The markings on the inside of the ring had been photographed and enlarged and transmitted over to the Cryptography section and it was only minutes before Cimarron Escobar was on the telephone shaking with excitement. I could imagine him dancing a flamenco in his enthusiasm.
“This is it!” he had declared. “This is the Rosetta Stone that we needed. We are already getting results. We should have confirmed translations for you within the hour.”
And he had been as good as his word. Teleconferencing from one of the public meeting rooms on the ground floor of the headquarters complex (nobody got further inside unless they were heading up to the Director’s office or had come to fix something that couldn’t be brought out to them in which case they were sedated and taken down by security staff), he had presented the results of his work on a screen behind him.
“What the hell does that all mean?” I demanded when I saw the pictograms that were being projected.
“I have absolutely no idea,” the big man (probably so sized from entering the all-Espana Paella Eating Championships) had replied happily. His work was over and it was now somebody else’s problem. “I’m a code breaker, not a linguist.”
“Egyptian hieroglyphs?” Miranda had queried, peering at the screen showing an image of Escobar’s screen.
“Si Senorita,” Escobar had cheerfully agreed, “but a very old kind that cannot be translated by the computer universal translator. I did a preliminary run and the results made less sense than British house selling laws. It will need to be translated by an expert. ”
“Oh crap,” I groaned, “I’m going to have to teleport to bloody Egypt again aren’t I?”
“You could try Houseman down at the British Museum in London,” Director Grayson had suggested from his quarter of the video screen “before spending even more Agency money on wholly unnecessary jaunts around the world.”
And so here we were, walking past the observant statues into the most complete recreation of Ancient Egypt outside of … well … Ancient Egypt. It was only a few minutes before closing time and the last of the tourists and history buffs were drifting listlessly away towards the gift shop and the exits. When Professor Houseman’s personal assistant heard what we wanted on the telephone, she had been unimpressed and said that she had an available appointment with the professor in six weeks time. When I mentioned who I worked for she said that the professor would be waiting for us whatever time we chose to arrive. The Agency has a great number of people employed on retainer in a whole number of roles in case their particular expertise is ever needed. They get a generous stipend for doing absolutely nothing. When we call, however, they are expected to drop everything (with the exception of the nuclear physicists) and pay attention.
The professor was not the bespectacled, thin and pale man with wayward hair that I had been expecting. Instead, she was a portly woman whose flowery dress reminded me of nothing so much as a summer’s meadow not least because it possibly could have covered one. The plunging neckline revealed a cleavage so deep that a whole team of potholers could have gotten themselves lost down there. She was certainly a formidable woman as she met us just inside the entrance to the exhibitions and shook me warmly by the hand, mine all but disappearing inside hers.
“Hello, hello,” she greeted us both effusively with a big smile. “Well now this is exciting I must say. I’ve been taking the money from that agency of yours for the longest time and never thinking anything of it and here you are now. I believe that you have some sort of enigma for me to have a look at? Some sort of arcane puzzle for me to solve? Some great mystery for me to unravel?”
“Well I don’t know about that,” I said, trying to downplay her excited expectations. “It’s just a small inscription on the inside of a ring.”
“Ah yes,” she agreed, her enthusiasm undimmed, “but one that your translation matrices can’t make head nor tail of is that right?”
“Yes, that is true,” I admitted.
“I say, it’s all jolly exciting. Is it something of national importance would you say? Of global significance?”
She was so excited that I didn’t want to spoil it for her by saying that we had no idea what it was all about or how important it really was. “Well all I can say that is that it is international, involves kidnapping and there have been some deaths.”
“How positively marvellous,” she declared excitedly and then stopped to consider what she had just said. “I mean obviously not for the poor souls themselves. Terrible for them of course. I mean I’m so awfully sorry.”
“It’s all right professor,” I reassured her. “I understand exactly what you mean.” And I did understand what she meant. Whilst the deaths were terrible and I would have done just about anything to have prevented them, even that of the Siren, the fact remained that there is something thrilling about being part of an investigation that is important and dramatic and there is certainly nothing more dramatic and important than people being killed all over the place. Especially to the people being killed.
“I wouldn’t want you to think of me as callous,” the professor continued. “I don’t get out of the museum much and this is a slice of real life that I would normally only catch a couple of minutes of on the TV before switching over to the archaeology channel so that I can complain about their complete lack of accuracy.”
“Think no more on it,” I waited for her to pause for breath before absolving her of her guilt and she accepted it as though it had come from the highest orders of the Church.
“Now then, it is a ring you say? Come, come and let’s see what we can make of it.” She turned and led us through the maze of corridors that was the below grounds research wing of the museum. As she moved she did not so much remind me of a galleon under full sail as an entire Armada setting out to destroy Elizabethan England.
