by Paul Sussman
'I'll leave this to you, Squires. I've got other stuff to deal with.'
'At least introduce yourself, old boy.'
'For Christ's sake, this isn't a goddam picnic.'
He spat and, turning, waddled away, wiping at his neck with his handkerchief. Squires watched him go.
'You must forgive our American friend. A sterling fellow in his own way, but somewhat underschooled in the arts of common politeness.'
He smiled apologetically and, reaching into his pocket, produced a boiled sweet which he proceeded to unwrap, his long white fingers tugging at the cellophane like the legs of a large spider. There was an extended silence, broken eventually by Khalifa.
'It was a set-up, wasn't it?' he said quietly, flicking his cigarette down into the trench. 'The tomb, the text, all this . . .' He waved his arm around him. 'All a set-up. To lure Sayf al-Tha'r back to Egypt. Back to where you could get him.'
Squires raised his eyebrows slightly but said nothing, just finished unwrapping his sweet and popped it in his mouth.
Despite the heat Tara felt something cold creeping across her skin. 'You mean . . .' She couldn't get her thoughts clear.
'The tomb was fake,' said Khalifa. 'Not the objects. They were genuine. But the wall decoration, the text: all modern. Bait to attract Sayf al-Tha'r. Brilliant, when you think about it.'
Tara stared at Squires, a look of mingled shock and incomprehension on her face. Daniel's face was pale, his body tense, as though he was waiting for someone to hit him.
'So who exactly are you?' asked Khalifa. 'Military? Secret service?'
Squires sucked thoughtfully on his sweet. 'Elements of both really. Best not to get too specific. Suffice it to say each of us represents our respective governments in what might loosely be termed an intelligence capacity.' He brushed some fluff from his sleeve. 'So what gave it away?' he asked Khalifa.
'That the tomb wasn't real?' The detective shrugged. 'The shabtis from Iqbar's shop initially. They were genuine, certainly, but of a later date than the tomb they'd been taken from. Everything else was First Persian Period. They were Second. If they'd been earlier I could have understood. It would simply have meant they'd been stolen from an older tomb and reused. Later, however, just didn't make sense. How could an object from the fourth century BC end up in a tomb that had been sealed a hundred and fifty years earlier? There were possible explanations, but it got me thinking there was something not right about the whole thing. It was only when I saw the tomb itself that I was certain.'
'You clearly have an acute eye,' said Squires. 'We thought we'd got it just right.'
'You had,' said Khalifa. 'It was perfect. That's what gave it away. Something my old professor told me. No piece of ancient Egyptian art is ever entirely precise. There's always at least one flaw, however tiny. I went over every inch of that tomb and there wasn't a single mistake. No drips of ink, no misaligned hieroglyphs, no correctional marks. It was faultless. Too faultless. The Egyptians were never that exact. It had to be a fake.'
Daniel's hand slipped out of Tara's and he moved a couple of paces away from her, shaking his head, a barely perceptible smile pulling at his mouth. She wanted to go over to him, hold him, tell him he couldn't have known, but she sensed he didn't want her near.
'Even then I still wasn't sure what was going on,' continued Khalifa. 'Someone had clearly gone to a lot of trouble faking a tomb. And the purpose of that tomb seemed to be to lead whoever found it out here into the desert. I guessed one of the security services was involved. It was them who were following me in Luxor. And the British embassy too.' He glanced at Oates. 'I couldn't see how it all fitted together, though. Still couldn't until about half an hour ago, when the helicopters arrived. Then it all fell into place.'
There was a brief burst of gunfire from somewhere on the other side of the camp. A gust of hot wind blew across them.
'Ironic, really,' sighed Khalifa. 'The amount of money you must have spent setting this whole thing up would have been enough to solve most of the problems that create people like Sayf al-Tha'r in the first place. How much did it cost you to bury this lot out here? Millions? Tens of millions? God, you must have emptied every museum storeroom in Egypt.'
Squires said nothing, sucking meditatively on his sweet. Then, suddenly, he began to chuckle.
'Oh dear, oh dear, Inspector, you do seem to have got the wrong end of the stick. The tomb was indeed a fake, as you so cleverly deduced. And, as you also realized, its purpose was to lead whoever found it out here into the desert. We didn't have to bury anything, however. It was already here.'
He noted the look on Khalifa's face and his laughter redoubled.
'Oh yes, this is the lost army of Cambyses. The real thing. Just as it was buried two and a half thousand years ago. All we did was to frame a plan around it.'
'But I thought . . .'
'That we'd planted it out here ourselves? I fear you've rather overestimated our capabilities. Even with the combined resources of the Egyptian, American and British governments we'd have struggled to fabricate something on this scale.'
