Jake Atlas and the Tomb of the Emerald Snake

by Rob Lloyd Jones

  Sami set up his laptop at the cabin’s control panel, and in seconds he’d turned the entire window into a screen for his holosphere. Digital information appeared over our view of the lake, identifying the islands and giving co-ordinates, depths and temperatures. It was like looking through a giant pair of smart-goggles.

  Reaching to the glass, I touched the island with the ruined temple. It turned pale pink on the holosphere.

  “The Temple of Isis,” I said, reading the information. “Osiris’s wife, right?”

  “Yes,” Mum said, “although that temple wasn’t always where you see it now. It was moved there when its original island in the lake was flooded, after they built the high dam. More importantly, do you see the island beyond it?”

  She touched the holosphere, highlighting an ugly clump of rock beyond the temple island.

  “It’s Biga,” Pan said. “The Holy Island.”

  That was where the inscription suggested the second Tomb of Osiris was hidden.

  “Wait,” I said, noticing something. “Zoom in on Biga.”

  The holosphere view thrust us to the shore of the Holy Island, where several motorboats were beached in inlets between boulders. A dozen black-clad figures were unloading bags of equipment onto the rocks.

  “Those aren’t tourists,” Sami said.

  “They’re here already,” Pan said “The snake lady’s goons.”

  Kit was there too, ordering the mercenaries around. The snake lady stood higher, on a rise of boulders. She held her metal case in front of her with two hands, like a schoolgirl with a satchel.

  “It doesn’t mean they’ve found the tomb,” I said. “It’s a big island, right?”

  “Yes,” Mum muttered. “It’s big and obvious.”

  “Obvious?”

  As Mum watched the mercenaries, she touched her amulet. Something was bothering her.

  “Biga was well-known as sacred to Osiris,” she said. “There was a temple there dedicated to him. But from what we’ve seen, the priests wanted to keep the tomb hidden. Biga just doesn’t seem secret enough.”

  She turned. “Sami, remember that blurred fragment of the inscription? We never read that part, the word that came before Holy Island.”

  Sami checked his laptop. “It was tricky to clear up. I had to try a different filter program. Could be another half hour until it’s ready to read.”

  “We should wait,” Mum said.

  “There’s no time to wait,” Pan replied.

  Mum’s eyes remained on the holosphere. She reached and touched the Temple of Isis, highlighting it pink. When she spoke again, her voice was distant.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Mum?” I asked.

  “The temples. The tombs. Such stunning monuments.”

  She sounded sad, even a bit confused. “Your father and I used to charge around, trying to save history. We saw ourselves as noble crusaders. But we were really in it for ourselves, just like Kit.”

  “Kit was obsessed with fame and money,” Pan replied. “You said you didn’t care about that.”

  “No, but we were addicted too.”

  “To what?”

  “The thrill. It was like…”

  She reached both hands to the holosphere and swept them around the images, causing the projections to crackle.

  “It was like electricity,” she said.

  “And when you stopped you felt dead,” Pan added. “You should be doing this more than ever, Mum. This snake lady seems—”

  “No,” Mum interrupted. “She’s something else. Something far more dangerous.”

  “Who is she?” I asked. “What’s all this about?”

  I feared she might get angry, but she just sighed.

  “I don’t know for sure. It was her case that I recognized. Your father and I once heard of people with the same symbol, the snake eating its tail. They weren’t hunters or historians. They were … different.”

  “How, different?”

  “They were involved in some sort of secret, a cover-up. And they had so much power. Power to shut things down, close sites, remove finds. To wipe things away as if they’d never existed. Those people, the people of the snake, were far more powerful than any treasure hunter. That’s all I know. It was around the time we stopped, and I never heard of them since.”

  “Mum,” I said, “back on the river I heard the snake lady talk about some sort of tablet. She said that was what they were really after from the coffin. It sounded like there were other tablets too, like they had loads of them to find in other tombs.”

