by Andrew Linke
“The meeting did not go as planned.” Rais said, his tone cold.
“This should not come as a complete surprise to a man with your history.”
“Not an hour ago I was sitting in my favorite café enjoying a cup of coffee and my morning newspaper, hoping to hear that you had secured the scroll for your rich American client and gotten it out of the hands of those mercenary bastards. Then I got a call. It was from one of those very same bastards. He said that your expert,” he spared a vitriolic glance for Diana before looking back to Oliver and continuing, “called the scroll a forgery and advised you not to purchase it.”
“What’s he planning to do?” Oliver asked, affecting a disinterested tone.
“I do not know. Given the sort of man he is, I imagine he might have already torn the scroll to bits or set it on fire in a rage.”
“Good. Then your secrets are safe.”
Rais Karim appeared to be gathering himself for a scream, or possibly even to throw a punch, when the elevator dinged to a stop and the doors opened. A young Japanese woman dressed in exercise shorts and a sports bra stepped aboard. Oliver stepped aside to allow her access to the elevator controls. She tapped the already glowing button for the roof and leaned against the wall beside Diana tapping a tennis racket against her knee. Oliver didn’t think it prudent to obviously block the panel with this woman in the elevator, so he remained standing a few feet from it as the elevator doors closed and the car began to ascend again.
Oliver turned away from the woman and addressed Rais in a calm tone, as if they were discussing an everyday business deal, “Anyway, I highly doubt that the supplier is going to act on any of the documents on his possession, assuming they haven’t been shredded already. That was your goal, wasn’t it? To ensure that your business assets remained guarded?”
Karim scowled at Oliver, but managed to engage with his charade. “You are not entirely wrong, but I would have preferred that the documents be preserved intact. I did not seek their destruction.”
“Business can be unpredictable. The deal would have fallen through anyway. My client balked at the share price.”
Karim glowered at Oliver, breathing slowly and deeply.
Oliver wondered if the old spy was about to attack him, despite the presence of a witness. He had no idea whether the young woman in tennis attire could understand English, but given her dress and presence in a hotel that catered to westerners, he had thought it prudent to speak metaphorically. He was actually grateful for her presence, as it seemed to have turned Rais Karim’s rage inwards.
Rais muttered something unintelligible and stepped forward to press the button of the floor they were approaching. The elevator dinged to a stop almost immediately and he stepped off.
Before the doors closed he turned back and said, “I hope this brings our business to a close, Mr. Oliver. If I have anything to say about it you will never again attempt to purchase stock on the Egyptian market.”
“Fortunate for me you are no longer involved with that business then, isn’t it?”
The doors slid shut on Karim’s face as it shifted to an expression of unmitigated hatred.
“Bad business deal?” the tennis woman asked. She spoke in English, only softly accented.
“You could say that,” Diana replied for Oliver.
The woman nodded and said, “I’ve been there.”
Oliver smiled wistfully, but did not say anything. The three of them rode in silence until they reached the rooftop tennis courts. There the woman waved to several friends and set off at an easy jog to join them on the court while Oliver and Diana settled in at the rooftop bar and ordered drinks.
They killed nearly an hour sipping their drinks and discussing the meeting at the book shop in low tones. Oliver wanted to give Rais Karim time to cool off and leave the hotel, just in case he had harbored any thought of waiting for them at another floor or tracking down their room number to continue their discussion. Diana quickly caught on that they would not be leaving in a hurry and joined enthusiastically in the discussion.
As they reached the end of rehashing the encounter in the bookshop, Diana took a long sip from her drink, then turned to Oliver and said, “I’m telling you Oliver, if Rais and your Senator buddy hadn’t vouched for it, I would have truly believed that the scroll I saw today was a forgery. A truly spectacular example of ancient Egyptian style manufacture, to be sure, but a complete fake less than a century old. I’ve handled paperback books from the 1900s that were more brittle than that scroll. What do you think the explanation could be?”
“There is the obvious explanation that the scroll is a fake, but I’m not inclined to go with that. There is little motivation to fake an artifact in every detail of authentic construction, ink chemistry, and content unless you also artificially age it. So if we throw that line of thought right out the window it leaves us with the simple result that this scroll is the genuine article, just remarkably well preserved.”
“But what could protect it so well? I’ve handled scrolls and works of art that were sealed in clay jars, hidden in temples, buried in mud, you name it. None of them were even close to that well-preserved. Most scrolls in museums have never been opened or were examined over the course of months, even years, of painstaking preservation efforts. And here I am, sipping a coke and recalling just...” Diana swept her arms apart, “...rolling open a five thousand year old scroll.”
Oliver took a sip of his drink and grinned, but didn’t reply.
Diana laughed aloud and shook her head. “This isn’t your first time encountering something like this, is it?”
Oliver shook his head and slipped Diana a wicked smile.
“Is it always this exciting?”
“Yep. I still remember my first genuine relic.”
“That’s the one your uncle brought back from South America, right? The one that got you started on all of this tomb raiding business.”
