Hunt Through Napoleon's Web (7 page)

Amun led Gabriel and Kemnebi through Jumoke’s to a storeroom in the back. Heaps of carpets, flat and rolled, lay on the floor. They navigated between them to a small room that served as an office.

Amun took a seat in one of the room’s two chairs and gestured for Gabriel to take the other. Kemnebi came around and laid Gabriel’s Colt on the table between them.

“How lovely,” Amun said, raising the gun and appraising it with a connoisseur’s eye. “An antique, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And I’m going to want it back.”

“Of course. If our talk goes as well as I expect, I will return it to you with pleasure.” He set the gun down again and accepted the glass of tea Kemnebi was holding out to him. A scent of mint wafted across the table. Kemnebi held a glass out to Gabriel.

“No, thanks,” Gabriel said.

“It’s very good,” Amun said, “especially when it’s so hot outside. No? Well perhaps a bit later.” Kemnebi set the glass down in front of Gabriel, some of its contents sloshing out into the saucer.

Amun picked up a cardboard tube from the floor, dug inside it with a finger, and removed a rolled print. He unfurled it, weighing down one corner with Gabriel’s gun and another with his saucer. The print showed a black-and-white photograph of a stone tablet covered in hieroglyphics. One corner of the tablet was broken off.

“Do you recognize it, Mister Hunt?” Amun asked.

“Of course,” Gabriel said. “Any undergrad would. It’s the Rosetta Stone.”

“Correct. A relic of ancient Egypt and one of the most important and most valuable artifacts ever discovered. It now unfortunately resides in the British Museum in London.”

“So?”

Amun’s brown eyes flared. “One day it shall return to Egypt, I promise you that. But that is neither here nor there.”

“Well, it’s not here,” Gabriel said. “It is there.”

Amun took a sip of his tea. His hand didn’t shake. “I know you are trying to provoke me, Mister Hunt. Perhaps I will do or say something I regret, something you could use to gain an advantage over me.” He set the cup down again. “I won’t.”

“Okay,” Gabriel said. “So you won’t. What is it you want me to do—break into the British Museum and steal the Rosetta Stone for you?”

“No, no, of course not. Nothing that simple.”

“Simple,” Gabriel said.

“There’s nothing simpler than taking something from a museum,” Amun said. “What we want your help with is considerably more difficult.”

“You going to tell me, or do I have to keep guessing?”

Amun stretched out a finger and traced it along the edge of the Rosetta Stone. “As you can see, there is a piece missing. Broken off. Lost forever. Who knows what additional information it might have contained, what secrets?”

“What’s your point?”

“What if I were to tell you, Mister Hunt, that a second entire tablet exists, twice the size of this missing
piece, one that contains even more precious—more powerful—information than the stone in the British Museum? Information that could, quite simply, change the world?”

Gabriel raised his eyebrows.

“I see you are skeptical,” Amun said. “What do you know about the Rosetta Stone, Mister Hunt?”

“You want a history lesson, you should ask my brother. He could talk your ear off.” Amun said nothing. “It’s, what, from the time of Ptolemy—one of the Ptolemys, anyway, something like two hundred B.C., right?”

“That’s very good, Mister Hunt,” Amun said. “Go on.”

“What else. There are three texts on the stone, or more precisely the same text written in three different languages. Comparing them was how Egyptian hieroglyphics were first deciphered.” Gabriel remembered Sheba McCoy regaling him with the story in bed one night, tracing the lines of various ancient symbols across his bare chest with a fingertip. He’d always had a thing for linguists, but never more so than that night.

“Go on.”

“That’s all I’ve got. As I recall, the text on the stone was nothing too interesting—something about taxes and putting statues in temples, wasn’t it?”

“Something like that. It was Ptolemy the Fifth and you were off by four years, but that’s better than most
Americans could have done. Better than most Egyptians, for that matter. Do you recall how the Stone was found?”

Gabriel had a sudden sense of déjà vu.
The old boy seemed to be turning up everywhere
. “Napoleon’s army found it. Around 1800?”

