by Talbot, Luke
“Nefertiti and Akhenaten,” she gasped. “Incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. Engravings of them together are more or less common, often appearing in private homes from Amarna, but a statue of them together like this is unique.”
She crouched down in front of the statues and studied their faces. Akhenaten was unmistakable, his elongated, almost caricatured face smiling serenely through large, inflated lips. The statue was still painted, and Gail marvelled at the tone of his skin, only a shade or two lighter than the deep black of the Nubians. His eyes were set in jet black obsidian.
His left arm ended in a clenched fist pointing directly at the floor, while his right arm wrapped around Nefertiti’s back, pulling her close at the waist.
“They were equals, here,” she commented. “Often the kings of Egypt would scale themselves far larger than their wives or concubines, who would commonly be shown at their feet. I’ve seen one notable exception, in Luxor where Ramses II is seated next to Nefertari. Ironically, a couple of miles away in Karnak there’s a huge statue of them again, but this time she’s a few feet high and barely reaches his knees.”
“I know the statue you mean, in Luxor,” Ben said. “I remember we went there together with George, on your second visit to Egypt. Except the one in Luxor has two differences. Firstly, here Akhenaten and Nefertiti are standing up, not sitting down,” he said.
“And secondly, in Luxor only Nefertari is holding Ramses II, while his hands are on his knees,” Patterson finished. “I’ve been there too, many years ago as a tourist, funnily enough.” He chuckled to himself, amused by the odd twist of fate.
“Almost,” Gail said. “His hands would be on his knees, if his arms weren’t cut off above the elbows. There’s another small statue of Nefertiti and Akhenaten I can remember, in the Louvre in Paris, of them both holding hands. They were quite a caring couple, even seen in contemporary artwork playing with their children, which is quite uncommon.”
Nefertiti’s face was a far cry from the famous bust in the Berlin Museum, instead sharing the same stylised approach as had been applied to her king. Gail remembered her first visit to Egypt, and asked herself if she would have been so fascinated in the woman and her story had it not been for the beauty of that bust.
Looking into the statue’s eyes, the intense blue of Lapis Lazuli against her pale olive-brown complexion, she knew without a doubt that the answer was yes; bust or no bust, she felt an irresistible connection with the enigmatic queen.
Nefertiti’s statue in turn pulled Akhenaten towards her with her left arm, so that their bare bodies touched. Both their hips were pronounced and feminine and their stomachs bulged slightly at the waistline, but not so much so in Akhenaten’s case as in the huge statue Gail had gazed at for hours in the Egyptian Museum of Cairo’s Amarna exhibit. Their stance didn’t follow traditional regal symbolism, either, with left foot forwards to represent their existence as both divine and mortal; instead they both stood with their feet together.
“Is it normal that they’re naked and bald?” Walker said pensively.
Gail clucked for a moment, playing with her thumbs. “No,” she said finally. “Semi-naked isn’t so uncommon, there are many statues of both Nefertiti and Akhenaten without clothes, but they always have crowns or headdresses, or have some form of accessory, such as a staff or amulet, even a loose fitting sarong. But for both of them to be completely naked is unique.” She paused for a moment. “The baldness is less strange, in fact it’s quite likely that one or even both of them were bald anyway, and that any hair they would have had, particularly Nefertiti’s, would have been a wig. It’s even possible that these statues had wigs, or were carved with the intention of having such an accessory.”
She inspected the statues more closely for several minutes while the others watched in silence. She was looking for any signs of wear on the paintwork, any scratches or markings that might betray the presence of some missing clothing or jewellery. She found none. It was possible that any clothing used on the statues failed to leave a mark, but somehow she doubted it. She was pretty sure the couple had always stood here, humbly.
“Small statues like this are fairly common. Like votive statues, inviting offerings from people visiting a temple. But as far as I know this one is absolutely unique. It’s obvious from first glance, but when you look more closely the peculiarities are stunning. They’re not like temple statues, designed to show the power and strength of a king during their own lifetime; these are normally made after the subject’s death, and by someone who probably never saw the person alive. Caricatured features like this are typical only of Amarna, and yet I wouldn’t have expected to see that here.
“And what’s more,” Gail continued, “they’re not showing any royal symbolism. They’re just a couple, standing naked, exposed, even their legs are together, almost rejecting their own divinity.”
“This is all very well,” Walker broke the silence that followed her monologue, “and we’re all learning a lot about history and all that, but this ain’t getting us out of here.”
Gail shone the torch around as Ben and Patterson reluctantly agreed that they should focus on looking for a way out. The small room under the staircase was completely bare save for the statues.
“There’s nothing in there,” he continued impatiently. “Give me the torch and let’s look around this place.” He made a grab for it but she twisted away just before his fingers closed around the black metal shaft.
“Wait!” she exclaimed. She looked down at the statue, and drew a line in the air with the beam of the torch, to the blank featureless wall where Nefertiti and Akhenaten had been staring for over three thousand years.
