The Deceit (34 page)

At last Helen said, ‘We have to get off this boat. The police will interview Albert.’

‘If he can speak.’

‘The police will talk to him,’ she said. ‘That kid on the little moto, he will have seen us: they will be looking for two Westerners in a little boat like this, we will not be hard to find.’

She was exactly right. Ryan scanned the next curve. The growing traffic on the riverside road showed they were near a town. It must be Kom Ombo – the City of Gold – with its great temple to Sobek, the crocodile god. There would be tourists here, if there were tourists anywhere between Luxor and Aswan. Maybe some backpackers, maybe some Russians undeterred by riots. And there would be cruise boats.

Yes. That was surely the answer. Going by train or plane was impossible: the airports and stations would be under surveillance. Travelling by road was equally risky: army checkpoints became ever more frequent the nearer you got to Luxor.

But a tourist cruise boat? That would be entirely anonymous. The few still operating would be desperate for business; and the cruise boats never got stopped. As long as they stayed on the boat, they could expect to reach Qena unmolested, and from there maybe they could hire a private vessel.

Ryan tillered the boat up to a small jetty. Rope tied, bags hauled, they climbed the steep riverside stairs, up the sandstone banks, and emerged onto the road.

As they watched for a taxi, Helen said, ‘This is not the answer. We do not have the answer.’

‘What?’

‘We have
not
solved it. I do not believe our solution. Something very important is still missing. Think about Sassoon. Would he really have killed himself because of a revelation like this? Really? The discovery is not entirely new. We have more facts, more proof – but it is not revolutionary. And what has happened to Albert?’ She shook her head. Angrily. ‘Has he been poisoned?’

A cab pulled over. The driver was a headscarved woman – extremely unusual. She looked their way as Ryan leaned towards her window, asking in Arabic, ‘Can you take us to the centre of town, to the main pier? We need a cruise boat.’

The woman nodded and they climbed in. The car joined the dinged and rusty traffic heading for the town centre. Donkey carts and Toyotas, bareboned horses and the odd gleaming limo. The car stalled at a clot of traffic. A man, squatting on the roadside, in a filthy turban and an even filthier djellaba, leered at Helen and her blonde hair.

Helen was oblivious. She spoke, staring straight ahead. ‘Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the Beast.’

‘What?’

‘Reckon the number. That is it, Ryan
.
That is what he is telling us. About the Greek words. It’s
isopsephy.
Numerology.’

‘I don’t get it.’

Helen turned. ‘Numerology. It is a code. The Greek words are not a curse or a chant or a spell: the letters mean numbers. That is why Macarius left that clue on the line directly before. He was telling us straight out.
Reckon the number of the Beast
. We have to
reckon the number
.’

Ryan felt the flush of excitement. Helen was quite possibly right. And if she was right, what did that mean? What revelation could be worse, for a Jewish scholar, than what they already knew? That Judaism and Christianity were fake?

‘Kom Ombo,’ said the taxi driver, gesturing. ‘You can take the boat.’

The purser of the cruiser
Hypatia
took one look at Ryan’s sweating face and tattered backpack and Helen’s similar state of disrepair; then shrugged and said ‘Sure.’
He looked like a man who didn’t care, whose business was dying, and so he might as well pocket the two-hundred-dollar bribe offered by Ryan and allow them on board. For another hundred dollars he would probably have let them enslave his children.

It no doubt helped, Ryan thought, that he so obviously desired Helen, giving her a sickly smile as she dragged her bag onto the deck.

The purser led them to a corridor of cabins. ‘Take your pick. There are seventy to choose from.’

They chose the very first cabin. It was small and bright with a Victorian engraving of Abu Simbel on the wall and a brass-ringed porthole. Ryan couldn’t help peering out, nervously, to see if Israeli commandos were pulling alongside in a fast black dinghy. Knives at the ready.

The purser was still watching, from the open door of the cabin. ‘You are being pursued,
effendi
?’

It was obviously a joke. But it stung. Ryan shook his head. ‘Ah no, just … it’s just—’

Helen interrupted. ‘We’ve been travelling by road for days, it will be a pleasure to sail on the Nile. When do we depart?’

The purser looked at his watch. ‘Any minute. The dinner is at seven, the entertainment is at nine. You do not have to book.’ He shut the door.

As became apparent, the purser was right: they certainly didn’t have to book. This was a phantom boat sailing the Nile. The
Hypatia
, with its crew of dozens and its handsome mahogany fittings, was designed for one hundred passengers; and it had maybe ten. There were more staff than diners at dinner. The man who carved the ice sculpture seemed to be in tears.

But all of Egypt was in tears. There was a TV in the corner of the restaurant showing the BBC news in English from Cairo: tear gas and mayhem, a fatal bombing in a business district. ‘Meanwhile, in Moqqatam, a Coptic quarter of the city, further violent clashes continued for the second day, as demonstrators burned down a clinic—’

The nation of Egypt was sickening; maybe it was dying. The Zabaleen, the Muslims, everyone. Ryan stared at the melting ice sculpture and remembered Rhiannon, in Cairo’s Christian hospital, the day
she
died: clutching at his arm, her heartbeat fluttering. He remembered the way the malarial fever had risen inside her, like a remorseless flood, taking the baby, then seizing Rhiannon.

The memories were, still, unbearable. Even as he’d kissed her he had known it was probably the last occasion he would kiss her. Goodbye, goodbye.

The purser switched off the TV, with its distressing news. Ryan and Helen glanced at each other, and shifted into the ballroom. They had to act like
proper
tourists: they couldn’t just stay in their cabin and work the code; so they sat in the big ballroom, and listened to the first few songs by the bosomy Egyptian singer in the disco room, where two old German ladies sat staring at the ceiling, and one young Russian couple danced by the tinsel-decked stage.

