The Staff of Moses (Oliver Lucas Adventures)

by Andrew Linke

  Mr. Lucas stepped forward and offered his hand to Oliver who, after only a brief hesitation, reached out and shook it. Their hands clasped tightly and Oliver looked his father straight in the eye and held his gaze until the older man blinked and broke his grip. He clapped Oliver on the arm and grinned.

  “You want to stick around for a drink? I think Gwen might have some of those beers in the fridge.”

  Oliver shook his head. “Maybe when I get back. I’m still dehydrated from the flight and it looks like I’ll be boarding another before the week is out.”

  Michael Lucas nodded and led his son through the heavy door and up the stairs. At the top he pressed a comically large red button set into the wall and waited for the false wall to swing up and out of their way. Once in the closet, they paused briefly to listen, then opened the door of the broom closet and stepped out into the kitchen. Amber and Gwen were there, sitting opposite one another with a steaming teapot on the table between them. Amber was in the middle of explaining her opinion on a recent live metal album to Gwen, who appeared a bit dazed at the younger woman’s blithe summary of the band’s onstage antics. Michael swept in and rescued her with a request to see how the gardens were growing since he had last been at the inn.

  Amber recognized her uncle’s gesture and stood to hug him goodbye before grabbing Oliver’s hand and leading him out the door and directly to her car. As they drove away from the inn he filled her in on the encounter in the bunker. She expressed annoyance at having never seen the underground room then lapsed into silence for several miles. Oliver rode quietly beside her, contemplating the day’s events.

  Eventually she spoke, her voice so calm and level that Oliver knew instinctively that she had been composing the sentence for at least a mile, working over exactly how to say it without too much emotion. “Oliver are you sure you want to take this job?”

  Oliver looked at her and sighed, his breath coming out long and slow. Then he spoke. “No. I don’t trust the man as far as you could throw him.”

  Amber couldn’t help giggling a little at that remark, but quickly became serious again. “Then why are you taking it?”

  “Because... What if? Amber, what if this is real? What if I actually have the chance to get my hands on a real piece of biblical history? So far everything I’ve managed to track down has been from the scattered remnants of fallen civilizations and dead religions. This might be my chance to find something that half the world would recognize as a genuine relic.”

  “Except that they’ll never get to see it.”

  “Well, yes. Except for that.” One side of Oliver’s mouth turned up in an ironic smile. “But it would still feel good.”

  “Until the Senator turns on you.”

  Oliver knew she was right. He had been thinking along those same lines ever since the door had closed on Senator Wheeler back at the inn, but the urge to find out exactly what he was dealing with was too strong.

  “I’m going through with it,” he said.

  Amber knew that tone and knew better than to try and talk Oliver out of his decision, so she just took a deep breath then said, “Do you want me to keep the mechanism fragment for you while you’re gone?”

  Oliver nodded. “I’ve got the others locked up in bank vaults across the country. If you could put this on in a safety deposit box somewhere around here, I’d appreciate it.”

  “If you won’t listen to my advice and get out of this game, the least I can do is lend you a hand.”

  Oliver nodded and settled back into his seat. He closed his eyes and began running through a list of what he might need to pack for his latest adventure.

  Chapter Four

  Five days later, Oliver was once again aboard a plane winging in for a landing at a large international airport. This time, however, it was Charles de Gaulle airport, fifteen kilometers north-east of Paris, France. While his ultimate destination was an expensive hotel in the center of Cairo, paid for with his advance from the Senator, Oliver needed to make a brief stopover in France first. If all went well, he would only be in Paris for a night or two before carrying on to Egypt and he would have secured a valuable asset for his mission.

