“Are you all right?” Osir asked.
“I’m … just tired,” she said. “It’s been a hectic day.”
He smiled. “My apologies—there’s no need to solve this riddle in one night. Besides, the race is tomorrow, and I was hoping you would join me there.”
“Sounds cool,” she said, the idea of watching noisy cars screaming past for a couple of hours anything but.
“Wonderful. Then before that, perhaps you’d join me for a glass of champagne?”
“Ah … I really ought to go to bed.” Privacy would give her a chance to try to contact Eddie.
“Just one glass, please,” Osir insisted. “I have a bottle of Veuve Clicquot in the next room—it would be a shame to drink it alone.”
“What about all your …” She almost said bimbos, but settled on “young lady friends?”
“My followers?” A jaded shake of the head. “They are all lovely, but sometimes I prefer more intellectual company. Someone with stories of her own. Like your discovery of Atlantis.” He smiled again. “Just one glass.”
Three glasses later, Nina was kneeling on Osir’s bed, her dress spread out around her in a silken circle. “So I was stuck on this platform with Excalibur, an’ Jack was starting up the generator so he could start up a war … when boom! Eddie’d rigged up a hand grenade as a booby trap. After that, the whole ship started blowing up like something out of a Bond movie. We had to bail out in this sort of jet-glider thing—almost froze to death before we landed on a trawler. Man, that was a bad smell!”
“Your life has been even more of an adventure than mine,” said Osir, stretched out beside her. “And fortune is certainly on your side.”
“If I were really that lucky, I wouldn’t have gotten shot. Check this out.” She hitched up her skirt to reveal the circular scar of a bullet wound on her right thigh. Osir’s eyes widened at the sight of the bare leg just inches from his face. “I wouldn’t have had my life and my career wrecked, either.”
“You don’t need to worry about that anymore, Nina,” he assured her. “Once we find the Pyramid of Osiris, your life will be … anything you want it to be. And very long, too.”
She drained her glass. “Do I get a free lifetime supply of Khalid’s Longevity Bread?”
“You’ll get whatever you want.”
“Glad to hear it.” She frowned slightly, thinking back to the lab at the Swiss castle. “Is it safe, though? You said it was genetically modified.”
Osir chuckled. “Of course it will be safe. I’ll be eating it myself! No, the genetic modifications to the yeast are to make it into exactly what I want it to be.”
“Which is? Or will your brother shout at you if you tell me?”
Another mocking laugh. “Sometimes it seems that Sebak thinks he is in charge of the temple, not me! No, my brother was being overcautious, as always. The genetic modifications are partly so that we can obtain international copyrights and patents on the new organism—yeast is very easy to cultivate, after all. I don’t want everyone being able to bake their own bread of Osiris—they will have to come to the Osirian Temple for it. And also”—his expression became more conniving, giving his handsome features an unexpectedly wolfish look—“I don’t want it to be too good at regenerating the body’s cells. People buying it once a year is not enough. They need to buy it once a month, or better still once a week.”
“Sounds like you’re trying to get them hooked.”
He shrugged. “What is a modest amount of money every week in return for immortality? Better that it goes to the Osirian Temple than to cigarettes or drink or drugs. We give a good deal of money to charitable causes, after all.”
No doubt in countries where the Osirian Temple wanted political favors, Nina thought. “So that’s what you want: to choose who gets to be immortal?”
“Fitting, don’t you think?” said Osir. “Osiris decided who received everlasting life. I’m just following in his footsteps. But I think the world will think very highly of the man who brought it immortality.” He finished his drink. “More champagne?”
Nina regarded her empty glass. “Oh. That went fast. I shouldn’t, really …”
“I’ll open another bottle.” He took her glass, then slid off the bed.
She lay down and closed her eyes. “Thank you, Khalid.”
“My pleasure,” he said, his smirk anticipating another kind of pleasure. He took another bottle from a fridge under a marble-topped bar, then crossed to the bathroom. “Excuse me one moment.”
