The Savoy, The Strand, London
The glamour of the Thames Foyer Dining Room in the Savoy might have distracted Michael and Emily with its opulence on any other occasion, but today they were both drawn to only one sight in its interior. Chris sat at a table across the room, looking much like he had the day Michael first met him in Chicago: fit and jovial, with tight features that seemed always to be on the cusp of a smile – or, as was more often than not the case, a joke. His hair was still cut Navy-style, though he had given up his uniform for an equally unchanging ensemble of beige khakis with a blue blazer over a grey turtleneck.
As Michael and Emily approached, Chris set aside his imported American beer, which he insisted on drinking from the bottle rather than the provided glass, and stood to greet them.
‘Mike!’ The word came with a genuine smile. ‘And I’m so happy to see you as well, Emily.’ Chris walked around the table to greet her, and after the formal handshake wrapped her in an unrelenting bear hug. ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your cousin. We’ll get to the bottom of this, don’t you worry yourself about that.’
Emily accepted his hug, then nodded. Chris was a kind and sincere man. She appreciated his words.
‘That’s why we’re here,’ Michael said as the group sat. ‘To get to the bottom of this.’
‘On the phone, you sounded convinced you have a way forward.’ Chris took another swill from his beer.
‘We do,’ Emily answered. ‘You remember what Michael told you about the manuscript Andrew’s killers broke in to steal?’
‘The one you say contains a map? Yes. Impressive stuff, too, from the bits and pieces Mike shared.’
Emily opened her bag and extracted a folded sheet of printer paper. A high-resolution printout of the X-ray displayed the ancient map. ‘This is what was hidden on the second page of the document, the page they didn’t manage to steal.’
Chris took the paper and examined it with a professional efficiency. ‘You know where this is?’ Though always outwardly casual and convivial, Chris was a talented tactical officer and was used to piecing together bigger pictures from small scraps of intelligence.
‘That’s only the second page,’ Michael answered, ‘and presumably most people would need the first to get them orientated. But in the centuries since this was drawn, the location in that panel –’ he pointed towards the second-to-last hand-drawn box on the page ‘– has become rather well known to scholars of ancient history.’
‘It’s the region of a small village called Nag Hammadi,’ Emily said. ‘Have you ever heard of it?’
‘Sorry. I’m no scholar of ancient history.’
Emily pushed herself back into her seat. The opportunity to orientate Chris would draw her focus back to history, which was about the only thing that kept the alternating rage and grief from flaring up and taking possession of her.
‘In the winter of 1945,’ she began, ‘two peasants were about ten kilometres from the village of Nag Hammadi, digging for fertilizer. One of those peasants, a man called Mohammed Ali, made the discovery that would turn out to be one of the most important finds of the twentieth century.’
‘Wait,’ Chris interrupted. ‘Mohammed Ali?’
‘Not the boxer, Chris,’ Michael sighed, shaking his head.
‘Damn you both!’ Emily snapped. ‘This isn’t the time for jokes. You can piss about later, if you’re up for that.’
Chris caught himself, for the first time realizing just how raw Emily’s emotions were. She carried herself with such composure that they stayed well hidden, but he should have anticipated that heavy grief.
‘I’m sorry, Emily,’ he said, ‘really.’
She took a deep breath, calming herself, a nod acknowledging that it was as much her nerves as anything Chris had said that had set her off. When composure had been reclaimed, she continued.
‘Mohammed found a large earthenware jar buried at the base of a boulder near a cliff. Specifically, he found it at this cliff.’ She pointed to a line drawn on the map. ‘When he saw that it was old, and sealed with pitch, he was afraid.’
‘Afraid?’
‘The al-Samman clan are superstitious, like most traditional peoples. Mohammed was worried that the jar might contain a jinn, an evil spirit.’
‘But the thought of treasure outstripped his fear,’ Michael added. ‘Drawing up his courage, Mohammed shattered the jar, and inside he and his friend found a stash of very old codices.’
