Текст книги "Keystone"

Автор книги: Luke Talbot

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Chapter 39

Gail subconsciously adjusted her backrest and fastened her seatbelt. She raised her hand and asked the nearby steward for a glass of water. Pulling her tablet computer from her bag, she hit the ‘On’ switch and waited for the welcome screen before using a stylus to enter her access signature.

A sudden burst of computer graphics brought her to her desktop, where all of her useful applications were waiting to be used. It was the same workspace as at her desk, and on the video wall at home, with all the applications and data synchronising in real time with a farm of University servers, probably deep inside a hill somewhere Gail had never even been. The tablet was never truly ‘off’ unless its battery was drained, and was constantly performing quick-syncs whenever it had access to WiFi.

The benefits to her and fieldworkers everywhere were enormous. What she saw on her tablet was identical to what she saw on her desktop machine in her office. No matter where she was, she could see the same files, applications and settings, saving her valuable time. In the field, it meant that she could input data and start analysing it on site, and collaborating with colleagues hundreds of miles away, before continuing at her leisure either at home, in the office, or as she was doing at that very moment, on the plane to Cairo. And if ever she lost her tablet, logging on to any new device as herself would synchronise everything once more

She tapped the screen to access her emails and scrolled down the list until she came to a recent one from George.

There was no text, just a picture of a cartoon rabbit looking sheepish. She smiled and checked the time of the mail: half past three in the afternoon. He must have sent it from his phone, as there was no way he could be home yet after having dropped her off at the airport. She saved the picture to her personal files and closed the message.

George didn’t pretend to know much about Egyptology, but he wasn’t an idiot either. He had known enough to understand that the news from Mars could be both good and bad. Knowing that he would always be with her and supporting her touched her deeply.

When he had learnt about the call from Mamdouh, he had been genuinely shocked. Gail and George had spent numerous holidays in Egypt over the past ten years, and had grown very close to the Professor. That he had never mentioned the missing book, even during one of his after-dinner ramblings, was surprising to say the least, as a great deal of their conversations had tended to centre on Amarna and the Library.

Gail had had time to think about things more now, and on reflection thought that she understood the situation better. In fact, as she deleted a selection of junk emails, she could even accept why the Professor would have hidden the book.

If it had shown any kind of link with Mars, then an unqualified archaeologist discovering it in the desert with no prior study of the area would seem too good to be true: the scientific community would never have believed that the book was genuine. Removing it ensured that the Library as a whole would be accepted without question.

But it did not all fit, she thought as she fired off a quick reply to a student, wondering if the lecture notes from that morning’s interrupted lecture would be available on her website. ‘Yes ’ was all she had written. Not everything made sense to her. For starters, removing one book on the spur of the moment couldn’t ensure that no similar evidence was present elsewhere in the Library. No one would have been able to check the thousands of books before she entered. And if you’re going to remove a book, then why not the one with the Amarna Stickman engraved on its cover? And why, when all the other books related to politics, economics and demographics, was her book so different, its content almost biblical in comparison? Surely, from what had been seen so far in the Library, her book was unique; but not enough to be removed?

Most confusing of all, though, was the fact that Mamdouh couldn’t have removed a book from the Library himself. Gail was the first to enter after the engineers, and the book had been sitting on the plinth undisturbed.

How had he made the swap?

She closed the email program and sipped her water. Her emotions had given way to curiosity, and concerns over the future of her career had been replaced by a number of questions she was eager to put to her friend in Cairo. Unfortunately, since their brief phone conversation, he’d not answered any of her calls or emails. Maybe he’s fending off questions left, right and centre, too, she thought.

She brought another application to the front of the desktop. A simple window, not unlike a word-processor, filled her screen. She dragged George’s sheepish rabbit picture over and dropped it in, then tapped a button on the application toolbar. A simple dialogue popped up asking her to enter her keyword.

