Chapter 9
The Geometry of the Lie
The silence that followed Napoleon's demand was suffocating.
Jean-Luc Moreau stammered, wiping cold sweat from his brow with a trembling handkerchief, unable to form an answer that wouldn't sound like treason or incompetence under the General's gray eyes.
Bonaparte's personal guard of grenadiers were already moving their hands toward their muskets.
Before Moreau could give himself away through sheer panic, Alejandro de La Vega took a firm step forward, breaking from the line of soldiers at attention.
He snapped off an impeccable salute, keeping his open notebook in his left hand and his chin raised with the boldness of a true officer of the Republic.
"With your permission, my General," Alejandro's voice echoed through the stone courtyard, in clean, firm French without a trace of accent.
"Engineer Moreau is only following my structural safety directives.
The fault for the delay lies with the ancient Egyptians' thrust calculations, not with France."
Napoleon slowly turned his face toward Alejandro. His eyebrows rose, surprised by the boldness of that young "officer" who had dared interrupt him. The silence in the temple grew even denser. Don Luiz, disguised close behind, clenched his teeth, bracing himself mentally for the worst.
"And who might you be, citizen?" Napoleon asked, eyes half-closed, sizing up Alejandro's uniform.
"Captain Alexandre Dumont, of the Civil Engineers Corps of the Vanguard, General," Alejandro lied with a frighteningly natural ease, taking two more steps forward and pointing with the tip of a bronze compass at the crack in the rock.
"If our men keep using pickaxes vertically in this quadrant, they'll breach the keystone of the lower arch. According to the geometry of material resistance, that will trigger a cascade effect that will bury the underground chamber and half your regiment under ten tons of sandstone."
Napoleon stepped toward Alejandro, staring fixedly at the sketches the Spaniard had quickly drawn in the notebook. The Corsican general, himself trained in artillery and a lover of mathematics, was genuinely intrigued by the precise logic of the argument.
"A collapse from dynamic thrust..." Napoleon murmured, crossing his arms and studying Alejandro's drawings with surgical attention. "Moreau, why haven't you shown me these calculations before?"
"I... well, General..." Moreau stammered, grabbing the lifeline Alejandro had thrown him. "Captain Dumont just finished refining the figures, yes!"
While Alejandro kept the sharpest mind in Europe entirely hypnotized by false geometric equations and technical engineering jargon, the real chaos was operating in the shadows.
Behind the retinue of French generals watching the scene, Mateo "El Gato" moved like a ghost.
Disguised in infantry uniform, he pretended to adjust the temple's wall torches.
With movements that would have looked like magic to any ordinary observer, Mateo's light fingers slid into the leather satchel of one of Napoleon's division generals.
In one second, Mateo pulled out a bundle of official papers bearing the Paris seal; in the next, he lifted a silver watch from a colonel, and finally, slid out the original topographic map of the excavations tucked into the belt of Bonaparte's aide.
Mateo stepped back twice, tossing the stolen documents into Samira's robe, who hid them among the folds of cloth with the speed of a viper.
"So, Captain De La Vega," said Napoleon, finally looking up from Alejandro's notebook and fixing his eyes on the Spaniard's face with a glint of cold admiration. "How do you suggest we breach Sheba's altar without bringing the ceiling down on my head?"
Alejandro pointed to the left side of the crack, where the spy Moreau had sabotaged the pulleys.
"We need to dig at a thirty-degree angle to the west, using wooden crossbraces, General. It will take six more hours, but it will guarantee you set foot in the chamber intact."
Napoleon clasped his hands behind his back, thoughtful. He looked at the temple, then at Alejandro, and gave a curt nod.
"Very well. The Republic's army advances with science, not luck. Moreau, follow Captain Dumont's instructions. If the chamber isn't open in six hours... I will personally choose the firing squad for the two of you. Carry on!"
Napoleon turned abruptly, marching back toward the temple exit with his guard, without noticing that his officers were now slightly lighter in their belongings and secrets.
When the echo of the General's boots faded, Moreau collapsed onto a toolbox, trembling from head to toe. Don Luiz and Lieutenant Vance approached Alejandro, releasing a breath they seemed to have held for minutes.
"By God, Alejandro," Don Luiz whispered, wiping the sweat from his neck. "You just gave the world's greatest strategist a lecture in false engineering and walked out alive."
"It wasn't entirely false, my colonel," Alejandro smiled, his eyes bright with adrenaline. "That rock really will come down if they dig there. I just changed the angle to make sure the French dig in the wrong spot and buy us some time."
Mateo appeared beside them, that same insolent smile on his face, dangling the French colonel's silver watch from his fingertip.
"The captain bought us time with words, but look what I got with my fingers," Mateo whispered, indicating the bundle of maps and papers in Samira's hands. "Bonaparte's original plans for the Rings of Sheba are right here."
Samira unrolled the stolen map under the faint light of a corner torch. Her brown eyes scanned the French annotations, then looked at Alejandro with newfound respect.
"The little French general thinks the main temple hides everything," said Samira, pointing to a hidden marking on the parchment. "But his map shows there's a second entrance, an underground ventilation shaft the soldiers overlooked. That's how we'll get in before them."
The map lifted by Mateo's agile fingers and Samira's ancestral knowledge guided the group away from the noisy courtyard of the French excavations.
While General Bonaparte and his men focused on the false, time-consuming route suggested by "Captain Dumont," the group skirted the immense outer sandstone ruins, reaching the western face of the temple, where the desert seemed to swallow the stone whole.
