued, “It was Simon who planned the operation against you. The CIA wasn’t involved, he just used them as a scapegoat. The blackmail that started five years ago has led up to this very night. I’m not asking you to forgive me, but I’ve forgiven myself. And I’m not asking you to help me. But I have a feeling you may want to.”
Fakhry's eyes registered anger, then seemed to shift to a resigned understanding. “Thank you for telling me.” He spit more blood, then, “You missed the entrance, you walked right past it. The last step is... a long way down.” And with that, Fakhry died.
Sky and Diana crossed to the landing and examined the area around the bottom step. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but he knelt down in the dim light, pushing and probing every square inch of rock and stone. Suddenly a stone gave way, followed by the grinding sound of machinery, possibly counterweights and pulleys. A rock wall slid aside leading to another stairway descending to where the light glowed even dimmer.
Sky looked to Diana, she nodded, then they stepped
into the chasm.
CHAPTER 29
Many Vietnam veteran special forces operators hold a special place in their hearts for the de Havilland C-7 Caribou. A bush pilot’s dream, the aircraft could operate from tiny jungle landing strips, beachheads, or improvised landing strips as short as 850 feet. Airdrops of supplies and ammunition by fearless Caribou crews to besieged positions on the ground saved countless American lives. The drop-down rear doors of the high-tailed cargo plane could even accommodate smaller vehicles, such as a nearly new Citroen and its frightened occupants.
The now privately-owned, lumbering Caribou had climbed to 25,500 feet over the Atlantic, about 2000 feet shy of its service ceiling. The 1450 horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines pushed the craft along at 150 knots.
Daubert and Swann sat restrained in the Citroen with their mouths taped shut, braced into their seats in such a way that their heads could only face forward. Their eyes were taped open so they could not close them, but could partially blink to lubricate the eyeballs. An audio-visual unit used the car’s windshield to project a slide show, akin to a modern fighter pilot’s HUD, Heads-Up Display. Ear buds provided audio to the couple over the roar of flight.
They sat as a captive audience, in every sense of the word, forced to watch and listen as General Klaymen neared completion of the program. The program consisted of a slide showing each victim from the two plane disasters and a shot of surviving family members. The general stood outside the vehicle reading the victim’s names and providing additional biographical information over the audio hookup, succinctly highlighting the uniqueness of each life.
Daubert’s clammy skin shone pale as a corpse. He felt as much angry as terrified, not that he thought he was going to die. He knew he was too valuable to kill. He cursed himself for negotiating with the Chinese to sell the particle beam technology. Forte must have found out, and now he was being punished. His brain jangled with a clutter of recrimination, regret, and strategies to extricate himself from this mess.
Carol Swann sat disconsolately with tears streaming down her cheeks. She looked shattered, as if she knew she would soon be dead, as if she knew she deserved it.
“Finally, the last victim,” intoned Klaymen. “First Lieutenant Todd Klaymen, United States Army. He graduated from West Point, third in his class. Wounded in action in Iraq, he received the Purple Heart and the Silver Star for his valor in and around Tikrit. He is survived by his wife Stephanie, his two year-old son, Kurt, and his father, Major General Kurt Klaymen.
“In the American judicial system, convicted murderers have to listen to the victim’s surviving family members. It doesn’t change anything, but I think it’s useful. It’s—” Klaymen choked back tears, “it’s important. But I get to do more than that. I get to recreate for you, what you created for your victims.”
The projector was removed from the car’s hood. Klaymen sat in a fold-down crew seat along the fuselage and strapped himself in.
The cargo doors opened with a great rush of freezing air and a brute force roar of vengeance, causing the plane to shudder, dip and jink. As the pilot adjusted to the new aerodynamic, the loadmasters, cinched by safety straps, removed the chocks around the Citroen’s tires and one of them reached in and put the car into neutral and released the emergency brake.
Swann didn’t react, but Daubert’s wide eyes went wider, his muffled attempts to scream buried beneath the bluster. The loadmasters stepped back. One of them hit a button and a green light went on. The stubby round nose end of the workhorse then lifted up in sudden steep ascent, and the Citroen rolled easily out of the cargo bay, for the long, reflective ride down to termination in the churning Atlantic.
###
Clothed in the vestments of Osiris and his sister / wife Isis, Forte and Bailey stood on a raised stone platform behind an altar carved from the living rock. He wore the double-crown of Osiris and she the sun disk crown of Isis.
A small athanor, its smoke rising to some unseen slit of an air shaft, sat on the altar amongst a virtual chem lab, including: jars, beakers, glass tubes, vials, grinders, mortar-and-pestle, and plastic bags containing ingredients for the elixir. An elixir Forte had almost finished preparing as he consulted the open Book of Spells in front of him.
Rene stood, focused, reciting the invocation, “Let the liquid of Ra entereth into thee as into the divine members of Osiris.”
As Sky and Diana stepped into the room, lit by two battery-powered lanterns set on stone tables, Rene drew the sidearm from under her robes and leveled it at Wilder without missing a beat of her intonation.
