The Pharaoh's Secret (24 page)

“No,” Joe replied quickly, “and I
am
an engineer. That water has to be coming from somewhere else.”

On the floor, a new argument broke out. This time, the words were more hushed and the flow of the conversation too quick to catch.

“Probably arguing about whether to get on the tram,” Joe suggested. “For the record, I wouldn't.”

“Unfortunately,” Kurt said, “that's exactly what we have to do.” He unzipped his own waterproof pouch, pulled out a 9mm Beretta and began easing down the stairs. “Let's go.”

Inside the security center of the Osiris hydroelectric plant, the malfunctioning camera had been detected. A security guard on duty had flipped through the options for resetting the camera and had tried everything from changing the contrast and brightness settings to cycling it on and off several times. When the effort failed, he called his supervisor.

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Looks like the sensor burned out,” the supervisor said. “We're still getting a little bit of detail around the edges, but everything else is just flared. Can you replace it?”

“As long as we have a new sensor,” the technician said. He went to a supply cabinet, rummaged through the boxes stacked on the shelf and found what he was looking for. “This is the one.”

“How long will it take?”

“No more than twenty minutes.”

“Better get to it,” the supervisor said, taking over the command seat in front of the computer screen and getting comfortable. “I'll wait here. Check in with me when you're ready to test it.”

The technician grabbed a set of tools and was about to step out when the camera came back online.

“That's strange,” the supervisor said. He cycled through the diagnostic checks. Everything suddenly looked fine.
But for how long?

“Better go replace it anyway,” he said. “If it's a bad sensor, it could go out again at any moment.”

The technician nodded and stepped out. The supervisor glanced at the clock on the wall. He had a little more than an hour to go before the third shift took over.

—

A mile from
the Osiris compound, Edo was already packing up. He folded the tripod and stowed it, snapped the lens caps over the laser emitter and the sighting unit and slid the entire thing into a box. He placed the box on the passenger seat so he'd be ready to toss it overboard should anyone stop him.

He gave the boat a shove, pushed it back into the river and climbed on board. Firing up the engine, he bumped the throttle to quarter speed. There was no need to draw attention to himself and no reason to hurry.

The plan was to wait a mile downstream from the Osiris plant. He would be near the west bank, sitting at anchor with every light in the boat switched on. Assuming the three infiltrators escaped
unharmed, they would drift down the river, spot him easily and swim up to the stern.

It was a simple plan, he thought. Simple plans were the best. There was little that could go wrong with them.
But,
the cautious part of his mind nagged at him,
little
did not mean
nothing.

He pulled a Russian-made pistol from a shoulder holster and advanced a shell into the chamber. He hoped he wouldn't need it, but he liked to be prepared.

Joe and Renata followed Kurt down the stairs, moving quickly and quietly. In single file, they cut across the floor of the generator room, arriving at the yawning section of the wall just as it began to close.

“Inside,” Kurt said, ducking into the darkness. Joe and Renata followed, and all three were in the tunnel when the door finished shutting.

The door sealed to the ground and the darkness was nearly complete. In the distance they could see the lights of the tram striking the walls and ceiling as it moved off.

Another tramcar sat empty on the rails beside them.

“Should I see if I can get this thing started?” Joe asked. “Or do we hike?”

Kurt looked down the line. The other car was speeding away, showing no signs of stopping.

The sound of its motor was reverberating off the walls. The strange, echoing acoustics made it hard to tell the distance, but these same acoustics would also make it difficult for the men inside it to realize they were being followed.

“Let's take the car,” Kurt said. “I've had my exercise for today.”

Joe climbed into the tramcar and found the controls. As Renata went aboard, Kurt went to smash the headlights.

“Or we could use the off switch,” Joe said. “Just a suggestion.”

Kurt held back. “A good one at that.”

Joe flipped a few switches and pulled a fuse just in case. He pressed the start button. Three small indicators on the control panel lit up, but nothing more. Like a golf cart, the battery-powered motor remained off until he pressed the throttle.

