The Cult of Osiris nwaec-5

by Andy McDermott

  ‘My name’s Nina Wilde. She left a message asking me to call.’

  The ambient noise from the other end of the line became muffled as the man put his hand over the phone. There was a short exchange with someone else, then a cry of excitement. Nina raised her eyebrows. This Macy was very keen to speak to her.

  A clunk and rattle as the phone was snatched from its owner. ‘Hello? Hello! Dr Wilde, are you there? Is that you?’ The woman’s accent was upscale southern with a vaguely Hispanic lilt.

  ‘Yeah, hi,’ Nina replied as she reached the sidewalk, rounding a ridiculously large red pickup truck parked outside her building before crossing the street. ‘Is this Macy?’

  ‘Yes, it is, yeah! Dr Wilde, thanks for calling me back, it’s such an honour to be talking to you. Really! I’m a big fan of yours.’

  A fan? Nina wasn’t quite sure how to take that. This wasn’t some practical joke, was it? ‘Uh . . . thanks. You left a message at the IHA that you wanted to talk to me?’

  ‘Yes. Look, this’ll probably sound weird and maybe a bit stalkerish, but I really need to see you in person. I’ve got something I need to show you. You still live in New York, don’t you?’

  Nina eyed the streets around her. ‘More or less.’

  ‘I’m staying with a friend in the East Village. Is there any chance you could meet me?’

  ‘I’m actually heading into Manhattan right now,’ Nina volunteered without thinking, before realising that she’d just blown a chance to turn Macy down politely. ‘But I don’t know if I’ll have the time today.’

  ‘I can meet you whenever, wherever - I just need ten minutes of your time.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘It’s about Dr Berkeley’s dig in Egypt, at the Sphinx.’

  The mention of Berkeley brought back the previous day’s humiliating meeting with Rothschild, which didn’t do Macy’s request any favours. ‘That dig’s nothing to do with me,’ Nina told her. ‘If you want to talk to somebody about it, you’d be better off finding someone at the IHA.’

  ‘No, I really need to show this to you. In person. You’ll understand why once you’ve seen it. Please, Dr Wilde? Just ten minutes. Five minutes, even. It’s really important.’

  The pleading in her voice seemed completely genuine. ‘Look,’ Nina finally said, ‘I’m meeting a friend, and we’re going to dinner later. But I might be able to see you after that.’ The East Village was her old neighbourhood, not too far from where she and Lola would be having dinner. She tried to think of somewhere fairly close to a subway station, so she could return home afterwards with the minimum of fuss. ‘There’s a coffee shop called 52 Perk-Up on 7th Street, near Second Avenue. If I’ve got time, I’ll call you and we can meet there. I can’t promise anything, though.’

  ‘That’d be awesome,’ said Macy with evident relief. ‘Thank you, Dr Wilde. Thanks for talking to me.’

  ‘No problem. Bye.’ Nina disconnected, already wondering if she could come up with an excuse to let Macy down gently. Whatever she had to say about Berkeley’s dig, it wasn’t her problem.

  Still, ten minutes of her time wouldn’t kill her.

  Eddie spotted the long queue of people outside the nightclub from the far end of the block. Even relatively early in the evening, people were lined up four abreast in the hope of getting into one of the Upper West Side’s hottest new venues.

  ‘Looks pretty cool, huh?’ said Grant as his bright orange Lamborghini Murciélago cruised slowly along the street. For day-to-day travel round New York the actor relied on the ostentatious anonymity of the limo service, but when he wanted to be noticed he employed a vastly more eyecatching vehicle. ‘Check out that crowd - hell, check out those legs!’ He lowered his window for a better look at the miniskirted women waiting to enter. The car had already attracted attention, and when people realised a Hollywood star was at the wheel the reaction was almost a riot. Grant grinned his expensive grin and waved, blipping the throttle to let a tiny fraction of the supercar’s 631 horsepower howl through its exhaust pipes.

  A section of sidewalk at the club entrance was cordoned off by velvet ropes: the VIP area. Grant pulled over, a valet swooping in to collect the keys in exchange for a token as he got out and stood before a galaxy of flashing phone cameras. Nobody needed to check that his name was on the VIP list, though Eddie didn’t receive the same star treatment. ‘Whoa, guys, he’s with me,’ said Grant as two bouncers closed ranks in front of Eddie like meaty sliding doors. ‘It’s cool, he’s my bodyguard.’

