The Exodus Quest Read online

  ‘But a minimum of three hours, yes?’

  ‘Usually. Though there are cases.’

  ‘There are always cases,’ said Naguib.

  ‘Yes.’ With his finger, the pathologist tickled out the fragile links of a chain around her neck, a silver charm hanging from it. A Coptic cross. He glanced around at Naguib, the two men no doubt sharing a single thought. Another dead Copt girl. That was all this region needed right now.

  ‘It’s a nice enough piece,’ muttered the pathologist.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Naguib. Which argued against robbery. The pathologist lifted the girl’s skirts, but her underclothes, while ragged, were intact. No sign of sexual assault. No sign of any assault, indeed; except, of course, that the back of her skull had been smashed in. ‘Any indication how long she’s been here?’ he asked.

  The pathologist shrugged. ‘I’d be guessing. I’ll need to get her back to base.’

  Naguib nodded. That was fair enough. Desert corpses were notoriously tough. A month, a year, a decade; out here they all looked the same. ‘And the cause of death? The blow to her head, yes?’

  ‘Too early to say.’

  Naguib pulled a face. ‘Come on. I won’t hold you to it.’

  ‘Everyone tells me that. And then they hold me to it.’

  ‘Okay. If not the blow to her head, maybe her neck was broken?’

  The pathologist tapped his thumb against his knee, debating with himself whether to say anything or keep quiet. ‘You really want my best guess?’ he asked finally.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You won’t like it.’

  ‘Try me.’

  The pathologist stood up. Hands on his hips, he looked around at the arid yellow sands of the Eastern Desert stretching away as far as the eye could see, shimmering with heat, broken only by the rugged Amarna cliffs. ‘Very well, then,’ he smiled, as though aware opportunities like this wouldn’t come his way too often. ‘I rather suspect she drowned.’

  III

  Knox found Omar Tawfiq kneeling on his office floor, the casing and innards of a computer spread out in front of him, a screwdriver in his hand, a smudge of grease on his cheek. ‘Don’t you already have enough to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Our computer people won’t come out until tomorrow.’

  ‘So hire new ones.’

  ‘New ones will charge more.’

  ‘Yes. Because they’ll come out when you need them.’

  Omar shrugged, as if to accept the truth of this, though Knox doubted he’d act upon it. A young man who looked even younger, he’d recently been promoted interim head of the Supreme Council for Antiquities in Alexandria; but everyone knew that he’d got the job because Yusuf Abbas, the Cairo-based secretary general, wanted someone pliable and disposable he could bully while he manoeuvred one of his own trusted lieutenants into the permanent role. Even Omar knew this, but he was too diffident to resent it. Instead, he spent his time hiding from his bemused staff in his old office, filling his time with comfort-zone tasks like these. He stood, wiped his hands. ‘So what can I do for you, my friend?’

  Knox hesitated. ‘I saw an old bowl in the market. Hard-fired. Well-levigated. Pinkish-grey with a white slip. Maybe seven inches in diameter.’

  ‘That could be anything.’

  ‘Yes. But it gave me that feeling, you know?’

  Omar nodded seriously, as though he had respect for Knox’s feelings. ‘You’re here to check our database?’

  ‘If that’s possible.’

  ‘Of course.’ Omar was proud of his database. Building it had been his main responsibility before his unexpected promotion. ‘Use Maha’s office. She’s away today.’

  They walked through together. Omar sat at her desk. ‘Give me a minute,’ he said.

  Knox nodded and walked to the window, looked down at his Jeep. It had cost him a fortune to have it repaired after the Alexander business, but it had been good to him over the years, and he was glad of his decision.

  ‘Any word from Gaille?’ asked Omar.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you know when’s she coming back?’

  ‘When she’s finished, I imagine.’

  Omar’s cheeks reddened. ‘All set,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ sighed Knox. ‘I didn’t mean to snap.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘It’s just, everyone keeps asking, you know?’

