“YOU WANT me to what?” Anson Hunter said at the meeting.
“Help us find what appears to be an ancient weapon,” she
said.
“Ancient weapon?”
“I know it sounds incredible,” the academic said.
“It does, even in my alternative, parallel universe.”
“Yet, astonishingly, this is what our authorities have
been forced to consider.”
“You’re going to have to unpack that a bit,” he said.
The man in the big blue suit, who bulked up the small
meeting table, and who sat flanked by young, careful-faced men, spoke up.
“Very few of us believe in remote killing, of the kind
you’ve been describing, anyway, but we all believe in remote listening. We have
intelligence that something ancient, called ‘the mother of revenge’ is being
levelled against our country from the land of the Nile.”
“Maybe it’s a pharaonic submarine,” Anson said
helpfully.
“Why not?” Dr Melinda Skilling said with a mocking
smile, “some alternative theorists seem willing to believe that the ancient
Egyptians possessed helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and armoured tanks, but
submarines probably weren’t of much use in the shallower reaches of the Nile.”
This Egyptologist could dig in more ways than one, he
observed.
He understood her allusion.
“You mean those mysterious symbols under a lintel in
the Temple of Osiris in Abydos that seem to show an arsenal of modern weapons?”
he said. “I may be alternative, but I’m not a crank. Nor am I a fan of aliens,
or of pyramid and sphinx builders from Atlantis, although I like the way they
exasperate Egyptologists. I’m sure there’s a more mundane explanation for the
symbols and so I’ll leave that to you.”
“I don’t do mundane, Anson. I’d rather be working on
the exhibition I’m curating than doing mundane, but the intelligence wires are
humming and it’s apparently alarmed our government enough to request
professional advice.”
“Then why ask me?”
“You’re special, not only because of your grasp of
arcane Egyptian knowledge and practice, but because of your standpoint. I must
confess that mainstream academics, restrained by what has been termed the
‘agnostic reflex’, are somewhat in the position of outsiders looking in,
careful to keep an objective distance from Egyptian religion, mystical texts
and esoteric practices. You, on the other hand, are a phenomenologist, one who
believes that you must grant value and credibility to the sacred and engage
with it experientially in order to appreciate it fully. I have a certain
sympathy for that position.”
A certain sympathy. Was she trying to be nice?
Perhaps. She’d certainly earned points from him for her candour.
But the blunt instrument in the big blue suit didn’t
try for points. His words came down on Anson like a mallet.
“Frankly, to many people you’re just a wild theorist.
And that gives you a lot more freedom to operate in. Nobody listens to you -
and nobody watches you. We can hide behind you.”
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