“Well, Jim, like just about everyone else, I’m fascinated by ancient Egypt, the pyramids, the Valley of the Kings, Tut, Nefertiti, the Rameses boys. So I have to tell you, I like the idea very much.”
Now it was my turn to smile and to laugh in relief.
“I’m really glad. So let me tell you what I thought would close the deal-though, obviously, I don’t need it. Michael, I have a hunch that Tut was murdered. And I hope, at least on paper, to prove it.”
Michael laughed again. “You had me at ‘King Tut,’” he quipped.
Part One
Chapter 1
Valley of the Kings
1492 BC
“THIS IS FAR ENOUGH! Stop right here.”
More than five hundred prisoners halted their march toward Thebes in a great field situated two miles from the city. A contingent of the palace guard watched over them in the sweltering midday sun. Not that it was necessary. The emaciated prisoners’ feet were bound with leather cord that was just long enough for them to frog walk; they could not run.
And even if they had tried to escape, their arms were tied behind their backs at the wrist and elbow.
They wouldn’t get far, and the punishment would be swift and brutal.
Ineni, the well-regarded royal architect, watched over the sad scene. He knew these men well. They had just spent five years in a remote valley, excavating a new burial place for Tuthmosis I.
By day they had endured withering summer heat and surprisingly frigid blasts of desert cold that sometimes strafed the valley.
At night they had slept under a sky shot through with stars.
It had been more than a thousand years since Cheops had built his great pyramid up the Nile in Giza. As grand and awe-inspiring as they were, pyramids turned out to be beacons of temptation for every local thief and blasphemous tomb robber. There wasn’t a single one that hadn’t been looted. Not one.