‘If I can wrap everything up in time, I will. But I can’t guarantee it at the moment.’
‘Well, you could if you let someone else take care of this new thing you’ve found.’ He considered what he had just said. ‘You see? You were worried about turning forty ’cause you thought there wasn’t anything else left for you to discover, but there you go. There’s still loads of old buried junk out there.’
‘It’s hardly “junk”, Eddie.’ The frost became more icy.
‘I’m joking, love. You should know what I’m like by now.’
‘And you know what I’m like. So you know I really, really want to see this through. Okay?’
His promise to stop using obscenities entirely had been spectacularly blown on a Himalayan mountainside two years earlier, but he still dropped his voice so Macy wouldn’t hear him swear. ‘For fuck’s sake, Nina. If it was just me, you know I’d complain, but let you do your thing. But what about Macy? What am I supposed to tell her, that her mum thinks some old ruin’s more important than her daughter?’
‘That’s not fair! Of course I don’t think that. But—’
‘If you didn’t, there wouldn’t be a “but”.’
‘God damn it, Eddie!’ A long pause as she calmed herself. ‘Okay, look. I wasn’t scheduled to leave Israel until the day after tomorrow anyway, so we’ll talk about this again tomorrow evening. Is that all right?’
‘Yeah. So long as you haven’t already made up your mind.’
‘I haven’t, I promise.’ She sighed. ‘Can I talk to Macy?’
‘Yeah, of course.’ He put on a broad smile for the little girl’s benefit. ‘Hey, love. It’s Mummy. Mommy, I know,’ he added, pre-empting her inevitable correction.
‘Everything okay?’ Elizabeth asked him as Macy chatted to Nina.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he replied.
‘Archaeology?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Ah.’ Knowing glances passed between his family members.
Macy said goodbye to her mother, then returned the phone. ‘Eddie?’ said Nina.
‘Yeah, I’m here.’
‘I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Right. I love you. Hope you enjoy the show.’
‘Love you too,’ he replied, still annoyed at his wife — and himself, for letting himself get annoyed with her. ‘Talk to you soon.’ He faced the others with another fake smile. ‘So. This horse thing’d better be good, then!’
5
The alarm on Nina’s iPhone warbled at 6 a.m., but she was already up, making her first coffee of the day before checking her laptop. She had left the computer running overnight, a program comparing a topographical database to a set of search parameters. Said parameters were vaguer than she would have liked, as there had been no indication of the heights of any of the mountains used to triangulate the lost city’s position. She had instead been forced to input the relative bearings of each carved peak surrounding the model of Zhakana and hope there was enough data to produce a result, but had not predicted much success.
Which meant the message on the screen came as a true surprise.
She hurriedly reread it, almost expecting it to morph into something more disappointing. But it remained the same. Location found. A string of numbers followed — the longitude and latitude of the place the program had identified.
The numbers were not as long as she had hoped, though. The software was capable of deducing a location to within as little as fifty feet. The result here had only narrowed it down to an area of four square miles.
But that was more than close enough.
Nina quickly brought up the coordinates on a digital globe, zooming in on Africa, central Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the huge country’s eastern region. The nearest sizeable settlement was over thirty miles away, which considering the terrain and dense jungle might as well have been a hundred. No roads were visible on the satellite imagery, only rivers winding languidly through the unbroken carpet of verdant green.
She switched to a three-dimensional view of the target zone. Terrain features sprang up. A river had curved around the base of the promontory upon which the model Palace Without Entrance stood; she used the trackpad to rotate the view, searching for places where waterways ran around cliffs.
It took several minutes to survey all the rivers. Two locations seemed promising. She zoomed in on the first.
Nothing unusual was visible on the ground, but she knew from experience that even large structures could be hidden from aerial observation by the jungle canopy. She moved the virtual camera in a full circle. The terrain didn’t correspond to the model, not flat enough to contain the city.
The second site. She immediately saw that this was a much closer match. There was the promontory, the river wrapped around its foot like a constricting snake…
And peeking through the covering of green, tantalising hints of stone.
Nina felt a little kick of excitement. She zoomed in, but the image degenerated into pixelated splodges. The satellite photography was at the limit of its resolution; with nothing there but raw jungle, none of the commercial providers had felt the need to photograph it in higher detail. Government agencies would undoubtedly have better images, but she no longer had access to them.
‘Dammit,’ she muttered. She was sure there was more on the clifftop than just trees, but had no way to confirm it. Another click to mark the exact spot, then she returned to a map view. The nearest major town with an airport was Butembo, close to the Ugandan border about a hundred miles to the north-east. Could she hire someone to make a photographic overflight?
Before she could ponder any more on the prospect, her phone rang. She was surprised; it was barely past dawn. ‘Hello?’
‘Nina, hello.’ Ziff. ‘Sorry to wake you.’
‘No problem, I was already up. I’m surprised you are, though.’
‘I had a phone call.’ He sounded concerned. ‘I’ve just been told about a news story. Are you at your computer?’
‘Yes. David, what’s going on?’
‘You should see for yourself.’ He gave her the web address of what she guessed was a Jordanian newspaper. ‘The top story, you can’t miss it.’
‘Okay, let me see — oh my God!’ she gasped as the page loaded.
The headline was in Arabic, the script unreadable… but the accompanying pictures told her everything. They showed the map room inside the First Temple, the largest image a wide shot of the model city. ‘Where the hell did these come from?’ Nina demanded, appalled. ‘Nothing was supposed to be released until — wait, son of a bitch,’ she said as a possibility occurred to her. ‘Did Mohammad Talal take these?’
‘I already spoke to him,’ Ziff told her. ‘He says he had nothing to do with it. The others deny it as well. What about your film crew?’
‘I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell going to find out.’
‘It may not have been anyone on either of our teams, though. Some of the diggers still had access after we left, and the security guards on the Temple Mount could have simply walked in and taken pictures on their phones.’
‘Great, so anyone could have leaked the biggest archaeological discovery of the year for fifty bucks a photo, and we’ve got no way of finding out who.’ She scrolled through the pictures. ‘Jesus, these are clear enough to read the text on the walls!’
‘I know. The story has a partial translation,’ the Israeli told her glumly. ‘It names Zhakana, describes how Solomon visited the Palace Without Entrance—’