“Hang on,” George said slowly, before Gail could help him. “I think I know what that is.”

“Yes?” she smiled.

Running horizontally across the X-ray were two very dark lines, approximately ten inches apart. Behind these were a series of six lighter lines, and behind those, ten more, lighter still.  The pattern repeated itself a dozen times until the colour of the last set of lines showed them to be at least one hundred and twenty feet from the room they were standing in.  An appreciation of the diminishing perspective as objects approached the limit of the X-ray’s reach made it clear that each line was equally spaced vertically, and that the sets of lines were the same distance from one another.  Also, although they were not visible for the first two sets of lines, from the third set onwards regular vertical lines seemed to intersect the horizontal ones.

“The machines scope spreads out in a cone, doesn’t it?  So we can only see a couple of feet square for the closest objects, but when it reaches the furthest ones we’re seeing a lot more?” George asked.

Gail looked at the display again and did some mental arithmetic. “As far as I can tell, at its furthest its showing us an area over thirty feet wide; it’s like a very expensive fisheye lens on a very old Egyptian front door,” she said.

George looked more closely and started to focus on the detail.  On top of almost every single horizontal line were dozens of thick, short lines and circles.  The lines tended to be placed next to one another, both horizontally and vertically, whereas the circles, of varying diameters, were generally on top of one another forming triangles, like sets of bowling pins seen from above.  As he understood the images more, it became evident that the Backscatter X-ray cylinder had not simply been placed against the wall randomly; the position had to have been chosen very carefully so as to show as much of the more distant objects as possible.  If a series of the short, thick lines had been present on top of one of the horizontal lines in the foreground, they would have blacked everything else out.

“I see it!” Ben shouted, making the others all jump. “Books! And the things you put books on!”

“Shelves. Dozens and dozens of shelves,” George said under his breath.

“And hundreds and hundreds of books,” Gail added. “It’s not a tomb, it’s a library.”

George found Gail’s hand and held it tightly. “And there’s something else, too,” he said.

It was strange that when faced with such an overwhelming number of priceless written records, anything could have been more impressive. But as George pointed with his index finger at the screen, everything Gail had seen so far that day seemed to dissolve in her mind, to be replaced with an excitement she had not felt for many years.  Suddenly, she was seven again, looking at the presents below the Christmas Tree, and only seeing the one huge, beautifully wrapped box towards the back.

In the bottom half of the screen in very faint grey, at least one hundred and thirty feet away from them and beyond the farthest set of shelves, was a rectangular object. It was very small on the screen, but despite the resolution Gail could just about work out that there was something else on top of it. 

One of the students looked at the controls of the laptop, and cautiously moved the cursor on the display until it was over the object. Bringing up a menu in Arabic, he selected an option and the X-ray image disappeared. After a heart-stopping moment, the image reappeared, but this time, the rectangular object filled the screen.

“Oh, wow,” Gail managed to say.  She’d practically stopped breathing.

Of all the hundreds of books inside the library, there was now only one that mattered.  It was placed on a plinth, at an angle, like a Bible at the altar of a Church.

George leant over to his wife and kissed her on the cheek.  “Merry Christmas, honey,” he said quietly. “Merry Christmas.”

Standing on the edge of the cliff outside, Professor Mamdouh al-Misri snapped his phone shut and placed it back in his trouser pocket.

He scanned the rocky terrain below him, from the Nile on his right to his original archaeological dig ahead of him to the south. Shaking his head slowly, he turned round and made his way back to the trench, where the Al Jazeera photographer was impatiently waiting to be escorted down the steps.

On the other side of the trench, the three engineers stood together, watching him carefully. At their feet stood the large black case that had been taken with him down the steps.

The Professor pulled his eyes away from them and jumped down into the trench, landing next to the photographer with a thud.

“OK, come and see what all the fuss is about,” he said in Arabic, ushering the photographer into the hole. He shot a nervous look over his shoulder at the engineers, whose steely gaze followed him as he descended once more.

Chapter 11

Captain Yves Montreaux had always dreamed of going to Mars. Born in California to a French-Canadian father and American mother, his first vivid memory was of an image beamed back from NASA’s Spirit mission, in 2004. He had been barely six years old at the time and his mother, a US Navy pilot, had shown him the picture on the Internet early one morning before school. Even now, forty-one years later, he still dreamt of being there, with the Spirit rover, as it edged its way carefully out of its landing craft and onto Martian soil for the first time.

He pulled himself over to the small circle of Plexiglas, his window onto the eternal sunshine of interplanetary space.

A month earlier, the view had been dominated by aluminium cranes, connectors and cylindrical pods in orbit around Earth; the precision-built chaos that was the International Space Station.  After half a century of operation, most of the original modules were now lost in a maze of metal and foil, somewhere towards the centre of the station. It had taken all of those fifty years to get to its current state, and was still exceeding the expectations of its original designers, now mostly dead.

Looking out of the window now, Montreaux had a front row seat to the stars.  There was no horizon, no up, no down; a confusing state of affairs at first, but it was not something that he had simply been thrown into from one day to the next.  For the past eight weeks, as the spaceship had gradually accelerated beyond the pull of the Moon and into interplanetary space, he had watched as his home planet had grown smaller, until now he was able to hold his thumb up and completely block it out.  Within another week it would be but a bright star, and it would be time to look the other way, towards Mars.

There was a knock on the plastic door-frame of his quarters.

“Come in,” he said without turning.

Despite the lack of actual doors to separate them, the ingrained protocol was hard to shake.

“Sir,” the female voice said. “We are in the Lounge.”

Montreaux smiled to himself as he held on to the handle on the wall and slowly pivoted round to see her. Her jet black hair was pulled into a tight ponytail, revealing her pretty, pale face. “Su Ning,” he said. “We have known each other for over a year, trained together for months, and lived in the same metal tube for over two months, haven’t we?” His voice was kind, soft.

She smiled. “And I still call you Sir,” she confirmed.

Montreaux’s Chinese was hopeless. A few basic commands and greetings were all he had managed to master since meeting Lieutenant Shi Su Ning the previous summer. For this reason it amazed and humbled him that she could not only speak perfect English, but do so with barely a hint of an accent. That she had also never lived outside of Beijing in her entire life only made the feat more incredible to him.