The museum may have been equipped with the very latest in all manner of scientific equipment (and the online brochure advised that it was), but the structure of the building seemed to have remained unchanged from the time that the first stones were laid down in the mid 1700s. The exterior façade might be all columns and mock Greek statuary (the real statuary having been returned to Greece under the Constantinople agreements on architectural antiquities) and the public sections of the interior might be all modern exhibition spaces with glass cases, masked lighting and state of the art sound and light presentations, but the subterranean research wings were simple concrete block constructions with plaster surfaces that showed every inch of their ancient heritage. Pipes of all kinds ran the lengths of the corridor ceilings and harsh fluorescent tubes provided the stark illumination.
“This is me,” the professor indicated, opening the door into an office that clearly belonged to an academic. I had visited enough dons in the university back in Oxford for the sight to be eerily familiar with only the absence of light coming through a window that looked over a leafy, sleepy quadrangle to spoil the déjà vu. There was a window, but it looked out over a sunken area of concrete that provided the emergency exit route. Books and objects littered every surface and every inch of shelf space around the room and there was a set of filing cabinets, wooden ones that had probably been installed when the underground wing was constructed a hundred years or so before. Everything looked in complete disarray, but I was willing to bet that the professor knew the location of every single thing that she might have needed without even having to think hard about it.
“Sit, sit, sit,” she waved us to a pair of comfortable overstuffed armchairs whose leather surfaces shone with the polish of several decades’ worth of backsides and elbows. “Inside of a ring you say? Come along then young man, let me see it, let me see this ring of yours.”
I shook the ring out of the evidence bag since there was no more forensic information that could be learned from it and handed it across to her. She extracted a jeweller’s eyepiece from under one of the piles of paper on her desk, screwed it in front of her right eye and squinted through it, frowning so much as she did
so that it almost disappeared into the folds of her face. I then passed over copies of Escobar’s decoded work, which she also studied.
“It is hardly surprising that your machines couldn’t decipher any of this,” she said at length, tapping the ring on the top of the papers, “because it is no language that was ever used openly and certainly never written down on any document that has survived to the modern day. What a wonderful thing. Could I keep it do you think? For the museum?”
“Once the case is over I can see no reason for it not to be returned to you,” I replied. Once a case was closed, the files were archived in the computer and the physical evidence went into a locked box that was transported to the evidence locker inside its barbed wire compound where it remained gathering dust forever. It was doubtful that anyone would mind if the ring was given to the museum instead, so I was hardly promising much. “As long as it is carefully catalogued and available if needed. If this language never existed…”
“Oh it existed,” Professor Houseman cut in. She was in full university lecturer mode now, having something interesting to lecture on, well something that she found interesting anyway. “It was just used by a very small and very select group of people. There are possibly only three or so scholars in the world today who would even have a hope of deciphering it. Fortunately for you, I am one of those.”
“So what does it say?” Miranda enquired.
“Not so fast,” Houseman chided her gently. “Background first, astounding revelations later. Surely you went to school at some point?”
Miranda nodded, somewhat cowed. Now that was a trick I would like to have learned.
“At the height of their power, the Pharaohs of Egypt ruled the known world,” Houseman continued and nothing was going to stop her now. She pulled a book off one of the shelves without having to stand and flipped it open to a page that was clearly well used. Spread across the pages inside was a map showing the extent of the land conquered or in thrall to the Egyptians. “An empire like that isn’t maintained by chance and the goodwill of the people you know. No indeed. The Pharaohs operated one of the most extensive and effective spy networks that the world has ever known. How do you think that Cleopatra knew that Julius Caesar had a thing for carpets hmmm? Not from the local Roman gossip columnists I can tell you. No, the Egyptians had spies in the courts of most of the major powers and were able to influence matters far beyond their own borders and for a network like that to succeed, it must remain secret, more secret than you could possibly imagine in these days of freedom of the press and surveillance and computer databases and everyone having a camera in their phone no matter where they are.”
At this point, the excitement overwhelmed her and she jumped to her feet again, heading for the door. When she realised that we had not immediately followed her, she favoured us with an impatient, “Well come on, what are you waiting for?”
Instead of retracing our steps up to the public exhibition spaces as I had imagined, the professor led us to an underground vault that she could only open by keying three separate passwords into three separate keypads. Inside were shelves and shelves of objects masked by plastic sheeting and marked with small index tags.
“These were the greatest spies and assassins that there have ever been,” Houseman recommenced the lecture. “No offence to yourself. They operated on what we might call the ‘three P’ principles – Patience, Preparation and Puncture wounds.”
“Sounds like my kind of people,” I commented and was brought up short by a withering look from the professor who clearly didn’t appreciate people talking in her classes and had perfected that expression over years of imparting vital information to undeserving students.
“In comparison, the so-called ninjas were just playing at it,” she pulled off a plastic sheet to reveal a device that was small, compact and had far too many moving sharp edges for my liking. “I won’t tell you where that would be shoved” she added with evident relish at my immediate discomfort.
“These are the people who once killed the King of Persia, Cambaxerxes, by poisoning the nail polish of his favourite concubine,” when we weren’t immediately impressed, she explained, “he had a foot fetish you see … liked sucking her toes.”