  ‘That’s because we like her so much. Because we like you both.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Knox. He began working his way through the database, colour and black-and-white photos of cups, plates, figurines, funerary lamps. Mostly, he flipped past them without a second glance, the old computer groaning and sighing as it strained to keep up. But every so often an image would catch his eye. Yet nothing quite matched. Ancient artefacts were like this. The closer you looked, the more potential points of difference you found.

  Omar came back in with a jug of water and two glasses on a tray. ‘Any luck?’

  ‘Not yet.’ He finished the database. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Of local provenance, yes.’

  ‘And non local?’

  Omar sighed. ‘I wrote to a number of museums and universities when I was setting this up. I didn’t get much of a response at the time. Since my recent appointment, however …’

  Knox laughed. ‘What a surprise.’

  ‘But we haven’t entered the data yet. All we have are CDs and paperwork.’

  ‘May I see?’

  Omar opened the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, pulled out a cardboard box of CDs. ‘They’re not in any order,’ he warned.

  ‘That’s okay,’ said Knox. He slid one into the computer. The chuntering grew louder. A page of thumbnails appeared. Fragments of papyrus and linen cloth. He clicked to the next page, and then the third. The ceramics, when he found them, were colourful and patterned, nothing like what he was looking for.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it, then,’ said Omar.

  ‘Thanks.’ The second CD was of Roman-era statuary, the third of jewellery, the fourth corrupt. Knox’s mind began to wander, triggered perhaps by Omar’s earlier question. A sudden memory of Gaille, taking breakfast one morning on the Nile Corniche in Minya: the way she licked her upper lip free of the slight glaze from her pastry, her dark hair spilled forwards, her smile as she caught him watching.

  The eighth CD was an anatomy lecture demonstrating how to distinguish manual labourers from the idle rich by bone thickness and spine curvature.

  Gaille’s mobile had rung that morning in Minya. She’d checked the number, shifted in her seat, turning herself away from him to hold a stilted conversation that she’d quickly ended by promising to call back later.

  ‘Who was that?’ he’d asked.

  ‘No one.’

  ‘You want to get on to your service provider, if you keep getting calls from people who don’t exist.’

  A reluctant sigh. ‘Fatima.’

  ‘Fatima?’ An unexpected stab of jealousy. Fatima was his friend. He’d introduced the two of them barely a week before. ‘What did she want?’

  ‘I guess she’d heard about Siwa being postponed.’

  ‘You guess?’

  ‘Fine. She’d heard about it.’

  ‘And she rang to commiserate, did she?’

  ‘You remember how interested she was in my image software?’

  The eleventh CD was of Islamic artefacts. The twelfth was of silver and golden coins.

  ‘She wants you to go and work for her?’

  ‘Siwa’s not exactly about to happen, is it?’ Gaille had said. ‘And I hate doing nothing, especially on a salary. I hate being a drain.’

  ‘You’re not a drain,’ he’d said bleakly. ‘How could you think yourself a drain?’

  ‘It’s how I feel.’

  The thirteenth CD was of pre-dynastic tomb paintings. He started checking the fourteenth on autopilot. He’d got halfway through when he sensed he’d missed something. He paged back to the previous screen,
then the one before. And there it was, top right, the twin of the bowl he’d seen, only upside down, resting on its rim. Same shape, same colour, same texture, same patterning. But there was no description of it, only reference numbers.

  He fetched Omar, who pulled a ring binder from the filing cabinet. Knox read out the reference numbers while he flipped through the pages, ran his finger down the entries, came to the right one, frowned in puzzlement. ‘But that can’t be right,’ he said. ‘It’s not even a bowl.’

  ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘A lid. A storage jar lid.’

  Knox grunted. Obvious, now that Omar pointed it out. Not that it helped much. Egypt had been the breadbasket of the ancient world. Huge quantities of produce had passed through Alexandria’s multiple harbours. Making jars to store and transport it had been a vast industry. ‘My mistake,’ he agreed.

  His admission did little to mollify Omar. ‘But it’s not from anywhere near here,’ he said. ‘It’s not even from Egypt.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  He squinted at Knox, as though he suspected himself the victim of a bad joke. ‘Qumran,’ he said flatly. ‘It’s what the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in.’