  Oliver had an insatiable appetite for adventure and an unshakable belief that he was right in his personal quest, but he had a definite weak spot in his understanding of ancient Egyptian languages and writing systems. He could read nearly a dozen ancient languages of Europe, South America, and Asia fluently, and could at least stagger his way through taxi instructions and hotel conversations in most major cities across the globe, but his studies had never taken him in the direction of learning to read the dead languages of ancient Egypt. He had, in fact, intentionally avoided studying Egypt any more than was necessary on the theory that the entire region had been picked clean by grave robbers and amateur archaeologists in the first half of the twentieth century and was therefore unlikely to hide any fragments of the mechanism.

  That was why he had taken this detour to the City of Light. His cousin Amber was not the only person fully versed in his theories who still believed that Oliver wasn’t completely insane. There was also a certain spunky art historian named Diana Jordan. She and Oliver had dated for a few months during his graduate studies, but their relationship had imploded after Oliver took off to South America with Amber and didn’t return for two months. She had also believed that arcane truths lay hidden behind the myths of the ancient world and so they had kept up a lively friendship over the years, sustained in large part by their mutual interest in discovering those truths.

  Unlike Oliver, Diana had been willing to keep her more exotic theories to herself and focus her official research on comparatively mundane aspects of ancient art, albeit with a distinctly punk/goth twist. Her graduate thesis had been on the relationship between ancient depictions of gods and heroes and the modern view of them in underground pop art. She had graduated and taken a string of research and instillation development positions at museums across the country until a year ago, when she had won a two-year grant to study the Egyptian artifacts stored at the Louvre in Paris.

  The plane landed at Charles de Gaulle airport early in the morning and Oliver made his way through French immigration without incident. He had brought nothing but a shoulder bag with a change of clothes and a few essentials, so there was no need for him to wait for baggage to unload from the plane. He skipped the taxi line and went directly to the train terminal, where he boarded the RER train to Paris.

  The train carried him as far as Gare du Nord, where Oliver purchased a stack of metro slips from a vending machine and hopped on line five to Gare de l’Est. There he switched to line seven and joined the press of commuters traveling into central Paris. Oliver had visited Paris twice before and come to love the speed and efficiency of the city’s metro system. He especially loved the, increasingly few, conjunctions between the modern metro stations, with their gleaming steel and glass, and the networks of old metro tunnels, both terrifying and beautiful in their profusion of shattered tiles and dripping walls. He left the final train and made his way to the surface at the Palais Royal station, which was built under a wide plaza directly across the street from the north wing of the Louvre.

  Oliver knew that most tourists approached the Louvre from the west, walking across the crowded pavement to admire the statuary and fountains of the grand courtyard. There they joined a lengthy queue to enter the museum through the twisting lines of escalators under the enormous glass pyramid in the center of the courtyard. That path was fine to take once, for the grandeur of the experience, but Oliver had quickly determined that he preferred actually being in the Louvre to baking in the hot sun of the courtyard.

  If Diana had been with him, Oliver would have used one of the employee entrances, but he hadn’t told her that he was coming, so he would have to make his own way into the museum. Fortunately, he knew a path nearly as direct as the employee entrance. The plaza that Palais Royal was directly across from had a side entrance that, while far less photogen
ic, was almost never blockaded by crowds of tourists because all the maps marked it as nothing more than the entrance to an underground mall.

  Oliver pushed through the heavy glass doors and rode the escalator down to the food court. His body insisted that it was nearly three in the afternoon, and Oliver had intentionally fasted and forced himself to sleep onboard the airplane in an effort to get himself synched to Parisian time as quickly as possible. He paused briefly at a vending machine to purchase a two-day Louvre museum pass, then strode to the food court and secured a sandwich and miniature cup of strong coffee from one of the vendors.

  He settled in a booth and enjoyed his breakfast, watching people stroll by with shopping bags in hand. The crowds at this entrance to the Louvre primarily consisted of shoppers passing through on their way to an expensive underground shopping mall built under the plaza of the Louvre. Most of the people Oliver saw were here to shop, and the fact that a left turn at the Apple store and a step through a security checkpoint would bring them into the central atrium of the Louvre museum probably didn’t even cross their minds.

