“Ugh, you are a slave driver.”
“If we had a drum, I think it would have helped.”
“Next time I’ll be sure to bring one.”
She laughed and helped him to his feet.
“Lights!” he called, and several students rushed forward with large lanterns and flashlights as Acton and his fiancée approached the now gaping entranceway into what Acton hoped would be the greatest find in the history of Egyptian archeology.
And as they stepped through the entrance, their lights flickering on the mysterious interior, there was a cry from somebody behind them, then the sound of panic setting in. Acton swung around to see the laborers all scrambling for the rope ladder that led to the surface, pushing and shoving at each other as they competed for the narrow escape route.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, stepping out, but as his light played across the back of the cover stone, he didn’t bother listen for an answer. The cause for their panic was clear. In the center of the massive stone was a carving of a king cobra, coiled around the hieroglyph representing Death, with an inscription carved in hieroglyphics, Latin, and Arabic. Quickly translating the Latin, he gasped.
“The Curse of the Pharaohs!”
Cairo, Egypt
One Day Before the Liberty Island Attack
Imam Mahmoud Khalil sat cross-legged on the floor, his followers few but devoted, spread throughout the room, similarly seated, devouring his every word. This was what he loved. The rapt attention, the hanging on every word. It was power. The power to inspire, the power to control.
The power to effect change.
Tired of the far too moderate teachings of the Imam he had followed since his youth, he struck out on his own, preaching his own views, far more hardline than most, but in his view, far more true to the Koran than some moderates would have the Infidels believe.
The ultimate goal of the Koran was to lay out the foundation necessary to convert the entire world to Islam. It was plain to anyone who read the Holy words. Peaceful coexistence was not an option. Peaceful subjugation was, in which those of a different religion could live amongst Muslims, but it was every good Muslim’s duty to harass them until they converted, or struck out in violence so they could be killed in the name of Allah.
Those who wanted to live in peace would convert to the religion of peace. It was very simple. Why so many pussyfooted around the true message was beyond him. The Infidels had already lost, they just didn’t realize it yet. Their economies were collapsing in a frenzy of security spending brought on by the glorious successes of Osama bin Laden, their populations were scared, and when just two young men bombing a marathon could bring a city of almost five million to a halt for a day, and distract a nation for days, costing untold billions in lost productivity, imagine what sustained, small attacks could do.
But Khalil wanted to inspire, and his plan, in the making for years, would not only uphold one of the tenets of Islam, but stab a dagger of fear throughout the Western world when those countries decided what monuments to decadence to build; it would encourage the nation of Islam, spread throughout every country, to rise up, and commit the small acts of terror necessary to bring the Western economies to a grinding halt, thus destroying their ability to strike back.
For tomorrow, the world would change forever, and the idol, worshipped by an entire nation, and the huddled masses around the world, would be no more.
The Arab Spring had been a glorious triumph, but not in the way the ignorant West thought. The countries that had overthrown their leaders had overthrown secularist leaders and replaced them with “democratically” elected Islamist governments. And as each domino fell, more and more of the caliphate was being restored. Eventually these countries would unite in common purpose and eliminate the plague that was Israel, then push all Western influence from their lands.
And tomorrow’s inspiration would enflame the passions of today’s youth for generations, demonstrating the superiority of those who followed the true religion.
Khalil turned to the monitors facing him, his much larger base of followers spread throughout the world awaiting their final instructions before chaos was unleashed. He smiled as he looked at each screen, the true believers, willing to die for their god and his prophet, staring back with expressions ranging from fear to excitement, but without exception, devotion burning in their eyes.
He held out his hands, encompassing those watching remotely, and those in the room ready for their domestic assault, and turned his eyes upward.
“Rejoice today in the gifts granted you by Allah, enjoy yourselves, then purify your souls, for tomorrow your brave sacrifice will see you in Jannah, with Allah’s perpetual blessing in Paradise, for helping fulfill his Word brought to us by the prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him.” His head lowered, his eyes opening as he looked at his flock, then with a surge of fury in his heart as he thought of those who would dare try to stop him, he shouted, “Allahu Akbar!”, and was quickly drowned out by those around him as they lost themselves in the rapture of true belief.
And with that belief, that devotion, the restoration of the Caliphate would begin tomorrow as the false idols were destroyed.
Nubian Desert, Egypt, University College London Dig Site
One Day Before the Liberty Island Attack
Laura stepped forward, her expert hands running over the inscription carved into the stone. She read the words several times, then finally said them out loud, confirming Acton’s translation.
“Death shall come on swift wings to him that toucheth the tomb of a Pharaoh.”
“Good thing you’re a woman otherwise I’d be scared for you.”
He received an elbow to the gut.
He grunted then chuckled as she stepped back.
“I always thought that the curse was a myth created by the newspapers during the King Tut excavations. There were no actual glyphs with those words, it was made up by someone.”
“A joke?”
She shook her head. “These look like they were carved here long before the Tut expedition. And judging from what I saw inside, no grave robbers have touched this place.”
