King Solomon's Curse

by Andy McDermott

  ‘Funny man. No, I’ve got to tell you about what I found today, because I might need to stay out here a bit longer to examine it fully.’

  ‘What?’

  His disapproval was clear in the single word. Nina tempered her enthusiasm, slightly. ‘We found a secret chamber, a map room. We think it gives the location of a lost city visited by King Solomon. I want to work with the team here to decipher it. We’ll also be shooting extra material for the documentary to cover the new find.’

  ‘And how long’ll that take?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. A couple of days? Maybe.’

  He moved a few steps away from the others for some modicum of privacy. ‘Maybe?’

  ‘Look, it’s a major discovery! I really don’t know how long, okay?’

  Now trying to conceal more than mere exasperation, Eddie glanced at their daughter. ‘Macy was expecting to see you in two days.’

  ‘If I can wrap everything up in time, I will. But I can’t guarantee it at the moment.’

  ‘Well, you could if you let someone else take care of this new thing you’ve found.’ He considered what he had just said. ‘You see? You were worried about turning forty ’cause you thought there wasn’t anything else left for you to discover, but there you go. There’s still loads of old buried junk out there.’

  ‘It’s hardly “junk”, Eddie.’ The frost became more icy.

  ‘I’m joking, love. You should know what I’m like by now.’

  ‘And you know what I’m like. So you know I really, really want to see this through. Okay?’

  His promise to stop using obscenities entirely had been spectacularly blown on a Himalayan mountainside two years earlier, but he still dropped his voice so Macy wouldn’t hear him swear. ‘For fuck’s sake, Nina. If it was just me, you know I’d complain, but let you do your thing. But what about Macy? What am I supposed to tell her, that her mum thinks some old ruin’s more important than her daughter?’

  ‘That’s not fair! Of course I don’t think that. But—’

  ‘If you didn’t, there wouldn’t be a “but”.’

  ‘God damn it, Eddie!’ A long pause as she calmed herself. ‘Okay, look. I wasn’t scheduled to leave Israel until the day after tomorrow anyway, so we’ll talk about this again tomorrow evening. Is that all right?’

  ‘Yeah. So long as you haven’t already made up your mind.’

  ‘I haven’t, I promise.’ She sighed. ‘Can I talk to Macy?’

  ‘Yeah, of course.’ He put on a broad smile for the little girl’s benefit. ‘Hey, love. It’s Mummy. Mommy, I know,’ he added, pre-empting her inevitable correction.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Elizabeth asked him as Macy chatted to Nina.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he replied.

  ‘Archaeology?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Ah.’ Knowing glances passed between his family members.

  Macy said goodbye to her mother, then returned the phone. ‘Eddie?’ said Nina.

  ‘Yeah, I’m here.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Right. I love you. Hope you enjoy the show.’

  ‘Love you too,’ he replied, still annoyed at his wife – and himself, for letting himself get annoyed with her. ‘Talk to you soon.’ He faced the others with another fake smile. ‘So. This horse thing’d better be good, then!’

  5

  Jerusalem

  The alarm on Nina’s iPhone warbled at 6 a.m., but she was already up, making her first coffee of the day before checking her laptop. She had left the computer running overnight, a program comparing a topographical database to a set of search parameters. Said parameters were vaguer than she would have liked, as there had been no indication of the heights of any of the mountains used to triangulate the lost city’s position. She had instead been forced to input the relative bearings of each carved peak surrounding the model of Zhakana and hope there was enough data to produce a result, but had not predicted much success.

  Which meant the message on the screen came as a true surprise.

  She hurriedly reread it, almost expecting it to morph into something more disappointing. But it remained the same. Location found. A string of numbers followed – the longitude and latitude of the place the program had identified.

  The numbers were not as long as she had hoped, though. The software was capable of deducing a location to within as little as fifty feet. The result here had only narrowed it down to an area of four square miles.

  But that was more than close enough.

  Nina quickly brought up the coordinates on a digital globe, zooming in on Africa, central Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the huge country’s eastern region. The nearest sizeable settlement was over thirty miles away, which considering the terrain and dense jungle might as well have been a hundred. No roads were visible on the satellite imagery, only rivers winding languidly through the unbroken carpet of verdant green.

  She switched to a three-dimensional view of the target zone. Terrain features sprang up. A river had curved around the base of the promontory upon which the model Palace Without Entrance stood; she used the trackpad to rotate the view, searching for places where waterways ran around cliffs.

  It took several minutes to survey all the rivers. Two locations seemed promising. She zoomed in on the first.

  Nothing unusual was visible on the ground, but she knew from experience that even large structures could be hidden from aerial observation by the jungle canopy. She moved the virtual camera in a full circle. The terrain didn’t correspond to the model, not flat enough to contain the city.

  The second site. She immediately saw that this was a much closer match. There was the promontory, the river wrapped around its foot like a constricting snake . . .

  And peeking through the covering of green, tantalising hints of stone.

  Nina felt a little kick of excitement. She zoomed in, but the image degenerated into pixelated splodges. The satellite photography was at the limit of its resolution; with nothing there but raw jungle, none of the commercial providers had felt the need to photograph it in higher detail. Government agencies would undoubtedly have better images, but she no longer had access to them.