She smiled to herself and typed bunny. A progress bar briefly worked its way along the bottom of the picture, and then a message emerged:

Good Luck Bunny, always with you. Love George xxx

The application she was using had been written by George as a Christmas present for her several years earlier. At first, she had believed it to be a simple viewer for all of her scanned pages of books from the Library. She had thanked him, but had secretly been a little disappointed that the fruit of his labours – three months of programming in the evenings after work – had produced a simple program she could have obtained for free from the Internet.

George had said nothing more of it.

The Christmas holidays had been over for nearly a month before Gail actually used the program he had made. She had uploaded her scanned images, and had been idly flipping through them when she noticed the strange icon along the toolbar. She had clicked it, only to be faced with an error: Please select glyph(s) for translation. Her heart had literally left her chest.

George had not simply made a viewer for her Egyptian texts, he had made a tool that helped her translate them. She grinned to herself as she remembered how she had thanked him that evening for his Christmas present.

Closing the message and the picture, she dragged another file into the application and a series of tiny rectangles filled the screen, as if someone had ripped the pages from a book and laid them out in rows on a grey background.  She tapped the first page and zoomed in to the wooden cover of the book from the Library plinth, the Stickman book as it had become known. The engraved Stickman looked so real she felt she could touch it. Memories of the dry atmosphere of the Library came flooding back to her, memories of the smell of old leather and wood.

The application let you select a hieroglyph or group of hieroglyphs, such as a cartouche, and add custom text, which would serve as the translation. The application would then run through all of the text and suggest the same translation for any matching symbols. It used a simple bitmap comparison algorithm with some additional routines for cleaning up background noise, so it couldn’t do anything too sophisticated. A common problem was that Egyptian hieroglyphs should be read in the direction in which the characters were facing. This meant that the bitmap analysis would correctly match two sets of glyphs reading from left to right, but would fail to recognise that a third set, reading from top to bottom, was also a match. It was a minor gripe, which George had promised to look into at some point in the future.

Once the analysis was complete, tooltips would appear all over the text. An overview pane would also give a summary of all the available translations in any given selection. By selecting multiple tooltips, it was possible to add further contextual translations too, giving a second or even third meaning to common groups when used in conjunction with each other. Over time, the more she used it the more complete the dictionary became, and while Gail’s own grasp of ancient Egyptian had improved to the extent of near-fluency over the past ten years, George’s application had evolved such a sophisticated dictionary that it became the envy of her peers. One of her outstanding actions in the Faculty was to wrestle the source code from her husband and hand it over to the Department of Computer Science, so that they could enhance its functionality and distribute it more widely. But before he would let her do that, he had to remove his ‘love-letter’ system, which was what allowed them to hide words in pictures, only to be revealed when a keyword was input.

She highlighted a group of hieroglyphs and read the lines of English text, along with annotations, that appeared in a box below the page.

 

To conquer | {and} gain dominion {rule?} {wage war?} | leads to no victory {?} | all {we?} shall be judged as one {together?}

She had read the first line of text a thousand times. It was isolated at the top of the page, separated from the rest of the hieroglyphs by the Amarna Stickman.

Gail highlighted the next line of symbols.

A beauty has come {Nefertiti} | with guidance {a message?} of  | {???}

She had never wanted to provide a translation for the Stickman symbol. In her mind, to do so was to admit that they would not find the genuine translation of the glyph and with so many texts from the Library unstudied, she looked forward to the day when she would triumphantly give the application its final translation. In the meantime, it simply returned three question marks whenever it occurred.

The religious undertones of the Stickman book were hard to escape. On every page could be found morals, stories, proverbs, and illustrations, all seemingly pointing to an idyllic way of life, a ‘just path’ as it had been dubbed, which she had interpreted as being an unsuccessful ideological movement started by Nefertiti under the reign of her husband Akhenaten. It fitted well with the archaeological evidence of the era: a new capital, a changed foreign policy, changing art, all capped by a worship of an old god, the Sun deity Aten. The movement had clearly failed, and future pharaohs had done everything possible to eradicate its memory.

