The Exodus Quest dk-2 Read online

  I miss you.

  Suddenly she felt wide-awake again, vibrant. She began downloading his photographs to her hard disk, eager to get to work on them.

  II

  Peterson never cursed out loud, but there were moments during the drive to the hospital when he came precious close. It was partly because he'd not had an opportunity to retrieve Knox's phone, for Shareef was in the back of the Toyota ministering to him and Tawfiq. But mostly it was from trying to keep up with Shareef's colleague in the Highway Agency cab. The man was crazy, driving recklessly fast, pumping his horn and flashing his lights as he wove through thickening traffic, road signs and markings whistling by like tracer fire.

  He roared past an articulated lorry, braked sharply for the off-ramp, up through the gears again, speedometer needle whipping around the dial. They emerged from an underpass, took such a sharp right that Peterson had to wrench the Toyota's steering wheel with his whole body, bumping down a potholed road, a barrier ahead being raised even as they approached, then racing into the hospital grounds, past the cement mixer and two pyramids of sand being used for ongoing building works, screeching to a halt outside the hospital front doors.

  The place was already abuzz with emergency staff from the Hannoville crash. A medic and two porters hurried out. The back of the Toyota flew up. The medic clamped masks over Omar's and Knox's mouths; had them put onto trolleys. Peterson got out, running alongside Knox as he was wheeled inside, his hand resting by his left hip, eyes on the bulge in Knox's pocket. He glanced around. Everyone was frantic, calling out orders, no one watching him. He reached for the-

  They crashed hard into swing doors, the surprise forcing Peterson to drop back. By the time he caught up again, Knox had been turned onto his side, his shirt off, blackened skin beneath. A nurse took off his shoes, unbuckled and pulled down his jeans. Peterson tried to grab them from her. 'My friend,' he said.

  But the nurse yanked them from him and pointed emphatically back at the swing doors. He turned to see Shareef standing there with a policeman, a bull of a man with small piercing eyes and a bitter line to his upper lip. Peterson forced a smile, made his way to join them.

  'This is Detective Inspector Farooq,' said Shareef. 'He was here for that other crash.'

  'A long night for you,' said Peterson.

  'Yes,' agreed Farooq tersely. 'And you are?'

  'Peterson. The Reverend Ernest Peterson.'

  'And you found these two, yes?'

  'Yes.'

  'You want to tell me about it?'

  'Perhaps I should move my car first,' said Peterson. 'It's blocking the entrance.' He nodded to them both, walked out through the front doors, thinking furiously about what story to give. The policeman had a look about him, the kind who distrusted everyone, who automatically assumed all witnesses were lying to him, until he could establish otherwise. He started up the Toyota, headed into the parking area. Stick to the truth. That was the key in such situations. Or, at least, stick as close to the truth as you could.

  III

  Gaille smiled as she opened the first of Knox's photographs. He hadn't been kidding about the light. The screen was almost completely black, except for a yellow tint of moonlight top left. But she was good at this, and soon she'd coaxed from it a dark but clear picture of a partially exhumed grave. She saved it and moved on. A few of the pictures proved beyond her skills, but most responded well. In fact, once she'd worked out which adjustments to make, it became almost repetitive. The content of the pictures kept her rapt, however. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. Catacombs, human remains, oil lamps, murals. But the most striking photograph was of a mosaic: a figure sitting inside a seven-pointed star, surrounded by clusters of Greek letters. Gaille frowned. She'd seen other such clusters recently, she was sure of it. But she couldn't think where.

  She finished the photograph, saved it and moved on. When she'd completed the last photograph, she composed a reply to Knox, attaching all the images she'd been able to enhance. Then she checked the time with a heartfelt groan. She was supposed to be setting off for Amarna in just a few hours. She hurried to get ready for bed to grab what little sleep she could.

  FIFTEEN

  I

  Farooq watched from the hospital's front doors as Peterson parked his Toyota 4x4 in an empty bay. 'Maybe I was just imagining things,' murmured Shareef. 'Maybe it was nothing.'

