Aysha put a finger to her lips and gestured toward Hiebermeyer, who had turned away from them. She leaned down and whispered to him, kissing his forehead and brushing his cheek. As she did so, the image on her phone changed from the pyramids to another view, the headline reading “Cairo Museum under threat.” The live streaming showed the museum behind a line of bonfires; in front of them men in black headbands were chanting and praying.
Hiebermeyer turned, took a deep breath, and stared at the image. “Mein Gott,” he said. “It truly begins.” He got up and turned around, his face drained.
“Jacob was right,” said Jack. “You may have to hang up your trowel for a while, but now is the time for ideas. After all, a few days ago, after your find of that carving in the tomb in the mummy necropolis, you handed me the best proof I could want that the Egyptian New Kingdom came about as a result of influence from Minoan Crete.”
Hiebermeyer suddenly bristled. “I did what? I said nothing of the sort. A gaggle of bare-breasted Minoan amazons cavorting around in chariots in the desert does not amount to cultural influence.”
“Prove it. And prove to me that the Egyptians travelled farther than the Greeks, in the Mediterranean, around Africa, even across the Atlantic. Go out and find the sites. That is, if they exist.”
“Oh, they exist.” Hiebermeyer was positively glaring at him now. “You know they exist. I’ll prove it to you. Just wait.”
Jack gripped his shoulder. “That’s the Maurice I know.”
Lanowski scuffed the floor with his feet and raised his hand, coughing.
“What is it, Jacob?” Costas asked cautiously.
“Permission to join the team,” he said.
“You’re already part of the team,” Jack said. “And a highly valued member. You’ve proved it yet again today.”
“No, I mean the real team. The expedition. You and Costas.”
“Come again?”
“You’re going to need someone else topside. Mohammed and his son will have their work cut out for them managing the felucca. I’ve already been out with them in the harbor and seen what it’s like. You’ll need someone else to manage GPS position finding and to help with equipment. And Mohammed’s English isn’t that great. I speak pretty reasonable Arabic.”
“You speak Arabic?” Costas murmured. “Of course you speak Arabic. I should have guessed.”
Jack eyed him. “There’s a big risk factor. You know that.”
Lanowski raised his arms in the air, looking exasperated. “The last big risk I took was when I turned down a tenured professorship at MIT for what amounted to a technician’s job at IMU. My friends thought I’d finally flipped. All hope of the Nobel Prize went out the window. What attracted me to IMU was the chance to combine my, well, genius with hands-on archaeology, something I’d dreamed about since first being fascinated by Egyptology as a kid. And I’ve been part of this project from the get-go. And show me a Jack Howard project that doesn’t involve big risks. Real risks.”
Jack glanced at Costas, who cracked a smile. “I guess we could use the odd genius.”
Jack pursed his lips. “You’d be our man on the felucca. Shore excursions are strictly off-limits. Okay?”
Lanowski punched the air. “Thank you, Jack. You won’t regret it.”
“One question,” Costas said, putting up his hand. “About our shore excursion. Assuming we make it out alive, how do we get picked up?”
Lanowski took a black object the size of small alarm clock out of his pocket. “Obviously you’ll be on your own underground, and the mobile network around Cairo will probably be completely dead by then. You’ll have a satellite phone, but the most reliable device is going to be this little gizmo.”
Costas peered at it. “A beacon?”
“You got it. Switch this on anywhere, and your GPS coordinates will be transmitted instantly via satellite to Sea Venture.”
Costas looked uncertain. “Our people won’t risk flying in a helicopter to pick us up on land. One thing the extremists have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan is how easy it is to shoot down helicopters. You can see shoulder-launched SAMs among those trucks in the Al Jazeera report, some of them looking very like Stingers.”
Aysha looked at him. “Our plan is for you to get out the way you got in. Mohammed and his son, and now Jacob too, will be waiting on the Nile in the felucca. Wherever you egress, your plan should be to make your way to the nearest point on the riverbank and activate the beacon. Sea Venture will pass on your GPS coordinates via satellite phone to Jacob. After they pick you up, the felucca will sail north of the Nile Delta far enough out to sea for the Lynx to extract you without danger of attack.”
“We may well have to go through Cairo to get back to the river,” Costas said.
“That’s a risk you’ll have to take,” said Aysha. “There are still going to be Westerners there: journalists, some diplomats, the usual vultures who show up during a coup thinking they’ll be in pole position to score lucrative deals with a new regime. But the first target for the extremists is likely to be members of the existing government, many of them Muslims. They might even want Western journalists there to report on it. It’s afterward when there are gangs of blood-crazed gunmen roaming the streets that you’d be in the most trouble. We’ll just have to hope that they’re still preoccupied with the purge when you arrive. You’ll never succeed in being inconspicuous, so you need to look self-confident, assertive. I take it you’d strip off your E-suits to the clothes you’ve got on now. And I may be on the ground to help.”
Jack stared at her. “What do you mean, on the ground?”
Aysha gave him a steely look. “It’s about Sahirah, the Egyptian girl. The deadline Ben set on Seaquest for a response from the antiquities director is only a few hours away. We’ve just seen on the newscast that he’s more concerned with saving his own skin right now. But something else has happened, Jack. One of the extremists who now effectively runs the judiciary saw that Sahirah had been arrested in connection with a visit to a synagogue. As a result he’s had the charge against her changed from the lesser one of antiquities theft to the worst crime of all in their books, apostasy. She won’t be given a chance to deny it. And even if the antiquities director were to intervene, there would almost certainly be no clemency.”
Jack pursed his lips. “I take it you have a contingency plan.”
“Do you remember the beggar outside the synagogue when we went in to see Maria? I told you that he was in fact my cousin Ahmed, the former Egyptian special forces soldier. What you weren’t to know is that he’s also Sahirah’s boyfriend. He and several of his former army friends think that in the confusion of the coup they’ll be able to get into the ministry building and find her. I’m going to Cairo to meet up with them.”
“You mean they’re planning to shoot her out?” Jack said.
“There may be no other choice.”
“Good people are going to get killed.”
“It’s going to be a bloodbath anyway, Jack. All we can do is try to save a few lives.”
“What’s our rendezvous point in the city to meet up with you?”
“The synagogue. If you have to come through Cairo and can’t safely get to the river, make your way there and activate the beacon. I’ll be in satellite phone contact with Sea Venture as well. I can help to guide you.”