Jake Atlas and the Tomb of the Emerald Snake Page 12

  “We have to keep looking,” Pan said.

  Mum gripped her amulet tighter and stared out to the horizon. Finally she tucked the symbol back under her combat suit. “You’re right,” she decided. “We cannot delay the hunt. But you two will remain safe while I search for the second tomb.”

  “But, Mum—”

  “No discussion.”

  The whirr of the drone grew louder as it lowered us onto a tarmac road that ran across the front of the villas. A black van sat by the side of the road.

  “Unclip from the wire as you land,” Mum said, “and run for the van.”

  Of course it worked perfectly for Mum and Pan. I tried to detach from the line, but totally messed it up. The drone dragged me along the road until Mum rushed back and helped me free. As we pelted for the van, its side door slid open. A rainbow-coloured jellabiya rustled and a wrinkled face grinned at us from the door.

  “What’s Sami doing here?” Pan protested.

  “It’s all right,” Mum said. “He’s with us. He kept an eye on you for me while you were with Kit.”

  That was good enough for me; I was glad Sami was still on our side. I returned his grin as he took my hand and helped me into the van.

  It wasn’t quite a van. There were no seats or steering wheel. One side was a workstation with a gyroscopic work table, tablets in the arm grips and one of Sami’s glass holosphere screens. Weapons and gadgets were fixed to mounts where the passenger seat should have been, and the van’s entire rear wall was a screen broadcasting news channels from around the world.

  “Good to have you back,” Sami said, sliding the door shut.

  “So you’re a fake too, like our mum?” Pan said.

  “Fake?”

  “You’re not really Kit’s friend.”

  “Actually, I am Kit’s friend,” Sami replied. “But I am better friends with your parents.”

  I’m sure Sami had a story about how he’d double-crossed Kit, but right then we didn’t really care. We were just glad to be safe as we flopped to the floor of the van.

  I watched the news on the screen. Most of the channels showed footage of the smoke cloud that had swallowed the ancient monuments of Giza. Some flashed up photos of Mum and Dad, and a couple had pictures of Pan and me. Headlines screamed LOST TOMB DESTROYED AT GIZA and LARGEST MANHUNT EVER.

  “What are we going to do, Mum?” Pan said.

  “You are not going to do anything,” Mum insisted. She tore off her gloves and body-armour jacket. “I am going to find your father. All I need from you is to think about what you saw in the tomb under Giza, maybe in the burial chamber, where the coffin should have been.”

  “But, Mum,” Pan asked, “whose coffin is it? It can’t be Osiris’s. He was a god.”

  “I don’t know yet, Pandora. The important thing is that the Ancient Egyptians believed the coffin to be Osiris’s, so they took it to a second tomb. There must have been an inscription, a clue that might lead us there. Ancient Egyptians believed hieroglyphs had magical powers. Once something was written in stone it became sacred, so they always carved markers of significant events. If they moved the coffin they would have left such a marker.”

  “You mean a stela,” Pan said.

  “Yes, a stela. How do you know that?”

  I wanted to say because Pan’s even cleverer than you think, but this wasn’t the time. “We saw one in the tomb,” I explained. “It had Osiris on it, and hieroglyphs.”

  “That’s it!” Mum said. “Can you remember what it said?”

  “Um, we can’t read hieroglyphs.”

  “Wait, we took a photo,” I said, remembering. “With my smart-goggles.”

  “Sam?” Mum asked.

  “Hold on…”

  Projections came up on Sami’s holosphere. He worked his hands around the images, flicked one aside, spun another around. He pressed one of the projections with two fingers to hold it, then swiped it away.

  “It’s coming up on the screen now,” he said.

  The photograph I took of the stela appeared on the TV screen. Mum stepped closer, her eyes roving around the painted carving of Osiris and curved shapes of hieroglyphs.

  “What do they say?” I asked.

  Mum traced the ancient writing with a fingertip.

  “Great God Osiris,” she translated, “Foremost of Westerners, who dwells in Duat. Behold his tomb at Rostau …”

  “Rostau?” I asked.

