The Alexandria Connection (10 page)

‘That might be possible. The price would be US $60 million, but that’s conditional on the success of the attacks on the choke points, and you would have to arrange for the collection of the painting – and the mask – in person.’

‘Always assuming the mask can be acquired,’ said General Khan, his dark eyes glinting with anticipation.

‘But the attacks on the choke point will only be a start,’ Crowley warned.

‘Oil again?’

Crowley shook his head. ‘Cobalt 60. One of the most prolific radioactive substances on the planet, and one of the most dangerous. It might only have a half-life of five years, but Cobalt 60 emits gamma rays so powerful that exposure to even one gram of this stuff is enough to kill you. I’ll be able to deliver Cobalt 60 to the three target countries in the next few months. That will be followed by Phase Three, which is designed to achieve something close to a worldwide market panic, where we can gain absolute control.’

‘I
am so excited!’ Aleta exclaimed, once they had regained their hotel room. ‘I can’t be certain, but those recesses in the walls are a very positive indicator. They’re exactly the same as the recesses you will see in the daughter library.’

She slipped on a pair of white gloves and ran a sharp knife through the thick layers of pitch that sealed the glazed jar. ‘Whoever sealed this jar didn’t want any air or moisture getting in,’ Aleta said, working as a surgeon might to carry out a delicate operation. She slowly eased the tightly fitting lid off the jar and stepped back as the centuries-old foul air was released. Covering her nose, she shone a torch inside.

Aleta extracted an ancient, cracked leather roll from inside the jar. She laid it gently on the coffee table and carefully unrolled it, revealing two yellowed papyri. For a moment or two, she scanned the faded Greek words on the first ancient parchment.

‘My God . . . this is part of the library
pinakes
– the catalogue! Out of the hundreds of thousands of papyri in the library, there’s only fifty or so listed here, so they’re probably some the library’s most important documents.’

‘Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble to record them,’ O’Connor observed.

‘Yes, it was a bit different back then’ Aleta said thoughtfully. ‘No electronic copies or storing them in the cloud. We have to remember, we found this only a metre or so from the top of the submerged wall, which would mean it was stored in the highest recesses of the library, near the ceiling.’ She scanned the parchment again ‘This pinakes lists works by Euclid, and papyri from Aristotle’s personal collection,’ Aleta said, running her eye down the list. ‘Archaeologists have only uncovered fragments, but from this list, it looks as if the library held Berossus’ complete history of the world in three volumes, his
Babylonaica
. As well as Sappho’s poetry and songs,’ Aleta continued, translating the Greek. ‘Sappho wrote around 600 BC, and she was probably one of the finest musicians of the ancient world. And look – Hypatia. Her works were stored here as well.’

‘And the other papyrus?’

Aleta turned her attention to the second document. Her heart skipped a beat, and it was some time before she spoke.

‘This is even more illuminating,’ she said finally. ‘Euclid worked and studied here around 300 BC, when Ptolemy I was pharaoh, and Alexandria was the capital of Egypt. Euclid wrote here the basis of today’s Euclidian geometry, his
Elements,
all thirteen books of it. The primary copy, the Heiberg manuscript, is held by the Vatican in the Secret Archives.’

O’Connor rolled his eyes. ‘They would keep something like that to themselves, wouldn’t they. A wonder they didn’t burn it. So is this the Euclid Papyrus?’

Aleta shook her head, ignoring O’Connor’s disdain for all things Catholic. ‘It’s an engineering treatise . . . a combination of ancient Greek writing and Egyptian hieroglyphics, but the reason I say illuminating,’ she said, ‘is that this document proves the Euclid Papyrus
does,
or at least
did
exist.’ Aleta’s dark eyes were flashing with an archaeologist’s excitement of discovery.

‘And how do we reach that conclusion?’ asked O’Connor, peering uncomprehendingly at the ancient letters.

