Death of a Pharaoh

  “Very comforting, but the desert is not the paved streets of Seville.”

  “I can assure you that the desert could never be as demanding as the people of Seville at Easter time.”

  “Well said, do you have any questions about what will happen?”

  “When does my team get to look at the parihuela?”

  “It is in the underground garage and you may take it for a test run tomorrow.”

  “When do we need to be ready?”

  “The filming will take place in two nights,” he informed them. “We do not expect your men to carry such a heavy load in the merciless sun of the desert.”

  “That is a relief.” It is hot in Seville but rarely at Easter.

  “Tomorrow after you test the float, we will take our guests for some sightseeing. You will have another opportunity to practice the next morning then we will transport you to Hassan’s village for lunch and some cultural entertainment,” he explained. “We will transport you to the staging area by jeep and camel as soon as the sun goes down. A crew will have dismantled and reassembled the float before we arrive.”

  “What will you be using for weight?”

  Pablo glanced at Mustafa for permission to speak.

  “We needed to keep this last part secret until you were all here,” he indicated. “This is not so much an experiment as an operation to remove an ancient relic, the remains of a great Pharaoh, and bring him back to Cairo.”

  “We aren’t going to carry him all the way to the capital are we?”

  Mustafa laughed and Eduardo realized that he understood Spanish.

  “No my friend, you will be carrying the remains of the Pharaoh a total of 22 kilometers to a point on a paved road where a specially equipped trick will take over.”

  “Why doesn’t the truck pick him up at the site?”

  “Some questions are best answered the day after tomorrow,” Mustafa interjected. “For now, please enjoy our hospitality.”

  The parihuela was an exact replica. It looked like it had been beamed down from Seville. The caudrilla was equally impressed. They loaded it up with cement blocks until it weighed almost two tons. That would be enough to start. It took them close to four hours before everyone on his team was satisfied with the alignment of the trabajaderas and the feel of the load. The costaleros were also happy and after a quick dip in the pool, they all climbed on buses and headed to Luxor for sightseeing. Eduardo relaxed after seeing that the float was adequate. He sat beside Pablo on the sightseeing trip and they chatted about old times.

  “How long have you worked for these people?”

  “Since university, they are a good group.”

  “Sr. Mustafa is impressive.”

  “He is one of the richest men in Egypt. He owns a large engineering firm and he built half the country, including the hotel. He wisely distanced himself from the corruption of Mubarak and is on excellent terms with the new government.”

  “Tell me about this King we will carry tomorrow.”

  “It is a secret. We do not want to attract the press. He is an important figure historically and any leak would be an international sensation. I am afraid that I cannot give you any more details.”

  “Twenty-two kilometers is a long slog for costaleros carrying three tons.”

  “Ten thousand euros is a lot of money.”

  “Good point!” Eduardo agreed, “Will you be there?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Staff Housing, Saqqara, Egypt, 19.12 EET, October 30, 2016

  The contract was a dream come true for Jake Turner. The recruitment agency contacted him with only two months left on his second tour in Afghanistan as a Medical Imaging Technician in the US Army. Prior to his first deployment overseas, the military sent him to train at one of the world’s largest suppliers of portable x-ray equipment. He specialized in setting up new units when they arrived in the field. Because of the dangers of excessive radiation from poorly calibrated machines, they performed most of the fine-tuning on human cadavers until they were certain the unit operated safely. The software was relatively complicated but Jake was a true computer geek and he even suggested improvements that the manufacturer later adopted.

  After his discharge, Jake planned to use the benefits of the GI Bill to study to become a forensic radiologist. When the agency offered him triple what he made in the army every month to work on an archeological dig in Egypt, and tax-free, he didn’t hesitate to sign on the dotted line. He’d still make it back in time for classes to start in September and he had always wanted to see the pyramids.