  “The ancient name for the Giza Plateau,” Pan said.

  Mum continued reading the inscription. “… where the Great God once lay. Behold the new tomb of Lord Osiris, in its home upon the…”

  She cursed under her breath. “I can’t read this word, Sam,” she said. “It’s still too blurred.”

  “What about the rest of it?” I asked.

  Mum continued. “The sacred rock, where Lord Osiris shall live for eternity.”

  “The sacred rock?” I said. “Half the desert is full of rocks.”

  “Sam,” Mum said, ignoring me, “we have to clean up this blurred fragment. It comes just before the words ‘sacred rock’. It must be important.”

  “I’ll run the image through an orthorectification filter,” Sami replied.

  “How long will that take?” Mum asked.

  “A while.”

  “We don’t have a while!”

  With a sigh, she rubbed her eyes. “At the moment the only clue this inscription gives us to the tomb’s location is those two words: sacred rock. That’s not enough.”

  “It is if you read it right,” Pan muttered.

  “Excuse me?” Mum said.

  Pan rose and came closer. She was still grumpy with Mum, but she couldn’t resist this challenge.

  “You’re translating it literally,” she replied. “But Ancient Egyptians used the same word to mean different things. So maybe ‘rock’ in that inscription means something other than just rock.”

  “Like … stone?” I suggested.

  “Like island,” Pan said.

  Mum stared at Pan, touching the Isis amulet around her neck. She wasn’t used to seeing her being so clever. You’d think she’d be delighted – smart Pan was a lot better than moody old Pan – but for some reason it seemed to freak her out.

  Mum turned. “Sam,” she said, “the inscription says ‘Holy Island’.”

  Sami shot back to the holosphere, hands whizzing around the projections. The hieroglyphs vanished from the screen, replaced by a map of Egypt, the green thread of the Nile Valley hanging down a yellow land.

  “Holy Island?” I asked. “What is it?”

  “This is Cairo,” Mum said, pointing to where the river split towards the sea. “From here, the Nile runs south past Luxor and onto Aswan and the first dam.”

  “There are two dams across the Nile,” Pan said, unable now to hide her excitement. “The high dam and the low dam. Between them is a lake with several little islands. Some of them are half underwater.”

  Mum scrolled down and enlarged a section of the image – a lake dotted with brown blobs. “These islands in this lake were sacred places to the Ancient Egyptians,” she added. “They were believed to be the homes of gods.”

  She tapped one of the larger islands, in the middle of the lake. “This one is called Biga. It’s a wild place. No one lives there, or ever has. It’s a place of legend.”

  “What legend?” I asked.

  “It was thought to be the birthplace of Osiris,” Pan said.

  “That’s true,” Mum agreed. “And it had another name.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Holy Island.”

  Holy Island. The legendary birthplace of Osiris and the location of his second tomb. I could tell I was right by how quickly Mum began to pack a duffel bag with gadgets from the van’s racks.

  “We’ll need to buy train tickets,” she said.

  “No chance,” I replied. “We’re wanted criminals. The police will be guarding every station in Egypt. We won’t make it by car either. There
will be roadblocks all the way south.”

  “I wasn’t asking for your opinion, Jake.”

  “He’s right though, Jane,” Sami said.

  “That’s not the issue, Sam.”

  “I say it is the issue,” Pan insisted. “We beat you to the first tomb, and that was Jake’s plan. So I’m following him on this one.”

  I didn’t really care who had the plan, I just knew it was right. There was no way we’d make it that far south by train or car without getting caught.

  “So how are we going to get there?” Pan asked.

  I touched the screen, expanding the map to see all of Egypt – a desert split by a path that trailed all the way to where we needed to go: Holy Island and the Tomb of Osiris.

  “The river,” I said. “We’ll go by river.”