There, half-hidden by an unstable dune and fallen blocks from an ancient obelisk, opened a square, vertical shaft a little over a meter wide. The wind rising from it carried a hissing sound, almost like a human whisper, laden with the smell of ancient dust and underground dampness.
"The ventilation shaft of the dead," Samira announced, taking the short rifle off her shoulder and looking down into the dark depths of the shaft.
"The ancient priests built this channel so that the breath of Osiris could circulate through the lower chambers. The French measured the walls from outside, but their science doesn't see what's buried under the sand."
Lieutenant Vance approached, dropping a small stone into the shaft. The sound of the impact took several seconds to return, echoing dully.
"That's at least fifteen meters of free fall," the Englishman calculated, undoing the knot of the nautical rope tied to his stolen uniform. "If the rope gives, there won't be any engineering that can put our bones back together down there. Who goes first?"
"The cat always lands on its feet, Lieutenant," Mateo mocked, taking the end of the rope and quickly tying it around his waist with a sailor's knot he'd learned on the docks of Barcelona. "Besides, if there's any lock or trap waiting for us on the way down, I'd rather be the one to clear the path."
With the agility that justified his nickname, Mateo slid down into the shaft, disappearing into the vertical darkness while Don Luiz and Vance held the weight of the rope up top.
Tense, silent moments passed, broken only by the friction of hemp against rock, until three firm tugs on the rope signaled that the path was clear.
One by one, the members of the expedition descended through the narrow shaft.
Alejandro went last, using the stone walls to brace his leather boots, studying the precision of the cut blocks with the clinical eye of an engineer.
The Egyptians had carved that shaft with a perfect incline to withstand the pressure of the tons of desert sand above.
Stepping onto the bottom, Alejandro lit a small pitch torch, and the flickering light revealed the grandeur of the scene.
They stood in a monumental gallery, entirely carved from living rock, far below the level the French were excavating.
The ceiling was held up by massive columns whose capitals took the shape of closed lotus flowers.
On the walls, golden hieroglyphs gleamed faintly under the torch's soot, narrating the journey of kings and queens of the past.
"Look at this..." murmured Father Bartolomeu, his Jesuit eyes bright with a mixture of archaeological fascination and religious dread.
He walked to the wall, running trembling fingers over the relief inscriptions.
"These are not ordinary funerary texts. These scriptures speak of the Queen of Sheba's visit to King Solomon...
and of the engineering pact sealed between Jerusalem and Egypt to hide the artifacts of power.
"The Queen of Sheba ruled the south, but the Nile was the road of the gods. She traveled to Egypt not with armies, but with Solomon's secret. The Egyptians gave the stone and the engineering; Sheba brought the power that needed to be hidden from the world."
"Save your theology for later, Father," ordered Don Luiz, his low voice echoing through the columns like contained thunder. He drew his Spanish rapier, eyes fixed on the darkness stretching beyond the hall. "Alejandro, which way?"
Alejandro opened the stolen map and brought the torch closer. His fingers traced the lines to an immense circular chamber drawn at the center of the underground complex.
"If the French map's calculations are correct, the main altar lies just past this colonnade," Alejandro explained, taking the lead with the torch raised. "But the ancient builders wouldn't have left a sanctuary this size unprotected. Watch for any unevenness in the stone floor."
The walk through the silent gallery was oppressive. The only sound was boots crunching in the fine dust. However, after advancing fifty meters, Mateo, walking a step ahead of everyone with his eyes fixed on the floor, abruptly threw out his arm, stopping the group in its tracks.
"Stop. Nobody moves a millimeter," El Gato whispered, crouching slowly in the dust.
A few centimeters from Lieutenant Vance's boot, the stone floor showed an almost imperceptible variation: one of the square sandstone blocks sat slightly higher than the others — less than two millimeters, but enough for Mateo's eyes to catch the flaw in the symmetry.
"A mechanical pressure trigger," Alejandro observed, crouching beside the thief. He used the tip of his dagger to clear the dust from the block's side seam. "If a man's weight presses on this stone, it releases a lead counterweight inside the wall."
"And what does that counterweight do, captain?" Mateo asked, with a tense smile.
Alejandro raised the torch, lighting the ceiling directly above them. Between the support blocks was a narrow longitudinal opening, from which the tips of bronze spears, corroded by time, lurked in the shadows.
"It turns this corridor into a meat grinder," Alejandro answered, his voice cold. "A rain of spears by gravity."
Lieutenant Vance swallowed hard, stepping back with extreme caution.
"Can you disarm it, boy?" the Englishman asked Mateo, his arrogant tone vanishing entirely before the real threat of death.
Mateo looked at Alejandro, receiving a nod of confidence from the engineer.
The rogue drew his trusty Albacete dagger and, with the precision of a watchmaker, inserted the thin blade into the stone's seam, feeling for the internal mechanism until he heard a dull metallic click from within the wall.
The block gave way a millimeter, locking permanently.
"The path is clear, gentlemen," Mateo smiled, cleaning the dagger on his French uniform and standing up. "But I'd suggest the priest pray a little louder from now on."
The group continued advancing with senses at maximum alert, until the colonnaded corridor finally opened into a colossal chamber.
The ceiling rose more than twenty meters, and at the center of the circular hall, bathed in a beam of moonlight entering through a natural crack in the rock, rose a pyramidal structure of black granite.
The Altar of Sheba stood before them. And at the top of the pyramid, resting on a richly ornamented bronze box, something gleamed with a golden, mysterious metallic sheen, defying centuries of darkness.