Jake Atlas and the Tomb of the Emerald Snake

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  I pulled myself up and staggered closer, grabbing a camera that a fleeing tourist had dropped. I cried out in pain. The black suit heard.

  He sprang up and stared at me, suddenly rigid and still as if he’d turned into one of the statues. I guessed he was furious. If he was from the Cult of Osiris, I’d just smashed a statue of his favourite god.

  Fire-fighters charged past. They pushed the black suit back towards the exit, knocking Kit’s book from his hand. I grabbed it and took a photo with the stolen camera. I prayed the shot was good enough to read the papyrus. There was no time to take another. A second later the papyrus disintegrated.

  Still the black suit kept staring at me.

  Another cry. Kit raced down the stairs with Pan close behind.

  That was enough for the black suit, who turned and fled. In moments he was lost among the scrum of people escaping the building.

  Kit stood, clutching his knees and gasping for breath.

  “Did you see?” he said. “Did you see that person’s face?”

  “No,” I wheezed. “Didn’t see under the mask.”

  “The papyrus?” Pan asked.

  The “Tomb Robber’s Tale” was now dust, but we didn’t need it. I raised the camera with a shaky arm.

  “Snap… Got a snap.”

  The smoke swirled around us, and the last tourists fled the museum, screaming in panic as they stumbled over the rubble of smashed statues.

  Pan looked across the chaotic scene and reached to help me up. “No one causes trouble like you, brother,” she said. “Now let’s get out of here.”

  14

  I should have hurt more. I shouldn’t have been able to move. I’d fought a ninja, jumped off a balcony and destroyed half a museum. My ankle was swollen and storm-coloured bruises raged from my hip to my armpit. I looked like I’d died and started to rot.

  I should’ve felt even worse on the inside. I’d broken the promise I’d made Mum and Dad, and stolen again. I’d destroyed ancient artefacts, maybe even priceless ones. Even if we could save our parents, I feared they might never forgive me.

  But the truth was, I felt amazing. I’d loved every bit of the museum heist: the smoke bombs, the battle with the black suit… I’d made a plan and it had worked.

  Well, sort of. The photo I’d taken of the papyrus was too blurry to read. Sami was running it through some sort of filter program to sharpen the details, projecting the image inch by inch onto a wall. What had appeared so far was crisp and bright, but it was taking ages.

  The longer we waited, the more frustrated we got. The black suit had photographed the papyrus too, and might already be on his way to the tomb.

  Kit stared at the projection on the wall, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as if he were standing on hot coals. He kept muttering to himself, cursing my photography skills and how long the program was taking.

  We were in the Cairo Semiramis, a swanky hotel close to the museum. I sat beside Pan on a giant bed that smelled of lavender air freshener, like Dad’s car. The air conditioning was set low enough to hang meat, but it felt like paradise compared to the stifling heat outside.

  Sami was fussing with first aid stuff he’d brought us – the entire contents of a pharmacy, by the look of it. He’d got here fast and was still out of breath, his multi-coloured jellabiya clinging with sweat to his chest.

  “I bought plasters and bandages and these pills,” he said.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “For you! You fell off a balcony.”

  “Actually, I jumped…”

  “We should go to hospital,” Sami insisted. “Kit, should we go to hospital?”

  Kit flapped a hand, eyes remaining on the projection. “Eh? Oh. No, they’re fine.”

  “But…”

  “The kids are fine, Sam. Did you shut down the base at Khan el-Kahlili? And bring the van?”

  Sami kept fussing over us. It wasn’t necessary but it was nice that he was trying. As well as the first aid stuff, Sami had brought us food – dips, bread and falafel. As I slurped a Coke, I sneaked glances at Pan – who sat in silence, flicking through a book about Ancient Egyptian religion. I recognized the look in her eyes. It was the same look she used to get after she’d been bullied at school.

  I offered her the drink. “You OK?”

  She looked up, surprised, and then continued turning the pages of the book. “Yeah. I mean… Are you? We robbed a museum, Jake…”

  I knew what she meant. Back in the museum, Pan had had to convince me to steal the papyrus. But now it was real, and scary. The police could be hunting for us. I didn’t know if they had juvenile prisons in Egypt and I didn’t want to find out.

