Serpent of Moses

3



As his captors marched Jack back along the route down which he’d fled, he decided that being forced to endure the indignity of retracing his steps bothered him almost as much as the pain of his minor bullet wound. Yet he couldn’t blame anyone but himself, as Mukhtar had warned him of these men before Jack left Al Bayda. Four men—three of them European, one Mukhtar had guessed was Egyptian. They’d slipped into and out of the city with a quietness that suggested a desire for secrecy, and when one required certain types of items, such items often had to pass through Mukhtar’s hands. And that suggested they were after the same thing Jack was. Even so, Jack had kept on task, intent on being the first to touch the artifact in perhaps a thousand years.

He hadn’t realized he’d slowed until the large man—whom the Englishman had called Imolene—placed a hand between Jack’s shoulder blades and shoved. Jack tightened his lips against the rough handling but remained quiet. Instead, he focused all his attention on the tunnel ahead, seen now in greater detail with the addition of three more flashlights.

His research told him this cavern slicing through the mountainous part of northeastern Libya had existed since at least the time of Cyrene, and he suspected the ancient Greeks had used it for defense, even as modern Libyans had used it to resist the Italian occupation. By his estimation the tunnel through which he walked was at least two centuries older than the others he’d explored in the area. Whoever built it had taken great pains to hide the entrance. It had been cut into the mountain at an angle so that the shadow falling across the opening gave it the appearance of a much narrower fissure. Hours ago, walking toward it, knowing he was heading in the right direction, he could not find the opening against the brown and gray rock until he was right on top of it. The experience made him wonder if, unlike most secret places surrounded by encroaching civilization, this one might have remained unspoiled.

“This tunnel is older than the others,” the Englishman remarked. It was the first thing any of them had said in some time, and Jack was taken aback by how the comment mirrored his own thoughts.

“At least two centuries older,” he agreed.

The Englishman walking next to him offered Jack a smile but didn’t say anything more. When they’d started out, Jack had asked his name and, failing to receive a response, pressed the man further as to how he knew Jack’s. That question had also gone unanswered.

They walked on for another twenty minutes, until Jack began to notice a change in the light. He guessed the darkness in the tunnel had been lightening for some time, but so gradually that he hadn’t picked up on it. Up ahead, he could see the place where the tunnel curved to the left, leading to the antechamber he’d been forced from before having the chance to do anything other than have a look around.

At the thought of what lay beyond the curve, Jack’s feet began to move faster. Despite the circumstances that occasioned his return to the cavern, he had no more control over his growing excitement than he did his own breathing. It was a feeling tied to a need to uncover the secrets hidden within the chamber regardless of all else. It was what had brought him back to the field after what had happened in Egypt, and what had kept him there following the events in Australia.

Moments later they reached the turn where, just ten yards more, the cavern opened up before them. Jack hadn’t realized he’d stopped until Imolene propelled him forward, moving toward a ten-foot drop-off to the cavern floor, where a rope ladder provided by Mukhtar awaited. As Jack waited his turn, the Englishman and another of his associates preceding him down the ladder, he kept a wary eye on Imolene, lest the man find that one final shove was sufficient to get Jack where he wanted him. In this case, though, the giant exercised patience. With the ladder clear, Jack turned and swung his legs over the side.

The cavern was thirty yards across at its widest point, stretching twice that to the back wall. The four battery-powered floodlights his predecessors had wrangled through the darkness barely reached those boundaries and did even less to illuminate the ceiling a hundred feet above them.

When he’d arrived in the cavern the first time, the other men now in his company had passed through and taken a smaller tunnel into the treasure room, as the original designers had intended. Jack had hoped to use their preoccupation to his advantage by taking what they wanted right out from under their noses. In covert archaeology, however, timing was everything, and Jack’s timing hadn’t been as perfect as he’d counted on.

“I’m assuming the treasure room was a misdirection,” the Englishman said.

Jack didn’t reply. Instead, he swung his pack around so he could raise the flap and slip his hand inside. Only when he felt Imolene’s huge hand on his shoulder—with enough strength to let Jack know he could crush every bone beneath his fingers—did he look over at the Englishman, who shook his head, his eyes on his enforcer. Jack felt the man’s grip ease and so returned his attention to his pack. He pulled out a notebook, flipped it open, studied it for a few moments, and then, without consulting his captors, started off toward the cavern’s far wall, which was opposite the exit to the treasure room.