  His meal finished, Oliver strode the short distance to the checkpoint, waited for his bag to come through the X-ray machine, and continued into the museum proper.

  He went straight through the reception area, up the central set of steps and past a booth where his ticket was stamped by a suited museum employee. He continued through the moodily lit Sully access corridor, went up a narrow set of stairs, turned left past a miniature sphinx, and turned into an alcove. Oliver glanced around. Seeing nobody around, he pulled out his phone and checked a note he had made on his last visit, then pressed a button set discreetly into the wall. A panel slid up, revealing a number pad. He punched in a number he had seen Diana use several months before when she took him on a tour of her new office in the bowels of the Louvre.

  The number still worked. The wood panelling beside the number pad split and slid open to reveal an elevator. Oliver stepped into the car and pressed the button marked “2”, then leaned back against the wall and ordered his phone to call Diana.

  Diana answered on the fourth ring, “Oliver, this is unexpected.”

  “Hey Diana, you at the office today?”

  “You know I am. This fellowship is up in three months and I don’t want to waste a minute.”

  The elevator door slid open and Oliver stepped out into a small sitting area with halls leading off in three directions. He turned right and began walking down a hallway lined with cramped offices. The carpet here had once been a pale blue, but had worn thin and accreted a beige track down the middle. The walls were a faded eggshell tone, blending to a darker tan near the ceiling from decades of nicotine stains before smoking had been banned in the office.

  “Funny you should put it that way,” he replied. “I need you to waste about a week, maybe two.”

  “On what?”

  Thirty feet down the hall, a door opened and a man stepped out, a stack of files crammed under one arm.

  Oliver switched to French and kept walking, nodding perfunctorily at the man as they squeezed past one another. “I’m going to Egypt on a job, and I need someone who can handle hieratic and demotic scripts. You know I’m lousy at anything Egyptian beyond simple hieroglyphs.”

  “That’s what you get for calling Egyptology ‘over-done’ and ‘so twentieth century colonialist.’ Incidentally, why the French?”

  “Didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself. Frankly, I’m surprised I got this far.”

  “Attention? Oliver, what are you up to?” Diana’s voice slipped into a whisper and Oliver knew he had her hooked. If only he hadn’t disappeared for two months without warning, they probably would have been perfect for one another.

  “Just this,” he replied, then ended the call and knocked on Diana’s office door.

  He heard a muffled string of expletives from beyond the door and smiled, slipping his phone into a pocket and leaning casually against the doorframe. The door opened and Diana faced him, eyes bright with anger and laughter at once.

  “How did you get in here?” she demanded.

  Diana pulled Olive into her cramped office, stuck her head out the door to ensure the hallway was clear, then slammed the door shut and leaned against it.

  Oliver took in the cluttered space that Diana had been assigned in the warren of offices underneath the Louvre. Her desk was piled high with books and printed photographs, intermingled with scraps of paper covered in Diana’s precise, but minuscule, scrawl. The walls were plastered with prints of paintings and bas-relief carvings, except for the wall behind her desk, which was dominated by a whiteboard covered in the colorful circles and lines of an extensive idea map. Oliver spotted the phrases “reborn hero”, “overthrown deity”, and “zombies”, scrawled along several lines drawn between the titles of several popular comic books and strings of letters and numbers that he took to be entries from the museum collection catalog.

  Diana stepped away from the door and plopped down on the edge of her desk. She crossed her arms and glared at Oliver. “Seriously, how?”

  “I used the elevator. This place really should change security codes more often.”

  “I’m impressed you still remembered.”

  Oliver shrugged. “You know me, Diana. I caught it when you brought me through last year and saved the code to my phone before I forgot. No special memory tricks here.”

