Rosier had turned on the comms and was flooded with mercenary voices shouting in different languages. He picked up enough to know that the locals had broken and were on the run.
The curse, for them, was true.
Then Rosier heard retreat orders from the outside mercenaries, who didn’t believe in curses but weren’t going to stick around to find out if they were wrong. They were getting paid to fight, not die.
As quickly as the explosion of sights and sounds had erupted, it was over outside. Hank stood out there alone as stiff and silent as one of the stone resonators that had suddenly gone cold. The sky faded from green to black. Rosier exchanged glances with a stunned Michaels. The only thing he could hear now were a few raindrops on the roof.
CHAPTER 11
Another day, another hosing down in the cellar beneath the Zawas villa for Conrad Yeats. Today, however, the Egyptian guards unlocked his irons and tossed him a white cotton galabeya to slip on for his soiree with the mysterious Doctor Omar. The Egyptian guards escorted him up some stone steps and out into the blinding light of day.
As they crossed a lush courtyard, he could hear the sound of babbling water and smell almond trees. They passed through an iron gate into the villa’s library.
Well, this is certainly better than I expected.
Then again, his left forearm was sore. He began to rub it and looked down to see a needle track where they had injected him with something while he slept. Hopefully it was something relatively benign like the truth serum sodium pentothal and not some ancient nasty scorpion poison or something.
The good doctor was seated in the far corner of the library under an impressive wall of ancient books and scrolls. Next to Omar was an Egyptian funerary table with an old book on it and a silver tea set.
The tea was karkade, brewed dark from dried hibiscus flowers and steaming. Omar had poured himself some and offered a cup to Conrad in a crisp British accent. “Tea?”
“I’m OK,” Conrad said, waving it off. “Colonel Zawas has quite some collection of books and artifacts here.”
Omar nodded as he sipped his tea through a sugar cube between his teeth. “The Zawas family has built up an extraordinary library over the past two centuries. A number of books are on display at the British Museum. A few scrolls may even be traced to the Library of Alexandria.”
So they obviously want me to look at something. Something connected to the Queen of Sheba’s tomb. The more I tell them, though, the less likely I’ll survive.
Conrad took a closer look at the funerary table depicting the jackal-headed god Anubis and the goddess Isis. “Magnificent.”
“Dug up in 1790 not far from your own dig in Meroe.”
The table was inscribed with Meroetic writing. Conrad asked, “I don’t suppose you know what these hieroglyphs say?”
“Nobody outside the Vatican has cracked the meaning of Meroetic writing,” Omar said with a clearer voice now that his sugar cube had melted. “You know that.”
“Yeah, I do,” Conrad said. “So what does it say?”
“We sent a photo to the Vatican some time ago, and Sister Serghetti sent us this.” Omar handed him a papyrus-like note with the Vatican seal on it.
Written in her own hand, Serena had translated what appeared to be a poem or a song:
Oh Isis! Oh Osiris!
It is Ada.
Make her drink plentiful blood.
Make her eat plentiful flesh.
Make her be served a good meal.
Make her leave only bones behind.
“I’m detecting a theme here,” Conrad said, unconsciously rubbing his sore arm again. “Death. That book there on the funerary table. I suppose that’s a copy of the Book of the Dead for me?”
“Actually, it’s the journal of a Scotsman by the name of James Bruce during his passage through your pyramid field in 1772.”
Ah, so this was what this whole charade of a meeting was all about.
Conrad knew about Bruce. The Scotsman was also a Mason during the time of the American Revolution. Washington and the other Founding Fathers who were Masons took a keen interest in Bruce’s travels through Egypt and Nubia. Suddenly the link between the Masons, Solomon, Ada and the rest made sense.
“Bruce was the first person in the modern era to connect the pyramid fields to ancient Meroe,” Omar went on. “He’s the reason you even know it as Meroe.”
Conrad muffled his reaction to this amateur know-it-all and picked up the book with genuine excitement. He began to flip through its pages. The journal was rich with descriptions in the first person as Bruce described the “heaps of broken pedestals and pieces of obelisks.” Conrad turned to the back and read the conclusion: “It is impossible to avoid risking a guess that this is the ancient city of Meroe.” Previously, the earliest record of that assessment was in a book Bruce published 18 years later in 1790.
Omar said, “It’s the drawing on page 57 that has intrigued the colonel for some time.”
Conrad thumbed his way to page 57 and found Bruce’s diagram of a great hole of some sort, an abyss. There appeared to be a zigzagging bridge over the abyss that ended not quite in the center. “Strange,” he said.
Omar echoed, “Isn’t it?”
Conrad flipped back a page and saw a drawing of the passageway mural from the Queen of Sheba’s tomb in Meroe. It was spread across two pages and showed the march of bound prisoners toward a black hole, where they disappeared into some abyss. The circle on the next page was obviously a more detailed depiction of that hole — or portal.
“I can see why Zawas is interested in this, if he thinks it's the entrance to the Queen of Sheba’s mines.” Conrad closed the book and set it down. “What’s your angle? I thought you were a medical doctor.”
“Not in the traditional sense.” Omar smiled. “I specialize in a particular field of alternative medicine.”
“Really? What kind?”
“Ancient biotoxins.”
“Interesting.” Conrad unconsciously rubbed his arm again. Perhaps this whole ruse this morning was simply an observation of the effects of whatever concoction they had pumped into his bloodstream. “What kind of biotoxins?”
“The kind that comes from metallurgy, and how elements can shape us in ways we are only beginning to comprehend,” Omar said, as two guards suddenly appeared beside Conrad to drag him back to the cellar. “I believe Colonel Zawas has a few blunt objects he’d like to try out on you.”
CHAPTER 12
After all his Sturm und Drang with the resonation of the ancient portal here in the heart of the African jungle, Hank Johnson should have been feeling on top of the world. He had found stone resonators and proof the ancients understood transdimensional portals. Still, he couldn’t fight the sting of anticlimax and frustration as he had yet to find any sign of the Queen of Sheba’s lost mines.
Hank looked down and saw his own footprints in the mud, prints he’d made more than five hours earlier. Yes, he’d been here before. This was his third pass through the area. Other than a quarry site for the stones that made up the resonators, there was no hint of civilization here.
What am I missing?
He returned to the production van and reviewed Rosier’s footage of himself at the stone resonators. The drone video replay of his heroics deploying the power cube looked pretty cool in a sci-fi movie kind of a way. And Michaels caught some nice bonus footage of local militants fleeing in terror while the hardened mercs from Strategic Explorations retreated from the fireworks, mowing down the locals as they left. It was Antoine Smith’s doctrine. When there was a big find, dead men tell no tales.