‘This is Euclid’s notation, which refers to another document he wrote on the ancient pyramids. He says here “I have already dealt with pyramids of a triangular base in Propositions III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII and IX in Book XII of the
Elements
. But having sighted these calculations of Pharaoh Khufu’s engineers, the real purpose of the Great Pyramid is now clear. I have confirmed their calculations and recorded this on a papyrus hidden separately, the answers to the location of which, lie in the heavens.” The Euclid Papyrus. We’ve got to find it!’ Aleta exclaimed.

‘The answers lie in the heavens? Some sort of cryptic code?’ O’Connor wondered, pondering the diagrams on the papyrus.

‘I think you may be right,’ said Aleta. ‘Look . . . do you see this series of circles at the bottom?’

‘I’ve seen that design somewhere before . . . one of the codes used by ancient civilisations, isn’t it? The Flower of Life?’ O’Connor mused.

‘Yes, but it’s not so much a code in itself as one that has codes embedded in it. I remember studying this when I was working at the Temple of Osiris at Abydos. One of these days I’ll show you over the site, but of all the ancient markings on the temple walls, the most striking is the Flower of Life.’

‘Why single that out?’

‘Because firstly, it’s so different to the usual hieroglyphics, and secondly, it’s related to energy. We now know the Egyptians were not the only ancient civilisation for whom the flower was important. You will find the Flower of Life carved into the balls under the feet of the Fu dogs, the guardian lions at the entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing.’

‘But the Imperial Palace postdates the Egyptian civilisation. Does that mean the Chinese got it from the Egyptians?’

‘It’s hard to tell. When the Ming and Qing dynasties occupied the palace, there’s evidence both were aware of the importance of the Flower of Life, but so were the Indians. You can find it on the Harmindir Sahib, the Golden Temple in Amritsar in India, which is one of the Sikh religion’s holiest shrines. We think it was passed on from the Egyptians, but we don’t have proof.’

‘Couldn’t they just be coincidental separate discoveries?’

‘Perhaps, but I find it interesting that somehow, this Flower of Life has appeared right across the ancient world.’

‘So if that’s Euclid’s notation on the papyrus,’ O’Connor said, returning to the priceless artifact, ‘what do you think he’s getting at?’

‘Other than indicating there’s another, even more important papyrus, I’m not sure. But I’ve seen speculation from well-respected scientists and mathematicians about a code hidden within this hexagonal design of the Flower of Life. There’s also speculation that the code may hold a link to the earth’s natural energy systems, and that’s what Euclid could be getting at. Curiously, the Flower of Life design appears frequently in the crop circles in England.’

‘Hmm . . .’

‘You don’t buy these crop circles do you? You’ve got sceptism written all over your face!’

‘No – as a scientist, I have an open mind. The Milky Way galaxy alone contains another thirty billion solar systems like our own, and we now know there are more than one hundred billion galaxies in the universe. That adds up to trillions of planets, so there’s a very high probability that some of those planets are going to be in the “Goldilocks zone” where it’s not too hot, nor too cold to support life . . . but start subscribing to a theory of aliens making crop circles and the media will accuse you of not being wrapped too tight in the head.’

‘And since when has the media been the arbiter of science?’ Aleta demanded.

O’Connor grinned. ‘The media might not be the arbiter of science, but they do influence public opinion, and the last time I read anything on this, the public firmly believed crop circles are made by untidy patrons who’ve been thrown out of the Elephant and Castle at midnight.’

‘Open mind, my foot! You’re on the Elephant and Castle team!’ Aleta dug him in the ribs. ‘You think they’re all a hoax!’

‘There are plenty of crop circles that
are
man made. Who was it that started all of this?’

‘Bower and Chorley . . . a couple of pranksters who heard about some crop circles that appeared in 1966 at a place called Tully in Australia. A farmer by the name of George Pedley was driving his tractor around nine in the morning, when he heard a hissing sound, and then he saw a flying saucer rising from one of his swamps.’

O’Connor raised his eyes to the ceiling.

