The Third Gate Read Online Free PDF

who had taken the measure of many, many men.
    “So I’m a key part of the team?” Logan asked.
    Stone nodded. “Naturally. Although, to be honest, I hadn’t expected you to be. You’re something of a late addition.”
    Rush took a seat across the table from them. Stone put aside the scroll he’d been reading, revealing a narrow folder beneath it. “I knew of your work, of course. I’d read your monograph on the Walking Draugen of Trondheim.”
    “That was an interesting case. And it was nice to be able to publish—I’m so rarely allowed to.”
    Stone smiled his understanding. “And it seems we already have something in common, Dr. Logan.”
    “Call me Jeremy, please. What might that be?”
    “Pembridge Barrow.”
    Logan sat up in surprise. “You don’t mean to say you read—”
    “I did indeed,” Stone replied.
    Logan looked at the treasure hunter with fresh respect. Pembridge Barrow had been one of Stone’s smaller, but historically more spectacular,discoveries: a burial pit in Wales that contained the remains of what most scholars agreed was the first-century English queen Boadicea. She had been found buried in an ancient war chariot, surrounded by weapons, golden armbands, and other trinkets. In making the find, Stone had solved a mystery that had plagued English historians for centuries.
    “As you know,” Stone continued, “the scholarly elite always maintained Boadicea met her end at the hands of the Roman legions in Exeter, or perhaps Warwickshire. But it was your own graduate dissertation—in which you argued she survived those battles to be buried with full warrior’s honors—that led me to Pembridge.”
    “Based on projected movements of Roman search parties far removed from the Watling Road,” Logan replied. “I guess I should feel honored.” He was impressed with Stone’s thoroughness.
    “But I didn’t summon you here to speak of that. I wanted you to understand just what you’re getting yourself involved in.” Stone leaned forward. “I’m not going to ask you to sign a blood oath or anything so melodramatic.”
    “I’m relieved to hear it.”
    “Besides, somebody in your unique line of work can be trusted to keep a confidence.” Stone leaned back again. “Have you heard of Flinders Petrie?”
    “The Egyptologist? He discovered the New Kingdom at Tell el-Amarna, right? And the Merneptah stele, among other things.”
    “That’s right. Very good.” Stone and Rush exchanged a significant glance. “Then you probably know that he was that rarest of Egyptologists: a true scholar, endowed with a limitless appetite for learning. In the late 1800s, when everybody else was frantically digging up treasure, he was searching for something else: knowledge . He loved to stray from the obvious dig sites—the pyramids and the temples—searching far up the Nile for potsherds or bits of clay pictographs. In many ways, he made Egyptology a respectable science, discouraging looting and haphazard documentation.”
    Logan nodded. So far, this was all relatively common knowledge.
    “By 1933, Petrie was the grand old man of British archaeology. He’d been knighted by the king. He’d offered to donate his head to the Royal College of Surgeons so that his unique brilliance could be studied in perpetuity. He and his wife retired permanently to Jerusalem, where he could spend his twilight years among the ancient ruins he loved so much. And so the story ends.”
    A brief silence fell over the archives. Stone pulled out the grimy spectacles, fiddled with them a moment, placed them on the table.
    “Except that it doesn’t end. Because in 1941—after years of sedentary retirement—Petrie abruptly left Jerusalem, bound for Cairo. He told none of his old colleagues at the British School of Archaeology about this new expedition of his—and there can be no doubt that it was an expedition. He took a bare minimum of staff: two or three at most, and those I suspect only because of his age and