by Jack Du Brul
A small woman in her sixties wearing a threadbare cardigan despite the rising heat was pacing the steps outside the Museum of Natural History, where she’d said she’d meet them.
She saw them mounting the steps and descended toward them with quick birdlike movements. “Do you have it?” she asked breathlessly. “You’re sure it was placed by Alexander the Great. Do you know what a find this is? I must study the actual stele.” She said all this in a rush, her words blending together in her excitement. “You are Dr. Mercer and Mr. Sykes, right?”
Mercer smiled. “That’s right. You’re Emily French?”
“Yes. I’ve already accosted two sets of tourists coming into the museum, hoping they were you. I just can’t believe this. There are so few new discoveries in Ptolemaic Egyptology anymore, at least that the Egyptians don’t publish themselves first.”
“Ptolemaic?”
“Yes, the time when Egypt was ruled by the Greeks, 331 to 30 B. C. It ended with Cleopatra, who was actually Cleopatra VII but no one would make movies about the first six. Oh, listen to me. I’m babbling. Let’s go to my office and take a look, shall we?”
“How can this possibly be a matter of national security?” she asked as she led them through the public part of the museum and into a warren of offices on the third floor. “This is an ancient artifact, not the plans for a nuclear bomb or something.”
Mercer almost gasped at how closely she’d guessed.
“We’re not at liberty to discuss that, ma’am,” Book replied in his deepest baritone.
“Oh, my.” She led them into her cramped and cluttered office, making an apology for the mess as if it wasn’t always so chock-full of books, stacks of papers, and knickknacks.
“And, Mrs. French,” Mercer added, “you are not allowed to discuss this matter with anyone. What I believe is written on the stele could change history and lead to one of the greatest archaeological discoveries since Tutankhamen. If I am correct and these findings are made public you will receive all due credit, I assure you.”
Her enthusiasm waned until Mercer slipped the computer disc into her laptop and the stele appeared on the screen. She plucked a pair of large glasses from her desk and settled them on her tiny nose. Mercer showed her how to use the mouse as Jacobi had taught him, to manipulate the image and zoom in on specific spots.
“It’s magnificent,” she breathed. “Look there, that’s the sign for battle. Here’s something about a burial, a king perhaps.” She kept changing her point of view, peering at the computer with her face only inches from the screen. “Some of this is in ancient Greek but here’s a cartouche. Let me see. It is about a king’s burial. That’s…Oh my Lord!” She looked across her desk at Mercer and Book, her eyes wide and owlish behind her glasses.
“Alexander the Great,” Booker said. “We know.”
“We believe the stele reveals the location of his tomb. It was placed near an old mine in Central Africa after Alexander’s death.”
“His tomb?” Her enthusiasm peaked again. “His actual tomb? Do you know how many people have searched for it over the years?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you do a full translation of the stele?” Mercer asked.
“Of course. It will take me some time, hieroglyphs are open to interpretation. They tell a story more than lay out words like a sentence.”
Mercer handed her a business card from a gold-and-onyx case he’d gotten as a gift years earlier from a petroleum heiress he’d dated for a short time. The number on the card was an answering service, so he scribbled his cell and home numbers on the back. “You can call me day or night.”
For dinner Cali cooked Mercer, Book, and Harry pasta carbonara, which she claimed was her best recipe and which made the men fear her worst. Her disappointment that she couldn’t be alone with Mercer had given way to excitement when he explained what they’d done that day and showed her a copy of Jacobi’s disc.
After the meal they settled in the bar with brandies, still talking and speculating about the possibilities. Beyond the alembic, Alexander’s tomb was rumored to be the richest, most magnificent in history. His crystal-and-gold sarcophagus was said to be the greatest work of art ever produced in the ancient world.
Mercer was on his second snifter when his phone rang. The conversation died with words still poised on lips. “Hello.”
“I have good news and bad news,” Emily French said without preamble.
“Okay,” Mercer said, drawing out the word, hoping but trying not to.