  If this news was a surprise to Mum, she didn’t show it. In fact, she smiled slightly as she continued to stare out across the lake.

  “We’ll find out what they’re up to,” I added, “after we rescue Dad.”

  “No.” Mum’s voice tightened. “Our only interest is saving your father. Then you’re going home.”

  “Home?” Pan replied. “What home? We’re wanted criminals. And anyway, we can’t go back now, not to how things were.”

  “We don’t need to,” I said. “I’ve thought about it, Mum. We can travel. You and Dad can train us to become hunters too. We could do this together, as a family.”

  Mum’s jaw unlocked and she tried to fight a smile. “That’s crazy, Jake. What about school?”

  “What about school?” Pan said. She sounded even more into the idea than me. “You can teach us everything we’d learn there, and loads more. We’ve got all the fake passports and bags of cash. How many emergency stashes have you hidden around the world?”

  “Hundreds,” Mum said. “Your father was always prepared.”

  “It’s not such a crazy idea, Jane,” Sami added.

  “Mum,” I urged, “we can help you. I know you think I act crazy, but this is the only thing I’m good at. Back home I’m no good. I’m a thief and a troublemaker. But here I’m a treasure hunter. And Pan, she’s happy to be clever here, not hiding it.”

  I’d wanted to say that since Cairo, but had feared Mum’s reaction. She didn’t seem angry though – she looked curious. Her eyes flicked from me to Pan and then to Sami, who nodded.

  “They’re good, Jane. They’ve earned a chance.”

  “A family of hunters.” Pan’s eyes were bright with excitement. “It’s the best possible cover story. We could get into sites and tombs, pretend to be bored tourists on holiday, act like a squabbling family. It’s perfect.”

  “I don’t want to go back,” I said.

  “We can’t go back,” Pan agreed. “Mum, we have to do this.”

  Mum turned back to the holosphere, and her eyes glistened in the reflected light.

  “You were never really a thief, Jake, or a troublemaker. You’re simply addicted to action, just like your father. We always knew that about you, but it scared us. You were too much like us. And you too, Pandora. You are cleverer and sharper than either of your old parents ever were. Sam was right; you have both been truly marvellous. Your father will be very proud. I am very proud. I love you both very much.”

  Mum reached out to hug me, and I’d never felt happier. But then she grabbed me and shoved me back. Before I knew what was happening, she’d snatched a set of handcuffs from Sami’s bag and locked me to one of the wheel latches on the cabin wall.

  “Mum!” Pan cried.

  She tried to pull away, but Mum twisted her arm behind her back and pinned her to the wall.

  “Mum! You’re hurting me…”

  “Sam!” Mum barked. “The other cuffs.”

  “Jane, I…”

  “Sam, do what I said!”

  “Don’t do this, Jane,” Sami pleaded. “Jake’s right, you can train them, turn them into—”

  “Sam, they are my children. Now throw me the cuffs.”

  Sami sighed, but finally tossed Mum a second pair of handcuffs. Mum locked Pan to a latch beside me on the cabin wall.

  I pulled at the cuffs, steel digging into my wrists. Next to me Pan yanked the wheel
latch, trying to force it free. But it was cast iron and held tight.

  “I am sorry,” Mum said, stepping away. “I wish what you were saying was true, but it’s not that simple. This job is too dangerous. I can’t let you face that, and I know you would come after me if I didn’t stop you. How could I ever live with myself if anything happened to you?”

  “Mum, please…”

  But she wasn’t listening. She began to gather her things, adding gadgets from Sami’s bag to her utility belt.

  “I’m going to Biga,” she said, “to find the mummy and the tablet, and save your father. There’s a way to get your lives back, I’m sure of it.”

  She put on Pan’s camouflage jacket and threw Sami the keys to our cuffs. “Sam, unless it’s an emergency do not release them.”

  “Mum?” I called.

  She stopped in the cabin doorway and looked back.

  “I’m not going back,” I said. “Not ever.”