‘You can laugh all you like, but Australians are pretty down to earth. They like their booze, but I doubt Pedley was blotto at nine o’clock in the morning. He and another farmer discovered that not only were the reeds in the swamp flattened into a circle, but in the process, an unknown force had uprooted all of them from the bottom of the lagoon. The RAAF investigated, with inconclusive results, but it’s become the Australian equivalent of Roswell.’

‘That may be, but it doesn’t alter the fact that it inspired Bower and Chorley, using ropes and planks of wood and garden rollers, to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes in the UK for years.’

Aleta took a deep breath, and then exhaled loudly. ‘There’s no doubt that many of them are man made,’ she agreed, ‘but some of them are so intricate that it’s just not possible to create them in one night. Are you familiar with Carl Sagan’s message that was transmitted from the
Arecibo
radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 1974?’

O’Connor nodded. ‘Part of the SETI program – the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I remember that message . . . a pictogram in binary code that detailed the human race, the solar system and our methods of communication.’

‘Exactly, and it might interest you to know, Curtis Seamus O’Connor, that in August 2000, an intricate crop circle appeared alongside the Chilbolton radio telescope in Hampshire in England. A year later, the image of a face appeared in the wheat nearby, with the strands so delicately and intricately flattened that they resembled pixels in a photograph – a binary code of zeros and ones, no less. Wheat waving in the breeze is not the easiest medium to work with when you need that sort of precision. And five days later, the strangest pattern of all appeared – one that contained an answer to the SETI message.’

‘A clever hoax?’

‘Not if you take into account it would have taken more than twenty-four hours to produce, and it was so intricately designed that it would have been impossible to construct it without lights. The field was covered by the Chilbolton security cameras, and they turned up nothing.’

‘Leaving aside the fact that you have to suspend belief to buy into Roswell and little green or grey men, where does all this leave
us
?’

‘I’m not sure, but unlike you, I
am
keeping an open mind, because the crop glyphs of the Flower of Life and its association with energy have appeared too many times for it to be coincidence. But aside from that, there’s something else,’ Aleta said, pointing to another diagram at the bottom of the papyrus. ‘We’ve long suspected that the pyramids of Giza have been linked to the structure of our galaxy, and if you look here, you’ll see what I mean.’

‘That looks like an aerial map of the pyramids?’

‘Yes, the Giza Plateau . . . but look at the dots superimposed over the
top
of the pyramids,’ Aleta said, her excitement rising again. ‘I’ve seen this theory before where it’s postulated that the pyramids were aligned with a constellation in our galaxy, and the dots over the tops represent prominent stars. I think Euclid’s trying to tell us something here. The Egyptians, like the Maya and Inca, were great astronomers, and it would be no coincidence that the pyramid layout in Giza matched the night sky, but it’s the dot out here that has me intrigued,’ she said, pointing to a spot on the papyrus.

‘Lines up over a rock formation?’

‘Yes, that dot falls over an area known as Gebel Ghibli – Arabic for southern hill. It’s a few hundred metres from the Great Sphinx. It has me intrigued, and I may have to go back to Professor Badawi to get his help on this one.’

O’Connor reached to view a text on his encrypted cell phone. ‘Shit,’ was all he said.

‘Don’t you dare tell me that’s a text from Washington! We’re on holidays!’

‘H
e’s waiting for you.’

O’Connor flashed a willing smile at Chanelle, the attractive blonde-haired personal assistant to the CIA’s Director of the National Clandestine Service.

‘And the weather?’

‘Stormy – he’s just come back from briefing the president.’

O’Connor knocked on the inner door of the seventh floor office.

‘Come in.’ Previously known as the DDO, or Deputy Director of Operations, the CIA’s chief spymaster swivelled away from a computer that was isolated from the world’s hackers by a dizzying array of firewalls.