  “Saving Mum and Dad is all that matters,” I said. “We got Ipuwer’s papyrus. Maybe we can still find the Tomb of Osiris and swap the mummy.”

  She nodded slowly. “You did.”

  “Eh?”

  “You got the papyrus, not us.”

  “We did it together, Pan.”

  She smiled and took a swig from the can. “Actually I want to blame you. Mum and Dad will be furious when they find out we destroyed those artefacts.”

  Kit kicked the wall with the projection. “Sam, can’t we hurry this up?”

  I still hadn’t worked Kit out. He was a show-off, and definitely liked the sound of his own voice. He was greedy too, eager to get his hands on the treasure. But before things had gone crazy at the museum, there had been something else in his eyes. He’d spoken about the papyrus with such affection, but then stolen it knowing it would disintegrate. He called himself a historian and a tomb robber, but could someone really be both?

  And what about Sami? He seemed trustworthy, but what did we actually know about him? I watched as he laid a glass screen on the writing desk. He tapped a code into the glass, and hologram files projected up from the screen, web pages floating in the air. He flicked through them, pinching some and zooming closer, discarding others with t’ai chi style air swishes.

  “The chaos at the museum is all over the news,” he said, reading the projections. “Good news, though: no mention of Jake or Pandora.”

  “Any mention of me?” Kit asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Oh.” Kit sounded disappointed.

  Sami scrolled through more holograms, his hands a blur. The old guy must have scanned a hundred web pages in a minute.

  “How do you do that so quickly?” Pan asked.

  Sami looked surprised by the question. I guessed that people were usually more interested in Kit than Sami’s gadgets.

  “This? Oh, it’s just something I put together. It combines holographic and diffraction optics, polarized reflectors and multi-touch gesture recognition. I call it an Optical Diffraction Gesture Control Interface. Or ODGCI for short.”

  “Catchy name,” I said. “We should call it a holosphere. Sounds cooler.”

  “But it’s not a sphere,” Sami replied.

  “Actually, that does sound cool,” Kit agreed, turning from the projection. “Holosphere. I like it. Good work, John.”

  “Jake,” I said. “John’s my dad.”

  Kit’s watch beeped. He read a message on its screen and his jaw tightened, causing his scar to pucker down his cheek. The look was gone in a second.

  “What are you kids eating?” he asked. “Falafel? Falafel is boring. This hotel does roast goat. I’ll go and get you some.”

  “What about the papyrus?” I asked.

  “First rule of treasure-hunting,” Kit replied. “Never search for a lost tomb on an empty stomach. Seriously, you’re going to love this goat.”

  He left, closing the door on his way out.

  “That is definitely not the first rule,” Sami muttered.

  I wasn’t really listening. The way Kit’s face had changed when he saw the message seemed strange. He was as eager as we were to find the tomb; would he really leave to get food when the projection was almost complete?

  Something was up.

&nb
sp; Checking that Sami wasn’t looking, I slipped from the room. The corridor was quiet, dark. The only sound was my heart beating as I crept through the gloom. I wasn’t just scared that Kit would catch me following him. I’d robbed a museum less than an hour ago. An armed SWAT team could be hiding around any corner.

  A loud ping caused me to flinch, but it was just the lift. Before its doors closed I glimpsed Kit inside. He had that same serious look on his face as he read another message on his watch.

  The lift began to descend.

  I ran past the lifts and down the stairs, taking them three at a time until I reached the hotel lobby. I looked across a world of gleaming marble and indoor palm trees, eyes roving among business people in meetings, tourists with huge cameras, porters in crimson suits…

  There!

  Kit wasn’t buying roast goat. He stood in the shade of one of the palm trees, talking to someone seated in a leather armchair. He was talking fast, the scar gleaming on his flushed face. He usually seemed so cool and controlled, but right then he looked more like a schoolboy explaining himself to his head teacher.

  I sneaked closer, hiding behind a marble column to get a better view.

