Decipher, p.11
Decipher, page 11
“Sound waves?”
Clemmens shrugged. He knew it was conjecture. “We got a specialist in, to give a preliminary date to the bowls. The guy studied the ground strata where they were found. It was a grave-robber tunnel. And he wound up giving us a date of over 4000 B.C.”
“And that’s a problem, how?”
“The grave-robber tunnel appears to wend its way over to the pyramids, though it’s filled in now. But if a grave-robber tunnel was constructed in 4000 B.C., just what were they robbing? The pyramids didn’t exist until 2500 B.C.”
In some areas, Arab workmen in long white cotton galebeyas were already hard at work shifting chunks of concrete without even breaking a sweat. Heavy machinery was busy clearing away rubble. Generators and night-lights were housed next to steel chainlink fences and store houses. Portakabins and trailers marked the nerve center. And then there were the pyramids.
“Tell me about the Carbon 60,” Sarah said. “What’s the story on that?”
“We found a few smashed pieces in a little cloth sack, along with the pots. There’s evidence of a fire down there, and some kind of close-quarter battle. Scorchmarks. Extremely violent. But so far—no bodies.”
“Maybe the grave robbers were discovered?”
“The fire indicates it started somewhere further down the tunnel—from the pyramid end. Whoever caught them had to be in one of the monuments, and went after them as they were on their way out.”
They arrived near the front gate. Sarah was about to respond when she shortened her stride.
A crowd had gathered. Military police were guarding the entrance to the site, and were unhappy with the situation. One of them was a little too eager in raising the butt of his rifle.
Sarah felt her heart miss a beat as they approached. “What’s going on?”
“Never mind,” Clemmens muttered as they headed in.
She could hear machinery. Heavy and loud just behind the sheer cliffs of devastation that marked the demolition zones within the camp. Plumes of oily blue smoke were shooting up into the sky marking their tracks in the distance. But that was nothing compared to the shouts of the crowd. There were about a hundred of them, Sarah guessed, mostly westerners. Some even had placards. About one third were media types with cameras and microphones. There was no choice but to bite the bullet and jostle their way through.
“Hey, do you mind? I’m trying to get to work, here!” Sarah shoved the large guy in front out of the way. But the mere mention of work caused the crowd to turn like a shoal of fish. She exchanged a brief look with Clemmens.
“That was a really bad move,” he mouthed.
“We demand access!” the protesters were shouting. “We have a right to know!”
Sarah struggled with more bodies. It was like an Ecobattle with a bunch of students, but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out what they were complaining about. Reporters hurled questions at her about Thorne. When did they expect him? Was Rola Corp. facing a board of inquiry at the Senate? But Sarah didn’t know what they were talking about. She ignored them all until a middle-aged woman with long silvery hair, tied back in a pony-tail, emerged from the mass to confront her. She wasn’t a ringleader as such, but she certainly had influence. The crowd eased back, but they remained loud. Her eyes were deep and penetrating. Sarah had never seen eyes like them before.
“You will help us,” she said. Her voice cut through the din like a knife.
Sarah tried to ignore her but found that she couldn’t.
The woman added: “Cayce was right.”
Sarah frowned. She tried to respond, but didn’t know how.
“You’ll see,” the woman concluded. Her face was engaging, enigmatic.
Sarah remained transfixed but in a flash she was being herded off. The soldiers had cut a path through the crowd and Clemmens was bundling her into the camp. “Come on!” he was yelling, and within seconds they were through.
Sarah kept trying to look back. Thought she’d caught a glimpse of the woman again, but Clemmens had a hold of her arm and was marching her up the path, deep into Rola Corp. territory. Moments later he let her free. “Who’s Cayce?” she asked.
Clemmens shrugged.
“What do they want?”
“I don’t know,” he grumbled. “What d’you care? They’re nutballs. Conspiracy theorists. End of the world freaks. They’re insane. A pain in the ass.”
Sarah eyed him closely. “So do they have anything to worry about, Eric?”
