by JT Osbourne
"Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name," Brook began, reciting very softly—Christian of course, but maybe the fact it was a prayer would impress them. She fiddled with the edge of her pashmina as if it were a rosary, gently bowed her head and began rocking back and forth, the way she'd seen the young men pray in the madrassas and the old men in the synagogues.
It seemed to work, and after a small exchange of Egyptian pounds—a "donation"—they were quickly waved through with many declarations from all sides that Allah was the greatest. When the cab was out of hearing range, the windows rolled up, and the air conditioning was blasting again, Saa whooped and seemed to be his old self again.
"Very, very good!" he said to Brook, slapping his arm over the seat next to him, turning to her and taking his eyes off the road. "You were totally weird!" he added with stern glee, shaking his finger at her. "And Canadian—totally Canadian. I believed it myself."
Brook laughed.
"Thank you," she said.
"But I'm going to drop the 'cousin' part—that they did not believe."
They drove on, and Saa stopped talking again.
Brook wanted to ask Saa how he knew she wanted to go to the monastery. Professor Green? Ali? Katy? She couldn't remember telling any of them, especially not Ali, though he was the most likely to have gotten word to Saa. Was somebody reading her e-mail? Had someone hacked into her phone? She couldn't help suspecting that unlocked door to her office. Had someone walked right in while she was down the hall in the women's room, or busy taking Saqqara outside for a few minutes? It would have been Professor Green, most likely, Brook reasoned. He knew all about the broken lock, after all.
That wasn't good news. If she didn't trust Ali, and she couldn't trust Professor Green, who could she trust? Was she all alone on this? Brook, of all people, knew very well that accomplishing what she wanted to accomplish would need to be a team effort, from Strelov on down.
Right. Strelov. Another partner she didn't really feel she could trust. A cool breeze hit her in the face as realization dawned. "You got the air conditioning fixed!"
Saa shrugged like it was no big deal, but the last time Brook had been there, Saa had considered the expense a very big deal. "Business been good," he stated simply.
Brook checked—the same four rings on his fingers, the same fake Rolex on his wrist. Strelov would never spring for a real one, no matter how much spying Saa did for him. Brook smiled.
"Is nice, right?" Saa asked, suddenly worried, ready to turn it up. "You prefer colder?"
"It's perfect," Brook answered.
"You are comfortable?"
"Yes, I'm very comfortable," Brook lied. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Saa relaxed.
Brook stared at the back of his head as he drove, considering. She thought about just asking him but feared Saa wouldn't give her a straight answer. If that happened, where would that leave her?
With more trust issues, that's where.
Brook decided to let it go.
"Another checkpoint!" Saa announced, sitting up. "Get ready."
Brook sunk down in the seat, bent her head, and again fiddled with the fringe on her headscarf. She mumbled The Lord's Prayer and began rocking, quickly descending into some kind of trance-like state in which she thought nothing, wanted nothing, and feared nothing.
How surprising, it occurred to her. You've found Nirvana in a Catholic prayer.
Skills she had obtained from a few hours of meditation to please a boyfriend once—she had dropped them both the same weekend—now kicked back in. She hadn't even been given her mantra yet.
She heard Saa's window roll down, angry voices, and the clatter of automatic weapons. The trunk opened and was checked, shaking the car. A gun-barrel tapped on her window.
Brook looked up. A grinning, toothless man stuck his tongue out at her.
Surely that’s some sort of strange version of sexual harassment? Brook tucked her head back down and went back to meditating.
Brook's father, Cale Burlington, was Jewish, actually, but Brook's mother was not, which meant neither was Brook. Her mother, a Catholic, had tried out of a combined sense of duty and guilt to enlist Brook into the Church, but beyond Baptism, Communion and memorizing The Lord's Prayer, the religion never really took.
Again, Brook heard the Arabic for "weird" and the English word "Canadian." No "cousin" this time—Saa was saying she was an "orphan?" Brook wasn't sure.
