A long time ago, back in his native France, Pierre Claudel had been a passionate archaeology scholar. As a young student he’d worked himself mercilessly, graduated top of all the classes he’d ever taken and formed the makings of a glittering career in academia. He’d taken a lecturer’s post at the Sorbonne, where some of the students were older than he was. He’d done well, settled into a comfortable if not terribly luxurious lifestyle. Found himself a nice girlfriend, Nadine, and moved into a flat together. A little car, a little dog, a cosy little Parisian routine. Talk of marriage, starting a family one day.
It would have satisfied a lot of men, but that wasn’t the way Pierre Claudel’s mind worked. He wanted more. And within a year or two, he was becoming restless.
Then, at the age of twenty-seven, his passion for Egyptology had brought him to his first excavation in the Western Desert and he’d felt the first kiss of adventure. He’d been hooked. It suddenly hit him what he should be doing with his life. Fortune and glory were the promises that lurked under the sands, and he was going to find them.
On his return to France he instantly started winding up his old life there. He quit his job, left Nadine weeping over a brief note on the kitchen table. With his whole world in a suitcase he boarded a flight, stepped down on the hot Egyptian soil and never looked back.
The new, reinvented Claudel installed himself in the cheapest rented rooms he could find in Cairo, and immediately got down with fierce enthusiasm to setting up his new business. He became, in effect, a professional tomb robber. And within a year of starting up his operation, he was already on the fast track to becoming a very wealthy man. He could still remember the day he’d made his first million. This is fucking easy, he’d thought.
And years later, that was still exactly how he felt about it. It was easy. Ridiculously easy. He was damn good at it, and it had been very, very kind to him.
He liked to think that his profession was older than prostitution. Ever since the earliest civilisations had started honouring their dead by burying them with precious objects, there had been opportunities for men like him. He wasn’t the kind of idiot that the Egyptian Antiquities Police would catch, shovel in hand, digging at the foot of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. Claudel’s operation was slick and sophisticated. And safe. He made sure that the guys doing the actual thieving never knew who they were working for, while he himself never even went near the desert. The wine bars and top class restaurants and golf courses were the places he carried out his business, and that suited him fine. Hot sand was bad for his handmade Italian shoes.
Claudel had travelled everywhere in the course of his trade-Rome, Athens, Ankara, Beirut, Damascus, Delhi were all potential sources of prime merchandise for him. But Egypt was the real deal. Egypt was where it was truly at, and he wasn’t the only greedy piglet suckling on her fat teat. Everyone with half a connection was muscling in for a piece of the action. Even government officials trusted with the job of protecting Egypt’s heritage had been caught amassing huge fortunes by squirrelling artefacts to private buyers in Europe and the USA. Pharaonic slate palettes, pottery, glazed figurines, bronze statuettes, amulets, gold trinkets, carved stone heads, tapestries, even furniture-not to mention the wealth of items left over from the Graeco-Roman period. There was a veritable avalanche of stuff pouring out of the country.
Claudel was careful never to let the artefacts too close to him. There was no Egyptian art in his home, not a scrap of anything that the Ministry of Culture or the Antiquities Police could ever catch him with. They’d never come close to suspecting him, but if they ever did come knocking on his door he’d be only too happy to show them around the place. Everything he personally owned was legit. Nobody could ever know that he’d paid for his collection of Ming vases by tunnelling through the wall into a storeroom used to house artefacts at a temple in Karnak and making off with a truckload of statues. He’d never even seen them. Even before they were his, they were sold.
It had been the same with the priceless Louis XIV desk in his study, a trade for a Ptolemaic-era gold mask lifted from a mummy at the necropolis of Deir-el-Banat. One of his first really big sales. He could still remember it well. The tombs had been nice and shallow, sometimes just a metre under the surface. Grab and go. By the time the authorities had rolled up, all the good stuff was gone. They could keep the bones and bandages. Claudel had little use for dusty old corpses.
And that was the way it had continued. Fifteen years on, business had never been more brisk. The appetite for Egyptian antiquities was as hot now as it had been in ancient times. Occasionally, an eagle-eyed Egyptologist would spot the stolen goods that cropped up in the auction rooms of Christie’s and Sotheby’s and the alert was sounded. The trail would sometimes lead back to the source and heads rolled, especially when the Ministry of Culture boys got together with Interpol to hunt down the crooked dealers. But Claudel was far too clever to let that happen. He’d made a fine art of creating buffers and paper trails to protect himself, and in any case most of his trade was with private owners. Unscrupulous connoisseurs were always keen to expand their collections, and blush-making sums of money would change hands-even if the artefacts could never be openly displayed.
So, Pierre Claudel was a man with just about everything in life. But it was in his nature to want more, as it had always been. He would stand at his balcony in the mornings, sipping espresso, and gaze out towards the desert far away. The sands still held many secrets. There were still undreamed-of fortunes to be made out there. He yearned for one really big find, something he could retire on. Some of the legendary treasures of ancient Egypt were still undiscovered-like the fabled tomb of Imhotep, one of the nation’s earliest and most influential rulers, a man long thought not even to have existed. Armies of archaeologists and historians were out there and had been for years, scouring the sands for that elusive prize. If only he could snatch something of that magnitude out from under their noses-what a coup that would be. Something like that would set him up for life and for twenty lives afterwards.
He would lie awake at night, just imagining it.
Then, one day in late September, seven months ago now, Claudel had had a call that changed his life.
The minute he’d heard the man’s voice on the other end, he’d known this was serious, heavy shit. Normally he’d have slammed the phone down or demanded to know where they’d got his private number. But instinct had told him otherwise, and he’d listened to what the man had to say.
As a result of the call, a meeting had been set up. Not in the city, but in the desert. The man had been insistent on that point. Claudel had been uncomfortable with the idea, but his gut feeling again directed him to go with it. So he’d driven out there, alone as instructed. It had been a long, hot, dusty drive. The meeting place was a spot he knew from years ago, one that had never been worth visiting again. Whatever scraps the lonely ruined temple had to offer had been pilfered centuries ago. Now it just stood there, neglected and half buried in the sand, in the shade of a towering escarpment miles from anywhere.
As he’d pulled up and stepped out into the searing sun, Claudel had sensed he was being watched from the escarpment high above. Time had passed. He’d paced up and down, checked his watch impatiently. The heat of the sun was giving him a headache. He wasn’t used to roughing it any more. He’d been just on the point of leaving when four off-road vehicles had appeared out of the shimmering heat haze and bounced across the dunes towards him.