The Jericho Deception: A Novel

by Jeffrey Small

  “Thebes?” a loud voice called from several rows behind Ethan. He turned to see the woman he’d followed from the market poke her head into the aisle. “I thought we were in Luxor.”

  Robin seemed to catch herself beginning to roll her eyes. “Thebes is the Greek name for Luxor.” She paused for a breath and continued, “As I explained on the boat, Thebes—or Luxor, if you wish—is one of the oldest cities on Earth. Its history dates back more than five thousand years. It was the capital of Egypt for centuries.”

  “Didn’t Homer write about it?” a balding man with small, round glasses asked from the rear.

  “In The Iliad,” the guide said. “Now, the complex, as you’ll see, is made up of a number of temples, courtyards—even a lake. It’s expansive, so stay within eyeshot of me.” She raised the Burberry umbrella. “We’ll spend most of our time in the temple of Amun-Ra, considered to be the most important of the ancient Egyptian deities. As I’ll explain in more detail when we arrive, he is a conglomeration of two earlier Gods: Amun, the distant creator god, and Ra, the sun god who brings warmth and light to our everyday lives.”

  Ethan listened with interest. A god who is both distant and near, he thought. Then an image flashed through his head. His vision on the river had shown him a view of a reality that was as intimate to his life as he was, yet hidden from ordinary view as well.

  The bus veered to the left, pushing the British guide into his side. Her body lingered for a moment longer than necessary before she righted herself.

  “Egyptian drivers,” she said in his ear.

  He glanced out the window. They pulled into a concrete parking lot so expansive they could have been entering Disney World. In a few minutes he would be reunited with Rachel. He ached to feel her touch, but the image of Wolfe’s man staring at him from the sidewalk still blazed in his mind. Would he, a doctor and college professor, be able to avoid trained CIA spooks? He pushed the question away. He couldn’t afford to have any doubt in his mind. His life, and more importantly Rachel’s, depended on his thinking clearly.

  CHAPTER 60

  KARNAK TEMPLE COMPLEX

  “He’s on a tourist bus,” the voice in Axe’s earpiece said, “heading to Karnak.”

  “What about the girl and the Arab?”

  “No sign of them. Just the professor.”

  “On my way.”

  Axe relayed the intel to the driver of the black Suburban. They’d landed the Black Hawk in the desert just outside the city. His strategy of spreading his men around the small but crowded town while he coordinated their movements from the back of the SUV had paid off. He would now have all of his men converge on the tourist site. The professor would be trapped.

  “We may have a problem,” the voice in his ear continued. “I think he made me.”

  Axe shook his head. This entire operation had been characterized by sloppiness. When it was over, he was going to kick some ass.

  “When you get to the temple, cover the entrance and any other escape routes. Recon only.” He spoke the next words slower, emphasizing each syllable. “Don’t make contact. I’m going after him myself.”

  He thought about the hidden compartment underneath the middle row seat that held several M4 rifles and a metal ammo box of loaded magazines. Unfortunately, with the tight security around the site and the Egyptians’ fear of terrorism, he couldn’t bring a gun inside the temple grounds, not even a compact sidearm. He recalled the shooting at Hatshepsut’s temple that had left sixty-two tourists dead in 1997. The terrorists had dressed as Egyptian police, walked into the heart of the temple with submachine guns, and opened fire on the mass of tourists. Since the incident, security at the major architectural sites had been increased significantly.

  He reached down, hiked up his pants leg, and ran his fingers inside the upper part of his calf-high black boots. He could feel the bumpy grip of the handle’s composite plastic. The knife strapped just above his ankle only had a five-inch blade, but in the hands of a trained soldier, it was more than enough to do the job.

  Ethan followed the British tour group down a stone ramp lined on both sides with dozens of ram-headed sphinxes, poised like an army of sentries guarding the main gate into the temple complex. The massive walls on either side of the gate towered at least seven stories over them. He walked through a world of beige: the sand, the stone pavers they walked upon, the blocks in the walls, even the sphinxes, were the same desert color.

