brilliantly polished and almost invariably black. But aside from these exceptions, the freeway traffic seemed one feverish anachronism, a time capsule from an earlier age.
Logan and Rush sat in the rear of the car, silently taking in the sights. Logan’s luggage had been left on the plane, and their driver-a local driving a Renault only slightly less aged than those around them-had expertly navigated the maze of airport access roads and was now headed into Cairo proper. Logan saw block after block of almost identical cement buildings, painted mustard, a half-dozen stories high. Clothes were drying on balconies; windows were covered with canvas awnings displaying a confusing welter of advertisements. The flat roofs were festooned with satellite dishes, and innumerable cables hung between buildings. A faint orange pall hung over everything. The heat, the unblinking sun, were merciless. Logan leaned out the wide-open window, gasping in the diesel-heavy air.
“Fourteen million people,” Dr. Rush said, glancing his way. “Crammed into two hundred square miles of city.”
“If Egypt isn’t our destination, why are we here?”
“It’s just a brief stop. We’ll be back in the air before noon.”
As they approached the city center and left the highway for local roads, traffic grew even denser. To Logan, every intersection seemed like the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel: a dozen cars all struggling to squeeze into one or two lanes. Pedestrians flooded the streets, taking advantage of the gridlock to cross willy-nilly, missing cars by scant inches. Somehow, grievous injury was avoided. Downtown, the buildings were no taller, but the architecture was more interesting, oddly reminiscent of the Rive Gauche. Security became increasingly evident: black-uniformed police were posted in booths at intersections; hotels and department stores had their frontages blocked by concrete fortifications to prevent car bombings. They passed the US Embassy, a fortress bristling with. 50-caliber machine- gun posts.
A few minutes later, the car abruptly pulled to the curb and stopped. “We’re here,” Rush said, opening his door.
“Where’s ‘here’?”
“The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.” And Rush stepped out of the car.
Logan followed, careful to avoid the press of bodies, the cars that passed close enough to ruffle the fabric of his shirt. He glanced up at the grand facade of rose-colored stone across the entrance plaza. He had been here, too, during his graduate research. The tingle of excitement that he’d first felt on the plane grew stronger.
They crossed the plaza, fending off trinket sellers hawking glow-in-the-dark pyramids and battery-powered toy camels. Bursts of high-speed Arabic peppered Logan from all sides. They passed a brace of guards flanking the main entrance. Just before stepping inside, Logan heard a voice, crackling with amplification, suddenly rise above the din of traffic and the chatter of package-deal tourists: the chant of the muezzin in the local mosque across Tahrir Square, calling the faithful to prayer. As he paused, listening, Logan heard the call taken up by another mosque, then another, the chant moving Doppler-like into greater and greater distances, until it seemed to echo across the entire city.
He felt a tug at his elbow. It was Rush. Logan turned and stepped inside.
The ancient structure was crowded even at this early hour, but the sweaty throngs had not yet warmed the stone galleries. After the fierce sunlight, the interior of the museum seemed exceedingly dark. They made their way through the ground floor, past innumerable statuary and stone tablets. Despite signs bearing warnings against camera usage and forbidding the touching of artifacts, Logan noticed that-even now-many of the exhibits were still open to the air rather than hermetically sealed, and showed signs of extensive handling. Passing the last of the galleries, they mounted a broad flight of stairs to the first floor. Here were row upon row of sarcophagi, laid out on stone plinths like sentinels of the shadow world. Along the walls were glass-fronted cabinets containing funerary objects of gold and faience, the cases locked with simple seals of lead and wire.
“Mind if I take a moment to inspect the grave goods of Ramses III?” Logan asked, pointing toward a doorway. “I believe it’s down that passage. I recently read in the Journal of Antiquarian Studies of a certain alabaster canopic vase one could use to summon-”
But Rush smiled apologetically, pointed at his watch, and merely urged Logan on.