To Dr Gail Turner, the evidence was quite clear, and her thesis had brought widespread acclaim. Many of the pieces of the puzzle surrounding Amarna and Nefertiti seemed to fall into place.

But that hadn’t stopped other theories cropping up on the Internet. As soon as her research had been published, stories appeared of the ‘first coming of the Lord’, in female form, over twelve centuries before Jesus Christ, passing on his teachings to the most powerful people on Earth. The similes between the Bible and the Stickman book were there if one looked hard, and an increasingly large group of people had made it their sole purpose to look as hard as possible. The Amarna Adventists believed that Nefertiti was the true daughter of God. They had lifted ancient passages word for word from her book, including some of her own translations, and used them to form their own controversial ‘bible.’

Amarna Adventists were not the only people to read more into the Library finds than the Egyptologists. The Internet was full of interpretations of the Stickman figure, from four-legged aliens to strange spaceships. For her part, Gail had felt that the Stickman represented a direction towards the Sun god Aten, its head being the Sun, and the arms, legs and body representing an arrow of some sort. It was an interpretation shared by most serious academics.

Now, however, as Gail read the sentence over to herself, and with the day’s revelations in mind, she wondered whether the Internet theorists hadn’t been more close to the mark.

The plane shot down the runway and lifted gently into the evening sky, leaving Heathrow and England behind.

And had she known for one second that she would never return, she would have given them more than just a fleeting glance as they disappeared beneath the clouds.

Chapter 40

Five hours later, the wheels hit the runway with a screech at Cairo International Airport.  She glanced out of the small window and smiled. Arriving in Egypt always brought back memories of her first flight all those years ago, when George had done so well in taking her mind off her irrational fear of landing. By now, after dozens of trips, travelling by plane was as mundane to her as travelling by train or car.

As usual, no one was waiting for her inside the terminal. Instead, she went straight to a line of yellow taxis and quickly negotiated a price with the driver in the first one.

Travelling in Egypt was also something that Gail had grown accustomed to quite fast following that first trip. Their decision to rent a car on that occasion had come from inexperience; certainly the distances looked great enough to warrant renting one. But now, Gail wouldn’t have dreamed of driving herself. Taxis were far more convenient, arguably safer and definitely cheaper.

More convenient because parking spaces were virtually non-existent in the city, particularly near the Museum where Gail normally went.

Safer, because the law of the roads in Cairo was survival of the fastest, where even the traffic police had difficulty controlling drivers.

And cheaper because once you knew how to and had built up the guts to do it, bartering with a taxi driver was as natural in Egypt as asking for the time. Within minutes, Gail was sitting in the first taxi, having agreed to half of the first suggested price.

It was already eight o’clock, six in the UK. She tapped the phone link on her earpiece and called her home number. George picked up after one ring.

“Hello?” he said. “Gail, why can’t I see you?”

“I’m in a taxi, my phone is in my pocket and it’s dark,” she replied, holding onto the door handle as the driver negotiating his way past an oncoming lorry.

“Cairo Taxi, eh? Better than Alton Towers. How was the flight?”

“Good, gave me time to think about everything. Thought about you on landing, as always. And thanks for the sheepish rabbit.”

He laughed. “Glad I could help, and glad you liked the bunny, Bunny. How about your work? You sound much better.”

She felt much better, she thought to herself. “Well, I know Mamdouh pretty well. I trust he would only have done what he thought was best for everyone concerned. I still feel betrayed, like he could have confided in me, but I don’t know the ins-and-outs of all this.”

“I’m sure everything will be fine. Oh, before I forget. Some guy called Martín Atony, or Antonass, or something like that, rang for you about half an hour ago. He sounded quite insistent and said he needed to meet up with you. He sounded Spanish or South American or something. He was from the European Space Agency.”

“What did he want?” she asked. She had already deflected a dozen reporters wanting her to comment on the Mars finds, but had made a firm decision to say nothing until she knew something. She imagined that this Martín was no different.