“Precisely. Although I still think I’d have been a legitimate historian if my doctoral board hadn’t taken such a dim view of me pursuing the truth on the university’s dime and reputation.”
Diana nodded gravely and lapsed into silence for a while.
That made Olive feel bad. He hadn’t meant to shut down their conversation by bringing up the past. His disgraceful fall from the halls of academia was far enough in the past that it hardly bothered him any more. He had spent about six months sulking and posting venomous rants on the internet, but then he had found the second of the metal fragments and it had rekindled his desire to search for the truth, damn the consequences or obstacles. That was when he had taken up adventure photography as a cover and a means of earning a living, and he had never looked back.
“It’s alright, Diana,” he said when it became apparent that she wasn’t going to speak again without prompting.
She looked up at him. Her eyes seemed to search his for a moment, as if questioning whether he was honestly alright with her bringing up his past. He nodded and said, “I’ve seen many genuine relics in the last decade. There’s no way of knowing for sure without following the clues, in the case of documents, or attempting to use them, if they are objects of power, but you develop a feeling. These things are special. They aren’t completely part of the natural world anymore and something about them just... feels right.”
“I was afraid to say it,” Diana replied. “It’s not like my fingers tingled when I touched it or anything silly like that, but I just knew that that scroll was different from any I had touched before. I got this feeling in my head...”
“Sounds about right. I wish I’d been able to touch it myself. My guess is that long ago the scroll was blessed in such a way that it doesn’t age or, at the very least, ages at a far slower timescale than the rest of our world.”
“Is that really possible?”
“I’ve seen it a few times before. Armor that never rusted. Bits of food left in temples that are still fresh after hundreds of years.”
“But that’s
...” She broke off.
“Afraid to say it?”
Diana nodded.
“Go ahead. You already believe me about the conspiracy, why not take it one more step?”
Diana drained her soda and set the glass on the bar. She looked out across the rooftop and watched the hotel guests lifting weights, playing tennis, or simply sunning themselves. From this height she could just make out the sands of the surrounding desert across the rooftops and through the smog of modern Cairo. It seemed a ridiculous thing to contemplate but if there was one place to accept such a thing it was here, in this place where the ancient and modern continued to coexist and likely would for centuries to come.
She turned back to Oliver, who handed her a freshly filled glass of coke.
“So?” he asked her. She didn’t need to ask to what he referred.
“Is it... Is it some sort of magic?”
“You might call it that. I honestly don’t have a real explanation for it yet, but that word is as good as any.”
“But magic is... well, it’s just magic. It’s made up.”
“What about miracles?”
“Well, sure. You don’t grow up the daughter of a Pentecostal minister and not encounter more than your fair share of them.”
“So you believe in miracles, but not magic?”
Diana sighed. “I’ve spent the last fifteen years dissecting myths to see where they intersect with modern culture, Oliver. My rational mind treats all of that as stories told down the ages to explain things mankind didn’t have the science to understand, but I have to admit that my heart still has a soft spot for dad’s faith healings.”
“That’s my point. Part of your mind insists that everything you grew up believing is completely true, even as another tries to examine it under cold hard light of rationality. No matter how much you fight it, there is some part of your soul that clings to the faith that those miracles you learned about in Sunday school and saw in church were real. What I need you to do, Diana, is realize that those parts of your psyche don’t have to be in conflict. I don’t have it all figured out yet, but the longer I spend in this line of work the more I’m convinced that this world is filled with secrets that we may never be able to explain as anything but ‘magic.’ I’m starting to think that’s where my quest is leading me: to unlock some sort of secret about how all of this works.”
Oliver sat back, realizing that he had leaned ever closer to Diana throughout this speech as he whispered it to her intently. He knew that he would have been waving his arms and nearly shouting with excitement, had they not been sitting in such a public place.
“So you’re calling this a quest now?”
“A bit too melodramatic?”
“Just a little.”
Oliver laughed. “Sorry. I just don’t get much opportunity to explain it to people. The point is that yes, I do think that scroll is protected by something that you might as well call magic.”
“Do you think Kyle and Frank would even have been able to destroy it?”
“Probably. I’ve seen a lot of relics over the ages and none were invulnerable. In my experience, the protection tends to be specific. The scroll probably doesn’t age like you’d expect. Maybe it resisted mold and insects, but I strongly doubt that it would survive a bullet or being tossed into a fire.”
“I felt bad telling them it was a fake. Everything in me wanted to take that thing back to a museum and see it preserved forever. And now... Oliver, I just as good as ordered the destruction of a piece of history.”
“Sometimes that’s necessary, Diana. We needed the information on the scroll and there was no way we could afford to purchase it. Besides, if Rais and the Senator are right about the scroll leading to the staff of Moses, the greater good might be to destroy the scroll so that nobody else can find the staff. Speaking of which...”
Oliver flicked a finger at Diana’s glasses. She grinned again and reached up to take them off her face and examine them.
“I felt like a regular spy wearing these. Can’t wait to see what they captured.”
