The Memory Agent

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  ALSO BY MATTHEW B. J. DELANEY

  Black Rain

  Jinn

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503942691

  ISBN-10: 1503942694

  Cover design by Damonza

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  September 1933

  In the instant before memory starts, I could have been anyone. All worlds were possible. But then like a rusted machine slowly coming, beginning to turn, the gears of memory rotated into place.

  I awoke in a bed, my face glazed with sweat, my mouth dry and awful. I was in an ordinary hotel room. A ceiling fan spun lazily, circulating warm air and disturbing the pages of the Pearl S. Buck novel on the small writing desk. A suitcase lay open on the floor, a few stacks of neatly folded clothes visible inside. On the bedside table, an Imperial Airways ticket from London to Cairo.

  My room was on the third floor of the Luxor Hotel and looked out across the crowded Jewish quarter of Cairo. Outside, the street bustled. Cairo was a city of the salesman. Vendor stalls were packed tightly together, hawking everything from fruits to rugs to falcons. Anything could be had in the streets. The entire classical world had ended up in Cairo, a counterfeit collection that could rival the world’s best museums. Several archeological expeditions that ended in an empty looted tomb could be artificially augmented with a few select purchases from a vendor’s cart.

  A journal was open on the table. Inside, a list of names.

  Samuel Clayton

  Charlotte Gonzales

  Edward Selberg

  Nasir Hajjar

  Elizabeth Blake

  Bobby Chan

  Below the names, a year.

  Already the afternoon heat was beginning to fade as the sun set behind the minarets of the old city. Long shadows stretched across dusty streets. I checked my watch. The rest of my team would already be assembling downstairs. I splashed water on my face from a basin, then left my room.

  The year was 1933.

  The Luxor was one of those large postcolonial affairs, a relic from the old British Empire which was quickly fading from the reaches of the globe. The lobby was large and open-aired. Porters stood at attention in jackets and white gloves, visibly sweating in the heat. In the dining room, brilliantly white-clothed tables were scattered like marbles across the hardwood floor. Charlotte Gonzales stood alone at the bar drinking tea from a clear glass.

  Charlotte’s skin was luminously pale, her wavy hair a shade more colorless than blonde. The only feature that sparkled with color were her eyes. They were a deep shade of green, big and round as an infant’s, but filled with more cunning than naiveté. They were the eyes of someone who had experienced the world, and so far, had not liked what she had seen.

  She was the team’s linguist and translator.

  “Rest of the team is still waking up,” Charlotte said.

  “You know what this is about?”

  “They must have found something in the desert.”

  Next to arrive was Edward Selberg. He staggered through the main doors of the dining room, holding his head with one hand, a grimace on his face. He had a thin, sharp countenance and narrow eyes, like some minor villain in a Charles Dickens novel. He shuffled forward as if drunk, leaned heavily against the bar, and nodded to Charlotte and me. “Anyone have any aspirin? My head is killing me.”

  “Lay off the vodka,” Charlotte said.

  Selberg shook his head. “I don’t think I had anything to drink last night. I don’t remember a thing.”

  “Which probably means you had too much to drink.”

  He continued to rub his forehead with one hand, while with the other he revolved a pair of dice over and over in his palm. He slapped the dice down onto the bar counter, then poured a cup of tea from the silver pot.

  The doors swung open again as Samuel Clayton entered. A black man with the misshapen nose and swollen eyes of a former boxer, he wore long boots, khaki pants, and a white shirt held up by a leather bandolier which also carried the weight of a Colt revolver. A brown American-style cowboy hat was pulled low over his brow. He nodded to us, then sat by himself at one of the tables. I brought him a cup of tea and set it down on the table. Clayton and I went back years.

  “Selberg’s got a headache,” I said.

  “I’ve got an everything ache. Head, body. Feel like I just stepped out of the ring. And look at this.” Clayton held up his hand. His fingers trembled. “I don’t know what’s going on with me.”

  Before I could reply, two more men entered. One was Nasir Hajjar, a tall Egyptian, with a black beard and large, round stomach. He wore khaki pants and a filthy button-down shirt. He was the local guide and he carried with him two painter’s easels that he set up in the front of the room. The easels were both covered with canvas. With him was a white man in a tan derby hat with a thick mustache that shone with wax like a new bowling ball. He wore an old-fashioned, tan, sack suit with a red bow tie, and in one hand he held a long, black walking cane. The stranger looked like an illustration from a Victorian novel.

  The man with the mustache placed a leather satchel on the table, looked at each of us, leaned against his cane and began to speak. “A month ago, a man stumbled out of the desert into the city of Luxor dying of thirst and claiming to have found a lost city beneath the Earth. He said this city was in the Valley of the Kings and—”

  “I’m sorry,” Charlotte interrupted. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Dunbar. I was sent here as the representative of a group of investors who are funding this project.”

  “Fine. That’s what you do, but who are you?”

