The Third Gate (24 page)

“What about the primary tomb painting?” Stone asked. “The one that appears to represent a punishment of some sort?”

“I don’t know any more than I did yesterday. Sorry. It’s completely foreign to my experience.”

“And the second gate?”

“From what I can tell by visual inspection, the royal seal appears to be similar to the first.”

“Thank you.” Stone turned to Dr. Rush. “And you, Ethan?”

Rush shifted in his seat, cleared his throat. “My analysis of the atmosphere, dust from tomb surfaces, and grit from the plaster is complete. Everything appears to be inert. There’s a relatively high concentration of mold spores and pollen, but nothing to be alarmed about if exposure times are kept limited. A careful cleaning, of course, will take care of that. I found no evidence of harmful bacteria, viruses, or fungi. Until the decontamination process is complete, I’d recommend N-ninety-five facepiece respirators be worn for particulate filtering, along with latex gloves, but you would mandate that as standard procedure, anyway.”

“Poison?” Stone asked.

“Nothing came up on my tests.”

Stone nodded his satisfaction, then turned to one of the others. “GPR report?”

A thin, nervous-looking young man sat forward and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Ground-penetrating radar, targeting the second chamber, shows a very large mass—apparently a single object—approximate dimensions four meters in length and two in height. Arranged before it are four smaller, identical objects.”

There was a brief silence.

“A sarcophagus,” March murmured.

“And its four canopic jars,” Romero added.

“Perhaps.” Stone frowned. “But in the second chamber—not the third?”

“There appear to be several other objects,” the young man said, “but the back-scatter makes them difficult to distinguish effectively.”

“Very well.” Stone thought for a moment. “We’ll spend the rest of the day securing, stabilizing, and decontaminating chamber one. Then, first thing tomorrow, we’ll proceed to the second gate. Meanwhile, if in your analysis any of you discover anything particularly unusual, let me know at once.”

He turned to Logan. “Speaking of that, is there anything you’d like to add, Jeremy?”

“Yes. Last evening, I spoke with Fontaine. He’d reported that one of the electronic devices under his care had been acting strangely—turning on at unexpected times, working when it wasn’t supposed to, operating by itself.”

Very softly, Romero whistled the
Twilight Zone
theme.

“The machine in question was one of the satellite phones. When I learned that both these incidents had occurred at one thirty a.m., I asked Fontaine to check the flash memory of the sat phone.”

“And?” Stone said.

“Its internal log showed a total of four unauthorized satellite uplinks, each made at precisely 1:34 a.m. local time. The uplinks were encrypted e-mails, each sent to an Internet remailing service, rendering them untraceable.”

The room fell into a shocked silence.

Stone had gone ashen. “How is that possible? Nobody has access to the sat phones; they can only be used by the communications officers.”

“Further examination of the phone showed it had been tricked out with a hand-built internal circuit board. Fontaine is examining the board with an oscilloscope and signal generator, but its function appears to be to receive wireless text messages from the Station’s WAN, encrypt them, and send them out to the satellite at a very late hour when the communications room would be unoccupied. The satellite then forwards the messages to their destination.”

Another, longer silence. Logan noticed the assembled group glancing around at one another uncomfortably.

“Who knows about this?” Stone asked.

“Fontaine, myself, and—now—those in this room.”

Stone licked his lips. “This is to go no farther. Understood? Nobody else is to know.” He shook his head. “Good Christ. A spy.”

“Or a saboteur,” said Romero.

“Or both,” Logan added.

38

Tina Romero made her way down the Umbilicus, hand under hand, following Porter Stone. She wore no respirator on this descent, just an N-95 mask, and the air both smelled and tasted faintly of vegetative rot. As she descended, it grew cooler, until by the time she had reached the air lock platform there were goose pimples on her arms.

A guard on the platform greeted them with a nod. Since Logan’s discovery of the unauthorized transmissions, Stone—obsessive about secrecy at the best of times—had doubled the usual security. In addition to a twenty-four-hour guard stationed at the Maw, there was also the guard here on the platform. In addition, video cameras had been installed, monitored by Corey Landau and the other tech weenies in the Operations Center.

