The Russian looked confused but grabbed the laptop anyway. Following Crouch’s descriptions, he began to trawl a path through images.
“All this talk about curses,” Alicia said. “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? I remember Tutankhamun’s tomb was said to be cursed.”
“Well, a curse is pretty much all-encompassing over here. Any person that disturbs an Egyptian body, be it a mummy or a pharaoh, can be affected. There are no differentiations. Thieves, kids, archaeologists, holidaymakers. You name it. You’re all fair game. Some Egyptian tombs contain curses, some don’t. Most commonly, the mistaken one is Tutankhamun’s. His resting place contained no curse.”
Dahl grunted. “A curse can be distorted into anything you want,” he said. “They’re usually rather vague.”
“And it normally mentions disease,” Crouch said. “Which, when one disturbs a corpse, is not out of the question.”
“No seven plagues then?” Alicia threw a glance at the window as if expecting hordes of flies and locusts gathering there.
“No, and that was different, as you know. That was God’s wrath. But the whole ‘curse’ commotion was thrown back into the light when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun. Carter’s canary died in the mouth of a cobra, thus inciting the locals to fear the onset of a curse. Later, Lord Carnarvon died, after becoming infected by a mosquito bite. A letter was written two weeks prior to his death, and published in the New York World magazine, in which Marie Corelli asserted that ‘dire punishment’ would fall upon anyone that desecrated a tomb. Mussolini, who some time before had accepted a mummy as a gift, ordered it removed. Next, and incredibly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became entangled in it, suggesting that ‘elementals’ created by ancient priests were involved and had caused Carnarvon’s death.”
Alicia shivered in the heat. “You can stop there if you like.”
But Crouch was on a roll, in his own element and talking about the very thing he loved most in the world. “Soon after, a man called Sir Bruce Ingram, who had been gifted by Carter a mummified hand with a bracelet that bore the inscription ‘cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come water, fire and pestilence’, saw his house burned down and then, after it was rebuilt, suffered a flood.”
“Shit, you couldn’t make this up.” Kenzie laughed.
“Surely you have come across curses in your line of work?” Crouch asked her.
“My line…? Well, I guess as a relic smuggler you’d think so,” Kenzie was taken a little aback by the direct question. “But believe me, the only curses I come across are those I speak and those uttered by my men when I make them work.”
Alicia looked over. “Yeah, Drake’s like that.”
“Hey!”
“Howard Carter himself was hugely skeptical of the curse,” Crouch went on. “But he did write about an unsettling occurrence — when in the desert he saw jackals of the same type as Anubis for the first time in almost forty years.”
Alicia gulped. “And you want us to go out there?”
“Of the fifty eight people present when Carter opened the tomb, only eight died in the following years. Six of those could be attributed in some way to disease.” Crouch shrugged. “You make your own theories, my friends.”
“I’m more interested in mummies to be honest,” Alicia said. “Those guys always seem to be angry.”
“Yeah, so Hollywood tells us,” Hayden said. “But if your internal organs were removed, your body washed out with spices, your brain liquefied, all over a period of forty days, and then your dried-out body was wrapped in linen, you wouldn’t exactly be feeling perky now, would you?”
Alicia screwed her face up. “Uh, nope.”
“I have it,” Yorgi said, swiveling the laptop around to face the room.
Crouch stared and then nodded. “That’s it. Meritamun’s tomb, discovered in the nineteenth century. It’s small, insignificant, and came with all the usual objects. Sarcophagi. Canopic jars for internal organs. Amulets. The Book of the Dead. Household furniture of a sort. Ushabti figurines to work for the dead in the afterlife. Food. Wall paintings. Statues and carvings. And, of course, wall-painted spells. Nothing out of the ordinary. Over sixty tombs have been found and most are similar, not unremarkable, but nothing on the scale of Tutankhamun and just a few others. The tomb of Nefertiti has never been found.”
“What are you saying?” Hayden broke in, sensing Crouch might wander off on still another tangent.
“That this tomb, in this place, will have been largely forgotten over the last couple of centuries. It’s dry now. Protected yes, but forgotten. If we looked hard enough we might even find an inventory of tomb photographs online, but I strongly suggest we attend in person.”
“There’s no suggestion about it, pal,” Drake said. “We’re going.”
Hayden watched the team rise up and make ready, and a feeling of pride swelled in her chest. Beaten down as they were, hunted by the most powerful nation on earth, they were still trying their best to work together to save it.
Team SPEAR would never die. Do to it what you would.
“You okay, Hay?” Mano was beside her, looking a bit worried. “You seem out of it.”
“No, no.” She snapped out of it. “Just thinking how, despite everything that’s happening, there are no other people on earth I’d rather be standing in this sweaty room with right now. That’s it.”
Kinimaka smiled. “Me too, Hay. Me too.”
She grinned up at him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Drake always imagined an Egyptian tomb would come with a sense of awe, of wonder and majesty; just like the first they’d visited, but the tomb of Meritamun was a narrow opening close to the ground. High pillars stood outside, adorning the entrance, but Drake got the sense that nobody really cared anymore.
The day was stifling, a hot, dry wind blowing across the desert. The vista was open to the right, broken by a series of low hills to the left. Their jeeps had left long, conspicuous tire tracks in the relatively short stretch of sand they’d covered since leaving the road. The team wore hiking gear, with as few clothes as possible, but carried all the weapons and tech they had. Nobody expected this to be easy today and a confrontation was all but certain. Everyone wore a hat except Kenzie, the ex-Mossad agent well-used to heat and even complaining that the odd gust of wind raised gooseflesh.
Drake, sweating enough to fill a pint-pot, took the GPS and marked the coordinates. “Well, this is the place. The tomb of Meritamun. Looks peaceful.”
Dahl bared his teeth. “Now that’s a proper dumb thing to say.”
Crouch sized up the entrance. “Let’s get this done quickly. Maybe we can be in and out before company arrives.”
“There again,” Dahl complained. “Inviting disaster.”
“Well personally,” Alicia said. “I’m more worried about heading down a mummy’s black hole. Who knows what we’ll find down there?”
Drake broke out the flashlights and other equipment they might need. The Jeeps stayed where they were, parked behind a series of low mounds but almost impossible to hide. Crouch, unable to conceal his excitement, muscled to the front and headed in first.
Alicia shook her head and followed. The rest filed in after. Kinimaka and Smyth stayed back to guard the entrance and the surrounding area. Kenzie ranged further afield, finding a position to watch the road and the desert.
“Something tells me that girl’s as at home in the desert as a scorpion,” Alicia said. “And still as nasty.”
“I think she likes that,” Dahl said wistfully.
“Being nasty?”
“Yeah.” He paused. “I mean there’s being nasty and then there’s being nasty.” He enunciated both words, one with more feeling than the other.