City of the Lost (21 page)

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘She’d been ill a long time,’ Karin assured him. ‘Anyway, she lived near Limassol down on the coast. She owned lots of beautiful things. Beautiful
valuable
things. Paintings and porcelain and jewellery and I don’t know what else.’ The fluency of her lies surprised her. She was better at this than she would have expected. ‘The thing is, I don’t want to auction it all off. These pieces were a part of her, you know. They hold memories. But I can’t leave them where they are either, because I’m definitely going to put the house up for sale. It’s
far
too big for me, though I am thinking of maybe moving here myself. Only I have my job and I can’t relocate just like that.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry. I must sound incoherent.’

‘Not at all,’ he assured her. ‘You want to keep your late grandmother’s most valuable and personal possessions safe while you decide what to do with them. A box in our vault is the obvious answer. Before you make your decision, however, you naturally want to know how much it will cost, what our facilities are like, what the procedure will be.’

‘Yes,’ smiled Karin. ‘That’s it exactly.’

He swivelled a little in his chair, steepled his fingers, looked up at the portrait of a stern-faced Greek Orthodox patriarch on his wall. ‘I can
tell
you everything you want to know. But I can’t show you, I’m afraid. It will seem strange, I know, but it is our strict policy here that only account holders can visit our vault. We know who they are, you see, because we’ve already run checks on their background. You’ll forgive me, I’m sure, for saying this, but when a stranger comes into our branch from off the street – however charming they may be – we have no way of knowing for certain that they are who they claim to be.’

‘I understand completely,’ said Karin. ‘In fact, I’m reassured to know you take your security so seriously. But I presume I could open an account here? And that I could open a safety-deposit box after that?’

He spread his hands. ‘Of course.’

‘How long would it take? Only I’m due to fly back home the day after tomorrow, and I’d love to have this sorted out first.’

‘Our new account checks are usually completed overnight, unless there are any …
issues
. Which I am sure there won’t be in your case. If I take your details now, therefore, and you make a nominal deposit, I should be able to show you the vault first thing tomorrow morning. Then you can decide what kind of box you need, and for how long, and we will set it up for you. After that, you can bring in your grandmother’s belongings whenever you like. As long as we’re open, of course, and one of our cashiers is free.’

‘Perfect,’ smiled Karin, reaching for her passport. ‘Then let’s get started.’

Mike waited for a van to pass then turned into a street of large houses with imposing façades. He drove slowly, looking for a place to park. But everything was taken. He accelerated to the end of the road, turned left and left again. The buildings in this new street were less impressive, but at least there were spots free. Iain grabbed his holdall then got out, squinting against the sandstorm as he followed Mike around the corner and into the sanctuary of the Institute’s lobby, where they both brushed themselves down once more.

‘My office, first, I think,’ said Mike. ‘I can’t operate without coffee.’ He led the way along a corridor with labs on either side, a sprinkling of young men and women in white coats working diligently at gleaming machines.

‘You had a car crash to tell me about,’ prompted Iain.

‘Yes,’ agreed Mike, pushing between a pair of fire-doors. ‘You see, we kept turning up these odd anachronisms, particularly here in Egypt. There’s a notorious tomb complex in Tanis, for example, where a twenty-second dynasty Pharaoh built his tomb before a twenty-first dynasty one. Which is odd. And we found a cache of mummies in a sealed cave in Deir el-Bahari. If our chronology is right, then one of those mummies simply couldn’t have been among them. But it was. And then there are all those Apis bulls missing from Saqqara.’

‘If you say so.’

‘It’s not enough to overturn our model, of course, because history is messy, you expect anomalies like that.’ He opened a door and ushered Iain into his office, cramped with filing cabinets and work-tables strewn with papers and samples. ‘But it was certainly enough to make us look again at our assumptions. And, when we looked at Sothic dating again, it turned out to have a slight flaw.’

‘Which was?’

