The Exodus Quest Page 11

  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 involved 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?’

  ‘It does seem odd.’

  ‘So if the Copper Scroll treasure didn’t come from the Second Temple, it must have come from the first. QED.’

  They reached the Nile road, headed south. The lime, flamingo and turquoise strip lighting of a minaret lit up the darkness like a fairground ride. Gaille turned right and then left, wending through a small village then out between lush fields of budding grain and down a gentle incline to the Nile, flowing sedately by. The glow of dawn was turning the eastern horizon blue, though the sun wouldn’t rise over the Amarna cliffs for a while yet.

  ‘Any good?’ she asked.

  ‘Perfect,’ grinned Lily from the back.

  They climbed out, yawned, stretched. Lily set up the camera and checked the sound while Stafford took out his vanity case and primped himself. Gaille sat upon the bonnet, savouring its radiated heat, her mind buzzing pleasantly. Somewhere, in the far distance, a muezzin began his call to prayer.

  The Copper Scroll. Ancient lost treasures. She laughed out loud. Knox was going to love her for this.

  II

  ‘That’ll have to do,’ grunted Griffin, as they stamped down the mix of sand, rock and earth with which they’d filled up the shaft. Even with everyone helping, it had been a long night’s work, and he felt drained. The two or three hours of sleep they could still get wasn’t much, but it was better than none.

  ‘What about the reverend?’ asked Mickey doubtfully. ‘Shouldn’t we wait for him?’

  ‘He’s scarcely going to turn up now, is he?’ snapped Griffin irritably. Peterson never had to explain himself. He just barked out orders and these damned munchkins ran to obey. ‘We’ll come back later.’

  ‘I still think we ought to—’

  ‘Just do as I say, all right?’ He wiped his hands on his backside, turned and strode over to the truck with as much authority as he could manage, hoping rather than expecting that his students would follow. But when he turned to
look, they were kneeling in a circle, arms around each other’s shoulders, giving thanks to the Lord.

  A familiar sweet stab of envy in Griffin’s groin, disturbingly like lust. How fine to release oneself into the group like that, to surrender one’s cynicism and doubt. But his own cast of mind had been set decades ago, and it didn’t do submission, it didn’t do faith. ‘Come on,’ he said, hating the wheedle in his voice. ‘We need to get moving.’

  But they didn’t pay him any heed. They took their own good time. His impatience turned to something akin to fear, a sense of impending doom. How the hell had it come to this? Nathan hadn’t said what had happened to Tawfiq and Knox, but from the state of shock he’d been in, it clearly wasn’t good. He’d sent him away before the others could see him, but now Griffin was worried he might have bumped into Claire at the hotel. Claire wasn’t like these others. She made her own judgements on things. If she found out that something really bad had happened … Christ! This whole house of cards could easily come crashing down.

  Finally, they were done. They walked across, still exuberant with prayer, climbed onto the pick-up’s flatbed, not one of them joining him in the cab. There were times he hated them, how low he’d sunk in the world. A moment of weakness. That’s all it had been. The girl had sat front row during his lectures, staring unblinkingly at him with her guileless blue eyes. He’d been unused to the frank admiration of an attractive young woman. It had set his heart pounding. Lecture after lecture, he’d kept glancing her way. She’d still been staring raptly. Then she’d come to his office one lunchtime, pulled a chair up beside him. When their knees had brushed beneath his desk, his hand had moved almost convulsively, with a life of its own, to the warm top of her inner thigh, fingertips pressing down between her legs.

  Her shocked shriek haunted him still, made his cheeks burn whenever he thought of it.

  No one had taken his side, of course. His boss had seized the opportunity to cut him loose. She’d never liked him. And she must have put the word out too, the vindictive bitch, because no one had even bothered to answer his application letters. No one except Peterson. What did they expect him to do? he thought defiantly. Did they expect him to starve?

  A strange noise reached him over the rumble of the engine. He took his foot off the gas, glanced over his shoulder. They were singing in the back, moonlit faces shiny with devotion, hands raised in ecstasy, worshipping together. His low spirits sank even further. Maybe there was something in religion after all. Maybe if he believed like that, attractive young women wouldn’t shriek in horror just because he put his hand on their leg.

  Maybe.

  III

  Knox woke abruptly, nebulously afraid without being quite sure why. It was almost pitch black in the room, at least until some passing headlights painted yellow slats upon the ceiling. But that only made him all the more anxious, because he didn’t recognize his surroundings at all. He tried to lift his head, but he had no strength in his neck. He tried to push himself up, but his arms felt atrophied and useless. He worked his eyes instead, left, right, up, down. A catheter taped to his forearm. He followed the translucent tube up to an IV drip on a stand. Hospital. At least that explained why he felt like shit. But he had no recollection whatsoever of what might have brought him here.

  Another car passed by, its headlights silhouetting a man standing by his bed, looking down. He tugged the pillow from beneath Knox’s head, held it squarely in his hands, made to place it over his face. Heels started clacking on the tiled floor outside, drawing closer and closer. The man vanished into the shadows. Knox tried to call out, but no sound emerged. The heels passed on by, pushing through swing doors and away, leaving only silence behind.