  “Stay together, now,” Robin called with her umbrella held high above her head.

  Ethan stuck to the rear of the group, close enough to appear to be part of them, but ready to separate the moment he saw Rachel and Mousa. He darted his eyes through the crowd, scanning every face. The anticipation of seeing Rachel again fueled him with an energy he hadn’t had since their escape. The tour group had taken over fifteen minutes to disembark the bus, gathering cameras and passing out water bottles and tickets. He’d tried to look for his friends in the parking lot, but it was simply too big and crowded. He had no idea whether he was the first one to arrive or if they were waiting for him inside.

  When Robin led them through the gate in the entrance wall, Ethan stopped and stared. The temple complex was larger than he’d imagined. Giant columns, monumental statues, obelisks that pierced the pure blue sky, and fallen blocks and rubble stretched for hundreds of yards in every direction as far as he could see.

  “This way, please.” Robin walked toward a stone statue of an Egyptian pharaoh so tall the top of her head only came up to its calf.

  He craned his neck upward and admired the three-thousand-year-old craftsmanship. The male figure stood with his feet together, wearing a tunic of smooth stone over a long body; his arms were crossed on his chest. The face had round features with almond eyes and a wide nose. A smaller statue of a woman, carved out of the same giant block of stone, came up to the pharaoh’s knees.

  “Ramses the Second,” Robin said when the group gathered in a semicircle around her in front. She had Ethan’s full attention. This was where Mousa had said to wait for them. He searched the crowd again.

  “As we discussed in Abu Simbel, Ramses’s reign as Pharaoh over seven decades in the thirteenth century BC was the longest and one of the most spectacular in the history of Egypt.”

  “He certainly liked to build statues of himself,” a man to Ethan’s left said. “Was he compensating for something?”

  Robin laughed. “He was one of the most prolific builders in ancient Egypt. The country also prospered under his reign. He was considered to be not just the ruler but an actual god.” She pointed upward. “Who remembers the significance of the figure with crossed arms holding a crook and a flail in his hands?”

  A stooped-over woman with a silk shawl draped over her head answered from the front row, “He’s in the form of Osiris, god of the afterlife.”

  “Exactly. Note the difference to that one.” She pointed to another monumental statue of Ramses on the opposite side of the walkway. “There he’s standing with one foot in front of the other and his arms by his side. That’s the depiction of Ramses in a living state.”

  “So we have the pharaoh pictured as a ruler both in this life and the next one,” the stooped woman said.

  “Wasn’t Osiris resurrected from the dead, like Jesus?” said Durward, the man with the safari hat whom Ethan had followed onto the bus.

  “The myth of Osiris is probably the oldest tale of resurrection we know of,” Robin replied. “Evidence of Osiris worship dates back twenty-four-hundred years—two and a half millennia—before Christ. His brother, the evil god Set, kills Osiris and dismembers him in order to assume his throne. But the goddess Isis, Osiris’s sister and wife, resurrects him by reassembling his parts. He then goes on to become the god of the underworld, the god who judges those deemed worthy of having eternal life by weighing their hearts on a scale. We’ll see depictions of this scene from the Egyptian Book of the Dead when we visit the tombs in the Valley of the Kings tomorrow.”

&n
bsp; Ethan found the parallels to the story of Jesus fascinating: overcoming death, the battle of good versus evil, the moral judgment of human lives by a higher power. He’d taught in his classes how the religious myths common to ancient cultures arose from a human psychological need to make sense of the presence of evil in the world and to believe that justice ultimately prevails. These myths also helped to alleviate people’s fear of their own mortality through belief in an idyllic afterlife that made the suffering of this world tolerable.

  Staring at the imposing stone king silhouetted against the azure sky, Ethan wondered for the first time whether that explanation was complete. The memory of his vision the previous day flashed through his mind again. He didn’t believe the miracle stories of people rising from the dead were historical events. Such things only happened in ancient times prior to the scientific worldview present today.