‘OK. Shall we go?’ She stood up.

‘No. Upstairs on the deck.’ Ryan gestured upwards. ‘You have your phone? We can get better reception there.’

‘But upstairs is dangerous? We agreed.’

‘Not at night. No one can see us, no satellite, no one. I’ve been on these boats before, they keep the light subdued so you can see the stars. Come on, I need the air.’

The desert stars were indeed beautiful. Long-armed Nut, the Goddess of Night, had littered the lovely blackness with all of the family diamonds.

‘You know, if we’re going to die,’ said Ryan, ‘this is a good place to do it. On the Nile.’ He stared at the passing scenery, barely lit by the moonlight. A few crackling woodfires glimmered in the fields. It was beautiful, even sublime. The banks rose in sandstone cliffs, then subsided to mud. The next stop was Edfu, tomorrow morning.

‘We are not going to die,’ said Helen, squeezing his hand. ‘But if we are, then I am glad I met you first.’

He kissed her, twice. They were the only people on the deck of the
Hypatia
. The mystery was theirs. If they could solve it.

At last, Ryan extracted his notebook. ‘Right, let’s test your theory. Finally.’

‘The quote about the Beast. We need to investigate that first.’ Helen keyed her smartphone, and read: ‘The Number of the Beast, from the Greek:
Arithmon tou Thēriou,
is a term in the Book of Revelation.’

‘And?’

Helen recited from the corresponding webpage: ‘“Theologians usually support the interpretation that the phrase ‘the Number of the Beast’ refers to pagan numerology, where every letter has a corresponding number.”’ She scanned the screen, and went on. ‘“For instance, 666 is the equivalent of the name and title, Nero Caesar, the Roman emperor; however, Protestant reformers have equated the
Beast of the earth
, of Revelation, chapter 13, with the papacy.”’

‘But what is isopsephy?’

Helen pressed her glowing phone and its light shone in the moonlit dark, like a tablet of illumination; the very stele of revealing. ‘“
Isopsephy
, from
isos
meaning ‘equal’ and
psephos
meaning ‘pebble’, is the Greek word for a special kind of numerology, derived from the fact the early Greeks used pebbles arranged in patterns to learn arithmetic.”’

‘But how do we know our guy would be using this … isopsephy?’

‘Because,’ Helen sounded a little triumphant, ‘the very earliest example of true isopsephy comes from Philo of Alexandria, and the form was perfected by Leonidas, also of Alexandria, in the first and second centuries.’ Her blonde hair was nearly white in the starlight as she gazed at Ryan. ‘So, you see? If we presume our man is a Hellenized Coptic scholar, who saw Alexandria as his intellectual capital—’

‘Which he did.’

‘Then this
isopsephy
is what he would use, if he wanted to use numerology to encode something crucial. In the Greek riddle.’

Ryan smiled. But he was suppressing his resurgent worries. What if Albert had recovered, and the Egyptian police had interviewed him? The cops would definitely want to catch Ryan and Helen. Two people had probably died at Luxor. He and Helen had stolen the papyrus even if they had since lost it. And the Egyptians would want to know all about the Israeli connection. So far they had been protected by the chaos unfurling across Egypt.

‘So. Am I right?’ Helen pressed.

He tilted the notebook into the moonlight.

AFΓO, AEΘH, AAΘ, BEZ, BHF.

‘If you’re right, the first letter alpha, A, corresponds to 1. The second letter F, digamma, means 6.’

Helen wrote down the number 1 and 6 in her own notebook. Ryan continued, ‘Then we have gamma, Γ, or 3. Followed by omicron, O, which usually means zero.’

Helen read out the number. ‘So that makes 1630.’

‘Let’s do the rest.’

The cliffs and palms of Nilotic Upper Egypt paraded past them, in the nocturnal silence.

‘So there are our numbers.’ Helen read them out: ‘1630, 1598, 119, 257, 286.’ She paused. ‘They go down then back up.’

Ryan felt the initial tingle of understanding. ‘They could be dates. Years maybe. What four- and three-digit numbers go down then back like that? I can only think of one obvious sequence: the years
BC
and
AD
. No? They’re years.
They’re dates.
’ He pointed to her phone, as she swatted away a mosquito. ‘Check those dates, see what happened in those years.’

Helen keyed the numbers in. ‘1630
BC
– ah …’ She glanced back at Ryan. ‘The eruption of Santorini. That happened around 1630
BC
, it seems.’

‘Interesting, what about 1598
BC
?’

She keyed. And paused. ‘Not so much … Very vague. A Hittite king sacks Babylon. Senakhtere is Pharaoh. Maybe …’

‘OK. OK.’ Ryan was getting lost now. ‘The newer ones will be surely more accurate. 119
BC
: try that.’

‘Hipparcus replaces Eumarcus as archon of Athens.’ She squinted at the phone. ‘And the Han Chinese nationalize the production of salt.’

‘Maybe it’s 119
AD
?’

‘A rebellion against Rome. In Britain.’

Ryan pondered. A rebellion? Was this about rebellions? Eruptions? What? The solution dwindled even as they approached.

‘Hmm. Don’t see it. Try the next 257? 257
AD
?’

‘Goths invade Turkey.’ Helen sighed.

‘OK, let’s do the last, 286
AD
.’

The silence was brief, as Helen worked her phone. ‘A new emperor in Rome, Maximian. The empire is divided between him and Diocletian … And that is it. I cannot see an obvious pattern. Can you?’