Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

  “It doesn’t really matter how you know,” he said dismissively. “But you are correct. The Book of Aniquilus and the Book of Xynutians: two books sealed in the Amarna Library deep underground thousands of years ago. You have studied the former intimately for years, but have never seen the latter. You will shortly get that opportunity, but first I have to fill in some gaps for you, to help you understand how important this is.

  “We knew that the books were hidden at Amarna before Professor al-Misri started his dig. In fact, I had been closely monitoring all archaeological excavations in the area before your dig even started. But knowing there are ancient texts hidden in Egypt is like knowing water is wet. Our knowledge was a little more informed: we knew of the existence of the books of Aniquilus and Xynutians, as when they were entombed thousands of years ago, the architect who designed the Library was free to go his own way. At the time, Egypt was in the middle of a short-lived religious revolution. The time of Akhetaten was almost over, and the capital was abandoned within a decade.”

  “Spare me the history lesson,” Gail sneered.

  “Indeed, I’m sure you know all this better than I. Nevertheless, please indulge me a little more. Soon, Akhenaten passed away, followed by Nefertiti. The capital was a ghost town, and looting was rife. As you know some of the most prolific looters in ancient Egypt were probably the workers themselves. The very people who created the supposedly hidden and impenetrable tombs knew exactly where they were, and precisely how to get in.

  “The Amarna architect however had been a strong believer in the ways of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and believed that the message sealed in the Library was too important to be lost to thieves, who would throw texts aside in their search for gems, gold and other precious metals that could be hammered flat and resold. Yet he also believed that the message was too valuable to be sealed away forever. Unfortunately for us, whilst he was a competent architect, he was not a great story-teller. The text he left behind, inscribed on a papyrus scroll, only gave the briefest of descriptions of the two important books, and a vague allusion to their location. It did, however, offer some insight into the architecture of the Library, and what he had done to keep its location secret.

  “The architect’s scroll was found inside a sealed jar in 2015, during some road works just north of Dendera. An art dealer bought the jar from the site foreman; he didn’t even want to know what was inside. You will know better than me the dangers of ‘rescue archaeology:’ a lot of the time, you people are only brought in if the construction company aren’t able to hide or destroy the finds first. Of course, in Egypt no groundwork can be undertaken without the presence of an archaeologist. But Egypt is a big country, and there just aren’t enough archaeologists. Not only that, but the Egyptians were still getting over a change of regime, and archaeology was lower on the agenda than fixing roads. The scroll was never missed.

  “It then came to me by way of a business partner. I made my fortune in nanotech back in the late twenties, and this person had just acquired the jar. He found the scroll inside, itself sealed inside a tube, and realising he couldn’t open it was looking for a buyer.”

  The image of the Book of Xynutians onscreen was replaced with a picture of the scroll. Gail immediately recognised the hieratic text. A stylised, cursive form of hieroglyphs, hieratic looked like a cross between hieroglyphs and modern Arabic. Another similarity with Arabic was that it always read from right to left. Two colours had been used in the text: ochre-red and black. The quality of the papyrus was excellent, and she was amazed at how complete it looked. It would have taken pride of place in any public museum, even in Egypt where such things were so much more common.

  “I’m glad you like it,” Mallus said. “A couple of years passed with it sitting in storage before I got the chance to try and open the scroll. If I knew what the text was about, you see, I might be able to make more of a profit. And so when I bumped into Dr Patterson during a science convention in Boston, we found we had this mutual interest. His equipment at Harvard helped open the scroll, and as it unfurled so too did the story of our architect.”

  “So that’s how you knew about the texts; fine.” Gail interjected. “But while the books and this scroll are priceless to me, that value is academic. Even on the black market no one would pay enough to warrant you going to all this trouble.”

  “Not everyone values life to the same extent, Dr Turner. But anyway, you’re right, of course: the books are worth a great deal of money, but it’s the message they contain which is their true value. The Book of Aniquilus is like a Bible for the Aten. As you know, it gives clear guidelines on how life should be lived in order to achieve so-called ‘celestial magnificence.’ But the Book of Xynutians is entirely different. It tells a story of a cataclysm so immense it wiped out an entire civilisation, the same race of Xynutians that you see on the cover of the book. It tells of their ascent to power, and then of their demise. Can you imagine, Dr Turner, such a technologically advanced race, wiped out?”

  “I find it difficult enough to accept they existed in the first place, let alone their being wiped out,” she said sarcastically.

  Until now, Patterson had been quiet. He took this opportunity to cut in.

  “I think I felt the same way, Dr Turner, until I saw the book for the first time.”

  She turned to him. “Then show me the book. Hell, why not show the whole world the book? I’m not stopping you.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. This book would cause a major issue in the public domain. You don’t appreciate how much: these books are proof of intelligent life predating our own by hundreds of thousands of years. It may seem trivial, but such a thing would turn religion on its head. It de-centralises man’s understanding of his position in the Universe.”

  She sighed. “So you’re saying that all this needs to stay hush-hush because you’re worried that if it gets out, there’ll be trouble?”