  The man re-emerged from the shadows, pillow still in his hands. He placed it over Knox’s face, pressed down. Until that moment, there’d been an almost hallucinogenic aspect to the whole experience, like a waking nightmare. But as the pillow pressed down hard and he couldn’t breathe, his heart kicked into overdrive, pumping out adrenaline, belatedly giving him some movement and strength. He scrabbled at the man’s hands, kicked with his feet and knees, tried to twist his mouth sideways to gain some air. But he had no leverage; his muscles were already tiring, his mind swimming from lack of oxygen, his system closing down. He flung up an arm in a last effort to claw his assailant’s face, tugging the IV tube so hard that the stand teetered and then tumbled with a great clatter. The pillow was instantly whipped from his face, falling to the floor, allowing Knox to heave in great gasps of air, savour the oxygen flooding gloriously through his system.

  The door flew open. A policeman came in, flapped on the light, saw the fallen IV stand, Knox gasping, went back out into the corridor, shouting for medical assistance, panic in his voice. Knox lay there, terrified his assailant would finish him off, until a doctor finally appeared at the door, two days of stubble on his chin and cheeks, eyes gluey with tiredness. He picked up the IV stand, checked the tube, reaffixed Knox’s catheter. ‘Why do you do this to me?’ he muttered. ‘I only want to sleep.’

  Knox tried to speak, but his mouth wouldn’t work, he could manage only a plaintive croak. A trickle of spittle ran down his cheek. The nurse wiped it sympathetically away. He checked Knox’s pulse, raised an eyebrow. ‘Panic, yes?’ he said. ‘Is normal. You have a bad crash, you know. But you’re safe now. This is hospital. Nothing bad can happen here. All you need is rest. That’s all any of us need.’ He picked the pillow up from the floor, plumped it and replaced it beneath Knox’s head. Then he nodded in satisfaction, went back to the door, turned off the lights and left Knox at the mercy of this stranger who wanted to kill him.

  SEVENTEEN

  I

  The Nile car ferry was little more than a motorized metal raft. Gaille leaned against the rail and watched the fishermen paddle their sky-blue boats with their flat slats of oars, the floating mats of vegetable matter passing serenely by. A Coptic monk muttered as he ran his finger across the small print of his Bible. Kids dangled their feet over the side, watching for the sudden pale flash of fish. Four young farmers kept looking at Stafford then howling with laughter. But even that couldn’t put him out of the cheerful mood he’d been in since he’d bagged his sunrise footage.

  They bumped against the east bank, drove up a short hill through a dusty village. Youngsters stared wide-eyed at them, as though they’d never seen tourists before. A shopkeeper polished with spit and cloth his tired display of lemons and mangoes. They passed a cemetery, drove along an empty road to the Amarna ticket office. The shutters were closed, though two tourist policemen were sitting beneath a sunshade by a cabin, sharing a cigarette. One stood, wandered across. ‘You’re here early,’ he grunted.

  ‘We’re filming,’ Gaille told him. ‘Aren’t you expecting us?’

  ‘No.’

  Gaille shrugged. It was ever thus in Egypt. You got clearance from the Supreme Council, the army, the security services, the police, a hundred different bodies; but no one ever bothered to alert the people on the ground. She beckoned Lily across with her fat file of documentation, offered it to him. He looked blankly at a page or two, shook his head. ‘I call my boss,’ he said, heading inside the cabin. ‘Wait here.’

  Gaille returned to the Discovery, opened her glove compartment. It was second nature now to carry a selection of goodies for such occasions. She took a bar of chocolate over to the second tourist policeman, peeled back the silver foil, offered him a chunk, took one herself. They smiled companionably at the sweet flavour, the way it melted in their mouths. Gaille handed him the rest of the bar, motioned for him to share it with his comrade. He nodded and grinned happily.

  ‘Chocolate-bar diplomacy, huh?’ murmured Lily.

  ‘It can be a life-saver, believe me.’

  The first policeman finished his phone call, made a gesture to indicate that his boss was on his way. They stood around smiling and eating the chocolate as they waited.

  ‘What’s going on?’ grumbled Stafford. ‘Is ther
e a problem?’

  ‘Just Egypt,’ Gaille assured him. At last, a truck trundled into view, trailing a cloud of dust. A man jumped down, looking for all the world like an army officer in his beautifully pressed military-green uniform with polished black leather belt and holster. His complexion was unusually soft and pink for Egypt, his hair razor-cut, his moustache silky. Yet there was a hardness beneath the surface vanity. ‘I am Captain Khaled Osman,’ he declared. ‘What’s this I hear about filming?’ He held out his hand for Lily’s file, leafed through it, his frown growing. ‘No one tells me about this,’ he complained. ‘Why does no one tell me?’

  ‘It’s all in order,’ said Gaille.

  ‘Wait here.’ He marched inside the guardhouse, made a phone call of his own that rapidly became heated. He came back out, beckoned to Gaille. ‘Where exactly you want to film?’ he asked.