by Paul Sussman
There was a muted clatter, presumably as Fadawi laid his Dictaphone aside. In his excitement he seemed to have forgotten to switch it off because although he was no longer speaking directly into it, the recording continued. The tape echoed with grunts and muttered comments, the creak of scaffolding, the clink and scrape of metal on stone. Every now and then Fadawi’s voice could be heard issuing instructions in Arabic – Khallee barak, Abu! Harees, harees. Batee awee! – his tone becoming increasingly breathless and urgent, the background grunts increasingly laboured until, after about ten minutes, there was an explosion of jabbering and a sharp rasping sound as of stone scraping across stone, followed by a gentle thud as if something heavy had been lowered onto something soft. A silence. Then Fadawi’s voice again, hushed, disbelieving: ‘Good God! Good God Almighty, it’s full of …’
In front of them the tanker suddenly slowed. Flin only noticed at the last moment and had to veer left into the outside lane to avoid crashing into it. A service taxi that was coming up to overtake them beeped furiously as its driver was forced to slam on his brakes. By the time Flin had rounded the tanker and waved the service taxi past, Fadawi had resumed talking directly into his recorder, his voice now jumpy, excited:
‘… large cavity filled with stone blocks, all jumbled up together like … reliefs, hieroglyphic inscriptions, parts of statues – I’m describing this as I’m seeing it, it’s just a mass of … Dear God, is that a … cartouche, yes, it’s a cartouche, hang on, Nefer … is that a ka sign? Nefer-Ka-Re Pepi, my God, my God, Neferkare Pepi – Pepi II. I just can’t believe what I’m seeing – the remains of an Old Kingdom … I have to get in there, I have to …’
There was hiss of static and a click as Fadawi stopped the tape. Flin leant forward, eyes bright, willing the recording to resume, which it did after a brief pause. Fadawi’s voice sounded calmer, and was accompanied by the background crunch of feet on gravel.
‘It’s midnight, we have replaced the block and I’m making my way back to the dig house, still barely able to believe what we have found. For so long I’ve accepted there would never be anything to match Imti-Khentika, that that would be the highlight of my career, and now, suddenly, out of nowhere … such a wonderful … who would have thought it, who could have guessed …’
He tailed off, his voice choking with emotion. For a while the only sound was the crunch of his footsteps before he seemed to gather himself and the commentary resumed.
‘As I suspected, there is a large cavity behind the sanctuary wall, about three metres wide and the same length as the chapel itself. What I hadn’t foreseen – couldn’t possibly have foreseen – is that the cavity has been packed out with the remains of a much earlier structure, in this case what appears to be a temple dating from the reign of Pepi II. It was something the ancient Egyptians did all the time, of course, using the remains of one monument to help build another – the Akhenaten talatat at Karnak spring immediately to mind – but I can’t think of anything remotely as important as this. I’ve only had the most cursory look around, but even that … the colours are just extraordinary, the inscriptions utterly unique, in some cases recording texts I’ve never even heard of before, including at least one, and possibly several, relating to the Benben and the Hidden Oasis – just wait till I tell Flinders!’
At the mention of his name Freya glanced across at the Englishman. He was staring straight ahead, a barely perceptible moistness to his eyes. He sensed her looking at him and pointed down at the tape, indicating she should concentrate on that rather than him.
‘… too early to say, of course, but my guess is that it’s not just this one wall that’s been filled in this way, but all the sanctuary walls, and possibly others parts of the temple as well. We could be sitting on the greatest collection of Egyptian architectural remains ever … I can’t contemplate it, I just can’t contemplate it. I’ll come back first thing tomorrow morning to begin a more detailed study of the inscriptions – I’ve sworn Abu and Latif to secrecy in the meantime – but for the moment I’m going to take a swift look in the dig magazine, see how they’ve done today, and then head to bed for a well-earned rest – at my age this sort of excitement really can’t be healthy! Unbelievable, just unbelievable.’