  ‘Dammit,’ she muttered. She was sure there was more on the clifftop than just trees, but had no way to confirm it. Another click to mark the exact spot, then she returned to a map view. The nearest major town with an airport was Butembo, close to the Ugandan border about a hundred miles to the north-east. Could she hire someone to make a photographic overflight?

  Before she could ponder any more on the prospect, her phone rang. She was surprised; it was barely past dawn. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Nina, hello.’ Ziff. ‘Sorry to wake you.’

  ‘No problem, I was already up. I’m surprised you are, though.’

  ‘I had a phone call.’ He sounded concerned. ‘I’ve just been told about a news story. Are you at your computer?’

  ‘Yes. David, what’s going on?’

  ‘You should see for yourself.’ He gave her the web address of what she guessed was a Jordanian newspaper. ‘The top story, you can’t miss it.’

  ‘Okay, let me see – oh my God!’ she gasped as the page loaded.

  The headline was in Arabic, the script unreadable . . . but the accompanying pictures told her everything. They showed the map room inside the First Temple, the largest image a wide shot of the model city. ‘Where the hell did these come from?’ Nina demanded, appalled. ‘Nothing was supposed to be released until – wait, son of a bitch,’ she said as a possibility occurred to her. ‘Did Mohammad Talal take these?’

  ‘I already spoke to him,’ Ziff told her. ‘He says he had nothing to do with it. The others deny it as well. What about your film crew?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m sure as hel
l going to find out.’

  ‘It may not have been anyone on either of our teams, though. Some of the diggers still had access after we left, and the security guards on the Temple Mount could have simply walked in and taken pictures on their phones.’

  ‘Great, so anyone could have leaked the biggest archaeological discovery of the year for fifty bucks a photo, and we’ve got no way of finding out who.’ She scrolled through the pictures. ‘Jesus, these are clear enough to read the text on the walls!’

  ‘I know. The story has a partial translation,’ the Israeli told her glumly. ‘It names Zhakana, describes how Solomon visited the Palace Without Entrance—’

  ‘There’s a – a goddamn panorama here!’ Nina cut in. Another picture showed a great swathe of the carved landscape surrouning the model city. ‘They might as well have printed a treasure map!’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Ziff asked, surprised.

  ‘I mean, I put the data from the model into a topographical analysis program. And it found Zhakana!’

  He was shocked. ‘Where?’

  ‘Eastern Congo, the Democratic Republic. It’s in the middle of the jungle, but it should be accessible by river. And these photos tell the whole world where it is! If I could find it, so can anyone else.’

  ‘Just because they can find it doesn’t mean that they will. Jungle exploration is hard work, as we both know. And DR Congo is not a country many people would choose to visit.’

  ‘People will do a hell of a lot if they think there’s something valuable at the end of it,’ she countered. ‘One of the reasons the International Heritage Agency was set up in the first place was to control this kind of information and stop tomb raiders from looting newly found sites. But this? Anyone with a map, a computer and patience will be able to use these pictures to find Zhakana. And there’s nothing we can do to stop them.’

  ‘I can contact the Jordanian government. They can put pressure on the newspaper to take down the pictures.’

  ‘It’s too late now. Once something’s on the internet, you may as well put it on a billboard in Times Square.’

  ‘So what should we do?’

  ‘We need to have a full meeting, try to figure out damage control. Beyond that, though? I have no idea.’

  ‘I’ll call everyone to the site.’

  ‘Great. I’ll see you soon.’

  Nina huffed in angry exasperation as she hung up. Finding whoever had leaked the pictures was now less important than trying to minimise the damage, both to the ongoing work at the First Temple and whatever might happen at Zhakana. But what could she do?

  Contact the IHA was her first thought. But she had left the agency over half a decade ago, her last dealings two years previously, and Dr Lester Blumberg was still its director. She and Blumberg were not on each other’s Christmas card lists, to put it mildly.

  So how to protect the new discovery from looters?

  She didn’t know much about the Democratic Republic of Congo, other than that the first word of its name was practically ironic and that while it was rich in natural resources, it was also unstable and fraught with violence. Someone would have to locate the site on the ground, then arrange with the Congolese government to secure it.

  But who could she trust to do that, and who had the contacts necessary to protect the site once it was found? And who would pay for it? She considered herself very comfortably off thanks to her television work, books and film deals, but not nearly enough to fund an expedition out of her own pocket, and she couldn’t imagine Eddie being happy about her doing so even if she could. So who . . . ?

  An idea took on form. She almost dismissed it out of hand, but then gave it greater consideration. Why not? At the very least, she had to try.

  She scrolled through her phone’s contacts. The number she found was American, the area code 323: Los Angeles. There was a ten-hour time difference between Jerusalem and LA, so it was evening in Hollywood. The person she needed to speak to might still be available.

  Nina gathered her thoughts . . . then made the call.

  Two hours later, she arrived at the Temple Mount and entered the dig’s tent. Ziff and his team were there, as were Fisher and the film crew. ‘What happened?’ said the elderly Israeli. ‘We expected you over an hour ago.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I had to make a call, which lasted a lot longer than I expected. But I’ve got some good news.’

