Read sample The Lost Legacy

I

Yasmin took a deep breath and closed her laptop. The last of the daylight filtered through the glass roof of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, giving the interior a mystical glow. Apart from her, there was no one else in the main hall of the library, the largest reading room in the world with two thousand seats.

As always, the thirty-five-year-old enjoyed finishing her working day in this magical place. Despite the modern furnishings, she always felt part of an ancient legend. Even as a child, she had been fascinated by her father’s vivid stories about ancient Alexandria: How scientists and philosophers had eagerly exchanged ideas about the mysteries of the world and increased the knowledge of mankind. A touch of that past was still present for her in this building made of wood, steel and glass.

Yasmin could have stayed in her flat or gone anywhere else for her dissertation, all she needed was internet access and her books. But this place of stored knowledge, located directly on the coast and close to the remains of the original library, inspired her.

The hall had already closed fifteen minutes ago. But Hamadi, a supervisor, always let her stay a little longer. Although she was ten years older than him, the young man was only too happy to take advantage of his role as the guardian of order.

He had once persuaded her to go on a guided tour of the entire complex. She already knew from her father that the outbuildings housed a planetarium and several museums, including archaeological collections and rare manuscripts. What was new to her, however, was Hamadi’s information that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina had owned a complete copy of the entire Internet since 1996 and was actively involved in the „Million Book Project”. This involves scanning books from past centuries page by page and making them available to the world online.

She smiled. Hamadi might be nice and courteous, but he was no match for her boyfriend. And tomorrow was Friday, which meant that the library would be closed like all the other public buildings and she would be spending the day with her sweetheart. Her dissertation for her doctorate in linguistics also sent her into a time-out on Fridays. After all, a relationship needed to be nurtured.

The thought of him sent a pleasant shiver through her. His mixture of charm, intelligence and just the right amount of audacity was irresistible to her and she felt like a teenager in love. I just have to get him to stop smoking, she thought with a sigh.

Yasmin shouldered her bag and left the reading room. As she walked towards the exit, the corridor seemed darker than usual. Was there something wrong with the lighting?

„Hamadi?” Her lonely voice echoed through the empty corridors.

Yasmin suppressed her uneasy feeling and carried on walking. The warden probably had something to do.

She strode resolutely towards the exit door of the reading room. Suddenly, a shadow loosened from the side, grabbed her by the arms and pushed her brutally against the wall. The man wore a black woollen mask over his face and his foul breath hit her. He said in a harsh voice: „Massa’ al-Kheir, ya habibti.” Good evening, sweetheart.

But he messed with the wrong sweetheart. She immediately pulled her knee up and rammed it straight into his crotch. The man yelped, let go of her abruptly and fell to the floor, whimpering. Without turning round, Yasmin ran through the door into the corridor that led to the exit of the building. Adrenalin shot through her body.

At that moment, she spotted another figure near the exit. To her immense relief, she recognised the silhouette of Hamadi. She shouted his name.

The young man hastily turned round to her. „Did you switch off the light, Yasmin?”

Out of nowhere, another unmasked person appeared behind Hamadi. Before Yasmin could react, the figure yanked the warden’s head back and cut his throat with a knife.

Yasmin screamed, blood shooting over Hamadi’s uniform. The killer dropped the young man to the side like a piece of rubbish.

Before Yasmin could react, someone held her from behind and pressed a wet cotton ball onto her nose. In tears, she saw the dead Hamadi lying in a pool of blood.

Before her senses faded into darkness, the last thing she noticed was a golden glint in the killer’s grin.

II

Archaeology student Daniel Preisner sleepily sank his spade into the ground, not suspecting in the slightest that he was about to make an incredible discovery today. A find that has known how to hide itself for thousands of years and has always managed to keep uninvited guests away. And it did so in a martial manner.

