Free The Cult of Osiris by Andy McDermott

cool. But most of my first year, I kind of goofed off. I was in a sorority, I was a cheerleader, every night was party night - you know what it's like!'
    Hmm,' said Nina, who at university had been anything but a party animal.
    But then I almost flunked out, and that was when I realised I needed to pull myself together. Part of it was because I didn't want to let down my mom and dad - I mean, they were paying for it! So I started working harder, and picked up my grades. But then when I heard about the IHA dig at the Sphinx, I realised it would be such a huge boost for me if I could be a part of it. So I managed to get on the team— 1
    There must have been a lot of competition.
    Oh, totally. But my mom does a lot of fundraising for international charities and she's got friends at the UN, so that helped!' She smiled brightly.
    I'm sure it did,' said Nina, unimpressed that nepotism, not hard work, had won her a place on the dig. While she didn't consider herself the kind of person who made snap judgements, she was forced to admit that her initial appraisal of Macy - a party girl who relied on her looks
    and money to coast through life - seemed accurate. Well, look, it's been nice meeting you, and I 'm glad I was such an inspiration, but I need to get moving/
    Macy's face fell. 'Oh, no, wait! Please, wait - I need to show you this.' She hurriedly stuffed the pages back in her bag, her hand returning with a digital camera. 'You know about the scrolls that told us how to find the Hall of Records, right?'
    The ones that were found in Gaza? Yeah. I still keep up with the news.
    Macy didn't register the sarcasm. 'Okay, well, the Osirian Temple gave three pages to the IHA, right? Turns out they didn't give us ail of them.
    An image appeared on the screen. Nina looked more closely, seeing what appeared to be ancient Egyptian papyruses, though the hieroglyphics were too small to read on the LCD display. 'Are these the pages?'
    Macy pointed at the three leftmost pages. 'These three are. But this one,' she tapped the one on the right, is something nobody's seen before. Not at the IHA, anyway. The first three pages talk about what the Hall of Records is and how to find it. This one says what's actually in it.
    Nina regarded her dubiously. And what is in it?' A map that tells you how to find the Pyramid of Osiris.'
    What?' Only the memory of having been at the other end of a similar discussion, trying to convince others of the truth of a legend, stopped Nina from letting out a dismissive laugh. The Pyramid of Osiris? That's barely even a myth - it's more like a fairy tale. You could count all the references to it in known ancient Egyptian texts on one hand, and even then it's only mentioned in connection with the mythology of their gods. It's not real.
    Well, I didn't think so either,' said Macy, bristling, but somebody does. Somebody who's going to dig into the Hall of Records before the IHA and steal the map.'
    Now Nina did laugh. You've got to be kidding me. Someone's digging under the Sphinx at the same time as the IHA? In the middle of the busiest tourist attraction in the entire country, and nobody notices?
    It's true!' Macy protested. They've dug a shaft at the north end of the Sphinx compound -I saw it!' She flicked through the images on the camera. 'I took a picture of the plans, look!'
    Nina gave it only a cursory glance. 'There's no way they could do that without attracting attention. They'd be arrested the moment they stuck their shovel into the ground/
    No, the people in charge, they're in on it! Gamal, the head of security, and Dr Hamdi -look, see?' Another picture, this one a blown-out closeup of a man's startled face. They're both working for a guy from the Osirian Temple!
    Nina kneaded her forehead. Why are you telling me this? If you really did uncover some conspiracy to rob the site, why didn't you just tell Dr Berkeley? Or the Egyptian police?
    I didn't know who I could trust. Dr Berkeley might have been in on it