  'Maybe,' agreed Farooq.

  'It was just… I kept getting this impression. That we were in his way, you know. That he was looking for something. And I wasn't imagining what I told you about the seat belt.'

  'Foreigners,' muttered Farooq, spitting a fleck of tobacco from his lip. He loathed them all, but the English and Americans most. The way they behaved: they thought it was still the old days.

  'You need me any longer?' asked Shareef.

  Farooq shook his head. 'I'll call if I have any questions.'

  'Not before morning, okay? I need my sleep.'

  'Don't we all?' He threw down his cigarette as Peterson arrived back at the hospital's front doors, then led him to the makeshift office he'd been given, motioned for him to take a chair, turned over a fresh sheet on his notepad. 'Go on, then,' he grunted. 'What happened?'

  Peterson nodded. 'You should know first that I'm an archaeologist,' he said, spreading his hands wide, giving what he no doubt imagined was a sincere and candid smile. 'I'm here on excavation in Borg el-Arab. Earlier today, yesterday now, I suppose, we had a visit from Doctor Omar Tawfiq, he's head of the SCA in Alexandria, you know, and a man called Daniel Knox, a British archaeologist.'

  Farooq grunted. 'You're not going to tell me one of those two men you brought in is head of the SCA in Alexandria?'

  'I'm afraid so.'

  'Hell!'

  'We spoke for a while. We informally arranged a full site tour. Then they left. I thought no more of it. But then, after dark, we had an intruder.'

  'An intruder?'

  'It's not uncommon,' sighed Peterson. 'The local Bedouin farmers are all convinced we're finding great treasures. Why else would we be digging, after all? We're not, of course. But they won't take our word for it.'

  'So this intruder…?'

  'Yes. We chased him off the site. He got into a car. Someone else was driving.'

  'And you went after them?'

  'You can't just let people run over your site. They'll contaminate important data. I wanted to give them a piece of my mind. I thought it might deter others. I was way behind them though. Then I saw flames.' He shrugged. 'I got there as quick as I could. It was awful. One of them, the man Knox, was still inside. I was worried he'd asphyxiate. I managed to release his seat belt. That's when the Highway Maintenance men arrived, thank heavens.'

  A tired-looking doctor knocked and entered. 'Bad news,' he said. 'The man from Borg. The Egyptian one.'

  'Dead?' asked Farooq gloomily.

  The doctor nodded. 'I'm sorry.'

  'And the other?'

  'Grade three or four concussion, smoke inhalation, moderate burns. The smoke and burns should both be manageable. The concussion is more problematic. You can never be sure, not this soon. It depends on impact damage, how the intracranial pressure builds, how the-'

  'When will I be able to talk to him?'

  'Give it two or three days and he should be-'

  'He may be responsible for the other man's death,' said Farooq tightly.

  'Ah,' said the doctor, scratching his cheek. 'I'll take him off the morphine. With luck, he'll be awake by morning. Don't expect too much though. He'll probably suffer retrograde and anterograde amnesia.'

  'Do I look like a doctor?' scowled Farooq.

  'Sorry. He's highly unlikely to remember anything from immediately before or after the crash.'

  'All the same,' said Farooq. 'I need to speak to him.'

  'As you wish.' He nodded and withdrew.

  'What terrible news,' sighed Peterson, when Farooq had translated the gist for him. 'I only wish I could have done somethi
ng more.'

  'You did what you could.'

  'Yes. Is there anything else?'

  'Your contact details.'

  'Of course.' Peterson turned the pad to face him, jotted down a phone number, directions to the site. Then he got to his feet, nodded and left.

  Farooq watched him out. Something wasn't right, but his brain was too tired right now, he needed sleep. He yawned heavily, got up. Just one more thing to take care of. If Knox was truly to blame for the death of Alexandria's senior archaeologist, he needed to be kept under watch: his own room, a man outside his door. Then he'd come back tomorrow and find out just exactly what the hell was going on.