Not too far off the mark, but I sound like a low budget movie! Weird Canadian Orphan, coming to a theatre near you.
At this checkpoint, too, it was the "donation" that quieted the angry voices, and they were soon waved through. Saa didn't celebrate this time, opting to act cool, as though he negotiated these deadly transactions every day of the week and it was no big deal whatsoever. He stopped speaking again, and just when Brook started feeling uncomfortable with the silence again, her phone rang.
"Ali," she said, relief coloring her tone.
His voice was terse. "Where are you?"
So he didn't know. Or pretended not to know.
"Very close," she answered.
"Now who's playing games?" he insisted, genuinely angry.
"There's something I want to check out," she told him. "Don't worry."
Silence at the other end. Ali hadn't said he was worried, but now he would be. People were so complicated—living ones, that is.
Give me a mummy or two, Brook told herself.
"I have something for you," Ali said. "Well, maybe it's something, maybe it's not. I can't make anything of it. I'm e-mailing right now. I translated myself, from the German."
"Okay, I got it," Brook answered after a minute. "Let me read it, then get back to you."
Brook hung up and opened the file—tiny type filling the screen of her mobile phone.
You gotta love the Germans, Brook remarked to herself as she read the transcript, which was verbatim apparently, dictated from memory by a fed-up young lieutenant named Kurt Muller. It meticulously documented his interrogation of a tribal elder in a small village far west of the Nile Delta. Libya, Brook speculated, maybe far inland, though the exact location was withheld for "security reasons." In Brook's experience, that meant there'd been civilians killed, possibly in a massacre, though none of that was mentioned in the otherwise meticulous report.
Gotta love 'em, Brook repeated to herself bitterly.
"The bodies are protected by the Golden Whales," the old man had told Muller.
Brook released a long, slow stream of air, somewhere between a sigh and a groan. Alarmed, Saa checked on her in his rear-view mirror.
"I'm okay, Saa. I'm okay."
Brook dialed. If she waited, Ali might know.
"I don't know what to make of this," she lied convincingly. "Is there more?"
"Volumes. The guy documented the whole damn war, minute by minute. Most of it is boring as can be."
"Interesting."
"I haven't translated it yet. You think I should?"
"I...maybe," Brook hedged. "You have a hard copy?"
"Yes, that's all I have. In German. Ten or so bound notebooks."
"I'd like to see them.”
"When you get here," he promised. They said goodbye and hung up.
Brook hadn't meant to be dishonest. She had a theory as to what the German officer's diary meant, but it went against all the other theories—both her own and established others’—about where the bodies of Cleopatra and Antony might have gone. She needed to keep it to herself for the moment, but Ali had set himself up as gatekeeper. He was in possession of the document, and had deemed himself official translator. Brook wished she read German better. She had an idea what Ali would want in exchange.
She had been warned more than once that she could be too possessive of her research. It wasn't ego as much as self-preservation, she told herself. You had to tie up all the loose ends, nail down the proof. Otherwise...
Brook thought of her father, who di
ed believing an enormous trove of ancient treasure was stolen from him.
"I wasn't careful enough," Cale Burlington had told her near the end.
Brook didn't know if she entirely believed him, but she knew for a fact this was a man who'd once been on top of the world and could buy anything capable of being bought, who'd lost everything and earned it all back plus some, including his good name and his legacy at the top of the pantheon of treasure-hunters, yet died a broken man.
***
The monastery's sixty-foot bell-tower emerged from the Sinai desert, challenging the bright dark mountain beyond, and racing it to the deep, blue sky. The sun was just setting, lighting the area with a magnificent orange-yellow glow.
Brook gasped at the sight, scooting up in the back seat to get a better view.
Even Saa, not usually impressed by much, was forced to sigh, click his tongue and shake his head.
"Is beautiful," he whispered simply.
