A: Have you heard of the Baghdad Battery? No, of course not. It's not something you'd hear about on TV.

Q: Professor . . .

A: The Baghdad Battery is a series of artefacts found in a museum in the city in 1938. It was composed of clay vessels, inside of which were copper cylinders, held in place by asphalt, each containing an iron rod. In other words, the whole thing was a primitive but effective electrochemical instrument that was used to coat different objects in copper through electrolysis.

Q: That's not so surprising. In 1938 that technology was almost ninety years old.

A: Ms Otero, if you'd let me continue, you wouldn't sound like such an idiot. The researchers who a.n.a.lysed the Baghdad Battery discovered that it originated in ancient Sumer, and managed to date it back to 2500 BC. That is a thousand years before the Ark of the Covenant and forty-three centuries before Faraday, the man who supposedly invented electricity.

Q: And the Ark was similar?

A: The Ark was an electrical condenser. The design was very intelligent, allowing the acc.u.mulation of static electricity: two gold plates separated by an insulating layer of wood, but joined by the two golden cherubim that acted like positive and negative terminals.

Q: But if it was a condenser, how did it store electricity?

A: The answer is fairly prosaic. The objects in the Tabernacle and the Temple were made of leather, linen and goat hair, three of five materials that can generate the greatest amount of static electricity. Under the right conditions, the Ark could release about two thousand volts. It makes sense that the only ones who could touch it were the 'chosen few'. You can bet the chosen few had very thick gloves.

Q: So you insist that the Ark didn't come from G.o.d?

A: Ms Otero, nothing could be further from my intention. What I'm saying is that G.o.d asked Moses to keep the commandments in a safe place so they could be venerated for centuries to come and be the central aspect of the Jewish faith. And that human beings have invented artificial ways of keeping the legend of the Ark alive.

Q: What about other disasters, like the collapse of the walls of Jericho, the storms of sand and fire that wiped out whole cities?

A: Invented stories and myths.

Q: So you reject the idea that the Ark can bring disasters in its wake?

A: Absolutely.

62.

THE EXCAVATION.

AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN.

Tuesday, 18 July 2006. 1:02 p.m.

Eighteen minutes before she died, Kyra La.r.s.en was thinking about baby wipes. It was a kind of mental reflex. Not long after she had given birth to little Bente two years before, she had discovered the advantages of the little towels that were always moist and left a nice smell.

The other advantage was that her husband hated them.

It wasn't that Kyra was a bad person. But for her, one of the fringe benefits of marriage consisted in noticing small cracks in her husband's defences and sticking a few barbs in them to see what would happen. Right now Alex would be contending with quite a few baby wipes because he had to take care of Bente until the expedition was over. Kyra would return triumphant, with the satisfaction of having scored real points against Mr They've-made-me-a-partner-at-the-law-firm.

Am I a bad mother for wanting to share the responsibility for our baby with him? Am I? s.h.i.t, no!

Two days before, when an exhausted Kyra had heard Jacob Russell say that they would have to step up the work and that there would be no more showers, she had thought she could put up with anything. Nothing would get in the way of her making a name for herself as an archaeologist. Unfortunately, reality and what a person imagines do not always coincide.

Stoically, she had put up with the humiliation of the search that took place after the attack on the water truck. She had stood there, covered in mud from head to toe, and watched as the soldiers went through her papers and her underwear. Many people on the expedition had protested, but they had all been relieved when the search was over and nothing had been found. The morale of the group had been greatly altered by recent events.

'At least it's not one of us,' David Pappas had said, once the lights went out and fear invaded every shadow. 'We can take comfort in that.'

'Whoever it was probably doesn't know what we're doing here. It could be Bedouins, angry at us for invading their turf. They won't do anything more with all those machine guns up on the cliffs. '

'Not that the machine guns did Stowe much good.'

'I still say Dr Harel knows something about his death,' Kyra insisted.

She had told everyone that, despite pretending otherwise, the doctor hadn't been in her bed when Kyra woke up that night, but no one paid her much attention.

'Be quiet, all of you. The best thing you can do for Erling, and for yourselves, is to work out how we're going to dig that tunnel. I want you to think about that even when you're asleep,' said Forrester, who, at Dekker's insistence, had left his private tent on the opposite side of the camp and joined the others.

Kyra was frightened, but she was inspired by the professor's fierce indignation.

n.o.body is going to chase us away from here. We have a mission to accomplish, and we will complete it, whatever the cost. After that everything will be better, she thought, without realising that she had zipped her sleeping bag up to the top in a ridiculous attempt to protect herself.