  Kit was speaking to a woman around my mum’s age, with high cheekbones and ruby lips. Her hair was as white as snow and fell over the shoulders of a black cape. Her tongue kept sliding across her painted lips as she watched Kit with eyes that were totally empty of emotion. With a pale hand she stroked a slim metal case on her lap.

  As I crept even closer I could just make out the decoration on the side of the case. A dazzling green jewel was set into the metal, cut into the shape of a snake that was coiled in a circle and eating its own tail. I didn’t know much about gemstones but I guessed it was an emerald. A big emerald. Whatever that symbol meant, it seemed to bother Kit. As he spoke he shot anxious glances at it, eyelid twitching.

  “What are you doing?”

  I whirled around, yelping in fright. It was Sami.

  “I … I’m hungry,” I said. “I’m looking for that roast goat.”

  Sami seemed to believe me, or was too eager to get me back to the room to think about why I might really have left. “You need to stay hidden,” he insisted. “I haven’t checked all the news reports yet. We have to keep you safe.”

  Keep me safe? Or keep me in his sight?

  “Come on,” he urged. “The filter program is finished. The papyrus is complete.”

  At least that was something. Finally we could get back on the hunt for the tomb. I glanced behind me as I followed Sami to the lift, but couldn’t see Kit or the white-haired woman. Maybe their meeting had nothing to do with my parents or our hunt for the tomb, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something else going on here. Something that Kit and Sami weren’t telling us.

  15

  Kit burst into the hotel room. He was out of breath, the scar gleaming on his cheek like a fresh wound. “Is it done?”

  It was. The once blurry photograph was now sharp and light, revealing Ipuwer’s scribbled writing in crisp detail. Kit rushed closer, eyes locked on the projection on the wall.

  “No goat?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “You went to get roast goat.”

  “Oh. No. It’s not very nice, anyway.”

  Or you didn’t really look, I thought. I hadn’t had the chance to tell Pan what I’d seen in the hotel lobby. I decided to worry about it later. Right then the only important thing was this papyrus, and whether or not it gave us the location of the Tomb of Osiris.

  “Can you read it?” Pan asked.

  “It’s tricky,” Kit replied. “It’s written in hieratic.”

  “I thought Ancient Egyptians wrote in hieroglyphs?” I said.

  “Hieroglyphics were for sacred things,” Pan explained. “Like carvings on temple and tomb walls. For normal stuff, Egyptians used simpler versions of the signs to write faster. That script is called hieratic.”

  I glanced at her. Back at Kit’s headquarters in the souk, Pan had revealed her intelligence just to shut Kit up. But now I wondered if she was enjoying the challenge of all this.

  “You can still read it, right?” she asked.

  “Of course I can,” Kit replied. “But this is a very cursive form. I can make a literal translation, but to make total sense of the meaning I’d need to work with the world’s two leading experts.”

  “So where are the experts?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” Sami said. “They’re your parents.”

  I’d guessed he was going to say that, but it still knocked the wind out of me. My mum and dad … were experts? I’d never really thought of them like that. But then I’d never asked.

  “But you can read something on the document?” Pan asked. “Tell me we didn’t just go through all that in the museum for nothing?”

  Kit barked out a laugh. “Ha! That museum job was a breeze compared to some of the adventures Sam and I have had. Hey, Sam, you remember that time in Cambodia, with the witch doctor and the tarantula pit?”

  “Kit?” Sami replied. “The papyrus?”

  “Right. Yes.”

  Stepping closer, he ran a finger over the lines on the projection, translating the script. “And lo, I entered the realm of the Foremost of the Westerners. I passed through the one hundred and eightieth level of the rays of the fading sun, whereupon I made my mark. But lo, I feared for the wrath of the gods, and left that place where Lord Osiris resides for ever.”

  “Great,” I said. “It’s a load of gibberish.”

  Kit ignored me, re-reading the document line by line. “Realm of the Foremost of the Westerners…”

  “That’s Osiris,” Pan said. “The west bank of the Nile was the land of the dead, where Ancient Egyptians were buried. So Osiris was known as the Foremost of the Westerners.”