“He didn’t say exactly. I gave him Mamdouh’s details so if he hasn’t already he’ll probably be calling you at the museum.”

“Bloody hell, George! You know I don’t want to talk to the press or anything like that, and I’m guessing Mamdouh doesn’t either.”

There was a short silence.

“I’m sorry, Gail, but he didn’t sound like he was after a story. I have his number here; I’ll give him a call and tell him you’re not interested.”

“Hang on a second.”

Her taxi was apparently racing with another through a junction and despite her experience she couldn’t help wincing as her driver swerved in front of the other to cut him up. He was rewarded with three short beeps, and he waved cheerily out of his window in reply.

 “No,” she said bluntly, her mind back on their conversation. “I’ll deal with him when I get there. We’re only a few minutes away at this speed, anyway.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I love you,” he added the last three words almost as an afterthought.

“Me too, George. I’ll call you later.”

“Oh, and Gail?”

“Yes?” She heard the sound of cutlery on a plate and grinned.

“I’ve eaten your portion, OK?” He spoke with his mouth full of what she assumed was her Fish and Chips.

“Whatever, George.” She pressed a button on the earpiece and ended the call.

Five minutes later, the car came to a stop in a street round the back of the museum. The driver turned round to face her with a wide grin.

She wondered briefly if the fact that she always haggled down to half the original price meant the driver always drove at twice the required speed, but then dismissed the thought. The look on this man’s face told her he probably drove like that all the time. She paid the agreed fare, added fifty Egyptian pounds of baksheesh, and stepped out into the relatively cool Egyptian-winter evening.

Professor Mamdouh al-Misri had always been proud of his office at the Egyptian Museum. It had a decidedly ‘Old World’ feel about it: dark oak shelves covered every wall from floor to ceiling, while an imposing solid mahogany desk filled the centre of the room. The shelves were mostly stocked with academic publications. The entire bottom shelf, running along three walls of the office, was filled with over a century of National Geographic magazines. A small shelf at head height nearest the Professor’s chair contained a selection of old archaeological books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. All three volumes of Carter’s The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen were present in the irreplaceable collection, and were themselves alone insured for over a hundred thousand British pounds.

Of course, in his few years as the General Director of the museum, the Professor had not yet had the time to furnish such a lavish office all by himself. Such a collection of books belonged not to him, but to the museum itself, and had been accumulated over the last century by dozens of General Directors, each one leaving their mark.

Professor al-Misri was more concerned with the safety of the collection, in particular the earlier works, than of adding anything specific to it himself. For that reason, he had been working with the museum planners to modify certain shelves in the office. Soon, for instance, Carter’s works would be protected by a thick layer of Plexiglas and steel that could only be opened by entering a six-digit code.

He sat in his chair and looked up at the books. They seemed so old and fragile, their spines mostly bent and frayed at the edges. The dust jackets of some were torn and partially missing. These were books that had been used countless times; thumbed-through by his predecessors, left on bedside tables at night, or lying on a desk under a pile of paperwork for weeks and months on end, and they showed their age with pride.

He thought about the Amarna Library, sealed tight against the elements, its contents immaculately preserved for millennia. Thousands of books and scrolls, more than a man could read in a lifetime, in better condition than the small collection he saw in front of him now.

He shook his head. Books were meant to be read, not hidden.

Gail knocked and entered without waiting. She found him sitting at his desk, which had been cleared of all paperwork, revealing in full its leather surface to her for the first time. The Professor looked at her blankly.

“Hello?” she ventured.

His face suddenly lit up. “Gail! Sorry, I was miles away. How was the flight?” He stood up and rounded the desk to welcome her, holding her right hand firmly and kissing her lightly on each cheek – a vestige of his Western education.

“Not bad, thanks,” she replied.

They exchanged pleasantries for several minutes after sitting down, before falling silent. The Professor looked down at his desk.

“Why have you cleared up, Mamdouh?” Gail asked.

He gave a deep sigh and looked her in the eyes. “Because I cannot lie to myself any longer. Being in this office reminds me every day of what I have let happen. I will resign in the morning.”

