Brian Sadler Archaeology 01 - The Bethlehem Scroll

by Bill Thompson

  The first company after the fall of the firm’s top executives had been the test case. No one knew if the firm could successfully bring another deal to the market. Would the SEC over-scrutinize the offering until it just dried up and died? Would WT&C’s previous client base still support the firm’s salespeople by investing in deals? And once the company went public would its stock price go right into the tank given all the negativity surrounding the firm that took it public?

  Everyone held their collective breaths at Warren Taylor and Currant that day in September when EvenGlow Cosmetics hit the market. The deal was small by WT&C standards – only $5 million – and the SEC had given its approval without delay. The Houston-based company was a fledgling multi-level cosmetics company that had hopes to be the next Mary Kay. It planned to use the public money to expand its existing product line and recruit salespeople to buy and sell its products through downlines of individuals.

  Brian and the other salespeople had found it more difficult to sell – there were many former customers who wouldn’t return his call – but with a smaller deal and a solid business idea the company’s stock finally ended up all pre-sold. On offering day things went off without a hitch.

  He reflected on how things had been that day. It was far more subdued. Nobody made a hundred thousand bucks in commissions. No Lamborghinis were won. It was more like the offering days at Merrill Lynch, Brian decided. Much calmer and much more professional.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  As far as Brian knew John Spedino remained free and charged with no crime. The two WT&C executives had been released on $500,000 bail each and had immediately disappeared from view. No trial date had yet been set on the numerous laws they had been accused of breaking. At both Warren Taylor and in the press, everyone assumed the Feds were diligently trying to work a deal that would put Spedino in the slammer in exchange for the two execs going free. Everyone also figured the Feds had these guys in a secret place, hidden away from Johnny Speed’s friends.

  Brian thought what a difficult decision it would be to turn state’s evidence and rat out a guy like Spedino. He was Teflon Two for sure – people around him frequently ended up hurt or dead for no apparent reason. This time Spedino might have had all the reason in the world to keep these guys quiet. That was why, according to the rumor mill, they were in a safe house somewhere far away.

  The most important thing for Brian had happened within a week after WT&C got the word he was no longer going to be pursued by the FBI or the U.S. Attorney. It was October – the same month that the firm had successfully taken their second company public under the “new plan,” where companies actually were real operating entities.

  One morning the mail clerk made his way from cube to cube on the sales floor as usual, dropping off packages and mail. A thick Fedex package landed on Brian’s desk.

  “Probably a big deal for ya,” the mail guy said.

  Brian ripped open the envelope and shook out the contents. There was a nicely bound investment-banking proposal for a company called Bijan Rarities Limited in New York. Brian looked at the envelope and saw that it was addressed to him and sent from New York. He wondered why someone had sent it directly to him, since there were people in the firm who got these things every day from companies needing money. It was those peoples’ jobs to make the decision which ones WT&C would look at and which would go in the trash. Guys like Brian never saw a deal on the front end like this. It just wasn’t part of his job description.

  He decided to send it downstairs to the corporate guys but first he opened the front cover to see how much money these Bijan guys were looking for. There was a yellow sticky note inside.

  It said, “For Brian Sadler. Payback time.”

  Now, six months after he’d received the Bijan proposal, he sat in his apartment on a blustery, cold winter afternoon in Dallas. Rain pelted the window and streaked down the glass. Thunder rumbled occasionally. The forecast called for snow showers later as the temperature would drop into the thirties after dark.

  Brian was hard at work on his new project – the antiquities gallery called Bijan Rarities. Dressed in sweat pants and a shirt, he sat in his favorite oversized leather chair, feet propped up on the matching ottoman. He’d been reading the most recent draft of Bijan’s offering document all that Sunday afternoon. The New York law firm he’d hired to prepare Bijan’s registration statement had been working for him for nearly six weeks. Now they were on draft number four and they had emailed him the latest version late yesterday. He had gone to WT&C this morning and printed the document; he found it easier to proofread in hard copy format.

  Although he had gone garage-to-garage from his apartment to the office he was glad he didn’t have to get outside in the weather. It was damp and chilly and the sky had settled into a gray pallor that hung over the city.

  This afternoon his pen and yellow highlighter were close at hand along with a mug of coffee. He’d painstakingly read each draft the firm had prepared and then he generated a spreadsheet with his comments, emailing it each time to Samuel Lowe, the attorney at the Karr Dandridge law firm who was handling this project for him. Today would be no exception. He needed to get finished with the proofing so he could generate his list of changes and get it sent off. Tomorrow promised to be a busy one at WT&C and he didn’t have time to work on this stuff at the office anyway.

  His mind ached from having read nearly three hundred single spaced pages and making yet another round of corrections, additions, deletions and changes. At this point most were minor but all of them were critical. Within two weeks WT&C expected to submit the offering documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and have yet another public offering pop out of the oven a few weeks afterwards.

