She rolled her eyes, closed the selfie and turned her attention to the pictograms. Yes, Ryan was right when he said at least one of them was a symbol of Tanit, which was hardly surprising given it was her tomb, but like Ryan, something about it was bothering her.
Ryan’s theory was pivoting around his Atlantis idea, and that was as good a place as any to start. She’d been with ECHO long enough to know that dismissing the impossible was usually a bad idea. After Poseidon, Lei Gong, Osiris, Medusa, Valhalla and Mictlan, she had no reason not to believe in Atlantis any more.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Startled, she turned to see Richard Eden entering the room with two coffees.
“And what am I thinking?”
He pointed at the symbol of Tanit. “That Atlantis is a bridge too far?”
“Maybe, but if it was good enough for Plato then it’s good enough for me.”
Eden laughed and looked at the TV. “You think he’ll win the debate?”
Alex shrugged. “Don’t ask me. I never gave a damn about his career and I’m not going to start now.”
“I thought you built some bridges during the Medusa mission?”
Alex sighed. “Maybe, but you never know with Jack Brooke.” She said the name as if he were just another politician. “He’s Dad one minute and then Mr Secretary the next.”
“Or maybe Mr President the next?”
She looked at Eden, saddened that she probably had a healthier relationship with him than she did with her own father. “Like I said, don’t ask me.”
Eden smiled briefly and decided not to push it. Instead, he changed the subject and brought things back to business. “Any luck with the pictograms?”
“Yes and no. I don’t know a whole lot about Phoenician culture, but this broken symbol here could be what we’re looking for,” Alex said, and let her hair down, shaking it loose and relaxing for the first time that day. She wheeled her chair across to another computer and opened another window. “Ryan found this one where the key was found so I think it’s very important and connected to the key’s meaning. I used some imaging software to clean it up and enlarge it.”
Eden peered in closer at the pictogram Alex was indicating. Half of it had been blown away by a bullet in the fire fight, but what was left looked like a man’s face and his raised hand. “You mean the raised hand?”
“I do.”
“The raised hands of Ka?”
Alex shook her head. “A good guess, but I don’t think so. The raised hands which made up the Egyptian symbol for Ka — their ‘vital spark’ or life essence — were never pictured with a face or head like this, but just two hands, usually forming a U shape.”
“So what is it then?”
“Considering a bullet blew half of it away, it was tough, but at first I was thinking this is Atlas.”
“Atlas?”
“Sure. If you look carefully you can see the hand is holding something up — indicated here by this very faint line — it has a convex curve, see? And here is a second arm. He’s holding the world up.”
Eden put his glasses on and leaned in close to the screen. “Well, bugger me! I think you might have something here. You said you thought it was Atlas at first — so you think something else now?”
She nodded. “I do. At first I got all excited because… you know — a symbol of Atlas in the Atlas Mountains, bla bla bla, but then I realized this wasn’t Atlas at all but Hercules.”
“Hercules?”
“Uh-huh?”
“What makes you say that?”
“The arms holding the world are straight like pillars.”
“But we decided this was someone holding the world up. I might have been at school several hundred years ago but my recollection is that Atlas held up the world.”
“Right,” Alex nodded. “After the Titanomachy Atlas was ordered to hold the sky up above the world for eternity, and for whatever reason he was linked to the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. They were named after him, of course.”
“So Hercules..?”
“According to legend Hercules also held the world up for a short time, so I think this symbol is a depiction of him performing that task. It’s an allegory representing a great burden perhaps carrying ancient knowledge.”
“I see.”
“Not only that but this symbol of Tanit also points in the same direction. To the untrained eye it looks like a woman in a skirt who is holding her arms out either side of her body in an upright position.”
“And to the trained eye?”
“The other way to interpret this symbol is two pillars either side of the sun, on top of a mountain. In fact the symbols of Tanit and the pillars are closely connected. Most depictions of the Pillars of Hercules show Hercules struggling between two collapsing pillars in an attempt to hold them up, and for this reason they are leaning in toward him and make a triangle — just like the ‘skirt’ of Tanit. It all points to the same thing.”
Eden squinted and cocked his head as he studied the image again. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure, yeah. These two symbols are both direct references either to Hercules or the Pillars of Hercules.”
“Just tell me you know what you’re doing.”
“I do, but I can’t take this any further now without specialist knowledge. I’m ninety percent certain that both these symbols are pointing to the far north of Morocco, but after that I’m out of ideas.”
“Mr Bale?”
“A polymath genius, Rich, for sure… but not this stuff — his knowledge is broad but not always deep. We’re going to need someone to help us decode these symbols. Any ideas?”
Eden frowned. “There are only two people in the world who have the knowledge to decode this stuff, and one of them is Dirk.”
“And the other?”
“Dr Maati Khatibi. He’s second only to Dirk when it comes to researching Phoenician and Punic semiotics. He’s our best chance.”
“Where does he work?”
“He doesn’t — he retired last year. His last academic post was the Oxford Center for Phoenician and Punic Studies, but from what I can gather he’s back in Morocco now.”
“Do we have an address?”
“Only if you can find one,” Eden said.
Alex turned around and begun furiously tapping into the computer. Eden took a moment to clear his mind and had a sip of the coffee. Five minutes later, Alex cleared her throat to get his attention and spun the monitor around for him. “I hacked the payroll in Oxford.”
“Where?”
“The Blue Pearl.”
“Ah,” Eden said, his face lighting with pleasant recognition. “I know it well. You try and get in touch with him and I’ll let Lea know where they’re going.”
“Sure,” she said, and Eden left the room.
She pushed her chair back to the plasma screen and looked up at the towering figure of her father, only now he was barely recognizable because the news network were playing old videotape footage of him descending a military aircraft’s airstair in his Delta Force dress uniform. Before she was born, she thought, and a smile broke out on her face without her even knowing it. He looked so young, she thought. He would be about her age right now with his whole life ahead of him.
She quietly wished him luck, not even knowing if she meant it or not, and switched off the plasma screen.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Ryan Bale received Alex’s text with a mixture of happiness and frustration. She was replying to his earlier email and as usual she’d got right on it. She’d even come up with some stuff about the raised arms being a symbol of the Egyptian Ka — another reference to eternity. He was happy that they had a good lead but irritated that she had once again beaten him to it, but that was the way things went with Alex Reeve. She was sharper than a serpent’s tooth, as someone once wrote, and he was proud to work with her.