by Tom Bane
Instinct and training took over. Suzy swooped down to pick up the knife and sprang up from the floor to slice through his burka, before turning to run. She didn’t want to kill him. She remembered Piper’s warning about the Egyptian prison system. She doubted if they would show much mercy to a woman who stabbed a man in the street, even under these circumstances. Fear, however, made her cling onto the knife instead of throwing it back to the ground.
Suzy ran with every scrap of energy she could muster but she could hear his steps pounding behind her. Reaching into her pocket she found the stone. She turned and hurled it at his head, hitting him square on. He fell to the ground, but bounced back up and started running again. He must be on drugs to be able to withstand so much pain, she thought. She suddenly realized she was running in the wrong direction, away from the safety of the hotel.
She screamed as she ran, hoping it would frighten him off, but his footsteps were still close behind and gaining on her. He made a grab for her scarf and ripped it off her head allowing her hair to fly free as she ran on down the street. She could feel him panting behind her and counted in her head as she ran, keeping just out of his reach, waiting for the perfect moment.
STOP! She applied the brakes, dropping down and crouching into a ball. His momentum sent him flying straight over her back and he skidded across the ground in front of her. He tried to spring back up but didn’t make it, toppling to one side. He was hurt this time. This was her chance to take control. She uncurled and leaped after him, stamping hard on his hand and pressing the razor sharp tip of the knife into his throat.
“Who are you?” she yelled. “Who are you?” She reached down to pull off his metal eye mask.
SCREEEEEEECH
A black Mercedes skidded out from nowhere and accelerated toward them, the headlights dazzling her.
She somersaulted sideways across the empty street. The Mercedes swerved and struck her a glancing blow as she break-fell over the bonnet and ricocheted off the wall into a pile of trash bags. The nearside passenger door swung open and a large figure leaned out, grabbing the assassin’s prone body and pulling it into the limousine. She just had time to see that the car’s license plate was in Arabic script before it reversed away with another screeching of tires. Suzy saw shadowy figures watching from nearby windows before silently pulling the shutters across. No one wanted to get involved as the sound of the Mercedes engine faded away, leaving her lying in the trash, dazed and panting.
When she was able to stand without her legs shaking too much, she staggered back to the hotel reception. As she came through the door she pulled herself up to her full height and forced herself to walk straight until she was alone in the elevator. Adrenalin was still pumping hard through her body, making her feel faint and energized at the same time. She felt so relieved she had not damaged her treasured silver locket, she would make good on her promise to one day become her father’s little professor. She went to inspect her neck, it was still stinging and, pulling her hair back and using the mirrors on the elevator walls, she spied a small spot of congealing blood. She felt the flat blade of the knife pressing against her underneath her clothing and a vision of it about to pierce her assailant’s throat flashed up before her. What was going on?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
In Boston it was two in the morning and George was still agonizing over the letter. Every blind in the house was closed, leaving no gap for anyone to spy on him. A glass of whiskey from a bottle he had been saving for a special occasion sat at his elbow and he lit a joint hoping that it might lead to some lateral thinking. Filling his lungs, he held onto the aromatic smoke as he read Ben’s note for the hundredth time.
I am indebted to your tutelage and I would like to entrust this drawing to you. If you hear of my demise, I would like you to open the drawing and take a long count of it.
He expelled the smoke with a snort of annoyance. It was a silly message. There were no cryptic word plays, no anagrams or homophones, so his finely tuned crossword skills were of no help to him at all. The only possible clue that he could see was the odd phrase “take a long count of it.” This could be a message that only a Mayanologist would understand but it seemed a bit too obvious, being so out of place in the sentence.
George could not figure why the police had wanted to see Ben’s e-mails. And why had they taken the damn drawing of the scarab brooch with them? And given that they must have known he was lying to them, why did they not question him further, or take him down to the station? He guessed that one way or another they were bound to be back to ask more questions. Next time he would probably have to come clean with them. Or maybe he could do the senile old man act that his wife had always accused him of affecting whenever he wanted to get out of trouble for forgetting to do some chore or other.
