Pharaoh (10 page)

‘What is your answer, General?’

Taksoun nervously bit his lower lip. ‘Afterwards . . . what will happen then? A threat like the one you’ve devised can’t be kept up indefinitely. If you keep a pistol pointed at someone’s head for too long without pulling the trigger, sooner or later he’ll manage to surprise you and disarm you.’

‘This has been foreseen as well,’ replied Abu Ahmid. ‘It should suffice for you to know that when we’re ready to negotiate, our position will put us at an absolute advantage. Well, General, what is your answer?’

‘You seem very sure of yourself, Abu Ahmid,’ said the officer. ‘But if I were to . . .’

Abu Ahmid watched calmly as the general’s hand settled on the butt of his gun.

‘You forget that there’s another person, besides myself, who knows everything about you. If you were to take such a risk, you would never make it back to headquarters, my friend. Isn’t your pilot, by chance, a young lieutenant from Zahko who served up to two weeks ago at the Erbil base and who has the habit of wearing his gun on his right side?’

Taksoun took a startled look at the helicopter, then seemed to think for a minute. ‘All right.’ He nodded. ‘Yes, you can count on me.’

‘And you on me,’ said Abu Ahmid. ‘At any time of day or night and in any weather.’

The wind blew harder and a flash of lightning lit the swollen clouds waiting on the horizon.

‘But how will I—’

‘You will never be able to contact me, for the simple reason that you will not know who I might be or where I can be found. I will come looking for you. And find you.’

‘Farewell, then, Abu Ahmid.’

‘Goodbye, General Taksoun. The day of the military parade is not far off.
Allah Akbar.’

‘Allah Akbar,’
answered the general.

He nodded and turned towards the helicopter. The pilot started up the engine and the blades began to rotate faster and faster until the craft lifted into the air. Beneath them, the man wrapped in his keffiyeh became very small, until he disappeared behind a veil of rain. The general looked away and sat thinking as the helicopter flew over the deserted banks of the Euphrates.

He suddenly turned towards the pilot. ‘Where are you from, lieutenant?’ he asked.

‘Town called Zahko, sir,’ the young officer answered.

T
HE SAME DAY
, but much later that night, Gad Avner left the National Security Council meeting in a very bad temper. The politicians, as usual, had spent the whole time tearing each other to pieces without reaching any decision regarding his request for a special allocation to reinforce the intelligence services.

They had asked him for proof, solid evidence that would justify such a large financial commitment, but all he had to offer was an old bloodhound’s sixth sense of danger in the offing. Yes, but something solid, they demanded. Unusual activity in certain circles, edginess in several banking institutes, suspicious transfers of massive sums of capital, disturbing euphoria among political prisoners. And two words: Operation Nebuchadnezzar.

And you’re asking us to allocate five hundred million shekels on the basis of two words?’ asked the leader of the opposition. ‘What kind of an idiot are you?’

‘Do you know who Nebuchadnezzar was?’ replied Avner. ‘The King of Babylon who took Jerusalem in 586 bc, destroyed the Temple and deported the remaining population to Mesopotamia,’ he said, leaving the room and slamming the door after him.

Now he was a few steps away from the Wailing Wall,

alongside the courtyard where he had parked his car. The neighbourhood was very quiet and almost no one was out on the streets.

He started up the car and drove past the square that was guarded by soldiers in combat fatigues, towards the King David Hotel, where one of his men was waiting for him with urgent news.

He was a recent acquisition but a good one: a young secret service agent, a second lieutenant of Italian origin, the son of a Venetian rabbi. Fabrizio Ferrario was working for him undercover as a social worker in an international charity organization with headquarters at the Jerusalem Plaza. Good-looking, he dressed with effortless but unmistakable elegance, nothing but perfect Armani shirts, whether under a blazer or a bush jacket.

They met at the bar in the lobby. Avner lit up a cigarette and ordered an ice-cold Maccabi.

‘What was so important that it couldn’t wait until the end of the meeting?’ he asked.

‘Two things,’ said the young man. ‘The first is that Operation Nebuchadnezzar does exist and is, in all probability, ready to go.’

‘And the second?’ asked Avner without looking up from his drink.

‘We have to take a walk. You have to see this for yourself, and right away.’

‘A walk? Where to?’

‘Follow me, as soon as you’ve finished your beer. It isn’t far.’

‘What else have you found out about Operation Nebuchadnezzar?’

‘Not much. What I have learned is from some wire-tapping we’ve done, mainly in the prisons. There are transfers in progress from several of the Middle Eastern banks, like the Banque du Liban and the Saudi Arabian, and we’re talking about considerable sums.’

‘Payments? In which direction?’

‘Swiss accounts. Nassau. We’re investigating likely recipients,

especially in the Sicilian and Russian mafias. It shouldn’t take us long.’

Avner had finished his beer and followed his companion out as the bartender turned to a couple of American tourists who weren’t ready to call it a day. Tourists in Jerusalem had become a rare commodity lately.

They walked down the deserted street to the great Antonian Fortress archway.

‘What do you think they’re buying with that money?’

‘Arms, electronic surveillance devices, missile systems, bacteriological and chemical weapons . . . who knows?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Avner. ‘Those kinds of goods are bought and sold by state ministers in this part of the world. The Palestinian Authority doesn’t have a cent and Hamas is already being financed by the Iranians and Libyans. They’re giving away plastic explosives on practically every street corner. Have I left something out?’

‘The ex-Soviet arsenal. You can get anything from them, at a good deal.’

‘Yeah,’ said Avner, pulling his coat collar up around his neck.

They had reached the centre of a large underpass and could see a weak halo of light filtering through a section of the wall between two soldiers armed with Uzi machine guns.