The last cool wind blew in from the desert and dawn bathed the surrounding hills in a dim light. For the time being, only a few labourers were disturbing the peace in the Valley of the Kings, but soon the first tourists would be making a pilgrimage ahead of him to one of Egypt’s greatest attractions: the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

Sometimes he could hardly believe that his current boss had chosen him, the student from Leipzig, of all people. Internships were highly sought after in Egypt in general, but especially in Luxor. And because of his boss’s reputation and background, many students applied for the position.

Daniel was looking for a great adventure, although many told him that he should rather become a mathematician. But he was sure that precious artefacts, ancient scrolls and faded skeletons awaited him in abundance near the tombs of the pharaohs.

Not anymore.

He had been ploughing through the desert sand for five months now. Apart from a few pottery shards and worthless coins, he and the team had found nothing, absolutely nothing. Everyone doubted that what they were looking for even existed. They toiled for ten hours a day in the four by four yards excavations. They used to call it slave labour, the nineteen-year-old thought to himself. And the Egyptian slaves had at least created pyramids, while he only left square holes to fill in with sand afterwards. After all, inattentive tourists could fall in and break their legs.

At the beginning of the internship, his enthusiasm had known no bounds. He had enjoyed the morning journey across the Nile on the ancient-looking ferry and the subsequent taxi ride with a constantly chatting driver called Mohammed. Every spadeful, every pottery shard promised a chance of a once-in-a-century find. The excavation site was provisionally labelled „Kings Valley 66“, or KV66 for short, and the proximity to the numerous spectacular pharaonic tombs alone fascinated him.

However, the lack of success, the daily grind and the eternal sun were increasingly wearing the team down. Daniel missed his friends back home in Germany, the rain and the Freiberger Pilsner, his favorite beer.

Ahmed, an Egyptian excavation assistant of the same age, was his only ray of hope. For a few weeks, the two of them had been digging in the snake pit, as their boss called the caves, and were getting to know each other better and better. Although they communicated in rather rudimentary English, Daniel felt a special closeness to Ahmed after a short time. They taught each other a few words from their mother tongue and shortened the working day with banter. He had a friendship with Ahmed, perhaps even more, and that energised him every day. But he also knew that this bond would come to an abrupt end as soon as Ahmed learnt the truth about his origins. It’s as simple as that.

Daniel turned back to his work. Their excavation square lay directly at the foot of a hill at the entrance to the eastern valley. The almost vertical, bare rock closed off the pit on one side. The ground only reluctantly revealed its rock-hard contents. A close-meshed black net, which hung on posts like a roof over the pit, served as protection from the sun. Besides him and Ahmed, only the boss and his assistant, Jemal, were working this Friday. All the other excavation workers, all Muslims, were enjoying their day off. Secretly, Daniel hoped that he himself was the reason why Ahmed was also working on Fridays and taking Saturday off. But he didn’t dare to ask.

The two young men had been digging for less than an hour when Daniel uncovered something on the rock face. At first he thought it was just a stain, but then he chopped three more times around the same spot with his pickaxe.

„Ahmed!” he shouted excitedly when he realised that it was not an impurity. The man called rushed to him, followed his gaze and saw it too.

As if he couldn’t believe his eyes, Daniel stroked the spot with his fingers and noticed a depression. He removed the sand from the indentation with his fingernail and now they recognised a sign, similar to a sprouting plant.

„A hieroglyph carved into the rock face,” Daniel whispered devoutly. They carefully scraped the area around it, uncovering more hieroglyphs until a familiar symbol finally emerged. Most people knew it, but only very few knew what it meant and where it came from. „Ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol for life. Or death, depending on the context.” Daniel’s heart began to pound as if he was just one number short of the jackpot on a lottery ticket.

Several kings in ancient Egypt had this symbol in their name. This includes the most famous of them, who was responsible for Daniel becoming interested in Egyptology in the first place: Tutankhamun.

Ahmed snapped him out of his thoughts: „Shouldn’t we call the boss?” Daniel stood up resolutely and fetched a shovel and the brush set. „We’ll see if there’s anything else first. Then we can still report it.”

Ahmed looked around a little sceptically, but then knelt down like Daniel and together they carefully uncovered sign after sign. Finally, they looked at a complete tablet.