Ben’s e-mails were always short and sweet but George felt sure they hinted that he had found a numerical code hidden in the ancient temples of the Maya and Egypt that connected the two cultures and a potential light to mankind, whatever that meant.
Inhaling another lungful of smoke George wondered if it was partly his fault that Ben had gotten into so much trouble. He had recognized the lad’s potential and brain power and had encouraged him to research some of the more fringe theories. Maybe he had placed Ben in unnecessary danger, leading him into ever more obscure parts of the world, until he fell into the clutches of narco-terrorists. Had George been irresponsible as a mentor to the younger man? Or had it been a risk worth taking for the potential reward of what they might find out?
He had half-hoped the more conformist Professor Piper would keep Ben’s PhD studies focused on mainstream archaeology. That was one of the reasons why he had recommended him, even though he and Piper had been bitter rivals for years, some might even say bitter enemies. But Ben’s attraction to the esoteric had not been so easily dampened.
George printed out another detailed picture of the scarab from the Internet to replace the one the police had stolen. He scribbled a thought in his notebook and came back to the long count. The Mayan long count was the Mesoamerican ancient calendar system, which formed the basis for a lot of quack theories and New Age beliefs, because it predicted a cataclysm that would take place on or about 21 December 2012. It was a forecast that most mainstream Mayanist scholars consider a misinterpretation. George had grown up with the beatniks and the flower power generation so, although he kept it hidden from many of his colleagues, he actually had a good deal of sympathy with these beliefs. He knew all too well what Piper thought of such things.
The Mayans had a 365-day calendar system but also a 260-day one. The long count was a more refined method of dating that was needed if long-term history was to be recorded accurately. The Mayans and Olmecs devised the long count calendar for large spans of time, a system with a fundamental day unit called a k’in. Twenty k’ins made a winal. Eighteen winals made a tun. Twenty tuns made a k’atun. Twenty k’atuns made a b’ak’tun, and a b’ak’tun amounted to 144,000 days. The long count calendar identified a date by counting the number of days from when they thought time began, namely August 11, 3114 BCE, then nine b’ak’tuns later the long count ended on the 21 December 2012, which gave rise to all the “end of the world is nigh” theories.
George understood the Mayan calendar very well; in fact he had written a book devoted to it ten years earlier. Yet despite his expertise he could not crack Ben’s frustrating puzzle. He was now getting very tired and he took another swig of whiskey.
He stared hard at the printed image of King Tut’s pectoral scarab brooch, one of the 143 precious objects discovered in the wrappings of Tutankhamun’s mummy. It had occurred to him that the 144th treasure was the mummy itself, which would coincide with the 144,000 days of the Mayan long count, but he ignored that distraction and came back to the brooch. It was beautiful, crafted in lapis lazuli and precious stones. It represented the scarab, or dung beetle, that was thought to roll the sun around the sky. Its three component parts were the sun-RE, the beetle-KHEPRU
and NEB—the basket of plenty at the foot of the beetle. NEB-KHEPRU-RE was also the throne name of Tutankhamun, meaning “the lordly manifestation of Re, the Sun.”
Something caught his eye and he leaned in closer over the picture. The brooch was not quite symmetrical. The basket NEB had three parallel bars above it that were not equally spaced. The distance from the outside of the bars to the centerline of the brooch was symmetrical but the distance from the inside bars was asymmetrical. George was deep in concentration as he counted the stones around the outside of the wings of the beetle.
“Damn!”
He sat back in his chair, clapping his hands in spontaneous delight and draining his glass. The number of stones on the outside of each wing was the same, symmetrical, but the number on the inside of the wings was different—asymmetrical—just as the bars beneath the basket had indicated.
