“That guy, anyway,” Hawke continued, “he discovered a tablet in the desert with similar glyphs to those on our map, and tried to decode it but made very little progress before he died. Decades later some other guy…”
“Pernier.”
“Thanks, mate… well, that guy discovered something called the Phaistos Disc, an ancient Greek artefact…”
“Minoan,” Ryan said. “Do you want me to tell this story?”
“Thanks, but no thanks, mate. Anyway Pernier and Mazzarro used the information on the disc along with Champollion’s earlier work and began to create a sort of decoder…”
“A deciphering matrix.”
Hawke gave the younger man a look and Ryan shrugged his shoulders and walked off down the aisle to get a drink.
“Anyway, thanks to the deciphering matrix, Ryan and Alex here were able to make sense of the map.”
“But we only had half the map, remember,” Alex said. “Hi, I’m Alex Reeve, by the way.”
“Hello. Maria Kurikova.”
They shook hands.
“Like I say, we only had the Poseidon half. We knew from Mazzarro Senior’s work on the Phaistos Disc that there had been some kind of ancient war when Poseidon and Osiris fought over possession of the map, and that’s why it was torn in half.”
“And that’s when we realized the other half must be the Tomb of Osiris,” Ryan said, returning with a large neat whisky. He took a gulp. “The only problem was where exactly.”
“Abydos, surely,” Maria said. “The Great Osiris Temple is in Abydos.”
“The Great Temple is, sure,” Ryan said. “And there’s another smaller temple dedicated to him at Karnak, but we were looking for a tomb, don’t forget. His temple is well-known, and he has a temple because he was a god. But just like with Poseidon, now we know Osiris was really here on earth, we know he must have a tomb, and that’s different from a temple.”
“I understand…”
“Luckily for us, it looks like Poseidon’s trust for Osiris didn’t run very far, and he had the location of his rival’s tomb written on his half of the map, so now we know where the tomb of Osiris is.”
“And it’s in Karnak,” Alex said. “Just like the smaller temple dedicated to him.”
“But not in the same place. The tomb is deep underground, beneath the Temple of Amun, so that’s why we’re flying to Luxor.”
Scarlet got up from her chair and yawned. “Get all that?”
Maria laughed. “I think so…”
“All that matters,” Hawke said with quiet determination, “is that we get there before Maxim Vetrov, stop him getting into the tomb and acquiring the other half of the map, and rescue Lea and Brad.”
“Damn right,” Scarlet said.
“Then we can translate Osiris’s half and finally discover the location of the Tomb of Eternity,” Ryan said, finishing his whisky.
Hawke eyed the empty glass with concern, but said nothing. He’d been there.
“Because in that tomb,” Eden said quietly, “there exists knowledge that has been hidden from mankind for thousands, or perhaps millions of years…”
“And hopefully gold,” Scarlet said, causing a subdued ripple of laughter in the cabin.
Hawke waited until the others had returned to their seats and then he lowered his voice. “Now no one’s trying to kill us any more, and we’ve got the Indiana Jones stuff out the way, I have some questions for you.”
Maria smiled. “I thought you might, Joe.”
“Why were British agents trying to kill us back there?” He glanced at the display on the bulkhead wall to read the flight information. “I can see why they might want to take you out, but not me. At this speed we’ll be in Luxor in less than an hour, so you don’t have much time to tell me.”
Maria inhaled deeply and took her dusty, torn suit jacket off. She draped it over the seat beside her and fixed her eyes on Hawke.
“Joe…those men were ordered to kill us in order to silence me and to stop you.”
“Stop me?” he asked, incredulous. “Stop me from doing what? And what does this have to do with my wife?”
“They don’t want me to tell you what I am about to tell you, Joe.”
Hawke clenched his jaw and rubbed a hand over his tired face. “I’ve had just about enough of secrets. Tell me what you know, and tell me now.”
Without a pause, Maria started to speak, calm and quiet. “Elizabeth Compton was a Russian agent, Joe.”
Hawke narrowed his eyes in shock and disbelief. “What are you talking about? Liz worked for the Ministry of Defence as a translator. She was fluent in German and Spanish.”
“And Russian.”
“No! She didn’t speak a word of Russian.”
Maria offered a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry, but she did speak Russian. I spoke with her myself in the language.”
Hawke was shell-shocked at the revelation and could barely control the thoughts of incredulity and despair that raced into his mind so fast he couldn’t begin to process them all. “You knew my wife?”
The Russian woman nodded respectfully. “Agent Swallowtail and I spoke on several occasions.”
“Agent Swallowtail?”
She nodded and Hawke recoiled in horror. Before she had died, Olivia Hart had used that word to describe the operation to murder Liz, and now the Russian agent was telling him it was his wife’s codename. He felt like the plane was falling apart all around him and he was tumbling to earth without a parachute.
“Your wife was half-Russian, Joe. I know she kept that secret from the Ministry in London, but she never told you either?”
Hawke clenched his jaw as he shook his head in reluctant confirmation of her question. “No, she never told me. In fact, I find it hard to believe. You could be spinning me a web of lies for any number of reasons.”
“I’m not. Please look at this.”
Maria handed Hawke a Russian identity card and passport from inside her suit jacket. The passport was an old one, now many years out of date, but like the card, it contained a picture of a woman who was very clearly his wife.
Subconsciously he shook his head as he stared at the documents. A shaft of sunlight shone through the window and illuminated the tiny images of his wife’s face as if to highlight the terrible deceit that was unfolding before him. “I just can’t accept this.”
Maria pointed at the Cyrillic letters: Eлизaвeтa Комптон. “This is her name — Elizaveta Compton.”
“Elizaveta?” Hawke asked. “Her name was Elizabeth… and for just one day it was Elizabeth Hawke.”
“Her English name was Elizabeth, but her Russian name was Elizaveta. Your wife’s mother was Russian, Joe. She was an architect from Kaluga.”
“That’s not right… Liz told me that before her mother died she’d spent her life in the south of England.”
“No. Her mother was part of a Soviet trade delegation that travelled to the West during the détente period. She spent many weeks in England, and that is when she met William Compton. She defected out of love for her boyfriend, later her husband, but her heart was always with the Soviet Union.”
Hawke looked into the Russian’s eyes but didn’t know what to say. He wanted her to say that all of this was an elaborate lie, some kind of terrible deceit designed to manipulate him and slow down the hunt for the map. He knew in his heart it wasn’t so.
“Elizaveta grew up and joined MI6, Joe, long after the Soviet Union had collapsed. They thought her background was ideal, but with the influence of her mother she was easily turned by FSB agents and she became a double-agent, working for both sides. All of this was long before she met you.”
Hawke’s heart began to pound in his chest. He’d tried to keep a lid on things while Maria was speaking, but now it was all getting too much. Here was a woman he had known for less than a few hours telling him more about his wife’s true life story than she herself had in all the years he’d known her.