  Only four weeks remained on his contract now. In the past two months, he trained a team of technicians to use the two machines, both of them state of the art, which his employer shipped to an excavation near Saqqara. Security was tight at the dig. The Chief Archaeologist cited the fear of grave robbers to explain away the extraordinary measures that made protocols at some of the bases in Afghanistan look like training manuals for shopping mall guards.

  After three months, he still didn’t know the exact location of the site. Every morning, they picked him up at the door of his very comfortable staff housing in an air-conditioned van with tinted windows that didn’t allow him to see outside or even into the cab. He knew that the driver took a different route each day so he couldn’t memorize the itinerary. They used the same procedure every night at the end of the day. All he ever saw were some barren hills with no visible landmarks when he came out for a cigarette break every few hours. He didn’t think they were far from Saqqara but there were hundreds of small valleys like this in the region. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack.

  To be honest, he understood their paranoia. He wasn’t an expert but the scope of the discovery undoubtedly rivaled the famous Valley of the Kings. If it ever became public, it would be an international sensation. A National Geographic documentary in the waiting! His employers made him sign an airtight confidentiality agreement that basically meant he’d be in deep shit and he’d have to change his identity and go live in Borneo if he ever mentioned where he had been working.

  By his count, the extensive underground chambers, richly decorated with hieroglyphics, contained at least 150 mummies and all of them royal by the looks of the elaborate sarcophagi. He was certain that vandals had never robbed the tomb and he could only imagine the treasures hidden with each of the stiffs. He even had the sense that someone had maintained the tomb over the centuries. The place was jammed with security cameras as well as environmental sensors for temperature and humidity like the ones in museums around the world; many looked as if that had been there a while. Another strange thing was the reverence of the teams whenever it came to scanning one of the mummies. It was as if they still worshipped the dead king or whoever it was in that box. It was sort of creepy, like some ancient cult or something like that but it didn’t matter to him since they paid so well.

  Jake was anxious to finish the job. He was eager to get back to fast food, cheap beer and loose women. He liked Egypt but the recent shift to Islamic fundamentalism made it uncomfortable for foreigners living outside the normal tourist enclaves. He had the weird sensation that people were watching him whenever he went to a café or to the souk on his days off. The other night he walked home after dinner and was certain a man in a brown djellaba followed him for several blocks. He worried it might be the morality police. He decided to stop drinking alcohol in public just in case he’d attracted the attention of the Muslim Brotherhood.

  Five days ago, he sat in his favorite kahwa drinking a strong Turkish coffee with enough sugar to warrant a warning label from the American Diabetes Society while he leafed through a day old copy of the Egypt Daily News. Suddenly, a man in his forties walked over to his table.

  “Sorry to interrupt, you are an American?” he asked with a German accent.

  Jake was accustomed to tourists introducing themselves uninvited. In a café full of locals, they would always drif
t toward the only other foreigner, like a magnet. He tried to be patient with their attempts to start a conversation.

  “Your name is Jake?”

  Jake studied him before answering. He had blond hair cut short military style and a strong build. He didn’t look gay. He lifted his right foot off the chair in front of him and pushed it back. The sound of the legs scrapping across the tile floor implied an invitation to join him.

  The man turned the chair with one hand and offered his right.

  “My name is Cedric, I am Swiss,” he informed him as they shook hands.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “We know everything about you,” he announced with shocking honesty. “We would like to offer you a job.”

  “Already have one and when it finishes shortly, I am going back to the good old U S of A to study at university.”

  “You misunderstand, my friend, we are interested in your current position.”

  “Sorry, I signed a confidentiality agreement.”

  “Of course,” he demurred, “but we thought you might consider breaking it for $50,000 in cash.”

  Jake almost fell off his chair; it was twice as much as he was making for his four-month contract.

  “That amount of cash smells illegal,” he opined.

  “Semantics,” Cedric dismissed with a wave of his hand. “All we require is some harmless archeological espionage. No one will ever know,” he concluded with a reassuring smile.

  Jake was intrigued and he tried not to show his interest.