Acton turned back toward the opening, holding up his lantern and sighed again. It was breathtaking. The amount of gold, silver and precious gems was spectacular, but the two sarcophagi, side by side, touching as if the arms of two lovers were forever together. He stepped inside, Laura at his side, several students following with their own lights.
“Bloody hell, it’s incredible.”
Acton smiled at Chaney’s outburst, then remembered where he was and the importance of it.
“I’m sure I don’t need to remind anybody not to touch anything.” He glanced over at Chaney whose hand hovered in midair, about to touch a sculpture of a scarab. His hand darted back to his side, then his chest, then his stomach, Chaney apparently desperate to find a place where it would be under control.
He stuffed it in his pocket.
Acton chuckled as Laura turned to the students.
“Two at a time. Five minutes, then switch off. Don’t worry, when we start to catalog everything, you’ll get plenty of chances to enjoy this.” She turned back to the sarcophagi, then looked at Acton.
“What do you think?”
Acton nodded to the one closest him.
“This is obviously Cleopatra.”
Laura sighed, placing her hand on the other sarcophagus.
“And this must be Antony.” She looked up at Acton. “Isn’t it romantic, buried side by side for eternity, together forever.”
Acton smiled. “Don’t you think you’d get tired of me after two thousand years?”
Laura’s hand continued to travel along Antony’s sarcophagus, reaching his head.
“I suppose so.”
“What?”
She looked up at him and winked.
“Har har.”
Suddenly gunfire from above echoed through the chamber.
“What the hell—”
“Professors, you be
tter get up here!” yelled a voice from the surface. Laura and Acton exchanged concerned glances, then hurried everyone from the room. Laura pointed at Terrence Mitchel and another student.
“You two guard this entrance, make sure no one goes inside.” She turned to the remaining students. “Everyone else out. We’ll organize shifts tomorrow.”
Chaney held the rope ladder steady as Laura climbed it, followed by Acton. As he pushed through the hole at the top, he gasped at the heat of the late afternoon sun, it so cool below. As soon as he recovered from the shock, he heard shouting and another burst of gunfire from the camp.
He and Laura ran toward the commotion, the camp coming into view below as they began their descent. The workers were all clamoring to board a truck, two of the security team holding them at bay with weapons, Reading with them trying to calm them down, despite the fact few spoke little if any English.
“What’s going on here?” Laura asked in Arabic.
The foreman, who spoke English, spun toward them and rapid fired the situation.
“We must leave! We cannot disturb the tomb of Cleopatra, otherwise we and our families will be cursed for eternity!”
“Nonsense. It’s just words on a wall. You know there is no such thing as curses.”
Acton’s words seemed to have no effect.
“You must let us leave. Now! We will work here no longer.”
Acton sighed, looking at Laura.
“What about just here, at the camp. Forget the tomb.”
The man shook his head emphatically.
“No! We must go!”
Acton looked at Laura, who shrugged her shoulders.
“They refuse to work; they’re scared of the curse. I don’t think there’s any reasoning with them.”
“Agreed,” sighed Acton. “Might as well let them go.”
Laura nodded, motioning the guards and Reading out of the way, and the truck was stormed, rolling away within seconds as bodies continued to be hauled into the back of those not fortunate enough to get aboard in the first wave.
“Now we have a problem.”
“What’s that?” asked Reading.
Acton motioned at the departing truck with his chin.
“Now the world’s about to find out what we discovered.”
Cairo, Egypt
Night Before the Liberty Island Attack
“They found it.”
Colonel Soliman frowned, scratching his thick but trimmed beard. They had known it was a possibility, ever since that damned professor from London had received a permit to dig. How she had done it, he didn’t know. His people had tried to block it at every turn, but she seemed to have connections even better than his.
“You’re certain?”
His friend of over thirty years, Mansoor, nodded. “There’s no doubt.”
“And of course the curse didn’t work?”
“It worked on the hired help, but not the professor and her students.”
Soliman sighed. He hadn’t expected it to work. After all, no educated person believed in curses any more. About all they had accomplished with the curse was to slow them down. Without their manual labor, they’d have to do everything themselves. But it didn’t matter. In the end the result was the same.
Desecration.
The ruse had lasted for two millennia. Archeologists for years had theorized the tomb was underwater, a victim of Alexandria’s partial collapse into the sea, but the truth was the remains of Cleopatra and her husband, Antony, had been moved to a secret site almost a thousand miles away, along with several other Pharaohs’ remains over the years.
But now the site had been compromised and something had to be done.
Mansoor looked at him. “What do we do? We can’t scare them away.”
Soliman shook his head. “No, we can’t scare them away.”
Mansoor looked out the window at the rooftops spread across Cairo, a clash of ancient buildings and construction techniques, stabbed with antennae and satellite dishes, electrical and telephone wires dangling in an unorganized tangle in a desperate attempt to modernize a city never meant to be modernized.
“There’s only one thing these Westerners believe in,” he said.
Soliman’s eyebrows rose slightly. “What’s that?”
“Violence.”
“Is that what you believe?”
Mansoor nodded.
“So what do you propose? We kill them all?”
Mansoor frowned.