  ‘This little guy?’ rumbled the larger of the two hulks, smirking. Eddie gave him a scathing look. A brief stand-off, then the bouncers moved apart and he followed Grant inside. Behind, a snarl announced the Lamborghini’s departure for the parking structure down the street.

  The club’s interior was on three levels, the lowest an almost pit-like dance floor with a higher area containing the long, neon-lit bar surrounding it. Overlooking both was a glass-walled balcony: the VIP lounge. The pounding music was as trendy and contemporary as the overdone hairstyles of the clubbers, and Eddie didn’t have the slightest idea of the band’s name.

  ‘Christ, I feel old,’ he muttered as he followed Grant up to the balcony.

  Nina almost didn’t call Macy after her pleasant afternoon and dinner with Lola; in fact, until she opened her bag to check her phone for messages and saw the note, she had completely forgotten her earlier conversation. She could have simply shrugged and gone home, but the twin proddings of politeness and minor guilt swayed her otherwise.

  She had no messages, so entered Macy’s number again. The same man answered, with the same suspicious air, before she heard Macy say in the background, ‘Is that her? Joey, give me the phone!’ One brief scuffle for possession later, and she was on the line. ‘Hi? Dr Wilde? Is that you?’

  ‘It’s me,’ Nina assured her.

  She sounded relieved. ‘Thanks for calling back. Can you still meet me?’

  ‘Do you remember where I said?’

  ‘The coffee place? Yeah, Joey knows where it is. Can you meet me right now?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess,’ said Nina, still not sure if she should go through with it. ‘I can be there in . . . fifteen minutes?’

  ‘That’s great! I’ll be waiting for you. Dr Wilde, thank you so much for doing this. I’ll see you soon.’ She hung up.

  Nina made a faint noise of exasperation, then set off. She might as well get it over with.

  The area hadn’t altered much in the two and a half years since she’d moved out of the East Village; some stores and restaurants had changed hands and a few buildings had been renovated, but 52 Perk-Up looked much the same as the last time she’d been there. The paintings on the back wall were by different local artists, and new faces were serving, but beyond that it was as self-consciously bohemian as ever.

  It was also small; she would have deduced which customer was Macy within moments even if she hadn’t sprung up to greet her. ‘Dr Wilde! Hi!’

  ‘You’re Macy, I take it,’ said Nina, coming to her table. Macy Sharif was not what she had expected; she had assumed that anyone involved with a dig as major as the Sphinx would be at least a post-grad. But the extremely attractive young girl before her, black hair tied back in a ponytail, was too young even to be a graduate, maybe still in her teens. She was also dressed more for spring break than study - as well as an extremely short denim skirt, she wore a very tight designer top emphasising her breasts. The slightly malicious thought crossed Nina’s mind that Berkeley might have chosen her for his team for reasons other than her academic qualifications, before she decided that was unfair. She didn’t know anything about the girl; she should at least give her the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Yeah, that’s me! Hi.’ Macy seemed genuinely pleased at the meeting; maybe she really was a fan. ‘I’m really glad Lola managed to get hold of you - I tried calling your number in the phone book, but it wasn’t working. So I went there in person, but the building super said you’d moved out.’<
br />
  ‘Yeah, a few months ago.’ Now Nina was faintly unsettled; perhaps Macy was a fan in the original sense of the word, derived from ‘fanatic’. But she appeared normal and polite enough.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’

  ‘No thanks, I’m fine.’ The table had another occupant, a man of Macy’s age with a fake tan, a necklace of chunky wooden beads and a spiky hairstyle that resembled something from a Japanese cartoon. He briefly looked Nina up and down, then turned his gaze back to Macy’s chest. ‘Hi,’ Nina said. The young man grunted.

  ‘You sure?’ Macy said. Nina nodded. ‘I could use something. Joey, go get me a cappuccino, will you? I want to talk to Dr Wilde in private.’

  Joey grunted again and got up. ‘I’ll sit over there, keep an eye on the door.’

  Nina gave Macy a curious look. ‘Something I should know about?’

