The Egyptian Read online

  THE EGYPTIAN

  by Layton Green

  At a mausoleum in Cairo’s most notorious cemetery, a mercenary receives a package containing a silver test tube suspended in hydraulic stasis.

  An investigative reporter tracking rogue biomedical companies is terrified by the appearance of a mummified man outside her Manhattan apartment.

  A Bulgarian scientist who dabbles in the occult makes a startling discovery in his underground laboratory.

  These seemingly separate events collide when Dominic Grey and Viktor Radek, private investigators of cults, are hired by the CEO of an Egyptian biomedical firm to locate stolen research integral to the company’s new life extension product. However, after witnessing the slaughter of a team of scientists by the remnants of a dangerous cult thought long abandoned, Grey and Viktor turn from pursuers to pursued.

  From the gleaming corridors of visionary laboratories to the cobblestone alleys of Eastern Europe to a lost oasis in the Sahara, Grey and Viktor must sift through science and myth to uncover the truth behind the Egyptian and his sinister biotech—before that truth kills them.

  Copyright © 2011 by Layton Green

  All rights reserved.

  First Ward 2011 Ebook edition

  Cover Art by Daniel Will-Harris

  Ebook creation by Dellaster Design

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any semblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental.

  Praise for The Works of Layton Green

  “The Summoner is one of those books that make you want to turn on all the lights in your house and lock the doors… The settings are authentic and you can feel and smell the countryside… This is a wonderful read for those who enjoy both suspense and action stories.”

  — Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Mystical, complicated, completely believable and terrifying… [w]ith an ending that will catapult you out of your reading chair. Riveting.”

  — The Review Broads

  “Layton Green is a gifted writer.”

  — Readers Favorite

  “Favorite book of the year so far.”

  — A Novel Source

  “[T]his book is above and beyond in its narrative, its cohesiveness, the depth of its characters and the quality of the writing. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read for Odyssey Reviews.”

  — Odyssey Reviews

  “Yes, I did put TWO Five Stars up there… giving Green’s The Summoner Five stars and Five stars alone downplays how I felt about this book… BUY THIS BOOK.”

  — 1000 + Books To Read

  “[C]alls to mind such series as Jason Bourne and Indiana Jones, with supernatural/religious overtones thrown in.”

  — Bookhound’s Den

  “Green writes like a dream, and Dominic Grey is a fascinating protagonist… The next installment of Green’s suspenseful storytelling and Grey’s next journey can’t come soon enough!”

  — Melody Moezzi, Award-winning Author, War on Error

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THE EGYPTIAN

  – 1 –

  – 2 –

  – 3 –

  – 4 –

  – 5 –

  – 6 –

  – 7 –

  – 8 –

  – 9 –

  – 10 –

  – 11 –

  – 12 –

  – 13 –

  BOOK TWO

  – 14 –

  – 15 –

  – 16 –

  – 17 –

  – 18 –

  – 19 –

  – 20 –

  – 21 –

  – 22 –

  – 23 –

  – 24 –

  – 25 –

  – 26 –

  – 27 –

  – 28 –

  – 29 –

  – 30 –

  – 31 –

  – 32 –

  – 33 –

  – 34 –

  BOOK THREE

  – 35 –

  – 36 –

  – 37 –

  – 38 –

  – 39 –

  – 40 –

  – 41 –

  – 42 –

  – 43 –

  – 44 –

  – 45 –

  BOOK FOUR

  – 46 –

  – 47 –

  – 48 –

  – 49 –

  – 50 –

  – 51 –

  – 52 –

  – 53 –

  – 54 –

  – 55 –

  – 56 –

  – 57 –

  – 58 –

  – 59 –

  – 60 –

  – 61 –

  – 62 –

  – 63 –

  – 64 –

  – 65 –

  – 66 –

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also By Layton Green

  The Summoner

  Hemingway’s Ghost: A Novella

  To my son

  That time of year thou mayest in me behold

  When yellow leaves, or one, or few, do hang

  Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

  Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

  In me thou seest the twilight of such day

  As after sunset fadeth in the west,

  Which by and by black night doth take away,

  Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

  In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire

  That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

  As the death-bed whereon it must expire

  Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by.

  This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,

  To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

  —William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

  THE EGYPTIAN

  The City of the Dead, Cairo, Egypt

  Siti hummed to himself as he picked his way through the crypts and mausoleums shrouded by eerie blue fog. He thought he had outgrown the nervous childhood habit at Cambridge, where he graduated first in his class in biomedical engineering and gained the hand of Halima, a beautiful Cairene girl he never would have dreamed of approaching back home.

