“I think,” Lanowski said, putting a finger to his lips and furrowing his brow, peering at Jack, “don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, but I think I’d prefer that.”
Jack suddenly felt dead tired; he was feeling the pain in his arm continuously now. He nodded slowly. “Wouldn’t we all.”
They crouched against the downdraft of the rotor, waiting until the Lynx had landed and powered down. Lanowski hurried off to help Sahirah and Aysha on board, and Costas got up, holding the rim of his hat against the dust. “I had a brainstorm just now in the boat about Little Joey,” he said, his voice raised against the noise. “Well, it was Lanowski, actually. It was about the microprocessor for the robotics, and also a small problem with how he swims. If you want a state-of-the-art robot to explore that Phoenician wreck, look no further than our new creation, Little Joey Four.”
Jack cracked a smile. “The big things.”
“You got it. Come on, Jack. Time to let Egypt go.”
EPILOGUE
Five days later Jack sat under an awning on the aft deck of Seaquest, gently easing his arm out of its sling and attempting to raise a water bottle to his lips. It was still too painful, and he let it down, gasping as he slid the arm back into the sling and sat back again. With his other hand he picked up his phone and looked at the picture that Rebecca had just sent him from Greece, showing Maria far above climbing a rope ladder to one of the monasteries on Mount Athos.
Jack suddenly remembered a promise he had made to himself. Maria. He made a mental note to contact her when he was back in action again. He put on his sunglasses, pulled down the peak of his cap, and looked disconsolately at the Mediterranean, wishing above all things that he could be diving into those crystal-clear waters right now. The hatch clanged behind him and Costas came sauntering out wearing a spectacular Hawaiian shirt and knee-length shorts, his feet bare. He sat down heavily on the deck chair beside Jack, cracked open a can of drink from the selection on the table, and put on his sunglasses, pushing aside a map of the world that Jack had been perusing. “How’s the world’s worst patient?” he said.
“Don’t ask,” Jack grumbled. “The doctors say three weeks until I can dive. Three weeks. I can make it one week, no more. It wasn’t even a compound fracture.”
“The small matter of a bullet hole.”
Jack looked scornfully at the dressing on his arm. “That’s nothing. Hardly even hurts.”
“Right.”
“Has Macalister said when we’re leaving?”
“He’s finishing the formalities with the Spanish authorities now. We should be under way within half an hour, course set for home. He wants to do a complete shakedown on the derrick and winch apparatus before she goes to sea again. He never wants to see an escapade like ours again.”
Costas leaned over and slapped the base of the derrick, the arm now secured to the deck in preparation for the voyage into the Atlantic. “It’s hard to believe our dive in the submersible was only ten days ago, isn’t it? I meant to say, Jack, I’m not sure if I said it properly, but—”
“Don’t mention it,” Jack replied, wincing as he shifted. “Don’t mention anything about diving at all. Now that really is painful.”
“Well, some other friends of yours have arrived to cheer you up.”
The hatch had opened again and Hiebermeyer, Aysha, and Lanowski came out, Hiebermeyer looking decidedly uncomfortable in a shirt and tie and Lanowski affecting an attempt at formality that looked like an ill-conceived safari suit. They all sat down around the table and Aysha opened her laptop, showing Jack a photo.
“That’s Maurice cutting the ribbon, with the mayor of Valencia and the Spanish minister of culture officiating,” she said. “There were about a hundred TV cameras behind me when I took this.”
Hiebermeyer loosened his tie, the sweat beading on his face. “Not my favorite way of spending an afternoon, but it was a good outcome.”
“Are they still planning to keep the sarcophagus on the waterfront?”
“They’re building a museum around it, with UNESCO and IMU providing the funding. They’ve taken up your idea of showing the sarcophagus within a virtual representation of the pyramid chamber as well as on the wreck, so the viewer can alternate from one to the other. The multibeam sonar data will allow a half-size model of the wreck, and there are plans for a permanent camera on the wreck site for live-stream imagery. That was an inspirational idea, Jack. To cap it all, Seaquest is due back next season to raise two of the bronze guns for the museum, one of them the cannon you spotted with the East India company markings.”
“I still hope that one day the sarcophagus can go back to Egypt,” Jack said.
“We all do,” Aysha said. “But it’s a pretty remote prospect now. Have you seen the news?”
“I’ve just been watching Al Jazeera. It looks like the apocalypse.”
“Our only hope now is military intervention. It can’t destabilize the region any more than it is already. Israel has just carried out a massive preemptive airstrike against extremist positions in Syria. The U.S. 6th Fleet is now within easy bombing and cruise-missile range of Cairo, and the president is due to make an emergency address at the White House within the hour. We all just hope that if there is an intervention, it’s on a big enough scale to destroy the extremists as a fighting force, and not result in a long-term insurgency war.”
“Have you managed to make contact with Sahirah’s parents?”
“They know she’s safe in England.”
“I just wish we could have gotten them out too.”
“I wish we could have gotten everyone out. But you have to draw the line somewhere. They’re hugely grateful to you and Costas and Jacob.”
Jack had a flashback to the final desperate minutes of their escape from Cairo. His ears were still ringing from the gunfire, but he felt nothing about those he had killed, men whose humanity was already long extinguished, only a surge of satisfaction that they had managed to get the girl out and had escaped themselves without fatality. He gave Aysha a penetrating look. “We arranged for her to go straight to Oxford, where she’s got an open-ended position at the institute funded by IMU to work on our Geniza finds. Jeremy thinks that she stands a very good chance of getting a place as a graduate student and that there could be a doctorate in it for her.”
“Ah. Speaking of Jeremy.” Aysha tapped the laptop. “While we were at the ceremony, he sent me an enhanced image from your film of the papyrus that Costas found on the dead caliph’s skeleton. He and Sahirah have been working on it day and night since they got to Oxford. Maurice and I brainstormed the translation in the Zodiac on the way back here from Valencia this afternoon, and we think we’ve nailed it. We have no doubt from the appearance of the hieroglyphs that it dates from the New Kingdom period, to the time of Akhenaten.”
Jack had forgotten his arm and stared at her. “I can’t wait.”
She opened a text file and began to read:
All wisdom comes from the Aten and is with him forever.
Who can count the grains of sand in the sea, and the drops of rain, and the days of existence?
Who can discover the dimensions of heaven, and the width of the earth, and the depths of the sea, and the entirety of wisdom?
I come to you like a stream into a river, like a water-channel into a field.
I said, I will water my orchard and drench my garden;
And lo, my stream became a river, and my river became a sea.
I will make wisdom shine like the dawn,