As he neared the corner, the others trailing close behind, his eyes ran along the wall, noting the unnatural smoothing of the surface by ancient tools, the intricate patterns carved into the rock. His first time through, he’d made it no farther before being discovered.

The lights did little to lessen the shadows, forcing him to pluck a flashlight from the hand of one of the Europeans in the party, a man who had not uttered a single syllable since Jack had been forced to join their group. Though the man frowned at losing his light, he remained mute. After looking at the notebook again, Jack began to run the light over the wall. It took him several seconds to find the focal glyph. While that vexed him, it also elicited respect for the ancient puzzle makers who had designed the system, who had set up the false treasure room where the others had wasted their time.

Slipping the notebook back into his pack, he used his free hand to wipe away the centuries of dust that had accumulated on the wall, revealing Semitic text, part of which matched what was written in a scroll he’d pulled from the sarcophagus of the Archbishop Giovanni Visconti in the Milan Cathedral. With a smile of gratitude that the effort to procure that scroll had not been in vain, he ran a finger over the text, his lips moving as he did the calculations. He did them twice just to be sure, and once he was certain of the result, it was all he could do to stop himself from putting the data to use.

Instead, he held back the thing inside of himself that desperately wanted to see his research and labor rewarded and stepped away from the wall, looking toward the Englishman.

“Here’s where we decide how we’re going to work this so you get what you came for and I get out of here in one piece,” Jack said.

The Englishman did not answer right away, but Jack had the impression he’d been awaiting the statement.

“I’m not sure you’re in a position to bargain,” he said.

“Probably not,” Jack acknowledged. “But since the odds are good that you’re going to kill me as soon as you have it in your hands, then it’s probably my only option.”

The other man granted that to Jack with a nod.

“Except that I believe you’re overestimating your worth,” he said. “Now that we know it’s not in the treasure room, and as we would also have possession of your notebook if you were dead, it would only be a matter of time before we found it ourselves.”

“Which would at least be a moral victory,” Jack said. “If I’m going to die anyway, I’d rather you do some of the work.”

The Englishman’s lip curled. “But then you would miss the opportunity to see something that no one else has seen in a thousand years.”

It was the one thing his captor could have said that stood a chance of enlisting Jack’s help, and he did not have a ready response beyond a rekindling of the excitement that had ebbed over the last few minutes. To get as far as he had, to have waded through the research and traveled half the world until he was finally standing in a cave in Libya, and then to be denied the chance to see, to touch the thing he sought, was difficult to swallow.

While he did not respond, he could see that the Englishman could read his thoughts.

“Relax. No one’s going to kill you, Dr. Hawthorne. This is about the staff, nothing more.”

There was no way to test the truth of that statement, so Jack didn’t try. He returned his attention to the wall and located the glyph. Then, using the symbol for its assigned purpose, he counted through the other symbols for the right spot. The one he landed on looked no different than the others, though he would have expected nothing else.

He tapped it once before reaching into his pack and pulling out a small hammer. After a glance at Imolene, to make sure the giant would not snatch the tool from him and use it for some purpose for which it was not intended, he struck the wall, the sound echoing in the chamber. It took a second strike before the hammer went through the thin stone and into the hollow beneath it. A feeling of exultation coursed through him, but he pushed that aside and began to pull away the shattered pieces, revealing a hole less than eight inches across. It took less than a minute to remove the shards, and once he’d cleared the hole he put his hand in, all the while wondering if the men behind him would allow him to do the honors or if they would pull him away now that his usefulness was expended. When no hands closed on him, he decided to reach into the opening.

His hand touched something coarse yet malleable. It took him a moment to recognize it as fabric, but then he felt the solid thing it encased. He tightened his grip and tugged, expecting some resistance but finding none. The thing slid out as if coated in oil—long and slender, wrapped in timeworn linen.

In that moment Jack was alone in the cavern.

He held the artifact up, his eyes bright with the pure joy that came from such a discovery. It was the right size, yet the only way to be sure was to remove the wrappings. That, however, was an honor he would not be allowed.

As he turned away from the wall he felt the hands on him, an arm wrapping around his chest. The Englishman stepped forward and took the artifact from Jack’s hands, an apologetic smile his only payment. An instant later the rock wall from which Jack had just pulled the relic came rushing forward, and then all was blackness.