  The humming resurfaced when the gambling debts started mounting, and reached a feverish crescendo when he discovered what was really going on at his company’s compound. Now, as he dodged the tombs and piles of human detritus, peering over his shoulder with every step, he had to fight to keep the humming from becoming a siren call to the thieves and murderers that populated the cemetery after dark.

  Why would Dorian choose such a godforsaken place to conduct this transaction? There were sections of the City of the Dead that had become a literal home to thousands of Cairo’s less fortunate citizens, but this particular area was avoided by all but the most desperate.

  And that, Siti thought, would be me.

  The damnable fog made it worse: it wasn’t the thick soupy mess of a London fog, but a union of pollution and cool night air. The faint blue sheen gleaming off the millions of tombs reminded Siti of a living, phantasmagoric El Greco.

  Siti maintained a constant rhythm: step, nervous glance, clutch shoulder bag even tighter. He tripped over a dark form on the ground, panicking when he almost dropped the bag, even though the contents were quite secure.

  He looked down, and the dar
k form stirred. It was a child, asleep on a cardboard box. Siti cursed and pressed forward.

  The path ended at a mosque-shaped mausoleum. A bulky man in a duster swung to his feet off the wall surrounding the mausoleum, then cupped his hands to light a cigarette. “Top o’ the evenin’ to you,” Dorian said.

  Siti couldn’t stop glancing around the cemetery. As dangerous as it was doing business with Dorian, crossing Siti’s employer was worse.

  Siti thrust his shoulder bag at Dorian. “As agreed.”

  Dorian flicked a wrist, and two men appeared. They frisked Siti and carried the bag to Dorian. Dorian unzipped the bag and extracted a small metal safe.

  Siti gave him the code, and watched Dorian remove the lid and contemplate the contents: an even smaller square container made of aluminium oxynitride, a transparent ceramic used in body armor. The container was attached to the walls of the safe via slender iron rods. Suspended in hydraulic stasis within the inner container was a test tube sheathed in silver.

  “Fancy,” Dorian murmured. He handed the safe to one of his men, who took it to a tall, sandy-haired man standing in the shadows of the mausoleum. Dorian said, “I must be getting soft in the arse in my old age, trading the paper you racked up for a wrinkle cream.”

  Siti almost collapsed with nervous laughter. He had set a price that would pay off his debts, and allow him to take his family and disappear. The price was so low it was laughable, but Siti didn’t have the time or the means to prove true value. And if he told Dorian what that test tube really contained, he’d never believe him.

  “If my buyer tests this and changes his mind,” Dorian said, “next time you’ll be coming here to visit your family.”

  “You won’t have to worry about that,” Siti muttered.

  • • •

  Siti’s shame consumed him as he returned through the cemetery. How had he reached this place in life?

  He knew how. He had an illness, and its name was gambling. Now he had to gather his beloved wife and sons, tonight, and go someplace where they could never be found. His wife would never forgive him, but at least they would be alive, which was a better deal than if he failed to pay Dorian.

  He reached the midway point and stopped. Had he seen something flicker in the distance? He started forward again, then jumped off the path when he caught a glimpse of movement in the bowels of the cemetery.

  Two men in field jackets walked past him, twenty feet apart, scouring the cemetery. Siti started to shake, and time seemed to both stop and accelerate. They knew.

  He spotted more men through the fog; his employer had an army now. He huddled behind a crypt and tried to think, but it was hard to form a coherent thought through his fear. He decided staying put was his best bet, and he scrunched his body against the cold stone. Someone would have to check behind this particular crypt to find him, and the five cemeteries comprising the City of the Dead stretched for miles.

  Siti didn’t hear a sound, but the first thing he saw in that terrible silence was the foot stepping around the base of the crypt, bandaged toes turning to point towards Siti. Siti’s eyes followed the foot upward, to the rest of the thing that could not be. Then he started to scream.

  – 1 –

  The meeting was set for five p.m., at the client’s hotel on the Upper East Side. Dominic Grey began to walk as the streets began to darken, the shadows cast by the buildings merging with the soft cloak of dusk. It was the sort of late March day that belonged more to winter than to spring: overcast, branches rustling in the wind, the electric undercurrent of an approaching front.

  Grey shrank into his woolen coat as the wind whipped his dark hair into his face. He’d forgotten how cruel Manhattan weather could be, and it didn’t help that his lean frame had become even more spare. He had been taking more jogs than meals.