  ‘I’ll tell you soon. Please, sit down.’ Nina sat opposite her. ‘Joey’s just watching out for me. He’s a friend from college - well, a friend with benefits.’ She grinned, making Nina a little uncomfortable about her openness. ‘He’s about the only person I know in New York. I’m from Miami.’

  ‘Right,’ said Nina, not particularly interested. ‘So, what did you want to talk to me about?’

  Macy sat straighter. ‘First thing - can I just say it’s so great that you were willing to see me? I’ve wanted to meet you for ages. You’re like my hero!’

  ‘Really?’ Nina felt a little glow inside her; it was a long time since she’d had any kind of professional flattery.

  ‘Oh, totally! It’s because of you that I picked archaeology for my major. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but then I read this and thought: wow, that is so cool.’ She took out several slightly tattered magazine pages from her bag, laying them out flat on the table. Nina immediately recognised them as an article from around a year and a half earlier, about her discovery of Atlantis. One of the pictures was a photograph of herself, beaming proudly. Her younger self had her hair in the ponytail she had favoured at the time, prompting her to glance up at Macy’s very similar style.

  ‘Er, yeah,’ said Macy bashfully as she fingered her own tied-back hair. ‘I, ah, kinda borrowed your look. I thought if it worked for you . . . Hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ Nina said, the glow moving to her cheeks in slight embarrassment.

  Joey returned and delivered a cappuccino, then sat at a table near the door. ‘See, when I read this,’ Macy continued, ‘it made me realise that wow, there really is all this amazing stuff still out there to discover.’ She tapped Nina’s picture. ‘And when I saw it was you who’d found it, it was like, oh my God! I mean, most archaeologists are guys, right, and they’re usually pretty old, but you? You were like a real-life Lara Croft. I thought, well, if you could do this, I could do it too!’

  Nina knew the younger woman had meant it as a compliment, but wasn’t thrilled by her phrasing. ‘So . . . you weren’t sure what you wanted to do until then? You weren’t serious about archaeology?’

  Macy shrugged. ‘The big, exciting stuff, sure. And I was already into Egyptology ’cause of my grandparents - they were from Egypt originally. My grandpa used to be a teacher, and he taught me to read hieroglyphics when I was a kid, which was pretty cool. But most of my first year, I kind of goofed off. I was in a sorority, I was a cheerleader, every night was party night - you know what it’s like!’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Nina, who at university had been anything but a party animal.

  ‘But then I almost flunked out, and that was when I realised I needed to pull myself together. Part of it was because I didn’t want to let down my mom and dad - I mean, they were paying for it! So I started working harder, and picked up my grades. But then when I heard about the IHA dig at the Sphinx, I realised it would be such a huge boost for me if I could be a part of it. So I managed to get on the team—’

  ‘There must have been a lot of competition.’

  ‘Oh, totally. But my mom does a lot of fundraising for international charities and she’s got friends at the UN, so that helped!’ She smiled brightly.

  ‘I’m sure it did,’ said Nina, unimpressed that nepotism, not hard work, had won her a place on the dig. While she didn’t consider herself the kind of person who made snap judgements, she was forced to admit that her initial appraisal of Macy - a party girl who relied on her looks and money to coast through life - seemed accurate. ‘Well, look, it’s been nice meeting you, and I’m glad I was such an inspiration, but I need to get moving.’

  Macy’s face fell. ‘Oh, no, wait! Please, wait - I need to show you this.’ She hurriedly stuffed the pages back in her bag, her hand returning with a digital camera. ‘You know about the scrolls that told us how to find the Hall of Records, right?’

  ‘The ones that were found in Gaza? Yeah. I still keep up with the news.’

  Macy didn’t register the sarcasm. ‘Okay, well, the Osirian Temple gave three pages to the IHA, right? Turns out they didn’t give us all of them.’

  An image appeared on the screen. Nina looked more closely, seeing what appeared to be ancient Egyptian papyruses, though the hieroglyphics were too small to read on the LCD display. ‘Are these the pages?’

  Macy pointed at the three leftmost pages. ‘These three are. But this one,’ she tapped the one on the right, ‘is something nobody’s seen before. Not at the IHA, anyway. The first three pages talk about what the Hall of Records is and how to find it. This one says what’s actually in it.’

  Nina regarded her dubiously. ‘And what is in it?’

  ‘A map that tells you how to find the Pyramid of Osiris.’

