Part 4 (1/2)

Ten minutes later she was standing on the sun-filled plaza near the Port Said Street entrance in the shadow of the twenty-three-foot-high colossus of Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Her head reeled. Her pulse pounded in her ears. Across the bay, whose waters bobbed with brightly-painted red, yellow, and blue fis.h.i.+ng boats, she could see the sandy embankment of the Silsilah Peninsula, and far away to her left, along the taxi-choked highway that was the Corniche, the dun-colored battlements of Fort Qait-bey at the tip of the western sweep of the harbor's crescent arm, where once the ancient Pharos lighthouse guided sailors to safety.

If the scroll was right...

Inhaling a lungful of salt-laced air, she pulled out her smartphone to call Skarda.

An incongruous sound interrupted her.

Quick footsteps approaching.

She turned to see a muscular Egyptian man with a shaved head and a cheap dark suit blocking her way, staring at her.

”Dr. Laura Carlson?” His Arabic accent was thick.

Flinders didn't answer. For some reason she couldn't explain, her guard went up at the sight of this man. There was something menacing-violent-about him. Something cheap and greasy. And behind him, she caught sight of two more identically-dressed men standing in the background, their hands hovering at their sides, as if waiting for a signal to strike.

”You are Dr. Laura Carlson?” he repeated.

In spite of her reservations, she found herself nodding. Immediately she cursed herself.

”Come with me,” the man ordered.

”Who are you?”

”Come with me, he repeated.” Menace weighted his tone. He took a step forward, reaching for her arm.

Adrenaline spiked through her bloodstream. She took a step back, glancing around for a security guard. ”Leave me alone!” Then she realized she was clutching her smartphone. Her fingers stabbed at the keyboard.

The man snarled and grabbed her arm, digging his fingers hard into her muscle. The phone dropped to the pavement, shattering.

Blood rushed to her head. ”I'll scream!”

”Go ahead,” the man said. It was a sneer.

His free hand shot out to clamp over her mouth. His fingers reeked of s.h.i.+sha tobacco, making her empty stomach roil.

Flinders' senses reeled. She kicked out wildly, spasmodically, but the man easily sidestepped her. Past his shoulder she saw the other two men moving toward her.

And one was holding a hypodermic.

She bucked against the hands clamped on her arm and mouth, squirming to wrench herself free. But the more she struggled, the tighter his grip dug into her.

Jellyfish.

Jellyfish? From somewhere in the dark recesses of her consciousness, her brain was yelling at her about jellyfish.

And then she remembered: yesterday she'd overheard two British tourists talking about a jellyfish infestation at Agami, just down the coast.

With a sudden lurch, she twisted her neck, rolling her eyes toward the oncoming men. The man with the hypodermic had almost reached her. Bright sunlight silvered the needle, magnifying it in her imagination.

Jellyfis.h.!.+

Without another thought she willed her muscles to go limp, as if she were a living puddle of flesh. Surprised, her attacker just marginally loosened his grip, but it was enough. She slid away from his grasp, at the same time stomping her foot down on his toe with all the power she could muster. He yelped, then swore loudly in Arabic.

She twisted away, free.

Flinders ran, her heart battering her ribcage. A flock of teenagers with backpacks burst from the edge of the granite faade and she merged into their midst, pivoting around, feeling suddenly safe in their numbers.

The three men had vanished.

The teenagers swarmed around her like a school of fish and then they were gone, running and laughing down the expanse of the plaza. For a moment she stood there, alone.

Then she ran for the safety of the library.

NINE.

THEY were sitting at an outdoor table at a coffee bar in Saad Zaghloul Square, its pastel green walls cooled by the serrated shadows of clacking palm fronds. April sat with her back to one of the walls, keeping one eye on the door and the other on the crush of taxis, yellow trams, and donkey carts parading past the Cecil Hotel. The air was heavy with the scents of cardamom and falafel.

Peering at the screen of her laptop, Flinders was trembling, not only from the scare of the attempted kidnapping, but from the excitement of what she'd found on the papyrus. She lifted her head, glancing around at the other patrons as if she expected to see the three Egyptian attackers bearing down on her.