The St. Mary's of Egypt Church was built in honor of a fifth century saint who spent her early life as a prostitute—but a prostitute with a difference. More driven by sexual desire than money, she often refused payment for sexual favors, preferring to beg or spin flax for money, freeing herself to choose lovers without regard to commerce. She traveled to Jerusalem; not to worship, but to find more partners to quell her insatiable lust—but found herself unable to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulcher there
An unseen force turned Mary of Egypt around, and the voice of The Virgin Mary sent her to the monastery of John the Baptist, where her conversion was complete. After that, she quit the world, and spent the rest of her life as a hermit in the desert.
Brook found the story raw and inspiring, especially since it rose from this harsh, unforgiving location. The monastery itself; known for housing some of the earliest Biblical texts, had been attacked by numerous jihadi groups, despite the fact that one of the monastery's prized documents was a signed statement by Mohammed himself granting the site worship rights.
Many Christians had fled the area, and only a few monks and nuns remained, furiously at work digitizing the two centuries of knowledge contained in its library. Unfortunately, the one artifact Brook was looking for hadn't shown up on the Internet yet; but thankfully it still existed here.
The nuns were eager to help. Brook Burlington might have been just one more junior academic employed by a university in the States; but here she was considered a rock star. For the last decade, they'd been communicating by mail and e-mail, but they'd spoken to her only a few times on the phone, and this was their first face-to-face meeting. Nevertheless, manuscripts were shared, and information traded. The nuns didn't particularly understand Brook's fascination with Cleopatra, but they enjoyed the attention, and indulged her with a certain amusement, allowing themselves to be steered in certain directions, and searching the deepest recesses of the library in an attempt to piece together those otherwise long-forgotten final days of the last Pharaoh.
There was an unspoken understanding between them that this was an important mission worth all the harassment, frequent attacks, and the danger of sudden death. They could be overrun at any second, and a great chunk of ancient knowledge could be lost, but for the moment they were safe.
They pored over the manuscripts; first Greek, then Coptic, each telling the story of a group of Roman soldiers chasing the mummified remains of Cleopatra and her Antony into the desert, never to be heard from again.
Even with latex gloves on, Brook was afraid to touch the pages. She'd seen these documents, of course, but they were in their digital forms, e-mailed to her after being photographed and enhanced. The real thing was different. Impossible to decipher, Brook thought, her heart sinking. Was she making too much of this?
There was one manuscript they couldn't open. It was a scroll; generated at the time of Cleopatra's death, so it was believed.
"It will require x-ray-based micro-computed tomography," the nun who first discovered the object had told Brook on the phone a few months earlier.
Brook knew what she was talking about: a method first developed to read the Dead Sea Scrolls. By opening the parchment, pages stuck together by the ages, the scroll itself would fall to dust, but with the x-ray…
"You'd have to send it to Jerusalem," Brook had mused, knowing it was impossible. There was no budget for that sort of thing anywhere, but more importantly: no mandate, no compelling evidence, and no reason to believe it would determine the whereabouts of a dead Pharaoh.
The young nun silently placed the scroll on the table, and carefully opened the glass case that enclosed it. Another nun clicked off the overheads, and a third silently turned a strong lamp on the object. It was a small roll, halfway between a roll of toilet paper and a roll of paper towels, brown and burnt and unraveled unevenly, with open flaps.
Brook gasped, recognizing the Demotic language inside, one of the three languages of the Rosetta Stone (along with Greek and Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphs), the language of the people of Egypt at the time of Cleopatra's death.
Thrilled by Brook's reaction, the nuns trained a camera on the text. A monitor glowed bluish on the other side of the room. Brook hurried over.
"It's the same?" she asked desperately.
The nuns nodded. "The same," said the one most fluent in English. "Exactly as the Greek and the Coptic versions; word for word. We're sure it's a direct translation."
"God, I wish I could open the rest of it!" Brook exclaimed, then covering her mouth, certain she'd committed some sort of blasphemy.