Clemmens seemed to grimace. Steered her onward by pointing to a series of pits and leveled areas across from the Sphinx. They were foundations to a series of buildings that had been ripped from the ground. Twisted pipe-work still protruded in places. Chunks of concrete were piled to the sides.
“That’s where we found the grave-robber tunnel. It’s empty now, of course.” He whipped out a postcard. Passed it over. “Used to be a whole bunch of restaurants and tourist shit. We leveled it. That’s roughly where they want to build the museum. Hey, have you seen pictures of what it’s gonna look like?”
“Yeah. It’s pretty. It’s like that one they built at the foot of the Parthenon in Athens.”
“It’s gonna be more than pretty. It’s gonna be awesome—sunk into the ground, looking up at the Sphinx and the Pyramids. Anyways, we’ve been running a geophysics survey over this entire area, like you asked when you called last night. Monuments an’ all.”
Sarah eyed the postcard casually. A grimy Arab stood by a rusted sign for Coke and a 7-Up vending machine. She handed it back. “Good. What did you find?”
Clemmens took a breath. “Granite under the Sphinx.”
Sarah faltered. She glanced over to the crowd still attached to the front gate before facing Clemmens again. They exchanged a look and they both knew. All bullshit aside, something strange was going on. Sarah set it down in her mind for a moment. It required focused thought, not some half-assed theory. A couple of Arab workmen sauntered past. They were chatting away cheerfully until they came across Sarah. They looked vaguely shocked when they spotted her and gabbled to themselves with a scowl. Clemmens waved them on while Sarah tried to shrug it off.
She said: “They don’t get out much around here, huh?” Clemmens was silent. And then she heard it—the call to. prayer. The muezzins were wailing high up in their minarets.
“Welcome to Cairo,” Clemmens chipped in glibly.
Sarah had been to Egypt before when she was twelve. It was winter, she remembered, and she’d arrived in Alexandria on a cruise ship. People herded sheep and goats in and out of filthy, dilapidated British colonial apartment blocks. It was a shock to learn those people also lived with the animals.
The other memory she had was animal-related too and equally squalid. She’d watched some kids play soccer on a patch of scrubland. It was near a mosque and she could still recall the faint scent of rosewater wafting across from the cart of a leathery old vendor. She’d strayed from her parents. They were bartering over a piece of cheap tourist papyrus, she remembered, when the boys noticed her. They’d grinned and kicked the ball over, hoping she might join in. Being a Westerner they must have figured she could play soccer. Being American, of course she could not. She’d grinned in return, and glanced down to kick the ball back. But it didn’t take long for her to realize what she was looking at. They were playing soccer with the decapitated head of a Labrador puppy. Its gums had rotted, and the teeth that remained were white. Snarling. Obviously she screamed. The mud was thick too, she remembered. Black. Yes, Sarah had lots of memories about Egypt.
She could feel perspiration starting to build up on the back of her neck. Already it was 30°C, and it wasn’t even 8 o’clock yet. This wasn’t right. It was only March.
They crossed out into the open, passed more demolition areas and moved on into the arena of the pyramids. The huge, jagged-edged megaliths seemed to cut into the very sky itself. The desert beyond them stretched to infinity while the Sphinx, ever enigmatic, sat passively waiting in a vast and relentless mass of shifting amber sands, each grain accompanied by a whiff of palpable history.
Sarah had to admit, she was impressed. She chewed her gum. “Cool.”
They reached the geophysics team, which was already hard at work.
Two operators methodically humped a set of meter-high electrodes around the site a yard at a time. Sarah recognized it immediately as an electrical resistivity survey, the type developed a couple of years ago that was able to peer through sand. Before then, sand showed up as solid rock and the ground had to be damp for the probes to function properly. It worked by passing a current directly into the ground and measuring the electrical potentials across the electrodes. In this way they built up a picture of the subsurface geology resulting in an underground map of the area without anyone lifting a shovel.
Sarah could see the operators were already struggling in the heat and dust. “You didn’t opt for a seismic survey then?” she asked.
“Are you kidding?” Clemmens did a double take before realizing he was being had. He shook his head. “Yeah, right. Blasting holes in everything with dynamite and listening to the echoes on geo-phones is really gonna go down well in this neighborhood.”