Forty-eight exhausting hours later, the group of archaeologists had outlined the route they would follow, digging down at an angle in order to reach the object. Kyra wouldn't permit herself to call it anything other than 'the object' until they were sure it was what they had expected and not . . . not just something else.

By the crack of dawn on Tuesday, breakfast was already a memory. All the members of the expedition had helped to build a steel platform that would allow the mini-excavator to find a point of attack on the side of the mountain. Otherwise, the uneven ground and the steep angle of the slope would have meant there was a risk of the small but powerful machine tipping over as it began the work. David Pappas had designed the structure so that they could begin digging the tunnel some twenty feet above the canyon floor. Fifty feet tunnelling in, then a diagonal in the opposite direction towards the object.

That was the plan. Kyra's death would be one of the unforeseen consequences.

Eighteen minutes before the accident, Kyra La.r.s.en's skin was so sticky she felt as though she was wearing a smelly rubber suit. The others had used part of their ration of water to clean themselves up as best they could. Not Kyra. She'd been incredibly thirsty - she had always sweated a lot, especially after her pregnancy - and was even stealing little sips from other people's bottles when they weren't looking.

She closed her eyes for a moment and in her mind she could see Bente's room: on top of the chest of drawers there was a box of baby wipes that would have felt heavenly on her skin just then. She fantasised about rubbing them over her body, removing the dirt and dust that had acc.u.mulated in her hair, the insides of her elbows, and along the edges of her bra. And afterwards she would hug her baby girl, play with her on the bed as she did each morning, and explain to her that Mummy had found buried treasure.

The best treasure of all.

Kyra was carrying several planks of wood that Gordon Durwin and Ezra Levine were using to sh.o.r.e up the walls of the tunnel to prevent a cave-in. It was to be ten feet wide and eight feet high. The professor and David Pappas had argued for several hours about the dimensions.

'It'll take us twice as long! Do you think this is archaeology, Pappas? It's a d.a.m.ned rescue operation, and we have a limited amount of time, in case you haven't noticed!'

'If we don't make it wide enough we won't be able to get the earth out of the tunnel easily, the excavator will bang against the walls and the whole thing will cave in on us. That's a.s.suming we don't hit the rock base of the cliff, in which case the net result of all this effort will be to lose two more days.'

'To h.e.l.l with you, Pappas, and your Master's from Harvard.'

In the end David had won and the tunnel measured ten feet by eight.

Kyra absentmindedly brushed a beetle from her hair as she made her way to the far end of the tunnel, where Robert Frick was struggling with the wall of earth in front of him. Meanwhile, Tommy Eichberg was loading the conveyor belt that ran along the floor of the tunnel and ended a foot and a half from the platform, throwing a steady cloud of dust over the canyon floor. The mountain of earth that had been excavated from the side of the hill was now nearly as high as the tunnel opening.

'h.e.l.lo, Kyra,' Eichberg greeted her. He sounded tired. 'Have you seen Hanley? He was supposed to take over from me.'

'He's below trying to rig up some electric lights. Soon we won't be able to see anything in here.'

They had dug almost twenty-five feet into the side of the mountain, and by two o'clock in the afternoon the daylight no longer reached the back of the tunnel, making it nearly impossible to work. Eichberg cursed out loud.

'Am I going to have to keep shovelling like this for another hour? Bulls.h.i.t,' he said, throwing his spade down.

'Don't go, Tommy. If you leave, Frick can't continue either.'

'Well, you take over, Kyra. I have to take a p.i.s.s.'

Without another word, he left.

Kyra looked at the ground. Shovelling earth on to the conveyor was a horrible job. You were constantly bending down, you had to do everything quickly, and keep an eye on the arm of the excavator to make sure it didn't hit you. But she didn't want to imagine what the professor would say if they took a break for an hour. He'd blame her, as usual. Kyra was secretly convinced that Forester hated her.

Maybe he resented my involvement with Stowe Erling. Maybe he would like to have been in Stowe's place. Dirty old man. I wish you were in his place right now, she thought as she bent down to pick up the shovel.

'Look out back there!'

Frick had reversed the excavator a little and the cabin almost slammed into Kyra's head.

'Be careful!'

'I warned you, beautiful. I'm sorry.'

Kyra made a face at the machine because it was impossible to get angry with Frick. The big-boned operator was vile-tempered, cursed constantly, and farted while he worked. He was a human being in every sense of the word, a real person. Kyra appreciated that most of all, especially when she compared him to the pale imitations of life that were Forrester's a.s.sistants.

The a.s.s-kissers' Club, Stowe called them. He had wanted nothing to do with them.

She began to shovel debris onto the conveyor belt. In a little while they'd have to add another section to the belt as the tunnel went deeper into the mountain.