Tina smiled a little grimly to herself. Despite Stone’s imprecations, threats, and demands for absolute silence, word of the saboteur—or
corporate spy—had leaked out to the Station at large. It was a little ironic: while there was of course consternation, there was also a guarded sense of relief. She herself had wondered: If there was a saboteur in their midst, might that not account for the inexplicable happenings?

There was a clatter overhead, and then Fenwick March joined them on the platform. He was followed by two of Valentino’s roustabouts. Each man carried pieces of a stainless-steel hoist under their arms.

Stone glanced around at the group. “Right,” he said through his mask. “Let’s get started.”

The security guard picked up a battery-powered winch from the metal grating, and the group of six approached the tomb interface. Tina noted that the rest of the granite facing had been carefully removed, and the first gate was now completely open. She hoisted the video camera she carried. This was only her second trip down. March had already been down several times; Stone had been down twice more, to supervise the unsealing of the second gate.

As she stepped into chamber one, she noticed that supportive bracing had been placed longitudinally from one wall of the tomb to the other, as a precaution. The guardian statue of Aapep had been covered by a tarp, and Tina found herself glad of it: the figure had been so lifelike, so violent in appearance, that—despite its incalculable importance—she hadn’t been looking forward to seeing it again.

The chamber that before had been so dim was now brightly lit by high-pressure sodium vapor lights, and she was surprised afresh by the beauty and remarkable condition of the artifacts. She also noticed—to her irritation—that many of the most interesting and important had already been removed, archival labels put temporarily in their place. No doubt that was the work of March, she thought: the bastard could never wait to get his grubby hands all over the antiquities. If he had his way, every dig site would be completely gutted, with nothing left in situ to show how it had once looked. Her own philosophy was the polar opposite: examine, stabilize, analyze,
describe, document—and then, once curated, leave everything exactly where it had been found.

The rear wall of chamber one had been obscured by plastic sheeting. Beyond it, the darkness was complete. The second gate, she knew, had already been fully removed, but chamber two had not yet been entered. They would be the first to do so.

Wordlessly, Stone nodded to the two roustabouts. They came forward and—with great care—removed the plastic sheeting, folded it, and placed it to one side. A rectangle of black space lay beyond.

Stone stepped up to the second gate. Tina followed, with March right behind. Here, at the very entrance to chamber two, Tina could make out vague shapes within. Her mouth went dry.

“Bring one of those lights over here,” Stone said.

One of the roustabouts wheeled the powerful light up to the group. As he did so, the room beyond burst into sudden brilliance.

It was as if somebody had just turned on the sun. The gleam of the chamber beyond was so bright, Tina had to turn away.

“God,” Stone muttered in a strangled voice. Once again, his veneer of detached reserve had fallen away under the spell of Narmer’s tomb.

As her eyes adjusted, Tina was able to make out the details of chamber two. She raised the video camera and began recording. Every surface—walls, floor, ceiling—had been covered in what appeared to be solid gold. This accounted for the incredibly bright sheen. Although the room was just slightly smaller than chamber one, it held far fewer objects. There were indeed four canopic jars, made of calcite, to hold the viscera of the mummified king. Before each jar was a small box, apparently also of solid gold. On one wall was a large painting, depicting what looked like Narmer’s victory over the king of upper Egypt. Another painting showed Narmer, lying on a dais, seemingly already in his tomb, being attended to by a mortuary priest. There were two shrines, set against the opposing walls of chamber two. Each bore a serekh, in sunk relief, of Narmer, using his coronation name,
niswt-biti
, king of upper and lower Egypt. It
was funny, she thought—while Egyptologists could read the language, its pronunciation remained a mystery. Although most uses of this phrase, she knew, were the phonetic spelling
nzw
, as found in the Pyramid Texts, here the feminine ending
t
remained. Odd. But then, so much of what she had observed about Narmer and his tomb was odd. There was so much here that was surprisingly
modern
—in ancient Egyptian terms. The tomb burial, the royal seals, the grave goods, the hieroglyphic messages so reminiscent of the Book of the Dead—they were of the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom, not the Archaic Period, the First Dynasty of the earliest pharaohs. It was as if Narmer had been many centuries ahead of his time, and his knowledge, practices, discoveries, and epiphanies had died with him, not to be resurrected until the pyramid builders of a thousand years later.…