“Seventeen ninety-nine. Bonaparte had led a campaign into Egypt in ’98. Having effectively conquered the country, he brought in scientists and archaeologists to rape us of our treasures in the name of ‘historical discovery.’ The Stone was found in Rashid—an area the French referred to as Rosetta at the time. The history books are sadly incomplete with regard to exactly what happened to the Stone over the next two years, after Napoleon returned to France, leaving his men here to continue their work.”

“Didn’t the British also invade Egypt around that time?” Gabriel asked.

“Yes. The British
and
the Ottomans. They decided to challenge the French, using my country as a battleground. The French took the Rosetta Stone to Alexandria along with numerous other bits of plunder, in an attempt to keep it all out of their enemies’ hands, but it didn’t work. The British prevailed, the French surrendered. The French commander, a man named de Menou, tried to keep the Rosetta Stone for himself as personal property. But that ended as you might expect.”

“With the Stone in the British Museum.”

“Precisely.”

“So what about this second tablet?”

Amun poured himself another glass of mint tea. “Are you sure you won’t have a drink, Mister Hunt? You know it is an insult to refuse hospitality from an Arab.”

“How do I know the tea’s not drugged?” Gabriel said.

“You don’t,” Amun said. “If I wish to drug you, Mister Hunt, you will be drugged. If I wish to kill you, you will be killed. Now drink your tea.”

Gabriel lifted the glass to his lips, sniffed, and took a sip.

“You see?” Amun said. “Not everything is a threat, my friend.”

“Let’s get one thing straight. We’re not friends.”

Amun shrugged. “Perhaps we will be once you have laid hands on the most important archaeological discovery in the history of the Western world.”

“Don’t bet on it,” Gabriel said.

“Mister Hunt. You can pretend all you like, you will not convince me that you are not curious.”

“Sure I’m curious. I’d have been more curious if you hadn’t kidnapped my sister.”

“Perhaps,” Amun said. “But you would have been less likely to turn the Stone over to us rather than to one of your museums once you’d found it.”

“How do you even know this second tablet exists? I’ve never heard about it.”

“Yes, well. That is in the nature of secrets: few people hear of them. And this one was kept very secret indeed.” Amun raised a hand to stop Gabriel from interrupting. “The Second Stone, as we have come to call it, was a good deal smaller than the first and buried quite a bit deeper in the ground. Napoleon’s brother Louis found it after the main excavation was completed. He unearthed it with the assistance of his private secretary and kept it for the emperor, as a gift. When Louis returned to France in 1799, he brought the Second Stone back with him. But he couldn’t restrain himself and
described it to his brother in a private letter sent in advance by courier. We have that letter.”

“How do you know he was telling the truth about it?” Gabriel said.

“You think he would lie to his brother? To Napoleon Bonaparte? No, no, it was the truth. When he arrived and presented the Second Stone to Napoleon, the emperor was overjoyed. He spent a week sequestered with the piece and summoned one of his most trusted advisors to his side to examine it with him. We have that letter as well.”

“Is that all you’ve got—a couple of letters? I mean, they might fetch a good price at Christie’s, but . . .”

“That is not all we have,” Amun said. “We have been searching for the Second Stone for well over thirty years, Mister Hunt. We have chased down false leads by the dozen, we have questioned people who we thought might be harboring information about its whereabouts, and one halting, painful step at a time, we have drawn closer to its hiding place. And we believe we have now found it.”

“So why don’t you go get it, if you know where it is?”

“We know
generally
where it is,” Amun said, “not precisely. And we also know that the location is protected, both mechanically and by a secret society sworn to keep the Second Stone ever from coming to light again.”

“What do you mean, ‘mechanically’?”

“When Napoleon finished his examination of the Second Stone, he ordered the aide he had summoned—an engineer of some repute—to take the Stone to Napoleon’s birthplace in Corsica and hide it there, in a cave near Ajaccio. Napoleon worked closely with this engineer to design the hiding place. We believe the vault in
which the Second Stone was placed contains a number of traps—deadly ones, Mister Hunt, based on Napoleon’s own ideas. To prevent the Stone from being found or stolen, you understand.”

“And the secret society?”

“That was Louis’s doing. He organized the group to keep watch over the Stone’s location. This small group of Corsicans has passed the knowledge down, father to son, through ten generations. They still exist today.”