  Her fingers tightened around the door frame, and a look crossed her face that made my heart ache. Not anger – she hadn’t looked angry this whole time – but sadness. Incredible sadness.

  She strapped her smart-goggles over her head. “I’m sorry, Jake. You will.”

  And then she was gone.

  31

  The corrugated roof rattled as I kicked the cabin wall. The steel rings of the cuffs dug deeper into my wrist, breaking the skin and drawing blood. Giving up, I pressed my boots against the pipes, trying to tear away the latch.

  It was no good. Even if I succeeded I’d still have been handcuffed to the heavy iron wheel.

  Pan had given up trying to force the cuffs open. Instead she attempted to pick the lock with a screw she’d found. Her curses – increasing in volume each time she dropped the screw – gave away the fact that she had no idea what she was doing.

  “Sami?” I called.

  He was trying to ignore us as he worked on cleaning up the final piece of the Osiris inscription. The holosphere had darkened most of the window, projecting only that single fragment of the carving. The hieroglyphs were almost visible, their blurred edges finally coming into focus.

  “I’m not allowed to talk to you,” he muttered. “Your mum said.”

  “But I need the loo,” I lied.

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I really do, Sami. Don’t make me do it in my pants.”

  Sami sighed, finally turned. He eyed me with suspicion, and then kicked a bucket across the floor to my feet.

  “There,” he said.

  I booted it so hard it crashed against the cabin door. “Just free us, will you? Mum needs us. There must be fifty of the snake lady’s goons on that island.”

  “She knows what she’s doing.”

  “You know she’s wrong, Sami,” I pleaded. “She needs our help.”

  “Talk to her more when she comes back. Maybe you can convince her.”

  “She’s not coming back,” I said. “Is she, Sami?”

  “What?” Pan asked. She dropped the screw. “What are you talking about?”

  So far I’d not been able to bring myself to say it out loud. “If Mum saves Dad, she’s going to turn herself into the police. She’ll confess to blowing up the Giza tomb to get us off the hook.”

  “But … she can’t.”

  Pan tried to protest, but she knew it too. She’d seen it in Mum’s eyes when she left. The way she said goodbye. She told us she knew a way to get us back to our old lives, but she never said she was going back. I knew I was right because if I could save my family that’s what I would do too.

  Screaming, Pan kicked the latch. Blood trickled down her arm from beneath the handcuff. But it did no good. We were trapped.

  I was about to appeal to Sami again when his laptop beeped. He turned to the holosphere. “The elevation model is complete. The last piece of the inscription.”

  On the holosphere, the fragment crackled, then reappeared sharper than ever. The hieroglyphs were carved by priests who were moving the coffin of Osiris to its new tomb here on the lake. They were three thousand years old, but they looked like they were cut just yesterday.

  “They don’t mean much to us,” Sami said.

  “Yes, they do,” Pan replied, twisting her body to see the projection. “We’ve seen it before. Bring up the rest of the inscription.”

  “Mum said not to free us,” I reminded Sami. “She never said don’t show us the inscription.”

  I could tell Sami wanted to show us, and a moment later the rest of the inscription appeared on the screen. Sami slid the final piece into its place in the puzzle.

  “There,” Pan said. “See the new symbols? They’re repeated later in the inscription, exactly the same.”

  “But we don’t know which word that was,” I said.

  “We do. I remember. It was island. Holy Island.”

  “So the inscription really says the tomb is on the island Holy Island? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Maybe it does,” Pan said. “If it means the island off Holy Island. Sami, can you bring up a map of Biga?”

  This time Sami didn’t hesitate. A satellite view of Biga appeared on the holosphere, a rocky island the shape of a face with a bulbous nose. There was another, smaller island beside it in the lake. An island off the Holy Island.

  “What’s that island there?” Pan asked.

  “That’s Agilika,” Sami said. “The one with the temple.”

  The window screen changed again, so we could see the lake and the Temple of Isis, lit golden by the midday sun.