She was taken aback by his statement. “No! You –”

“Gail, I have to tell you the truth,” he interrupted her. “At least what little I know of it.” He fished a piece of paper out of the top drawer and passed it across the desk. “Before I forget, you may want to contact this man later; he called for you earlier.”

She read the note. Martín Antunez, again! It was followed by a phone number. Like I don’t have more important things to do than talk to him! She shook her head and put it in her pocket.

“Please let me tell you everything, without interruption, and then we can discuss things,” he said.

Gail reluctantly agreed.

“You will certainly remember when you first set foot in the Amarna Library, Gail. That day, you walked into a veritable treasure trove, the single most impressive archaeological find I have ever witnessed. Certainly on a par with Howard Carter more than a hundred years ago. But I was not entirely honest with you that day.” He paused to moisten his lips. “Months before our excavations at Amarna began, I was contacted by an American man; an old friend who studied Anthropology with me at Harvard. His name is Dr Henry Patterson. I hadn’t heard from him in years, and we spent a good hour on the phone reminiscing about old times. It turned out he was calling because he had heard of my excavation.

“I was amazed; the excavation wasn’t exactly high profile, barely a blip on the Supreme Council of Antiquities’ radar. Why would he know of it? He explained to me that he worked for an agency in the States, based near Tampa in Florida. They had reason to believe that certain finds from Amarna could be extremely damaging to the political stability of the region. How they knew of these finds, he could not fully reveal, but he suggested that his agency’s investigations pointed to an as-yet undiscovered text, somehow related to Nefertiti. If we were to find the text and reveal it publicly, his agency felt the repercussions would be disastrous.

“Of course, as I listened to him explain all of this I could not stop myself from laughing out loud. It sounded completely preposterous, like a prank call. I accused him of playing such a joke, but he flatly denied it. Instead, he offered me help. On top of providing materials and equipment to aid in our work, his agency would take responsibility for removing the offending finds in the event that we uncovered them, and help ‘oil the wheels of bureaucracy’ if required. That basically meant baksheesh. They would also ensure that no loose ends were left lying around to give anything away. You saw the men from the agency when you were on the dig, Gail.”

“The engineers,” she whispered.

“Yes, the engineers. They were attached to me from day one. I reported all of the finds to them. From the moment they arrived, I regretted agreeing to work with this agency. I always felt like they were spying on me, on the dig, and on all of my students. There was something dark, something oppressive about their presence that made me want to call him up and tell him they could leave right away. But I never did, and when I found out what they wanted to hide, I was glad I hadn’t.

“The engineers pretended to make the Library ‘safe’ for us to investigate, Gail. In truth, they went in to find what they were looking for and remove it.”

“The second book on the plinth.”

“Yes. We were left with one volume of a two-book set, Gail. What they took away was removed from the Library as cleanly as possible, they even scattered dust around the plinth so that nobody could guess anything was amiss. I spoke to Patterson by phone shortly before you entered the Library, and demanded that he tell me what they were hiding. What had been so important that the biggest discovery in living memory was to be spoilt by an agency I knew nothing about? I had trusted him because we had been friends, but on seeing the engineers on site with their damned suitcase, I wanted to know everything.

“Patterson calmed me down as best he could over the phone and told me that I could not see the find whilst still on site. However, before it was shipped to its final destination, God knows where, he promised that I would be able to look at it. He was as good as his word, and on his request I journeyed to Cairo the day after you first entered the Library.

“Patterson met me in this very building, in my old office down the hall. One of the engineers was with him, and they had made space for their case on my desk. I had already signed a document stating I would not divulge anything to third parties about our arrangement, but they made me sign another form before they would open the case. They were quite forceful, but to be honest I probably would have signed anything at that point: my curiosity was more powerful than anything. Then the engineer opened the case and Patterson ushered me forwards.