“I take it the archeologists around here want access to the data. You know how they love to save money.”
“That’s, uh, well …” Clemmens scratched his head. “You’d better just talk to Douglas about that.”
Sarah eyed him coolly, unsurprised. Douglas was a company drone in charge of Rola Corp.’s construction arm. It was a small wing set up to accommodate favors for Third World governments, based on the notion that if they built a few things like a palace and a hotel, immediate tangible things, then they could dig or drill all they liked.
She found Douglas in the makeshift survey tent. Under the shade of some dusty green canvas and surrounded by a myriad of trailing cables and wires, he was the picture of organization. Hair slicked back, he wore a thin cotton shirt and dark glasses. He drank orange juice from a disposable plastic carton and jotted notes down on a yellow legal pad. Next to him on a rickety desk were stacks of papers in neat, tidy piles. He was standing, leaning over his notes when he glanced up. He did not look pleased.
“Wear longer sleeves next time, please,” he remarked.
Sarah gave a cursory glance at her bare arms. She was wearing khakis and a plain white cotton T-shirt. The humidity was low. The breeze coming in off the Sahara was dusty and harsh on her skin, but it was better than frostbite. And besides, she was damned if she was going to wrap up for these people.
“Fuck that,” she said angrily, throwing her purse down on the table.
Clemmens winced and ducked out of the firing line by taking up a position at one of the monitors. Douglas looked around sharply to see if any locals were in range. He let out a sigh of relief when he was certain there were not.
“Listen, Doug. Is this Islam thing gonna affect my entire stay?” Sarah glared. “Gee, well at least I missed Ramadan. People going scatterbrain, starving themselves half to death from dawn till dusk for a month and dropping like flies because of it. Are you gonna ask me to abstain from sex too? Is that it?”
Douglas tried to let it roll over him. Failed. He slapped down the document he was working on. “Just try to stay out of trouble. I haven’t gotten your visas all cleared yet.”
“It may have escaped your attention, but I’m not a Muslim and I’ve no intention of becoming one. So you can stick your dress code up your—”
“I get the point. I’m just passing on information. It’ll make working here a damn sight easier. Since the extremists started taking over, this is a changed country, you know.”
Sarah kept her gaze level. “No shit,” she said. “They’re screaming for your blood at the gate.” Douglas inclined his head and let her win that one.
Clemmens eyed Douglas derisively as he handed Sarah a sprawling printout with a set of gray-scale graph lines running down the entire length of paper. She thanked him under her breath. Clutching the data tightly, she speed-read the first sweep geophysics survey sheet. It was a torrent of numbers.
Clemmens said, “It’s to a depth range of around fifteen meters.”
“They got the substructure readings for this entire area?”
Clemmens confirmed that they had, but Sarah was shaking her head. “This can’t be right.” She held up the scan for all to see. “This is a perfect heptagon. There’s a seven-sided structure—directly beneath the Sphinx.”
It was clear Douglas and Clemmens were well aware of this revelation.
Clemmens jerked a thumb in the direction of the two operators. “Sally’s out there now doing another sweep.”
Sarah tossed the printout aside and went to one of the computers. She glanced down at the bearded, chunky guy sitting at the terminal and waved him away. He didn’t look like he wanted to move.
“Frankie, this is Sarah Kelsey. She’s the geology—”
“Oh, the geology chick.”
Sarah ignored them both as she tapped away on the keyboard. Clemmens had taken his cap off and was scratching his head again, embarrassed. “Yeah, the chick.”
“You’re sure about these figures?” Sarah demanded. She keyed in reference points and analyzed the test results.
Clemmens dug into his shirt pocket and thumbed through his notebook. “Yeah. On the, uh, the fifth we took a core sample, authorized by the EDA at section G-one-eighty-seven.”