‘It was bunk, old chap. Complete and utter bunk.’ He allowed himself a nervous laugh as he poured a generous helping of ground coffee into a fresh filter. ‘At least, the
theory
is fair enough. But in practice it depends entirely upon the Egyptians never having adjusted their calendar. Not once. Not in thousands of years. Yet people were always adjusting their calendars. We know of several examples from the Ptolemaic and Roman eras alone. And before them came the Persians, the Nubians, the Libyans and a wretched intermediate period when Egypt disintegrated into rival chiefdoms vying for control. And we’re supposed to believe that the calendar was never adjusted in all that time?’ He glugged bottled water into the percolator then set it running. ‘Not
once
? Even though the most important Egyptian season was actually called inundation because – as you might expect – it marked the annual flooding of the Nile. Except, of course, that it wouldn’t. Yet no one noticed this, or did anything about it, for a thousand years? Perhaps it
could
have happened.
Perhaps
. But it’s fifty-to-one against. And to base our entire chronology upon such odds …’ He shook his head.

‘So out goes Sothic dating?’

‘Out goes Sothic dating. Unfortunately, our chronology was already set by then. Reworking it from scratch would have been a monumental task. Because, like I said, it wasn’t only Egypt now. It was the whole ancient world. And we’d all kind of internalized the chronology as undergraduates. It’s what our textbooks said and what our professors taught us. But then they would, wouldn’t they? They wrote the damned books.’

Iain frowned. ‘What about carbon dating and the other scientific techniques? Didn’t you say they supported the conventional chronology?’

‘I did, yes. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Take radiocarbon dating. The original and still the best. But what holds true for it also holds true for dendrochronology, thermoluminescence and the rest. Do you know how it works?’

‘Not a clue,’ said Iain.

‘There’s a variant of carbon called carbon-14 in our atmosphere. Radioactive but harmless. We breathe it in all the time, absorb it into our flesh and bone. We’re both taking it in now. All living things are. But when we die, we stop ingesting it, and so it begins a slow transition into a more common isotope of carbon, carbon-12. We know the half-life of this process, so by measuring the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 in a sample, we can deduce how long it’s been dead. Simple, accurate, flawless. Or so people assume.’

Iain frowned at him. ‘Are you saying it doesn’t work?’

‘Oh no. I’d hardly have made a career out of it if I thought that.’ The percolator was choking on its last drops. He poured them each a cup, added two heaped spoonfuls of sugar to his own, then a dribble of milk. ‘What I
am
saying is that its reputation for precision is sometimes better than its capability. For one thing, we need organic materials to test. But organic materials decay unless they’re preserved in some way. One common method of preservation is charring, from being partially destroyed in a fire or being cooked. Yet exposure to heat can make wood seem older than it really is. Or take a wooden beam: date it and you can work out the age of a building, right? Except that beams last hundreds of years and were often reused, potentially throwing out calculations by
centuries
. Then there’s confirmation bias. It’s only human to accept data that fits your model while excluding that which doesn’t. Two samples from Tutankhamen’s tomb carbon-dated to nearly five hundred years after his death. Those results didn’t fit the accepted model and so were discarded. But if every such anomaly is discarded then the models gain false credibility. And even that isn’t the biggest problem. The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere varies significantly over time and place. We can’t, therefore, use raw results. We have to calibrate them. Let’s say our raw results indicate that a piece of wood is from a tree that died three thousand years before present. We check our charts for that time and place, calibrate the result, then declare that it’s actually two thousand eight hundred or three thousand two hundred years old, or whatever.’

‘Seems logical.’

‘Yes. But think about it: How do we calibrate our results? Well, we’re fortunate to have a vast bank of securely dated artefacts. How do we know they’re securely dated? Because they’re tied to particular Pharaohs whose dates we can be confident of, thanks to Sothic dating.’

‘But you just told me Sothic dating was bunk.’

‘I did, yes.’

Iain frowned at him. ‘So calibration assigns dates by referring to a discredited chronological model? But that’s ridiculous.’

Mike smiled broadly. ‘
Now
you’re getting it,’ he said.