“All aboard.”

Kurt joined Renata in the back as Joe eased the throttle forward and the electric motors engaged. With a soft hum, the car moved into the darkness, traveling slowly and maintaining a separation of several hundred feet from the first tram.

The tunnel never veered, and the pipeline to their left was a constant companion.

“So what's this pipe for?” Renata asked in a hushed tone. “It's clearly headed away from the river.”

“It could be a storm drainpipe . . . for runoff,” Joe answered quietly.

“Seems a little large for a desert city that doesn't get much rain,” Renata said.

“Maybe the system from the city funnels into one place and then gets aggregated into this pipe.”

“It's not a storm drain,” Kurt said. “Water was pumping out of
it when we passed it in the river channel, but it hasn't rained here in weeks.”

“Then where's the water coming from?” Joe asked.

“No idea,” Kurt said.

“Maybe some other Osiris project we're not aware of,” Renata said.

“Maybe,” Kurt replied and then changed the subject. “The man in the suit. One of the Arabs called him Piola. You seemed to recognize that name. Do you know who he is?”

“Possibly,” she said. “Alberto Piola is one of the leaders in our parliament. He's been an outspoken critic of American interference in Egypt, especially Libya. It's a sore spot for him, and for many in my country, because Libya used to be our colony.”

“What would he be doing here?” Kurt asked. “Especially now when half the continent is falling apart?”

“Assuming I heard correctly, he's here to
negotiate
something. But exactly what that might be, your guess is as good as mine.”

“I think,” Kurt said, “that he's here to negotiate some kind of tribute to Osiris.”

“Tribute?” Renata said.

“Think about it,” he said. “Based on what former major Edo told us, Osiris has risen from nowhere to become a force of power. Shakir, the man who runs it, fancies himself a kingmaker. He was connected with the old guard. And the old guard, thrown out so quickly a couple of years ago, is now in full ascendance in all these other countries, rising up with a swiftness no one could have predicted. All of it aided by a sudden water shortage that no one can explain.”

He looked at them, they were waiting for more.

“Before we hijacked Paul and Gamay from their vacation, they were working with a Libyan hydrologist. I read the report on our flight down. Geology, mostly. But according to some tests Paul
rigged up, there's a deep aquifer underneath Libya that
was
feeding the water table up above. Suddenly, that water was on the move, creating a negative pressure instead of a positive one and rendering the pumps all but useless. And here we are, underneath the sands of Egypt, next to a pipeline you could drive a truck through, which seems to be drawing tons of water per second and just dumping it into the Nile.”

“Are you suggesting Osiris is causing the drought to foment the upheaval?” Renata asked.

“If there's a human cause, I don't see anyone else with a motive. Or the means.”

“And Piola?”

“He wants influence in Libya. That costs money. He's either here to pay or here to collect. Either way, he's part of this. And the drought is helping him.”

Joe studied the pipe. “I don't know how much water you'd have to draw out of an aquifer to cause what Paul was suggesting,” Joe said.

“It's a big pipe,” Kurt pointed out.

“Sure,” Joe said. “But not big enough.”

“How about nineteen of these?” Kurt asked. “According to their website, Osiris has nineteen hydroelectric plants online up and down the Nile. What if all of them are drawing water from the aquifer?”

Joe nodded. “Powered by the river itself. Ingenious.”

“So it's all connected. The Black Mist, the drought—it all leads back to Osiris.”

Ten minutes later, the scenery finally began to change. “A light at the end of the tunnel,” Renata whispered.

Kurt had a feeling it wasn't exactly
the end of the tunnel
, but at least it was another stop on the line.

For more than twenty minutes they'd been traveling in utter darkness, the only light coming from the soft glow of the instrument panel and the headlights of the tram up ahead of them.

“They seem to be slowing,” Joe said.

“Let's not get too close,” he said. “If they stop, I don't want them to hear us hitting the brakes.”

