Thebes. Bit by bit, they started stashing it away, somewhere it could never be found, using what power they still had to keep the operation secret. But it was a wildly risky thing to do. Suicidal. Sooner or later the pharaoh’s agents were bound to get wise, and they did. Informants talked, people were tortured. Suddenly the priests were marked men, and it became impossible for them to keep shifting treasure the way they’d been doing. They stashed the last of it wherever they could, somewhere out in the desert. Wenkaura described how he was able to smuggle himself out of Thebes safely by stowing away on board a merchant vessel. He only heard later what became of Katep and Menamun. Rather than be captured and tortured, they’d committed suicide by drinking poison.’
‘Wenkaura fled to Syria?’
‘A resourceful guy, clearly. He got himself a job as a private tutor to a rich man’s son, assumed his new identity and became Diodore. Years went by. Then one day he heard the news. Akhenaten had died. Maybe assassinated, nobody knows. Suddenly the old order was being restored, Akhenaten’s reforms and his name were stamped in the dirt, and his successor, Tutankhamun, reinstated the old religion with Amun as head of the gods. It was Wenkaura’s dream come true. He was old and sick by then, and scared that if he didn’t act soon, the secret of the treasure would go to his grave with him. He sat down and started writing his letter. Sadly, or perhaps not so sadly, it was never sent. We never knew why. Maybe he died before he got the chance to finish it. Maybe he had second thoughts. Who knows? Who cares? What matters is, we found it. And that treasure is still out there, just waiting.’
Ben was quiet for a few moments, taking it all in. ‘Is this for real, Kirby? Because there’s a hell of a lot riding on it.’
‘Trust me, it’s very for real. Morgan and I spent months deciphering the papyrus.’
‘Where’s the papyrus now?’ Ben asked.
‘In London,’ Kirby said. ‘Locked away in a safe deposit box and, now Morgan’s dead, I’m the only person in the world who knows where.’
Ben frowned. ‘How do we know it’s genuine? How do we know that this Diodore really was Wenkaura?’
‘Because by way of a letterhead, he marked it with the personal seal that only he would have used, during his tenure as High Priest. It would have been unique to him, and very few people would ever have seen it. It instantly identifies him as Wenkaura. I’ll show you.’ Kirby took a pen from the breast pocket of his jacket, grabbed a stained beer mat from the table and hunched over it, scribbling something. He slid it over to Ben. In a blank corner of the beer mat was a small, distinctive circular logo, bearing an image of what looked like a temple in the centre. It was flanked by palm trees, and a crowned bird sat over the top of it.
Ben looked at it for a moment, then slid the beer mat back towards Kirby. ‘If this is so genuine, why aren’t Egyptologists the world over talking about it?’
Kirby let out a derisive snort. ‘Because our esteemed peers are a bunch of closed-minded arseholes. According to a panel of eminent professors, our research was speculative, unscholarly, nonsensical; and to resurrect the old myth of the heretic’s lost treasure would have done our careers about as much good as writing papers on astrology.’
‘Maybe they were right.’
Kirby took another slurp of Scotch. ‘Oh, yeah? These are the same kind of pricks who said Imhotep was a myth, until 1926 when a chance discovery proved them wrong and caused a lot of red faces. So Morgan and I thought, stuff ’em. They deserve to be humiliated. And they will be. I guarantee it.’
‘So you’re saying the letter indicates where the treasure is?’ Ben asked. ‘Simple as that?’
Kirby shook his head. ‘I’m afraid nothing’s ever that simple. Morgan and I reckoned that the old man was concerned it might be too easily intercepted en route. If he’d just given a location-X marks the spot-anyone could have found it. Wenkaura was cautious. And very smart. He’d seen the whole thing coming years before, and in the letter he tells how, before he’d fled Egypt, he’d devised a series of clues, sitting right under the noses of Akhenaten’s agents, that could point the way to where the vast bulk of the treasure was hidden.’ Kirby leaned back in his chair and smiled.
‘You know these clues?’
Kirby’s smile dropped. ‘Not quite. The way it works is that the first clue is in the papyrus. That leads you to a second clue, then the second leads to a third, and so on. All we had was a cryptic reference in Wenkaura’s letter, giving the specific location of the second clue.’
‘Which is what?’
‘The tomb of “He who is close to Re”,’ Kirby said.
‘That doesn’t sound very specific at all,’ Ben replied. ‘Since Re was one of their chief gods, I imagine quite a few people would have thought themselves close to him. You could be working your way through half the tombs in Egypt before finding anything.’
‘Exactly. And that’s what Morgan was working on in Cairo.’
‘And he found out what it meant?’
‘He found out something, that’s for sure.’ Kirby paused, sighed. ‘Problem is, I don’t know what. While he was out there I came home one day to find a phone message from him. He sounded all excited, saying he’d figured out the first clue, that it had led him to the second clue like clockwork, and he was going somewhere the next day that he was sure was going to offer up the next. I was supposed to call him back, but his phone was switched off. And that was the last time I ever heard from him. Next thing I knew, he was dead, and all his research notes were stolen. If he got round to updating his notes, we’ll never know. They’re gone.’
‘Maybe not.’ Ben dug in his pocket, took out the little blue memory stick and laid it on the table. ‘Morgan’s notes, taken straight from his laptop.’
Kirby snatched it up. ‘How the hell did you get hold of this? On second thoughts, don’t tell me.’ He held the memory stick in front of him, gazing at it. ‘What I wouldn’t give to see what’s in here.’
‘You’re not the only one. The bad guys have it too.’
‘But they’d never get into it,’ Kirby smirked. ‘Not a chance in hell. The most fiendishly crack-proof encryption ever known. Morgan’s and my secret.’
‘We need computer access,’ Ben said. ‘We can’t go back to the house.’
‘But we could drive to my office.’
Ben looked at his watch. They’d been sitting in the pub for over an hour, and night had fallen. ‘Then let’s go. Right now.’
Chapter Forty
Back in St Andrews, Ben parked the Mercedes under the amber glow of a street lamp and followed Kirby to the iron gates of the Faculty of History building. They were locked.
‘It’s OK,’ Kirby said. ‘We all have a key, in case we need to come back to the office after hours.’ He unlocked a creaky side gate and they walked across the dark, empty car park to the entrance. Ben glanced up and down the street as Kirby opened the door. There was nobody around. Inside, Kirby was about to turn on the lights when Ben stopped his hand. ‘Keep the place dark,’ he said.
They climbed the stairs by the moonlight that shone from the windows, and Ben led the way through the shadowy corridor to Kirby’s room.
Ben drew down the blinds in the dark office as Kirby fired up the laptop on his desk and fumbled blindly to insert the memory stick. After a few moments the screen lit up, casting a bluish glow over his face in the darkness. ‘Hardware recognised. OK, here we go.’ He clicked the mouse, tapped a few keys. ‘Now for the password. Calypso Jennings.’
‘Calypso Jennings?’
Kirby glanced up. ‘She was a junior lecturer in ancient Greek, when Morgan and I were undergrads together at Durham. Hottest academic you’ve ever seen. We were both nuts about her. She seemed the obvious choice of password. Like I said, the most crack-proof encryption known to man.’
Ben watched as Kirby’s podgy fingers scuttled quickly over the keys, typing in the password. The file unlocked instantly, and they were in.
‘Here we go, the Akhenaten Project research file,’ Kirby said proudly. He held down a key and scrolled down