  “Agreed,” Kit said. “And the one hundred and eightieth level is specific. But level of what?”

  “Darts,” I said. “The top score in darts is one hundred and eighty.”

  Everyone stared at me.

  “Could you not talk for a while?” Kit asked.

  He had a point. I wasn’t much help among these big brains.

  “So what does Ipuwer mean?” Sami asked, glancing at me apologetically. “The rays of the fading sun?”

  Kit shook his head, repeating the words. “Fading sun, fading sun…”

  Suddenly Pan bolted up, her eyes as wide as if she’d seen a second head sprout from Kit’s shoulder. She was definitely enjoying this. “It’s obvious!”

  Kit looked at Sami, who shrugged. “Is it?” he asked.

  “Well, fading means old, right? So it’s something that was already old when Ipuwer wrote his tale. He lived in the New Kingdom, during the reign of Ramesses III.”

  “Right,” I said, beginning to follow. “So the place where he entered the tomb of Osiris was old even then. But what about the rays of the sun?”

  “That’s the key bit,” Pan said. She was beaming now, her pale face lit by the projection. I’d never seen her look so excited. “This thing was meant to look like the sun’s rays,” she continued.

  “My god,” Kit said. “You’re right.”

  “She is?” Sami said.

  “A pyramid,” Pan said.

  “You mean…” I asked. “The big pointy things?”

  “Big pointy tombs,” Kit replied. “Of course! Pyramids were meant to look like rays of the sun, rising to the sun god Ra in the sky. They were built in layers of stone blocks, which must be the levels Ipuwer talks about.”

  “So the entrance to the tomb is on the hundred and eightieth level of a pyramid?” I asked, trying to keep up.

  “But there were lots of pyramids,” Pan said. “Over a hundred, some experts think. Most have crumbled away.”

  “Can’t be many with over a hundred and eighty layers,” I muttered.

  They all looked at me again, and I shrugged. “OK, OK, I’ll keep quiet.”

  “No!” Pan said.
“You’re right! In fact, only two pyramids were ever that big. Isn’t that right, Kit?”

  He slapped her on the back gently. I was amazed she didn’t punch him in the face. She never let anyone touch her.

  “And surely the tomb entrance would be on the first of those that was built,” Kit added.

  “Why?” Sami asked.

  “Because that’s why that pyramid was built there,” Pan said, finishing Kit’s thought. “Egyptian kings were thought to merge with Osiris after they died. So where better to build your pyramid than right on top of the Tomb of Osiris?”

  “So which king built the first of the two big pyramids?” I said.

  Pan looked to Kit. “Khufu?” she said.

  “Khufu,” Kit replied.

  I was getting annoyed now. They both knew. They were just dragging it out to make Sami and me feel stupid.

  “Is Khufu’s pyramid still standing?” I asked.

  “It’s still standing, all right,” Kit said. “It’s the only remaining Wonder of the World.”

  “You mean … you mean…?”

  “He means the Great Pyramid,” Pan said.

  16

  The van jolted over a crack in the road, hurling me into Pan’s lap. She shoved me back, but another bump sent her sliding into me.

  “Hold tight!” Kit called.

  He yanked the steering wheel, skidding the van onto an even rougher surface. Digital information flashed across the windshield: road maps of Cairo as 3-D images. As he drove, Kit flicked one away, scrolled to another, finding the best route to the pyramids. His jaw was locked tighter than ever, but there was a glint in his eyes that seemed almost childlike.

  “Just like Guatemala back in 2006, eh, Sam? Those were the days, eh? Sam? Weren’t those the days?”

  At the back of the van, Sami rolled his eyes. He sat at a work table, preparing equipment for the tomb. A gyroscopic table, he’d called it, with springs that kept the surface still over bumps.

  It had taken Sami a few hours to gather the right equipment for the hunt. Kit had wanted to leave for the pyramids straightaway, but the monuments swarmed with tourists until evening and then there was a sound and light show until late into the night. There was no chance to climb the Great Pyramid.