  Diana smiled a bit, then stepped forward and wrapped Oliver in an enthusiastic hug. Oliver responded in kind, enjoying the moment before releasing Diana to once again perch herself on the edge of her cluttered desk. He would always remember the summer abroad they had spent together in England. Her hair had been short back then, trimmed almost boyishly tight and dyed pitch black. They had spent nearly two weeks backpacking through the countryside to remote historical sites where they passed hours debating which elements of local legends were based on true events. Now her hair was longer, down to her collar, and the black had been accented with twin streaks of florescent blue. She was dressed simply in charcoal wool pants and a white men’s dress shirt, open a couple of buttons at the collar to show off a patch of olive skin below her throat.

  “I always liked how you could find your way into places, Oliver,” Diana said, looking up at him from her perch at the end of her desk. “You said something about needing a translator for an Egyptian job.”

  “That’s right. I’ve got a client who swears that he’s got contacts in Egypt who have stumbled on a relic of historical significance. He wants it for himself. Thinks that it will give him some sort of advantage in his campaign for President.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Wish I was. Old contact of my father, a Senator Wheeler. He’s one of the few candidates whose campaign hasn’t imploded in the last few weeks, but there are some questions about his old buddies in military contracting business, so even his campaign is on shaky legs.”

  “How can you help him? Your specialty is relics from ancient religions and magic, with a dash of global conspiracy theory now and then.”

  Oliver shrugged and pushed his hands into his pockets and leaned one shoulder against the flimsy office door. “Seems the honorable Senator has a strong hunch that the genuine Staff of Moses is within his grasp, and that it might still bestow a dose of magical charisma upon the owner.”

  “Really?”

  “He’s a true believer. Though I suspect what he truly believes in is his own importance.”

  Diana laughed. “Alright, I see where you fit in, but what’s this got to do with me?”

  “Like I said, this is Moses’s staff and my contact is in Egypt. I’m familiar enough with the bible and Egyptian mythology, but you know I’m lousy at interpreting hieroglyphs and scripts.”

  “You’re right about being bad at the scripts.”

  “You know it. So, I need someone to come with me who knows those particular dead languages, isn’t afraid of a little dirt, and won’t tie me up and call the loony bin f
or going after a relic from biblical times. As I recall, you fit all of those requirements.”

  Diana pondered Oliver’s invitation for a moment. He hoped that she would say yes, not only because he enjoyed traveling with Diana, but because if she didn’t, he would be forced to find a local translator. That wouldn’t be difficult, even in the chaos of post-revolution Egypt, but finding a translator who would stick with him in tight places could prove more difficult.

  Diana launched herself from the desk with a giddy shout and leapt into Oliver’s arms. He just managed to catch her as she wrapped her legs around his waist and planted an enthusiastic kiss on his cheek.

  “Do you really think the staff is real?” she asked, clasping his head between her hands and gazing directly into his eyes.

  Oliver nodded.

  “And you’re not just here in some ill-conceived attempt to win me back?”

  Oliver shook his head. “We had a good time together, Diana, but I know as well as you that it’d never last. We work a lot better as friends.”

  Diana unclasped her legs and swung back to her feet, already pulling Oliver towards the door. He followed without protest and allowed her to spin him out into the hall as if they were dancing and she had the lead.

  Diana locked her office and took Oliver’s hand again. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

  “What?”

  “Something that will explain why I’m willing to come with you on this crazy quest.”

  She led him down the corridor, past dozens of doors which Oliver assumed opened into cramped offices similar to Diana’s. Eventually they turned a corner and came to another small lobby featuring more worn sofas and doors to restrooms, emergency stairs, and an elevator. Diana pressed the call button and the elevator opened immediately. They rode it back up to the public area of the Louvre.

  Diana led Oliver around the imposing circular walls of the medieval Louvre, still preserved here in the basement level of the museum, and up a set of stairs in to the ground floor of the museum. Glancing out through the old glass panes, Oliver saw the distorted image of a group of tourists wandering through the enclosed space of the central courtyard. They continued up the worn marble stairs for two flights until Diana stopped their ascent at the first floor and gestured for Oliver to take in the collection of Greek bronzes marching into the distance of the hall before them.