‘Ah . . . O’Connor. Have a seat,’ Tom McNamara said, gesturing toward one of two cracked and worn, brown leather couches. McNamara had a big, round face, grey hair that he kept very short, and piercing blue eyes. Weighing in at 120 kilograms, the huge barrel-chested ex-Marine regularly pressed 150 kilograms in the gym. He picked up a crimson folder marked ‘TOP SECRET – NOFORN’, meaning no foreign national would be given access, and he moved from behind his desk to settle in to the other couch. ‘Pleasant flight?’

‘Cattle class,’ O’Connor replied, feigning a hurt look. The flight from Alexandria to Washington had taken a bum-numbing twenty-one hours.

‘Remind me to send one of our private jets next time.’ Tom McNamara looked at O’Connor over the top of his tortoise-shell glasses, a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth, but then his lips hardened. ‘A few days ago, a Chinook from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment was shot down near the northern border of Afghanistan and Pakistan,’ McNamara said. ‘It’s not yet public – the Pentagon’s having difficulty tracking two of the next of kin, but as soon as they’re contacted, they’ll hold a media conference. It could have been worse, but we’ve still lost four crew and four SEALs . . . eight of the best.’

O’Connor nodded soberly, waiting for his boss to continue. As tragic as the loss of the chopper and the SEAL team was, he knew McNamara would not have recalled him from leave unless there was more to it. Responsible for running the CIA’s international web of agents, along with countless black operations, some of which even the president wasn’t briefed on, in many ways McNamara was more powerful than the director himself. O’Connor had no doubt his boss had something else in mind – something that would be very tightly held.

‘I called you back here because of some highly sensitive intelligence we’ve gleaned on the Pakistani Taliban,’ McNamara continued. ‘The Chinook incident just adds to our fears. In a nutshell, somebody is supplying the Pakistani Taliban with American-made surface-to-air missiles. The chopper was heading toward the Hindu Kush mountains, but it was shot down before it reached them, flying at a height of over 8000 feet.’

‘Stinger?’ The ubiquitous shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile had been the mainstay of US ground troops for over three decades. In 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the United States decided to send the missiles to Osama bin Laden and the Mujahideen, the Islamic freedom fighters, to help them drive the Soviets out. O’Connor and McNamara both knew that over 500 of the state-of-the-art missiles had been supplied across the border with Pakistan. Travelling at nearly 2500 kilometres an hour, the deadly accurate Stinger used an infrared system to lock on to the heat from an aircraft’s exhaust, and it could bring down any aircraft flying below 10 000 feet, including a commercial jetliner. Like so many armies before them, the Soviets had been defeated in the rugged, unforgiving terrain of Afghanistan, and when the Soviet army withdrew, the CIA desperately tried to buy the missiles back, but many of them had found their way into the hands of bin Laden’s al Qaeda.

‘It could be, but we’re not sure. A lot of those Stingers would be unserviceable now. Have a look at this.’ McNamara opened a file at a flagged XKeyscore intercept from the NSA, and pushed it across the coffee table. The intercept read ‘Scorpions en route. Artifact acquisition in train.’

O’Connor frowned. ‘Is that all there is?’

‘It’s not much,’ McNamara agreed, ‘and we’re still unsure who sent that text, but it was received by the ex-head of the Pakistani ISI, General Farid Khan.’ McNamara wasn’t the only one who thought the ISI, notorious for their support of the Taliban, were a law unto themselves. ‘He forwarded the information on to a satellite phone located in the Hindu Kush, and it wasn’t one of ours.’

‘Careless of him.’

‘He probably thought a short text would go unnoticed.’

‘So even though he’s been sacked, this General Khan still wields some influence in the ISI?’

‘We think he still wields a lot of influence. He was one of the most powerful generals in the Pakistani Army, and he was sacked by the Pakistani president at our behest. I’ve been talking to our station chief in Islamabad, and he tells me the ISI are furious with their president . . . and ours for that matter.’