  “I just told you, I’m here representing the people paying your salaries. As far as I’m concerned, you are aware of everything relevant that you need to know about me. May I continue?”

  Charlotte nodded, leaning back against the bar.

  “Thank you.” Dunbar gave a long thoughtful pull on his mustache. “Not long after being found, this man died, but not before he had drawn this.”

  Dunbar pulled away the covering from one of the easels to reveal a stencil drawing of what appeared to be a modern city skyline. I could see what appeared to be several tall skyscrapers, architecture that did not exist in Cairo. “This is what the man claims to have found beneath the sand.”

  “Sounds like a mental patient to me,” Selberg said.

  “Maybe. But sometimes it’s simply easier to dismiss someone as mentally ill than it is to open one’s mind to the possibility of the truth,” Dunbar said. “But this man was a Bedouin. He had spent his entire life in the desert. He had never visited a western city before, so where could he have seen the model for what he drew?”

  “He must have seen a photograph. The Valley of Kings is filled with westerners,” Selberg said.

  “Possible. But in the man’s possessions, we found two other item
s.” From his pocket, Dunbar revealed a small book. The pages were yellowed with age, the cover a dark leather. “The Bedouin cannot read English, but he said he found this book on the remains of a dead man dressed in a red and blue uniform who carried a rifle. Our experts believe this to be the 130-year-old journal of a French soldier named Bouchard who served under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte during his expedition into Egypt.”

  “But Napoleon’s army never made it as far south as the Valley of the Kings,” Charlotte said. “His last major engagement was near Cairo, hundreds of miles to the north.”

  “That is true,” Dunbar said. “But while his army never made it that far south, he did send emissaries for scientific exploration throughout the region. It’s possible one of these men made it to the Valley of the Kings. Which would explain how the Bedouin also found this.”

  Dunbar opened his hand like a magician to reveal a single gold coin. On the front of the coin was the familiar profile of a man, the words Bonaparte Premier Consul inscribed around the edge. On the back of the coin, 20 FRANCS. Dunbar flipped the coin end over end along the top of his fingers.

  “So you found a coin?” Clayton said. “How impressed should we be by that?”

  “As this is a Napoleonic-era coin minted the same year as his expedition to Egypt,” Dunbar winked, and twisted one end of his mustache, “I would say you should be very impressed. Wouldn’t you?”

  Charlotte nodded in agreement. “Have you translated the journal?”

  The coin vanished back into Dunbar’s pocket. “We have. Bouchard writes about traveling for months along the banks of the Nile, which is consistent with a trip south from Cairo. He arrives in an area described as two valleys in the Theban Hills on the West Bank of the Nile near Luxor. Here he claims to have found an opening that led down to a great city beneath the Earth. A city of buildings higher than anything he had ever seen. A city made of metal and glass.”

  “There have always been legends of mythical lost cities,” Charlotte said. “El Dorado. Atlantis. Perhaps every culture on Earth has tales on the subject. Doesn’t mean the stories are real.”

  Dunbar tapped the journal thoughtfully. “That is very true. Perhaps Bouchard was suffering from delirium. He had been through a war, then traveling through the desert for months, maybe he gets a little frazzled. Or maybe he doesn’t.”

  “You said the Bedouin had two items in his possession,” I said. “What else did he have besides the journal?”

  “No matter what explanation we might come up with for the journal,” Dunbar said, “there is nothing I think to explain the second item.”

  From his satchel, Dunbar pulled a folded newspaper. The paper was yellowed to parchment, and Dunbar carefully smoothed it out across the table. We gathered around. Across the front was the familiar masthead of The New York Times with its Old English font. The rest of the paper was spaced with articles. Some local politician had been accused of corruption. There had been a fire in Manhattan. The stories weren’t familiar, but the images were vibrant with color.

  “What am I looking at?”

  Dunbar tapped just below the masthead to a date.

  November 3, 2017.

  The silence in the room stretched out for almost a minute. Sounds filtered in through the silence. In the hotel kitchen a dish was dropped, followed by a round of cursing. Two men spoke in the hall outside. In the distance, the call to prayer sounded. Finally, in the dining room, someone coughed.

  “That’s almost ninety years from now,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  Dunbar shook his head. “We didn’t understand either. We checked the entire newspaper. The people, the events. None of them exist in our time.”

  “I don’t know . . .” Charlotte said. “Sounds . . .”

  “Too much to believe? That’s what we thought too,” Dunbar said. “Until we found the tunnel.”

  The Valley of Kings was almost a full day’s travel south of Cairo. Nasir had gone ahead and met the rest of the team at base camp. The excavation site stretched a hundred yards along the valley. Khaki-colored tents billowed in a desert breeze, while near the tomb fifty diggers worked with the constant ring of metal against stone. I shielded my eyes against the sun and studied the excavated opening cut into the side of the valley.

  “Parker, I am so glad you arrived,” Nasir said to me. “We have made great progress on the seal.”

