The Pharaoh's Secret (11 page)

“I thought you were going to wait until I got here to make any moves?” The words came from Renata Ambrosini.

She was sitting with Kurt and Joe in a luxurious suite on the top floor of the most expensive hotel in Malta. Kurt was holding a scotch on the rocks against his forehead to soothe a nasty bump he’d taken. Joe was trying to stretch his back and loosen a crick in his neck.

The fact that they weren’t in prison was a minor miracle. But after they had been arrested and detained, calls from the U.S. and Italian governments and an eyewitness video of their heroics tipped the scales in their favor. In two hours they went from being threatened with fifty years of hard labor to being considered for
knighthood in the Order of Saint John. Not a bad day’s work, but either one of them would have traded the accolades for a better clue.

“Believe me, we tried,” Kurt said. “Not much we could do once they smashed the wall in and took off running.”

Renata poured a drink of her own and sat beside Kurt. “At least you two are all right. Both Kensington and Hagen are dead.”

Joe looked dejected. “I should have just left him on the ground. He was only half conscious when I brought him to the wall.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Kurt said. “You couldn’t know they’d have a sniper providing cover for their escape.”

Joe nodded. “Did we find out what was in the syringe?”

“Ketamine,” Renata said. “A standard, fast-acting anesthetic. Nothing like what hit us in Lampedusa.”

“Any chance ketamine is the antidote?” Kurt asked hopefully.

“I’ve had Dr. Ravishaw try it,” she said. “Just in case. No effect. So we’re back to square one.”

Kurt took a sip of the scotch, eyeing the crumpled note Kensington had given him.

“Getting names and phone numbers while you were out there?” Renata asked.

“Kensington was writing this when the battering ram came through the wall.”

He handed it to her.

“Sophie C. . . . doesn’t sound familiar.”

“Not to us either,” Kurt said. “But he was trying to tell us something.”

“Maybe Kensington wants us to find this person,” Joe suggested. “Maybe she can help us. Maybe Sophie C. is the mystery patron who’s donating all the artifacts for this big auction.”

“Too bad he didn’t write faster,” Kurt said.

“Why write at all?” Renata asked. “Why not just tell you?”

Kurt had been wondering that too. “From the way he was talking and glancing around the room, it seemed like the place might have been bugged. Or, at least, Kensington thought it was.”

She took a sip from her glass. “So he writes a note to give you some information while telling you out loud that he knows nothing.”

Kurt nodded. “Guess he figured they could hear him but not see him. I think he was trying to help us but not get caught.”

“So why’d they kill him if they had him under their thumb?” she asked.

“Same reason they shot Hagen,” Kurt said. “Covering their tracks. They must have figured he was going to crack sooner or later. Our arrival probably just sped things up.”

“They could have been targeting all three of you,” she suggested.

“Possibly,” Kurt said. The reasons didn’t matter at this point. The outcome did. And the score was tilting heavily in their adversary’s favor now that they’d lost their two best leads. At least they were still in the game. “We must find this Sophie person,” Kurt said, turning to Renata. “You’ve better access to names and records than we do. Think your friends at Interpol can help? Maybe she’s a friend of Kensington’s or a member of the museum’s board or one of the donors.”

“Maybe she’s one of the people invited to the party,” Joe said.

Renata nodded. “I’ll have AISE and Interpol run a check,” she said. “It’s a small island. She can’t be that hard to run down. If nothing turns up immediately, I’ll go wider. Maybe it’s a code name or the designation on an account or a computer program—something.”

“She could even be Joe’s sniper,” Kurt said.

“Why not?” Renata said. “This is the modern world. A girl can grow up to be whatever she wants.”

Kurt nodded grimly and took another sip of the scotch. The cold fire of the liquor, combined with the numbing sensation of the icy glass against his forehead, had brought the pain down to a tolerable level. He felt his mind clearing. “It all comes back to something in that museum. Kensington said the men were looking for artifacts from Egypt—he called them trinkets—but who knows if he was telling the truth. We need to take a look. Which means Joe and I will be going to the party.”

“I do look good in tails,” Joe said.

“Don’t break out your tux just yet. We’re going to be a little underdressed. After what happened tonight, we don’t want to make ourselves obvious targets.”

“I sense a disguise in my future,” Joe said.

“Better than a disguise,” Kurt said without elaborating.

“I’m shocked to hear that this party is still going on,” Renata said.

Kurt agreed. “So am I. But things have a way of working backward sometimes. From what I’ve heard, the incident has boosted interest, not diminished it. Almost as if the danger were making people more excited. So instead of canceling, they’ve tripled security and invited a few more potential buyers.”

“And we’re just going to walk up and ring the doorbell?” Joe asked. “While the triple force of crack security teams look the other way?”

“Even better,” Kurt replied. “They’re going to escort us inside personally.”

Southern Libya

The cockpit of the old DC-3 shuddered continuously as the aircraft crossed the desert at an altitude of five hundred feet, while traveling at nearly two hundred knots. Based on the vibration, Paul Trout estimated the propellers were out of sync or perhaps slightly unbalanced. He morbidly wondered if one of them was about to come off the hub and fly off into the waiting desert or slice into the cabin like a vengeful can opener.

