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‘But if she doesn’t even understand our cause, then how can she support it?’
The woman – Audrey Milne – had once been a trophy wife. Though she had long ceased to be the spring chicken who had once attracted her husband via his libido, she had retained her position in his heart and home by good grooming, a rigorous fitness regime, an adroit and skilful manner in the salon, and most important of all, a readiness to accept her husband’s serial infidelity with stoic equanimity.
Her husband had always known that she would never embarrass him professionally or personally and she knew how to host a dinner party and say the right things to the right people at the right time. With those social skills and her selective blindness to her husband’s extra-curricular activities, there was no need for him to cut her loose. And for her part, she had no reason to break loose. In their relationship, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.
She was, however, no longer a trophy wife. She was now a trophy widow.
‘Jane understands family loyalty,’ said Morris. ‘That means she’s loyal to me. That’s all that matters.’
‘Carmichael might be a problem,’ said the professor. ‘Once the shit hits the fan.’
‘Why?’ asked Audrey Milne defensively. ‘A befuddled old man suffering from dementia…’
The professor looked at her irritably. He had never really liked her and the only reason she was even at this meeting was because she had inherited proprietorship of a chain of fifteen newspapers from her husband. He had served the cause well, but had died towards the end of the previous year. So now, if their work was to continue unhindered, they needed his widow on-board, or at least access to her newspapers.
The Internet was fine for creating publicity, but what it couldn’t do was create credibility. A prestigious newspaper, on the other hand, lent the imprimatur of its authority to any story that went out under its masthead. That made Audrey Milne a powerful ally in their cause.
‘He’s already getting agitated over the fact that his paper still hasn’t been published.’
‘But the journal is only published once a year.’
‘He knows that, Audrey. But he’s angry that we missed the deadline for the last edition.’
‘So tell him that it took a few months to do a proper peer review. He’s an academic. He’ll understand.’
‘I did that!’ the professor snapped. ‘But he’s still upset about it. At one point he even threatened to pull the plug and send it to another journal.’
Ignoring their bickering, Arthur Morris played with the handle of his walking stick. It was an elaborate, overly ornate affair made of lacquered mahogany topped with a bronze snake head.
‘But if they’ve found the stone fragments,’ said Audrey, ‘then doesn’t that make it irrelevant what Carmichael does?’
Morris looked at Audrey as if trying to weigh up the subtext to what she was saying.
‘Whatever comes out of Egypt, we can control. It may even lead us to solve the questions posed by Carmichael’s research. But Carmichael himself is a problem. He isn’t one of us and he would resent any attempt to recruit him.’
‘He probably wouldn’t even understand it,’ said Audrey, ‘in his mental state.’
‘We can’t take a chance,’ said the professor.
‘I agree.’ This was Morris. And his word on the issue was final.
‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Audrey.
‘We need to send someone to deal with the problem.’
Morris’s mobile beeped. He took it out and cast a quick glance at the message.
Foreign Aid Bill vote 20 mins.
‘Sorry,’ said Senator Morris, ‘we’ll have to cut this short.’
‘Who are you going to send?’ asked Audrey hesitantly.
‘Someone whose loyalty is unwavering and whose talent for doing the work is unequalled.’
Audrey closed her eyes as she uttered the next word. ‘Goliath?’
Chapter 3
‘It’s a pity you didn’t find the rest,’ said Akil Mansoor in a quiet monotone.
‘Assuming there is a “rest”,’ Gabrielle replied.
‘Of course there’s a rest!’
They were in the lab at the University of Cairo that the Supreme Council of Antiquities used for examining ancient Egyptian artefacts. Mansoor was somewhat shorter than Gabrielle and was showing signs of a middle-aged paunch. But his white hair gave him a kind of patrician gravitas that made others around him instantly recognize his academic authority.
‘We branched out radially from the square where it was found,’ Gabrielle explained, ‘stopping at forty-nine square metres.’
The air conditioning had failed again and so Mansoor left three buttons undone on his check shirt and used a handkerchief to wipe the area between his chin and neck. The assembled fragments of stone looked like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. Mansoor moved to his left, as if to get a better view of the engraved characters on the surface, brushing against Gabrielle in the process. She didn’t say anything, but moved away quietly to the other side of the workbench to give him room to view the stone fragments.
Temporarily distracted from the arrangement of stones, he watched her athletic body, more with a sense of curiosity than outright lust. He remembered that she had been a competitive swimmer, winning a silver medal for Austria in the European Student Games. Even now, in her tight-fitting T-shirt and dark blue jeans, she cut a striking figure.
‘The distribution of fragments was like a V formation from the main group.’ Her words snapped him out of his thoughts. ‘That would suggest that the stones had been dropped or thrown from a certain position and smashed outwardly in the same direction. So working outward radially any further made no sense.’
‘You could have excavated another line of squares on the far side, to follow up your V distribution theory.’ His tone was impatient.
‘We did. And we found another two pieces. But they were both quite small, without any engravings. The only reason we think it might have formed part of the stone or stones is because of the shape. One of the students on the dig is a physics graduate and he said they looked like break lines. He also told us that lighter pieces travel further when they bounce.’
‘And?’ Mansoor prompted.
‘Well, he also said that with stone lighter means smaller, and that meant that if we found any more fragments, they’d be too small to physically handle to put them together.’
Mansoor shook his head. ‘We’ve got people who can do that with tweezers and glue. Besides, nowadays we scan them in 3-D and then examine them on a computer screen. I’m surprised your physics student didn’t tell you that.’