  “You found a seal?” I asked as we walked toward the tunnel opening.

  The seal was a wall of terra-cotta, which traditionally separated the tunnels from the burial chamber. The same type of seal had blocked off the tomb of the pharaoh, Tutankhamen.

  “We have found more than the seal,” Nasir said.

  Beyond the opening, a stone stairway led down into the Earth. The air began to cool significantly as we descended. Electric torches filled the small space with white light and guided us down until we reached a flat area about twenty feet wide. The underground chamber ended with two stone doors, connected by a rod of wood wrapped with rope and sealed with clay.

  On the clay was stamped the royal seal of ancient Egypt, an egret backed by an image of the sun.

  “The clay is unbroken,” Selberg whispered.

  “Good sign,” I replied. I had seen many tombs before this where the clay seal had been broken hundreds of years before by grave robbers. Sometimes only months after the burial, thieves would find the tomb, break open the door, and take whatever they could. Over the years, the ceiling appeared to have partially collapsed. A heavy mound of rubble blocked the base of the door. It would have to be cleared before we could move forward.

  I bent forward and inspected the seal. “And you say it was completely intact when you found it?”

  “As if nothing had disturbed it for thousands of years,” Nasir said. “And we also found him.”

  Nasir pointed to the far corner of the room.

  In the flickering light of the torch, I saw the remains of a man laid out on the stone. The skin on his face was shrunken and dried, his cheeks and jaw sharp edges beneath parchment. His lips had retracted to reveal uneven teeth set in gums long turned to bone. He wore a military uniform: white pants and a dark blue jacket, both faded and dust covered, but exactly as the Bedouin had described.

  Two white leather belts crossed the dead soldier’s chest; one supported a cartridge box, the other held a short saber. Near the body lay a long firearm, broken and rusted over by the passage of time.

  Selberg bent down enthusiastically. “He appears to be a French soldier of the Napoleonic wars. The uniform is quite distinct. Look, here, on the button, an eagle with outstretched wings. This is the mark of Napoleon himself.”

  “And the firearm?” I said.

  “Definitely French make. It’s a Charleville musket, named after the armory in Charleville, France.”

  “What do you think he was doing in the Valley?” I said.

  Selberg tapped his lower lip with a dusty finger. “Napoleon landed with thirteen ships near Alexandria in 1798 and marched inward toward Cairo to cut off the British food supply by capturing the fertile areas around the Nile. It’s possible a small band of his troops made it down this far.”

  “To do what?” I said.

  “I have no idea. The Valley of the Kings would have been unknown to the French in 1798. I can think of no compelling reason for him to travel the hundreds of miles from Cairo to Luxor and into the Valley. And at that time, this would have been a brutal trip. Most would die trying.”

  “Must have been something important. Whatever the reason,” I said. I bent down and gently inspected the dead soldier’s pockets. This close, the skeleton was frightening. The skin was yellowed and dried, but still intact, as were the man’s hair and teeth. The dry climate and the darkness of the tomb had preserved the man’s uniform. The blue jacket still felt soft to the touch and the pants retained their original crease. The man’s boots, though covered in dust, looked like they would polish up nicely with the right care.
/>   I felt paper inside his vest. “There’s something here.”

  Slowly I retrieved two small items. The first was a strange, small card, like paper, except shiny in the light, and it seemed to be constructed of a durable material the likes of which I’d never touched. Along the top portion, in rich blue lettering was the word MetroCard.

  “What’s a MetroCard?” Charlotte said.

  “No idea,” I replied. The second item was a square of parchment, which I unfolded on the dead man’s chest, being careful so that the creases did not tear in my fingers. The parchment appeared to be a charcoal rubbing off a stone or some other hard, smooth surface. The sheet was the size of a dinner menu and was covered in written characters.

  The characters were grouped into three sections. I was no linguistics expert, but the top section of the parchment was obviously Egyptian hieroglyphs. The middle and bottom portions were unknown to me. Charlotte bent down and held the electric torch over the paper.

  “My God,” she said. “This looks like a portion of the Rosetta Stone.”

  Anyone familiar with the classical world knew of the Rosetta Stone, the discovery of which allowed researchers to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics, but I couldn’t remember all the details of the story.

  “Tell me again about the Stone?” I asked.

  Charlotte studied the parchment. “During the two years Napoleon and his men were in Egypt, his soldiers found a stone marked by three distinct bands of inscription. Two of the inscriptions were written in an unknown language. The third was in Greek. And each inscription bore the same message.”

  Selberg cut her off. “Thereby allowing researchers to use the known language of Greek to decipher the other two.”

  “What were the languages?” I asked.

  “You can see them here,” she said. She indicated the parchment rubbing and I could see the three distinct bands of writing on the stone.

  “The top portion is hieroglyphics. Demotic script in the middle and Greek on the bottom,” Charlotte explained.

  “What’s Demotic?”

  “It’s sort of a shorthand version of hieroglyphics.”