The Lost Army of Cambyses by Paul Sussman

Author:Paul Sussman [Sussman, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Action & Adventure, Fiction - Espionage, Fiction, Suspense, Thrillers, Thriller
ISBN: 9780802143785
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2010-01-15T19:51:40+00:00

some sort. Beyond the margins of the torchlight the darkness was thicker and more tangible than any darkness Tara had ever known. They began to move forwards, Daniel flashing the torch over the neatly chiselled walls, ceiling and floor. After a few paces, however, he stopped.

'What?' asked Tara.

'There's something moving down there.'

'Bats?'

'No, on the floor. There.'

He dropped the beam. Something was coming

towards them, fast.

'Daniel,' she said, trying to sound calm, 'stand very still and don't make any sudden movements.'

BETWEEN CAIRO AND LUXOR

The night train to Luxor was less crowded than it had been coming in the opposite direction and Khalifa had almost an entire carriage to himself. He removed his shoes, lit a cigarette and began going through the files on Dravic, which Tauba had had photocopied for him. Behind him, at the far end of the carriage, two backpackers, a boy and a girl, were playing cards. The files didn't make pleasant reading. Born in 1951, in the former East Germany, Dravic was the son of an SS

officer who had subsequently joined the

Communist Party and risen through the ranks to a position of some prominence.

As a boy he had excelled at school, especially in languages, and, aged only seventeen, had won a 316

place at the University of Rostock, where he had gained a doctorate in Near Eastern Archaeology. He had published his first book at the age of twenty - an analysis of Minoan Linear A script -

and had thereafter produced a stream of other works, one of which, on Late Period Greek settlements in the Nile Delta, was still regarded as a standard text on the subject.

Khalifa finished his cigarette and lit another one, remembering how he'd read the Greek settlements book for an essay he'd written at university. He stared out of the window for a moment,

the landscape flat, dark and empty apart from the occasional lights of a far-off house or village, then returned his attention to the papers in front of him.

From the outset Dravic's academic achievements had been overshadowed by a tendency to violence. At the age of twelve he had put out a fellow pupil's eye during a playground fight, only narrowly escaping criminal proceedings after the intervention of the local Party supremo, a friend of his father's. Three years later he had been implicated in the murder of a vagrant who had been found burnt to death in a local park, and the year after in the gang rape of a young Jewish girl, on each occasion escaping punishment because of his father's connections. Khalifa shook his head, appalled.

The German had begun excavating in his early twenties, first in Syria, then Sudan and then Egypt, where he had worked for five consecutive seasons at Naukratis in the Delta. Despite persistent rumours of antiquities smuggling and worse, no 317

charge against him had ever been sustained, and his career had flourished. There was a photograph of him shaking hands with President Sadat and another of him being presented with an award by Erich Honecker.

He had seemed destined for great things.

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