  “Maybe the inscription means the tomb is really on that island?” I suggested. “Isis was Osiris’s wife, right? Maybe her temple was built on top of his tomb so they could be close together.”

  “Maybe,” Pan replied. “Except the temple wasn’t originally on that island. It was moved there recently, when the temple’s original island ended up underwater after they built the dam.”

  “Original island?” I asked.

  Pan had cracked it, I was sure…

  “Where was that original island, Sami?” I called.

  He typed on his laptop and the submerged island appeared on the satellite view as a small dotted oblong. It was right beside Biga, even closer than the island on which the temple now stood.

  “That’s it,” Pan said. “What was it called?”

  “Philae,” Sami said. “But it’s totally underwater now. You can’t even see it.”

  “That’s where the tomb is,” Pan said. “Mum didn’t think it would be on Biga, she said it was not secret enough. The tomb was hidden on Philae. It was once under the Temple of Isis.”

  “When they moved the temple to its new island,” I guessed, “they had no idea the Tomb of Osiris was on Philae. So it’s still there, somewhere underneath that sunken island.”

  Pan kicked the wall – not from anger this time, but excitement. “Sami, we can find the mummy and get the tablet. We can still use it to save Dad. Let us free.”

  Sweat slid down the wrinkles of Sami’s forehead. His eyes flicked between us as he tried to work out what to do.

  “It’s dangerous, you know?” he said.

  “We know,” I said.

  “You’ll have to find an underwater island and a tomb somewhere under that. Even if you’re not seen by the mercenaries, you could drown.”

  “We know, Sami!”

  He looked at us and sighed. “You two are exactly like your parents.”

  He tossed Pan the keys and she unlocked our cuffs.

  Sami opened one of his bags and brought out our utility belts. “They’re fully equipped with the usual gadgets, including bombs. And there’s something else.”

  He took another device from his bag. It looked like a torch; slim and round, with a single button on the side. “This is a hydropiezoelectric transducer. It projects sound waves as well as light. When it detects different thickness in an underwater surface, it emits low-pitched sonic vibrations.”

  “You mean, if it detects
a door to an underwater tomb, it sings?” Pan asked.

  Sami raised the gadget, trying to fight a smile. “I call it … the tomb tracker.”

  “All right!” I said, laughing.

  Sami came in for a high five, but Pan ignored me again as she fixed her belt around her waist.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked.

  I stepped to the window and closed Sami’s laptop. The holosphere vanished. I needed to see the lake clearly, to think without all the information flashing and distracting my mind.

  My eyes roved among the islands, their shores and outcrops of broken boulders. Had Mum reached Biga? Maybe she’d approached it from the other side, to stay hidden. The mercenaries might have gone deeper into the island to hunt for the tomb, but they had probably set up watches around the shore. It would be hard to get onto that island without being seen.

  But we didn’t need to get onto that island. We were heading for Philae, the sunken island off the side of Biga. The rock off the sacred rock.

  And there was only one way I could think of to get there.

  Pan stood behind me, looking over my shoulder across the lake. “I doubt we’ll even reach the end of this dam without being seen. How are we going to get into the water?”

  Despite my fears for Mum and Dad, of the police and the snake lady and her army of mercenaries, I couldn’t help grinning. Finding a tomb underwater was going to be tricky. Getting into the water was the easy bit.

  32

  We were meant to have gone after the count of three, but Pan jumped on three, so she went over first. She sprang up and out and into the air, totally silent until she splashed into the lake thirty feet below.

  Stupidly, I shuffled closer to the edge and looked over. I staggered back, my stomach churning and legs turning to jelly. I wanted to be a treasure hunter, but treasure was usually buried underground. Why did I always have to be up so high?

  I was glad Pan had gone first. Now I couldn’t chicken out and leave her to find the tomb alone. I couldn’t stay on top of the dam for much longer, either. The police on the shore, or the mercenaries on the island, might spot me.

  I had to do this now.

  I took a deep breath and counted to three … then to five … then to ten… And then I heard Pan call me to hurry up and finally I did it.