Idleness didn’t come easily to Zehra. She’d spent her whole life working her house and land and so felt uneasy when not usefully occupied. She washed a basket of clothes then hung them up to dry on the clothes-lines on the small balcony. Then she set about cleaning the apartment. She left her son’s study until last. His desk had twin filing cabinet drawers. The top one was locked but the bottom one was open. It was packed with folders of columns, articles and speeches he’d written over the years, many of which were scribbled with annotations marking his dissatisfaction with them.

Curiosity tugged at her. She pulled one out to read. The light in his study wasn’t very good so she took it into the living room instead. She quickly found herself offended and exasperated by her son’s naïvety. She kept exclaiming in indignation and dismay. Yet, when she was finished, she went back for another and then a third.

One phrase in particular got beneath her skin. It came up in speech after speech, exhorting his audience to stand up and be counted. Fear was a border, he said. You could cross it in your mind.

How easy for him to say! He’d never experienced a unified Cyprus himself, as she had. He’d never seen what neighbour would do to neighbour when given half a chance. Who was he to call her a coward? Who was he to disparage those who chose peace and separation over fear and conflict? She put the last of the pages away. The sun had shifted, leaving the apartment gloomy. She felt agitated. She felt the need for fresh air, for sunshine on her face. It was still an hour until Katerina finished school, but she set off anyway then waited in her usual spot, in the shade of a dappled almond blossom across the road.

When you feared for your life, you made bad bargains, because being safe trumped all. But those same bad bargains meant you’d never be safe. Nor your children. Nor your children’s children.

Something hardened inside her as she contemplated this. She wasn’t quite sure what.

Parents arrived in cars, blocking her view. Doors banged. A first few pupils ran out the gates. A bell rang and trickle turned to flood. Katerina appeared with two friends, all speaking excitedly over the others. Something twisted in Zehra’s heart, a mix of pain and pleasure that she hadn’t felt in years. She thought of her late husband. She thought of her imprisoned son.

‘Who were those two?’ she asked, when Katerina came over. ‘They looked nice.’

They
were
nice, enthused Katerina. They were working on a biology project together, growing beans in the school garden. She reached into her satchel and pulled out her digital camera to show Zehra various photographs she’d taken. Zehra found herself captivated, as much by the camera as by the pictures. The gadgets they had these days! She took it from her, turned it around in her hands.

Fear was a border. You could cross it in your mind.

An unexpected serenity settled upon Zehra as she crossed that border now. She would return to Famagusta in the morning. She would see inside the house of the man from the photograph, come what may. She passed Katerina back her camera. ‘Teach me,’ she said.

Asena sat in the passenger seat of the silver Subaru and read yet once more the transcripts of last night’s telephone calls between Iain Black and Karin Visser. It didn’t get any better. The Lion was right: Black was close enough on their trail that he needed to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. The only question was how. She glanced across the street at the front door of the Cairo Institute of Archaeometry: no movement since Walker and Black had hurried inside half an hour or so before. She didn’t know what tests they’d be running in there, but presumably they’d take a while.

She had time.

Hits were nothing new to Asena. She’d killed her first man – a loathsome creep of an army officer called Durmu
ş
Hassan – immediately before joining the Grey Wolves three years ago. She’d killed on multiple occasions since. It was shocking how easy it was, as long as you had patience, strong nerves and a robust plan. But abduction was far more challenging, as your target was unlikely to come willingly. That was why she’d brought Bulent and U
ğ
ur with her, and why their first order of business on arrival had been to visit the Lion’s contact for weapons and other equipment.

Mike Walker had his in-laws staying. Black would need a room. New Cairo was a city reclaimed from desert. There were no tourist attractions here, and therefore no hotels. All those were in Cairo proper. It was far too far to walk there, and public transport was uncomfortable, unreliable and slow, especially with the
khamsin
blowing. After he’d checked in for the night, he
might
go out again to eat or to sample the nightlife. But she couldn’t count on it. Ideally, therefore, they needed to take him between here and his hotel.