“How about my wife? How do you know she was alive when I identified her?”

Kamal looked George in the eyes. “How many dead people have you seen, Mr Turner? How many dead people have you stood next to and touched?” George shook his head. “I have lost count,” Kamal continued. “Cairo isn’t the most dangerous place on the planet, but there are many hundreds of murders every year nonetheless, most of which I investigate, and some of which come with a body. Your wife, Mr Turner, was not dead. She may have looked still, and pale, and it may have appeared that she was not breathing, but I only had to look at her for the briefest of moments to realise that she was as alive as you or I.”

There was a moment’s silence as they took in what he had just said.

“So where is she now?”

Kamal dove his hand into his breast pocket again and fished out his packet of cigarettes. He placed them purposefully on the small table before standing up and making to leave.

Ben stepped forward in protest. “Wait, you can’t leave without telling us where Gail is.”

“You can have the cigarettes, Mr Turner, I am giving up,” was all he said as he pushed past them and reached the door. Opening it, he turned back towards them briefly. “The agency that is behind all of this is not Egyptian, so I would recommend that you look elsewhere.”

Before they could object again, the door closed behind him.

George strode across the room and grabbed the packet of cigarettes. Ripping it apart, he discarded the foil insides and the single remaining cigarette on the table and turned the unfolded card over and over in his hands, looking for some sort of hidden message, before throwing it too onto the table.

“Bastard!” he exclaimed as he made a run for the door. Throwing it open, he launched himself out into the corridor and shot towards the lift.

Ben moved closer to the table and picked up the discarded cigarette. Turning it over in his hands, he checked the make. “George, wait!” he shouted, but the door had already swung closed behind him. He made a wet line along the length of the cigarette with his tongue, before gently peeling it open and emptying the tobacco onto the table.

There was a knock on the door. Ben checked his discovery once more and let George in.

“Bastard’s gone already!” he said.

“He left a note,” Ben said.

George looked at him in surprise. “I checked the cigarette packet; there was nothing inside but a left over cigarette!”

“Not quite. I looked more closely: why would someone buy a pack of Marlboro and use it to hold a rollup, unless they were using the rollup to hide something?” With this he lifted his hand to show George the small sliver of paper that had been hidden amongst the tobacco. “He left us a note.”

George took the piece of paper and turned it over in his hands. On it was a word, written faintly in black pencil:

DEFCOMM

They stared at each other for almost a minute, digesting the information.

“Why tell us so much then leave a secret message?” George asked. “And what’s Defcomm?”

“Maybe he wanted to leave a breadcrumb, in case they got to him before he got to us?” Ben said as he tapped the strange word into the browser on his phone. He showed the search results to George. He then asked the single most obvious question:

“What time does Martín’s flight leave?”

Chapter 56

Gail turned the pages slowly, looking at the symbols one by one and making notes with a pencil in the margin. She’d been given a copy of the Book of Xynutians, with a promise to see the original should her initial investigations be encouraging.

She was now on her tenth page, and was becoming desensitised by the overload of information. She had seen Xynutians in cars, Xynutians in what appeared to be mass-transportation systems, and even Xynutians going up and down in lifts attached to the sides of towering skyscrapers. And then she had seen Xynutians running, Xynutians on fire, skyscrapers broken and twisted and cars and mass transportation systems crumpled and destroyed. The drawings were like no other ancient Egyptian illustrations she had ever seen, though the accompanying text left no doubt that they were contemporary to the Book of Aniquilus.

She scanned through the translations that Patterson, or someone from his team, had made.

Aniquilus cast his gaze over the Xynutians, He eats their pride and ambitions with his swift punishment.

She shook her head. Eats made no sense at all in the context of the sentence. Obviously, it hadn’t to the Patterson either, who had circled the offending hieroglyphs.

Her tablet would probably tell her what they meant – she knew a lot of Egyptian verbs off the cuff, but she had become maybe a little too reliant on George’s application remembering some of the more complex contextual translations for her.

She flicked through a few more pages before stopping at a picture of a group of Xynutians, gathered around what she assumed were houses, looking up at the stars in the sky. Some calculations had been scribbled in pencil below the original hieroglyphs, along with a post-it note: Nefertiti’s return is 3344 years after the writing of the Book of Xynutians. This was in 2007!

She crossed the date out and scribbled some notes down on her own pad. Amateurs, she thought. The ancient Egyptians had followed a three hundred and sixty-five day calendar. Eventually, Roman rulers in the first century BC had imposed an earlier Ptolemaic ruling that every fourth year had to have an extra day, to account for the discrepancy between the solar year and the traditional Egyptian year.

The Book of Xynutians had been written thirteen centuries before this ruling, and at least a thousand years before the Ptolemaic kings had first suggested the change.

Therefore, the calculations in the translation she was looking at were, to the best of her mental arithmetic, about three years out. The ‘second coming’ of Nefertiti was scheduled to have occurred in 2004, not 2007.

“The year I was born,” she said with a wry smile.

She sat back and looked at the next picture carefully. Aniquilus left a trail of destruction behind him, and yet there were a handful of Xynutians, standing outside their homes looking to the stars, according to the translation waiting for the next coming of Aniquilus. She scratched her head, and then suddenly gave a satisfied laugh as she snatched the text up from the desk. On her desk was a telephone. It allowed her to dial one number: Patterson’s.

He came in with a smile a moment later. “Less than an hour into it and you’ve already made a discovery?”

She nodded at the paper on her desk. “A few things, I think,” she began. “Some odd translations here, I need my tablet to verify them, but the text makes no real sense.”

He agreed. “But I probably can’t get you access to your equipment. I’ll work on that one. What else?”

“The dates. You’re about three years out, because of the leap years,” she said with more than a hint of triumph.

He looked surprised and nodded. “Well spotted. I had no idea that the ancient Egyptians had no leap years.”

“You’re obviously not an Egyptologist then, are you? Finally,” she pointed to the picture of the surviving Xynutians, “there’s this.”

He looked at her, puzzled. “What does this prove?”

“Think about it: if Aniquilus somehow punished these mythical Xynutians, but left some alive to pass the message on, then where are they now? Surely such an advanced civilisation would pick itself back up and thrive again. Even in low numbers their technology would be enough to help them survive until their numbers were restored?”

Patterson contemplated the thought for a moment. “But what if there was nothing left? What if all the scientists were dead? Would you know how to make an internal combustion engine, or indeed have the ability to, if no-one was able to assist?”