He waved at the group of local divers who had parked their van in the lane and were beginning to kit up for their dive. They were friends he had known for years, stalwarts of his team, and had been responsible for many exciting wreck discoveries. Over lunch he had talked with them about the logistical challenge of raising timbers from the wreck, and together with the project supervisor they had sketched out a plan that would see the hull exposed and all the timbers raised and safely back in the IMU conservation facility within two weeks. He glanced up at the sky, feeling the early-afternoon breeze on his face and seeing the clouds beginning to accumulate. Everything depended on the weather; for that they were as much in the lap of the gods as the ancient mariners had been. But he had the best possible people on the job, and he knew he could rely on them to make the right decisions and take the project forward, whatever the forces of nature chose to throw at them.
He ducked under the flap of the operations tent and put his notebook on the trestle table in the center. A tall, tousle-haired young man with glasses was arranging his papers and laptop at the other end of the table, having brought them in from his car a few moments before. Jack smiled at him and shook hands. “I saw you arriving from the café, but thought you’d probably want to go and say hello to Rebecca first.”
He looked slightly flustered, and pushed his glasses up his nose. “Haven’t really had the chance yet. I wanted to get everything ready here first.”
“Are we going to see you in the water this time?”
“That’s the plan. What’s the temperature like?”
“Warm. Barely need a wetsuit.”
“That’s Jack Howard for ‘cold.’ You’re as bad as your daughter. She barely feels anything. I think I made a mistake in having Costas teach me to dive in the Red Sea. It’s completely spoiled me.”
Jack grinned at him. Jeremy Haverstock had become an integral part of the IMU team since he had first arrived from Stanford as a Rhodes Scholar almost eight years before, to work with Maria at the Institute of Palaeography in Oxford. Since then he had completed his doctorate, published the first volumes of material from their two greatest manuscript discoveries — the secret medieval library in Hereford Cathedral and the lost library of the Emperor Claudius in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum — and had recently become assistant director of the Institute. He had also become interestingly close to Rebecca, something that had slowly developed as Rebecca had grown into a woman and that Jack pretended to watch with bemused indifference.
The flap opened and Rebecca came in, finishing off an apple. She tossed the core into a bin and wiped her mouth. “Is Costas here yet?”
“Half an hour away,” Jack said. “He called to say he was caught in traffic.”
“Hello, by the way,” she said to Jeremy. “Nice of you to call.”
Jeremy coughed, glancing at Jack. “Surprise. Sorry. Been really busy with this translation.”
“Right. I only hope it’s good. We’ll talk later.” She turned to Jack. “We really need Costas here to find that inscribed sherd. There are more than two hundred buckets next door containing amphora sherds with painted inscriptions on them, and the conservation people have their hands full now with everything else that’s coming up.”
“He says he can find it straight away.”
“Costas is pretty important, isn’t he? He always seems to have the key to unlock things, even if he doesn’t realize it himself.”
“I’ve been coming to that conclusion myself.”
“I hadn’t realized it was Costas who actually discovered the plaque on Clan Macpherson last week. I’d say he counts as a fully fledged archaeologist by now.”
“Not sure if he’d be pleased to hear you say that. The tough-guy engineer, you know. The Greek immigrant brought up on the mean streets of New York. The practical man who leaves the ideas stuff to wishy-washy people like us.”
“I think he’d be pleased, even though he might not show it,” Rebecca said. “Anyway, getting a PhD from MIT does actually involve a few ideas. In fact he’s probably the smartest of all of us. And as for the tough-guy stuff, take it from me, he’s a softy underneath. It’s a toss-up whether Uncle Costas or Uncle Hiemy will be reduced to tears the quickest when small children are around.”
“Speaking of Uncle Hiemy, how’s he getting on?”
“I spoke to Aysha in Carthage again over lunch. She’s been pressing Maurice to call you. He’s found something interesting in the harbor excavation, but he’s decided not to disturb you until you’re settled back here following the Deep Explorer trip. She says it’s going to need your full attention.”
“I can’t wait,” Jack said. “Maurice only ever calls me when it’s good.”
“Leave it for him to get in touch with you. Remember, this is his comeback after Egypt, and he should be allowed to drive things at his own speed. When he’s ready, he’ll do it.”
“You’re probably right. You’ve spent more time with him recently than I have, so you know his state of mind.”
“They’ve been excavating at Carthage for almost a month now. It took a long time to pull him out of his frustration and shock after they had to leave Egypt last year. Everything that’s happened since then with the extremists makes it even less likely that he’ll ever be able to return.”
“Do you think he’s going to find evidence of Egyptians at Carthage?” Jeremy said, looking up from his laptop. “It was the Phoenicians who founded it, early ninth century BC, wasn’t it?”
“That’s what the Roman historians tell us, and the archaeology so far doesn’t contradict it,” said Jack. “If there was some kind of earlier Egyptian presence, it’s more likely to have been merchants or trade representatives in an outpost run by the Canaanites, proto-Phoenicians. They seem to have been the ones in charge of maritime trade in the late Bronze Age, just as their descendants were at the time of our wreck here. If Maurice does find Egyptian artifacts, it doesn’t necessarily signify an Egyptian settlement.”
“Aysha says that he’s like you: when he has a gut feeling, he won’t be happy until he’s dug a hole right down to bedrock,” Rebecca said.
“I remember it well from when we were at boarding school together, sneaking out at weekends to dig up part of the local Roman villa. We shouldn’t have done it, but we did record everything meticulously and eventually published it. Watching out for the landowner while Maurice’s rear end was sticking out of a hole in the ground is one of my abiding memories of those days. I called him the human mole.”
“He surely couldn’t have found anything Egyptian there,” Jeremy said.
“Oh yes, he did. It turned out that the villa had been built in the second century for a retired centurion who was a follower of the cult of Isis, a favorite among Roman soldiers. I can still remember the look of indescribable joy on his face when he emerged from his hole clutching a little faience statue of Anubis. That was how he caught the Egyptian bug. That summer he absconded using some money an aunt in Germany had left him and was next heard of in the Valley of the Kings, having been taken on by an American director who had never come across an eighteen-year-old with such an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient Egypt. In fact, he was sixteen, not eighteen, and getting him home nearly caused an international incident. But after that, he never looked back.”
“The question with his idea about Egyptians at Carthage is whether it’s gut instinct or wishful thinking,” Jeremy said. “For a man designed to be down a hole, imagining you might have to spend the rest of your career studying artifacts in museums would be pretty devastating. I can see why he might want to find Egyptians everywhere he digs.”