  TWO

  I

  Assiut Railway Station, Middle Egypt

  Gaille Bonnard was beginning to regret coming inside the station to meet Charles Stafford and his party. She usually enjoyed crowds, the clamour and camaraderie, especially here in Middle Egypt, with its effusively friendly people, not yet soured by overexposure to tourists. But tensions had grown palpably over recent weeks. A protest march was even taking place that afternoon elsewhere in the city, which presumably explained why she could see only three men from the Central Security Forces on the platform, as opposed to the usual flood of uniforms. To make matters worse, an earlier train had broken down, so twice the usual number of passengers were waiting to board, all girding themselves for the inevitable squabbles over seats.

  The tracks started to rattle. Vermin scurried. People manoeuvred for position. The ancient train rolled in, windows already being lowered, doors crashing open, passengers spilling out, laden with belongings, fighting through the scrum. Hawkers walked along the line of windows offering translucent bags of baladi bread, paper cones packed with seeds, sesame bars, sweets and drinks.

  Away down the platform, a strikingly good-looking thirty-something man emerged from the first-class carriage. Charles Stafford. Despite his two-day stubble, she recognized him at once from the jacket photographs on the books Fatima had lent her the night before. She’d skimmed through them out of courtesy, though they were the kind of populist history she deplored – wild speculation backed by outrageously selective use of the evidence. Conspiracies everywhere, secret societies, lost treasures waiting beneath every mound; and never a dissenting voice to be heard, unless it could be ridiculed and dismissed.

  Stafford paused to put on a pair of mirror shades, then hoisted a black leather laptop case to his shoulder and descended onto the platform. A stumpy young woman in a navy-blue suit came after him, tucking wilful strands of bright-red hair back beneath her floral headscarf. And an Egyptian porter followed behind, struggling beneath mounds of matching brown-leather luggage.

  An elderly woman stumbled against Stafford as he pushed his way through the crowd. His laptop swung and clipped a young boy around the ear. The boy saw instantly how wealthy Stafford looked and promptly started bawling. A man in dirty-brown robes said something curt to Stafford, who waved him arrogantly away. The boy bawled even more loudly. Stafford sighed heavily and glanced around at the redhead, evidently expecting her to sort it out. She stooped, examined the boy’s ear, clucked sympathetically, slipped him a banknote. He couldn’t suppress his grin as he danced off. But the man in the brown robes was still feeling stung from Stafford’s dismissal, and the transaction only irritated him further. He declared loudly that foreigners evidently now thought they could batter Egyptian children at will, then pay their way out of it.

  The redhead gave an uncertain smile and tried to back away, but the man’s words struck a chord with the crowd, and a cordon formed, trapping them inside, the atmosphere turning ugly. Stafford tried to barge his way out, but someone jolted him hard enough that his shades came off. He grabbed for them but they fell to the ground. A moment later Gaille heard the crunch of glass as they went underfoot. A scornful laugh rang out.

  Gaille glanced anxiously over at the three CSF men, but they were walking away into the ticket hall, heads ducked, wanting nothing to do with this. Fear flared hot in her chest as she debated what to do. This wasn’t her problem. No one even knew she was here. Her 4x4 was parked directly outside. She hesitated just a moment longer, then turned and hurried out.

  II

  ‘But it’s just a lid,’ protested Omar, as he hurried down the SCA’s front steps after Knox. ‘There must have been thousands like it. How can you be so certain it came from Qumran?’

  Knox unlocked his Jeep, climbed in. ‘Because it’s the only place Dead Sea Scroll jars have ever been found,’ he told Omar. ‘At least, there was one other found in Jericho, just a few miles north, and maybe another at Masada, also close by. Other than that …’

  ‘But it looked perfectly ordinary.’

  ‘It may have looked it,’ replied Knox, waiting for a van to pass before pulling out. ‘But you have to understand something. Two thousand years ago, jars were used either for transporting goods or for storing them. Transportation jars were typically amphorae, with big handles to make them easier to heft about, and robust, because they had to withstand a lot of knocks, and cylindrical, because that made them more efficient to stack.’ He turned right at the end of the street, then sharp left. ‘But once the goods reached their final destination, they were decanted into storage jars with rounded bottoms that bedded into sandy floors and were easy to tip whenever people needed to pour out their contents. They also had long necks and narrow mouths so that they could be corked and their contents kept fresh. But the Dead Sea Scroll jars weren’t like that. They had flat bottoms and stubby necks and fat mouths, and there was a very good reason for that.’