“I will never forget my first sight of the book, Gail, my first glimpse of the cover. It was exactly the same dimensions as the Stickman volume, except that it was thicker: it probably contained half as many pages again as your volume. Its cover was also wooden, with a bound spine. On it had been engraved a picture, in the same fashion as the Stickman. My God! They would have looked impressive together!”

“Wait,” Gail said. “You said that this so-called agency wanted to stop information from being spread from Amarna to the outside world, and so went to all this trouble to hide one book. But there were hundreds and hundreds of different books in that room, how did they know for sure that they had removed the only one that mattered? What if my book had also contained something important, or what if one of the hundreds of scrolls that we haven’t even looked at did?”

Mamdouh shook his head. “I have no idea, Gail. Somehow, they knew that there was only one book to take care of. They certainly didn’t have time to read anything whilst in the Library. They couldn’t have checked the entire Stickman book in that time, and believe me after having read it myself I can assure you that it makes no reference to the content of the book they took away. Their information must have been well sourced, but I’m at a loss from thereon in. And I have not heard from the agency since that day in my office.”

“What made this book so special then?” she asked.

“In itself, the cover was interesting enough. The engraving showed a human figure holding a long staff aloft, as if in defiance. But it was upon opening the book that the true surprise came.  It was mostly illustrations, accompanied by small segments of text, a mixture of hieroglyphs and hieratic. Full page drawings of people living in vast cities that we would classify, even today, as futuristic; filled with flying machines, vehicles of all descriptions, towering skyscrapers, sprawling forest-parks with fountains and paths. It was like looking at a science-fiction landscape. Then there were pictures of farms rolling over hills to the horizon, seascapes showing fleets of strange vessels. The text below, in the little time I had to read and quickly translate it, simply described the illustrations, like an encyclopaedia, with comments like Ancient City with administrative centre or Agricultural Environment. And then suddenly, the mood of the illustrations changed. I turned the page, and it was like a vast hand had been swept across the city from the previous pages. Everything was razed to the ground, people were running in all directions in obvious panic. I barely had time to take the scenes in, however, because as soon as I had turned the page the engineer stepped forward and closed the book, quite forcefully moving me aside. I have not seen or heard from it since.”

“My God, Mamdouh. Professor Hunt would love to hear about this! But even he would never believe such advanced human civilisations from the past,” she said.

The Professor looked her straight in the eyes. “And you think I would? Gail, over the decades I have seen thousands of ancient texts, not just from Egypt but from all over the world. This wasn’t some dream-fuelled flight of fantasy, it was a vision of a future world. It was so real, so tangible, so believable that it can only have come from someone who had witnessed it.

“All of the people in the streets of the mysterious city, the pilots in flying machines, the farmers in the fields and sailors on the strange ships existed. And from the little I saw, it is clear to me that they were wiped out, erased from history.”

Gail could not find the words, her mouth opened and closed slowly like a goldfish.

“When I saw that book I realised what it represented; I knew it couldn’t be shown to the outside world. I don’t pretend to know what wider implications it may have and why the agency would want to cover it up. Whatever religious or political motivations they might have, I simply understood that to reveal it would have been professional suicide. I would have been no better than those who claim that the Great Pyramid of Khufu was built as a landing platform for interstellar spaceships. Here was I, looking at a veritable link between the ancient Egypt I love and something that would destroy everything we think we know about our origins.

“I couldn’t let that happen. As a philosopher, I was frustrated that I would never again be able to see the book, to study and translate its text. But as a man who wanted to earn a living and develop my career, I was relieved that it was being taken off my hands. The responsibility was no longer mine.

“Because of this, I never once felt inclined to reveal this to you, or to anyone for that matter. Over time, I made myself believe that the book did in fact represent little more than a fantasy world. I mean, what will people think thousands of years hence when they discover our libraries full of science fiction? Would they believe that we had really waged war with Mars, that we genuinely conquered the stars or that we could easily travel through time at will?” He paused and let out a long sigh. “That idea helped reconcile my guilt. The belief that it was a work of fantasy got me through the past ten years in one piece.