‘And you think that text’s a reference to the Scorpion missile system?’ The successor to the General Dynamics Stinger, the Scorpion had been manufactured by EVRAN, and the missile’s guidance systems and power plant were so highly classified that Congress and the president had issued an edict preventing EVRAN from making the missile available to any military outside the United States, even to allies like Israel and Australia.

‘It’s looking that way,’ said McNamara, ‘although the artifact acquisition reference remains a mystery. Not long after that text was sent we received some satellite imagery on a shipment of timber, ostensibly bound for Kabul,’ McNamara continued, pulling out a series of satellite photographs. ‘You can see the convoy there quite clearly, moving through the Khyber Pass, and on across the Pakistan–Afghanistan border; but the shipment never made it . . . at least not to Kabul.’

‘Attacked by the Taliban?’

‘It was made to look that way, but there were no casualties, and when the convoy reached Jalalabad, just across the border, instead of continuing west to Kabul, it turned north along the Kunar Bajaur link road through Asadabad and on to Asmar.’ McNamara spread a map of the Pakistan–Afghanistan border area across the coffee table. ‘When they got to Hajiabad,’ McNamara continued, pointing to a small town north of Asmar in the foothills of the soaring Hindu Kush, ‘they transferred the timber to a pack of mules.’

‘An awful lot of trouble to get timber into the Hindu Kush. You think there was more than timber on those mules.’

‘Exactly, particularly since there’s Indian cedar around . . . not a lot of it, but it’s a darn sight closer than what they can get from Pakistan. And on the lower slopes of the Hindu Kush, they’d have access to holly oaks. And to add to the puzzle, even though Pakistan has extensive forests, over 75 per cent of their soft wood and a good deal of their hard wood is imported, so Pakistan’s a fairly unlikely exporter.’

‘If that timber’s just a cover, we need to find out where it came from, because that might lead us to whoever’s supplying the missiles,’ McNamara concluded, leaning back on the couch.

‘And how do you propose we do that?’ O’Connor asked, already suspecting the answer.

‘Not me . . . you.’ McNamara’s smile was broader now. ‘One of our jets is standing by to take you to Afghanistan, to Bagram Airfield, where a SEAL team is waiting for you to join them. Their dossiers are in this folder, although I suspect you’ll know most of them.’

‘Have I done something to piss you off lately?’

‘No, but you undoubtedly will, so I’ll hold this one on account,’ said McNamara, looking pleased with himself. ‘I’ve just come from briefing Rebel,’ he continued, more seriously, ‘and he’s pretty pissed.’ Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt, the White House Communications Agency had assigned code names to presidents, first ladies and other VIPs and installations. Kennedy had been known as Lancer, while Jacqueline had gone by the code word Lace. President McGovern was known as Rebel, while the first lady, very much her own woman, had been assigned Reformer.

‘Rebel wants us to confirm whether or not the Taliban have Scorpions, and if they do, who’s supplying them. I don’t need to tell you, but at the moment, this thing is burning my ass,’ McNamara said. ‘How’s Aleta?’ he asked, moving back behind his desk.

‘Enjoying Alexandria, or was. So other than not talking to you, she’s in good shape.’ O’Connor kept to himself his misgivings about leaving her alone in an Egypt still troubled after the military coup.

‘Tell her I’ll make it up to her,’ McNamara responded, his smile returning. Weizman was well known inside the CIA, although not always with affection. The archaeologist’s exposure of the CIA’s dark involvement in the deaths of 200 000 civilians in the Guatemalan civil war had not gone down well in some quarters. It was an involvement that prompted then president Bill Clinton to apologise to the people of the desperately poor Latin American country during his visit to Guatemala City in 1999. But there was also unflagging respect from the more honourable men and women in ‘the Company’, as the CIA was known to insiders. Weizman had proven herself more than once under fire, as she and O’Connor had fought their way in and out of ancient tombs in the jungles of Guatemala and Peru.

Deep in thought, O’Connor headed back to collect his bag from the office he’d been temporarily assigned in the old headquarters building. He had a deep foreboding . . . a sixth sense that Aleta was in danger.