‘These papyrus books had leather covers, and they were very, very old,’ Emily said. ‘Some were deteriorated into flakes, others in fairly good condition. But Mohammed and his partner had no idea what they were. They went back to their village, and the codices were distributed to various people in the community. Mohammed threw his portion into some straw near the stove in his hut, and his mother, not realizing these were priceless fourth-century treasures, never seen in the sixteen hundred years since they had been hidden in the sand, used some of them to fuel the fire for their food.’
‘Bet she regrets it now!’ Chris interjected, amazed. ‘They must be worth a damned fortune.’
Michael gave him a warning glance, trying to suppress Chris’s intractably upbeat air. Emily’s face reddened.
‘They’re literally priceless,’ she said firmly. ‘Thank God that eventually bartering and attempts to make pocket change by Mohammed’s friends led to collectors realizing what had really been discovered. Though it took a few years, all the surviving codices were collected and assembled, and today they reside in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. They’re widely agreed to be one of the two most important manuscript finds of the last hundred years – the other being the library of documents found at the Qumran settlement near the Dead Sea.’
‘The Dead Sea Scrolls? Those I’ve heard of.’
‘They were found only a few years later. It’s a coin toss as to which find has been more influential in the scholarship since.’
‘The entire field of Gnostic studies has been fuelled by these ancient manuscripts,’ Michael added. ‘Nearly everything we knew about Gnostics and Gnosticism prior to Nag Hammadi was from second-hand reports and the pens of ancient writers who had worked to discredit them. With the Nag Hammadi find, we had for the first time a library of Gnostic texts written by the Gnostics themselves. A whole new world opened up.’
‘This is amazing,’ Chris said. He looked to the printout of the map. ‘Your manuscript contained an invisible map to this find?’
‘Not precisely,’ Michael corrected. ‘This map uses Nag Hammadi as a waypoint, but as you can see, its “X” marks a different spot.’ He tapped his finger on the final panel. ‘That location is marked “Keystone”.’
‘And what’s a keystone?’
Emily hesitated. ‘We . . . we don’t know.’
Chris’s eyebrows rose and he looked at her quizzically.
‘But,’ Emily added, ‘we know it’s what these men are looking for. They talked about using the map to find this keystone – and obviously, they’re desperate to get to it. Andrew, ransacking the house . . .’
Chris took a long drink of his beer, draining the last of its contents. When the bottle was set aside he leaned forward and put both his elbows on the table, gazing straight at Emily.
‘So, I get that the map is ancient, and important. I get that it points to something that your cousin’s killers want. I get that you want to do whatever you can to make them pay. But what I don’t get is why you want to follow this map. What’s your bigger plan?’
‘My plan is to draw these men to me, in a way I can control.’ Emily leaned forward to match Chris’s gaze, her eyes intense and determined. ‘They’ve proven they’re not going to leave us alone, not if they’re willing to come back to the scene of their own crime, on the same day, looking for this. So we don’t wait for more attempts: we move a step ahead. Once we’ve got what they want, they’re damned well going to come after it. We can make sure we’re ready, and use it as a trap.’
‘And how are you going to do that?’
‘I have no godforsaken idea.’ Emily said the words with such angry force they sounded like a rallying cry, despite their content. After a few seconds she added, only slightly less emphatically, ‘But I have every intention of figuring it out.’
Chris stared at her a long moment before leaning back.
‘So, I’ve heard what you’ve had to say. It’s interesting, the X-ray-secret-invisible-ink thing is pretty cool; but your plan is dangerous, unresolved, and potentially suicidal.’
‘And?’ Michael asked.
‘And I’m totally in, obviously.’
Emily let out a held breath with a rush of relief.
‘Thank you, Chris!’
He smiled at her. ‘When do we go?’
Michael reached across the table and dangled his cell phone before Chris’s face. ‘I’m already dodging the obligations of my own work, and we managed to get our passports out of what’s left of our house . . . If you call the Embassy now, is there any chance you can take some leave starting this evening?’