“And how do you know that? Another letter?”

“No, Mister Hunt,” Amun said. “Much simpler than that. We succeeded in capturing one of them. He told us much before he died.”

“But not the location of the cave.”

“Not its precise location, no. He would have, eventually. But he was too weak. His heart . . .” Amun made a gesture with one hand, a closed fist opening.

A second Rosetta Stone. Gabriel was having some trouble wrapping his brain around the idea. It would be a treasure, to be sure—a priceless one that men might die to possess. But why would they die to keep its mere existence a secret?

“What’s so special about this Second Stone? There’s got to be something more to it than its archeological significance.”

Amun smiled. He leaned forward across the table. “After seeing what was inscribed on the Second Stone, Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Europe. He was a strong soldier before—but after, for a time . . . ? He was unstoppable. He was a god.”

Gabriel put both hands on the arms of his chair, started to stand. Kemnebi stepped closer.

“What is it, Mister Hunt?” Amun said. “We are not done.”

“Oh, yes we are,” Gabriel said. “I’m not searching for some magic stone you think will give you the power to conquer the world.”

“Don’t be rash,” Amun said. “Your sister will die if you walk out of here now. And so will you.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Gabriel said. “How good a magic stone could it have been? Napoleon lost!”

“Sit down!” Amun snatched up Gabriel’s Colt and pulled back the hammer. “Or would you rather be shot with your own gun?”

Gabriel sat.

“First of all, Mister Hunt, I did not say it was a
magic
stone. I only said it was contemporaneous with the Rosetta Stone and contained an inscription of sufficient interest that Napoleon spent a week examining it.”

“Examining what?” Gabriel said, exasperated. “He couldn’t have read it—the Rosetta Stone itself wasn’t even translated for twenty more years!”

“Be that as it may. He inspected it, and somehow emerged changed. Transformed. By all accounts, it was the inscription on the Second Stone that gave him the power to achieve what he did. You may call it magic if you wish; I prefer to think of it as the will of the old gods, those who gave the pharaohs their power. Bonaparte gained power he should never have had. He gained . . . I am not sure what to call it. Charisma. The mantle of a great leader. Whatever along these lines he had before was multiplied a hundredfold. A thousandfold. He became the Napoleon of history books, the famed emperor of Europe. He was a changed man.”

“Who
lost
!”

“Yes, ultimately. He made some serious mistakes and was brought down—but he came closer to dominating the world than anyone since Alexander or Genghis Khan.”

“Did they have magic stones too?”

“Who knows? Perhaps. All we care about is what Bonaparte had.” Amun took another swallow of his tea. His hand was shaking now, very slightly, and Gabriel saw sweat dotting his brow. The man was not completely unflappable. “He had no right to it,” Amun said. “It was ours—it was Egypt’s. The stone and the power it conveyed. And you are going to help us get it back.”

Gabriel stood once more. Kemnebi leaned toward him, grinding the knuckles of one enormous hand against the palm of the other.

“I’m not leaving,” Gabriel said. “Just need the bathroom. Too much tea.”

Amun nodded at Kemnebi. “Show him where it is.”

The big man extended one long arm, pointing. He followed close behind as Gabriel walked between two tall piles of rugs. A wooden door stood open and through it Gabriel could see a small cubicle with a sink and commode.

He shut the door behind him, unbuckled his belt, and went through the motions of using the facility, trusting the sound to travel through the thin door. Meanwhile, he reached into his jacket pocket and dug out his cell phone. He saw a text message from Sammi on the screen:

That was all there was. Just the three words, and the third possibly not even complete.
That’s the problem
. . . ?
That’s the professional
. . . ? What had she meant to
type—and what had prevented her from finishing the message?

Pressing the phone’s tiny loudspeaker tightly against his ear to muffle its sound, Gabriel thumbed the icon to dial Sammi’s cell phone. It rang just once and then went to voice mail.

Damn
.

After zipping his pants and washing his hands, Gabriel swung the door open.

Kemnebi and Amun were standing there, waiting for him. Before Gabriel could say a word, Kemnebi grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and slammed him against the wall. The big man patted him down until he felt the phone through Gabriel’s jacket. He groped inside and held it aloft like a prize.