Hassan added, ‘And they say he was found with a bag. Of documents.’
Ryan resisted the idea, at first.
‘What has it got to do with me?’ He shook his head. ‘I work for you guys now, I’m not an Egyptologist. That was a decade ago.’
‘Please.’ Hassan gently raised a hand in protest. ‘You have done enough here. At least take some proper time off, a month at least, three months better.’
‘But—’
‘When did you last have a holiday?’
Ryan watched the café owner drop a glass of tea on their table. The smell of apple shisha hung in the frowzy air. ‘Six years ago.’
Hassan smiled. ‘Exactly. This is too much: you have done Egypt great service. We owe you money! And really –’ another languid gesture – ‘are you going to spend the rest of your life carrying bricks, like a peasant? Is this all that is left? Sassoon was your great friend.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you know the rumours of what he found.’
‘Yes.’
Everyone in Egyptology, anyone remotely connected to Egyptology, had heard or read these rumours. Ryan’s heart had secretly raced at the notion. The Sokar Hoard! And then, the absurd thought had occurred: what if he, Ryan Harper, found the Sokar Hoard once again, and deciphered it? Of course he had crushed this outbreak of ambition as soon as it was born; but here was his boss telling him to seize the moment.
Again, Hassan smiled. His dark suit looked expensive on the terrace of the shabby Tetisheri tea-house; Ryan’s jeans were still covered in dust.
‘So. Ryan. Please will you go? I will make the arrangements. Give you letters. Holiday pay. Go now. Go and find the Hoard. Go and be an Egyptologist again.’
‘Hassan—’
‘This is an order! I am your boss, Ryan. Remember I can have you shot at dawn, under the temple of Nectanebo, if you disobey.’
This was a joke, of course. But there was a steeliness in Hassan’s voice. And the sternness of the order was answered by a corresponding yearning in Ryan to obey. He wanted to go: maybe there was still a scientist inside him, despite the calluses on his hands and the sand in his sun-bleached hair.
Hassan pressed his point. ‘There is no teaching work here any more. Maybe even the charity will have to close, because of the disturbances.’
‘Really?’
Hassan frowned, heavily. ‘Really. It is very bad, very bad …’ He sighed. ‘But at least I can help a friend come to his senses. Your dear wife would have wanted you to do this. To be the Ryan Harper she knew, once more. After ten years, I think, it is time. No?’
The moment was tense. Ryan drank his tea, and said nothing, and watched the moon rise over the Temple of Seti. He remembered Rhiannon. Her fever, the last days, the terrifying and inundating sadness. Maybe it was time to let this go.
The moon stared at him. Shocked at his decision. But the decision felt entirely right.
He took leave of absence that very night, hastily packing a bag, then jogging straight to the teeming Abydos railway station.
Time was strictly limited. Ryan was very aware that others would be on the trail. He had to get to Nazlet as quickly as possible. But quickly as possible was not an Egyptian state of mind.
The ticket queue was full of sweating men in djellabas, all shouting angrily at the narrow-eyed man behind the cracked-glass reservations window. The man behind the glass was dispensing his tickets with a reluctant and painful slowness, as if they were his personal inheritance of Treasury bonds. Harper growled with impatience. They’d found the body of Victor Sassoon!
Sassoon was his old tutor, his mentor, a man Harper had once admired and revered: the great Jewish scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the greatest men in his field. What had happened that he should be found dead, alone, in a cave? What could have driven him to do that? To walk into the wilderness, alone, two months ago? Poor Victor.
It had to have been something extraordinary to invoke such a response. That meant the bag found with Sassoon’s body must contain the Sokar Hoard, the great cache: the cache Victor had illegally bought in his final days of life, or so the lurid rumours had it. Sassoon had, it seemed, read these documents, then killed himself. Or been murdered. Why? What had Sassoon retrieved at the White Monastery? What was in those texts?
The mysteries were arousing, energizing, tantalizing. They pumped the blood in Harper’s heart. Hassan was right. All these years the keen and ambitious scientist in Ryan Harper hadn’t entirely gone away, but had merely slumbered. And now the long-buried Egyptologist was being resurrected.
If Ryan could find the Sokar Hoard, then he would have done something with the scholarly skills he had disregarded for a decade. Something amazing.
Did you hear about old Ryan Harper? Oh, he found the Sokar Hoard.
Ryan Harper?
‘Effendi!’
‘Maljadeed!’
The queue in front of him seemed to be getting longer as half of Abydos barged in. Harper resisted the urge to punch his way to the kiosk. But it was hard. Trying to buy a ticket in an Egyptian railway station was always a hassle – like trying to change nationality during a hurricane – and he knew he had to exercise patience. But he couldn’t exercise patience tonight of all nights. The next Sohag train – the last Sohag train of the day – was leaving in fifteen minutes.
‘La – ibqa!’
‘Jagal – almaderah – incheb!’
What could he do instead? He crunched the equations, frantically. Perhaps he could hire a car and driver and just take the road? But no. That might be possible by day, but at night – not a chance. Security was tightening up and down the Nile; a Westerner in a cab without a very special permit would be immediately halted at the edge of town and summarily returned whence he came – that or detained and questioned. Or worse.
No, a train was the only way to get to Sohag tonight. Then he could head on to Nazlet tomorrow. And he needed to get there tonight. Because, if the reports of Sassoon’s body being rediscovered had reached Abydos, then they would have reached elsewhere, too; and other people would have reached precisely the same conclusion.
‘Haiwan!’
‘La! La!’
There were men apparently fighting at the front of the queue.
Harper abandoned any hope of getting a ticket in time. Instead he reached in the zipped pocket of his fleecy climber’s jacket – the desert night was cool, even down here in southern Egypt – and pulled out a wad of US dollars. Baksheesh might just work where patience was exhausted. He had to try, or his quest would be finished before it began.
Ryan sauntered over to the concrete arch that led onto the platforms. Like almost every official threshold in Egypt it was barred by an airport-style detector, a boxy doorway of metal: a detector that served no purpose as it wasn’t plugged in.
But the security guard was real enough. He eyed Harper. ‘Men fethlek? Aiwa? Tick-et!’
The voice was curt; this was far from promising. But Harper had no choice. Subtly as he could, he