He closed the door, then admired himself in the mirror before stripping to his silk boxer shorts and donning a dressing gown, also silk. A quick splash of cologne, then he stepped back into the bedroom.
To his delight, the lights had been turned down low, and an inviting shape waited beneath the expensive sheets. He climbed on the end of the bed, slowly moving up it. “I see you’ve made yourself comfortable.” He gently pulled back the sheets … to see Eddie Chase grinning back at him.
“Pucker up, Romeo,” said Eddie, sticking Diamondback’s revolver into his face.
EIGHTEEN
Osir cringed as Eddie sat up. “How—how did you get in here?” he demanded, outrage battling fear.
“Yeah, I was kinda curious myself,” said Nina from the zodiac room, where Eddie had wordlessly signaled her to hide when he crept into the cabin.
Keeping the gun on Osir, Eddie threw back the sheets and stood, his clothing sodden. “I looked for his boat where you told me at the harbor. Then I swam under the pier to it and grabbed the anchor chain. Just had to hang on until we got here.”
Osir blasted a glare of betrayal at Nina. “Then you are still with him! Sebak was right!”
“Duh,” Nina said. “Like I was really going to join up with the Froot Loop religious cultist who tried to have me killed!” She looked to Eddie. “Okay, now what?”
He gestured for Osir to move to the bathroom. “First thing, we tie him up and keep him quiet. Then we work out where this pyramid is, and then we bugger off and find it. Sound like a plan?” She nodded. “All right, lover boy,” Eddie said, advancing on Osir, “in there.”
The Egyptian’s eyes were fixed on Nina. “I really did have no desire to see anyone get hurt,” he snarled. “But now I’m happy to make exceptions.”
“Shut it, arsehole,” said Eddie. He shoved Osir into the bathroom, toiletries clattering to the floor as the stumbling man’s elbow swept them from a shelf. “On your knees, head in the bog like you’re about to puke. Now!” He pushed the revolver against Osir’s head as he knelt at the toilet bowl, then yanked loose his dressing gown’s belt. “Nina, tie his hands behind the pipe.” He kept the revolver firmly in place as Nina secured the other man’s wrists to the waste pipe. “Then find something to tie his feet with.”
She went back into the cabin, returning with a collection of ties hanging over her arm. “Pick a color.”
Eddie twisted one into a ball and pushed it into the protesting Osir’s mouth, then secured it with a second. He used a third to fasten his prisoner’s ankles together before tying the other end to a pipe beneath the washbasin. “Now listen, King Tut,” he said, tapping Osir’s head with the gun. “One sound out of you, and I’ll flush you back to your ancestors. Got that?” Mouth filled with the makeshift gag, all Osir could manage was an angry gurgle. “Good.”
He left the bathroom and locked the cabin door, then joined Nina at the zodiac. “So, you found the pyramid?”
“Not yet,” she admitted.
“Well, how long’s it going to take?”
“No idea.”
“Maybe if you’d been working on it instead of getting pissed on Osir’s champers …”
She gave him an irritated look. “Don’t start, Eddie.”
“And while we’re at it, what was going on when I came in? You were stretched out on his bed with your skirt hitched up to your knickers!” Concern crossed his face. “You’re wearing knickers, right?”
“Which part o
f ‘don’t’ and ‘start’ is so hard for you?” Nina snapped.
“Well, I think part of him was hard for you …”
She banged a hand on the Lexan. “For God’s sake, Eddie! I was stringing him along so I could get a look at this thing—so can you at least shut up and let me work?” She indicated the table. “There are some notes his people made over there; can you get them for me, please?”
“You’d better not be walking like an Egyptian tomorrow,” he muttered as he collected them.
The notes revealed a great deal about the zodiac, beginning with an estimate of the date it was created based on the positions of the planets. (She was amused to note that it had been calculated to the month—October 3567 BC—and intrigued that it indirectly confirmed Macy’s theory that the Sphinx predated the construction of Khufu’s pyramid). She also found the names of the various constellations, a chemical analysis of the paints, the zodiac’s dimensions to the millimeter, the type of stone from which it had been carved … “Useless,” she muttered, flicking through more pages.