It took her five minutes to explain her findings. She summed up by telling him she’d e-mail the entire translation. He gave her the address, set the cordless back on the coffee table, and roared with laughter. The others stared at him, but soon his laughter caught on and they started to chuckle and laugh along with him, until Harry finally said, “Are you going to let us in on the joke?”
Mercer actually had to wipe tears from his eyes and take several deep breaths, and still the laughter was in his voice. “It was there all right.”
“The tomb’s location.”
“Yup. He wasn’t buried in Alexandria or the Sawi Oasis as some scholars speculate. They took his body south along the Nile and buried him in a cave at the very head of a valley they called Shu’ta.”
“So we go find this valley, grab the alembic, and put an end to this nightmare,” Cali said.
“Not so fast.” Mercer chuckled again. “Emily French did some research on our behalf and discovered the exact location of the Shu’ta Valley. In the process she learned that in 1970 it was submerged under about a hundred feet of water when they built the Aswân High Dam. I still want to go see it for myself but she says the area is totally inaccessible.” The irony of it all made Mercer break out in laughter all over again.
Aswân, Egypt
Mercer couldn’t help but recall the last time he was in Egypt. It had been a couple years earlier and he had spent two weeks cruising the Nile with an Eritrean diplomat named Salome. He hadn’t seen or heard from her since, making her memory just an enigmatic smile.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Cali said. They were seated by the pool of a luxury hotel on Elephantine Island right in the middle of the sluggish Nile. Between them and the town of Aswân, tourist boats and lateen-rigged feluccas plied the waters.
“I was here once with somebody,” Mercer replied, refusing to cover the truth with a white lie no matter the consequences.
“Lucky girl,” Cali said. “She comes here for a romantic getaway and I’m stuck chasing old tombs and dirty bombs.”
He should have known Cali didn’t have a jealous bone in her body.
Booker approached their table. In a black tank top and khaki cargo pants cut off at the knee, he made an imposing figure. He eased himself into a seat, mindful of his still-tender back. “We got us a boat.”
“Terrific.”
When Mercer had told Ira Lasko about the tomb’s location, the admiral had reported the findings to the President. Two hours later Ira phoned Mercer back, telling him that they didn’t want to involve the Egyptian government just yet. In truth they didn’t want to involve them at all if they could help it. By the terms of international law the tomb and everything within it belonged to Egypt. No one in the administration wanted to see another Middle Eastern nation with nuclear capabilities. Relations with Cairo were good but that didn’t mean they couldn’t deteriorate in the future. Like so many other Arab nations they had a minority population of fundamentalists eager to turn their country into a theocracy.
It was decided that Mercer, Cali, and Booker would travel to Egypt as tourists and reconnoiter the sunken valley first. If possible the President wanted them to snatch the alembic. A guided missile cruiser was being diverted from a courtesy call to Cyprus and would transit the Suez Canal. If they could get the alembic, they could meet the vessel on the deserted coast of the Red Sea. At that point the location of Alexander’s tomb could be revealed in such a way to politically benefit the U
nited States. If they couldn’t retrieve the alembic covertly then it would be up to the diplomats to figure out the best solution.
Although the head of the Shu’ta Valley was only a half mile from the shoreline of Lake Nasser, Mercer decided to use a boat rather than an aircraft to reach the sunken tomb. They needed to bring a lot of equipment and he didn’t trust any of the charter flight companies to keep their activities secret.
Booker had gone out first thing this morning to find them a suitable vessel.
“What is it?” Mercer asked.
Booker smiled broadly. “Hope you’re keeping a running tab on what the government owes you ’cause the only thing that would work for us is a Riva.”
Mercer was familiar with the Italian luxury boat builder and could just imagine the rental price. “How bad?”
“She’s a sixty-foot Mercurius. Sleeps four and has a compressor for refilling scuba tanks, provided extra, of course. According to the lease agent she has a top speed of forty knots and was only available because the German couple who had rented it this week ran into a little difficulty when the husband found the wife in bed with his business partner. And because we don’t want to use the owner’s crew, the price is a paltry two grand a day.”