The recording clicked off again. Freya waited for Fadawi’s voice to return, describe what he’d discovered the following day. There was nothing, just the soft hiss of spooling tape. She started fast-forwarding, trying to pick up the recording again, but the hiss continued until with a clunk the tape came to an end.
‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘He must have continued on another cassette. We’ll have to go—’
‘There’s no other cassette,’ said Flin.
‘But he said he was going to—’
‘That’s it. That’s everything.’
She looked at him.
‘How do you know?’
His face had gone very pale.
‘Because it was on the night of Sunday, 12 February that Hassan was caught stealing from the dig magazine. He never got the chance to go back to the temple. He was locked up in prison.’
The moistness in his eyes, Freya noticed, had become much more pronounced.
‘Christ Almighty, no wonder he was bitter. As if it’s not bad enough getting banged up for three years, banned from doing the one thing you really love doing, for it to happen just as you make the biggest discovery of your career …’
He shook his head and drove on in silence. Houses started to appear to either side of the road. Sporadically at first, lone punctuation marks on the otherwise empty sheet of the desert, then more frequently, single dwellings clustering into estates, and estates swelling into a solid mass of buildings as the city’s suburbs swept out to meet them. A brightly lit Mobil petrol station appeared ahead. Slowing, Flin swung the Cherokee onto its forecourt and cut the ignition. An attendant in blue overalls and white rubber boots came over and started filling the tank. Flin got out and trotted across to a payphone beside the kiosk. Freya could see him lifting the receiver and dialling. Thirty seconds later he was back. Three minutes after that they were on the road again.
‘I’d offer to drop you at the airport,’ he said, ‘but I think I’d be wasting my breath.’
She didn’t reply.
‘Last chance to bail out.’
Freya just sat there. The Pyramids loomed in front of them, a signpost announced that it was straight ahead to Cairo, right towards Fayyum, Al-Minya and Asyut.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘we go together.’
‘To Abydos?’
Flin slowed, indicated and turned right.
‘To Abydos.’
Molly Kiernan sat on the swing seat in her bungalow garden, swaying gently back and forth. A mug of coffee was cupped in her hands, a blanket wrapped tight around her shoulders for it was late and the night air had turned chill. She’d just picked up the message from Flin. It sounded like a good lead although she’d have to wait a few hours to find out exactly how good. At least it was a lead, which was more than they’d had for the last two decades.
She knew she should have felt more upbeat. Would have felt more upbeat were it not for the Angleton situation, which was more serious than she’d feared. Her people had run his name through the system, done a bit of digging and it turned out he had form, a reputation. ‘A nightmare,’ that’s how Bill Schultz had described him. ‘Our worst fucking nightmare. The man’s a human limpet.’
She gave the swing seat another push. Her laptop was balanced on her knees, its screen filled with the image of Angleton they’d mailed over from the States. Obese, balding, a faint sheen of sweat brightening the curve of his apple-red cheeks. He’d have to be confronted, of course, couldn’t just be left to his own devices. The question was when? And how? Twenty-three years she’d been involved in this thing and tonight, for the first time, she felt a genuine shiver of fear. For Sandfire, and also for herself. Angleton, by all accounts, was not someone to be messed with.
She droppe
d her head back and looked up at the stars. Breathing in the scent of jasmine and bougainvillaea, listening to the creak of the swing and the soft rustle of flame-tree leaves as they swayed in the breeze, she wished more than ever that Charlie was there with her. That she could just curl up and snuggle into the crook of his arm as she used to on their porch back home in the States, all her cares pushed off and held at bay by his warmth and his strength and the certainty of his faith.
But Charlie wasn’t there, and there was no point wishing he was. She’d come this far without him, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to crumple now. She looked up a while longer, allowing the swing to slow to a standstill, then, finishing her coffee, she closed the laptop, picked up the Beretta handgun from the seat beside her and went back into the house, locking and bolting the door after her.
‘Come on, Flin,’ she murmured. ‘Bring me something useful. Please, bring me something useful.’