Eddie had returned to the cabin to keep watch while she read; now he came back in. “What?”
“These tell me everything about the zodiac—except what I need to know. The hieroglyphs tell you how to reach the Pyramid of Osiris, if you already have certain other facts. Osir’s people worked out the position of Mercury, which was one clue—but we don’t know the others.”
“What’re the clues?”
“A place called the silver canyon, which we have no idea how to find, and the second eye of Osiris. And we don’t even know where the first one is, never mind the second.” She walked around the zodiac, hoping it would give her a literal new angle on its secrets. No flashes of insight came to her. “What am I missing?” she wondered aloud.
“If it’s Egyptian stuff, Macy might know.” Eddie reached into his tuxedo jacket. “Did you see her?”
“Yeah, I told her to wait for us.”
“Hope she found a hotel—that tinfoil dress won’t keep her too warm … oh, bollocks.” He had wrapped the passports and his phone in a plastic bag to protect them from the seawater, but the seal hadn’t been as secure as he’d hoped. The passports were damp but would be salvageable if given time to dry; the phone, on the other hand, released a sad little dribble of water from its casing. “Hope you’ve still got your phone.”
“Yeah, but it’s with my things two decks down. I don’t want to go wandering around the ship unless I have to—especially now that we’ve got its owner tied up in the john. If anyone gets suspicious, this’ll be the first place they come.”
“Guess you’ll have to suss it out without Macy, then.”
Nina fruitlessly rechecked the notes for any clue she had missed, then turned her attention to a shelf of reference books about ancient Egypt, searching the indexes for any mentions of the silver canyon or the eye of Osiris. The former had none; the latter several, but only in the context of Egyptian symbology, nothing tied to a specific real-world location.
“I don’t get it,” she said with a sigh after some time, returning to the zodiac. “Where’s it telling us to go? It’s got to be connected to the stars somehow—we’ve got the constellations, the Milky Way, planets—how do they all tie together? I mean, the pyramid’s marked right there, complete with directions, so what’s the starting point?”
Eddie shrugged. “Dunno—all I know about Egypt is what I saw in The Mummy.”
“Which was hardly an impeccable source.”
“Maybe not. I’ll tell you something, though—that’s not the Milky Way on there.”
She looked at the light blue line. “It’s not?”
“No, it’s the wrong shape. I know what the Milky Way looks like, and that ain’t it.”
“Okay, so if it’s not the Milky Way, what is it? What else would they put on a star map?”
An idea occurred to Eddie. “It’s not a star map,” he said, going to the mirror. “There’re stars on it, but they’re not what it’s all about.” He stared at the reflection, a knowing smile spreading across his face. “Take a look.”
He took an atlas from the shelf and flipped through it as Nina peered at the reflected zodiac. “What am I supposed to be seeing?” she asked.
“This.” Eddie held the atlas open at a particular map: Egypt. He ran a finger down the page, tracing the course of a river from north to south. “Remind you of anything?”
She looked at the map, then the reflection in the mirror, the map again … ‘It’s the same shape,” she realized. “Oh my God, it’s the Nile!”
“Put the thing on the ceiling, and it matches the shape of the Nile if you sort of project it upward,” he said, nodding. “Make it into a normal map, though, and it gets flipped over.”
Nina hurried back to the zodiac, sweeping the notes aside so she could see the river’s path. “So this is the Nile delta at the north, which means the other end … Eddie, bring the map over here.”
“You didn’t say the magic word,” he said, but he brought the atlas to her anyway, comparing it with the painted line. Even taking the mirroring effect into account, there were differences. “The delta’s not the same—there’re more rivers on the old map.”
“The Nile used to have more mouths; some of them silted up,” Nina told him distractedly, fixing on something much farther upstream. “Look, look at this! This big bend in the river, where it goes around the Valley of the Kings …” She tapped excitedly on the Lexan. “This Osiris figure, the one that wasn’t on the Dendera zodiac—look where its eye is!”