  25

  Sami arranged for a boat and we were on-board within an hour. He picked up a newspaper too, with our faces splashed across the front page. At least the grainy passport photos didn’t look much like us. They’d been taken a few years ago, before my hair had turned so blond, and when I had chubbier cheeks. Pan looked different too. Most of her Goth make-up had washed off since we’d been in Egypt, but her hair was still jet black, matching the colour that Mum had just dyed hers.

  Mum hurled the paper down on the deck, cursing in Arabic.

  “What does it say?” I asked.

  “That I killed your father,” she said.

  “What? Why would they write that?” Pan asked.

  “Someone must have told them that.”

  “Kit?”

  “Maybe,” Mum replied, although she didn’t sound convinced.

  Dozens of boats were jostling for space at the jetty. Sails unfurled and flapped like seagulls’ wings. There were big houseboats called dahabiyas, with several sails and posh wood-panelled cabins, and tourists in safari suits sipping cocktails on the decks. But most of the vessels were single-sailed wooden feluccas like ours. Backpackers lay in sweaty heaps on their carpeted decks as the captains squabbled for space on the water.

  Almost all the boats were heading south to the temples at Luxor and the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. We were going beyond that. Any of these captains could sail us there, but most would have seen our photos on the news. We had to find one that looked, well, not quite with it.

  Sami came up trumps. From the moment we hurried onto the felucca, our faces hidden by headscarves, we knew the captain wouldn’t give us any grief. He sat at the tiller, a glazed look in his eyes. His jellabiya – and even somehow his turban – was stained with splashes of booze.

  “Welcome!” he said, grinning black and brown teeth. “My name is David Beckham.”

  “He’s roaring drunk,” Mum protested.

  “He is,” Sami agreed, smiling proudly. “So drunk he doesn’t know what’s going on. But he can sail us to the dam on instinct alone.”

  “Children!” Mum barked. “Put on your life-jackets.”

  The river around Cairo wasn’t pretty. Mud banks rose to stone embankments and concrete tower blocks. Women crouched by the brown water, rinsing clothes and slapping them against rocks. The air was hazy with diesel fumes.

  Sami had brought us headscarves and sunglasses, but as there was no shelter, we were exposed on the deck. If we were spotted we could jump ship, but the river was wide and fast-flowing. We didn’t stand much chance of swimming to the bank before one of the captains thumped us with an oar and fished us onto his boat for a reward. Basically, if we were recognized, we were caught – and Dad was dead.

  “Keep your heads down,” Mum said. “Try to sleep.”

  Sleep. God knows I needed it. Each time I moved I discovered a new ache or pain somewhere on my body. But there was too much noise and too much danger. I tensed at every shout and at each honk of a boat’s horn. Only one thought gave me comfort: Mum was here.

  I watched her rush about, unfurling a sail and then casting us off from the jetty. Sailing was another of her secret skills. How many others had she kept from us?

  Pan had gone back into a grump. She pulled down her headscarf and sat at the back of the boat. “Will you tell us now?” she asked, her voice muffled.

  Mum kneeled at the side of the boat, watching the banks through a rifle scope. “What’s that, darling?”

  “Will you please just tell us what’s going on?”

  Mum’s fingers tightened around the scope. Slowly, she slid it back into her utility belt. She’d been doing her best to avoid this moment. “You’re right,” she said. “You deserve answers. Pandora, come over here and sit with Jake.”

  Pan made a noise as if she’d rather not, but she came over pretty fast. She didn’t want to miss a word of Mum’s story.

  26

  “Your father and I met at university. He was the best and brightest in our class.”

  “He said you were the brightest.”

  “He’s nice like that, Jake. Your father is brilliant, but there was another in our class who was almost as smart.”

  “Kit Thorn?”

  “Yes, Kit. The three of us grew close. While everyone else was in the pub, we were in the library, reading archaeological reports. We were competitive, too; who would be the best? History was our life.

  “After we left college we were recruited to the Egypt Exploration Society as archaeologists. Those were good days. We didn’t earn much, but we were in Egypt, helping to uncover its history. But they were frustrating times, too. We were always applying for permits to dig or begging for grants. With all the red tape over who the sites belonged to, who had claims to finds… Sometimes it seemed as if all we did was fill in forms. It was like that for over a year, until we were sent on a dig at Siwa, an oasis town in the Western Desert.”

