The Jericho Deception: A Novel (42 page)

Ethan followed the British tour group down a stone ramp lined on both sides with dozens of ram-headed sphinxes, poised like an army of sentries guarding the main gate into the temple complex. The massive walls on either side of the gate towered at least seven stories over them. He walked through a world of beige: the sand, the stone pavers they walked upon, the blocks in the walls, even the sphinxes, were the same desert color.

“Stay together, now,” Robin called with her umbrella held high above her head.

Ethan stuck to the rear of the group, close enough to appear to be part of them, but ready to separate the moment he saw Rachel and Mousa. He darted his eyes through the crowd, scanning every face. The anticipation of seeing Rachel again fueled him with an energy he hadn’t had since their escape. The tour group had taken over fifteen minutes to disembark the bus, gathering cameras and passing out water bottles and tickets. He’d tried to look for his friends in the parking lot, but it was simply too big and crowded. He had no idea whether he was the first one to arrive or if they were waiting for him inside.

When Robin led them through the gate in the entrance wall, Ethan stopped and stared. The temple complex was larger than he’d imagined. Giant columns, monumental statues, obelisks that pierced the pure blue sky, and fallen blocks and rubble stretched for hundreds of yards in every direction as far as he could see.

“This way, please.” Robin walked toward a stone statue of an Egyptian pharaoh so tall the top of her head only came up to its calf.

He craned his neck upward and admired the three-thousand-year-old craftsmanship. The male figure stood with his feet together, wearing a tunic of smooth stone over a long body; his arms were crossed on his chest. The face had round features with almond eyes and a wide nose. A smaller statue of a woman, carved out of the same giant block of stone, came up to the pharaoh’s knees.

“Ramses the Second,” Robin said when the group gathered in a semicircle around her in front. She had Ethan’s full attention. This was where Mousa had said to wait for them. He searched the crowd again.

“As we discussed in Abu Simbel, Ramses’s reign as Pharaoh over seven decades in the thirteenth century BC was the longest and one of the most spectacular in the history of Egypt.”

“He certainly liked to build statues of himself,” a man to Ethan’s left said. “Was he compensating for something?”

Robin laughed. “He was one of the most prolific builders in ancient Egypt. The country also prospered under his reign. He was considered to be not just the ruler but an actual god.” She pointed upward. “Who remembers the significance of the figure with crossed arms holding a crook and a flail in his hands?”

A stooped-over woman with a silk shawl draped over her head answered from the front row, “He’s in the form of Osiris, god of the afterlife.”

“Exactly. Note the difference to that one.” She pointed to another monumental statue of Ramses on the opposite side of the walkway. “There he’s standing with one foot in front of the other and his arms by his side. That’s the depiction of Ramses in a living state.”

“So we have the pharaoh pictured as a ruler both in this life and the next one,” the stooped woman said.

“Wasn’t Osiris resurrected from the dead, like Jesus?” said Durward, the man with the safari hat whom Ethan had followed onto the bus.

“The myth of Osiris is probably the oldest tale of resurrection we know of,” Robin replied. “Evidence of Osiris worship dates back twenty-four-hundred
years—two and a half millennia—before Christ. His brother, the evil god Set, kills Osiris and dismembers him in order to assume his throne. But the goddess Isis, Osiris’s sister and wife, resurrects him by reassembling his parts. He then goes on to become the god of the underworld, the god who judges those deemed worthy of having eternal life by weighing their hearts on a scale. We’ll see depictions of this scene from the Egyptian Book of the Dead when we visit the tombs in the Valley of the Kings tomorrow.”

Ethan found the parallels to the story of Jesus fascinating: overcoming death, the battle of good versus evil, the moral judgment of human lives by a higher power. He’d taught in his classes how the religious myths common to ancient cultures arose from a human psychological need to make sense of the presence of evil in the world and to believe that justice ultimately prevails. These myths also helped to alleviate people’s fear of their own mortality through belief in an idyllic afterlife that made the suffering of this world tolerable.

Staring at the imposing stone king silhouetted against the azure sky, Ethan wondered for the first time whether that explanation was complete. The memory of his vision the previous day flashed through his mind again. He didn’t believe the miracle stories of people rising from the dead were historical events. Such things only happened in ancient times prior to the scientific worldview present today.

