The Cult of Osiris

Eddie leapt up and ran—

The generator exploded. The lights instantly went out, but Eddie could see all too well as a bright orange fireball erupted behind him, singeing his skin and hair as he dived. A greasy wave of flame roiled over him, clinging to the ceiling.

The echo of the blast faded - but that wasn’t the noise he was concerned with. Instead it was the sinister crackle of flames consuming wood, the deeper crunch of stone as the damaged ceiling gave way . . .

Eddie sprang up and raced into the darkness - as the roof caved in with a huge boom behind him. He tumbled across the entrance chamber in a swelling, choking cloud of sand.

‘Eddie!’ Nina shouted between coughs. ‘Are you all right? Eddie!’

‘I’m - I’m okay,’ he spluttered, pulling his T-shirt up over his mouth and nose. The noise of the collapse had stopped, only the hiss of falling sand audible from the tunnel.

‘What the hell happened?’

‘The generator blew up, took out the props. Ceiling fell down.’

‘You mean we’re trapped?’ A ball of ghost light resolved itself into Macy holding Broma’s dropped torch. ‘Oh, my God! We’ll run out of air!’

‘This place is pretty big, so we’ll be okay as long as nobody starts running laps,’ Eddie assured her. ‘Or starts panicking.’

‘I-I’m not panicking! I mean, we’re only trapped under the Sphinx, what’s to panic about?’

Nina helped Eddie up. ‘You okay?’

‘I’ll live - although I owe that mulleted twat a good kicking. Macy, give me the torch.’ He aimed it down the tunnel. Though the swirling dust was still thick, it was plain that the passage was completely blocked. ‘Huh. We’ll have a job digging through that.’

‘We don’t need to. Remember?’ Nina turned his hand to illuminate the chamber’s eastern end. The beam fell on the carved pillars of the second entrance. ‘We just have to wait for prime time . . .’

Berkeley composed himself before taking hold of the final broken stone and, with deliberate theatricality, moving it aside. ‘This . . . is it,’ he said to the camera behind him. Though the tunnel’s confines meant there was only room for half a dozen people to witness the opening of the Hall of Records first-hand, the cyclopean glass eye was an avatar for millions all round the globe. His words in the next few minutes could be as well remembered as those of Neil Armstrong when he made the first footfall on the moon.

As he passed the stone back to another team member, he briefly glanced at his watch - 4.46 a.m., 9.46 p.m. in New York, exactly on schedule - before picking up a crowbar and facing the camera again. ‘The last piece of rubble has been cleared from the entrance,’ he said, with as great a tone of expectant gravity as he could manage. ‘The only thing now standing between us and our first sight of the legendary Hall of Records beneath the Sphinx is this stone slab. Once it’s opened, we will be the first people to enter for over five thousand years. Nobody knows exactly what treasures are within . . . but there’s one thing we can be sure about. Whatever we see beyond this door will be remembered for a very long time.’

Behind the cameraman, he saw Metz making a ‘hurry up’ gesture. Concealing his annoyance at being rushed, Berkeley inserted his crowbar into the gap at one side of the block, then turned back to camera. ‘Here we go.’

He pulled at the crowbar. For a moment the only sound was the scrape of metal on stone, then with a low grumble the slab moved. Berkeley could hardly contain his excitement as the stone inched outwards from the wall. It was finally happening! The Hall of Records, revealed at last . . . and he was the one the world was watching. Not any of the other archaeologists who had been so desperate to win the IHA assignment, and certainly not Nina Wilde . . .

The slab turned slightly, revealing a line of blackness. A puff of dust billowed out. Berkeley’s heart raced. He pulled harder. The slab came free. He pushed it aside, then looked through the opening. The cameraman moved forward, the camera’s light shining on what lay within . . .

It found the grubby, dust-covered face of Nina Wilde.

‘Hey, Logan,’ she said, as Berkeley’s heart plunged down through his chest cavity and fell deep into the ground below. ‘Welcome to the Hall of Records. What kept you?’

9

‘These people are nothing more than vandals and thieves. They should be thrown in prison for twenty years!’

There was anger in Hamdi’s voice, but also an undertone of fear. Which was hardly surprising. Nina thought; if the Egyptian authorities saw proof of his involvement in the zodiac’s theft, he would be the one facing twenty years in prison.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have such proof - certainly not enough to stand up in court. After she, Eddie and Macy emerged from the Sphinx - and were arrested, the default action when those in charge had no idea what was going on but had to be seen to be doing something - they were eventually taken to the Ministry of Culture to explain themselves, with Hamdi and Berkeley acting as an impromptu and rather strident prosecution.

What they did have, though, was enough evidence to prove that someone had indeed beaten the IHA to the Hall of Records. The recording from Macy’s camera had been copied to a computer, and was now displayed on a large TV in the minister’s office. The image was frozen, the last section of the zodiac revealed on the ceiling, with Shaban and Hamdi standing before it. Unfortunately, the glare from the lights in the zodiac chamber rendered them barely more than silhouettes.

‘We weren’t the ones who robbed the place,’ said Nina. ‘Eddie and I only arrived in the country yesterday morning. But the work needed to dig out the tunnel must have been going on for weeks. Since it was happening right there in the Sphinx compound, it had to have been done with the collusion of someone at Giza.’ She eyed Hamdi. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’

The minister, an elderly, long-faced man called Malakani Siddig, examined a photograph. ‘The dead man, this Gamal, was in charge of site security. I think it’s a safe assumption that he was working with the robbers.’

‘It was a mistake to use private security contractors,’ mused Dr Ismail Assad, the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. ‘We should have brought in the army - maybe even the Antiquities Special Protection Squad.’

Eddie worked out the acronym. ‘ASPS? Cool name.’

‘It’s more likely that Gamal was following Dr Wilde and her gang and was murdered when he tried to arrest them,’ said Hamdi. Even Berkeley regarded his suggestion with disbelief.

Assad leafed through more photos of the equipment the thieves had been forced to abandon. ‘This was a much larger operation than just one man, one woman and a girl could have carried out.’

‘I’m not a “girl”,’ Macy protested.

Nina batted her arm with a ‘Shush!’ then continued: ‘There were at least ten people involved - the six men on the video, plus the guards at the construction site and the ones at the compound gate. Probably more. If you’re going to investigate everyone at Giza who might have been involved, I’d suggest starting at the top.’ She stared at Hamdi.

‘This is outrageous!’ Hamdi blustered. ‘They are trying to implicate me to deflect attention from themselves.’

‘You sound a bit bunged-up, mate,’ said Eddie.

‘Looks like someone hit your nose,’ Nina noted. ‘Wonder where that happened?’ She examined her knuckles. ‘Funny, I’ve got kind of a nose-shaped bruise here . . .’

‘Minister,’ growled Berkeley, ‘at the very least Dr Wilde and her husband should be charged with trespass and damage to an archaeological site.’ He glared at Nina. ‘You couldn’t let me have my moment, could you? No, you had to ruin everything so you could be the centre of attention and take all the credit.’

‘Oh, grow up, Logan,’ Nina snapped.

Assad leaned back in his chair. ‘Dr Berkeley, there are more important crimes to be investigated first.’ He pointed at the image of the zodiac. ‘A priceless national treasure has been stolen - from under your nose! People will want to know how you could have possibly not known about a second tunnel being dug right in front of you.’