It was good that Harry and Maggie's family was so large as the homestead had been deliberately constructed for a large number of people coming and going almost constantly at all hours of the day and night, as around their massive scrubbed dining table there was currently a cluster of rough-and-ready world-weary explorers.
And Jonathan, in his tartan pyjamas. He hadn't been this underdressed for a war council since 1939.
"So the Israelis grabbed you?" O'Connell asked doubtfully. "Who'd you tick off this time?"
"Hey, it's not me, and I'm rather tired of people automatically assuming it is." Jonathan grumbled.
"You do have a bit of a reputation, Uncle Jon." Alex put in.
"The state of Israel is still new, and without money the whole thing will collapse." Jonathan continued like he'd never been interrupted.
"And the Emerald Tablet of Thoth is rumoured to be the key to alchemy." Alex said.
"Lead into gold?" Rick asked, perking up, casting him a look.
Jonathan frowned. "What's that tone supposed to mean?"
"Just saying, it kind of explains why you know about it."
"Yes, yes, I'm like a small bird that gets dazzled by anything too shiny." He rolled his eyes.
Rick's eyebrows lowered. "Jonathan, that's the whole reason we even met."
Sigrun shook her head, looking exhausted that everyone had apparently jumped onto the crazy train and accepted that the Emerald Tablet just had to exist. Jonathan raised his voice a little as he caught her eye. "And regardless whether it's all a load of horseshit or not, someone believes it is."
"At least two someones." Alex added.
"Yes." The Mossad. And the unmarked shadowy phantoms that had chased away one of the most deadly intelligence agencies in the world. Jonathan's lips thinned, wondering what dear old creepy Mr Talbot was doing right now. Was he still busy brooding around Europe, or currently mincing around a Moroccan beach in his undertaker's suit?
"So, what? Should we just go in and grab this thing before it gets grabbed?" Rick asked.
"We only have half of the research, Dad." Alex said.
"About that-" Jonathan started, but that was when Kurt emerged from the corridor, placing a leather satchel on the dining table beside Simon Gerhard's journal. After a moment Sigrun reached for the bag, sliding the notebooks and papers out across the table, in Kurt's fluid hand. He silently took a seat beside her and Jonathan.
"The other half of the research."
Sigrun's brow furrowed, and she looked at Jonathan, who shrugged. "The Israelis had them." He said. "And while it makes a certain amount of sense they'd have got their hands on them somehow considering Israel's ties to America, the fact that the research wasn't destroyed when – rather implies that someone was aware of the potential behind rediscovering Punt."
"Someone knew the Emerald Tablet was there." There. There it was, the inquisitive excitable note in Sigrun's voice. It had taken a while to unearth, but he'd got there.
"Or had seen enough proof that they were willing to take a whack at it." Jonathan said. "And then everything went to pot when Gerhard disappeared and Kurt… went away."
"The ferry." Sigrun said. "The diary. Was Gerhard coming to kill Kurt, or warn him?"
The table went silent.
"I don't know." Kurt said. "I hadn't seen him in years. I don't know." He looked down at the scarred surface of the table. "I suppose we'll never know now."
Jonathan knocked his shoulder against his friend's. "We'll figure it all out, dear chap. We always do."
The room went silent again.
"Will this count for extra credit?" Alex asked.
Perusing both historians' research side by side was genuinely like seeing two different versions of the same story. Kurt's work was entirely more factual than Gerhard's, which took a decidedly more fanciful bent. Jonathan and Sigrun were pouring over the work, heads almost touching. Alex was at the end of the table, taking notes.
"This Simon, he's just… I don't know what to say." Sigrun said. "He's just so fanciful."
"Fanciful? You're going to complain about fanciful? Not that long ago you smacked the undead in the face with a book."
"Oh, shut it." She rolled her eyes. "But, really, look at this. This is nonsense. He's talking about the hanging gardens of Rameses. The golden fleet of Djoser. The pink peacock of Halicarnassus. It's all nonsense."
Jonathan pulled the journal closer, frowning. He'd hadn't really had a chance to examine the journal closely before, but now he could see what Sigrun was talking about. In between diagrams and latitude and longitude figures and quick sketches of reliefs and their translations were crammed seemingly nonsensical unrelated phrases, pulling in all manner of historical figures and jamming hundreds of years haphazardly together.
It was an insanity, but as Jonathan ran his fingers over every deliberate word, he knew that their author hadn't made a mistake in their inscription. Everything was written with an absolute deliberation.
"I think it's a substitution code."
Alex's eyebrows shot up.
"What?"
"Can you crack it?" Sigrun asked.
"Possibly, in time. It would be easier if I had the key, though." He flipped through the book. "Especially if old Gerhard added a numerical element or something as well, that'll take even longer."
"I'm sorry, what?" Alex repeated.
"Is the key in the book?" Sigrun asked.
"Not that I can find." Jonathan pushed the journal toward her, inviting her to flick through. "And if this chap went through the trouble of writing his work in code, I don't see the point of him just writing the key down for any Tom, Dick, or Harry."
"True." Sigrun demurred.