  II

  Gaille was drifting to sleep when suddenly she jolted awake, sat up, turned on her light. Stafford's two books were on her bedside table. She grabbed the one about Solomon's lost treasures, flipped through the pages to a photograph of the Copper Scroll, most mysterious of the Dead Sea Scrolls: a treasure map written in Hebrew, but containing an anomaly that no one had ever satisfactorily explained: seven clusters of Greek letters.

  K?? XA? HN?????P??

  She took the book over to her laptop, turned it on, brought up Knox's photograph of the mosaic. A thrill shivered her as she saw that the clusters were identical, though arranged in a different order. But the figure in the mosaic was pointing at the K??; and the line that made up the seven-pointed star went past the other six clusters in the exact same sequence as in the Copper Scroll.

  She sat back in her chair, astounded, confused, electrified. The Copper Scroll had been an Essene document, and thus linked to Knox's Therapeutae site. But even so…

  She grabbed her phone. Knox would want to hear this at once, whatever the time. But he wasn't answering. She left messages instead, telling him to call at once. Then she sat there, reading Stafford's book and studying the photographs, brooding on what it might mean, her mind fizzing with the excitement of the chase.

  III

  Peterson moved his Toyota to the far shadows of the car park, then sat there watching the hospital's front doors, for he dared not leave without first taking care of Knox's camera-phone.

  It felt like an age before Farooq finally came out, lit a cigarette, walked wearily over to his car, drove away. Peterson gave it ten more minutes to be safe, then headed back inside. First things first. His face and hands were smeared with oil and soot. If anyone saw him that way, he was bound to be challenged. He found a men's room, stripped down, washed himself vigorously, wiped himself dry with paper towels. Not perfect, but it would have to do. He checked his watch. He needed to get busy.

  A family was squabbling in strained, hushed voices in reception. An obese woman was stretched out on a bench. Peterson pushed through swing doors into a dimly lit corridor. Signs in Arabic and English. Oncology and Paediatrics. Not what he was looking for. He took the back stairs, emerged into a corridor. A doctor scurried between trauma patients on trolleys, the adrenaline long-since worn off, leaving him merely exhausted. Peterson hurried past, pushed through double doors into a small room crammed with six beds. He walked the aisle, scanned faces. No sign of Knox. Back along the corridor, into the next ward. Six people here, too, none of them Knox. He continued checking rooms without success, out into a stairwell, up another floor, through swing doors into an identical corridor. A policeman was snoozing on a hard wooden chair outside the nearest room, his head tilted back against the wall. Damn Farooq! But the man was asleep and there was no one else in sight. Peterson approached stealthily, listening intently for any change in the rhythm of his gentle snoring. God was with him and he reached the door without alarm. He opened it quietly, rested it closed behind him.

  It was dark inside. He gave his eyes a few seconds to adjust, walked over to the bed. Peterson was a veteran of hospitals. He noted the saline IV drip, the pungent smell of a colloid application. He looked around for Knox's clothes, found them folded on a chest of drawers, a small pile of belongings on top, including his camera-phone. He pocketed it, turned, then paused for thought.

  He'd surely never get a better chance to deal with Knox once and for all. The policeman asleep outside the door would no doubt swear blind he'd been wide awake all night, that no one could possibly have got in or out. In a heathen backward country like this, they'd take it for granted that the effects of the crash had simply caught up with Knox. Shock. Trauma. Concussion. Burns. Smoke inhalation. They'd give him only the most cursory of autopsies. And he was an abominator, after all. He'd brought his fate upon himself.

  He took a step closer to the bed.

  SIXTEEN

  I

  Stafford and Lily were already waiting by the Discovery's passenger door when Gaille went out at twelve minutes to five. 'Sorry,' she said, holding up Stafford's book by way of an excuse. 'I got carried away.'

  'It is good, isn't it?' he nodded.

  'The Copper Scroll,' she said as she and Stafford climbed in and Lily went to open the gates. 'That's for real, is it?'

  'Do you imagine I'm in the habit of populating my books with make-believe artefacts?' he asked sourly. 'Go and visit Jordan's Archaeological Museum if you don't trust me.'