Except it wasn’t just a wall. Thin strips of wooden beading ran along the walls, floor and ceiling, almost invisible at first glance and in the poor lighting. She walked to the end of the room and carefully placed her hand against the wall. Instead of the hard coolness of stone, she encountered the soft-warm touch of finely woven cloth. She could feel the hardness of the surface it hid.
“A fake wall!” Patterson gasped.
Walker strode to Gail’s side and placed his palms on the material. Looking up and down at the beading holding it in place, he slowly curled his fingers inwards, letting his nails run along the weave, testing its strength.
“You can’t just rip it down,” Gail protested, reading his mind.
The look he gave her stopped any further complaints, and he dug his fingers into the cloth, taking the few millimetres of slack up and ripping downwards. After several long rips, the entire wall was uncovered, and the remains of the cloth lay scattered at his feet.
Still recovering from the initial shock of Walker’s lack of respect, Gail moved the torchlight from side to side on the now uncovered wall; it was crammed with inscriptions and drawings from the book of Xynutians; Xynutian cities with flying vehicles and towering buildings followed by the chaos and destruction of the wrath of Aniquilus. There was no need here to understand the Xynutian language. This was the story of the destruction of a civilisation, a story that had survived the millennia to warn the ancient Egyptians, who stood here in humility before it.
On top of the engravings, it’s four legs and two arms covering the width of the walls and its round head rising above the ruins of the Xynutian world, the Stickman of Amarna, the symbol that Gail had chased the meaning of for a decade. Aniquilus stood before them.
Seeing it like this, the final pieces of her jigsaw were starting to fall into place.
Akhenaten and Nefertiti, laid bare, abandoning the old gods, were accepting the higher power of Aniquilus, who it was shown had destroyed a more advanced civilisation than their own. But how would they break with thousands of years of tradition and present the truth of Aniquilus to the Egyptian people? By taking Aniquilus and linking it with the old god Aten, the sun disk with outstretched rays touching the people below, and then moving the capital of Egypt to Amarna, away from Thebes and Memphis, away from the old way of li
fe.
And then, finally, by renouncing their own pharaonic link with divinity, by showing that they were mere mortals, and that they would all face the judgement of Aniquilus, from the people who worked the fields right up to the kings and queens.
Gail fell to her knees.
“So this is it,” she whispered. “This is what it was all about. I saw it in the books, I saw the finds on Mars. But this,” she nodded to the statues facing Aniquilus, “is what this is all about.”
Patterson resisted the urge to say ‘I told you so’, and patted her shoulder. But he could little understand what this meant to Gail. After so many years of studying the texts from the Library, without the missing pieces of the puzzle, to finally see everything in context so clearly was at the same time immensely exciting and unbelievably demoralising.
“Before I saw the Book of Xynutians this week, I only had ideas. Now, I have the actual truth,” she said, deflated. Up until now she had been denying the evidence fed to her by Patterson and Mallus, but now there could be no mistaking the message in the small room under the staircase.
Suddenly, the torch switched itself off; a heartbeat later it came back on again. The momentary darkness made everyone jump.
Walker seized the torch and inspected it. “There’s enough battery left for another eight hours,” he claimed, after checking the charge. But no sooner had he finished his sentence than they were again plunged into darkness for good.
“Shit!” he exclaimed among the cries of the others.
In the pandemonium, Gail had a vivid recollection of her dream when she was kidnapped, of being helplessly stuck in the darkness. She felt a tingle down her spine, as if the lack of light had taken all warmth from the air.
After what seemed like an age, but what could in reality barely have been a few minutes, a thin blade of blinding white light appeared at the bottom of the wall. Within seconds the wall had disappeared into the ceiling, and they were shielding their eyes as they tried to see what had been revealed.
Gail, still on her knees where she’d been facing the Xynutian engravings, squinted into the light. At first all she could make out was a straight corridor, the light coming from strips along the ceiling and walls. As her eyes became more comfortable, the strips split up into single points, and she saw that the corridor was illuminated with thousands of small dots of very bright white light, like the solitary LED at the top of the stairs. They led down the corridor, deeper underground; to a dead end that she guessed must also be a door.
Walker recovered first, and strode into the corridor towards it. Ben hesitated, pistol in hand, on the threshold. Gail looked up at Patterson.
“Henry, this is all very familiar,” she said slowly, thinking of the astronauts trapped behind the door on Mars.
He nodded and started walking into the corridor. “It is, and I know what you’re thinking, but we don’t really have a choice: the air in here is turning stale and the flashlight has gone out.”
As he said it, she became all too aware of the acrid taste on her tongue from the low quality air they’d all been sharing. The hall they had entered was massive, but she knew that its oxygen content had been poor to start with.
“Feels fresher in here,” Walker said with an approving nod. “Just need to work out how this other door opens, but we’ve been doing well so far,” he joked.
Gail paused for a moment as she got to her feet. George was somewhere behind her, above her, and yet ahead and further down was the only possible route. The lack of torch and dwindling air supply made further exploration or even retreat impossible.
It was the only way forwards, and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something very final about going down the corridor. Nonetheless, she accepted Ben’s outstretched hand and joined him and Patterson inside. She was barely a few steps down the corridor, moving towards Walker, when she thought to look back at Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
What she saw terrified her.