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  January 2006

  Reflecting, Brian was surprised it had taken him two days to link the word “payback” to the phone call in the limo that day after the deposition. The voice had said, “Good job. Now we’ll help you.” He had forgotten about it since nothing had happened for months.

  Brian had taken the Bijan Rarities investment banking proposal home with him the night it arrived. It was well done and very thorough. The document outlined the company’s current operations, its need for $4 million and its prospects for the future after the infusion of new capital. It included three years of audited financial statements and the most recent six months’ unaudited numbers. As he read, he learned about the world of ancient artifacts and it fascinated him.

  Bijan was on the tip of everyone’s tongue in the world of archaeological relics at the moment because of the upcoming sale of the sarcophagus of Inkharaton, a pharaoh who had been missing from the line of kings for thousands of years until the discovery of his tomb in 2005. Because of Brian’s interest in the subject, he knew that the sale would put Bijan on the map as one of the top names in the rarity auction field.

  Within three days Brian had devoured the Bijan document, spent hours poring over Bijan’s website and phoned Darius Nazir, the owner of the gallery. Early the next week Brian put in for three days off and headed to New York City to talk to Nazir himself.

  Bijan fascinated Brian. His love of ancient things, his interest in reading archaeological adventure fiction, his secret fantasy to be the twenty-first century Howard Carter, unearthing the next King Tut tomb in Egypt – all of this came to the forefront as he immersed himself in this company’s information. From a Fifth Avenue storefront Bijan sold some of the greatest and most interesting rarities of the ancient world to discerning collectors everywhere.

  Throughout the document, reference was made to Darius Nazir’s contacts. In this business it was your connections – who you knew – that made the difference. You had to be on top of discoveries in order to be the one who got to broker their disposition. You had to be there virtually from the discovery itself, to beat out the other firms who would do whatever they could to land a hot piece of history with the attendant publicity for the selling fir
m, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars of potential commissions on the sale itself. It was fascinating stuff to Brian Sadler, the armchair archaeologist.

  Brian was not a frequent flyer and didn’t feel like paying a thousand bucks each way for the privilege of sitting in the front of the American Airlines 767. He therefore occupied a cramped aisle seat in coach, all six feet of his frame trying to balance between knees stuck in the seat in front, and the kid behind kicking the back of Brian’s seat. He thought how much flying had become a hassle in the years since 9/11. Not that he used to fly so much before then. It was just easier, before the Transportation Security Administration hired a bunch of people with no tact, no interest in being helpful and a bored attitude, who moved passengers through lines like cattle going to the slaughterhouse.

  He pulled out some web pages he had printed. Brian copied Bijan’s announcement of the sale of the sarcophagus of Inkharaton and a lengthy article from Archaeology magazine that gave details of the amazing discovery of Inkharaton’s long-forgotten tomb. Although he had read it before the story of how this tomb was discovered and how the priceless sarcophagus came to be offered for sale by a New York rarities dealer still fascinated him.

  Chapter Two

  In mid-2005 the announcement was made that a new tomb had been discovered in the Valley of the Kings, the first since Howard Carter had found Tutankhamen’s burial place in 1922. For a brief period the press had given a lot of attention to the find, because such things tended to grab the attention of mainstream people everywhere. It was a chance to read about a time long gone, to hear about a man who walked the earth and ruled a nation three thousand years ago.

  Inkharaton was the forgotten pharaoh. His name had been obliterated from hieroglyphs by jealous successors, and even the lists of kings that scholars had developed had a hole where Inkharaton’s name belonged. For all this time, it was known only that a nameless pharaoh ruled Egypt shortly before King Tutankhamen, around 3500 years ago. Archaeologists had looked for the tomb of this missing individual for forty years. Not having a name, they were virtually at a standstill until that day in 2005 when a workman’s donkey shied away from a snake and pawed the ground.

  The man was helping dig a new roadbed for the tour buses that brought needed dollars to bolster Egypt’s economy. The government had decided to create a roadway that snaked among the tombs, to be used to lure tourists who wanted to see the locations of long-dead pharaohs without braving hundred-degree heat. Buses could traverse the new road and tour guides could point out tomb entrances as people watched from the air-conditioned comfort of the bus. It was a plan that horrified the Director of Antiquities and many scholars, but one the President, in his desire to generate revenue, pushed through the legislature.

  A side effect of excavating anywhere in Egypt was the distinct possibility that something would turn up. Ancient inhabitants of this land had possessed almost unfathomable abilities in architecture, government and art. While much of the world was in the twilight of emerging civilization, the dwellers of this barren country were under democratic rule, they built monuments that lasted longer than any other thing on earth, and they used a beautiful language of pictures called hieroglyphs to record for posterity what they did during the days of their lives.

  The excavation of the Valley Tourway was no exception. As men moved rocks and rubble by donkey, a base was created which would be smoothed and covered with asphalt. On that fateful day the worker led his donkey toward a dumping ground. Large baskets on both sides of the donkey’s back were loaded with stones so that walking was difficult for the burdened animal. As the man pulled him along with a rope a snake suddenly twisted across the path in front of the beast, causing it to try to rise up. With the weight on its back, it could not do so. Instead it pawed at the snake.