As usual, Gamay shared none of his fears. She was in the right seat, where the copilot would normally sit. Enjoying the view out the window and the thrill of traveling so quickly at such a low altitude.

Reza, their host, stood with Paul just behind the pilots’ seats.

“Do we have to fly so fast?” Paul asked. “And so close to the ground?”

“It’s better this way,” Reza insisted. “Otherwise, the rebels have an easier time shooting at us.”

That was not the kind of answer Paul was looking for. “Rebels?”

“We’re still in a low-level state of civil war,” he said. “We have militias, who alternately work with us or oppose us; foreign agents, especially from Egypt; the Muslim brotherhood; even members of Gaddafi’s old regime—all fighting for power. Libya is a very complicated place these days.”

Suddenly, Paul wished they’d stayed an extra day in Tunisia and flown home to the States. He could be sitting on his porch, smoking a pipe and listening to the radio instead of risking his life out here.

“Don’t worry,” Reza said. “They would be fools to waste a missile on such an old plane as this. Usually they just take potshots at us with their rifles. And they haven’t hit us yet.”

With that, Reza reached around Paul and knocked on the wooden trim that lined the bulkhead. Like everything else in the DC-3, it was literally from another era, worn almost to the core where people had brushed against it stepping in and out of the cockpit for the past fifty years.

The controls were in the same state. Big, bulky metal levers with grooves worn in them where men and women had handled them for decades. The pilot’s yoke was the old half steering wheel type, it was even bent in the middle. The one in front of Gamay looked little better.

“Maybe we should have driven,” Paul said.

“The journey is eight hours by truck,” Reza replied. “Only ninety minutes by air. And it’s much cooler up here.”

Ninety minutes, Paul thought, checking his watch. Thank goodness. That meant they were almost there.

Still cruising at high speed, they crossed a series of rocky folds that rose out of the sand like a sea monster’s back emerging from the ocean. They continued south and made a circle around what looked like a dry salt bed, before lining up for a final approach to a dirt strip that ran beside what Paul assumed was an oil field, complete with towers, derricks and several large buildings.

The landing was relatively smooth, with a single bounce and then a long rollout as the plane slowed. Like most aircraft from the early days of aviation, the DC-3 was a tail dragger. It had two large wheels under the wings and a small guide wheel at the back, beneath the tail. Because of this, landing was accompanied by the odd sensation of touching down flat and then the nose tilted up as the plane slowed. It was backward, Paul thought, all of it, but he was happy to be on the ground again.

As soon as his boots hit the sand, he turned to help Gamay out, offering his hand. She grabbed it and hopped free. “That was amazing,” she said. “When we get back home, I’m learning to fly. Joe could teach me.”

“Sounds wonderful,” Paul said, trying hard to appear supportive.

“Did you see the Berber Oasis?” she asked.

“No,” Paul said, thinking back. “When did we pass it?”

“Right before we turned onto final approach,” Reza said.

“You mean that dried-up area?”

Reza nodded. “In a week, it went from a healthy tropical paradise to a salt bed. The same process we saw in Gafsa is now being witnessed all over the Sahara.”

“It doesn’t seem possible,” Paul said.

Reza was holding a hand against the sun. “Let’s get inside,” he said.

He led them to the main building, bypassing a large bank of pumps and a series of pipes that stretched out into the distance, heading back toward Benghazi. After the heat of the desert, being back in the air-conditioning was a welcome relief. They approached a group of workers.

“Any change?” Reza asked. “For the positive, I mean.”

The lead technician shook his head. “We’re down another twenty percent on output,” he said grimly. “We’ve had to shut three more pumps down. They were overheating and bringing up nothing but sludge.”

As he listened to the conversation, Paul looked around. The room was covered with display screens and computer terminals. The few windows there were had a dark reflective tint to them. It reminded him of an air traffic control center.

“Welcome to the headwaters of the Great Man-Made River,” Reza told him. “The largest irrigation project in the world. From here, and several other sites, we draw water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer and deliver it across five hundred miles of desert to the cities of Benghazi, Tripoli and Tobruk.”

Reza tapped a display screen and it began to cycle through photographs of giant pumps churning, wells being sunk and water flowing down huge dark pipes in a torrent.

“How much water do you bring up?” Gamay asked.

“Until recently, seven million cubic meters a day,” he said. “That’s almost two billion gallons, for you Americans.”

Paul was studying the boards; he saw indicators in yellow, orange and red. Nothing was lit up in green. “How badly has the drought affected you?”

“We’re down almost seventy percent already,” Reza said, “and it’s getting worse.”

“Have there been any earthquakes?” Paul asked. “Sometimes, seismic activity can shear off wells and destabilize aquifers. Making the water more difficult to retrieve.”

“No earthquakes,” Reza said. “Not even tremors. Geologically speaking, this area is incredibly stable. Even if it’s not so politically.”

Paul was truly baffled and he uttered the only thing that made any sense. “I’m sure no one wants to say it, but is it possible that the aquifer is running dry?”

