The Cult of Osiris

‘Although you seem to have got ahead of us again,’ said Karima, regarding Eddie’s wedding ring before grinning mischievously at him. ‘And for some reason, I missed the ceremony. Invitation lost in the mail, perhaps?’

‘It was . . . kinda short notice,’ Nina admitted.

‘No notice,’ said Eddie, nodding.

‘So you eloped?’ Karima said. ‘How romantic.’

Nina snorted. ‘Yeah, nothing says romance like a cab ride to the Justice of the Peace in Greenwich, Connecticut. But congratulations on getting engaged, anyway.’

‘And congratulations on your marriage. Even if they’re a little late.’ Karima looked at Macy. ‘But I take it there’s more going on than just you turning up inside a five-thousand-year-old chamber under the Sphinx?’ She arched an eyebrow. ‘Strange. With anyone else, that would sound bizarre. With you, it’s almost normal.’

Nina completed the introductions. ‘Macy’s why we’re here,’ she told Karima and Rad. ‘She found out about the attempt to rob the Hall of Records.’ She held up a DVD-R; Siddig had, true to his word, provided a copy of the memory card’s contents. ‘There’s a video on here of the actual robbery.’

Rad’s eyes lit up, but Karima sternly said something in Arabic that immediately dampened his enthusiasm. ‘He works for a news network,’ she told Nina, giving Rad a look that was both teasing and warning. ‘I just told him that no, he can’t have it as an exclusive.’

‘Great. So, Rad, what can you do to help us?’

Rad reached into his messenger bag, taking out a travel-scuffed Apple laptop. He opened it, revealing a keyboard covered with sticky labels in different colours: shortcuts for professional video-editing software. He grinned. ‘The question is: what can’t I do?’

Rad set up shop in a quiet corner of the hotel bar, the others peering over his shoulders as he worked. ‘I know my cologne is irresistible,’ he said, ‘but could I have a little more space?’

‘Sorry,’ Nina said, retreating slightly, but still anxious to discover what hidden secrets the recording might hold. So far, Rad’s efforts to enhance the image had met with limited success; the video mode on Macy’s camera had been designed with small Internet-friendly clips in mind, not high definition footage. Shaban and Hamdi were visible only from behind or with glare obscuring their features - and, as Eddie remarked, real life wasn’t like an episode of CSI: Miami. No matter how powerful the software and how clever its user, digital information couldn’t be extracted if it was never there in the first place.

Rad was having more luck with the audio, though. Wearing earphones, he looped the recording, adjusting filters with each pass. ‘The saw’s making a fairly constant sound,’ he explained, pointing at a jittering waveform display in one window. ‘I won’t be able to get rid of it completely, but I can tone it down enough to hear the dialogue.’

Karima leaned closer. ‘Let me listen.’

Rad removed one of the earphones and passed it to her. She ran her thumb round its edge before putting it in her own ear. ‘I saw that,’ Rad said.

‘What?’

‘You just wiped my earbud.’

‘I don’t want your wax in my ear.’

‘I do not have waxy ears!’

‘You sound married already,’ Eddie said, sharing a grin with Nina. ‘So what are they saying?’

Karima translated what was being said by the two men as Rad replayed the filtered recording. ‘The one on the right, Hamdi, is worried about how long it will take to clean up the Hall of Records. If there’s any suspicion, it might fall on him . . . He’s just complaining.’ The playback continued for several more seconds without further commentary.

‘What’s he saying now?’ Eddie asked.

‘Still complaining!’ Another pause, then: ‘Oh, now they’re talking about the Pyramid of Osiris. The other man, Shaban - he says it will definitely lead them to it. They . . . I can’t hear properly,’ she said, the waveform display jumping as the noise of the machinery spiked. ‘Rad, wind it back. It’s . . . something about planets and constellations, but it’s very hard to make out. He wants to compare them to something.’

Rad rewound the recording again. Karima frowned, frustrated. ‘There’s too much noise, but I think he wants to compare the zodiac to the constellation of . . . Dendera?’

‘There’s no constellation called Dendera,’ said Eddie. ‘Least not that I’ve heard of.’

‘Dendera’s not a constellation,’ Macy said. ‘It’s a place - it used to be a provincial capital of Upper Egypt. The Temple of Hathor’s there . . .’

She tailed off, realisation dawning, but Nina was a step ahead. ‘He’s not talking about Dendera the place - he means the Dendera zodiac!’

‘What’s the Dendera zodiac?’ Eddie asked.

Macy darted in before Nina could answer. ‘It’s a star map on the ceiling of the Temple of Hathor.’

‘At least, it was on the temple ceiling,’ Nina added. ‘There’s a replica there now; the original was taken - well, stolen - by Napoleon in the 1790s.’

Rad paused the recording. ‘So they’re going to Dendera? You might still be able to catch them.’

Nina shook her head. ‘No. The replica’s a close copy, but it’s not exact. They’ll want to compare the Sphinx zodiac to the original.’

‘Where’s that?’ said Eddie.

She smiled. ‘You want to see some art?’

10

Paris

‘Been a while since we were here last,’ said Eddie as he, Nina and Macy crossed the Cour Napoleon, the central courtyard of the Louvre. ‘Must be, what? Three and a half years?’

‘God, where did the time go?’ Nina sighed.

They passed the 72-foot-high glass and aluminium pyramid at the courtyard’s heart and continued to the ornate Sully Wing beyond. There were more security guards than on her previous visit; a spate of high-profile art thefts around the world in recent months had prompted the Louvre to pre-emptively deter the robbers from trying anything in Paris. ‘Okay, so we want room 12a in the Egyptian bit,’ Eddie said, unfolding a tourist guide. ‘Typical. It’s right round the far bloody side. So let’s see, right there, then left there, then straight on through . . .’

‘Eddie, we are not just going to charge through the Louvre, look at one thing and then walk out again,’ Nina insisted.

‘Yeah, but you’ve already seen the Mona Lisa, so it’s not like you’ll be missing anything.’ He winked at Macy to show he was just winding up his wife - and succeeding. ‘Anyway, Shaban and his mates are probably halfway to the Pyramid of Osiris. We don’t have time to play art critics.’

‘Philistine,’ Nina sniffed, but saw his point. The great museum’s treasures would still be here the next time she visited Paris, but those inside the Pyramid of Osiris would be gone for ever if the Osirian Temple reached it first.

But she was still able to take in some of the exhibits along the way, the halls lined with splendid displays of Egyptian antiquities ranging from simple papyrus scrolls to full-sized statues and carved temple columns. She took small revenge on Eddie by stopping to examine various items, forcing him to come back for her with increasing impatience each time.

Eventually, though, her curiosity about the importance of the Dendera zodiac drew her to it like a magnet. Room 12a was a small antechamber off one of the main halls. At one end of the room was a sandstone relief from the Temple of Amun at Karnak, but it was what waited at the other end - or rather, above it - that caught their attention.

‘That’s a fancier decoration than anything at Home Depot,’ said Eddie.

Nina tipped her head back to take in the sight. The Dendera zodiac was a slab of pale brown stone behind glass some nine feet above them, lit to pick out the detail carved into it. It was larger than the zodiac in the Hall of