Now the tumblers inside his brain were falling into place in quick succession. There were 183 inlaid stones on the feathers of each wing, 366 in total, signifying the number of days in a leap year. It was not uncommon for sacred objects to have an astronomical or calendric significance in Egypt, or for the Maya. Had he gotten that right? He needed to be sure. He counted the stones again. Then he counted the stones inlaid on the gaps between the feathers. There were 31 in total. That made a grand total of 397 stones. The other number encoded into the brooch was 397.
But what did the number 397 signify?
He went upstairs and grabbed one of his son’s old astronomy books from the bookshelf, and sat on the edge of the bed skimming through to see whether the number 397 had any particular significance. He couldn’t find anything. Heading back down to his study, he found a copy of the Kabbalah numerology book. The answer had to be something to do with sacred geometry or numerology. “Let’s see, 397, 397 …” He whipped through the pages but the number never came up. There was lots of information on 360, 365, 366 and 400 but nothing about the number 397.
It was 2:30 a.m. but he still felt wide awake, his head buzzing, certain he was on the trail of something. He went back the kitchen to pour himself another whiskey but thought better of it and made a pot of strong coffee instead. He sat down and stared at Ben’s message again.
I am indebted to your tutelage and I would like to entrust this drawing to you, if you hear of my demise I would like you to open the drawing and take a long count of it.
“What a stupid message!” George cried, frustrated.
He was sure it was a numerical code that he was being asked to crack, but was Ben playing with him? Was he trying to show he was intellectually superior? Why the scarab brooch? What was the link to the Mayan long count? He would be counting all night if that was it!
By four o’clock, George had reread the message and examined the brooch for the millionth time. In a burst of inspiration, he wondered why Ben had not addressed the message to him personally, or signed his name. Was he meant to pass it to somebody else?
The light dawned. To include his name would have been too many words. He looked back and forth at the circular red sun disk in the brooch and the message.
I am indebted to your tutelage and I would like to entrust this drawing to you. If you hear of my demise I would like you to open the drawing and take a long count of it.
There were 37 words in the message. If he subtracted that from 397 he got 360. The sun was 360 degrees round. The original picture of the scarab brooch, stolen by detective Christie, was drawn on a circular piece of paper so that had been a clue as well—the 360 degrees in a circle.
The number 360? It had taken him sixteen hours to find out what every ten-year-old schoolboy knew, that there were 360 degrees in a circle? There had to be more to it than that.
Exhaustion swept over his brain like a dust storm, despite the coffee. George wrote the number in his notebook, tucked it into a desk drawer in his study and went upstairs. He settled into bed and closed his eyes. Partly thinking and partly dozing, his mind now more relaxed, the answer hit him like an express train. Sitting bolt upright he threw the bedclothes off and, cursing his arthritis, hobbled back downstairs to find his notebook. As he sat back down at his desk he felt strange calm come over him yet excited at the same time. All his life he had worked to unlock the mysteries of the ancients and now he had the answer. The world might be a better place with this knowledge but it was going to be a dangerous secret to possess. This theory would win him a place forever in the history books. He wrote like a man possessed for half an hour, then he was finished, sinking back into his chair, drained and exhausted.
He made his way step by step up the stairs and dropped onto the bed with a satisfied sigh. He hadn’t heard the footsteps behind him. When he saw the silencer and barrel of the military Luger coming through door, he thought for a moment that he had already drifted off into a dream but then, sitting up, it was all too real. The gun pointed directly at his face. George stared in disbelief at the smooth line of the silencer, watching the trigger finger tighten and retract. The trigger jammed. Time seemed to freeze and George’s mind filled with half-remembered Buddhist mantras. With extraordinary calmness he thought of the cycle of Samsara, the circle of life and death. Then his eye registered movement again, and he saw the dark silhouette of the intruder stepping forward.
