The Alexandria Connection (42 page)

T
hree a.m. O’Connor put Aleta out of his mind as he crossed the Calle Ghetto Vecchio bridge. The Campo del Ghetto Nuovo square was deserted, and he made his way silently toward the narrow cobblestoned alley, and to Galleria d’Arte Rubinstein’s entrance, a wooden door at the far end.

O’Connor smiled grimly to himself. The entrance was unmarked and there was no sign of a burglar alarm. Perhaps the last thing Rubinstein wanted was the Italian
polizia
poking around his gallery and he relied on anonymity for security. If you had business with the dark side of the art world you would know where to go. The door was heavy and old, and the lock was almost as old – a ‘five-pin and tumbler’ barrel lock. He delved into his shoulder bag and extracted a small tension wrench and a selection of picks. Two minutes later, the old door swung easily on its heavily oiled hinges and O’Connor closed it gently behind him and listened. Nothing. He switched on his torch and made his way through a strangely sparse display room, down a stone passage and into a back room. O’Connor closed the door, and confident it would not be seen from the passage or square outside, he switched on the light and looked around.

Neatness was not one of Rubinstein’s long suits, he thought, as he was confronted with two heavy desks, piled high with papers, art magazines and other paraphernalia. Set in the stone wall on the far side of what appeared to be Rubinstein’s office was the heavy steel door of an old combination safe with a single dial.

O’Connor extracted a stethoscope from his bag, spun the dial to clear the tumblers and placed the stethoscope diaphragm on the gradations. He turned the dial very slowly to the right until the cam and lever mechanism engaged with a click. Standard 25 as the last number, he thought.

Working slowly, as he’d been taught on his course by an old master safecracker recruited from the dark side, O’Connor rocked the dial back and forth until he picked up a soft
nikt
on 68. A while later, he picked up another
nikt
on 52 and he allowed himself another grim smile as the final
nikt
in his earpiece fell on 33. He quickly cleared the tumblers, and dialed in the combination. The rusty handle turned with a clunk and he swung the vault door open.

O’Connor let out a low whistle as he recognised a Picasso, a Monet, a Gauguin and a Matisse, the proceeds of a break-in to the Kunsthal art gallery in Rotterdam in the Netherlands; but it was the old locked trunk in the corner of the vault that caught his eye.

He had it open in an instant, and he extracted the first of several leather journals and thumbed through what was clearly one of Rubinstein’s
real
books of account, arranged by client, in alphabetical order. It took less than a minute to find the transactions attributable to Crowley, and O’Connor let out another whistle. He ran his eye over a voluminous list of priceless stolen art: a Rembrandt and a Vermeer from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Turner’s 1813
Landscape in Devonshire
, and Vincent van Gogh’s
Poppy Flowers
. The criminal world no longer surprised O’Connor, but the sheer audacity of the last entry was extraordinary: ‘Funerary mask of Tutankhamun €110 million’. Perhaps even more importantly, a very minor stolen Egyptian artifact had, three years earlier, been consigned by courier, to a villa in the mountains north of Sartène on the island of Corsica.

O’Connor photographed the pages relevant to Crowley and turned his attention to the Khan entries. The list was not as extensive, but again, it was the last entry that caught his attention: ‘Tutakhamun falcon pendant €60 million’.

He photographed the Khan entries and relocked the old trunk.

As the CIA Gulfstream jet levelled off at 30 000 feet, O’Connor eased into one of the secure communications stations and put on the headphones for an encrypted call back to Langley. He briefed McNamara on what he’d discovered in Rubinstein’s art gallery, and then listened as McNamara brought him up to speed on the FBI raid on EVRAN.

‘The FBI have uncovered a commercial intelligence operation in EVRAN headquarters that would rival what we’ve got here,’ said McNamara. ‘While that’s not illegal in itself, it would appear that Davis was in possession of Walter Cronkwell’s script before the debate. That will send the media into a tailspin and call the whole Davis candidacy into question, but that’s not our problem. The question is, where is Crowley? Because I’m hoping Crowley will also lead us to the whereabouts of Badawi and Aleta, over.’

‘Hopi One Four, roger . . . the address I gave you for Crowley’s Corsican villa puts it in the hills above Sartène, and if Khan’s aircraft is headed for Figari Sud-Corse, there’s a strong chance that he’s headed for the villa as well. If Crowley can’t be found in Dallas it may be that he’s in Corsica too. Let’s hope so, over.’

‘Roger . . . I’ve been in touch with my contacts in Paris. They’ve agreed we should search the villa, but they’ve also told me it’s heavily guarded, so they’re readying a detachment from their Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale.’

O’Connor nodded as he listened. He’d worked with the group before and it was one of the best. A special forces unit of the French military, they were specifically trained to deal with counter-terrorist and hostage rescue missions.

‘Given the circumstances, and what we have riding on this, the French have agreed to a joint mission, which will be launched from Figari Sud-Corse, and I put that about 50 kilometres from Crowley’s villa. I didn’t want you to feel lonely, and since they’ve been with you from the start, your Korengal team is inbound to Corsica as we speak. As to the Pharos Group, the trading on the stock market by the Crédit Group of banks has come to the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and we’ve sent them across a top-secret brief. Apparently it’s raised more than a few eyebrows, and our chief of station in Cairo is liaising with his counterparts to organise a raid on the Kashta Palace in Alexandria.’

O’Connor moved back to one of the big, comfortable leather chairs in the cabin, and as the pilots changed course for Corsica, he once again had to detach himself from his feelings for Aleta.