There was more than a hint of mockery in his tone.
‘I thought it was more important to bring back what we already found.’
‘I figured as much when you phoned me on your mad dash to Sharm el-Sheikh Airport.’
‘Well, it’s not as if the remaining stones are going to get up and walk away.’
Mansoor frowned at Gabrielle’s levity. She should have remembered that he was an utterly humourless man, and proud of the fact.
‘We can carry on today. I put the team on standby, waiting for your decision. I’d already pulled them off their regular duties to concentrate on this find. I didn’t want to put them back on the areas they were digging because they’re all too excited about—’
‘You told them your theory?’ he blurted out in a mixture of shock and fear.
‘I didn’t tell them,’ replied Gabrielle. Then after a few seconds she added, ‘But it must have been fairly obvious.’
‘To an overenthusiastic kid, perhaps. Not to a serious scholar.’
‘I think a credible case can be made out.’ Her tone was defensive. She knew that Mansoor was always sceptical about Big Theories.
‘Let’s keep some sense of proportion. So far all we can say is that we have fragments of two stone tablets with an old, somewhat simple linear script with repeated characters engraved on them.’
‘But it is definitely two stones?’ she asked cautiously.
‘We have seven corner pieces. That suggests at least two separate stones.’
‘What’s your assessment of the writing?’
Mansoor peered at it carefully. ‘Well, the style is a bit like hieroglyphics, but only the simplest hieroglyphics. In fact, some of the symbols are quite recognizable – if we can find the right light to view them in.’
‘So it can’t be a diplomatic document or treaty.’
‘If it was, it would be written in Akkadian cuneiform.’
‘And that also rules out Hittite and Sumerian.’
‘Exactly,’ Mansoor confirmed.
‘I’m wondering if this could be our Knossos.’
‘This isn’t Mycenaean or Minoan, Professor Gusack; I can assure you of that!’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ replied Gabrielle irritably. ‘I mean another syllable alphabet, like Linear A or Linear B.’
‘And I suppose you were hoping to be the next Michael Ventris.’
‘Well, it would be nice to follow in the footsteps of the man who rewrote ancient Greek history.’
‘Nice, perhaps. Likely, no.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
Mansoor’s voice took on a dour tone. ‘Well, as far as I can tell, there aren’t enough unique characters for a syllable alphabet.’
‘So it’s… what? A phonetic alphabet?’
‘Precisely. More specifically, an abjad. No vowels – just consonants.’
‘Aramaic? Phoenician?’ She didn’t bother to include Hebrew or Arabic in her question, because both were familiar to her and she could tell immediately that it wasn’t either.
‘It doesn’t look all that much like Aramaic. It might bear some vague comparison to Phoenician.’
‘Vague comparison?’ Gabrielle echoed.
‘It’s hard to tell until we can look at them under the right lighting conditions. I’ll get one of the photo experts to take some pictures and play around with the contrast then we’ll take another look.’
‘But what’s your gut instinct?’
Mansoor looked at Gabrielle with mild irritation. She was being pushy. He decided nevertheless to hazard a preliminary speculation.
‘It reminds me of the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions.’
‘Proto-Sinaitic?’
‘Yes.’
Proto-Sinaitic was one of the oldest phonetic alphabets ever used – if not the oldest – dating back nearly 4,000 years. The name was derived from the Greek ‘proto’ meaning first and the place where the writings in the alphabet were initially discovered: Sinai. Some thirty engravings of the script had been found in Sinai at the turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadim, once used as a penal colony by ancient Egypt.
‘Can you translate it?’
Mansoor was amused by Gabrielle’s eagerness.
‘Well, assuming I’m right, we know how it sounds, but not what it means.’
The letters of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had been matched to their equivalent letters in all the other main consonant alphabets – like Hebrew and Arabic – so the pronunciation was reasonably certain. But the underlying language was unknown. Was it an ancient form of Hebrew even older than the Bible itself? Some generic Semitic language that later split up into several different languages? Or was the same alphabet used for a whole variety of languages that were already different, and spoken all around the Middle East?
‘Maybe this could be our Rosetta Stone.’
The Rosetta Stone; written in three languages – hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic script and ancient Greek – had facilitated the deciphering of hieroglyphics by enabling scholars to compare the Greek, which was already understood, to the unknown hieroglyphics and demotics.
‘The problem is that the writing on these fragments appears to be all one language, or at least one alphabet. In order to use it like the Rosetta Stone, we’d need a suitable candidate text in another language to compare it to.’
‘Well, if I’m right, then we already have one.’
Mansoor noticed the look on Gabrielle’s face and realized that she wasn’t backing down.
‘That’s a bit of a quantum leap in logic, Professor Gusack.’
‘Is it really? The site where we found it is a very good candidate for the real Mount Sinai—’
‘In the opinion of some people.’
‘According to the Bible, Moses smashed the original tablets of stone—’
‘If you take the Bible literally.’
‘And now we’ve found fragments of stone with ancient writing on them that appear to have been smashed, quite possibly deliberately.’
‘Well, even if you’re right, my biblical Hebrew isn’t that good. And neither is yours.’
‘Then maybe we should call in someone who has specialized knowledge of biblical languages.’
‘I’m not going to call in anyone from Israel,’ said Mansoor. ‘At least not at this stage. It would just be too controversial.’
