Amazon Kindle
Amazon
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Amazon
Pages: 344
Can a renegade Egyptologist stop the reactivation of an ancient apocalypse of plague, pestilence and global scorching?
An apocalyptic danger has arisen from the ancient past in Egypt today bringing a threat to the Middle East and also to the West - of plague, pestilence, fiery destruction and global scorching.
Anson Hunter, controversial, alternative Egyptologist, theorist, blogger and phenomenologist is the hero of this historical adventure novel with a rich mythological vein. Followed by Western Intelligence organizations, shadowed by a mysterious androgyne assassin, he must race to avert a crisis in a quest spanning USA, Britain and Egypt. Who is behind the plan to trigger an apocalypse? Neo-religionists, Torchbearers with a dangerous New Age agenda, Christian dispensationalists who are eager to bring on the ‘end times’ or radical Islamists with a hatred of the West?
In mythology, Ra Egypt’s sun god, hurled an execration upon a rebellious humankind and, in a hot rage, despatched the scorching Eye of Ra, a holocaust sun in the form of the goddess Sekhmet, to destroy them. A marauding lioness, her breath spread pestilence and plague and her claws and teeth death as she swept through Egypt in an orgy of killing. Then Ra had second thoughts and halted her apocalypse.
But the execration had been uttered and it was always feared that the inherently unstable agent of destruction – the Female Soul With Two Faces – would one day return to finish off what she had started, cleansing the earth...
Excerpt
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 peeling black door.
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. There was 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, 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.
He remembered the way the train had seemed to jolt as if it were in a shunting yard when he first saw the bracelet on her arm. Now he felt the violence of a derailment.
He tumbled back in time to an age that seemed as old as the world, imagined scenes of worship in dim sanctuaries, the chants of thousands of priests over thousands of years, the smoke of sacrifice and incense…
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