For some reason Freya had got it in her head that Abydos was just south of Cairo. It was south, only rather more than ‘just’: 500 kilometres, to be precise, a little less than half the length of the entire country, a distance which, even at night with the roads relatively clear of traffic, would in Flin’s estimation take them a minimum of five hours to cover, probably longer.
‘Doesn’t leave us a lot of time,’ he said. ‘From what I remember the temple opens to the public at 7 a.m., so we’ll need to be out of there by, say, 6.45 at the latest or we’ll be seen, which believe you me would not be good news. The Egyptians don’t take kindly to people breaking into their monuments and pulling them apart.’
He glanced down at the dashboard clock. 11.17 p.m.
‘We’re going to be cutting it fine.’
‘Better get your foot down then,’ said Freya.
He did, pushing the speedometer up past 100 km/hour, leapfrogging the sporadic lorries and tankers that were the only other vehicles around at that time. They covered about twenty kilometres, then, abruptly, Flin veered in to the side of the road and skidded to a halt in front of a line of ramshackle shops. Even at this late hour they were still open. Outside one, illuminated by a bare strip bulb, was a display of building and agricultural tools – brooms, scythes, sledgehammers, tourias. Flin hurried in, emerging a minute later carrying two weighty-looking iron crowbars, two torches and an enormous pair of bolt-cutters.
‘We’re just going to have to pray there’s either a scaffolding tower or a ladder on site,’ he said, dumping the tools into the back of the Jeep and swinging himself behind the wheel again.
‘If there’s not?’
‘Then we’re buggered. Unless your climbing skills allow you to hover in mid-air.’
He started the engine, skidded back onto the road and sped off into the night.
They didn’t talk much during the journey. Flin listened to the Fadawi tape a couple more times, cementing the necessary information in his mind, and they exchanged a few half-hearted bursts of chatter. Freya told him a bit about her climbing, Flin described his work in the Gilf Kebir, some of the joint expeditions he and Alex had undertaken. Neither of them went into much detail, they weren’t really in the mood for it, and by the time they had reached Beni Suef 120 kilometres south of Cairo they had both fallen silent, the only sounds the purr of the Cherokee’s engine and the thud and thwack of tyres speeding over uneven tarmac.
Freya slept fitfully, dozing off only to jerk awake again as they clattered over a deep rut or slowed to pass through a police checkpoint. She got little sense of the landscape through which they were passing beyond the fact that it comprised a lot of scrubby sand punctuated by sugar-cane fields, palm trees and ramshackle mud-brick villages. Around 1.15 a.m. they stopped off in a brightly lit town to fill up with petrol and buy some water – Al-Minya, Flin informed her, just under halfway. Shortly after that they very nearly crashed head-on into an oncoming coach as Flin badly misjudged an overtaking manoeuvre around an oil tanker. Other than that, the drive was uneventful, the speedometer hovering around the 110 km/hour mark, the world rushing dimly past to either side of them, the kilometres ticking away as they sped southwards.
‘Freya.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Freya.’
She blinked her eyes open, disorientated, uncertain where she was or what was going on.
‘Come on. We’re here.’
Flin was already climbing out of the Jeep. For a moment she remained where she was, yawning, the only sounds the distant barking of dogs and the soft metallic ting of the Jeep’s cooling engine. Then, with a look at the dashboard clock – 4.02 a.m., they’d made good time – she threw open her door and climbed out as well.
They were in a large village, at the foot of a hill, a lamplit road running steeply upwards ahead of them towards a mobile phone mast at the top of the slope. A parallel road climbed 300 metres away to her right, fronted, like this one, with a drab wall of shops and concrete tenements. Between the two an enormous rectangle of open space ran backwards into the hillside. At its head – clasped between the arms of the village as though between the prongs of a giant pair of tweezers – was the spectacular floodlit façade of what she assumed must be the temple of Seti I: long, flat-roofed, imposing, lined with a parade of twelve monumental pillars, like the bars of some gargantuan cage.