C
rowley pushed the button under his desk in the stone-walled study of his château, and the huge 80-inch screen rose silently from the sideboard. He flicked on CNC to get an update on the election, but he first had to sit through images of the continuing panic on the streets of London, Chicago, Sydney and Melbourne. When the anchor finally got to the election, Crowley listened intently for any mention of what might have happened in Dallas.

‘So in summary, Susan,’ Cronkwell concluded, ‘when Americans go to the polls on Tuesday, it looks as if a sizeable majority will be voting for Carter Davis.’

‘That’s right, Walter. Even in normally solid Democrat states like Illinois and Delaware, people are worried about their jobs. People have a lot of respect for Campbell, though here’s what one woman in Delaware had to say.’ A woman in her late fifties appeared on screen, outside a store in West Loockerman Street.

‘Don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for Hailey . . . a lot of respect. And I admire her determination to tackle global warming, but I work for a big chemical and pharmaceutical company. I’ve still got a mortgage and I’m worried about my job, so I’ll have to vote for Carter Davis – not so much because he’s a committed Christian and an upright man, although I think we need that in a president, but because I think he’ll do the best for the economy.’

‘If the polls are right, Walter, come inauguration day, it will no longer be Governor Davis, but
President
Davis.’

‘That was Susan Murkowski, reporting from Governor Davis’s home state of Montana, where the governor is spending the last day of the campaign.’

Crowley flicked off the broadcast. Despite the Dallas incident, the journalist hadn’t reported it. Perhaps it wasn’t nearly as serious as Bannister had made out. Oblivious to the FBI raid on his headquarters and his estate, Crowley’s spirits rose. Things were getting untidy, and although the Egyptian media and some international media were carrying the story, he was confident no connection had been made between him and the disappearance of Badawi and Weizman. As soon as they had deciphered the Euclid Papyrus, Ruger could eliminate both them and Bannister in the one hit.

‘We need to delay on this as long as possible, Hassan,’ Aleta said. Since their arrival in Corsica, they’d been locked in a stone-walled section of the middle floor of the villa. ‘I’ve got a feeling that Crowley’s need to have this translated without letting anyone else know what’s in it is the only thing keeping us alive.’

Professor Badawi nodded. ‘I agree. And it’s easy to see why. I think Euclid’s interpretation of the drawings of Khufu’s engineers is very accurate. When you think about it, there’s a lot of energy tied up in the planet, and I’m not talking about fossil fuels – there’s magnetic, thermal, electrical . . . a whole range of sources, including what Khufu’s engineers discovered about vibrations and frequency resonance. We can hear the hum of an aircraft engine, but if you slow those revolutions down to the earth’s rate of once in every twenty-four hours, we can’t.’

Aleta nodded, looking at the notes on the papyrus. ‘Exactly. The earth’s pulse would be huge, but inaudible. From what I’m reading here, Khufu’s engineers managed to tap into the earth’s vibrations and use them as a source of unlimited energy.’

‘We’ve always gone with the herd’s tomb theory,’ said Badawi, ‘but the Euclid Papyrus blows that out of the water.’

Aleta nodded, staring at the hieroglyphics. ‘It’s all here. The Egyptians built this massive pyramid, designing it as a precise mathematical correlation of the dimensions of the earth . . . that much we’ve known for some time. But this is proof they found a way to convert the earth’s vibrational energy into what we know as microwave energy – with the pyramid’s very precise dimensions enabling it to vibrate in harmony with the earth. That energy was channeled through a series of resonators in the grand gallery and converted into airborne sound which passed through an acoustic filter in the antechamber, and on in to the King’s Chamber.’

‘And that explains why the chamber was devoid of the usual hieroglyphics and why, instead of being made from limestone blocks, the walls were made out of specially quarried granite,’ said Badawi. Despite their grave predicament, the old professor was excited. The mystery had puzzled him for decades.

‘And if you look here,’ Aleta continued, pointing to another papyrus leaf, ‘the King’s Chamber was constructed with dimensions that created a resonance that was in harmony with the incoming sound. The specially quarried granite then vibrated in sympathy, stressing the quartz in the granite, which started a flow of electrons.’

‘What today we call the piezoelectric effect,’ Badawi agreed. ‘It’s quite extraordinary – so complex, yet so simple.’

‘Curtis would be proud of me,’ Aleta said, smiling wistfully, ‘even though I’m only reading Euclid’s notes. By this point the Egyptians had generated enormous and unlimited acoustic and electron or electromagnetic energy. The hydrogen which was produced down in the Queen’s Chamber, resonating at the same frequency, absorbed the energy from the King’s Chamber, and the single electron in the hydrogen atom was pumped up to a higher energy state.’

‘In other words, the hydrogen now has energy stored in trillions upon trillions of atoms. We know the northern shaft to the Kings chamber was originally lined with metal. Khufu’s engineers would have used those to focus a low-energy beam . . . the same cosmic microwave background beams that are constantly bombarding the earth today. This would have then reacted with the highly energised hydrogen atoms, forcing the electrons back to their original state and releasing the stored energy, generating an immensely powerful beam that could then be channelled out through the metal-lined southern shaft. The Egyptians would have then harnessed that power, which explains why many of their constructions have been planed to within thousandths of an inch.’ Badawi let out a low whistle. ‘The existence of this papyrus has been rumoured around the souks for decades, and I suspect Crowley must have had some inkling of just how explosive this technology is . . . it could consign his precious fossil fuel industry to the past.’

Aleta’s eyes lit up. ‘We may have found a way to leave the oil in the ground!’ And then just as quickly her spirits sagged as the door opened and Crowley entered.