Jonathan picked up Kurt's diary, the man's work entirely more reader-friendly than Simon Gerhard's, eyes narrowed.
"I'm wondering whether our Mr Steiner has it."
"If Kurt had the key he would have told us." Sigrun said immediately.
"Not if he didn't know he had it." He opened the folio, the spine crackling. "Anything either of those boys wrote down would be privy to the Socialists. They could have been asked to show their research at any time, and there would have been the knowledge that their papers could have been reproduced and handed over to other teams at any time and their own digs reassigned."
Her eyebrows rose. "And that's why Gerhard came for Kurt."
He turned Kurt's book upside down, shaking out the pages, then he balanced the diary on a hand, bringing it level with his eyes. "Does that front cover look a bit bulky to you ladies?"
Apparently Alex's frown was not going to shift from his face. "Well, the diary is from the war. Germany was running short on everything. Whatever books were manufactured had their covers reinforced with newspapers, straw. It was the same at home."
Jonathan stood, looking into the farm kitchen. "Which means that something could be easily hidden inside and no one would bother to look, yes?"
He boiled the kitchen kettle and as it desperately whistled he held Kurt's diary over the steam as the binding glue grew tacky, picking at the edges. Seeing that he didn't have enough hands to peel the cover back and also hold the book over the steam at the same time, Sigrun reached out and slowly started the peel the canvas back. Sitting back down at the table, the two of them completely separated out the covers. There were the anticipated old newspapers, scraps of material and old tram tickets. Jonathan checked the tram tickets as Sigrun flicked through the newspapers.
Jonathan threw down the last tram ticket. "Anything?"
Sigrun shook the old newspapers before dropping them to the tabletop.
"Nothing."
Jonathan's shoulders slumped, not looking forward to the hours or days it would take to crack the code from scratch, when he was already so bloody tired. Suddenly at his elbow Alex darted forward so fast that Jonathan almost fell out of his chair in surprise. The boy grabbed the discarded canvas cover and slammed it flat on the table triumphantly.
Jonathan could have kicked himself as he saw the letters and numbers scrawled on the other side of the canvas in engineer's chalk. The series of letters and numbers that wouldn't have meant anything in the slightest if you didn't know that Simon Gerhard's journal was written in code.
"Well, look at that." Jonathan caught Sigrun's grey eyes and grinned. "Shall we find some treasure?"
Despite his earlier enthusiasm over finding the key, Jonathan only managed to translate a few pages of Gerhard's code before almost collapsing nose-first into his papers from exhaustion, and Sigrun had passed the research and the key to Alex before sternly walking Jonathan to the guest room and telling him, in no uncertain terms, to sleep because she needed him at the top of his game.
Rick had made a little heh noise on Jonathan's way past him, but his face didn't give anything away.
It seemed like he'd been asleep for days when Jonathan next woke up, dried drool having glued his pillow to the side of his face. Attractive. He scrambled out of the sheets, feeling like in this very moment time had no real meaning and was as thick as vegetable soup.
He almost jumped out of his skin when someone pounded loudly on the door.
"Are you alive yet, grandpa?" Andy Hallet called.
Jonathan wiped at the drool and scrubbed his eyes. His hair, much longer than he normally kept it, had gone uncomfortably curly and he ran his hands through it to try and tame it slightly. "No."
"Well, you better hurry up, 'cause we're moving."
Adulis had once been the largest port city of Eritrea, when Eritrea had been the kingdom of Aksum, and the maritime trade routes reached all the way into India, Sri Lanka and China. It had been under excavation since a German expedition in 1906 after the initial French survey in 1840. The earliest surviving mention of the port was in the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, a guide to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean in 1AD, but shipping ports had a centuries-old habit of being built essentially on top of each other, as there were only so many ways to get a boat inland.
"Are you sure we've got the tick to be here?"
"Are you feeling threatened that you are not the only one that 'knows a bloke'?" Sigrun said.
Jonathan smiled slightly. "Touché, dear doctor."
"Besides, there haven't been any major excavations since 1915." She murmured, a little furrow between her eyes like she disapproved entirely of the very notion of leaving history to rot.
"To be entirely fair, the world has been a little busy since 1915."
"And we haven't learned a damned thing since then." Rick O'Connell said, and there were vague agreeable grunts from Hallet and Dragovitch.
Sigrun had several charts of the area spread out on the hood of their car, along with several copies of Gerhard's notes.
"This whole area suits the descriptions of Punt best, geographically and according to records of flora and fauna, what the Egyptians traded with the Land of the Gods."
"Yeah?" Rick said.
"Pottery and other articles have been unearthed that date back to the dynasties in Egypt." She replied. "It is doubtful that it's Arabia, as descriptions of particular animals and crops that were traded don't exist there."
"So it's not the other side of the river?" His brother-in-law said innocently.
Jonathan snorted.
"Simon Gerhard's records stop here."
"So the Emerald Tablet is here?"
Sigrun raised an eyebrow, her version of a buggered-if-I-know shrug. "If it is, it would have to have been placed in an area that the Tablet's safekeepers would be fairly certain wouldn't have been destroyed in any future expansions of the city."