Khalifa was staring out across the crater, disbelieving. The tangled remains of the ancient army stretched away as far as the eye could see – arms and legs and heads and torsos, a jumble of ossified flesh and sinew, with here and there an upturned face, eyes wide, mouth open, bobbing helplessly on a tide of shattered humanity.
'When was it found?' he whispered.
'A little over twelve months ago.' Squires smiled. 'By a young American chap. John Cadey. Spent an entire year working out here all on his own. People said he was mad, but he was convinced it was here and so it was. One of the greatest finds in the history of archaeology. Perhaps the greatest find. Just a shame he didn't live long enough to enjoy his triumph.'
Jemal had begun clicking his worry beads, the noise magnified and sharpened by the silence of the desert so that it seemed to fill the air.
'How are we doing for time, Crispin?' asked Squires.
Oates looked at his watch. 'About twenty minutes.'
'Then I think the least we can do is to offer our friends an explanation of how all this came about, don't you?'
He thrust his hands into his pockets and wandered down to the edge of the excavation crater. Beneath him Sayf al-Tha'r's body lay tangled in a filigree of arms and legs.
'It all began, I suppose, with a young man named Ali Khalifa.' He stared at the body for a moment, then turned. 'Oh yes, Inspector, we know all about your relationship. I sympathize, I really do. It can't have been easy, a decent law-abiding citizen like you being the brother of
Egypt's most wanted terrorist. Not easy at all.'
Khalifa said nothing, just stared at Squires. Somewhere on the far side of the camp there was a loud whump as an oil drum exploded.
'He first came to our attention in the mid-Eighties. Prior to that he'd belonged to a variety of minor fundamentalist groups, nothing to concern us particularly. In 1987, however, he broke away and, styling himself Sayf al-Tha'r, formed his own organization. Began murdering foreign nationals. What had initially been a domestic matter suddenly became an international one. I became involved on behalf of Her Majesty's government; Massey, who you just met, acted for the Americans.'
Teams of soldiers had started collecting dead bodies and laying them out in rows alongside the excavation trench. Tara watched them, Squires's voice seeming to come from far away. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Daniel staring out across the remains of the army, expressionless, the machine-gun still clutched in his hand.
'We did everything we could to catch him,' said Squires, 'but he was clever. Always managed to stay one step ahead. We very nearly got him in '96, in an ambush down at Asyut, but he gave us the slip again and hopped across the border into the Sudan. After that it was impossible. We got plenty of his followers, but it meant nothing if the man himself was still at large. And so long as he stayed out of Egypt there was no way we were going to catch him.'
'And s
o you set a trap to lure him back,' said Khalifa.
'Well,' said Squires, smiling, 'it was really more a case of the trap setting itself. We merely added certain details.'
He pulled out a handkerchief and began polishing the lenses of his glasses. Jemal's worry beads were clacking faster.
'The crisis came just over a year ago when he damn nearly assassinated the American ambassador. That really caused a storm. We were put under extraordinary pressure to deliver him. All sorts of wild schemes were flying around. There was even talk of a limited nuclear strike against northern Sudan. Then, however, Dr Cadey made his amazing discovery and we started thinking along altogether different lines.'
Somewhere far off there was a scream, followed by a brief thud of gunfire.
'We'd been monitoring Cadey for some time,' explained Jemal. 'He was working close to the Libyan border and we wanted to ensure he was doing nothing to compromise national security. One day we intercepted a package he'd sent, from Siwa. It contained photographs: a corpse, weapons, clothing. There was a covering note. Just one sentence: "The lost army is no longer lost."'
'Initially we didn't appreciate the potential of the find,' said Squires. 'It was Crispin who alerted us to the possibilities. What was it you said, old boy?'
'That it was a good thing Sayf al-Tha'r hadn't discovered it or he'd be rich enough to equip an army of his own.' Oates smiled, pleased with himself.
'That was the spark. We started thinking: what if Sayf al-Tha'r had found it? Something that big would be too good an opportunity to miss. Complete financial independence. All his funding problems over. A godsend. And he'd almost certainly want to see it himself. It was inconceivable a man as obsessed with history as he was would stay sitting down in the Sudan while his men were uncovering a find of that magnitude. Oh no, he'd come back. And when he did . . .'
He raised his spectacles to his mouth, breathed on each lens in turn, and slowly circled his handkerchief around the glass. More and more dead bodies were being laid out alongside the excavation, like rows of big black dominoes.
'We approached Cadey and asked for his cooperation,' continued Squires, 'but he wasn't at all accommodating, and in the end we were left with no choice but to . . . remove him from the equation. Unpleasant, but the stakes were too high to let one man stand in our way.'
Tara stared at him, shaking her head, a look of mingled horror and disbelief on her face. The Englishman seemed not to notice her expression. He merely held up his glasses again, examined them and resumed polishing.