‘We’re almost there,’ said the lieutenant. ‘It’s this way.’

Avner followed him into a sort of tunnel dug into the wall of the fortress, cut through the solid rock. They could hear voices coming from inside and the passage was lit by a couple of neon lights hanging on the walls.

‘What is this?’ asked Avner.

They’d already reached the end of the open part of the passage, where a group of people with miner’s hats and digging tools were at work. Avner recognized the archaeologist Ygael Allon among them; he had been a cabinet member during the Shimon Peres government.

Lieutenant Ferrario introduced Avner as ‘Engineer Nathaniel Cohen of the civil engineers’.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Avner, grasping the archaeologist’s dust-covered hand. Then he turned towards the tunnel which appeared to be partially caved in. ‘But what is this?’ he repeated.

Allon showed him a few ceramic fragments and shone a torch on a short inscription in the wall. ‘It’s a tunnel from the age of the kings of Judah. And it seems to lead to the Temple.’

W
ILLIAM
B
LAKE
had dozed off for a couple of hours, trying to get a little sleep before they landed. He was woken by a voice over the intercom that wished them all a merry Christmas and asked them to fasten their seat belts. When he opened his eyes he saw that the plane’s window shades had been lowered. Gordon was nowhere to be seen; he must have gone into the cockpit.

‘Where are we?’ he asked Sullivan.

‘Nearly at our destination, Professor Blake,’ was the reply.

Not much of an answer. But Blake thought they must be somewhere west of Luxor if the descriptions of the terrain that his companions had provided him with at the beginning of the flight were accurate.

Sullivan and Gordon had shown him a few snapshots that they had taken inside the tomb, but it was still rather difficult to get an overall idea, because of the constricted angles of the shots. What was clear was that the tomb was definitely untouched. It was in the same condition, at the time of its discovery, as when the person lying inside had been buried.

A few more minutes went by until the wheels touched down and the engines were reversed. When the plane had nearly come to a complete stop, the pilot opened the side hatch to allow the passengers to exit. Blake stepped into the doorway and inhaled the dry, scented air of the desert. Then he looked around to try to get a bearing on where he was.

The aeroplane had come down on a dirt runway that was smooth and even enough to permit landing without any problems. It was situated at the centre of a valley which stretched between two mountain ridges. The hillsides were furrowed by a series of gullies joining in the bed of a wadi which meandered across the valley, more or less parallel to the runway. The river bed was completely dry but flanked and shaded here and there by low thorny vegetation, broom and tamarisk bushes.

A station wagon pulled up alongside the plane and loaded on the passengers and their luggage. They set off as the Falcon rolled down the runway towards the hill where a hangar hatch was opening.

They travelled up the river bed for about half an hour, until they reached a group of trailers: the camp of the Warren Mining Corporation. Off to one side was a power generator run by a petrol engine and to the other a large black Bedouin-style tent, probably used for meals and meetings.

Behind the site, on the hillside, was a wheeled cistern connected to pipelines which distributed the water to a number of trailers. One of them was much larger than the others, and Blake imagined it was the residence of the site manager or mining foreman.

All the company vehicles were lined up in a rectangular area marked off by a row of stones: a tracked drill, a dump truck, three Jeeps, a truck and two three-wheeled ATVs.

About 200 metres away from the camp was a cabin with a sack outside full of white powder, also sprinkled liberally all around the structure. Obviously the latrine, with its supply of quicklime to dump into the pit, replacing the toilet flush. He decided immediately that he would never use it; the desert was a big place, and there was nothing worse than the shared latrine in a camp.

On the right, looming over the main valley, the mountain took on the shape of a crouching lion or sphinx. The hammada terrain was typical, a geological formation common to the entire Middle East and most of North Africa: compact soil and sand covered by flint and limestone pebbles. But the setting sun helped to soften the eroded landscape, cloaking it in a rosy glow and making the dried satinpod fruit sparkle like so many silver coins.

The sky had already turned cobalt blue. A full white moon was rising at that moment opposite the setting sun, hovering over the deserted, silent mountain crest. It looked like it was rolling forward over the rugged peaks.

The car stopped in front of the main trailer and a well-dressed man in a khaki-coloured bush jacket came forward to welcome them.

‘My name is Alan Maddox,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Ras Udash, Professor Blake. I hope you had a good trip.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Maddox,’ replied Blake. ‘The trip was fine and I’m feeling much better than I had expected.’

Maddox was a hefty man of about sixty, with wide black eyebrows, a grey moustache and beard. He wore an Australian ranger’s hat, grey cotton trousers and a pair of military boots.

‘This is your lodging,’ he said, pointing to a grey trailer off to the left. ‘I’m sure you’d like a shower. The water is always nice and hot here. Dinner will be ready in half an hour, here in my accommodation. I hope we’ll have the honour of your company.’

‘You can count on it, Mr Maddox. I never manage to eat on planes, not even luxury planes like your Falcon. I’ll see you in half an hour.’

Gordon and Sullivan also went to their living quarters, located to the right of the main unit.

Blake entered his trailer, which smelled dusty. Someone had hastily wiped down the floor and the bathroom, smearing the mirror above the sink. The place was sparsely furnished, but he was relieved to see that there was a computer on the desk with what looked like a modem connection and a small portable television.

He got into the shower and let the water run hot. He couldn’t help but remember the last shower he’d taken, curled up on the floor like a dog, his stomach gripped by cramps.

He rubbed himself dry with a towel, combed his hair carefully and arranged his toiletries, while the TV blared with news of rioting and skirmishes at the outskirts of Jerusalem and in Hebron. Fifteen Israeli schoolchildren killed before the gunman took his own life. Blake couldn’t shake a feeling of dismay; he couldn’t remember when the situation had ever been quite so bad in the Middle East.