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| Look inside all 3 novels in the Egypt trilogy |
Browse 3 opening scenes of my Egypt trilogy of adventure thrillers ... right here.
(Opening - The Smiting Texts)
Chapter 1
THEY INTERCEPTED him as he came out of Baltimore-Washington Airport, two men wearing suits and an air of officialdom like a brisk cologne.
“Mr Anson Hunter, the British Egyptologist?”
Egyptologist? That sounded good. Very establishment. Anson stood a bit taller, which placed his beanstalk elevation a few inches above theirs. The man could have said independent, renegade Egyptologist and phenomenologist, lecturer at out-of-town halls and auditoriums, writer, blogger and alternative theorist as well as leader of occasional, fringe tour groups to Egypt. But instead the man had said ‘Egyptologist’.
“Who wants to know?”
“You are invited to Johns Hopkins University. They want to hear you speak.”
Anson goggled just a little. Johns Hopkins and Anson Hunter? His moment of elation quickly faded. They didn’t belong in the same sentence.
“A nice thought, gentlemen, but venerable institutions like Johns Hopkins don’t want people like me to speak. They would prefer us not to breathe.”
Anson had arrived to give a lecture on ancient Egyptian ritual smiting power and execration texts at a hired Masonic hall that evening.
He tried to move past, but the men blocked his way, smiling with steely politeness.
“Please come with us, Sir.”
“There must be some mistake.”
The spokesman frowned and reached inside his coat. Hell, Anson thought, what is this? Has mainstream Egyptology finally sent a hit squad? The hand came out of the coat. Anson resumed the business of breathing. The man flipped open a wallet, by way of introduction. Anson glimpsed a crest – an eagle inside a circle and the words: US Homeland Security.
(Opening - The Hathor Holocaust)
Chapter 1
AN EMAIL arrived at his hotel, giving him an address in South Kensington and a caution:
‘Come alone. Take care you are not followed. Change trains or taxis.’
It was a message from a mysterious young woman who had ambushed him on a train to London.
Satisfied with the evasive manoeuvres he had taken, he arrived at mid morning at a block of apartments and went up a chequered path to a black door with flaking paint.
Was it a trap?
He found the right number on a rusted panel and pressed a buzzer. While he heard no sound beyond, he felt an answering buzz and tingle run through his body as if he had touched a naked wire.
She had offered herself to him like a baited hook, using the lure of an Egyptian antiquity. The circumstances were suspicious, but there had been nothing suspect about the antiquity on her arm. For Anson Hunter, alternative Egyptologist, theorist and expert on the esoteric beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, there was an invisible ‘maker’s mark’ on the real thing that he could not mistake.
The door clicked open.
Should he go through with this? He shrugged. He liked to be flexible. He went inside and climbed a flight of carpeted stairs to be met at a door by the Egyptian-born Greek, Alexia, dressed in black, but wearing a smile that was bright and daring.
He went past her, caught a whiff of perfume.
She locked and chained the door. He saw that she was still wearing the Egyptian bracelet. Gold, turquoise and carnelian in an archaic design winked on her wrist.
“We can do this two ways,” she said. “Agreeably - or we can do it in a cold, business- like manner. I say agreeably. A good coffee, first. There’s an espresso machine here.”
“You say that as if this is not your permanent address. Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
She smiled.
“Don’t let’s get all suspicious, Anson. May I call you that?” She took his coat and hung it behind the door.
It had the look of a furnished apartment. He noticed a forced assimilation rather than a blend of furnishings, a modern couch and dingy chairs in the sitting room. A bizarre piece of ornamentation caught his eye. It was an unpainted white porcelain cobra. A snake, here? It was sitting - or rearing - on the top of a television set as if to remind him that he had walked into danger.
“Where is it?”
“Sit, relax. What difference will a few more minutes make after thousands of years?”
Anson stretched out his long-boned frame in a chair and waited while she went to work in the adjoining kitchen area. He could view her from here.
A thousand years elapsed while she made coffee at a stainless steel espresso machine. The aroma of ground coffee wafted out and surrounded him, snugly enveloping, cosying up to his nerves. Maybe he could enjoy this.
She brought out his coffee and put one on a table for herself.
Then she vanished into a bedroom. What now?
He heard a squeaking sound. She came out again dragging a black leather suitcase on wheels.
“You’re walking out on us already?” he said.
She gave a small grunt as she swung the case onto a rectangular coffee table in front of him, unzipped its lid and swung it open. She lifted a towel from the top.
He bent over it and looked down into the heart of a golden cache of jewels floating in white clouds of cotton wool.
It was a hoard of relics dedicated to the goddess Sekhmet-Hathor, jewellery in the form of necklaces, menat collars, bracelets, golden and jewelled anklets, and small lioness statues and pendants of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, carnelian, turquoise and amethyst.
(Opening – The Ibis Apocalypse)
Prologue
Ibis catacomb, el-Ashmunein, Egypt
“SORRY, ANSON. Your search for the stela ends here!”
The voice of the woman funnelled down the underground passage, the echoes fluttering off the stone like startled bats.
Anson Hunter, alternative Egyptologist and theorist, felt a chill as the words reached his ears. It was caused as much by the emotional separation in her voice as by its distance. Her voice was startlingly removed. It was also hard and cold. A few minutes earlier she had been a companionable presence at his shoulder. Now this. She had deserted him, stealing back up the ramp of the passage.
Why?
A rumble of thunder came to deepen his puzzlement and then a screech, the sound of stone moving over stone, grinding, scouring. He felt a tremble under his feet. He spun his flashlight. The abrasion grew to a roar that made his eardrums cower.
A slab of darkness surged out of deeper darkness. His beam flared on a block of granite in a humanoid shape. A man-mountain. It was a stone block with a carved head on top… a colossal block-statue of a High Priest of Thoth, weighing tons.
The cubic man, with head, feet and hands protruding, squatted on a base with his knees raised and arms folded across them under a cloak to form a crushing volume in stone.
In the turmoil, the passage trembled and so did Anson.
The wigged and bearded face on top of the block wore a smile that belied the missile’s crushing intent as the statue shuddered over the floor. Hieroglyphs on the front of the block leapt into Anson’s vision like an execration hurled at him, a spell to obliterate an intruder.
The attack of the granite rockslide turned him to stone.
He had seen the block statue earlier, bulking at the head of the passage, and, fearing a trap, had urged his female companion to step over a granite flagstone in the floor, fearing it might trigger disaster.
But she had slipped back and deliberately set it off.
Now he understood the reason for the vast corridor and the ramped floor that plunged into the earth. It was built to speed the massive plug on its rush down the passage.
The cubic man gathered momentum and the sound of tortured stone assaulted his ears as he felt a blast of arriving air hit his body. It felt like a train coming down a tunnel.
He could never outrun it.
Then what?
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