  “Not quite. Within this story of their destruction comes a clear warning: what happened to them will happen again, to us. We need your help to decipher the last pieces of text that Patterson has been struggling with, so that we can avoid that fate.” He seemed almost nervous as he said this, and he looked away from them both, towards the hieroglyphs on the screen.

  Patterson cleared his throat. “The Book of Xynutians was written under instruction from Nefertiti. It recounts the fall of the Xynutians more than two hundred and fifty thousand years earlier. It claims that the final coming of Nefertiti will signal the beginning of the next cataclysm. The problem is that according to the statement in the book, the final coming of Nefertiti occurred nearly forty years ago.”

  Gail sat back and looked at them both. Patterson had seemed nice enough, but he also appeared to be as passionate about this story as Seth Mallus, who in every way was coming across as completely insane.

  She looked at her options carefully; on the one hand, she could protest, demand to be freed, make a nuisance of herself, and then probably end up dead like Mamdouh. On the other hand, she could cooperate for the time being, play their little game, and wait patiently for her chance to escape.

  That option made the most sense to her now. And in any case, she would be lying if she said she wasn’t eager to get her hands on the book that had been snatched from under her nose back in Egypt all those years ago.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll help you finish interpreting the Book of Xynutians.”

  Chapter 54

  “Ridiculous,” she muttered as Henry Patterson sat down beside her in what she had been told was her ‘room’, but which to her only represented her prison cell. “Absolutely absurd. For a start, how would the Egyptians have known anything about these people?”

  “Xynutians,” Patterson added helpfully.

  “Whatever! This so-called intelligent race with such advanced technology conveniently leaves no trace at all of its existence. All we’re left with is a picture book written long after they were wiped out. Xynutians indeed! You’ll be
telling me Star Trek is a fly-on-the-wall documentary next!” She shook her head and pushed his folder of notes back towards his side of the desk.

  Pushing the folder back, he selected one scanned page from the Book of Xynutians. “Look at the detail, Dr Turner,” he pointed to a vehicle. “Look at the back: it has what look to be exhaust pipes. Look at the driver: he’s holding a joy stick. How can the ancient Egyptians have even imagined such things? They must be based on something!”

  “Why? Why must everything have a meaning? Isn’t it possible they knew about steam power? That the person who drew this understood what could be done with steam, like the ancient Greek Hero Engine, and that any vehicle propelled in this way would need to expel steam? Isn’t it just obvious that in a forward moving vehicle the exhaust goes at the back, so you can see where you’re going?”

  “I agree in principle, but the Hero engine wouldn’t be invented for another twelve hundred years after this book was buried deep underground. And in the case of Hero, it’s thought his invention was simply an object of fascination. This picture shows actual vehicles being propelled.”

  “So the Egyptians thought differently. And besides, what does it prove? I’ve seen films where spaceships battle it out using lasers and death rays. If some other civilisation discover those same films in a hundred thousand years, do they have to assume we actually had that technology?”

  Patterson sighed. “So you think this is a work of Egyptian science fiction? That the writer was the Asimov of his time?”

  “Maybe!”

  “What other examples of ancient science fiction are you aware of?”

  “How the hell should I know? It’s not exactly my domain!”

  He flipped through the pages until he arrived at a long manuscript. There were no Egyptian symbols or pictures to be seen. “This story tells of a trip to the Moon, and of a battle between the king of the Sun and the king of the Moon, involving many types of creature, including ants thousands of feet long.”

  She looked at the text briefly. “So?”

  “It was written in the second century AD by Lucian, a Syrian philosopher,” he said dramatically. “You’re right to question the veracity of the Book of Xynutians, in the same way you would be right to assume that Lucian didn’t really sail to the Moon. But the difference is that no one takes Lucian seriously, partly because of his own disclaimer, but also because his story is obviously fake. The hallmark of ancient fiction is exaggeration. It wasn’t a lion, because that’s too easy to defeat: it was a lion with wings. Or a woman who turned you to stone on sight whose hair was actually made of dozens of snakes. It’s not a trip to the Moon, it’s a trip to the Moon in a sailing ship after a two hundred mile journey into the sky on the uplift of a tornado. It’s clearly imagination.

  “The Book of Xynutians has no flaws. No over-enthusiasm on the part of the author. It simply displays a believable advanced civilisation before and after a major cataclysm. And it only requires you to make one leap of faith.”

  “Which is?”

  “That somehow, the ancient Egyptians had an intimate knowledge of something that happened two hundred and fifty thousand years before their time.”

  Gail scoffed. “That’s one hell of a leap of faith. How do you make it believable?”

  “Word of mouth?”

  “Nonsense! If it was word of mouth, two things would have happened: firstly, the same story would have made its way all over the world, as populations migrated for tens of thousands of years before settling down. We’d get a similar legend in Peru, China, Europe, Siberia, India, Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. Yet I have never before heard of such a civilisation. Secondly, by the time the story was written down, it would contain embellishment, bits added by the story tellers over the years as they add their own twist to make it their own. You would end up with exactly the kind of exaggerated story you’re telling me this isn’t.”