„That’s beautiful,” Daniel whispered in awe.

„Can you translate?” asked Ahmed.

Daniel answered in the negative. He was familiar with the meaning of individual symbols, but he couldn’t put them into context.

They were startled when a menacing voice sounded directly behind them and thundered: „Death will come on swift wings to the one who disturbs Pharaoh’s peace.”

With a broad grin, Jill Carter added: „Congratulations, boys. You’ve just been excellently cursed!”

III

Today is a good day to be cursed, Jill thought.

She blew a strand of hair out of her face and climbed down into the pit. Daniel and Ahmed moved aside like caught thieves.

Jill knelt down in front of the hieroglyphic tablet. She gently stroked the characters with a brush as if it were a previously unknown fresco by Leonardo da Vinci. Some of the hieroglyphs still had traces of colour. Jill interpreted this as a sign that the engraving had been buried a long time ago. We just hit the right spot.

Jill audibly cracked some of her knuckles. She often did this when she was nervous and had to concentrate at the same time. A sometimes irritating habit for bystanders.

She needed a success, badly. She had been waiting three years for a discovery like this. Three long, arduous years. It had taken the thirty-nine-year-old a year to get the permits and organise the sponsors. As a woman from England, she would never have been authorised to excavate here in Egypt, let alone in the Valley of the Kings, without her famous uncle. Jill had to convince several officials and eventually even the Minister of Culture and Antiquities that her excavation was a win-win situation for all concerned. Luxor was still associated with horrific terrorist attacks and could use some good publicity.

After a first, extremely disappointing excavation season, she only received permission for further work because of her name and some baksheesh in the right places. In the meantime, mid-March had already passed and it would soon be too hot for excavation work. From May to September, Upper Egypt resembled a sweltering oven. In addition, from April onwards, the Khamsin, a scorching desert wind that often raged for several days as a sandstorm, threatened.

And now a millennia-old, auspicious curse lay before her. A good indicator for valuable graves and sites, but unfortunately all the grave robbers in the world knew this too.

She sighed. Just don’t lose heart now.

„Well done, boys.” Jill grabbed a shovel. „Let’s see how serious the curse is. Let’s go!”

Daniel and Ahmed didn’t need to be asked twice. They carefully chopped open the ground beneath the hieroglyphs until a difference in colour emerged between the rock face and the lighter, hard desert sand. The dividing line was rectangular, and the deeper they dug, the more obvious an entrance became. The goal seemed close.

Around ten o’clock in the morning, they stopped digging into the depths. Eager to find out what the curse was trying to protect, they literally beat on the supposed entrance. Two people dug at a time, while one paused.

After they had penetrated a metre deep into the rock, it was Ahmed’s turn. He hit the wall with his pickaxe with great force. When it suddenly gave way, he fell lengthways and let out a scream. After a brief moment, he scrambled back hastily.

„All right?” asked Daniel.

But Ahmed only stuttered: „There … there is someone!”

Jill raised an eyebrow sceptically. She pulled a mini torch out of the breast pocket of her shirt and shone it into the opening. A corridor about ten metres long and two metres wide stretched out in front of her. The light from her lamp glided along the walls, revealing ancient Egyptian drawings and reliefs of impressive beauty.

She wiped the sweat from her brow. Whatever they had discovered here would go down in history. Nowadays, a find like this quickly became a sensation.

But she discovered two skeletons on the floor. She let out a silent curse. She had rejoiced too soon.

When she turned back to the others, Daniel couldn’t hide his excitement. „So, Dr Carter, what’s in there?”

„You’ve discovered an underground corridor with extensive murals. It could be what we’re looking for,” Jill replied thoughtfully. „The bad news is that there are the remains of two bodies on the floor. I reckon they had a date with Osiris thousands of years ago.”

Ahmed seemed to overhear the allusion to the Egyptian god of the dead and looked round, puzzled. „Why bad news?”

„They were probably grave robbers,” Daniel replied disappointedly.

And Jill added: „We’re too late again.”