  ‘You have found out who sold the photographs of the First Temple?’ asked Talal.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘This leak’s kinda destroyed one of our unique selling points,’ said Fisher. ‘We could have had a worldwide exclusive – the first time Joe Public saw the map room, it would have been on our show. But now, by the time we reach the air it’ll be old hat.’

  ‘Well, hopefully the rest of the documentary should still draw the crowds,’ Nina said. ‘But this call was about something else.’ She addressed the whole film crew. ‘A proposition – for you.’

  ‘For us?’ said Lydia, confused.

  ‘Who did you call?’ Rivero asked.

  ‘Mike Konigsberg, in LA. And after he heard what I had to say, he got the network head on a conference call right away.’

  Fisher was not happy. ‘Wait, you called my boss behind my back?’

  ‘This wasn’t about the current show. This is something new. I told David this morning that the leak of the map room pictures means that sooner or later, and probably sooner, someone will use them to find Zhakana.’

  ‘Because that’ll be dead easy to do,’ Lydia scoffed.

  ‘I’ve already done it.’

  That brought surprised reactions from the documentarians, though not from the archaeologists. Ziff had been selective in sharing the news. ‘It’s in the jungle, in the Democratic Republic of Congo,’ she went on. ‘It’ll be hard to reach – but not impossible. The site is two days’ travel from the nearest airport. The problem is that now the images from the map room are out in the open, anyone else can get there too.’

  ‘Only if they’re crazy enough to go Apocalypse Now into the Congo,’ said Rivero.

  ‘Or Heart of Darkness, more accurately,’ Nina said.

  ‘Heart of what? Anyway, it sure as hell isn’t somewhere I’m in any rush to visit.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ she replied. ‘Because what I discussed with Mike and the network – what they’ve provisionally agreed to back – is a documentary expedition to find Zhakana. They want to follow up the current series with a journey into the unknown, literally. Whatever’s out there, whatever we find, we’ll be the first people to see it for thousands of years.’

  ‘They already agreed to fund it?’ asked Lydia.

  Fisher looked thoughtful. ‘It’s a good hook. Documentary meets reality TV. Indiana Jones, live – or live-ish. It could work.’

  ‘You said we,’ noted Howie.

  Nina nodded. ‘That’s right. You guys are already out here, and you’ve seen everything leading up to the map room’s discovery, so you know the background. Plus you already work as a team, so Mike thought you’d be the obvious choice to do it.’

  ‘Nice of him to ask us first,’ Lydia objected. ‘And you, too!’

  ‘I did tell him you’d probably want to think about it,’ Nina assured her.

  ‘Aw, that’s real good of you!’ The sarcasm was biting.

  ‘It’s definitely worth considering,’ Fisher said to her. She was not convinced.

  ‘How long would this take?’ asked Rivero. ‘We’ve been out here for almost three weeks already. I kinda want to see my girlfriend again.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nina admitted. ‘I’d guess we’d be on the ground for about two weeks.’

  ‘You would be going as well?’ asked Ziff.

  ‘Well, yeah. I mean, it’s my series, it’s about the things I�
�ve discovered. And I found the map room.’

  ‘We all found it!’ Talal protested.

  ‘You wouldn’t even have looked at that wall if I hadn’t been there. But the main reason the network was willing to consider this is because I proposed it, and it’s conditional on my involvement.’

  ‘So they won’t do it without you, but they will do it without us?’ said Lydia.

  ‘Pretty much, yeah. Mike wants to know if you’re interested. But we’re kind of on the clock,’ she warned. ‘The main reason I proposed this is so we can find Zhakana before anyone else – looters, treasure hunters, even locals out for a quick buck. So don’t take too long thinking about it, because if it goes ahead, it’ll be soon.’

  ‘How soon?’ Fisher asked.

  ‘As soon as everything can be arranged. We’ll have to deal with the Congolese government, hire guides and porters. And we’ll need security too. The DRC isn’t super-safe right now.’

  ‘No shit,’ muttered Rivero.

  ‘So decide whether or not you want to be involved as soon as you can,’ Nina told them. ‘If you want to stay together as a team, that’s good. But if the network has to hire replacements, they need to know.’

  A discussion began amongst the film crew. Lydia and Rivero appeared the least enthusiastic, Fisher undecided, while Howie was positively excited at the prospect. ‘We get to explore an uncharted jungle?’ he said, grinning. ‘With a lost city in the middle of it? C’mon, that’s awesome! Imagine seeing that model spread out ahead, only for real. That would be . . .’ He struggled to find a suitably hyperbolic word, settling for one he had already used. ‘Awesome!’

  ‘It’d be a hell of a feather in our caps,’ mused Fisher. ‘If we actually did find the city, it could be Emmy material. This could really boost all our careers. What do you think, Lids?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the New Zealander uncertainly. ‘I get what you’re saying, Steve, but it’s another two weeks. And we’d be roughing it in the jungle too.’

  ‘Come on!’ Fisher said with a smile. ‘Where’s that Kiwi spirit?’