“It’s a very good question,” Reza replied. “The groundwater here was left over from the last Ice Age. As we pull it out, it’s obviously not being replaced. But most estimates suggest it should last at least five centuries. The most conservative assessment suggests a supply of at least a hundred years. We’ve been drawing on it for only twenty-five. And yet, like you, I have no other answer. I don’t know where the water is going.”

“What do you know?” Gamay asked.

Reza moved to a map. “I know the drought is progressing, it’s getting rapidly worse. It also seems to be sweeping westward. The first wells to report issues were here on the eastern border.” He pointed to a spot south of Tobruk, where Libya and Egypt met. “That was nine weeks ago. Shortly thereafter, wells in Sarir and Tazerbo, in the center of the country, began to lose pressure. And thirty days ago, we noticed the first drop in volume at our western wells, south of Tripoli. The onset there was rapid and the volume of water pumped was halved within days. That’s why I went to Gafsa.”

“Because Gafsa is farther to the west,” Paul noted.

Reza nodded. “I needed to see if the effect was continuing and
it is. My counterparts in Algeria are beginning to feel the effects as well. But none of these countries are as dependent on the groundwater as we are. In the twenty-five years we’ve been operating, Libya’s population has doubled. Our irrigated agriculture has increased five thousand percent. Our industrial use of water five hundred percent. Everyone has become dependent on the flow.”

Paul nodded. “And if they go to the tap and find nothing there when they turn it on, you’ll have problems.”

“We already do,” Reza assured him.

“Aside from you, is anyone else looking into this?” Gamay asked.

Reza shrugged. “Not really. There’s no one else qualified to do it. And, as you can imagine, with a civil war still going on, the government has bigger issues to deal with. Or so they think. They asked if it was the rebels’ doing. I should have said yes. They would have given me every resource in the country to figure it out. But I said no. In fact, I told them such a thought was ludicrous.” Reza’s face scrunched up as he recounted the incident. “Let me tell you, it’s not wise to tell a politician his question is ludicrous. At least not in my country.”

“Why?”

“I would have thought that was obvious.”

“No,” Gamay corrected. “I mean, why couldn’t it be the rebels?”

“Rebels blow things up,” he said. “This is some kind of natural phenomenon that we’re grappling with. A natural disaster in the making. Besides, everyone needs water. Everyone has to drink. If the water goes, there will be war but nothing left to fight for.”

“How is the country surviving?” Paul asked.

“For now, the reservoirs outside Benghazi and Sirte and Tripoli are holding everyone over,” Reza told them. “But rationing has
already begun. And, without a change, we’ll be shutting off entire neighborhoods within days. At that point, everyone will do what desperate people do. They’ll panic. And then this country will fall back into chaos once again.”

“Surely they’ll start taking you seriously if you show them these projections,” Gamay suggested.

“I’ve shown them,” Reza said. “All they do is tell me to solve the problem or insist they will just replace me and blame me for mismanagement. Either way, I have to have a solution before I go back to them. At least a theory as to why it’s happening.”

“How deep is the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer?” Paul asked.

Reza brought up a cutaway view of the drilling process. “Most of the wells go to depths between five and six hundred meters.”

“Could you drill deeper?”

“My very first thought,” Reza said. “We’ve sunk a couple of test wells to a thousand meters. But we came up dry. We sank one to two thousand meters. Also dry.”

Paul studied the schematic. The diagram showed their compound on the surface as a collection of little gray squares. The well shaft was colored bright green, which made it easy to see as it descended through layers of earth and rock and into the reddish sandstone where the water from the Ice Age remained trapped. A dark-colored layer rested beneath the sandstone; it continued downward to a depth of one thousand meters. The area beneath that was gray and unmarked.

“What kind of rock underlays the sandstone?” Paul asked.

Reza shrugged. “We’re not sure. No survey was done to study anything deeper than two thousand meters. I’d guess it’s probably more sedimentary rock.”

“Maybe we should find out,” Paul said. “Maybe the problem isn’t in your sandstone. Maybe it lies underneath.”

“We don’t have time to drill that deep,” Reza said.

“We could do a seismic survey,” Paul suggested.

Reza folded his arms across his chest and nodded. “I would like very much to, but to see through that much rock we need a powerful bang to emit the vibrations. Unfortunately, our stock of explosives has been confiscated.”

“I guess it makes sense. The government doesn’t want the rebels getting ahold of explosives,” Gamay replied.

“It was the rebels who took them,” Reza said. “The government then chose not to replace them. At any rate, I have nothing here capable of creating a sound that would penetrate so much rock and reflect back to us with any type of clear signal.”

For a moment, Paul was stumped. Then an idea came to him, an idea so crazy it just might have a chance of working. He glanced at Gamay. “Now I know how Kurt feels when the inspiration hits. It’s like madness mixed with genius all at the same time.”

Gamay chuckled. “With Kurt, the balance can be a little out of whack sometimes.”

“I’m hoping that’s not the case here,” Paul said, before turning back to Reza. “Do you have sound equipment to record a signal?”

“Some of the best in the world.”

“Get it ready,” Paul said. “And, much as I hate to say it, have them fuel up that old plane of yours. We’re going to take it up for a spin.”