Cali winced. “Admiral Lasko will need to be awfully creative explaining this during his next budget hearing.”
Mercer slipped on his sunglasses. “When can we leave?”
“They’re topping the tanks right now.”
They checked out of the hotel, putting the three rooms on Mercer’s Amex, and took the ferry to Aswân’s riverfront corniche, where hawkers immediately tried selling them statues, postcards, T-shirts, and assorted tourist geegaws. There was a taxi stand near the main post office. Ten minutes later they were passing the Aswân High Dam, a two-mile-long concrete behemoth that held back the waters of the Nile.
Built at a cost of a billion dollars in the 1960s, it was financed partly by the Soviet Union in a political ploy to curry favor in the region and partly from revenue generated by the Egyptians’ seizure of the Suez Canal. To make way for the fifteen-hundred-square-mile lake it would create, nearly a hundred thousand Nubians in northern Sudan and southern Egypt were relocated, often to unsustainable lands. Twenty ancient temples and shrines were disassembled and rebuilt above the flood mark, the most famous being Abu Simbel far to the south and the Temple of Philae near Aswân. Countless more ancient sites were left for the inundation, and an unknown number more would remain undiscovered because of the project.
While the dam did its job of preventing the Nile from flooding its banks and wiping out villages all along its length, it had also prevented nutrient-rich sediment from reaching farms, necessitating the import of a million tons of fertilizer per year. The fragile Nile Delta was being slowly eroded away without the replenishment of dirt from the interior of Africa, and salt contamination from the Mediterranean had reached as far south as Cairo.
Ten miles south of the dam they came to a marina. Mercer paid off the driver while Booker hauled their luggage from the trunk. The waters of Lake Nasser were deep blue and still, hemmed in by desert hills sprinkled with the occasional palm. It reminded Mercer of Lake Powell in Utah where the Colorado River had been penned behind the Glen Canyon Dam. It wasn’t yet ten in the morning but the sun was a sizzling torture baking the dry earth.
The Egyptian leasing agent greeted Booker like a long lost brother and ordered two marina workers to lug their bags to the jetty. Amid the houseboats, water-ski runabouts, and hundred-foot tourist cruise ships, the Riva looked like a thoroughbred in a herd of Shetland ponies.
She was beamy but her long, rakish lines made her look like a javelin. She had a small dive platform at her transom, a white inflatable, and an open cockpit over the main salon. Her hull was a deep black while her upperworks and radar arch over the cockpit were snowy white. With a pair of MAN 1300 horsepower engines under her deck Mercer didn’t doubt her speed. She looked like she was already on plane just sitting tied to the dock. Her name, Isis, was painted in gold at her bows.
Cali pecked Booker on the cheek and threw Mercer a look. “Now, you know how to treat a lady. Mercer would have gone for that rowboat over there.”
“Yeah, and made me row,” Book laughed.
“I won’t tolerate a mutiny until we’re at least on the boat.”
The slick leasing agent led them aboard and showed them the highlights. He demonstrated how to remove the little inflatable from its concealed garage, as well as the compressor and all the dive equipment. The interior of the motor yacht was as elegant as the outside, with sleek leather furniture, marble in the two baths, and silk sheets on the beds. The galley was small but functional and the refrigerator was packed. They were shown where extra stores were hidden in secret compartments throughout the salon. Mercer said he was satisfied when he found an assortment of liquor in one of the cabinets.
The agent had a wireless point-of-sale device and happily swiped Mercer’s card. If he had any questions about two men and a single woman going out for a week alone on a floating bordello he kept them to himself.
“Just think of all the airline miles you’re racking up,” Booker said.
“When this is all said and done I’ll have enough for a flight on the space shuttle.”
The master’s cabin in the bow had a queen-sized bed and private bath. Cali staked it for herself. Book had already tossed his bag into the other large cabin, leaving Mercer with a single bed tucked into a tiny room in a corner. Booker laughed at him and nodded at the closed master suite door. “Damn, man, just go in there and do it already.”