'The problem then became how to lead Sayf al-Tha'r to the army without him actually suspecting he was being led. That was the key: he had to believe it was he himself who was making the discovery. If it occurred to him for one instant the find was in any way compromised he wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole.'
'But why go to all the trouble of inventing a tomb?' asked Khalifa. 'Why not just plant someone in his organization who claimed to know where the army was?'
'Because he would never have believed it,' replied Squires. 'This isn't the Theban Hills, where people are stumbling over new finds all the time. This is the middle of nowhere. It's inconceivable someone would just happen to find the army.'
'Cadey did.'
'But Cadey was a professional archaeologist. Sayf al-Tha'r's people are fellahin, peasants. They'd have no business out here. It just wouldn't have rung true.'
'Whereas the tomb of someone who'd survived the army would?'
'In a bizarre way, yes. It was somehow so outlandish it could only be real. Sayf al-Tha'r would have been suspicious, of course. Who wouldn't be? But not as suspicious as he would have been about someone claiming to have found the army itself.'
He gave his glasses a final buff and returned his handkerchief to his pocket. Khalifa pulled out his cigarettes and removed one from the pack. There was a smouldering crate nearby and, crossing to it, he held the cigarette tip against the glowing wood.
'I really can't bear to see you having to light your cigarettes like that, old boy,' said Squires.
Khalifa shrugged. 'Dravic took my lighter.'
'How very thoughtless of him.' Squires turned to Jemal. 'Be a good fellow and lend the inspector some matches, would you?'
The Egyptian pulled a box from his pocket and threw it across.
'Has anyone seen our friend Dravic, by the way?' asked Squires. 'He seems to be keeping a remarkably low profile.'
Tara continued staring at the row of black-robed bodies. 'He's dead,' she said, her voice dull, beyond caring. 'On the other side of the dune. Quicksand.'
There was a brief pause, and then Squires smiled. 'Well, that's one less problem for us to deal with.' He pulled another sweet from his pocket and began tweaking at the wrapper. 'Where was I?'
'The tomb,' said Khalifa.
'Ah yes, the tomb. Well, there was no way we could have dug one from scratch. That would have been wholly impractical. Fortunately there was an existing one that fitted the bill perfectly. Right period and design. Empty. Undecorated. And, most importantly, unknown to anyone aside from a handful of Theban necropolis specialists. Sayf al-Tha'r's people certainly wouldn't have heard of it, which was, as I'm sure you'll appreciate, crucial if the whole thing was to work.'
Part of the sweet was stuck to the wrapper and he stopped for a moment to pick away the cellophane.
'Even with a readymade tomb it still took us almost a year to complete the job.' He sighed. 'Painstaking doesn't get even close to describing it. The decoration had to be created from scratch and then chemically aged to make it appear two and a half thousand years old. And, of course, it all had to be done under conditions of absolute secrecy. Believe me, it was a huge operation. There were times when we thought it would never be finished.'
He finally managed to free the sweet and slipped it into his mouth, rolling the wrapper into a ball and putting it in his pocket.
'Still, we got there in the end. The decoration was completed and the tomb stocked with a selection of funerary items from the storerooms of Luxor and Cairo museums, with a few bits from the army itself. All that remained was to tip off one of Sayf al-Tha'r's informants and wait for his men to decipher the inscription.'
'Except that someone got there first,' said Khalifa.
'The one thing we hadn't expected,' said Squires, shaking his head. 'A million to one chance. Ten million to one. Even then it needn't have been a complete disaster. They might have just taken a few objects and left the decoration intact. As it was, they hacked out the one bit of text that really mattered so that when Sayf al-Tha'r's people did get there the tomb was, from our point of view at least, completely useless. Devastating, really.'
'Although not as devastating as it was for Nayar and Iqbar,' said Khalifa quietly.
'No,' conceded Squires. 'Their deaths were most regrettable. As was that of your father, Miss Mullray.'
Tara looked up, eyes bright with hatred. 'You used us,' she spat. 'You let them kill my father and you didn't think twice about risking our lives too. You're as bad as Sayf al-Tha'r.'
Squires smiled benignly. 'A slight exaggeration, I think, although given the circumstances a perfectly understandable one. Your father's death was, sadly, beyond our control, but yes, we did use you. As with Dr Cadey, we concluded the well-being of the individual must be subordinated to the wider interests of society. Distasteful, but necessary.'
He was silent for a while, sucking on his sweet.
'Initially we had no idea what had gone wrong with the plan. We knew that Dravic had discovered the tomb, but for some reason he didn't seem to be taking the bait. When we found out about the piece of missing text we were faced with an extraordinary dilemma. It was too late to abort the whole thing, but neither could we do anything overt to help Sayf al-Tha'r. We had no choice but to let events take their course.'