She shook these thoughts away and busied herself with the video camera. Atop the two shrines were various offerings: amulets, beautifully knapped flint knives, figures of alabaster, ivory, ebony. But the most remarkable object of all lay in the center of the room. It was a huge sarcophagus, of a most unusual pale blue granite, unpainted—also most unusual—and in absolutely perfect shape; far better, for example, than that of the cracked outer shell of King Tutankhamen’s coffin. The granite had been worked into tracery relief of the most detailed and painstaking kind. At the head of the sarcophagus stood the figure of a giant falcon, its wings spread wide, the stylized feet thrust out like the hands of a clock at five and seven, ceremonially standing watch over the body of the king.

The others had been silent, seemingly struck dumb by the splendor of the sight. Now Stone stepped forward. He walked a little stiffly, as if on wooden legs. He made a brief inspection of the chamber, and then he approached the row of four small gold chests.

“These chests, arranged before the canopic jars,” he said, absently, more to himself than to the others. “That’s something I’ve never heard of.” He knelt before the closest, examining it carefully, touching it gently here and there with a latex-gloved hand. Then, ever so carefully, he lifted its lid. Tina caught her breath. Sparkling
back at them from inside the box was an overflowing abundance of gemstones: opals, jade, diamonds, emeralds, pearls, rubies, sapphires, cat’s eyes—an almost obscene riot of treasure.

“Good lord,” March murmured.

Tina had lowered the video camera to take a closer look. “Half those gemstones weren’t even known to the ancient Egyptians,” she said. “At least, not so early.”

“Narmer must have established trade routes that collapsed after his rule ended,” Stone replied, still in a quiet voice.

Tina licked dry lips. The splendor was so overwhelming she realized she was in denial. It was physically impossible to take it all in.

Stone glanced at Tina. “What about those two shrines? I’ve never seen quite such configurations before.”

“I’d have to examine them more closely. But I think perhaps they form a double function. Not only are they shrines, but they are symbolic of the greatest test Narmer would face in his passage through the Underworld: the Hall of Two Truths—assuming that belief system had been developed in such an early era. But then again, they seem unique—such a dual purpose must have been lost in the dynasties following Narmer’s.”

“Symbolic, you say?” Stone repeated.

“Almost as if they were to be used in a
simulation
of the Hall of Two Truths. A dry run, so to speak.”

“But that’s unheard-of,” said March.

Tina waved a hand around the tomb, as if to say,
Isn’t that true of everything here?

The roustabouts were now busy assembling the stainless-steel hoist. The security guard attached the winch to it, and then—at a nod from Stone—fired up the motor. A roar filled the room before settling back to a low grumble. The roustabouts fixed the hoists’ grappling hooks to the edges of the sarcophagus lid, then—moving at a snail’s pace—they raised the lid from the coffin, swung it to the side, and placed it gingerly on the floor.

The security guard killed the motor and everyone—even the roustabouts—drew closer. Inside the sarcophagus was a shroud made
of unknown material, woven into a complex design. Stone reached out a hand to touch it. As his glove made contact with the shroud, it crumbled away, disintegrating into gray dust.

A low murmur of dismay rose from the group, quickly changing to gasps of surprise. Through the dust, a coffin was visible within the sarcophagus—a coffin of solid gold, its face carved into the effigy of a splendidly robed king.

Without a word, Stone and March picked up the inner coffin lid by its handles and pulled it aside. Within lay a mummy, thickly covered in winding sheets. Lotus petals were strewn across its upper surface. Over the face lay a golden mask, beaten into the shape of the god-king’s commanding, almost forbidding visage.

A faint smell of dust and decay rose from the mummy, but Tina did not notice it. She bent in closer, filming, heart beating fast.

“Narmer,” Stone whispered.