Diana, just as fast and with both hands on her gun in the Weaver stance, had a bead on Forte. The solid stone altar stood between the two couples, but afforded partial cover only to Forte and Rene. Sky and Diana stood in the open.
“I’m very good at head shots, Simon, and I’m not talking about photographs,” spat Diana.
“Don’t stop the incantation, Rene, whatever happens.” Forte glanced up momentarily then returned to his wizardry. “You’re an excellent shot, Diana, almost as good as Rene.”
“And I’m aiming at your head. How poetic it would be to blow your brains out just before the big moment.”
“That would be unfortunate.”
Wilder stood dumfounded. The room resembled some kind of fantastically appointed temple like he’d never seen, yet it seemed strangely familiar in an unsettling, deja vu-type way. His eyes riveted to the Book of Spells, loosely bound papyri sitting open on the altar in front of Forte. “How did you get the—?”
“How did I get the Book of Spells? Destiny, doctor. And a dumb move on your part. Your excellent photos of the Arizona tablet were easy enough to get from MAHG, but if Rene hadn’t stumbled on the actual tablet sitting in that display case in Sedona, we might never have known to sing the chant in the key of D. The wall recess opened right up and there awaited the book.”
Sky looked crestfallen. His “hide in plain sight” idea hadn’t worked out so well.
“I already suspected the location of the book here in the temple,” Forte continued, “but you know how the old Egyptians built these things with all their silly traps. A forced entry can bring down the whole damn roof. Even after three thousand years. We only unsealed this room a month ago, that’s why the relics are so pristine. Thirsty?” he teased.
Wilder took in the opulence of the surroundings. A pythonic black stone sarcophagus sat heavily against the wall directly opposite the altar platform where Forte and Rene stood. Had Hui intended to use this as his tomb, wondered Sky? Or could this be like Cheops’ King’s chamber, where the empty sarcophagus, as some had posited, performed a role in some secret society’s initiation ritual for receiving Divine Knowledge?
To the right of the sarcophagus, a collection of wooden carts, buckets, bows and arrows, spears, musical instruments and other implements of life from the eleventh century BC. A sun disk painted in sharp color decorated the far wall. Seven hands reached out from the sun, and the head of a Sphinx stared out dispassionately from the center.
All around he saw sacred alphabet, signs, symbols, tablets and statues. In the middle of the room a circular table of alabaster stood upon four legs; an alabaster basin and jug sat on the table. Wilder noticed the room’s pillars took the shape of lotus buds, the water jug the shape of a large opening lotus and the basin of a fully open lotus. Sacred temple language etched deep into the pillars.
Circumstances did not permit speculation as to the symbology of the items in the room or their actual functions, for he realized Forte needed only moments to complete his task.
“Spellbinding, isn’t it? Sorry I don’t have time to give you the nickel tour. We found a male skeleton when we opened up the chamber, but everything else you see now is as it was. You may be interested to know that Hui kept a cache of shem-an-na in a stone jar right under this altar. He must have forgotten to take it with him.”
“Manna from heaven, placed by Aaron into the Ark of the Covenant,” said Wilder,
who felt like a kid in a candy store, except the clerk had a gun pointed at him. “The Israelites—not the Hebrews, they were a different group—the Israelites called cakes made from the powder shewbread. The Egyptians called it scheffa. Exodus tells us that Bezaleel, son of Uri Ben Hur, made shewbread for Moses. But Bezaleel wasn’t a baker, he was a goldsmith.”
“Correct, and the cakes made from shem-an-na fed Babylonian kings, Egyptian Pharaohs, and soon a couple of Immortals named Simon and Rene.”
“Theoretically to breed the leaders of humankind, to sustain them mentally and physically in some kind of heightened state.”
“Called the dimension of the Orbit of Light. The Plane of Sharon. I’ll let you know what it’s like,” said Forte.
“I would very much like to see the shem-an-na.”
“Next time you’re in Florence, stop by my pensione. I believe you know how to find it.”
Sky’s mind was spinning. Shem-an-na! If Forte had really squired it away to Italy, it would be an incredible complement to the Book of Spells. The only known sample even suspected to exist was sent to the British Museum by Petrie after he uncovered the Temple of Hathor on Serabit.
This all went to the heart of alchemy, with the Egyptian god Thoth, who became Hermes in Greece and Mercury in Rome, considered by some as the first alchemist. Aristotle, Paracelsus, Isaac Newton and many others followed in the steps of the “Great Work,” alchemy representing the general striving of all things toward perfection. For Simon Forte, however, there had been nothing pure about his pursuit of the alchemical key, which he believed he held in his hand.
“Let the liquid of Ra entereth into thee as into the divine members of Osiris.” There was a mesmerizing quality to the repetitiveness of Rene’s mantra, but it served to urge Sky to action, to do something before the chanting stopped.
“I bet the bullets in your girlfriend’s gun match the one’s in Doctor Fakhry’s chest. His office is swarming with intelligence agents, by the way. DSS knows Diana and I are down here, and the exit is sealed. You can drink all the herbal tonics you want, eat all the shem-an-na, but you’re not walking out of here a free man.”