Oliver stood and took Diana by the arm, leading her towards the elevators.
“Rais is probably gone by now. Let’s get you to work on the translation.”
Chapter Nine
Back in Oliver’s hotel room, Oliver showed Diana how to download the video captured by the small camera embedded in the frame of the glasses. As soon as the file transferred she began stepping through the video frame by frame to translate the hieratic script written on the scroll. The process of translation turned out to be quite tedious, as Diana typed partial translations of each line of the scroll into a word processor, then went back and applied what she had learned from the later portions of the text to revise her translation of earlier portions.
After an hour of tedious work, occasionally interrupted by turning to yell at Oliver for breathing down her neck as he read each translated line over her shoulder, Diana shoved her chair back and jumped to her feet.
“Enough, Oliver,” she shouted. “Leave me alone or do your own damn translation.”
Oliver shrugged and flashed her a playful grin. “You know I can’t read a word of hieratic.”
“Then that settles it,” Diana muttered. She grabbed the laptop from the table and stormed through the doorway into her room, slamming the door shut behind her.
Left alone, Oliver quickly began to fidget. Normally he would have been the one doing the translation, experiencing the wonder of uncovering an ancient secret line by line, but his ignorance of ancient Egyptian languages meant that he could do nothing but wait. Rather than letting his mind run wild with the possibilities of what secrets might be hidden in the inscrutable lines of text on the scroll, he clicked the television on and tuned it to a channel showing a soccer match between South Africa and Ethiopia. Needing something to keep his hands busy, Oliver unlocked the large case of supplies that Senator Wheeler had shipped over through diplomatic mail.
The majority of the supplies consisted of survival gear, with a few weapons, a generous supply of ammunition, and some of his spare camera gear filling the remaining space. He had correctly assumed that Diana would not have any camping equipment of her own, so he had packed extra supplies as well as a second backpack for her to use.
Oliver pulled the spare backpack out now and began filling it with the necessities for a trek of several days in the desert. This occupied him for a good while as he attempted to pack the bag in such a way that Diana would be able to find whatever she needed without delay. Once the bag was filled he lifted it and judged that it might be too heavy for her. Diana was not a weak woman, but she was still smaller than Oliver and not accustomed to trekking through the desert. So he went back through the bag and dithered over every piece of equipment until he was certain that he had cut the bag down to the bare minimum that he felt safe giving her for several days among the dunes.
Glancing at the clock on the bedside table, Oliver was frustrated to see that he had not even expended an hour packing and repacking Diana’s bag. He pulled his own backpack out of the case and double-checked the contents. He checked the charge on the spare camera batteries, freshly formatted each of the memory cards for the camera, and ensured that the spare magazines for his gun were fully loaded. Unfortunately, Oliver was so well practiced preparing for adventures into remote places that within another hour he had completed all possible preparations and was once again left with nothing to do but wait for Diana to finish her translation.
He sighed deeply and settled down on the bed to watch the remainder of the soccer match, doing his best to not think about the lines of ancient writing scrawled across Diana’s computer screen, giving up their secrets one at a time as Diana worked her way through the scroll.
Oliver started to wakefulness at the sound of a lock clicking in the darkness. He reached out and grasped the grip of the gun that he had set on the bedside table, then rolled off the bed. He glanced at the clock and balcony doors as he rolled. 9:35 at nigh
t. He knelt beside the bed and sighted down the gun barrel at the door to the hallway. Nobody opened it, so he turned his attention to the door into Diana’s room. It pulled open and he saw Diana’s body silhouetted in the light from her room spilling through the open door and her face lit up in the glow of her laptop.
Oliver relaxed and stood, setting the back on the bedside table and rubbing his eyes with on hand.
“Must have fallen asleep,” Oliver yawned. “Did you finish?”
Diana nodded and strolled across the dark room to deposit her laptop on the table. Oliver took that to mean that she had, so he flicked the bedside lamp on and joined Diana at the table.
Diana looked at him with bloodshot eyes and yawned as she settled into a chair. “Is this what you always do on an adventure? Take naps and let other people do the hard work for you?”
Oliver shrugged and smiled back at her. “Nope. Generally I’m all alone and don’t get nearly enough sleep until I get back home.”
Diana nodded and yawned again. She stretched and pulled her feet up under her in the chair, then waved at her laptop. “I’ve got a rough translation finished. Still needs a lot of polish, but I’m pretty sure it’s accurate.”
Oliver stepped up the the table and settled down in front of the computer. His eyes were still a little bleary from sleep, so it took a moment for them to adjust to reading the screen. The open document consisted of several pages with neatly organized rows of text. Each line of the text was labeled with a number which, at a glance, Oliver saw corresponded to bright red numbers that had been added before each line of the original scroll in a series of screen captures. As she said, Diana’s translation was far from perfect, with many words and phrases still bracketed and colored to indicate that there were only an approximate translation of the original intended meaning of the text. Occasionally a word, or even an entire line, had been replaced with bracketed question marks to indicate a place where Diana had been unable to make any sense of the text.