Skarda rested a hand on her shoulder. ”Don't worry. April will keep a lookout.”

She nodded, grateful, but her eyes kept darting left and right as she rotated the screen to show him the photos of the papyrus she had taken. ”What we have here is a hymn dedicated to Djehuty/Thoth. Dr. Cowell dated the shaft to the Gerzean period-starting about 4,000 BCE-which coincides with the introduction of writing on papyrus paper in Egypt. Gerzean script is proto-hieroglyphic-it's my specialty-and this script is similar, but its forms are much older, less formalized. I've never seen anything like this before.” Lowering her face closer to the screen, she shook her head back and forth in amazement. ”I'm willing to bet that this is a copy of a much older doc.u.ment, maybe something that was carved in stone.”

”So what does that mean?” Skarda asked.

She sucked in a breath, not quite believing what she was seeing. Then she looked up, staring at him with wide eyes. ”It means that the hieroglyphs on this scroll are at least seven thousand years old-two millennia before writing was supposedly invented.” Excitement glowed on her face. ”Let me fill you in with some basic background info. As we talked about before, my specialty is archaic Egyptian-meaning Predynastic-scripts. That would be prior to around 3,000 BCE, before the beginning of the Pharaonic monarchy starting with King Menes. We're talking Neolithic settlements here-small villages of nomads who built wattle-and-daub huts from reeds or animal skins, made pottery, wove cloth. This would be around 6,000 BCE. While there are quite a few archaic inscriptions from a couple of thousand years later, like the symbols on Gerzean pottery from 4,000 BCE and the Narmer Palette from 3,200, artifacts from this period are hard to come by because a lot were isolated symbols etched into the bottom of clay pots and much of the evidence has been buried by Nile silt over the millennia.

”But here's the good news. Recently some new finds have been uncovered in Lower Egypt-carved ivory tablets and pottery shards that show a remarkable resemblance to the Vinca script found in eastern Europe. Vinca is also known as 'Old European'. I personally believe it's a continuation of the language spoken by the Cro-Magnons, who spread into Europe around fifty thousand years ago. It's very clear that the Cro-Magnons had language-today it survives in isolates like Basque and Berber. For example, the Basque word for 'ceiling' means 'top of the cavern', and the word for 'knife' means 'stone that cuts'. I think that by 7,000 or so BCE a system of writing was being developed in eastern Europe around the Black Sea. Eventually this evolved into Vinca-pictogram inscriptions found mainly on pottery shards discovered in Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and the Ukraine, dating as far back as 5,300 BCE, but no doubt having their origins much earlier. Some scholars think the symbols are religious iconography or votive offerings, and some think they're a numeral system, but I think they're an syllabary for a spoken language. So far no one has been able to decipher the Vinca script.”

She turned her laptop so he could see the screen covered with rectangles, inscribed circles, comb-like symbols, and triangles. ”This is what Vinca looks like. The script has a remarkable resemblance to Minoan Linear A, which I think also evolved from Vinca.”

She maneuvered the computer back around. ”Now imagine,” she went on, ”a group of Neolithic people living on the sh.o.r.es of the Black Sea seventy-five-hundred years ago. At that time the sea wasn't a sea at all, but a freshwater lake, which archaeologists call the Euxine Lake. There would have been villages and settlements all along the sh.o.r.e-probably a fairly large population. And here's what's amazing-using robot submarines researchers have found buildings from these settlements perfectly preserved on the anoxic bottom.”

Skarda raised a quizzical eyebrow at the word.

Flinders grinned. ”It means there's no oxygen on the bottom of the Black Sea, or at least very little. So anything organic, like wood, won't rot. It will be perfectly preserved through the millennia.”

April kept her eyes on the crowd, but it was clear she'd been listening. ”How about bodies?”

Flinders gave a little shudder of revulsion. ”I guess they're probably down there. I guess they'd have to be.”

”Cool.”

Flinders scrunched up her mouth, chasing the thought away. ”At any rate, this would have been an almost Eden-like area, with a healthy population, farms and fields of grain, orchards, a huge lake teeming with fish, and prosperous trade.”