The white light from the corridor had picked out the polished stone of their eyes. But instead of reflecting in the black of obsidian and blue of Lapis Lazuli, Akhenaten and Nefertiti were fixing her with blood-red eyes. Their peaceful smiles took on a whole new sinister dimension, and as Gail stared incredulously at their evil gaze, the door that led back to the Hall, back to the Library and back to George, slid closed, leaving them trapped in the corridor.
Chapter 75
During the mid-1980s, more than seventy thousand nuclear weapons existed in stockpiles maintained by the Americans and Russians. It is often quoted that the yield of those nuclear weapons was sufficient to destroy the world several times over, but that is poor imagery to help describe how such a cataclysmic event would take place.
In reality, a mere fraction of those nuclear arsenals would ever be deployed. After the first few hundred ICBMs had landed on foreign soil, there would be precious few people left alive who could even launch the remainder, and even fewer of whom would want to.
In 1991, the Cold War ended; on both sides of the border, no one had ever truly wanted to use the weapons they had created. The understood devastation of nuclear holocaust, the indiscriminate killing of millions of innocent people and the no-win situation that would arise from its aftermath ultimately spelled the end of the stand-off between East and West.
Nonetheless, in the post-Cold War era nuclear disarmament was both slow and unenthusiastic. The Russians, reeling from their own economic implosion, were unable to maintain their existing weapons, let alone decommission them. For its part, the West was particularly loath to take a large proportion of its nuclear arsenal off hair-trigger alert. Despite numerous attempts to pass resolutions through the United Nations, the United States of America, France and the United Kingdom persistently voted against the action.
This meant that several decades after the end of the Cold War, the old West maintained an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons pointed at targets in the East that could effectively be launched in less than five minutes.
Then, on 28th July 2015, the Islamic Republic of Iran announced to the world that it had officially joined the elite club of nations in possession of nuclear weapons.
The announcement came not via the state media, nor from the network of foreign intelligence agents and informants who risked their lives on a daily basis to provide up-to-date reports on the country’s machinations, although the very existence of such networks did mean that few were surprised when the announcement finally came.
Instead, it came from the vaporisation of fifty square miles of desert and arid shrub-land in the South Khorasan region of the country, less than a hundred miles from Afghanistan. It was confirmed by satellite imagery, but such technology was not needed for the majority Kurdish population along the Afghan border, who saw the mushroom cloud hit the Earth’s stratosphere around about the same time the ground started to shake.
The show of strength caused international relations in the already volatile region to heat up considerably; particularly damaging was the face-off that ensued between Iran and its pro-West neighbours Pakistan and Afghanistan, with many skirmishes along Iran’s heavily fortified border causing tensions to rise dramatically within the UN.
India was critical of the militant stance taken by Pakistan in particular, and terrorist activity in the two countries increased. The governments blamed each other, but nonetheless decided to increase investment in their own already substantial nuclear deterrents.
While Pyongyang sent congratulations to Tehran, Moscow urged prudence on behalf of the world’s largest nuclear power. Israel was up in arms, stepping up air patrols and angering Iraq and Iran for infringing airspace with spy drones.
The announcement meant it was now theoretically possible, although practically less so, to travel by land from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Bengal or even the East China Sea without once having to set foot in a country that did not possess or have access to nuclear weapons.
The United States of America quietly slowed
down existing disarmament programs, continuing to decommission warheads and delivery systems (that would in any case have belonged in museums) while installing ever more effective systems to support the warheads that would remain active.
At the same time, the President issued a stark warning to Tehran: “Nuclear Proliferation will not be tolerated,” he said with his hands firmly rooted to the podium at a press conference. “In cooperation with our international partners, the United States of America will strive to uphold the values that saw the end of the Cold War; the end of the nuclear arms race.”
In Tehran, they could read between the lines: Welcome to the club.
In 2045, nuclear weapons were still a deterrent; one that earned the owner greater respect, and made it far less likely you would ever be attacked. Everyone understood the destructive power of the technology and where it could lead the world.
And it would still take a complete maniac to actually use them.
The white utility vehicle turned left into a side alley connecting Franklin Street and White Street, a block away from Broadway, and came to a stop. The enticing smell from the Lafayette Grill kitchens made the driver’s mouth fill with saliva, but there was no time to pop in for a bite to eat. He’d have to grab a McDonald’s or a Burger King on his way out of New York by train.
He couldn’t remember which would be available at Penn Station, probably both. He would have half an hour or so before he hopped on the train to DC to make up his mind, as long as he could hail a cab and they didn’t get stuck in traffic.
Having already changed out of his overalls and into jeans and a shirt, he shouldered his gym bag and locked the doors. He also checked thoroughly for parking restrictions, and peered into the windscreen of another car parked on the same street to check for parking permits. He’d stopped where he’d planned to, of course, but he didn’t want to leave anything to chance. That’s why he’d been chosen for this job; not just that he understood the importance of getting it right, more importantly the consequences of getting it wrong. He also knew there were no surveillance cameras in this street, and the narrow alley made it very unlikely that any decent satellite imagery would be obtainable.