  ‘What?’ Only the memory of having been at the other end of a similar discussion, trying to convince others of the truth of a legend, stopped Nina from letting out a dismissive laugh. ‘The Pyramid of Osiris? That’s barely even a myth - it’s more like a fairy tale. You could count all the references to it in known ancient Egyptian texts on one hand, and even then it’s only mentioned in connection with the mythology of their gods. It’s not real.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t think so either,’ said Macy, bristling, ‘but somebody does. Somebody who’s going to dig into the Hall of Records before the IHA and steal the map.’

  Now Nina did laugh. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me. Someone’s digging under the Sphinx at the same time as the IHA? In the middle of the busiest tourist attraction in the entire country, and nobody notices?’

  ‘It’s true!’ Macy protested. ‘They’ve dug a shaft at the north end of the Sphinx compound - I saw it!’ She flicked through the images on the camera. ‘I took a picture of the plans, look!’

  Nina gave it only a cursory glance. ‘There’s no way they could do that without attracting attention. They’d be arrested the moment they stuck their shovel into the ground.’

  ‘No, the people in charge, they’re in on it! Gamal, the head of security, and Dr Hamdi - look, see?’ Another picture, this one a blown-out closeup of a man’s startled face. ‘They’re both working for a guy from the Osirian Temple!’

  Nina kneaded her forehead. ‘Why are you telling me this? If you really did uncover some conspiracy to rob the site, why didn’t you just tell Dr Berkeley? Or the Egyptian police?’

  ‘I didn’t know who I could trust. Dr Berkeley might have been in on it too.’

  ‘Logan Berkeley’s many things,’ said Nina drily, ‘but I don’t think he’s a crook.’

  ‘He didn’t believe me, anyway. He already had some problem with me, I don’t know why. He’s kind of a jerk.’

  Nina couldn’t help a sardonic smile; that was certainly one of the ‘many things’. ‘The police, then. The Egyptians take artefact theft very seriously.’

  ‘I couldn’t go to the police.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They kinda . . . wanted to arrest me. They think I stole a piece of the Sphinx and hit Dr Hamdi.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I didn’t!’ Macy reconsidered that. ‘Okay,
I did hit Dr Hamdi . . .’

  Nina stood. ‘I think I’ve heard enough.’

  ‘No, wait, please!’ Macy jumped up; across the room, Joey half rose, watching Nina suspiciously. ‘Look, they chased me, they were going to kill me! I had to get out of Egypt.’

  ‘So why come to me? Why didn’t you tell the IHA?’

  ‘Because they wouldn’t listen; they thought I was a thief. I came to you because . . .’ Her expression crumbled to downcast disappointment. ‘Because I really thought you’d believe me.’

  Despite herself, Nina felt a pang of sympathy for the young woman. Whether she was paranoid or just the victim of a hyperactive imagination, Macy had still gone through a lot to meet her ‘hero’ - only for the meeting to fall short of her hopes. ‘Look,’ she said, more quietly, ‘right now I don’t exactly have the highest opinion of the IHA, but that doesn’t mean they won’t listen to you. Okay? There aren’t bad guys hiding round every corner - you can go to them and tell them your side of the story.’

  ‘I . . . suppose,’ said Macy unhappily.

  ‘You don’t have to do anything right now.’ Nina glanced at Joey, who had relaxed. ‘Go home with your friend, sleep on it, then call the IHA in the morning. I promise, it’ll be okay.’

  Macy didn’t appear convinced, but she nodded reluctantly, then moved to meet Joey near the door.

  Nina sat again, deciding to wait for them to go before leaving herself. The meeting certainly hadn’t been what she expected, but at least it had been different, a break from blankly vegging out in front of the TV.

  Though that was all she had to look forward to when she got back to the apartment. Eddie probably wouldn’t finish work for hours. She sighed.

  Macy and Joey turned to go. The door opened before they reached it.

  And Macy shrieked.

  Nina looked up in surprise. In the doorway was a greasy-looking man in a snakeskin jacket, his straggly goatee twisting as he leered at the young woman.

  Macy jerked back. ‘That’s him! He’s one of them!’

  ‘Hi again, li’l girl,’ said the man, his grin widening unpleasantly as he advanced. Jaw set, Joey stepped in front of him—