“Clever,” Miranda mumbled.
“Forget firing arrows up the khazi,” the professor revealed another device which appeared to be a collar through which a ratchet forced needle sharp, well, needles. The collar, though, was too small to fit around a neck and I couldn’t bear to think what part of the anatomy it would be placed around, “these people raised the science of assassination to an art form that nobody else has been able to challenge. They were subtle and elegant and it was something of a compliment to be killed by them.”
“A compliment I could gladly forego,” Miranda risked the professor’s wrath to mutter.
“They practically invented espionage and established many of the principles and operating protocols that your agency probably uses even today. In fact, agent, they were, in a very real sense, the you of their day.”
She resisted the urge to bow and I resisted the urge to applaud, but both urges hung in the air between us, palpably.
“Anyway, the language on the inside of that ring was invented for their use alone and only those of sufficient rank within the organisation as to be privy to the most secret and important of information. By speaking a language that was not known to anyone else, they were able to operate the perfect code for the oral transmission of information. They could speak anywhere without fear of giving away vital secrets since nobody could understand a single word they were saying. They also didn’t have to fear being overheard by people unseen. It’s quite an elegant solution really. Must have been terribly frustrating for their enemies. Of course most of their enemies were dead before they realised they were enemies anyway. You should really try something similar.”
She opened the vault door and took us back out into the corridor, heading for her office again.
“I have trouble enough coping with English,” I told her, not exaggerating the case. Ordering a coffee in Spain would have taxed my limited language skills.
“A pity. One can learn so much about a people by studying their language. It’s tells us almost as much as what they actually say with it.” We re-entered the office and she crossed to one of the sets of drawers that were built into the shelves that lined the walls. This being the British Museum all of the storage space was fashioned in wood and possessed brass handles, though the handles here were somewhat dulled. The professor was clearly more of a user than a polisher. “Even I will need a little assistance from the books to tell you what it says on this marvellous ring of yours,” she said, opening one of the drawers.
A screaming cloud erupted into the small office from the open drawer. It hit the professor squarely in the chest and would probably have been the end of her had not that chest been quite so ample. The cloud wasn’t smoke or water vapour, though. It was made up of dozens of small, squirming, vicious creatures.
“Get out!” I yelled at Miranda who immediately attempted to help the stricken academic. There were so many of the creatures and they were moving so fast that there was little to no chance of pulling them off her. The small, furry bodies were all over her and their tiny teeth had already elicited quite a serious flow of blood across her face and body. I grabbed a metre ruler and tried to scrape them off her. Instead of achieving anything useful, I only managed to get them to turn their attention to me and to leap at my face instead. I dived backwards, barely avoiding getting my nose savaged, and darted across the room and out through the door that Miranda was still holding open. The creatures streamed through in pursuit of me and Miranda slipped back inside the office behind them and slammed the door shut.
Which left me alone with the vicious little buggers.
This wasn’t a betrayal and I understood why she had done it instantly. With me and the creatures outside, she might have a chance at helping the professor. She trusted in my ability to sa
ve myself, which was more than I did at that moment.
Because the most famous sphinx in the world is the bloody huge great thing sitting (or rather lying down) just outside Cairo that’s how people imagine them to be in reality, huge and fairly dormant. What people don’t know is that the famous Sphinx is, in fact, a final act of hatred carried out on Pharaoh Sekhumbetti the Third by his sister Hakusnettifer when she followed him onto the throne following an unfortunate accident that befell him in his bed with a Nile crocodile and a bucket of dead fish. Sekhumbetti the Merciless as he liked to be known (though most of those who were close to him thought of him as ‘Sekhumbetti the Particularly Nasty’ and those that were far enough away from him thought of him as ‘that bloodthirsty bastard Sekhumbetti’) was not one of the country’s most beloved leaders at the time of his assumed demise. His death had to be assumed since most of the vital bits were never actually found in order for a death papyrus to be issued.
Since most of the king’s burial arrangements were only partially started at the time of the young Pharaoh’s death (Egypt’s kings starting to build their own death cities as soon as they ascended the throne being one of the reasons why that country has so many historic sites and such a negative gross national product), his surviving sister undertook the rest. Her first decision was that her brother’s greatest monument would be in the shape of the most annoying agricultural pest that plagued the country. That pest was the sphinx, a small flying feline that looked a lot like a miniature housecat with wings and an attitude.
Her second decision was that the handler of the Pharaoh’s crocodiles would become her official consort. Such a surprising choice of companion was not questioned by anyone who could not swim very, very fast.
The real sphinxes had been hunted down and exterminated over the centuries until they were finally made extinct. They had been blamed for the loss of all manner of domesticated animals and even small unattended children from time to time, so it was something of a curiosity to census takers and the Pharaohonic police force that the number of missing children and animals didn’t actually drop in the years that followed the killing of the last nesting colony.
The Man From U.N.D.E.A.D. - the Curious Case of the Kidnapped Chemist Page 17