Hawke and Lea shared a quick glance and could barely believe their luck. Hawke reached out for the shield, but Moussa slammed his hand down on it and pulled it away.
“No, my friend. Your liberty you can have, but this stays with Egypt.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It was after midnight by the time Captain Moussa took the phone call that released them from custody and now their options were limited. Vetrov had both halves of the Map of Immortality and was still holding Mazzarro as a hostage.
On the upside, Ryan and Alex assured everyone it would take Mazzarro at least a day to decipher the map — they knew because they were busy doing the same thing with their fragment of it, so for now, they had done everything they could and it was just a matter of killing time — just one night in Luxor and then onward into whatever hell Vetrov was planning on creating in the Tomb of Eternity.
Eden had not only used his contacts in London and Cairo to have them released from Moussa’s custody, but had come through for everyone once again and booked some suites in the Luxor Hilton. The luxurious rooms overlooked the Nile and included balconies, spas and massage tables. Hawke knew Eden had money, but this was getting ridiculous.
Outside their suites, they stood on private patios with cold drinks and watched the sun set over the Nile. The desert air was still warm around them as the moon rose over the east bank of the river, illuminating the date palms and turning them into ghostly silhouettes against a black sky.
“I didn’t realize you liked roughing it,” Hawke said, turning to Eden with a cold beer in his hand and a cheeky grin on his unshaven face. For the first time since Lea was snatched in Venice, Hawke was able to stop worrying about her.
Eden, looking as ever the perfect gent in his crisp white suit with silk pocket square, took a look around him. “Oh this? Well, wealth does bring certain advantages, but of course the counterbalance is the tremendous responsibility.”
“If you say so, Rich,” Hawke said, and swigged the beer.
“I do say so,” Eden said, smiling. “And now it’s time to get back to work.” The look Eden gave Hawke left no room for interpretation as he walked inside to check on the progress Ryan and Alex were making in their studies of the image of the shield Hawke had taken back in Osiris’s tomb.
The night went on, hot outside but cool in the air-conditioned rooms. Hawke was just dozing off to sleep in the early hours when he was woken by the sound of Ryan shouting. He had done it.
“It’s all here — I can’t believe it!”
Hawke rubbed his eyes and yawned as he walked to the desk, tripping over one of Lea’s boots as he went and nearly knocking himself out on the bed post.
“Sorry, Joe!” she said, picking the boot up and sliding it on.
Hawke gave her a look and turned his attention to Ryan and Alex, around whom everyone else was congregating. All except Lexi who wanted to sleep and had explained that if anyone woke her for anything short of a full-scale assault on the hotel, she would kill them. They believed her.
“So what have you got for us, Mr Bale?” As Eden spoke, he checked his watch and sighed. “Mazzarro must have got to the bottom of it by now, but let’s just hope you’ve beaten him to it.”
“This thing — the shield in the tomb… it’s a map.”
“Another sodding map,” Hawke said.
“Doesn’t look like a map to me,” Scarlet said, confused. “Looks more like a plate or something. Are you sure it’s a map?”
“It’s a map,” Ryan repeated.
Lea screamed. “Oh sweet mother of God, anything but another bloody map!”
“And you’re sure it’s a map?” Hawke asked.
“One hundred percent. We’re definitely looking at a map of some kind.”
Lea was still unsure. “But that tomb was thousands of years old — I didn’t even know they had maps back then.”
They watched Ryan’s face as he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and sighed. There followed the mother of all face-palms. “They used maps in Egypt as far back as the Old Kingdom, which means four and half thousand years ago to you, plus we know the Map of Immortality is from basically before time as we know it. Keep up.”
“No one likes a smart-arse,” Scarlet said.
“No, but everyone needs a smart-arse,” Ryan replied, “including you, right now, so shut up and listen. What you discovered in Karnak closely resembles a famous predynastic image known as the Narmer Palette, uncovered in Hierakonpolis and around five thousand years old, which is nearly as old as Cairo Sloane.”
“Touché, boy,” Scarlet replied, raising a cigarette to her mouth.
“And it does look like a plate, in fact it almost is a plate.”
“So what was this thing used for?”
“Most often for grinding up stuff like copper carbonate for use in the manufacture of cosmetics, but something of this size — like the Narmer job — would have been for use in a temple — it’s more decorative. Either way, it’s still a map.”
“If you say so,” Scarlet said.
Ryan sighed again. “All right — it’s not a map in the way we would understand it but it is a two dimensional representation of a geographic space, and for its time it was pretty groovy. At the bottom of the smiting side of the Narmer Palette you can see what basically looks like just another hieroglyphic, but in fact it’s a bird’s eye view of what is probably a walled garden, so that is pretty much a map. Well, we can see that on your palette, if you want to use the word, we have a similar style of glyph, so…ergo, this is a map. More than that, along with the famous scorpion macehead also discovered in Hierakonpolis in the temple of Horus, it gives us a very early image of an Egyptian king.”
“King who?” Lea said.
“Narmer of course,” replied Ryan.
“Oh, sorry… I thought Narmer was the name of the dude who found it or something.”
“Narmer, was the successor to the Scorpion King during the Early Dynastic Period. Seriously, Lea, what did they teach you in school?”
“Well… not that, that’s for frigging sure, but I did learn what happens if you spray shaving foam in the exhaust pipe of the geography teacher’s Fiat or what happens if you go behind the bike sheds with Ronan Murphy…”
“All right,” Hawke said, “I think we’re drifting from the point a little. Ryan, just how does all of this help us?”
“I was waiting for someone to ask that,” he said, clearly beginning to enjoy himself again. “None of you can see it?”
“See what?” Eden asked, leaning in to the computer.
“No?” Ryan repeated, zooming in on the image of the shield.
“Ryan,” Scarlet said in a whisper. “My boot is hurtling toward your nuts. You have half a second to tell us what’s going on before it’s Deep Impact time between your legs.”
“I’ve already told you. This is the map.”
“Yes,” Eden said. “I think we just established that.”
“No, not a map, but the map.”
“I don’t understand…”
“This is a copy of the original Map of Immortality — the one torn in half by Poseidon and Osiris.”
“Eh?” Hawke looked confused.
Ryan explained. “You can see here that it’s clearly a representation of the map we took from Poseidon’s tomb, but with the other half in addition — the hieroglyphic similarity is undeniable — it’s not exact like a rubbing or something, but a copy in the sense Osiris must have ordered to be made from the original at some point.”