  But what if the everyday physical reality in which he lived, a reality he knew to be finite, was not the entire story? As he pondered the possibility that his vision held truth, the sight of the person ahead of him in a maze of columns shocked him out of his thoughts.

  The security in the Karnak complex was much tighter than Axe would have liked. The Egyptians guarding the ancient site were not the rent-a-cops one might find at a monument in the US. These guys were military, and they were well armed. He would have to act quickly when he spotted the professor. Lightman’s death would be seen as an unfortunate robbery. But first he had to find him amidst the hordes of tourists and the ruins.

  He moved toward a set of giant columns seven stories tall that were part of an ancient temple whose roof had long since fallen and been replaced by a cloudless blue sky. He froze in place.

  The Jordanian doctor!

  Mousa walked among the columns at the opposite end of the temple. Axe’s pulse quickened. Then he saw the girl with him. He couldn’t suppress the smile that spread across his face. They must have come to rendezvous with Lightman. His job had just become much easier. Wolfe would be ecstatic.

  “These columns are huge!” Rachel ran her fingers along the hieroglyphics carved into a stone column twenty feet in diameter and seventy feet tall.

  “The Great Hypostyle Hall,” Mousa said as they walked through the rows of columns in the fifty-thousand-square-foot temple. “The columns used to hold up a roof.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “With my family two years ago.”

  He was so close to returning to his loved ones. He’d called his wife the moment they’d arrived at the hotel. When she’d put Amira on the phone, both father and daughter had cried so hard they’d had trouble understanding each other. The temptation to leave Luxor yesterday and race to the Jordanian embassy in Cairo had been intense. But he owed his life to the American doctor, and he had promised him he would take care of the delightful woman he had escaped with.

  “So this is where you told Ethan to meet us?”

  “Any minute.”

  “Any sign of the professor?” Axe spoke into his sleeve while he tracked his two targets.

  “Negative,” Dawkins voice came over his earpiece. “There’s a shitload of tour buses here.”

  No matter. He would take care of these two first and then deal with Lightman.

  He bent over, feigning scratching his calf, and slipped the five-inch K-bar knife out from his boot. He flipped the blade around, concealing it against his wrist and forearm. When they disappeared behind the next column, he advanced forward, keeping the maze of stone between him and his prey.

  Other than the tour group he’d just passed outside the temple, he saw only a few others walking among the columns. Rachel and Mousa were isolated. It was the perfect time to strike.

  Ethan felt paralyzed. James Axelrod had just walked passed him. When the security man had swiveled his orange-tinted sunglasses in his direction, he’d ducked behind Durward’s wide safari hat. Now the huge man bent over not thirty yards from him and removed something shiny from his boot.

  “Does anyone recognize this?” Robin pointed to the hieroglyphics carved on an eight-foot-cubed block that had once been part of a larger wall.

  “A Coptic cross,” Durward replied.

  The historical discussion barely registered for Ethan. The blood drained from his head the moment he saw what held Axe’s attention. Walking amongst the giant columns were Rachel and Mousa. From their vantage point they couldn’t see Axe. Then a realization sucked the air from his lungs: He’s stalking them with a knife!

  “Why would there be a Coptic cross in the middle of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics?” the woman in the shawl asked loudly.

  Ethan willed his feet to come unglued from the stone.

  “Notice this scratched-out area at the top of the cross,” Robin said

  “It used to be something else.”

  “Exactly. Originally it was an ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol for the key of eternal life. Tomorrow, when we visit the Valley of the Kings, you’ll see ankhs depicted in every tomb painting, usually in the hands of a god leading the deceased emperor into the afterlife. Look here.” She pointed to the top of the cross where the ankh had been defaced. “The loop at the top part of the ankh represents the delta of the Nile. The vertical line running down from the loop represents the Nile itself, the source of life in ancient Egypt, and”—she traced the horizontal section of the cross—“the horizontal line of the ankh signifies the unification of the eastern and western parts of Egypt.”