  ‘Which was?’

  His brakes sang as he slowed for a tram clanking across the junction ahead. ‘How much do you know about Qumran?’ he asked.

  ‘It was occupied by the Essenes, wasn’t it?’ said Omar. ‘That Jewish sect. Though haven’t I heard people claim that it was a villa or a fort or something?’

  ‘They’ve suggested it,’ agreed Knox, who’d been fascinated by the place since a family holiday there as a child. ‘I think they’re wrong, though. I mean, Pliny said that the Essenes lived on the northwest of the Dead Sea. If not Qumran itself, then very close to it, and no one has found a convincing alternative. One expert put it very succinctly: Either Qumran and the scrolls were both Essene, or we have a quite astonishing coincidence: Two major religious communities living almost on top of each other, sharing similar views and rituals, one of which was described by ancient authors yet left no physical traces; while the other was somehow ignored by all our sources but left extensive ruins and documents.’

  ‘So Qumran was occupied by the Essenes,’ agreed Omar. ‘That doesn’t explain why their jars are unique.’

  ‘The Essenes were fanatical about ritual purity,’ said Knox. ‘The slightest thing could render a pure receptacle impure. A drop of rain, a tumbling insect, an inappropriate spillage. And if it did, it was a major headache. I mean, if a receptacle became tainted, then obviously anything in it was immediately tainted too, and had to be chucked. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Liquids and grain are poured in a stream, you see, so the real issue was whether the impurity climbed back up that stream and infected the storage jar too. The Pharisees and other Jewish sects took a relaxed view, but the Essenes believed that everything would be contaminated, so they couldn’t risk pouring out contents in a stream. Instead, they’d lift the lid a little, dip in a measuring cup and transfer it that way. And because they no longe
r had to tip their storage jars, they could have flat bottoms, which made them much more stable; and short necks and fat mouths, too, to make them easier to dip into.’

  ‘And jars with fat mouths need bowls for lids,’ grinned Omar.

  ‘Exactly,’ nodded Knox. They were nearing the Desert Road Junction. He hunkered down in his seat to scan the road-signs. A quick review of the records in Omar’s office had shown just four foreign-run sites in the vicinity of Lake Mariut, but there was nothing currently happening at Philoxinite, Taposiris Magna or Abu Mina; which left only one worthwhile candidate: a group called the Texas Society of Biblical Archaeology excavating out near Borg el-Arab.

  ‘So what would the lid be doing here?’ asked Omar, once Knox had navigated them onto the right road.

  ‘It may well have come centuries ago,’ shrugged Knox. ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls were known about in antiquity. We have reports from the second, third and fourth centuries of texts being found in Qumran caves. Origen even used them to write his Hexapla.’

  ‘His what?’

  ‘The Bible written out six times in parallel columns. The first in Hebrew, the second in Greek, and then a series of edited versions. It helped other scholars compare and contrast the various versions. But the point is, he relied heavily on Dead Sea Scrolls.’

  ‘And you think they might have been brought here in this jar of yours?’

  ‘It’s got to be a possibility.’

  Omar swallowed audibly. ‘You don’t think we might actually find … scrolls, do you?’

  Knox laughed. ‘Don’t get your hopes up. One of the scrolls was inscribed on copper – a treasure map, would you believe? But all the rest were on parchment or papyrus. Alexandria’s climate would have chewed those up centuries ago. Besides, there’s another explanation. A more intriguing one. To me, at least.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We’re pretty sure the Essenes didn’t live only in Qumran,’ said Knox. ‘Josephus mentions an Essene Gate in Jerusalem, for example, and several scrolls laid down rules for how Essenes should live outside Qumran. Besides, we know there were several thousand Essenes, whereas Qumran could only hold a few hundred. So obviously there were other communities.’