Ryan pulled a swivel chair over from another desk and began to work with the various screens in front of him around the table. “Looks like she didn’t get out much,” he said, and then stopped himself before going any further. “Sorry, Joe… I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“Forget about it,” said the former SBS man. “I only found out about the wheelchair a few moments ago myself.”
Ryan made no reply, but carried on looking through the computers. Hawke made a search through the bookshelves and anywhere else he could think of — inside kitchen cupboards, under the furniture, even inside the air-conditioning ducts, but he found nothing.
“Looks like she was pretty lonely,” Lea said, glancing around the apartment.
Hawke nodded in response but said nothing.
Lea looked at him for a moment. “What is it, Joe?”
“Nothing… just that it’s suddenly hit me just how little I really know about her — there’s nothing here even with her name on it — nothing. She’s gone out of her way to remove herself from the world, even inside her own apartment.”
“Spooky, if you ask me,” Lea said.
“What about on there?” Hawke asked Ryan. “Any names or anything that can help identify her?”
Ryan shook his head. “Not really. First, the only name I can find anywhere is Nightingale, and second, whoever she is, as far as computer skills go she’s way above my pay grade…”
Lea sighed. “I don’t know what to make of it.”
“Exactly,” Hawke replied. “We really are coming to a dead end.”
“No, I mean that Ryan just admitted someone else was better than him at something and I really can’t believe I heard that right.”
Ryan sighed. “The only way you could get any funnier, Lea, is if you put on a clown outfit, you know that, right?”
“Zip it, Ry.”
“With a big, red nose.”
Hawke looked at them both. “Guys, I need some focus in here right now, yeah?”
“Sorry…”
“What about the desktop?” Hawke asked.
“I’ll fire it up.”
“Woah!” Ryan said.
“What is it?” Hawke leaned in to look.
“Looks like your little Nightingale has more than a passing interest in the Map of Immortality — check this out!”
Hawke looked at the screen and saw a long list of files. “What are they?”
“These ones here are all named after Egyptian gods.”
Ryan clicked on a file and opened it.
Lea whistled. “Oh my…”
“My sentiments exactly,” Ryan said.
They were now looking at a PDF full of text and symbols.
“Isn’t that one called a wank or something?” Lea said, winking at Hawke behind Ryan’s back.
“It’s called an Ankh,” Ryan said, sighing and shaking his head. “It’s the ancient Egyptian symbol of eternal life, called the crux ansata in Latin, which means the cross with a handle.”
“And they called it that because it looks like a cross with a handle on it, right?”
Ryan craned his neck to look at Lea. “You are kidding me, yes?”
Lea laughed. “Of course I’m kidding, Ry! You are so easy…”
Ryan was unamused. “The ancients called this symbol the breath of life or the key of the Nile and it’s one of the oldest symbols in the world. It’s found on carvings thousands of years old but no two Egyptologists can agree on its true origins.”
Hawke frowned. “Which is a mystery almost as interesting as why Nightingale has hundreds of files relating to ancient Egypt and immortality on her computer.”
“Hey! A girl can be interested in ancient Egypt, can’t she?” Lea said.
Ryan stared at the laptop. “Sure she can, but I think this goes way above interested — there are countless files on here, and the research just goes on and on. There’s also an email trail here to a mystery man called Mercurio who seems to know more about this stuff than anyone.”
Hawke stood up and scratched the stubble on his chin. “When did she start researching all this and talking to this…Mercurio?”
Ryan took a few moments to flick through the files. “Er… looks like around the time we were trying to stop Zaugg finding the vault of Poseidon.”
Lea sighed. “Great, so we’re to blame…”
“It gets better,” Ryan said,
“What is it?”
“A lot of these files look like they originated in the US Defense Department — the Pentagon.”
Hawke looked shocked. “Really?”
Ryan nodded. “And they’re pretty highly classified as well, unfortunately someone’s spoiled all the fun and all the good bits have been redacted.”
“Eh?” Hawke said.
“Blacked out,” Lea said. “We say blacked out in English, but they say redacted in Nerdish, right Ryan?”
He ignored her, transfixed by the information unfolding on the screen in front of him. Since Sophie’s murder in Tokyo, Ryan had gotten a lot less interested in sparring with Lea, or anyone else for that matter. He had gone back inside himself again, back to where he had hidden after his divorce. Now, all this seemed to be dragging him back to life.
“So all her research was pointing to Egypt?” Hawke asked.
Ryan nodded. “She seems to have followed a path from Poseidon back from Greece to Ancient Egypt, which isn’t that surprising.”
Lea frowned. “Why not?”
Ryan nodded. “The ancient Egyptians were very big on anything to do with immortality. They believed that eternal life was possible in the sense that their souls could be reincarnated in the next world so long as they led an honest, good life and never offended the gods.”
“Sounds simple enough,” Lea said.
“Not really. Like I said, they took it very seriously. There was a specific ritual of mummification that you had to go through if you were to going to be successful in reaching the next world.”
“Like what?”
“For one thing, their internal organs were removed, dried out, and placed in Canopic jars.”
“In what?”
“Large pottery jars with lids moulded into likenesses of the gods. Placing the viscera…”
“Ryan!”
“Sorry, Lea… placing the organs inside these jars after a process of drying them in salts was an important part of ensuring the soul would be reincarnated in the next world, thereby achieving immortality, so to speak. The stomach went inside the jackal jar, the liver went inside the human jar, the lungs went in the baboon jar and they put the intestines inside the hawk jar.”
“Someone say my name?” Hawke said, turning to face them.
“No, I said…”
“I know what you said, mate,” Hawke said, smiling. “But something’s bothering me.”
Ryan scratched his head. “What?”
“All this talk of taking people apart as part of the mummification process…”
“Yeah?”
“It’s not quite the same kind of immortality that we’re searching after, is it?”
Ryan turned in his chair to face Hawke. “How do you mean?”
“The stuff you’re talking about here is about the immortality of the soul, but that’s not what Hugo Zaugg or Sheng Fang were risking their lives to get hold of, and I doubt that it’s what’s motivating whoever’s kidnapped Nightingale to get their hands on her knowledge of all of this stuff.”
“I see what you mean.”
“Those nutcases were trying to achieve immortality of the body — the power to live forever in their bodies, as they live and breathe now. They weren’t seeking some kind of eternity in the spirit world.”