A core sample was taken by literally drilling a long hollow pipe into the ground and pulling it out again. The pipe would fill up with soil and rock and the resulting core was a cross-section of the ground. From that, each stratum could be measured and analyzed. A history of the entire area could be charted. If there was ash then chances were there’d been a fire. If there was a lot of ash, chances were a volcano had been nearby. If there was any organic matter it could be carbon-dated. And even though it was an unreliable method it still gave a relative age, which could be assigned to that stratum, the logic being that if a fly was fifteen hundred years old and five feet down the core, then five feet represented fifteen hundred years ago. Any flies found further down the core sample had to be older.
Sarah scrolled through pages of the project specs before she found the information she was looking for. “What did the core reveal?” she demanded, tapping the screen and jotting down the figures she needed.
“A big ole chunk of Aswan granite,” Clemmens confirmed. “Just like the survey said we’d find.”
Sarah looked up sharply. “Aswan granite?”
Clemmens shrugged. “Yeah, you and me both know—Aswan’s five hundred miles south of here.”
“You and me both know there isn’t any natural granite anywhere in the Nile Delta, especially not here at Giza. It’s a sandstone outcropping.” She confirmed and tapped the geophysics survey. “And there’s no way in hell that this seven-sided granite … thing was created by Mother Nature.” Her gaze rested on Douglas. They locked eyes for a moment.
“So what d’you think?” Clemmens prompted.
Sarah was cautious. But firm. She looked from man to man. “I think someone leaked this to the crowd outside.”
“No way,” Douglas growled. “Forget about them, they don’t know anything. That’s not why they’re here.”
“Why are they here?”
Douglas wasn’t biting. “What is your opinion on the granite?”
“I think,” Sarah said tentatively, keeping a fixed gaze on the foreman, “a good archeologist will tell you that the ancient Egyptians shipped all the granite they needed, down-river. Who’s to say they didn’t just build something under the Giza plateau?”
Clemmens was stunned. “How?”
Sarah looked pensive. “Who knows. Who cares. It’s not our concern.”
“It’s a natural formation,” Douglas insisted.
“Oh, come on!” Sarah scoffed.
“It’s natural.”
“Who’s the geologist here?”
Douglas glared, causing Sarah to fall silent. So that was it. Cooperation with the Egyptian Department of Antiquities was not what was going on here. Like her other trips to Egypt, the greasing of government palms was what was important here. To begin with, Rola Corp. had drawn up a strategy on how to tap oil in the Northern Desert west of the Nile, and had assessed the potential of the water reserves on the southern borders with Sudan. Both of these major resources, discovered in the late twentieth century, were vital to Egypt. Being the second largest international, and U.S., aid recipient in the world, a large proportion of her 70 million-strong populace needed immediate relief. And having just flown over Cairo this morning Sarah was in agreement. The Bulaq district was a slum. The Nile stretched off into the distance, a vast glistening lifeline broken up by the Sixth of October Bridge and the island of Zamalek. But even now, well into the twenty-first century, the best public housing Egypt had to offer was still made from mud brick. The people were desperate. The nation was on the verge of turning fundamentalist and the government had its back to the wall. And Rola Corp. knew how to manipulate that to its advantage.
The computer beeped as it popped up another window of data. “Gotcha,” she said, as a steady stream of spikes appeared all over the geo-survey.
Egypt had mineral deposits. But nothing as exotic as the readings she was seeing. Gold was more her thing, found mostly to the east, in the Nile valley and the Sinai Mountains. Granite under the Sphinx was interesting but completely irrelevant to Rola Corp.
What was of prime relevance were the tiny spikes of data forming a pattern beneath the surface across the entire Giza site map. Sure enough they’d found more Carbon 60, just as Houghton had said.
Sarah eyed Douglas again. “Exactly what kind of a museum are we building here?”
Douglas said: “Rola Corp.’s been out here almost ten years now, Sarah. Made a lot of people a lot of money. Won a lot of friends.” He finished off the last of his juice. “The government likes the work you did when you were out here last. And you of all people know how they like to reward loyalty.” He let the words sink in. “But there are only two certainties in this country. Poverty and sunstroke. So what do you do? Your education system sucks. Your industry—well, forget your industry. You got a few offshore rigs in the Red Sea, but that’s about it. Half your population works for other countries and sends home next to nothing. But you got minerals, and you know minerals are power.”
