2152 BC, Egypt As the 94-year reign of pharaoh Pepy ll draws to a close, with the Old Kingdom disintegrating and anarchy slowly engulfing the Nile Valley, fifty priests set out under cover of darkness into the Western Desert, dragging with them a sled on which rests a mysterious object swathed in cloth. Four weeks later, having reached their destination, the priests calmly slit each other’s throats, the last one left alive falling on his own sword.1988, Georgia, USSR A plane takes off from a small airfield near the recently decommissioned Mtskheta nuclear research facility, bound for the Sudan. On board, a cargo that will fundamentally tilt the balance of power in the Gulf. Somewhere over Egypt’s Western Desert the plane disappears. The present, Egypt A group of Bedouin traveling near the southern edge of the Great Sand Sea discover a desiccated corpse half buried in the dunes. With it they find a Soviet-issue compass, a camera and a notebook on whose pages are scrawled a confused jumble of figures in a script they don’t recognize. Shortly afterwards doctor Freya Hannan, 32, arrives in Egypt for the funeral of her elder sister Alex, a desert explorer who has lived in the Middle East for the past fifteen years. Recently diagnosed with a degenerative neurological condition, Alex has taken her own life. Freya is met at Luxor Airport by a colleague of her sister’s, who drives her the 515 kms to Dakhla Oasis where Alex lived. Only one other non-Egyptian is present at the funeral: Professor Flinders Flin’ Brodie, 45 - tall, rugged, handsome - a world authority on pre-dynastic Egypt. The funeral over, Freya spends the next few days sorting through her sister’s possessions and finding out more about her suicide. As she does so, she becomes increasingly uneasy. How was Alex able to inject herself so neatly with an overdose of morphine when her physical condition made it difficult for her even hold a pencil? Why was the morphine syringe held in her right hand when she wa