  “Maybe the Egyptians copied the text from something they found?”

  “So they found something then hid it again? And since then we’ve found nothing? Why?” She couldn’t feel more negative towards the whole concept.

  “Then maybe someone told the story to Nefertiti first-hand.”

  Gail was about to reply when suddenly something clicked in the back of her mind, like the latch of a door that hadn’t quite been pulled-to properly. A faint but recent memory started to surface. Within seconds, she was back in the Library in Amarna, looking at herself talking to the architect. He was pointing to the plinth. She was back in the dream she had experienced while drugged-up and strapped-down to her hospital bed.

  “Dr Turner?” It was the first of Patterson’s suggestions she had not refuted immediately, and he leant forward eagerly.

  She remembered the architect, pointing to the symbol of Aniquilus. He had then pointed to something behind her when she had asked who ‘Xynutians’ was. She had turned, and then darkness overcame her. Had she caught a fleeting glimpse of the Xynutian behind her?

  If Nefertiti recounted the book of Xynutians to the Egyptian scribes, could a Xynutian have told it to her directly?

  She shook her head: she’d already managed to convince herself that she knew the words ‘Xynutian’ and ‘Aniquilus’ from Patterson: somehow he’d probably said the words while she was in a semi-conscious state, and she’d incorporated them into her dream.

  So the dream meant nothing. It was simply a dream.

  And yet…

  She was there against her own free will, but she was not obliged to let them know what she was thinking. She’d keep playing along, waiting for her chance. In the meantime, she needed to have a closer look at the Xynutians.

  “Give that here,” she said angrily, picking up the folder and standing up. “I need peace and quiet, access to the original text and whatever translations you’ve already made. And a cup of tea.”

  Chapter 55

  Ben and George stared at Captain Kamal in stunned silence for what seemed an age, during which time Kamal, oddly, seemed to relax a little into his chair. Ben was masquerading as Ahmed Mohammed Nasser, a role he was pulling off perfectly.

  “What do you mean she isn’t dead?” George said, his voice like a whisper.

  “You have given me more trouble than I expected, Mr Turner. However, I only have myself to blame. I only hope that in some way the truth does set me free.” His eyes moved left and right, as if checking there was nobody in the room that shouldn’t be, before leaning forward. “I don’t know everything, but I do know enough to have not been able to sleep for the past week,” he started.

  “I hope you don’t expect me to feel sorry for you,” George snapped.

  “Let me tell you the facts as I know them,” Kamal tried to calm him down. “Firstly, your wife was indeed in Professor al-Misri’s office the night of his murder, but what I did not tell you is that they were not alone. Approximately twenty minutes after your wife arrived, they were joined by at least two men, and a fight broke out.

  “The Professor slipped during a struggle and cracked his skull on the corner of his desk. Gail was alive when she was taken away by the men. Half an hour after this incident, I was contacted by an agency I had never heard of and informed that Dr Gail Turner, whom I had also never heard of, had just murdered Professor Mamdouh al-Misri. I was told to build my case as usual but that the conclusion would be the one that I told you. Some evidence, such as the CCTV footage, would be faked to allow me to make that conclusion.

  “They left me a contact mailbox which would allow me to get hold of them indirectly if required. I didn’t expect to need to do that, but on meeting you I quickly realised that you would not sit by idly. So I contacted them, and they wrapped the whole thing up. Dr Turner’s body would be delivered to the morgue ready for you to identify. Only instead of her dead body, it was your live wife; she must have been given some sort of drug that made her appear dead.”

  “Wait a second,” George interrupted. “They told you all of this? They told you that Gail
didn’t murder the Professor, but was kidnapped instead? They told you that the body I identified wasn’t actually a body?”

  “No, not at all. They told me that I had to lead an investigation that would be solved for me, they told me what to say, but they didn’t say anything about your wife being alive, or about what happened in Professor al-Misri’s office.”

  George scoffed. “So how do you know all this?”

  “Because I have been investigating crime scenes for many years, Mr Turner, and even though I was unable to publicly announce my findings in this case, you don’t just turn off your ability to find evidence, no matter what the price.”

  “So you were bought?”

  “Not so much bought as persuaded. I really had no choice.”

  Ben wondered what kind of leverage it had taken to buy Kamal; family? Promotion? Whatever the price, it had obviously been eating away at his conscience to the extent that he was willing to throw that away for the sake of the truth.

  “How about my wife? How do you know she was alive when I identified her?”

  Kamal looked George in the eyes. “How many dead people have you seen, Mr Turner? How many dead people have you stood next to and touched?” George shook his head. “I have lost count,” Kamal continued. “Cairo isn’t the most dangerous place on the planet, but there are many hundreds of murders every year nonetheless, most of which I investigate, and some of which come with a body. Your wife, Mr Turner, was not dead. She may have looked still, and pale, and it may have appeared that she was not breathing, but I only had to look at her for the briefest of moments to realise that she was as alive as you or I.”