Joe slowed the car to a crawl. The vehicle ahead of them continued to reduce speed and then moved onto a siding, leaving the tunnel.

Joe stopped about a hundred yards from the opening and the three of them followed on foot.

When he reached the edge of the tunnel, Kurt peered around the corner.

What he saw surprised him. He looked back at his friends.

“Well?” Joe whispered. “Are we alone?”

“If you don't count a pair of eight-foot-tall guys with jackal heads and spears in their hands,” Kurt said. “Anubis.”

“You mean the Egyptian god?”

“Yes.”

Kurt moved aside so the others could see the details of the room, an overarching cavern with walls made of sand-colored stone illuminated by a series of lights connected to a snaking black cable. Egyptian art and hieroglyphics could be seen along one section, while another seemed to have crumbled. The two large statues stood beside the entrance to a hand-carved tunnel on the far wall.

“Where are we?” Renata asked.

“More like
when
are we?” Joe said. “We started in a modern hydroelectric plant and wound up in ancient Egypt. I feel like we just time-traveled back about four thousand years.”

Both the pipeline and the tunnel seemed to run arrow straight
along a westerly line. Recalling the satellite photos of the Osiris power plant, he remembered there was nothing to the west but congested streets filled with block after block of storefronts, warehouses and offices. Farther out, it became apartment buildings and small houses right out to the desert, where . . .

“You might not be too far off,” Kurt said.

“That's a first,” Joe said.

“Based on the speed of the tram and the time we were in the tunnel, I'd guess that we're five, maybe six miles west of the river.” He turned to Renata. “I think you're going to get your wish.”

“What wish was that?”

“To see the Pyramids up close,” he said. “By my calculations, we're right underneath them.”

“Underneath the Pyramids?” Renata asked.

“Or at least the Giza Plateau,” Kurt said.

“How far down?”

“Impossible to tell, but we seemed to have been descending for part of our journey and Giza is at least two hundred feet above the river level. We could be five hundred feet down or more.”

“Not really going to see the Pyramids, then, are we?”

Kurt looked around the room. Aside from the tunnel with the rails and the pipeline, the only way in or out of the room was the path guarded by the two statues of Anubis. “Not unless we catch up with the rest of the tour.”

“I'm surprised there aren't any guards,” Renata said.

Kurt replied, “Guards stand on the tower and watch outward. We're already in the heart of their stronghold.”

The tunnel was poorly lit, illuminated by bare low-wattage bulbs every seventy feet. In some places the passageway seemed like a natural fissure, in others it had clearly been hewn out of the rock by primitive tools and in certain sections farther on it had been shored up by modern methods.

After a downward section, the tunnel leveled off and ran straight. Along the walls were carved-out recesses reminiscent of the catacombs in Rome. Instead of holding human bodies, they contained mummified animals. Crocodiles, cats, birds and toads. Hundreds and hundreds of toads.

“The Egyptians mummified all kinds of things,” Joe said. “Crocodiles are a big one. Found in many tombs because of their connection with Sobek, one of their gods. Cats, because they could ward off evil spirits. Birds too. There's a huge crypt in a dark cave beside the Pyramids—perhaps right above us—called the Bird Tomb. Hundreds of mummified birds. No humans.”

“What about frogs,” Kurt said, examining a half-unwrapped bullfrog or toad. “Was there a frog god or something?”

Joe shrugged. “Not that I'm aware of.”

They kept on moving and soon arrived at the entrance to a brightly lit room. Kurt eased toward the opening. He had the sense of being on the balcony at the opera, about halfway up and to the side of the stage. Spread out in the open cavern below was enough floor space to mount a small convention. Modern lighting illuminated the room, but everything else was of ancient origin.

The walls were smooth and covered with hieroglyphics and paintings. One wall depicted a pharaoh being tended to by Anubis, another showed a green-skinned Egyptian god raising up a dead
pharaoh. A third panel displayed men with crocodile heads, swimming in the river, retrieving frogs or turtles.