‘The House of Millions of Years of King Men-Maat-Ra, Joyful in the Heart of Abydos,’ said Flin, coming up beside her. ‘Impressive, eh?’
‘Sure is.’
‘I’d offer you the full tour, but given the time constraints …’
He took her arm and steered her to the back of the Cherokee. Opening the rear door, he gathered the tools from the back seat. He handed Freya the torches and one crowbar, took the other crowbar and bolt-cutters himself and locked the vehicle. She started towards the temple, but he called her back with a click of the fingers and instead led her to the left, down a side street, past a donkey munching on a heap of fodder and deeper into the village.
‘The whole area’s crawling with guards,’ he explained in hushed tones, waving her right up another street. ‘We should keep out of sight as much as possible.’
They weaved through the houses, everything deathly quiet save for the dogs still barking in the distance, and, once, the sound of someone snoring. The ground climbed steadily, then started to flatten out. Turning down a narrow alley, they came back out onto the road on which they had parked. They were almost at the top of the hill now, the mobile phone mast rearing to their left, the Cherokee just visible at the bottom of the slope to their right. In front of them a stretch of rubbish-strewn waste ground ran away towards a ragged barbed-wire fence. Beyond lay a confusion of broken columns and mud-brick walls, the tallest of them no more than chest height. And beyond that rose another, much more solid wall made up of a hotchpotch of stone blocks – the side of the temple compound. Flood-lamps bathed everything in a wash of orangey light; black-uniformed guards could be seen patrolling around the perimeter.
‘Like Hassan said on the tape, these guys tend to shoot first and ask questions later,’ said Flin, drawing her back into the shadows. ‘We need to be careful or they’ll end up doing Girgis’s job for him.’
He peered out, surveying the ground ahead, watching the way the guards moved, calculating the pattern of their patrol.
‘There’s a blind spot when that guy turns,’ he said after a few moments, pointing to one of the uniformed figures. ‘We can make it under the fence and in among the ancient storerooms. When he turns again we go through that small gateway in the corner and down onto the temple portico. OK?’
‘What if they see us?’
He didn’t reply, just tilted his head and raised his eyebrows as if to say: ‘Let’s hope they don’t.’ Thirty seconds passed, then, nudging Freya with his elbow, he started forward. She followed, and they hurried across the stretch of waste ground, ducked through a gap in the fence and worked their way into the maze of mud walls. Crouching down behind a row of pillar bases they felt horribly visibl
e, the flood-lamps swamping the area with light, the windows of the overlooking buildings seeming to stare directly at them. They held their breath, half expecting to hear shouts and the crunch of running feet. As it was, their presence went unnoticed, and after another thirty seconds Flin raised his head, took a quick look around and waved Freya on. They kept low to the ground, flitting among the ruins and through a narrow gateway in the wall of the temple enclosure. Four steps took them down to a terrace that ran along the building’s floodlit front.
‘Stay quiet,’ he whispered, drawing her in behind the first of the monumental pillars that lined the façade, holding a finger to his lips.
‘What the hell did you think I was going to do?’ she murmured. ‘Start singing?’
Again they paused, pressing themselves tight against the stone, listening for signs that they had been spotted. Then they began moving along the terrace towards the black rectangle of the temple entrance, scuttling from one pillar to the next, their silhouettes – towering, monstrous, misshapen – sliding across the floodlit walls to their left before disappearing again as they slipped out of sight behind each column. There was one agonizing moment when, as they reached the pillar adjacent to the doorway, Freya stumbled and clanged her crowbar against the stone floor. The sound reverberated around the enclosure, seeming to fill the night. They shrank back into the shadows, freezing, listening as footsteps approached across the courtyard in front of the temple, coming right up to the very edge of the terrace.
‘Meen?’ came a voice, no more than a couple of metres away, accompanied by a rustle and a click as of a rifle being unshouldered. ‘Who there?’