“I don’t like it any more than you do, but they have desecrated the tomb of a Pharaoh. Isn’t that punishable by death?”
Soliman bit his lip as he closed his eyes, leaning his head against the back of his chair.
“Yes, normally it would be. But consider their intent. Do they intend to steal what’s inside?”
Mansoor shrugged. “I guess not. They’re legitimate archeologists.”
“And with the current laws, anything they find has to be turned over to the authorities. Nothing can leave Egypt.”
“True.” Mansoor’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not defending this, are you?”
Soliman smiled. “Not at all. But before we go and kill them all, I think we need to examine the situation.”
Suddenly the door burst open and young Ahmed rushed in, his face flushed, his brow covered in sweat, his chest heaving as his lungs sucked in precious oxygen.
Both Soliman and Mansoor jumped from their chairs, rushing over to him.
“What is it, Ahmed?” asked Soliman, placing a hand on his shoulder.
But Ahmed couldn’t answer, his lungs still desperate for oxygen. Instead he shoved a tablet computer he had been gripping toward Soliman. Soliman took it, holding it up for them all to see. Mansoor gasped at the headline.
British Archeologist Team Locates Cleopatra’s Tomb.
“We’re too late!” cried Mansoor, spinning around and booting his chair across the room.
Soliman quickly scanned the article, noting the sources quoted were workers from the dig site. Mansoor was right. They were too late if killing them were the only option.
But there’s one other thing Westerners believe in, perhaps even more than violence.
Nubian Desert, Egypt, University College London Dig Site
Acton poked a stick at the fire, mesmerized by the dancing flames. They were all there, it a nightly ritual missed by none. Gathered by the open fire, the wood collected from the surrounding area, and never taken from a live plant, was used sparingly—artificial logs flown in at Laura’s personal expense added to the flame, along with a healthy helping of camel dung supplied by their laborers who in their rush had left their beasts behind. It wasn’t a roaring fire as they might have at his dig site in Peru, but it was beautiful nonetheless.
“So what exactly have we stumbled upon,” asked Reading. “Is it really Cleopatra’s tomb?”
Acton nodded, his eyes still on the flames.
“It would appear so.”
“What the devil is it doing out here in the middle of nowhere?”
Laura chuckled and waved her arm toward the dig site sitting nearby.
“Two thousand years ago this wasn’t the middle of nowhere. There was a thriving community here.”
“But no city.”
She dropped her head slightly in acknowledgement.
“But no city. Why the tomb is here, I have no idea, I’m just pointing out that what is now barren and abandoned wasn’t always so. There is obviously a reason her remains are here.”
“What can you tell us about Cleopatra that the movie didn’t tell us?” asked Chaney.
Reading’s eyebrows shot up. “You’ve seen the movie?”
Chaney shrugged. “I like the classics.”
Reading looked at Acton. “I worked with him for years and never knew that.”
Acton winked and then looked at Chaney. “Let’s ignore the movie. First, her name wasn’t officially Cleopatra, it was actually Cleopatra the Seventh Philopator, as she was the seventh
to use that name. As well, she wasn’t Egyptian. She was actually Greek, her family lineage descendant from when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt.”
“She wasn’t Egyptian?” exclaimed Reading. “I’ve always wondered about that. I would have expected a Roman at the time to not publicly be involved with an African, even North African, but if she was Macedonian, she was probably as white as he was.”
“True. They were more similar than many realize from a cultural standpoint.”
“That coin that showed her certainly had her looking pretty beastly,” piped in one of the students, which resulted in a round of laughter.
“Hard to tell from the coin what she really looked like, and our definition of beauty was probably quite different from theirs back then. The stories speak of her beauty and her power over men. It could simply be the way she dressed which may have been more provocative than what European men were used to at the time, or her confidence in her sexuality that made her so alluring. We don’t really know, but whatever it was, Mark Antony fell for her head over heels, much to the objections of the Roman aristocracy.”
“Wasn’t he responsible for the destruction of the Library of Alexandria?” asked Chaney.
“No, that’s the movie confusing things,” replied Laura. “In fact when the Romans set fire to the ships in the harbor, it ignited fires in nearby buildings, but the Library was nowhere near the docks. History records the destruction of thousands of scrolls, but these were most likely just paperwork.”
“Then how was it destroyed?”
“There are several theories, one of which Laura just debunked,” began Acton. “The attack of Aurelian, the decree of a Coptic Pope, or after the conquest by the Muslims.”
“Which do you think it is, Professor?” asked Terrence.
“I think they’re all true in their own way.”
Reading’s eyebrows shot up. “Huh?”
“During the attack of Emperor Aurelian, it is recorded that the main library was destroyed, but a smaller part of the library, in a separate building, survived. This was nearly three hundred years after the death of Cleopatra. Then, over a hundred years later, the Coptic Pope Theophilus declared paganism illegal, and ordered the destruction of all pagan artifacts, including documents. This resulted in the destruction of much if not all of what remained of the library in my opinion.”
The Arab Fall (A James Acton Thriller, Book #6) (James Acton Thrillers) Page 11