“You're the resident Egyptologist,” Kurt said to Joe. “What's this all about?”

“The green-skinned guy is the same one we saw on the tablets in the museum. He's Osiris, god of the underworld. He decides who stays dead and who goes back to life. He also has something to do with bringing the crops to life and then making them go dormant at the end of the season.”

“Osiris bringing the dead back to life,” Kurt said. “How appropriate.”

“Those crocodile men are representatives of Sobek,” Joe said. “Sobek also has something to do with death and resurrection, having saved Osiris once when he was betrayed and cut into little pieces.”

Kurt nodded and took in the rest of the scene. In the center there was a long row of sarcophaguses. At the far end was a small version of the Sphinx covered in gold leaf and iridescent blue lapis lazuli. At the other end, almost directly beneath them, lay a pit filled with a couple feet of water and four large crocodiles.

One of them roared and swished violently as an interloper got too close.

“Somehow, I liked the mummified ones better,” Kurt said.

“They were certainly smaller,” Joe said.

It looked as if the pit below them was recessed several feet, apparently deep enough to keep the crocodiles contained as two men walked past them unconcerned and went into a tunnel at the far end of the room.

“Are you sure we're not
inside
one of the Pyramids?” Renata asked.

Joe shook his head. “I've been to Giza three times,” Joe added. “I don't remember this being on the tour.”

“It's incredible,” Kurt said. “I've heard rumors of caves and chambers under the Pyramids, but usually on those TV shows that insist aliens built everything and then left it all behind.”

“How would anyone build something like this?” Renata asked. “How could they work down here in the dark?”

Joe crouched down and touched the floor, plucking some pumice from the ground. Much of the cave seemed to be covered in it. “This is sodium carbonate,” he said. “The Egyptians called it natron. It's a drying agent designed to help the mummification process, but, combined with certain types of oil, it makes a smoke-free fire. That's how they made enough light to work in the tombs and in the mines. This place might be both.”

“A tomb and a mine?”

Joe nodded. “It's odd, though,” he added. “Natron is usually found where water enters and then dries up.”

“Maybe it's being pumped out,” Renata suggested.

Kurt wondered. “Why make it into a tomb?”

“It would kill two birds with one stone. By putting the tomb here, they could excavate the salt and the natron and then bring in the dead and use the materials here to mummify them right at the site.”

“Imagine,” Renata said. “A lost tomb with more gold and art than Tutankhamun's and no one knows about it.”

“Because Osiris International found it first,” Kurt said. “This place must have something to do with the Black Mist.”

“Maybe they found what D'Campion and Villeneuve were looking for down here.”

“That would make sense,” Kurt said. “And when they found the secret, and learned that it actually worked, they put a lid on this place, dug that tunnel and made sure no one was ever seen coming or going.”

The sound of a small engine came from down below. Kurt pulled back into the shadows as a wide-tracked two-man ATV came out of one of the tunnels. It had a pair of seats, a roll cage and a flat shelf at the back.

Two men in black fatigues sat up front. Behind them, on the shelf, were two passengers in lab coats. Each of them had one hand on the cage's roll bar and the other wrapped around a small cooler as if they were trying to keep it steady.

The ATV crossed the floor beneath them, drove past the golden Sphinx and off into another tunnel.

“Unless those guys are taking a twelve-pack to some secret underground ballpark, I'd say that was a pharmaceutical setup,” Kurt said.

“My thoughts exactly,” Renata said.

Kurt was about to go after them when he heard voices echoing through the burial chamber. A group of men could be seen crossing the floor in front of the Sphinx, headed past the row of stone coffins and toward the pit of crocodiles.

They stopped right beside it and were soon joined by two more men.

“Hassan,” Kurt whispered.

“Who's the guy next to him?” Joe asked.

Kurt said, “I have a feeling that's Shakir.”