They made their way to another staircase-this one narrower, missing its banister-and climbed to the next floor. It was much quieter here, the galleries devoted to more scholarly collections: inscribed stelae; fragments of papyri, faded and decaying. The lighting was dim, the stone walls grimy. Once Rush stopped to consult a tiny floor plan he pulled from his pocket, hand-sketched on a scrap of paper.
Logan peered curiously around half-open doors. He saw stacks of papyrus scrolls, shelved floor to ceiling in niches like so many wine bottles in a sommelier’s vault. Another room held a collection of masks of ancient Egyptian gods: Set, Osiris, Thoth. The sheer volume of artifacts and priceless treasures, the weight of so much antiquity on all sides, was almost oppressive.
They turned a corner and Rush stopped before a closed wooden door. Inscribed in gold letters so faded as to be almost indecipherable were the words Archives III: Tanis-Sehel-Fayum. Rush glanced back briefly at Logan, then over his shoulder and down the empty hall. And then he opened the door and ushered Logan inside.
The room beyond was even darker than the hallway. A series of windows arrayed just below the high ceiling grudgingly admitted shafts of sunlight, heavily filtered through countless years of grime. There was no other illumination. Bookcases covered all four walls, stuffed to bursting with ancient journals, bound manuscripts, moldy leather-covered notebooks, and thick bundles of papyri, fastened together with desiccated leather stitching and in apparent disarray.
As Rush closed the door behind them, Logan took a step into the room. It smelled strongly of wax and decaying paper. This was precisely the kind of place he could find himself very much at home in: a clearinghouse for the distant past, a repository of secrets and riddles and strange chronicles, all waiting patiently to be rediscovered and brought into the light. He had spent more than his fair share of time in such rooms. And yet his experience was primarily in medieval abbeys and cathedral crypts and the restricted collections of university libraries. The artifacts here-the histories and the narratives, and the dead language most of them were written in-were very, very much older.
In the center of the room was a single research table, long and narrow, surrounded by a half-dozen chairs. The room had been so dark and still that Logan had believed them to be alone. But now, as his eyes adjusted, he noticed a man in Arab garb seated at the table, his back to them, hunched over an ancient scroll. He had not moved at their entrance, and did not move now. He appeared completely engrossed in his reading.
Rush took a step forward to stand beside Logan. Then he quietly cleared his throat.
For a long moment, the figure did not move. Then he turned slightly in their direction. The old man-for it was clear to Logan he was an elderly scholar-did not bother to make eye contact; rather, he simply acknowledged the new presences. He was dressed in a formal but rather threadbare gray thawb, with faded cotton pants and a hooded linen robe that partially concealed a plain black-and-white patterned ghutra fringing his forehead. Beside him, a tiny cup of Turkish coffee sat on a worn earthenware coaster.
Logan felt an inexplicable stab of annoyance at this presence. Rush had clearly brought him here to consult some private document: How were they going to keep their business confidential from an elderly scholar, even one who was so insolent as to barely acknowledge them?
Then-to Logan’s surprise-the old man pushed his chair away from the desk and, very deliberately, stood up to face them. He was wearing a pair of old reading glasses, cracked and dusty, and his seamed face was hidden behind the folds of the hood. He stood, regarding them, eyes indistinguishable behind the ancient spectacles.
“I’m sorry we’re late,” Rush said.
The man nodded. “That’s all right. This scroll was just getting interesting.”
Logan looked from one to the other in confusion. The stranger standing before them had replied in perfect English-American English, in fact, with the faintest whiff of a Boston accent.
Now, slowly and carefully, the old man pulled back his hood, revealing a shock of brilliant white hair combed carefully beneath the ghutra. He took off the glasses, folded them, and slipped them into a pocket of his robe. A pair of eyes stared back at Logan. Even in the faint light of the archives, they were as pale blue as a swimming pool on the first fresh day of summer vacation.
Suddenly, Logan understood. The man he was looking at was Porter Stone.