  This was his first official assignment since leaving Diplomatic Security and agreeing to work with Professor Viktor Radek, professor of religious phenomenology at Charles University in Prague. Viktor consulted with police agencies worldwide, and sometimes private clients, on the pathology of dangerous cults. He had needed a partner skilled in the more secular aspects of his dangerous investigative work, and Grey, an ex-Marine Recon and Japanese Jujitsu expert, was a perfect fit. Viktor made his pitch after he and Grey finished a case together investigating the disappearance of a diplomat in Zimbabwe—a case Grey would just as soon forget.

  A step into the unknown, to say the least: from the rigidity of government life to freelance investigation of bizarre religions. The fact that Viktor had doubled Grey’s meager government wage had eased the transition.

  Viktor was busy with a ritual murder in Berlin, and had asked Grey to check out a potential client who called concerning a corporate theft. Grey had no idea why someone would call Viktor concerning stolen property, but the client was on a business trip in Manhattan, and if Viktor wanted him to check it out, then he would. At this point he’d investigate a stolen church hymnal in northern Canada.

  Anything to fill the day, Grey thought. Anything to push away her last knowing gaze that was stamped onto his mind.

  Nya.

  His corner in a crowded room, his quickening. What happened to her in the caves beneath Great Zimbabwe, the torture that had left her nearly catatonic for weeks, had changed her. She would smile, invite Grey to tea, stroll with him through her garden, but three months later she still hadn’t let him touch her.

  Maybe it was her scars, maybe it was something else. Maybe she’d seen something in him, a permanent silhouette of violence she could no longer accept. When he voiced his thoughts, she’d turned her head to the side. It was best, she said, if they took different paths.

  He wasn’t the type of guy you had to tell twice. He left Zimbabwe a month ago and bought a one-way ticket to the States. He had wanted a direct flight, a U.S. city, and crushing anonymity.

  New York it was.

  Since then he’d done nothing but question. Maybe he had made the wrong choice. Maybe he’d left too soon. He didn’t know; his mistakes had a way of staying hidden until fully embraced. What he did know was that her sweet vibrant memory was fading, and he was sad. She was there but she was not. The lingering doubt became his shadow he would never reveal to the sun, for fear of losing her entirely.

  He’d checked into a moderate Midtown hotel and waited for the call from Viktor. He jogged and he read and he trained and he thought. He found himself taking the subway at random, to the frontiers of the city, ducking into stores in small ethnic neighborhoods, watching faces. Everyone seemed to know exactly who they were and what they were doing. They fingered tomatoes and selected wines and flashed familiar smiles at the checkout clerks. They did those things, he imagined, day after day, week after week, year after year. They did them because it was what they did.

  Alone and on the move, he found himself in familiar territory. But it was dark, this place. Black.

  • • •

  Grey approached the hotel, a column of brick and banded stone halfway down one of those austere tree-lined streets on the Upper East Side that he found more interesting in black and white photographs than in person.

  He stepped into a foyer cloaked with old world snobbery, and glanced at the piece of paper in his hand. Room 1501. The bellhop looked the other way, chin high, as Grey strode past reception to the elevators.

  He pressed the brass doorbell to the fifteenth floor suite, and at first Grey thought a large child had opened the door. Grey was six-foot-one, and the person in front of him couldn’t have been more than five feet tall.

  His first impression turned absurd. The swarthy man standing in front of him in a dark suit struck Grey as the polar opposite of a child, the cold eyes and set mouth suggesting the man had seen and done things which had erased all traces of innocence. He was almost as wide as he was tall, and his squat, pockmarked face topped his square body like the stopper on a bottle of cologne. Tufts of black hair congregated in unkempt patches on his head, as if stuck on in
afterthought. The suit looked out of place, too refined for the person underneath. His face possessed the mixture of hardness and fat common to ex-bodybuilders.

  The room was a dim antechamber. When the man moved to open the door on the far side of the room, Grey noticed a protrusion on the upper middle of his back, an ugly hump that stretched like a swollen tumor against the fabric of his suit.

  The humpback held the door as Grey stepped into a sizeable parlor. There was an olive-colored couch against one of the walls, two matching armchairs in the center. Muted track lighting maintained the theme of thin illumination. The air was scented with a heady musk, and a sense of manufactured calm enveloped the room, like the waiting room at a doctor’s office.

  A man in a silken green robe entered the room from the corridor to Grey’s left. He walked with a serene gait, almost gliding into the room. He had a hawkish nose and chin, and stood level with Grey. He looked somewhere over fifty, but his skin possessed a healthy, vigorous sheen. The top of his head, high and narrow and bald, suggested urbanity.