  “What do you want exactly?”

  “There is one very special mummy among the many at the site where you are working.”

  “They all look the same to me,” Jake admitted.

  “On the contrary, one of them is of particular interest to my employers.”

  “Who might they be?” Jake inquired,

  “The Vatican,” the Swiss announced.

  That was the last thing Jake expected to hear. “What does the Vatican want with a dead Pharaoh?”

  “Not everyone is what they are wrapped up to be,” he commented in a mysterious tone. He moved closer to the American and lowered his voice, “We have reason to believe that the body of a very important saint from the earliest days of the Catholic Church is among the many in the tomb.”

  Jake wished he had paid more attention in bible classes as a boy. “Can you be a little more specific?” he demanded.

  Cedric lowered his voice even further and Jake had to lean forward on his elbows to hear him over the din of the crowd.

  “Saint Peter,” he lied with breathtaking ease.

  “You mean the first pope?”

  “Exactly!”

  “I thought he was buried in Rome?”

  “So did we until evidence surfaced recently that his body had been spirited away just after his martyrdom by devoted Coptic Christians who brought it to Egypt for safe keeping. His remains were mummified to preserve them as a relic.”

  “How will I know which one is him?”

  “Very simple, he will be the only one who was crucified.”

  Jake knew it would be relatively easy to determine if someone had died nailed to a cross. The trauma would be obvious.

  “You don’t propose that I steal the body, do you?”

  “Certainly not!” he insisted. “It will be enough for you to identify the sarcophagus and provide some physical proof that you have found the correct remains. An x-ray would suffice.”

  Jake weighed the options in his mind. He didn’t have access to the copies of the x-rays taken of the different mummies. He saw them briefly in the course of his work but a technician later saved them to a hard drive located at the site. They never allowed him to take his laptop past the lunchroom, precisely to ensure he couldn’t make any copies. The internal network used by the archeological team had Wi-Fi but the signal didn’t reach the common area where he often checked his email on a separate signal provided for the contractors. One time he took his laptop into the john and noticed a weak signal, not enough to connect. He wondered if he could smuggle in an antenna to boost reception.

  “So if I get you an x-ray of someone who was crucified, you’ll pay me $50,000 in cash?”

  “Happily!”

  “Cedric, you have yourself a deal,” Jake confirmed as he reached across the table to seal the contract with a handshake.

  In his excitement, Jake failed to notice the two Arab men playing dominos a few feet away. Half the customers in the kahwa sat hunched over one game or another. The pair of Guardians was a team assigned to shadow the Swiss captain after the information from their captor, now ally, identified him as a key decision maker. They reported right away that the enemy had recruited the technician. Hassan was pleased that Franz’s intelligence was proving useful. Everything was going according to plan.

  As soon as he got home, Jake got to work devising a plan. In the cafeteria, he had access to an internet connection for emails and surfing that wasn’t connected to the main working group. Even though he had the password for the dedicated network from the unit on each x-ray machine, it didn’t do him any good if he couldn’t pick up the signal on his laptop. He was certain they had no idea that a trace of the signal reached the last stall of the men’s toilets located near a window and much closer to the trailer housing the mainframe. What he needed was a booster to enhance the signal but there was no way he could sneak a commercial antenna in without them finding out. They searched his briefcase every morning and evening.

  As with all red-blooded American geeks, Jake turned to the internet to find a solution. He spent hours trolling extreme tech websites until he discovered that you could manufacture a decent antenna out of a Pringles can then connect it to the laptop’s Wi-Fi card with a simple coaxial cable. He was in business.

  Pringles are as universal as Coca-Cola, you can get them all over the world. Even in the small store in Giza where he lived. He found the connectors, wires, a pair of needle-nosed pliers, a small drill, a soldering device and the rest of the articles on the list he downloaded from the internet at a local hardware store. He did several experiments and found that the BBQ flavor provided the best results; something to do with the graphics he supposed. Just by hanging it out his kitchen window, he was able to pick up over a dozen networks and two of them weren’t password protected. The download speeds were amazing. The antenna was directional so it took some maneuvering to pick up each signal but he was certain it would work at the site.

