‘Who?’

‘They don’t call it a myth for nothing,’ Kirby said. ‘The fact is, nobody has ever known who, or how, or whether it even happened. It’s just one of those camp-fire tales that have been rolling around for millennia, and which nobody has taken seriously for centuries.’

Ben could feel his muscles tightening. ‘So this is all just hearsay. No substance to it whatsoever. This is what I’m wasting my time on.’ He was on the brink of walking out of the pub. Despair was beginning to well up inside him again. Why was he here? Why hadn’t he tried to follow Paxton’s traces back in Paris?

Kirby seemed to sense his mood. ‘Hold on. I haven’t finished. What I’m about to tell you changes everything.’

‘It had better be extremely good,’ Ben said.

‘It is. Here’s where the legend ends and reality begins. Morgan’s and my involvement with this kicked off with a chance discovery in Antakya, Turkey. Which at one time was the site of the ancient Syrian city of Antioch.’

Ben knew the name from his theology studies. Antioch was where the followers of Jesus had been called Christians for the first time. A city ravaged by centuries of wars and sieges, crusades and earthquakes. It had passed through the hands of the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. But that still didn’t tell him much.

‘A couple of years ago, Morgan was there on holiday,’ Kirby explained. ‘He always liked browsing around in little antique shops, street markets. Most of what you find in those places is fake trash. Ancient papyri that are really last year’s banana leaves with a bit of paint on them. Any old bit of bone that’s been carved, fed to turkeys so that the gastric juices make them look all ancient, then passed off as precious artefacts. But then, on his last day before he was due to fly back home, among all the crap Morgan found something special.’

‘What was it?’

‘A small casket,’ Kirby said. ‘All eaten away with age. The vendor said it had been dug up near the ruins of the Antioch ramparts. Must have thought it was just junk. Morgan snapped it up right away, took it home and spent half the night opening it up. Inside it was a papyrus.’

‘Not last year’s banana leaf?’

‘No way. This was the real deal. It was written in authentic hieratic script, which was a simplified, abbreviated form of hieroglyphics used for writing letters.’

‘I know what hieratic script was,’ Ben said. ‘Go on.’

‘It was an unfinished letter, written by a resident of Antioch around 1335 BC, sometime after the death of the pharaoh Akhenaten. The author introduced himself as Diodore of Heraclea, a very sick old man with something important to say.’

‘For God’s sake, Kirby. I haven’t got time for all this.’

Kirby held up a finger. ‘Bear with me. This is where it gets exciting. Because the letter was addressed to Sanep, the High Priest of Thebes, and in it Diodore revealed an amazing secret. He was confessing, openly and willingly, to one of the biggest heists in the history of Egypt. But it wasn’t a crime he was ashamed of, or that he’d be punished for. In fact, if the letter had ever been finished and reached its destination, he would have been brought back to Egypt and paraded through the streets as a hero. Let me tell you why.’

Ben didn’t reply. Waited for the rest. Maybe, just maybe, this was getting interesting.

‘You need to flash back a few years,’ Kirby continued. ‘To when Diodore wasn’t Diodore at all. His real name was Wenkaura and he was Egyptian, born in Thebes. He’d been one of the city’s most revered and influential High Priests, and in those days Sanep was his young novice. Now, in the letter Wenkaura describes how, back in the year 1344 BC, he and two of his fellow clergymen, Katep and Menamun, had all decided they had to do something to prevent the disaster that Akhenaten was bringing down on their country and their religion.’

Ben was listening now. ‘Do what?’

‘Well, imagine the situation. All this is happening around you. Everyone’s convinced that the king is batshit-mad. He’s threatening the very survival of the state with his cultural revolution and this nutcase sun cult. Destroying all these magnificent treasures, priceless even at the time, and everything you believe in. The situation isn’t going to get better on its own. What would you do? What would you have to do? Think about it.’

Ben already knew the answer.

Kirby grinned at the look on his face. ‘Right. One option they had was to conspire to have the bastard assassinated. I’m sure they must have thought about it. But a murder plot was too risky-he had agents and informants everywhere. Nobody could be trusted. So they decided to wait it out, in the hope that once this reign of madness was over, normality would be restored. It was only a question of time.’

‘So they decided to hide the treasure for posterity,’ Ben said. ‘Hoping that one day, it could be returned to its rightful place.’

Kirby nodded enthusiastically as he took another gulp of whisky. ‘Wenkaura, Katep and Menamun didn’t want the treasure for themselves. They saw themselves as its stewards, its protectors. So they used their influence to salvage all they could over a period of several months, maybe a year, and stored it up in a secret location in Thebes. Bit by bit, they started stashing it away, somewhere it could never be found, using what power they still had to keep the operation secret. But it was a wildly risky thing to do. Suicidal. Sooner or later the pharaoh’s agents were bound to get wise, and they did. Informants talked, people were tortured. Suddenly the priests were marked men, and it became impossible for them to keep shifting treasure the way they’d been doing. They stashed the last of it wherever they could, somewhere out in the desert. Wenkaura described how he was able to smuggle himself out of Thebes safely by stowing away on board a merchant vessel. He only heard later what became of Katep and Menamun. Rather than be captured and tortured, they’d committed suicide by drinking poison.’

‘Wenkaura fled to Syria?’

‘A resourceful guy, clearly. He got himself a job as a private tutor to a rich man’s son, assumed his new identity and became Diodore. Years went by. Then one day he heard the news. Akhenaten had died. Maybe assassinated, nobody knows. Suddenly the old order was being restored, Akhenaten’s reforms and his name were stamped in the dirt, and his successor, Tutankhamun, reinstated the old religion with Amun as head of the gods. It was Wenkaura’s dream come true. He was old and sick by then, and scared that if he didn’t act soon, the secret of the treasure would go to his grave with him. He sat down and started writing his letter. Sadly, or perhaps not so sadly, it was never sent. We never knew why. Maybe he died before he got the chance to finish it. Maybe he had second thoughts. Who knows? Who cares? What matters is, we found it. And that treasure is still out there, just waiting.’

Ben was quiet for a few moments, taking it all in. ‘Is this for real, Kirby? Because there’s a hell of a lot riding on it.’

‘Trust me, it’s very for real. Morgan and I spent months deciphering the papyrus.’

‘Where’s the papyrus now?’ Ben asked.

‘In London,’ Kirby said. ‘Locked away in a safe deposit box and, now Morgan’s dead, I’m the only person in the world who knows where.’

Ben frowned. ‘How do we know it’s genuine? How do we know that this Diodore really was Wenkaura?’

‘Because by way of a letterhead, he marked it with the personal seal that only he would have used, during his tenure as High Priest. It would have been unique to him, and very few people would ever have seen it. It instantly identifies him as Wenkaura. I’ll show you.’ Kirby took a pen from the breast pocket of his jacket, grabbed a stained beer mat from the table and hunched over it, scribbling something. He slid it over to Ben. In a blank corner of the beer mat was a small, distinctive circular logo, bearing an image of what looked like a temple in the centre. It was flanked by palm trees, and a crowned bird sat over the top of it.