  The reptile moved on but a small hole appeared in the ground where the donkey had struck it with his hoof. By chance the worker had turned to see what was causing the problem and noticed the hole. He knelt and picked up a rock, using that to enlarge the hole. The man grew excited. He stood within eyesight of the tombs of Seti I and Ramses X and knew this could be important.

  What should I do?

  By then another man had moved up behind him, pulling his own donkey along toward the dumping ground.

  “What is it?” he called to the first worker. And the rest, as they say, was history.

  Brian read how the worker had stayed at the site while the second man informed their team leader. As is required in the Valley, the Department of Antiquities was immediately notified. Given the location and potential importance of the hole, the Director himself had shown up about two hours later. By chance he had been in Luxor for a meeting and was therefore close by.

  All work stopped on the roadway. The workers smoked cigarettes and milled about, watching as the Director’s driver pulled his SUV close to the site.

  “It’s here, Director,” pointed the man who worked for the official as overseer of the Valley of the Kings.

  Chapter Three

  Within a week excavation had begun in earnest. The road project was put on hold and a wooden fence erected to keep prying eyes and sticky fingers away from the site. Armed guards patrolled the area at night. No one knew what to expect from a new tomb. Usually the looters had gotten there first, thousands of years ago, and what was left was in total disarray. Rarely, as in the case of King Tut’s tomb, treasure of inestimable value was found. Artifacts, hieroglyphs and pictures gave a stunning glimpse into the lives of the ancestors of today’s Egyptians, and today excitement was in the air.

  The small hole had led to a stairway mostly filled with rubble. It was painstakingly cleared, stone by stone, in the stifling heat. At the bottom of thirteen steps was a stone doorway encased by a lintel made of three enormous blocks. Carvings were literally everywhere on the lintel and work again stopped as interpreters were called from Cairo to come to the scene.

  Within days there were front-page headlines. USA Today reported that interpreters read the words on the lintel that were written fifteen hundred years before Christ.

  They were intended to invoke fear. “An eternal curse will befall he who defiles the death temple of the great Inkharaton, ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt, brother to the gods, pharaoh of the people.”

  The curses placed on tombs always grabbed the reader’s attention but in reality many tombs had them. Researchers believed they were used in hopes to ward off tomb robbers, who usually arrived within a year or so after the burial of the pharaoh. Sadly, most defiled tombs bore witness to the fact that robbers were more greedy than superstitious.

  The Director of Antiquities looked closely at the door. All the pictures had been taken, all inscriptions carefully recopied to paper by hand, and it was time to open the tomb. To him the lintel and doorway appeared intact. There were no telltale holes where a grave robber might have sneaked into the tomb and brought out gold and jewels. But the Director also knew the chances of finding another Tut treasure were a million to one.

  “Let us open this tomb.” He gave detailed instructions to the crew chief on how to remove the door with as little damage as possible to the carvings and the lintel.

  For a week the work continued on the stone door. The Director of Antiquities was lucky to get a room at the Nile Sheraton in Luxor, no small feat during the height of tourist season. Each morning he crossed the Nile where a driver with a Jeep met him to take him along the west bank to the Valley of the Kings. When he arrived his first task was to interview four armed guards who were stationed at the site every night, making sure nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The night guards were sent home, replaced with a fresh set. The job of the day guards was to keep tourists, reporters and busybodies away from the staircase and the door at its bottom.

  By the seventh day the door had been loosened and small hooks placed on its four sides. A cable was attached and strung up the stairway, where it was connected to a winch on the front of the Director’s Jeep. At his
signal the driver began to very slowly draw in the cable. It stiffened as it pulled all four hooks taut, then the winch ground noisily as it struggled to move several tons of solid rock.

  The winch broke, and a decision was made to connect the cable to a backhoe. The machine was then slowly moved backwards as it pulled the giant stone forward into the area at the foot of the stairway. The rock was over two feet thick and it took several hours to move it sufficiently to offer a chance to peer into the black opening behind it. While the work progressed, the Director asked that three reporters be allowed in. The first was from Al-Ahram, Cairo’s oldest newspaper. Next were a BBC reporter and one from CNN. The director wanted complete coverage worldwide. He told the reporters to stand to one side, which was somewhat difficult in the cramped area at the bottom of the stairway. To make more room he sent away all but one of the workmen who had helped prepare the stone for moving.

  As the senior man present, the Director had the right to be the first to see inside. But he deferred. He motioned to the workman whose donkey had created the hole.

  “You found it. You may have the privilege of being first to view the tomb. Please look inside and tell me what you see.”

  He handed the man a flashlight as a ladder was propped up against the door. It filled the stairway almost completely except for a couple of feet at the top.

  Shaking, the workman climbed the ladder until he reached the top of the rock door. He leaned forward across it, stretched the hand holding the light in front, and stuck his head into the inky darkness. He switched on the light.

  Chapter Four