  He wouldn’t have time to open the thousands of x-rays searching for the telltale signs of a crucifixion. He could hardly spend hours in the bathroom even if he pleaded a case of the common tourist tummy known as the Pharaoh’s Revenge. He needed to narrow the selection and as always a little baksheesh worked wonders in Egypt; especially among the fellahin who labored at the site. He rarely spoke to them on a normal day, most knew only a few words of English. Like many third world countries, foreigners largely ignored the legions of poor performing menial labor or begging in the streets. They formed part of the landscape and were as unremarkable as elevator music.

  The supervisor of the cleaning crew was a dignified older man with a prayer mark on his forehead, who had often tried to ingratiate himself with Jake. His frayed djellaba looked like a shroud a mummy would wear and a wad of Egyptian pounds would go a long way.

  Youssef’s friends and neighbors knew him as a pious man. He lived a modest life and they respected him for his devoted wife, five grown children and a position that allowed him to offer employment to their sons. He was a good Muslim, blessed by Allah, and he rarely had to pay for his tea at the kahwa after noon prayers at the mosque on Friday. People always cultivated his favor.

  He was also a lifetime member of the Servants of Ma’at, as his father had been before him. Hassan ordered him to be friendly with the American and to cooperate if asked to leak the location of the mummy of the Pharaoh Jesus. It was imperative that their enemies knew where it was so that they would also miss it whe
n it disappeared. As suspected, he didn’t have to wait long to play his part. Jake came to see him only three days after Hassan’s men discovered him conversing with the Swiss captain in town.

  “Youssef, my friend, perhaps you can help me?”

  “If it is in my power, Effendi.”

  “The Chief Archeologist asked me to examine the quality of the x-rays of the mummy from the early Christian era,” he fibbed, “I’m too embarrassed to admit that I’m not certain which one he means.”

  Youssef tried to look shocked, “We are not permitted to speak of this matter to anyone,” he told the American.

  “It would help me so much and I would be grateful,” Jake intimated.

  Youssef opened his eyes wider as if to say, “How grateful?”

  Jake extracted a wad of bills from his pocket and peeled off enough to equal one hundred US dollars. It was more than Youssef made in a month. He frowned as if to indicate that it was too little. Jake doubled the amount. He smiled showing that they were getting closer to an agreement. Jake sighed and counted another hundred. It was a small fortune and perhaps Youssef could buy a second hand Vespa for his son. He reached for the money and deftly hid it in a pocket under his djellaba.

  “You must promise never to say I helped you.”

  “You have my word,” Jake replied.

  Youssef glanced from side to side to make certain they were alone then leaned toward the American, “The mummy you seek is in the stone coffin labeled as TP003. Any files would have the same reference. The archeologists always use that number when they ask us to move the machines.”

  Jake managed to hide his satisfaction but he looked like one of Youssef’s grandchildren caught with his fingers in the baklava. Three hundred dollars was surely a drop in the bucket compared to what the Swiss dog had offered him. Jake thanked him with a warm embrace. Youssef was glad to be of service.

  Tomb of the True Pharaohs, somewhere outside of Saqarra, Egypt, October 31, 2016

  On the day he selected for the operation, Jake spent half an hour packing his lunch to make the Pringles can look as nonchalant as possible and to camouflage the cable. He wasn’t too worried about a thorough search. The guard at the main entrance only took a cursory look as they filed by his desk. The airport type pat down with a metal detector was at the second control that allowed access to the dig. He was more concerned about anybody who might walk into the bathroom while he played airplane with a Pringles can. They would probably think he was in there jerking off to some porn. Arabs thought all American males were addicted to smut. He assumed they were secretly jealous. He wondered if he should provide some convincing sound effects in case anyone was listening.