The Cult of Osiris

expensive yachts lined up like gleaming buildings along the jetties.

Nina looked round anxiously as Osir brought her to the Solar Barque’s distinctively painted tender. She had hoped to spy Eddie nearby, waiting for the tender to depart so he could follow it to its mother ship. But there was no familiar stocky figure amongst the people boarding the floating palaces, nobody surreptitiously observing them from a neighbouring pier.

Had the police caught him? Or worse, Shaban?

She dismissed the latter as soon as the awful thought came to her. If Shaban had found Eddie, Osir would have been told. But his absence was still a worry - not least because without him, she would have to improvise her own escape from Osir’s yacht. With the Solar Barque being over half a mile offshore, swimming was not her preferred option.

They boarded the tender and Osir gave an order to its pilot. With a diesel rumble, the boat set off. Even though the evening was warm, the breeze over the open vessel was cold. Nina rubbed her bare arms.

‘Here,’ said Osir. He took off his jacket and draped it over her.

‘Thank you,’ she said automatically, keeping to herself that her chill was not solely down to the wind.

They passed more opulent yachts and made their way between the quays marking the boundary of the inner harbour of Port Hercule. The outer harbour’s breakwaters extended ahead, the darkness of the Mediterranean visible beyond them. The tender drifted off course from the exit, the pilot having to adjust for what seemed to be a stronger than expected current, but they soon cleared the long concrete barriers and entered the open sea.

Swimming was now an even less appealing idea, Nina decided. Past the breakwaters, the ocean was choppy, the tender bouncing through the waves with great smacks of spray. An anchor chain rattled against the hull with each impact. She looked back to shore. Monaco was aglow against the surrounding hills. It was a spectacular sight . . . but her worries made it impossible for her to appreciate it.

There were numerous other vessels moored offshore, but the Solar Barque stood out as large even by the standards of megayachts. The tender pulled up to its stern, where a mooring platform, big enough also to accommodate a pair of smaller speedboats and several jet skis, had been lowered to water level. A crewman tied up the boat, then Osir took Nina by the hand to help her on to the deck.

‘I’d like to thank you for your company,’ he said. ‘Even though things didn’t go quite as I planned.’

‘My pleasure,’ Nina replied. ‘And, ah . . . I apologise for my husband. I just wish I’d been able to persuade him to see things my way. It would have made things a lot less . . . well, expensive.’

‘You don’t have to take the blame for his actions,’ he assured her. ‘And as for the money, none of it will matter when we discover the Pyramid of Osiris.’

‘In that case,’ said Nina, ‘we’d better go see the zodiac, hadn’t we?’

They entered the yacht and went to one of the upper decks. Osir led her to a door. ‘Please, wait in my cabin,’ he said. ‘I will see if the zodiac is ready.’

The cabin turned out to be larger than her entire apartment, the adjoining bathroom and walk-in closets making it even bigger. It also boasted a mirrored ceiling above the enormous bed. The decor was every bit as playboyesque as his Swiss home, missing only a tigerskin rug to complete the picture. ‘This is - stylish,’ she managed.

Osir smiled as he went to another door at the room’s far end. ‘Make yourself comfortable. I will just be a minute.’

She perched on the end of the bed, kicking off her heels and fidgeting with the long dress as she waited. Before long Osir returned, his smile even wider. He pulled a catch above the door, folding panels back to reveal another large room beyond. ‘It is ready.’

Nina crossed the room. She looked past Osir . . .

To see, for the first time, the fully assembled zodiac.

Whoever he had employed to restore it, she had to admit they had done an absolutely exquisite job. The six- foot-diameter disc rested on a low circular stand beneath a thick protective layer of transparent bulletproof Lexan. It wasn’t until she stepped right up to it that she could see any trace of the cuts made to remove it from the Hall of Records.

Seen in its entirety, the zodiac was spectacular. Smaller than the one in the Louvre, it made up for it with its vibrant colours. Sealed within the Sphinx, protected from the elements, the paint picking out each constellation from the dark background had remained almost intact. A thick, weaving line of pale blue bisected the sky - the Milky Way, she assumed.

There were other markings: the red dot she had seen in Macy’s photo, almost certainly Mars, and circles representing other planets. But her attention immediately went to the yellow triangle near the small figure of Osiris.

A pyramid. Osiris’s pyramid.

She leaned closer. There was something barely discernible painted beside it, very small characters. Hieroglyphs.

Nina looked excitedly round at Osir. ‘Have you seen these?’

‘Of course,’ he said, going to a large table and picking up a printout from beside a laptop. ‘I had them translated when the zodiac was still in pieces. They’re directions - the problem is, I don’t know the starting point. Nobody does. Which is why I need your insight.’

He handed her the translation. ‘ “The second eye of Osiris sees the way to the silver canyon,” ’ she read. ‘ “One atur towards Mercury beyond its end is the tomb of the immortal god-king.” An atur, that’s an Egyptian unit of measurement, right?’

‘Eleven thousand and twenty-five metres.’

Nina instantly performed the mental arithmetic to convert the figure to imperial measurements: ‘Six point eight five miles.’ Osir raised an eyebrow. ‘Like I said, I’m good at math. So the pyramid is just under seven miles from the end of the silver canyon in the direction of Mercury, which is . . . one of these planets on the zodiac, I guess.’

‘Actually, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘The planets on the zodiac are Mars, Venus and Jupiter.’ He pointed them out. ‘But we used their positions to calculate Mercury’s position as well. It would have been . . . here.’ He indicated a particular spot to the right of the pyramid.

‘So, about seven miles east of the end of the canyon. Except,’ she continued, nodding at a wall mirror, ‘because the map is mirrored since we’re looking at it from above rather than below, it’s really seven miles west.’

Osir was pleased. ‘So all we need to do is find the silver canyon.’

‘Which means first, we need to find the second eye of Osiris. Where’s his first eye?’

‘There are two Osiris figures on the zodiac,’ he reminded her. ‘Perhaps they point the way together?’

Nina bent low to examine them. Typically for Egyptian art they were in profile, only one eye visible on each, but at the small size of the carvings they were nothing more than dots. She drew an imaginary line between the eyes of the two figures, but it neither ran near the pyramid nor seemed to point to anything in particular.

‘The Eye of Osiris is also a symbol, isn’t it?’ she asked.

Osir nodded. ‘A sign of protection. Found in temples, tombs . . . it’s supposed to help guide you through the Underworld.’

‘So fairly common, then. That won’t narrow things down.’ She stared at the zodiac, thinking. ‘Could the “silver canyon” be a clue? The ancient Egyptians valued silver above gold - were there any silver mines in the pre-dynastic period?’

‘I don’t know. You’re the historian, not me!’

‘Point taken. This’ll need more research. We need to check the archaeological databases . . .’ She tailed off, realising she was slipping into a state of professional excitement over the chance to crack the puzzle - and forgetting that doing so would help the very person she was trying to stop.

‘Are you all right?’ Osir asked.

‘I’m . . . just tired,’ she said. ‘It’s been a hectic day.’

He smiled. ‘My apologies - there’s no need to solve this riddle in one night. Besides, the race is tomorrow, and I was hoping you would join me there.’

‘Sounds cool,’ she said, the idea of watching noisy cars screaming past for a couple of hours anything but.