The nuns smiled.
"We'd like that, too," another of them reassured her. "But maybe this will help." The nun pointed to one visible segment, measuring just a couple of inches on the monitor. "It’s not in the translations. Possibly not considered important."
"What is it?" Brook asked. "My Egyptian isn't that strong."
"It's the name of the witness."
"The witness?" Brook nearly gasped again.
"The confidante, the narrator. The man telling the story."
Brook held her hand up. She knew exactly what was being said. And she could make out the name: Neferu of Rakota!
13
Somewhere west of the Qattara Depression
Near the Libya/Egypt border, 1942
Kurt Muller loathed himself—not with the simple, unadorned self-loathing of the standard SS officer, but with the kind of deeply held, beyond-suicide distaste that reaches into the core of one's very being, down to the depths of the soul.
He stepped out from the darkness of his tent into the harsh light of the desert sun, rubbed his eyes, then noticed his Luger was gone.
"Sergeant!" he screamed.
The sergeant hurried up.
Muller hated him, too.
"Have you seen my Luger?" he demanded.
"Yes sir. Here it is, sir," the sergeant said, clicking his heels for emphasis as he handed back the unloaded weapon.
Muller asked for no explanation. They both knew Muller had been drinking, and that he couldn't be trusted any longer with the handgun. Whether he'd use it on himself or on others was beside the point. For several months, Muller and his unit—a dozen men in all—had been scouring the Qattara Depression searching for the mummified remains of the last Pharaoh, Cleopatra, and her dead lover, Mark Antony.
Muller let out a disgusted laugh at the futility of it all and collapsed into a camp-chair.
"Coffee, sergeant! Bring me coffee!" he bellowed.
The Qattara Depression was one of Nature's best jokes: one of the driest places on Earth was littered with the remains of ancient whales. There was a simple explanation of course—the Mediterranean once intruded into Egypt, creating a vast inland sea, something like the Gulf of Mexico, and ancient whales swam and died there.
Muller had brought his men here on the thinnest of pretexts: the old Guardian's statement that "the bodies are protected by the Golden Whales."
Muller had decided to take the words literally, but not because he reall
y believed them. "Dead people in Egypt are protected by all sorts of things!" he had spouted with drunken enthusiasm just the night before. "Baboons, jackals, falcons, crocodiles! Why not a whale, too?"
No, Muller had brought his small cadre of men to this lonesome outpost because it was just close enough to Afrika Korps—Rommel's army of sleek tanks and blue-eyed warriors—that Muller could claim to be a part of that force without suffering the hellish battles, death, and destruction just to the north. The war in North Africa had been going on for years, and Muller was sick of it. Sick like the Italians, sick like the native Egyptians and Ethiopians. It was Rommel vs. Montgomery, and neither would quit till the last tank was on fire, with the last brave soldier trapped inside.
Crisp uniforms, perfect haircuts, but certain death.
Most of all, Muller was sick of Schrecklichkeit, widely known as the German terror—the policy of terrorizing civilian populations which harked back to the First World War. It was an attitude more than anything, which Muller had embraced at first, looking down on the sheer terror of the peasants as he rolled into town in his huge Sonderkraftfahrzeug special purpose vehicle. Now they were demoted to noisy Kübevagens, whose vicelike bucket seats were designed (unsuccessfully) to keep you from falling out of the door-less vehicles.
In this place, there were no locals. The area south of El Alamein was known as Devil's Country to natives and was where Muller was certain he belonged. There were no vehicles, either. Only a camel could make it through this dry sand. But, on the other hand, Muller and his men would survive the war here.
"Maps! Bring me my maps!" he called to his sergeant. As long as he was here, as long as he was doing this, Muller would be thorough, marking off each quadrant in turn, and making whatever inspection they were capable of. They had no equipment, few personnel, and little archeological knowledge, but they could poke and dig with their shovels, and best of all, stay alive.