  “So why did they turn the ankh into a cross?” asked the woman wearing the shawl.

  “As Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the Romans converted many of the ancient Egyptian temples into Christian churches. Tragically, they often destroyed the hieroglyphics; in some cases, like this one, they converted the Egyptian symbols into Christian ones.”

  As the lecture continued, Ethan looked around for the police he’d passed at the entrance into the temple complex. Of course they were omnipresent when he didn’t need one, but now, in the heat of the afternoon, they were probably chatting in the shadow of the main entrance wall.

  He was on his own. His skin tingled.

  He scanned his surroundings for something he could use as a weapon. He wasn’t sure how he was going to confront the huge man, but he had to protect Rachel. Then he saw it.

  He left the British tour group and hurried toward a pile of rubble twenty yards to his right. He kept the baseball cap pulled low over his eyes in case Axe turned around. The moment Wolfe’s man disappeared behind a column, Ethan sprinted. When he reached the rubble, he grabbed one of the waist-high metal rods attached to a rope that cordoned off the rubble from the tourists. He jerked upward, praying that it wasn’t set in concrete. It pulled free of the sand. He worked frantically at the knot on the end. He only had seconds. When it came free, he spun on his heels and ran toward the columns. He could no longer see Axe or his friends.

  Wolfe’s head of security was well trained. He’d kidnapped Rachel and killed Elijah and Chris. What were Ethan’s chances against a man like that? He tried to calm his rapid breathing, but his limbic system was on its own.

  Fight or flight, he thought. This time I’m going to fight.

  Axe ducked behind a column to his left as the girl stepped into an opening three rows ahead.

  His only regret in taking her out was that he’d never have his way with her. The memory of her naked body quivering in fear the night he’d kidnapped her sent a wave of heat through his loins. He flexed and released his quads. When his mission was complete, he’d head into Cairo for a night of R&R. He’d always had good luck with the Eastern European prostitutes there. They had no one to go to if he was too rough.

  When they passed in front of the next set of columns, he moved up two more rows. This is too easy, he thought.

  “I’m taking them down now,” he whispered into his mic. Dawkins had been shocked when he’d relayed the news of their sudden fortune.

  �
��Roger. Get out quickly.”

  He glanced behind him. The tour group he’d passed outside hadn’t entered the temple yet. He was alone with his targets.

  He crept to the next column. Their voices came from the row ahead. He peeked around the edge of the stone. Their backs were to him. Both were gazing up at a section of roof still in place, a giant slab of stone seventy feet over their heads. The Muslim doctor was pointing out the remnants of the blue, red, and gold paint that remained, three thousand years later, on the underside of the ceiling.

  The Arab had the greatest potential to put up a fight. Axe would dispatch him first. He flipped the knife in his hand, pointing the blade down. He would strike the kidney, a blow that would seize the man’s body with pain. Then, with his prey unable to resist, he would draw the knife across the man’s windpipe and carotid artery. The sight of blood spurting from his throat would paralyze the girl with fear and shock for a few seconds. He would be on her before she realized she needed to run.

  He relaxed his grip on the knife and released his breath, just as he’d been trained. Then he attacked.

  Often when Ethan was engrossed in his research, hours would pass without him even noticing. His focus would narrow so that he never heard the traffic on the street or the chatter of the students in the hallway. As he dashed from column to column, mirroring the path Axe took, he felt the same narrow focus. He was no longer aware of the tourists behind him, the heat from the desert sun, or the ancient artifacts around him. His senses were telescoped on the man a single row in front of him.

  Axe paused and lifted his wrist to his mouth, radioing to Wolfe’s other men. He couldn’t hear Axe’s words, but his friends’ voices were clear.

  What do I do now?

  He was separated from the killer by only a few yards, but then that same distance separated Axe from his friends. If he yelled out, he’d lose the one advantage he had over the trained fighter: surprise.