Chapter Three #2
Gabriela turned onto Bloomsbury Street, and in two blocks she turned onto Great Russell Street.
One side of the street was lined with redbrick town houses dating back to the 1800s.
Five or six stories and an attic. White-trimmed windows stacked one on top of another and separated by white columns.
Shops and businesses sprinkled throughout on the ground floor.
The British Museum was on the other side of Great Russell.
The sidewalk was wide and tree lined. The museum was behind a high black wrought iron fence with an iron gate that was open for visitors.
Gabriela, Rafer, and Harley walked through the gate and into the courtyard that led to the main entrance.
Gabriela had been to the museum many times and she loved its collections, but she didn’t think the Greek Revival entrance with its forty-three columns was as impressive as the Met Museum in New York.
The Met beat out the Brits in stairs alone.
They passed through security, entered the Great Court, and made a left turn into Room 4 and the Egyptian sculpture gallery. The Rosetta Stone display was dead ahead.
“So, this is it,” Rafer said, staring at the glass case that contained the stone replica. “The scene of the crime.”
“Do you know anything about the Rosetta Stone?” Gabriela asked Rafer.
“No. I slept through that part of my education,” Rafer said.
“The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele,” Gabriela said.
“That’s a fancy way of saying it’s a tablet of black granite.
This isn’t the whole stele. As you can see, the top part of the stone is broken off at an angle.
The piece of the stone that the museum owns is inscribed with a decree that was passed by a council of priests and issued in Memphis, Egypt, in 196 BCE.
The decree was written in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek, making it possible for a wide variety of people to read it.
This is one of many steles that were distributed throughout the region.
There are twenty-eight known copies of this particular stele. Twenty-one of them remain in Egypt.”
“Okay, then what’s the big deal with the Rosetta Stone?” Rafer asked. “It’s not like it’s the only one.”
“Hieroglyphic writing died out in Egypt in the fourth century CE, and the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphics was lost until soldiers in Napoleon’s army discovered the Rosetta Stone in 1799.
They were digging the foundations of a fort near the town of Rashid, which the French called Rosetta, and they found this chunk of stone.
When Napoleon lost the war, the stone became the property of the British government.
In the early nineteenth century, scholars realized they could use the Greek part of the stone as the key to deciphering the hieroglyphics. ”
“And that makes it worth seven hundred fifty million dollars?”
“The importance to Egyptology was immense,” Gabriela said. “It’s a priceless piece of history.”
“And now it’s in someone’s basement,” Rafer said. “This glass box looks pretty secure. And it looks to me like there are cameras and motion sensors everywhere.”
“The bank sent a bunch of experts to snoop around and certify that the museum had really substituted a fake to temporarily take the place of the real stone. There’s a sign displayed somewhere explaining that the real stone is being restored,” Harley said.
“It wasn’t difficult to prove it’s a fake.
It weighs a fraction of the real stone.”
“While they were snooping, did they figure out how the stone got out of its glass box?” Rafer asked.
Harley shook his head. “No. The sensors didn’t go off and the cameras didn’t catch anything. The glass is high impact, and the temperature and humidity inside the glass is strictly controlled. Every possible precaution had been taken to protect the stone.”
“This had to be an inside job,” Rafer said.
“Possibly,” Gabriela said, looking at the museum map that she’d picked up when they entered. “Maybe.”
She was standing ten feet from the case, scanning the room, picking out cameras and exits.
She was cataloging museum employees who were in the area.
And she was wondering how this could have happened.
If she wanted to steal the Rosetta Stone, how would she go about it?
She would need help. A computer expert to disable the security.
Easier to do in the movies than in real life.
Then she would need at least one other person to assist in removing the stone from the case and getting it out of the building.
It would help if the assistant knew how to do this.
And what about the night guards? There was no mention in any of the reports that they’d been injured or incapacitated. Hard to believe.
Gabriela checked her watch. “I’m meeting someone in a couple minutes. He’s one of the curators here. I worked with him on a case last year. Nothing as big as what we have in front of us, but I was able to locate their missing object. I thought it would be interesting to get his take on this.”
“You have friends in high places,” Rafer said.
“In this case it’s more of an acquaintance who occupies a medium-to-high place,” Gabriela said. “I’m meeting him for lunch, so you guys are on your own for the afternoon. Marcella made reservations for dinner at the hotel restaurant. Seven o’clock. I’ll meet you there.”