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“It was the nearest approach to a real find that we had yet made in the valley,” Carter wrote in his journal.
Once again, he was the hopeful Don Quixote of Egypt.
Chapter 66
Highclere Castle
Near Newbury, England
1922
TO BE HONEST, Carter’s time in the valley had been expensive and fruitless. He had found nothing to warrant the hundreds of thousands of pounds Lord Carnarvon had spent in search of a great lost pharaoh-or even a minor one.
The alabaster jars had buoyed hope after the 1920 season, momentarily pushing aside memories of barren searches in years past.
But 1921 had yielded nothing important. There seemed no reason to think that the upcoming 1922 season would be any different.
Now the two men strolled across the sprawling grounds of Highclere Castle, Carnarvon’s family estate back in England.
The mood was uneasy, and Carter had an inkling that he had been summoned for very bad news.
The two had become unlikely friends over the years. They had spent so much time together, fingers crossed, praying that their next effort would be the one to unearth some great buried treasure. But now that hope was apparently gone.
Tons of rock had been scraped away. But Howard Carter hadn’t made a major find in almost twenty years, and his reputation as a cranky, self-important, washed-up Egyptologist was well known in Luxor and even here in England.
The war hadn’t helped. His Lordship’s health had suffered in the absence of those warm Egyptian winters. He had gotten out of the habit, so to speak. And now he was ready to stop funding costly excavations that yielded nothing.
Carter quietly made his case anyway: He had located ancient workmen’s huts near the tomb of Rameses VI, but because of heavy tourist traffic he hadn’t been able to dig deeper. His plan was to start digging in early November to avoid the peak tourist season.
Carnarvon rebuffed him. He was through with the valley. There would be no more excavations with his money. Their partnership was over. “I’m so sorry, Howard. I’m nearly as sad about this as you are,” Carnarvon said.
The news would have been even more crushing to Carter if he had not anticipated this moment and pla
Carnarvon was astounded. “You don’t have that kind of money,” he exclaimed.
“I’ll find the money, sir.”
“You will? To pay the wages of a hundred diggers? To pay for the guards? To feed yourself?”
Carter offered a rare smile. “I’m not all that hungry, for food that is. I suppose I will need cigarette money.”
Carnarvon squinted as he rubbed a manicured hand across his face. He was touched by this show of faith. “I will fund one more year. But just one, Howard. This is your last chance. Find King Tut, or we’re done.”
Part Three
Chapter 67
Palm Beach, Florida
Present Day
“WHAT ARE YOU SMILING ABOUT, Jim?” asked Susan. My wife was standing in the doorway to my office. She’s tall and blond, like a femme fatale from a forties film noir-though a femme fatale from Wisconsin.
I had just hung up the phone-with Marty Du-gard, actually. “My gut feeling is getting stronger. Tut was murdered, Sue. I just have to figure out who killed the poor guy.”
“A hunch doesn’t mean very much if you can’t prove it,” she said. “Am I missing something?”
“Oh, I’ll prove it,” I said with a grin. “And thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Anytime,” she called over her shoulder. Femme fatale? Definitely.
Sue had a point though. How was I going to prove that Tut hadn’t died from wounds suffered in his chariot crash? That was the most widely accepted theory about his death.
My most popular fictional character, Dr. Alex Cross, lives by his hunches and instincts. Quite possibly that’s because I do as well. At that moment, I felt I was gathering evidence that Tut had been murdered and that I would soon know who was responsible for Tut’s death-perhaps someone you might not expect. That was what had me excited now.
I had been making notes on a new Cross manuscript before the call from Marty Dugard. The pages were stacked in a pile on my desk, next to pages from a dozen other projects I had in the works.
That’s pretty much the way of my workday: up at 5:00 a.m., write and edit, take a break-maybe golf, maybe a movie-then get back to it. Seven days a week. I have an ability, or a curse, to focus on several projects at once. But Tut was distracting me from all the other projects.
Ignoring the Cross manuscript, I reached for my list of pharaohs.
The New Kingdom, as the era spa
I ran my finger down the list. Right then, a gust of wind blew in through the open window, scattering part of the Cross manuscript on the floor. I half wondered whether some ancient Egyptian god had been responsible for that. Or was it part of the pharaoh’s curse?
I read the succession of kings out loud. “Amenhotep II, Tuthmosis IV, Amenhotep III, Akhenaten, Nefertiti, Tutankhamen…”
Then I stopped.
Not just the next name but the next two names held my attention. I had looked at this roster before, but only now was I begi
Staring at them, I began to think that I wasn’t studying a random act of murder but a cold-blooded conspiracy. There was that gut instinct of mine again-the reason, I think, that Time magazine had once called me “The Man Who Can’t Miss.”
We’d see about that soon, wouldn’t we?
Chapter 68
Valley of the Kings
November 1, 1922
THE MEN WERE ASSEMBLED for work, usually a twelve-hour day, sunrise to sunset. Carter knew most of them by name or sight after working the valley year after year. They carried their digging tools casually over their shoulders and wore thin sandals and flowing white shirts that extended to their ankles.
“Mabrook,” they called out in greeting, their smiles a sure sign that they were ready for a brand-new season with their demanding boss man.
Carter tried to appear upbeat, but now even he was racked by self-doubt.
“We had now dug in the valley for several seasons with extremely scanty results,” he wrote in a rare candid moment. “After these barren years, were we justified going on with it?”
He had decided that they were and had convinced Lord Carnarvon to wager another several thousand pounds. Nodding to his foreman, Reis Ahmed Gerigar, Carter gave the official order to start.
They were begi
Near where he stood, just in front of the cavernous opening to the tomb of Rameses VI, rose a triangle of ruins first excavated five years earlier-a chain of ancient workmen’s huts.
“They were probably used by the laborers in the tomb of Rameses. These huts, built about three feet above bedrock, covered the whole area in front of the Ramesside tomb and continued in a southerly direction to join up with a similar group of huts on the opposite side of the valley, discovered by Davis in co