Eddie mentally flipped the zodiac to match the map. The figure’s head corresponded to a point west of the river, near a kink in its otherwise northward course. “So what’s there now? Some place called … Al Balyana.”
“That’s not all that’s there.” She practically skipped back to the table, dress swirling, to pick up a coffee-table book full of lush photography. “It used to be one of the most important places in Egypt.” The appropriate page found, she rushed back to show him. “Abydos. The city of Osiris!”
The photographs showed several large ruined structures. “Looks like they need to get the builders in,” Eddie joked.
“After we get in,” said Nina, scanning through the text. “There must be something pointing the way to this ‘silver canyon’—once we find it, we’re only seven miles from the pyramid.”
“Find what?”
“The second eye of Osiris. I think it’s a double clue—there’s the eye of the second Osiris here on the zodiac, which tells you to go to Abydos … but the hieroglyphics said the second eye ‘sees the way’ to the canyon. The one on the zodiac’s just a dot; it doesn’t see anything. My guess is that somewhere in Abydos there’s the actual symbol of the eye of Osiris, and the direction it faces is where we’re meant to go. I’ve got no idea where in Abydos, though—Macy might know.”
“Then we’d better get off this boat and find her.” Eddie eyed the zodiac.
Nina knew the look. “No. Absolutely not.”
“Absolutely not what?”
“You are not smashing the zodiac!”
“It’ll stop Osir’s lot from finding the pyramid.”
“They already have all the clues, they just weren’t smart enough to figure them out. If we leave it intact, it can be returned to Egypt.”
“Only if Imhotep back there gets arrested,” he said, jabbing a thumb at the bathroom.
“If we beat him to the pyramid, we can expose him for what he’s done.”
“One flap of that dressing gown and he’d have exposed himself, all right.”
“Oh, give it a rest,” Nina huffed. She tugged the clips from her hair and shook out the twist, fashioning it back into a ponytail. “I still need to get my things.”
He drew the revolver. “I’ll check that your boyfriend’s still praying to the great god Armitage Shanks, then we’ll go.”
Osir was still where they had left him. Eddie poked the gun into the furious Egyptian’s b
ack, then made sure he was firmly tied to the waste pipe. “Okay,” he said, returning to the bedroom, “let’s—”
Someone knocked on the cabin door.
Eddie whipped up the gun. “Shit!” Nina whispered, frozen beside him. “What do we do?”
“Shh!” In the bathroom, Osir made muffled grunts; Eddie rushed back and kicked him. “You shuddup an’ all!”
“Khalid!” said an impatient voice from outside. Shaban. “Khalid, I know you’re in there. Let me in.” The locked door’s handle rattled.
Nina stared at it—then dived onto the bed, the mattress springs creaking loudly. Before Eddie could ask what she was doing, she gasped and moaned in simulated ecstasy. “Oh … oh … oh God, yes, come on, yes, harder, oh!”
The handle stopped moving, and with a clearly audible snort of disgust Shaban walked away. Nina continued her Meg Ryan routine until she was sure he was out of earshot, then jumped off the bed.
“Fuck me,” said Eddie, smirking. “And I mean that literally. I’m all turned on now!”
“Hold that thought until we’re back on shore. And in private.” She went to the door and listened. No sounds outside. “I think we’re clear.”
Eddie joined her, opening the door a crack. The passage was empty. “Which way?”
“Go right, then around the first corner. There are some stairs.”
He darted out, gun at the ready. Nobody was there. To the left, smoked-glass doors opened on to one of the upper decks; he could see the lights of Monaco through them. He went right and peered around the corner. Still no one; the promised stairs were some thirty feet away. “Okay, clear.”
Nina followed him, acutely aware in the yacht’s insulated quiet that her long dress was rustling with every step. “This is why I always wear Dockers,” she whispered.
“If you wore miniskirts, like I keep asking …” Eddie paused at the stairs. A faint conversation was audible from the deck above, but it soon became clear that the speakers were not approaching. He descended. “Two decks down, you said?”