Mercer grinned ruefully. “I’ve got the feeling if your sorry ass wasn’t here I’d be invited.”
Booker shook his head and went for the stairs leading to the main deck, muttering, “Crazy white people.”
Mercer threw his duffel onto his bed and changed into shorts and a Penn State T-shirt. Cali emerged from her stateroom as he was about to join Booker. She wore sandals, a brief pair of shorts, and a bikini top. Her red hair fell over her shoulders in a shimmering cascade. It was the most revealing Mercer had ever seen her and his imagination hadn’t done her body justice. Though her breasts were small, they were perfectly shaped and proportional to her lean torso, and her legs seemed to stretch forever. Her skin was flawlessly smooth and freckled.
“I’m sorry about the sleeping arrangements,” she said shyly. “It’s just with Booker here…you know I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”
“That’s okay,” Mercer said, stepping close enough to smell the tropical sunscreen she’d already applied. “If I didn’t bring you to a screaming orgasm in the first five seconds he’d never let me hear the end of it.”
She slapped him playfully. “Pig.”
The leasing agent was still on the dock, and without ever taking his eyes off Cali he managed to cast off the lines when Mercer fired the Riva’s engines.
After the engines had come up to temperature Mercer bumped the throttles and eased the motor yacht from her berth. There was a lot of boat traffic around the marina, fishing boats mostly and a little cruise ship coming back from its regular six-day excursion to Abu Simbel. Mercer kept his speed to ten knots, working the wheel to get used to how the boat responded. It came as no surprise she was as nimble as a JetSki.
A few tourists waved as they passed, while fishermen either ignored them altogether or eyed them with ill-disguised contempt. When the boat traffic thinned as they reached the broad lake, Mercer began to edge the throttles. The big boat reacted instantly as vessel and master tested each other, and the more Mercer asked for the more the Riva wanted to give, until they were planing across the water at thirty-eight knots.
He could hear Cali’s laughter chiming over the bellow of the engines and the wind whipping past them. “I love boats,” she screamed. Her upper chest and throat were flushed, her lips had plumped and reddened, and her eyes had gone startlingly wide. The adrenaline rush of speed had obviously aroused her. Mer
cer felt it too and once again he cursed Booker’s presence. He looked over his shoulder. Booker had also noticed and he shot Mercer a cocky wink.
They stayed well out of the regular shipping lanes used by the tourist boats, so it seemed they had the lake to themselves. Mercer took lunch at the helm, enjoying the chunks of flatbread smeared with hummus Cali fed him. And while beer had first been perfected in Egypt thousands of years ago, there were no modern breweries in the Muslim country so he settled for an Italian Peroni from the fridge to wash it down.
Booker and Cali took turns spelling Mercer at the wheel as the day wore on. She’d put on loose cotton pants and a top to protect herself from the sun, a baseball cap taming her wind-tossed hair.
At six thirty they turned westward as if chasing after the sun as it sank toward the barren horizon. It painted the desert surrounding the large bay they were entering, in a hundred hues of red and purple. Mercer thought Cali looked especially beautiful in its scarlet glow.
According to the boat’s GPS the Shu’ta valley was at the end of a long bay that cut into the Nubian Desert like a dagger. The coastline was mostly sandstone bluffs that fell into the lake. There were no inhabitants in this region, no sign that anyone had ever lived here, and the sparse vegetation clinging to the hills, sage and camel thorn, could only survive by absorbing evaporation off the lake. They were entering an area as desolate as the moon and one even less well studied.
With five miles to go Mercer inexplicably throttled back the engines.
“Why are you slowing?” Cali asked.
He pointed ahead. Coming out of the sun, another boat was cutting across the water toward them. At this range it was impossible to tell what type of boat, but Mercer doubted the occupants were fishermen or tourists.
“You know that scene in horror movies where someone always says they’ve got a bad feeling about this?”