“Don’t kill me,” he pleaded. “I have—”
A black knife wheeled through the air, the cold steel passing through his mouth and into his midbrain. An instant later, a second knife, a Bowie, pinned his neck to the pillow. Two hundred pounds of muscle pounced onto him, but George had no fight left. The assassin adjusted the angle of the Bowie and smashed his right knee into the knife’s pommel, driving the blade straight through the cervical vertebrae of the neck, an expert power assist, severing George’s spinal column.
Blood sprayed across the white pillows and sheets. The knife was stuck firm. The assailant tried to ratchet the blade free but it was wedged solid in the bone. He did his best not to decapitate the old man, leaving his chin resting on the knife’s Micarta handle instead.
He checked his watch and timed the bleed out, ensuring death was a certainty. A slow, cavernous, rasping sound came from what had been George’s neck as his chin and clavicle parted into a yawning, twitching, bloody hole. Dead at three minutes and seven seconds, George’s heart stopped, his pulse evaporated and the assassin quietly got to his feet, went downstairs and let himself out of the house.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“To you, the gods who are on earth assemble for you, they place their hands under you, they make a ladder for you that you may ascend on it into the sky, the doors of the sky are thrown open to you, the doors of the starry firmament are thrown open for you.”
-Pyramid Texts, Utterance 572
When she woke the following morning, Suzy was sore, tired and hungry. It had not been a good night’s sleep. She had tried to reach Professor Piper on the phone from her room but there had been no reply and she had been left staring at the ceiling, thoughts churning through her head as she tried to make sense of what was happening to her. She had to work out what to do next.
Pulling herself painfully out of bed, she showered and then sat for a while, wrapped in a towel, staring at the dagger that had so nearly killed her. She shivered, thinking back to how she had picked it up during the fight. God, she’d even held it against the attacker’s throat! What had made her do it? She still felt a powerful revulsion toward knives of any kind. Being careful not to cut herself, she picked up the dagger and turned it in her hand. It was about seven inches long and had a strange wavy pattern on the blade, which looked Japanese. Her sense of her own danger and vulnerability outweighing her revulsion, she decided to keep hold of it as a self-defense weapon for as long as she remained in Egypt. It would only be used as a last resort, she told herself, tucking it into her trusty bag.
She sat on the soft, springy mattress, going over her options again and again. Thinking about her reaction to the knife, she realized just how much danger she must be in and
made another surprising decision. She would go to the police after all, and tell them the whole story. They were bound to be more lenient if she turned herself in than if they hunted her down and caught her. She was sure she could use the knife to prove her story.
With renewed resolve, she dressed and went down to the dining room for breakfast, picking up an English language newspaper on the way in, so that she wouldn’t have to make eye contact with anyone else while she waited for her food. She was taken to a table on the verandah overlooking the Nile. The flowing waters looked fresh and new, sparkling in the early morning sun. A gentle breeze skipped across the surface, the Falluca boats billowing out their kite shaped sails, meandering across the waters, on the far side fisherman cast their nets into the water like blobs of color from a Venetian Canaletto. Suzy sat back in her white, basket-weave chair and smiled, as the waiter took her order and then left her in peace with her newspaper.
“Fancy seeing you here,” Suzy looked up to find Tom Brooking standing beside the table. What the hell was he doing here, she wondered. She couldn’t shake him off. He looked all spruced up in freshly ironed clothes, as if on his way to the tennis club. He was smiling at her. “You look like you’ve been in the wars. What happened? Having you been picking fights again?”
“I’m OK,” she said, touching her throat. “I fell.”
Tom leaned in for a closer look, his expression concerned. “Looks like someone tried very hard to choke you. And you’ve got some blood on the back of your neck.”
“Listen, I’m just trying to have my breakfast here,” she snapped. “Do you mind?”
“Why are you so hostile?”
Suzy felt her blood pressure rising again, as it had when he cornered her in the hotel lobby. “Me? What about your dirty fighting at the judo club? That was unprovoked, not to say a little disrespectful!”