Walking out from behind the podium – she briefly thought of the first lecture she had given, when she had literally hidden behind it - she introduced herself and welcomed them to the course, Introduction to Egyptology.

Looking around the room, she noted with a certain degree of pride that practically everyone was transfixed by either her or the projection on the wall behind. She had never seen such an eager group.

“Egyptology is the study of Egypt and its antiquities,” she began. “It has been practiced in its present form for over two hundred years, and is closely linked both to archaeology and history. How many of you here are taking Archaeology and History?”

Approximately half the theatre raised their hands. Some said yes, one person near the back said he wasn’t sure, to which everyone laughed.

“Until the turn of the twenty-first century,” she continued, “the last royal tomb to be excavated in Egypt was that of Tutankhamen, in 1922.  For decades, many people believed that the last tomb in the Valley of the Kings had been discovered. They were very wrong. Since 2006, three more tombs have been discovered and excavated there, two in the last decade alone.” She looked around the theatre at her wide-eyed audience. I must be getting good at this, she thought to herself. “Over the past fifteen years, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities has seen major investment and modernisation; it now has the capability to regulate and oversee three times the number of simultaneous archaeological excavations compared to fifty years ago, particularly in the pharaonic sector. In other words, the Egyptian government, aided by UNESCO, has invested millions in making it easier to go to Egypt and do archaeology.” She paused and looked behind her at her introduction slide. “And believe me, if you thought two hundred years was enough to find out everything there is to know about Egypt, think again. Egypt is throwing up unexpected find after unexpected find, every day.”

She stopped talking and walked back to the podium. Hitting the screen once with her index finger, the slide changed to a photograph of the book that had been on the plinth in the Library at Amarna, with the Stickman carved into its cover.

“Has anyone seen this Stickman symbol before?” she asked confidently. She always liked to follow this up with ‘don’t worry, until about ten years ago, neither had anyone else’.

Except that this time, not one hand stayed down.

She was used to the normal group, usually near the front, who would raise their hands, sometimes smugly. But since she had started giving the same lecture two years earlier, nothing had come close to this. She was amazed, and was about to say ‘Wow!’, when Professor David Hunt burst through the door at the back of the lecture theatre.

He stumbled down the steps, mumbling apologies to the students, most of whom still had their hands held high. He didn’t even say hello to Gail as he rushed over to the podium and closed her presentation. Bringing up an Internet browser, he found the BBC website and expanded the ‘Breaking News’ of the day.

“Look!” he said, out of breath, pointing up at the projection on the wall.

Gail turned round, still in shock. She read the words, her eyes widening.

‘Evidence of Intelligent Life Revealed on Mars,’ the headline claimed, boldly.

“Wow!” she finally said, as if her brain had queued the word she had been about to say before David’s entrance, and had to make her say it before more words could be used.

“No,” David said with a grin like a Cheshire cat. “This is wow!” He scrolled down to the bottom of the page, and clicked on a picture. She saw two people in space suits standing on some sort of platform on the side of a cliff. He clicked to show the next picture: a close up of the platform, which she now saw was like a small stone jetty coming out of the cliff wall. He clicked to show the last picture. It was another close up of the stone, clearly showing the engraving on its surface.

“Is this some kind of joke?” she said, walking towards the screen. She was oblivious to the excited talking going on in the theatre behind her. “Is that really Mars?”

“Yes!” he almost shouted.

Gail needed to sit down. She pulled a stool out from under the podium and perched herself on top of it. “How?”

“I have no idea, but I’m going to love finding out,” he replied. He was even more enthusiastic than usual, like a small child at a birthday party after too many sweets. “You’ve got to agree with some of my ideas now, Gail, haven’t you? You might even have to revisit some of your Amarna dating,” he jabbed.

She was absolutely stunned. “I don’t know,” was all she could say. “I don’t know.”

That the news showed proof of extra-terrestrial life was amazing.

That it had been intelligent extra-terrestrial life was barely credible.

But that such intelligent life had managed to carve the very same Amarna Stickman, in all of its glory, into the surface of a rock a hundred million miles away on Mars left Dr Gail Turner utterly speechless.

Chapter 36

Larue’s English was certainly good enough to get the general idea of the book Martín had given him, and he had now read enough of it to know what to do next. Nevertheless, he continued to flick through it with increasing interest, dwelling on a series of photos of the archaeological excavation. In one shot, an attractive young lady and a much older, bearded man stood proudly beside a large rectangular stone in the desert.  Another picture showed a row of bookshelves covered in scrolls and clay tablets of varying sizes. The picture he was most interested in, however, was of a large engraving on a wall showing the symbol from Mars next to a bunch of hieroglyphs.

He called Martín back in to his office, and when the Spaniard entered he snapped the book shut. He opened his desk drawer and took out a large wallet. “So, you’ve met Dr Turner before?”

Martín smiled proudly and nodded. “Yes, in London. I was visiting some friends and we went to one of her lectures.”

“Why?” Larue was intrigued as to why a young man with a master’s degree in physics would be interested in archaeology.

“A friend of mine was studying history, and recommended that we all go to the lecture with him, because we were doing nothing else that afternoon.” He looked at the signed copy of the book. “He was also too shy to ask her to sign his copy of the book, so I did it for him. I got confused and she signed it for me instead. My friend was quite upset and told me to keep the book.”

Larue smiled at his little story.

“Martin, I think that this cover-up is not over. I don’t believe for a second that whoever is behind it will simply turn over and admit defeat. We will be accused of the same fakery as we are accusing them of.”

He opened his drawer and withdrew a credit card. He placed it on the desk in front of him. “This book is very interesting, but from what I can see it doesn’t make any reference to Mars. And yet here we are. Dr Gail Turner will no doubt have made progress in her research in the last few years. Maybe she knows something she wasn’t able to publish at the time. While we are unable to get close to the findings on Mars, we should look to this site in Egypt to help explain what is going on.

“Your encounter with her, no matter how brief, does give you an icebreaker of sorts, and she may help us find out more. I want you to find her and get more information.” He pulled a piece of paper from the drawer and, along with the credit card, pushed it across the desk. “This is the pin number for the business card, which you may use as required.”

“But Monsieur, I am not a detective!” he complained.

“You are a researcher in my department. This is your research.” Larue closed the drawer and gestured for him to leave.