picked up another and looked at it, then another and then yet another. He noticed some repetition of the symbols, which confirmed his suspicion that there was nothing random about these engravings. They had been made purposively, by a human hand. And that made this a find!
He could just bag it up and mark it, leaving the others to figure out its significance in due course, but something about this discovery appealed to his ego. He wanted some small share of the kudos, even if someone else had dug it up, and someone more knowledgeable than himself would interpret it. And in any case, if it was something important, they would surely want to know about it now.
Joel realized that he had been daydreaming and Jane had noticed that something was up.
‘What?’ she asked, in that ever cheerful way of hers.
He held out one of the stone fragments and let her look at it, making sure that she didn’t actually get her hands on it.
‘Oh… my… God!’ she blurted out.
Fearing that others people would hear and start gathering round before he had had a chance to claim his glory, he threw the fragments into a plastic bag and raced over to Professor Gusack, suppressing the urge to cry out aloud like Archimedes on his homeward sprint from the public bath house.
While Joel was racing off to claim his share of the glory, Jane felt her breath constricting. Unlike Joel, she understood the full significance of what she had just seen. And she had to do something about it.
Mumbling some excuse about a stomach bug, she raced off to the latrines, which were little more than holes in the ground with individual booths around each drop. She closed and bolted the door behind her and whipped out her slender mobile phone from the pocket of her combat trousers. She was supposed to have handed it in to the security people at the entrance to the camp, but she had been forewarned of this in advance, so she had made sure she had two mobiles. The large flashy one she had handed over meekly with a look of disappointment. But this small thin one with its limited features, she had retained. She knew that the male soldiers wouldn’t frisk a woman, and they had no female soldiers at hand to do the job. So her secret was safe.
Safely ensconced in the latrine, she frantically keyed in a message and hit the ‘Send’ button. A minute later her message appeared on another phone six thousand miles away. It said: They found the stones.
Chapter 2
‘I got the message at two in the morning,’ said Arthur Morris.
They were seated round an oval cherrywood table in a small meeting room; two men in their fifties and a woman in her early forties. Morris was practically bald, except for two small, neatly combed patches on either side of the crown that were silver, but with some slight remnant of the brown that it had once been. His eyes were also brown and held just a hint of menace, warning friend and foe alike that he was a man not to be denied his wishes.
Behind him, a 555-foot obelisk glinted in the morning sun, forming a backdrop to their tense gathering.
‘Would they have had time to figure it out yet?’ asked the second man.
He was slightly older than Morris, with a short, neatly-trimmed beard. He was also taller and thinner. But the main contrast between them was the informality of his attire. A pair of light summer trousers and a beige sweater with the word ‘Georgetown’ written across it. Arthur Morris, on the other hand, was impeccably clad in a dark-blue suit. He favoured blue over grey and solid over pinstripe because he had read somewhere that they were signs of political conservatism.
‘She had to be brief in her text message, Professor. But the fact that she sent the message with no qualifications or reservations suggests that they probably did. And even if they didn’t, it won’t take them long. They’re not stupid and we must assume that things will start moving quickly from here on in.’
‘I don’t know how you can use Jane like that,’ said the woman uneasily. ‘She’s just a child.’
Morris thought for a moment before answering slowly and deliberately. ‘She doesn’t need to understand the whys and wherefores.’
‘But if she doesn’t even understand our cause, then how can she support it?’
The woman – Audrey Milne – had once been a trophy wife. Though she had long ceased to be the spring chicken who had once attracted her husband via his libido, she had retained her position in his heart and home by good grooming, a rigorous fitness regime, an adroit and skilful manner in the salon, and most important of all, a readiness to accept her husband’s serial infidelity with stoic equanimity.
Her husband had always known that she would never embarrass him professionally or personally and she knew how to host a dinner party and say the right things to the right people at the right time. With those social skills and her selective blindness to her husband’s extra-curricular activities, there was no need for him to cut her loose. And for her part, she had no reason to break loose. In their relationship, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.
She was, however, no longer a trophy wife. She was now a trophy widow.
‘Jane understands family loyalty,’ said Morris. ‘That means she’s loyal to me. That’s all that matters.’
‘Carmichael might be a problem,’ said the professor. ‘Once the shit hits the fan.’
‘Why?’ asked Audrey Milne defensively. ‘A befuddled old man suffering from dementia…’
The professor looked at her irritably. He had never really liked her and the only reason she was even at this meeting was because she had inherited proprietorship of a chain of fifteen newspapers from her husband. He had served the cause well, but had died towards the end of the previous year. So now, if their work was to continue unhindered, they needed his widow on-board, or at least access to her newspapers.
The Internet was fine for creating publicity, but what it couldn’t do was create credibility. A prestigious newspaper, on the other hand, lent the imprimatur of its authority to any story that went out under its masthead. That made Audrey Milne a powerful ally in their cause.
‘He’s already getting agitated over the fact that his paper still hasn’t been published.’
‘But the journal is only published once a year.’
‘He knows that, Audrey. But he’s angry that we missed the deadline for the last edition.’
‘So tell him that it took a few months to do a proper peer review. He’s an academic. He’ll understand.’
‘I did that!’ the professor snapped. ‘But he’s still upset about it. At one point he even threatened to pull the plug and send it to another journal.’
Ignoring their bickering, Arthur Morris played with the handle of his walking stick. It was an elaborate, overly ornate affair made of lacquered mahogany topped with a bronze snake head.
‘But if they’ve found the stone fragments,’ said Audrey, ‘then doesn’t that make it irrelevant what Carmichael does?’
Morris looked at Audrey as if trying to weigh up the subtext to what she was saying.
‘Whatever comes out of Egypt, we can control. It may even lead us to solve the questions posed by Carmichael’s
