Free The Moses Riddle (Thomas McAllister 'Treasure Hunter' Adventure Book 1) by Hunt Kingsbury Page B

rather than pry, Martha decided to wait and see if Thomas would volunteer the reasons behind his worried look.
    While they drove across the barren, sandy-tan desert outside of Cairo, Thomas recounted the events of the past weeks and Martha’s eyes welled with tears at her good friend’s loss of job. Thomas had seemed to have the perfect career . Bright, young successful archeology professor to become next Dean of the Archeology Department.
    On the phone, and again this morning, he seemed a little harder, or more direct, than he had in the past. Was life taking its toll on him? Had he lost some of that youthful exuberance? “You’re always welcome here, Thomas. We could use you in the Valley. Just say the word. There aren’t many people who have been intimately involved with discovering a Pharaoh’s tomb. Field experience may not matter on certain college campuses these days, but it certainly matters in the Valley.”
    Thomas appreciated her sympathy but wanted her to know that he didn’t want to dwell on it. He didn’t want to slip back to the place he’d just emerged from. He changed the subject. “Martha, I think I’m on to something. Maybe . . . something big.” He told her about the odd entry by Abubaker in the Amenophis Notes . He told her his Moses hypothesis and Abubaker’s comment about the man being Reuel’s son. She knew that Reuel had fathered only daughters, but reminded Thomas that it would be a stretch for the man who had arrived at Unas to actually be Moses. “It may have just looked like him. There may be another Reuel, Priest of Median,” she said.
    She was playing devil’s advocate so that her friend wouldn’t be let down if they didn’t find anything. But she did concede that it was odd that someone, no matter who it was, had spent so much time inside the temple. And she agreed that they must’ve been traveling with something that was valuable if there were that many armed guards. Back then, most people owned only what they could carry, so the presence of an armed escort was a telltale sign something valuable was nearby. But Martha, like Thomas, was a scientist, and it was going to take a lot more than one entry in an ancient diary to convince her that Moses had visited Saqqara.
    They arrived at the necropolis at sunrise. It was quiet, except for the barking howls of a few coyotes. They sat on the warm hood of the car and watched the sun come up, absorbed in their own thoughts. Sunrise at the ancient pyramids in Egypt could be a mystical, almost religious experience. When the globe began to turn from orange to yellow, Thomas broke the silence. “Did you remember to bring the battery-operated light? I saw the ladder, in the back of the station wagon, but not the light.”
    “Yes, it’s under that tarp, with the cooler. How about you get the ladder, I take the light?” The light was a commercial grade, 10,000-watt portable lamp used by construction companies for night jobs. Many of the tools archeologists used, like lighting, vehicles, and digging implements, had to be construction grade because of the harsh working conditions.
    As they approached Unas, Thomas said, “It’s bigger than I remember.”
“I always think that about the pyramids, in the morning.” Martha smiled, unusually happy to be back in the field with Thomas again.
They were ninety feet from the pyramid when a figure, shrouded in shadow, emerged from the still dark west side of the temple. Thomas slowed his pace and whispered to Martha. “Do you see that?”
In Egypt, like in other countries, bandits tended to frequent places where tourists gathered. Thomas was also conscious of the fact that Saqqara, being a necropolis, or city of the dead, was also haunted.
They continued to walk, but more slowly. The figure approached them. After twenty more paces, they could see that it was only one of the security guards hired by the government to keep vandals away. Martha knew many of the guards, but not this one. They showed