Aysha looked uncertain. “It’s shut to the public, but I still have a pass. Our driver knows the back routes and could get us to the rear entrance. I’m supposed to return you to Alexandria and then I’m straight off to the Faiyum to join Maurice at the mummy necropolis. But we could squeeze in the extra hour if you really want it.”
“Who knows when I’ll be in Egypt again.”
Maria eyed him. “You’ll be back. I’ve never known Jack Howard to walk away from something like this.”
“I’m thinking of visiting Jerusalem next.”
“That’s going from the frying pan into the fire, isn’t it? There have already been rockets from Syria falling on Haifa.”
Jack shrugged. “I was there doing research for my doctorate in the week before the first Gulf War, remember? There were no tourists, and I had the Holy Sepulchre all to myself. I told Rebecca she should seize the opportunity to explore as much as possible while she’s there now, when the place isn’t swamped with tour buses.”
Maria looked at him shrewdly. “If the real reason you’re going to Jerusalem is to look out for Rebecca, forget it. She’d never forgive you. You’ve got to let her plough her own furrow, and then ask you out there herself.”
Jack pulled out his phone and showed her an image. “That’s the tunnel she’s about to go down under the City of David. She sent this just after we left Alexandria. She wanted Costas to go too, but I texted her about Lanowski’s visit and said Costas might be tied up for a while with some engineering problem on Seaquest.”
“When you reply, tell her the trip she and I have planned to Greece is definitely in the cards. I’ve just had permission for us to visit the monasteries on Mount Athos to look at the manuscript libraries. At last they’ve agreed to let women in, and she and I are going to be the first.”
Jack raised his eyes. “Fascinating. I’ve always wanted to have a look in there. Maybe I’ll join you.”
“As if, Jack, as Rebecca would put it. This is a strictly girls-only trip to a once-strictly-male preserve. It’d look as if we had a chaperone.”
Jack put away his phone, and paused. “I’ll call you in Oxford. We should spend some time together.”
Maria turned back to the vellum. “How’s Katya?”
Jack shrugged. “Haven’t seen her for months.”
She turned to him. “What’s going on there, Jack? She’s perfect for you. A paleolinguistics PhD who can hold her own in a gun battle and runs her own project on the Silk Road in Kyrgyzstan. What is it now, ten years since you first met? She helped you find Atlantis.”
Jack shrugged. “You helped me find the last Gospel of Christ.”
“What are you doing, Jack? You need to make up your mind.”
“She’s with that Kyrgyz guy, Almaty, at the petroglyph site.”
“Well, I guess at least he’s on the same continent as she is. I know how she feels.”
Jack glanced at Aysha, who gave him a rueful look. “Time to go, Jack. There’s a curfew at midnight, and we definitely can’t push that.”
Maria looked at them. “I’m doing an all-nighter here and then I’m on the early morning flight back to Heathrow. I want to get my Hebrew expert at the institute to look at this and then I’ll email you the final translation. And watch out for something from Jeremy. He’s working flat out in the British Museum stores looking for more Howard Carter manuscripts, for anything further on the old soldier and his story of lost treasure under the pyramids. Jeremy usually comes up trumps, if you give him time.”
“We may not have a lot of that,” Jack said.
“He was on to the last box of correspondence when I left. With the pyramid a no-go zone, his findings may be the last hope you have of discovering another way underground. Who knows what that guy told Carter.”
“I’ll text him when I get back to Alexandria, right after I contact the IMU board and do all I can to get your friend Sahirah released. Any plans to return the sarcophagus to Egypt are on hold until she walks free. If we are indeed able to raise it tomorrow, that would bring maximum public humiliation to the antiquities director. Releasing Sahirah should be a price he is willing to pay to keep face.”
“Tomorrow might be your last chance,” Aysha said. “The antiquities director might not last much longer than that, and whoever takes his place from the extremist junta won’t care less about the sarcophagus returning to Egypt. That is, if there’s even a Ministry of Culture left. It’s already halfway to being an interrogation block.”
Jack gave her a steely look. “I’m going to insist on her release by midday tomorrow Egyptian time. If there’s no response, I’ll be meeting with the IMU security director and assessing all options.”
Maria stood, arms folded, and looked up at Jack. “Congratulations on your chariots discovery in the Red Sea, Jack. But it makes me think of lines from Yannai, another poet in the Geniza, on the burning bush in the Book of Exodus. ‘Omens of fire in the chariot’s wind, Pillars of fire in thunder and storm.’ Take care of yourself, Jack. Don’t stretch that envelope too far; otherwise, it’ll be Rebecca coming to find you, not the other way around.”
Jack looked at her with concern. “Will you be all right here alone?”
Aysha turned to him. “That beggar you gave money to at the entrance to the synagogue precinct? He’s ex-Egyptian special forces, a cousin of mine, Ahmed. He has a Glock 17 concealed in those rags. He won’t let Maria out of his sight until she’s sitting on the plane for Heathrow tomorrow morning.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want to be coming back here to rescue Maria.”
“You wouldn’t need to. I’d be here first.”
Maria paused, and then quickly kissed him on the cheek. “See you in Oxford when this is over.”
Aysha gave them both a wry smile. “Inshallah.”
Half an hour later Jack ducked out of the Land Rover into a back street and followed Aysha quickly down a passageway behind the museum. While they had been in the synagogue, Cairo had erupted again, the low cloud over the city reflecting the orange glow of fires and the roar of the traffic punctuated by the wail of sirens and bursts of gunfire. Aysha spoke to the two armed guards at the entrance, showed her pass, and waited as one of them unlocked the door. Moments later they were in a long, ill-lit corridor and then ascending a staircase that came out at the rear of the ground-floor exhibits hall. The entire museum seemed sepulchral, with many of the cases shrouded with sheets.
“The last antiquities director ordered this, the last archaeologist, that is, before he was ousted by the new regime,” Aysha said as they hurried on. “Everyone here was fearful of a repeat of what had happened to the museums in Iraq and Afghanistan, and covering the exhibits at least buys some time, keeping them out of the eye of the extremists, who see virtually everything in here as un-Islamic. Here we are, Room Three, the Amarna Room. The sculpture you want is in the far left corner under the shroud. I’ll wait here in case a guard comes by and I have to explain what we’re doing. You’ve got ten minutes, maximum.”
She switched on the light, and Jack left her pacing the entrance to the room. The air smelled musty, tomblike, and Jack had the chilling sensation of being at the end of an era, with the mummies and sculptures and other priceless artifacts celebrated the world over about to be entombed again, swallowed into the ground or smashed to pieces within the ruins of this place. He passed the famous unfinished sculpture of Nefertiti, her beautiful face looming out of the darkness, and then he saw her again in a relief sculpture, no longer so beautiful, with the same elongated profile and same bulbous features as her husband. He stopped at the far corner in front of a shrouded form that towered over the rest of the room, and he carefully pulled off the sheet. The sculpture rose above him just as he had remembered it in the travelling exhibition in London, only here the features were even more deeply accentuated by the shadows. It was a representation utterly unlike that of any other pharaoh from ancient Egypt, with the extended chin, the thick, half-smiling lips, and the bulbous eyes, as if it were from another place and another time altogether.