‘Cool,’ said Grant. ‘But if Mr Osir’s not here, who’s holding the ceremony?’
‘I am in charge.’ A larger smile, edged with smugness.
Someone knocked at the door. A large, grey-haired man entered: Lorenz, face still bruised from the fight in the Hall of Records. ‘The first bus is coming.’
Shaban nodded, then turned back to Grant. ‘I have to prepare for the ceremony. Wait here - someone will come for you.’
‘Looking forward to it,’ Grant said as the two men left. He waited several seconds, then took a cell phone from his pocket - a phone with an open line. ‘Did you get that?’
‘We got it,’ said Nina into her wireless headset.
Half a mile up the valley, a pair of Mitsubishi Shogun 4×4s and a panel van were parked overlooking the castle. The van’s boxy cargo area was large enough to contain the six-foot-diameter zodiac, but it was currently serving as an impromptu command post for a team of ten soldiers from the Egyptian government’s Antiquities Special Protection Squad.
‘What kind of ceremony?’ asked Assad, in charge of the unit. Nina could only shrug, and Macy had nothing helpful to offer either. He frowned, turning to one of his men. ‘He mentioned a bus. See if there’s anything heading for the castle.’ The black-clad soldier nodded and jumped out. ‘The ASPS are only equipped for a surprise raid. If there are more people there than we expected . . .’
‘What do you want me to do?’ Grant asked. ‘This zodiac dealie, it’s in a room full of Egyptian stuff - I saw it on the way in.’
Assad shook his head. ‘We can’t do anything until we have visual proof that Shaban has the zodiac. The minister made that very clear - this operation is on shaky enough diplomatic ground as it is.’
‘We should have given Grant the camera,’ said Macy.
‘I think that might have made them a teensy bit suspicious,’ Nina pointed out. ‘Grant, I think the best thing for now is just stay put. Keep the line open; if there’s any trouble, we’ll let you know so you can try to get out of there.’
‘Escaping from a castle? Hey, I already did that in Condition: Extreme,’ Grant told her, unruffled.
‘Well, you only get one take here, so be careful.’
‘Will do.’ Grant returned the phone to his pocket.
The soldier climbed back into the van. ‘A bus just arrived - they’re lowering the drawbridge for it,’ he told Assad. ‘I checked the road along the lake, and there are more coming.’
‘This ceremony must be a big thing,’ said Nina, concerned. ‘What do we do?’
Assad frowned again, thinking. ‘We came here to see if Shaban has the zodiac. Let’s get proof first.’
Nina nodded. ‘Eddie?’
Grant’s Mercedes had parked in a lot to one side of the pyramid, near the courtyard’s wall. When Grant was taken to Shaban, his chauffeur had remained in the dark-windowed vehicle.
The chauffeur was Eddie Chase.
‘I’m here,’ he said, donning his own headset, a clip-on unit similar to a Bluetooth earpiece - with a small video camera protruding from its side. ‘What’s the situation?’
Nina updated him on what Grant had told her. Eddie looked past the pyramid to the castle’s gate, seeing the two halves of the drawbridge lowering. There was a dull bang and a rattle of chains as they met, and then a coach crawled across. From the number of faces Eddie glimpsed through the windows, the large vehicle was full to capacity. The bus stopped at the other end of the parking lot.
‘Jeez,’ said Nina, seeing the passengers disembark over the video link. ‘There’s a lot of them - and there are more buses coming. How are you going to get into the keep with all those people around?’
‘Piece of piss,’ Eddie told her. He had been watching the guards patrolling the battlements through the car’s sunroof - their attention was now focused on the crowd spilling from the bus. He slid across to the front passenger seat, then silently opened the door and slipped out. He had deliberately parked the Merc beside a large SUV; now he hunched in the shadows, keeping perfectly still until he was sure nobody had seen him exit. Satisfied, he moved forward until he could see the whole courtyard.
The pyramid’s blank glass flank lay ahead, the bus off to the left. To the right was a small ornamental garden - he could use the bushes and trees as cover to reach the keep’s side entrance. ‘Okay, I think I can get inside without being seen. Which floor’s the zodiac on?’
‘The third,’ said Nina.
‘Is that the American third floor or the British third floor?’
He smiled at her faint sigh; transatlantic terminology differences were a reliable way for him to wind her up. ‘American, of course.’
‘So, the second floor. Okay.’ He crossed the gap to the next car and crouched behind it, checking the battlements, the courtyard—
He froze.
Shaban!
The cult leader emerged from the keep’s main entrance, heading for the pyramid in the company of three men. Eddie recognised two of them: Broma and Lorenz, apparently taking over the role of Shaban’s personal guard from Diamondback. The third, carrying a cylindrical metal container, was unfamiliar.
Nina knew him, though. ‘Eddie - the guy with glasses, he’s one of the scientists I saw in the lab.’
Eddie was more interested in the object he was holding. There was a symbol marked on the stainless steel. He narrowed his eyes, trying to make it out as the four men approached the pyramid.
They disappeared from sight behind the structure’s blue-edged corner. But he had seen all he needed to see. He recognised the symboclass="underline" it had appeared in his SAS training for NBC warfare.
Three sets of curved horns, arranged in a circle. Biohazard. The cylinder was a containment flask.
For a biological agent.
He suppressed an involuntary chill. The cylinder’s contents weren’t an immediate threat: if they were, Shaban and his followers would all be wearing hazmat suits. But considering what the Egyptian had said in the tomb, the potential for enormous harm was there - and for all Eddie knew, the four men had already immunised themselves.
He had stopped one biological attack four years earlier. Now he had to stop another.
‘Uh, Eddie, where’re you going?’ Nina asked as he moved back into the SUV’s shadow.
‘I’m gonna blow up that lab. Top of the pyramid, right?’
‘That - that’s not why we’re here, Mr Chase!’ Assad stammered. ‘Our top priority is finding the zodiac.’
‘My top priority’s making sure some fucking nut-job who thinks he’s an Egyptian god doesn’t start spreading killer spores around the world.’ Eddie watched as the cultists headed for the entrance through which Shaban had just gone. He wondered why they weren’t using the nearer doors on the side of the pyramid facing the drawbridge, but decided it didn’t matter. What did matter was that they would give him a way in.
Assad and Nina both continued to protest, but he ignored them, taking a closer look at the newly arrived cultists. Unlike the mix of ages and sexes at the Osirian Temple’s gatherings in New York and Paris, this group was predominantly young men, though still of varied nationalities. Shaban’s own personal followers from round the world?
Bent low, he moved to the cover of a car closer to the pyramid, then reached up to his headset. ‘Okay, I’ll have to go off-mike. Can’t exactly stroll in there with a camera strapped to my head.’
‘Eddie, don’t—’ said Nina, but he had already removed the earpiece and clipped it unobtrusively to the bottom of his jacket.