Rick's eyes narrowed. "Like a graveyard?"
Jonathan pointed to an area marked on Sigrun's chart.
"Or a church."
Jonathan stared into the shaft as the occasional passing native peered at the Westerners curiously. "I'm not going down first."
Rick quirked an eyebrow. "No one said you had to."
"Just putting it out there, since there's an alarming tendency to give me these jobs." He glanced sideways at his brother-in-law. "As well you know."
Rick just shrugged. "But you're so good at it."
There was a rattle, and Jonathan looked up to see Kurt coming toward them with a climbing tripod balanced over his shoulders. Sigrun wasn't that far behind with a massive coil of rope, climbing harnesses and flashlights. Despite himself, Jonathan felt nervous. Every time he'd gone forth into a sealed room lately something horrible leapt out at him, sometimes literally.
"I can go down." Alex volunteered.
"Yeah, nope." Rick said. "You've got your Uncle's tendency to fall through ceilings."
"I've only done that once. Maybe twice." Alex grumbled. "I could."
"Yeah, sure you could."
"Or we could send down the best climber we have on the crew." Hallet said casually.
Alex rolled his eyes. "What, you?"
"Hell, no." Hallet chuckled. "But thankfully we just happen to have on staff a guy who was an acrobat in the Moscow Circus before the War."
Jonathan blinked. After an awkward pause as one everyone seemed to turn to Vasily Dragovitch, who glowered darkly at Andy while the kid beamed brightly with the absolute knowledge that he had absolutely shattered his friend's ultra-tough image quite spectacularly.
"You're an acrobat?" Rick asked sceptically.
"What, really?" Jonathan grinned. The man was towering, with stupidly broad shoulders, but for the first time he realised that under the military greatcoat Dragovitch was of a reasonably lean and strong build. An acrobat's build. Jonathan couldn't quite imagine the Russian in a bright skintight costume with his face fully greasepainted up, but the image wasn't quite as ridiculous as it first appeared. "That's… brilliant."
He'd gone to see the Moscow Circus a few times. He might have even watched Dragovitch without realising it. He wondered if he'd been that one trapeze artist that had spiralled through the air as a red and silver streak, because blimey.
Still scowling, the big Russian buckled himself into a harness while Kurt and Sigrun assembled the climbing rig. Unconsciously Jonathan moved to check Dragovitch's lines before the Russian let go of the tripod. Kurt's arms went taunt as he took up the slack in the line.
Jonathan watched as Dragovitch and his torch disappeared into the darkness.
One of the best things about being an average chap of average size and average build was that it was easier to haul himself up and down ropes if he needed to.
Jonathan's boots settled down onto the floor with an extra crunch, and he winced. Please don't be bone. He stepped away from the rope just as Andy Hallet slid down with the annoying agility of the young.
"Don't look much like a church."
"With all your vast experiences with churches." Jonathan ribbed his brother-in-law.
Rick snorted. "Yeah, you should talk, with all the catholic schools you were sent to."
"Did anyone ever succeed with the exorcism?" Alex grinned.
"Oh, poo to both of you."
Sigrun walked down the centre aisle, shining her torch. The church they were in roughly dated from 400BC, so the pews had long since disintegrated, along with any railings and the wood inlay on the altar. Any windows had long shattered, spilling rubble into the building. Jonathan shone his torch up into the roman arches, hoping that they could hold the whole sodding thing for another thousand years and the whole thing wasn't about to crash down about their ears.
"Look at the dome." Alex said, his face alive with the same excitement that Evy always had in situations like these.
"We're in the transition point between the polytheistic Arabic faith Aksum had followed to Christianity after King Ezana's conversion." Kurt said.
"Of course." Jonathan said, like he knew what his friend was talking about. "So, do we just wander around until something happens?"
"That's normally what we do." Alex said. "We do just kind of… fall into these things."
Regrettably, his nephew was probably right, but – "It would be nice to occasionally have a solid plan beyond get X before Y and running around like headless chickens."
"Well, we've already saved the damsel in distress." Rick slapped him on the shoulder. Jonathan put a hand to his heart.
"Excuse I. This damsel saved herself, thank you very much." He fluttered his eyelashes and Rick laughed.
Just then there was a shout from the surface, and people started screaming. At once they all looked up. "Lights," Sigrun hissed, and the church was immediately plunged into darkness. That bloody feeling of impending doom was back, and Jonathan unconsciously held his breath as he listened to the babble of voices far above them. There was no way in hell they could possibly miss the climbing rig, or the bloody car.
The voices stopped, and the rope trembled as someone kicked the climbing rig. As he watched, someone seized the rope, and Jonathan swallowed as he expected one of those gun-toting fatigued men to come sailing down. Seemingly having the same thought, Rick's revolver clicked as he chambered a round. The click echoed around the church.
The rope stilled, and there was a shnick sound. There was a pause when time seemed to slow, and with wide eyes Jonathan watched as the rope spiralled down to the ground with a puff of dust, the severed end landing at his feet.