  'I didn't mean for real like that,' said Gaille, gunning the engine a little to warm it up before pulling away. 'I mean, how can you be sure it's not a hoax of some kind?'

  'Well, it's certainly not a modern hoax,' he said, as Gaille braked to allow Lily to climb in the back. 'Scientific analysis has proved that beyond question. As for an ancient hoax, the Essenes weren't exactly known for their frivolity, were they? Especially as the copper was over ninety-nine per cent pure – effectively ritually pure; and the Essenes took ritual purity very seriously.'

  'Yes.'

  'Besides, it wasn't on just one sheet of copper, surely plenty for a hoax, but on three sheets riveted together. And it wasn't inscribed in the normal fashion, with the letters scratched out with a sharp stylus. Someone actually punched the letters out from behind with a chisel. Extremely painstaking work, believe me. No. Whoever went to all that trouble believed it genuine.'

  'Believed?' asked Gaille.

  He granted her a slight smile, a teacher rewarding a bright pupil. 'The text seems to have been copied from another, older document, probably by someone unfamiliar with the language. So it's possible, I suppose, that some mischief-maker wrote out a hoax on parchment or papyrus, and that this hoax was somehow mistaken by the Essenes for the real thing, and that it became so venerated by them that when it began to disintegrate, they copied it out, only onto copper this time. But that's quite a stretch, wouldn't you say?'

  A donkey cart ahead, laden with long green stalks of sugar cane that bounced and swished like the skirts of an Hawaiian dancer, blocked the full width of the narrow lane, forcing Gaille to fall in behind. It was still dark, but the eastern horizon was just beginning to lighten with the first intimations of dawn. Stafford leaned across and tooted the horn again and again until Gaille swatted away his hand. 'There's nowhere for him to pull into,' she said.

  Stafford scowled and folded one leg across the other, crossed his arms. 'Do you realize how important this shot of sunrise is for my programme?' he asked.

  'We'll get there.'

  'Akhenaten chose Amarna as his capital because the way the sun rose between two cliffs mimicked the Egyptian sign of the Aten. That's going to be my opening shot. If I don't get it-'

  'You'll get it,' she assured him. The cart finally found a place to pull in. Gaille waved gratefully as she sped by, the acceleration making Stafford's book slip from the dashboard. He picked it up, flipped the pages with authorial pride, stopped to admire a photograph of himself by the Wailing Wall. Gaille nodded at it. 'How come you're so sure these Copper Scroll treasures came from the Temple of Solomon?' she asked.

  'I thought you'd read it.'

  'I haven't had a chance to finish it yet.'

  'The scroll's in Hebrew,' he told her. 'It was owned by the Essenes. So the treasure was unquestionably Jewish. And the amounts invo
lved are staggering, I mean over forty tons of gold. That's worth billions of dollars at today's prices. The kind of quantities only a hugely wealthy king or a very powerful institution could possibly own. Yet some of the treasures are described as tithes, and tithes are paid exclusively to religious organizations. Others are religious artefacts like chalices and candelabras. A religious institution, then. In ancient Israel, that means either the First Temple, the Temple of Solomon, which was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC; or the Second Temple, which was built on the ruins of the first, and which was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. Most scholars ascribe these Copper Scroll treasures to the latter. But my book proves that impossible.'

  'Proves it?'

  'It's all to do with dates,' said Stafford. 'The Copper Scroll was found in the Qumran caves, remember. And Qumran was taken and then occupied by the Romans in AD 68, two years before Jerusalem fell. Advocates of the Second Temple theory would have you believe that Jews took the treasure out of Jewish-held territory to bury it in Roman-occupied territory, then hid the map to it right under the noses of a Roman garrison. How crazy would they have had to be to do that? But even that's beside the point. The Copper Scroll was found buried beneath other scrolls that had been left there at least twenty years before the Roman invasion. And, as I just said, it was copied from another, older document. And the script itself is a very peculiar version of archaic square-form Hebrew dating to 200 BC or even earlier. Tell me, is it likely the Second Temple treasures were hidden from the Romans hundreds of years before they came rampaging?'