But what if the everyday physical reality in which he lived, a reality he knew to be finite, was not the entire story? As he pondered the possibility that his vision held truth, the sight of the person ahead of him in a maze of columns shocked him out of his thoughts.

The security in the Karnak complex was much tighter than Axe would have liked. The Egyptians guarding the ancient site were not the rent-a-cops one might find at a monument in the US. These guys were military, and they were well armed. He would have to act quickly when he spotted the professor. Lightman’s death would be seen as an unfortunate robbery. But first he had to find him amidst the hordes of tourists and the ruins.

He moved toward a set of giant columns seven stories tall that were part of an ancient temple whose roof had long since fallen and been replaced by a cloudless blue sky. He froze in place.

The Jordanian doctor!

Mousa walked among the columns at the opposite end of the temple. Axe’s pulse quickened. Then he saw the girl with him. He couldn’t suppress the smile that spread across his face. They must have come to rendezvous with Lightman. His job had just become much easier. Wolfe would be ecstatic.

“These columns are huge!” Rachel ran her fingers along the hieroglyphics carved into a stone column twenty feet in diameter and seventy feet tall.

“The Great Hypostyle Hall,” Mousa said as they walked through the rows of columns in the fifty-thousand-square-foot temple. “The columns used to hold up a roof.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“With my family two years ago.”

He was so close to returning to his loved ones. He’d called his wife the moment they’d arrived at the hotel. When she’d put Amira on the phone, both father and daughter had cried so hard they’d had trouble understanding each other. The temptation to leave Luxor yesterday and race to the Jordanian embassy in Cairo had been intense. But he owed his life to the American doctor, and he had promised him he would take care of the delightful woman he had escaped with.

“So this is where you told Ethan to meet us?”

“Any minute.”

“Any sign of the professor?” Axe spoke into his sleeve while he tracked his two targets.

“Negative,” Dawkins voice came over his earpiece. “There’s a shitload of tour buses here.”

No matter
. He would take care of these two first and then deal with Lightman.

He bent over, feigning scratching his calf, and slipped the five-inch K-bar knife out from his boot. He flipped the blade around, concealing it against his wrist and forearm. When they disappeared behind the next column, he advanced forward, keeping the maze of stone between him and his prey.

Other than the tour group he’d just passed outside the temple, he saw only a few others walking among the columns. Rachel and Mousa were isolated. It was the perfect time to strike.

Ethan felt paralyzed. James Axelrod had just walked passed him. When the security man had swiveled his orange-tinted sunglasses in his direction, he’d ducked behind Durward’s wide safari hat. Now the huge man bent over not thirty yards from him and removed something shiny from his boot.

“Does anyone recognize this?” Robin pointed to the hieroglyphics carved on an eight-foot-cubed block that had once been part of a larger wall.

“A Coptic cross,” Durward replied.

The historical discussion barely registered for Ethan. The blood drained from his head the moment he saw what held Axe’s attention. Walking amongst the giant columns were Rachel and Mousa. From their vantage point they couldn’t see Axe. Then a realization sucked the air from his lungs:
He’s stalking them with a knife!

“Why would there be a Coptic cross in the middle of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics?” the woman in the shawl asked loudly.

Ethan willed his feet to come unglued from the stone.

“Notice this scratched-out area at the top of the cross,” Robin said

“It used to be something else.”

“Exactly. Originally it was an ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol for the key of eternal life. Tomorrow, when we visit the Valley of the Kings, you’ll see ankhs depicted in every tomb painting, usually in the hands of a god leading the deceased emperor into the afterlife. Look here.” She pointed to the top of the cross where the ankh had been defaced. “The loop at the top part of the ankh represents the delta of the Nile. The vertical line running down from the loop represents the Nile itself, the source of life in ancient Egypt, and”—she
traced the horizontal section of the cross—“the horizontal line of the ankh signifies the unification of the eastern and western parts of Egypt.”

“So why did they turn the ankh into a cross?” asked the woman wearing the shawl.

“As Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the Romans converted many of the ancient Egyptian temples into Christian churches. Tragically, they often destroyed the hieroglyphics; in some cases, like this one, they converted the Egyptian symbols into Christian ones.”

As the lecture continued, Ethan looked around for the police he’d passed at the entrance into the temple complex. Of course they were omnipresent when he didn’t need one, but now, in the heat of the afternoon, they were probably chatting in the shadow of the main entrance wall.

He was on his own. His skin tingled.