  “What sort of dig?”

  “The remains of a cult temple. It was fascinating. The temple was part of a predynastic ritual enclosure designed for—”

  “Mum? The treasure-hunting stuff?”

  “Yes, sorry. While we were at Siwa we heard from a Bedouin tribesman that people in a nearby village had discovered a cache of mummies.”

  “Mummies? But you don’t get mummies that far from the Nile Valley.”

  “Exactly, Pandora. It was a big deal, but the villagers were pulling the mummies apart for amulets in the wrappings. Of course we had to tell someone. Usually a report like that would have to be filed with the Ministry of Antiquities in Cairo. They would process it, send an inspector, and then … well, it was a drawn-out process. The mummies would have been long gone; whatever secrets they held would have been lost. But we were so close, a mile away. We decided to do something about it.”

  “You were going to kick butt!”

  “Jake! No, we were not. We were just pale, frightened historians. None of us had been in a fight in our life. But your father, Kit and I drove to the village and surveyed the site from a hiding place. A group of locals was digging near a well, just digging hell for leather, destroying the site. The longer we watched, the more determined we became to stop them. We knew they would defend their find. These were poor people. Those treasures would feed their families for years. We waited until dark, when the moon was bright and low. And we made a plan.”

  “What did you do?”

  “It was complicated. It involved a broken power line and a camel stampede. There was a fight, pushes and punches. Then we were in the pit, just digging for our lives. We extracted three mummies and got them to our car. Don’t pick your nose, please, Jake.”

  “Sorry. So what happened to the mummies?”

  “We left them at the rear of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, with drawings and notes describing the site. They were among the museum’s most prized exhibits until you destroyed them yesterday, Jake.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

  “So that was your first treasure hunt?”

  “Yes, Pandora, and it felt incredible. It was as if we’d ripped away the red tape and made a real difference. It was a thrill unlike any I’d known. I supp
ose we became addicted. We researched other sites where locals were destroying finds or selling them to the black market, where they would never be seen or studied.

  “We would go straight to the finds and take them to museums. We visited Bedouin tribes and bribed them to tip us off on illegal digs. We set up informants in villages. We involved a few archaeologists, who kept their eyes and ears peeled. Over time we created a network of sources throughout the Middle East, and then all over the globe. If anyone dug up anything that wasn’t reported, we found out.”

  “So you went on other adventures?”

  “More than I can count. Each mission was dangerous. We learned how to defend ourselves. We recruited Sam, who taught us how to use advanced technology on missions.”

  “And you got good, Jane, very good.”

  “We did, Sam. We honed our skills. We travelled the world: China, India, Mexico, Peru. Everywhere, really. Sometimes they were false leads, or the finds were already gone. Other times we rescued antiquities that would otherwise have been melted down, or sold on the black market and never seen again.”

  “No one else knew what you three were up to?”

  “Not at first, Pandora. But then, about twenty years ago, we discovered that some villagers near Abydos had begun to loot a small but intact mastaba of a royal princess.”

  “Mastaba?”

  “A type of tomb.”

  “Exactly, Pandora. But this was different. This time the tip came from a museum. They’d learned about us, and they were sick of the red tape too. They needed people who could cut through all the nonsense to rescue artefacts from destruction or disappearance. Soon, other institutions found out. The British Museum, the Vatican, the National Museum of Damascus… They offered us a lot of money. That’s when things started to go wrong.”

  “Because of the money?”

  “We spent what we needed on equipment and training. After that, we took only as much as we would have made as archaeologists, which was a modest salary. We weren’t in it for the riches. At least, not your father and me.”

  “But Kit thought differently?”

  “Yes, he began to. With him, it was never just about the work. It was about the lifestyle, the thrill. He began to demand more from the museums. We challenged him, and fought. He said he’d take his own jobs for his own fee.”