Nina smiled at her. ‘Y’know, this is really more of a joint discovery, Macy.’
Macy beamed. ‘Not bad for a C-student, huh?’
Eddie took a closer look at a set of painted wooden figurines, symbolic representations of the servants who would attend their king in the afterlife, then eyed a cruder statuette carved from an odd purple stone before moving to the other side of the sarcophagus. ‘All right, so what do we do now we’ve found all this?’
‘Normally I’d say photograph, catalogue, then examine,’ said Nina, ‘but this isn’t exactly a normal case. First thing we need to do is secure it. We’ll have to contact the Egyptian government, go to Dr Assad at the SCA.’
‘So what about this bread Osir was after?’ He looked for anything resembling food. On a small wooden table was what might once have been loaves, but they had long been reduced to mouldering dust. ‘Don’t think he’ll get any sarnies out of them. Is there anything else?’
‘Look down.’ Eddie did, seeing a recess set into the coffin’s base, a pottery jar about ten inches high inside it. ‘Canopic jars. The Egyptians used them to store the body’s vital organs after they were removed during mummification. Osir thinks there’ll be yeast spores in his digestive system.’
Macy saw another jar on the floor by Nina, then went to the head of the sarcophagus to find a third. ‘There’s one here, too - and there should be another down by his feet.’ Eddie checked, and nodded. ‘One for each compass point. This one’s got a monkey head, a baboon - it’s the god Hapi. That means it’s got Osiris’s lungs in it.’ She was about to pick up the jar when she realised what she had just said and flinched away. ‘Gross.’
‘Which jars are which?’ Nina asked.
‘Hapi represented the north, so . . .’ She worked out the compass directions. ‘The one on your side should be a jackal - that’s Duamutef.’
Nina shone her light on the jar, revealing that the painted cap was indeed in the long-eared shape of a jackal’s head. ‘Yep.’
‘So that’ll be the stomach. The one opposite’ll be a falcon, that’s Qebehsenuf. Or is it Qebehsunef? That’s what you get for having a language with no vowels, I guess. Anyway, that’ll have his intestines inside.’
‘Lovely,’ said Eddie. ‘A jar full of guts.’
‘And the one at the south end, under his feet, that should look like just some guy because Imseti was a human god. That’ll be Osiris’s liver.’
He smacked his lips. ‘That’s more like it. Anyone got any fava beans?’
‘It’s six thousand years old, Eddie,’ Nina warned with a grin. ‘And we didn’t bring any Pepto-Bismol.’
‘I’ll give it a miss, then. So if Osir’s after these jars, what should we do with them? Smash ’em?’
‘I’d really rather you didn’t,’ said Osir from the entrance.
Nina jumped in shock, and Macy yelped as they spun to see him leaning almost casually against one of the Osiris figures. Beside him, Shaban’s stance was anything but casual as he covered them with a gun.
Osir stepped forward, revealing that more people, Diamondback and Hamdi among them, had crept down the steps. ‘It’s more incredible than I imagined,’ he said, taking in the chamber’s contents. ‘And now, it all belongs to me.’
‘No, it absolutely does not,’ snapped Nina.
‘We were here first,’ said Eddie. ‘Finders keepers.’
Shaban gestured for them to move away from the sarcophagus. ‘I have something else you can keep. A bullet.’
Osir went to the silver coffin, picking up the canopic jar from its foot. ‘And the organs of Osiris himself are here. Just as I said, Dr Wilde.’
Nina was about to reply when someone else entered. ‘Logan?’ she gasped. ‘Oh, you son of a bitch. You’re working for these clowns now?’
Berkeley regarded her coldly. ‘This is a habit of yours that’s starting to piss me off, Nina. I make a big find, but you’ve beaten me to it. At least this time you’re not making me look like a complete jackass on live TV.’
‘Oh, boo hoo,’ Nina sneered, pretending to wipe away a tear. ‘Poor little Logan, someone stole his thunder - so he’s going to go against everything I thought he believed in and sell out to a bunch of wack-jobs from some stupid bogus religion.’
Shaban’s scarred face twisted angrily and he aimed the gun at Nina, but Osir shook his head. ‘Not in here. I don’t want the tomb despoiled.’ He put down the jar and slowly circled the sarcophagus. ‘Four jars - the liver, intestines, lungs . . . and stomach.’ Almost reverentially, he raised the jackal-headed jar. ‘This holds the key to eternal life, Dr Wilde. In this jar are spores of the yeast used to make the bread of Osiris. All I need is one sample, and the secret will be mine. I will cultivate it, I will own it, and I will control it.’
‘That’s assuming there are actually any spores in there,’ said Nina. ‘Maybe Osiris hadn’t eaten any bread before he died. Maybe it was overcooked and the yeast cells were killed. You might have gone through all this for nothing.’
‘Not nothing,’ said Osir, shrugging. ‘I’ll still have the tomb, no matter what. But that’s why I brought Dr Kralj.’ He waved for a bearded man to join him. It took Nina a moment to identify him: one of the scientists working with the yeast cultures in the Swiss laboratory. ‘There are two canopic jars that can say which of us is right, Dr Wilde - the jar of Duamutef,’ he held up the jackal-headed container, ‘and the jar of Qebehsenuf. I’m willing to sacrifice one to learn what is in the other. Dr Kralj, which would be better for your test? The intestines, or the stomach?’
‘Anything in the intestines would have been through the digestive process,’ said the Serbian scientist. ‘If there are spores present which survived that, there are likely to be more in the stomach. So the intestines, yes.’
‘Then do it.’
Kralj collected the falcon-headed jar. ‘No, wait,’ pleaded Nina. ‘That jar’s an incredibly valuable artefact. If you open it, you might as well be destroying it.’ She looked at Berkeley. ‘Logan, you’ve got to have some feelings about this.’ She knew she had struck a nerve - he couldn’t keep a conflicted expression off his face - but he said nothing. ‘Is however much he’s paying you worth this?’
‘Dr Berkeley knows a good deal when he is offered one,’ said Osir, as Kralj set up a small folding table and placed the jar on it, taking more equipment from a case. ‘It’s a shame you didn’t. If you hadn’t betrayed me, we would still have been in this room together - only you would be in charge, not a prisoner.’
Shaban kept Nina, Eddie and Macy at gunpoint, two of his troopers joining him with their MP7s raised. Everyone else watched as Kralj worked on the jar. After laying out a line of small bottles containing colourless liquids, some test tubes and a portable microscope, he examined the carved lid, then used a metal pick to peel away the black resin sealing it. Once it was clear, he looked up at Osir, who nodded.
He carefully turned the lid. The two pieces of ancient pottery scraped against each other . . . then, with a faint crackle as the last remnants of the seal broke, they separated.
‘Whoa, shit,’ said Eddie, as the stench of something awful permeated the chamber. ‘Literally. Smells like his last meal was a kebab!’
Nina suppressed her revulsion. ‘It means the seal held, though. The contents were preserved for all this time.’
Kralj used a penlight to examine the jar’s interior. Something glistened inside. He tipped three of the bottles into it, swilling the mixture round, then used a large pipette to draw out a sample of the resulting dark slurry. He squirted it into a test tube, then added the last bottle’s contents.
‘This will take several minutes,’ he told Osir as he sealed the tube. ‘If there are any spores, the test will show them.’