He had not known for certain why he wanted to see this statue again, but now he realized why. Before she had left for Jerusalem, Rebecca had talked to him about Baldwin the Fourth, the Crusader king who had ruled the city with his Frankish barons in the twelfth century, soon after the Geniza poet Halevi had met his end there. Together they had watched the Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven, in which Baldwin is portrayed in a golden mask, concealing the leprosy that had ravaged his face and would eventually kill him. Jack had remembered the wooden Burundi face masks with their hooded eyes that he had seen in Sudan, ceremonial masks with a history that may have extended back thousands of years to the time when the pharaohs had tried to conquer the desert. It was there that Akhenaten had experienced his revelation of the Aten, had cast off his priestly role and pushed aside the old religion. Had the tribesmen seen his extraordinary features and created their masks in his image? Or had he seen their masks, the masks of those who lived under the radiance of the Aten, and then had he and Nefertiti adopted them for their own, symbols of their own allegiance to the new religion? How else to explain the transformation of Nefertiti in the sculptures? Instead of signs of illness, as many had suspected, was Akhenaten instead portraying himself like the Burundi, seeking the anonymity that a mask gave him in the light of God?
Jack looked up one last time at the sculpture. He did not know whether he had just experienced a blinding revelation, or whether the idea of the mask just pushed Akhenaten further back into mystery. It was as if the pharaoh himself were playing games with him, tempting him to take one step further into the unknown, then showing him that the trail was an illusion. It seemed to reflect everything that had happened over the last few months, of tottering on a knife-edge between success and failure, between unlocking a mystery that Jack knew lay somewhere beneath their feet and having to walk away with that ambiguity in Akhenaten’s face, that mask over reality, seared into his mind.
His phone hummed. It was a text from Costas. He quickly read it, and suddenly coursed with excitement. The dive from Seaquest to raise the sarcophagus was on for tomorrow afternoon. The IMU Embraer jet was due at Alexandria at dawn tomorrow, and the Lynx helicopter was already waiting at Seville airport in Spain to transfer them to the ship. Rebecca would understand his trip to Jerusalem being postponed, and Maria had been right; it would have been wrong for him to jump on the first plane to Tel Aviv after receiving Rebecca’s text, as if he had been waiting on tenterhooks for a chance to watch out for her. And she was used to the last-minute change in priorities that often took place when Jack was following too many leads at once.
As he put away his phone, he smelled the Geniza on his hand. He remembered Maria at the bottom of the chamber, eyes ablaze, voicing her passion for the project, for Jack to hold on to his vision of what might lie ahead. He felt a sudden upwelling of emotion, and swallowed hard. After reading the letter of Yehuda Halevi, he had begun to understand what it was that had overwhelmed Solomon Schechter and the other Geniza scholars, not so much the sheer quantity of material but the humanity it represented, preserved with breathtaking immediacy. It had been as if Halevi had been writing the letter to him, brimming with curiosity and a fascination with the world around him that struck right to the core of Jack’s being. He felt revitalized, more determined than ever to pursue his own quest. He remembered those last lines of Halevi, the extraordinary account of the tunnel, and he felt a burning excitement. But meanwhile he had another priority, to do all he could to secure the release of the Egyptian student who had been the first to make the discovery. The sarcophagus might give him only a small amount of leverage, but he would use it to his utmost. He needed to make contact with the outside world as soon as possible.
He turned and walked quickly back to the entrance to the room. Aysha already had her finger on the light switch. “Seen what you wanted to see?”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Right. Twenty minutes to midnight curfew. We need to get out of here.”
PART 3
CHAPTER 12
Jack sat back in the passenger seat of the Lynx helicopter, glanced at the helmeted figure of Costas asleep in the seat opposite, and stared out at the shimmering blue of the sea below. At Valencia airport he had turned down the pilot’s offer to take over the controls, relishing instead the half hour of downtime before they hit the bustle of Seaquest and all the demands of the day ahead. Jack knew that he would be walking off the helipad into a teleconference to discuss the imprisoned Egyptian girl, and Costas would be straight down into the engineering lab to make sure that all the equipment was as ready as it could be for the dive that afternoon.
The sound of snoring came through his headphones, and Jack turned just in time to see the grizzled face loll forward in his shoulder straps. He leaned over and pushed him gently upright, and Costas opened his eyes and looked blearily about. “We there yet?”
“Not yet, but you were taking a slow nosedive for the floor.”
“Dive,” Costas mumbled. “Need to adjust the dynamo in the ADSA submersible stabilizer system. I knew I’d forgotten something on my checklist. Always think better when I’m asleep. Can’t believe I won’t have Lanowski to help me.”
“His talents were needed in Alexandria stripping Hiebermeyer’s computers and making sure his database was secure. You’ll just have to wing it.”
Costas crinkled his nose where Jack’s hand had been and leaned toward him, sniffing like a dog. “What’s that smell? That terrible smell?”
Jack looked at the fingers of his right hand and saw the dark stains from the resin. He remembered the Geniza chamber. “Ah, yes. Couldn’t scrub it off.” He sniffed the tips of his fingers. “That, my friend, is a thousand years of mouse.”
“Huh?”
“An ancient archive. A hole in the wall. With Maria.”
“That sounds just like a date with Jack. Really romantic. You’re talking about the synagogue in Cairo?”
“I’ll fill you in when I can show you my pictures. It was a fantastic discovery, a clue that pushes us one step closer to getting under the desert again. You’d have loved it. There was a sacred snake guarding the archive.”
“No way.”
“Only kidding. Well, nearly only kidding. Anyway, Maria thinks the curse was lifted long ago.”
Costas looked aghast. “What curse? What snake?” He looked back into the cargo compartment at their bags. “You haven’t brought anything with you, have you?”
Jack grinned. “Just something for you to dream about. I’ll wake you when we’re there.”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. Okay.” Costas slumped against the window, and seconds later Jack heard the low rumble again. He glanced at the text message he had received from Maria when he and Costas had landed in the Embraer from Egypt an hour and a half before. All it said was Thanks for last night. He smiled at the irony of it. “Last night” meant a dusty chamber in an old synagogue poring over a medieval manuscript, with barely a farewell embrace.