Celtic Empire (Dirk Pitt 25)

“Package for NUMA?” Summer asked at the desk as Dirk made a phone call.

She signed for two boxes and wedged them into the trunk while Dirk completed his call. As she slammed the trunk closed, she noticed her brother was grinning.

“Don’t tell me. Riki Sadler?”

Dirk nodded. “Sounded surprised to hear from me, but she has some pending business in Dublin she thinks she can move up. She’ll try to hop a flight from Edinburgh and meet up with us in the next day or two. She said she looks forward to seeing us again.”

“Us?” Summer arched her brow and tossed Dirk the keys. “Since you’re so happy, you can han

dle the driving here.”

Dirk climbed into the right-hand seat and started the car. Keeping glued to the left shoulder, he navigated through the city of Limerick, then southeast across sixty miles of open country to the town of Tralee. A charming Irish country town founded by the Normans in 1216, it was best known for its annual beauty pageant, where the “loveliest and fairest” woman from across the country was crowned the Rose of Tralee.

Dirk followed Summer’s directions, locating their hotel between the city hall and a large town park. After checking in, they walked several blocks to a large mustard-colored building labeled KIRBY’S BROGUE INN. Inside, they found a warm and inviting pub just beginning to fill up with the early-evening drinking crowd.

They no sooner entered when a slight man approached from the back. He had salt-and-pepper hair with a matching mustache and wore a wrinkled oxford shirt beneath a herringbone tweed jacket.

“Be you the Yanks from NUMA?” he asked in a heavy brogue.

“One and the same.” Dirk introduced himself and Summer. “You must be Dr. Brophy.”

“Eamon Brophy, at your service. Brophy to my friends. Come along.” He turned on his heels. “I’ve got a quiet table in back. Any opposition to joining me in a stout or two?”

“I’m a stouthearted man,” Dirk said with a nod.

Brophy slapped a hand on the pub’s main bar and called to a raven-haired barmaid. “Noreen, a triplet of Guinness, if you please.”

He continued to a small corner table sided by framed posters of old whisky advertisements. As they took a seat, Dirk noted an empty beer glass on the table next to an antique clay pipe.

“This is just what I would have imagined,” Summer said.

“Aside from the beer,” Brophy said with a wink, “they’ve got the best pub food in all of Kerry.”

“Do you live in Tralee?” she asked.

He shook his head. “After I retired as archeology department head at Dublin University, my wife and I bought a small farm near Annascaul, overlooking Dingle Bay. It’s about thirty kilometers to the west.”

Noreen arrived with the beers and cleared away Brophy’s empty glass.

“Thank you, lass.” He raised his glass and tilted it toward Dirk and Summer. “To my new friends. May misfortune follow you the rest of your lives, but never catch up.”

He downed a healthy swallow, then set the glass on the table. “Now then, my old mate St. Julian Perlmutter tells me you’re on something of a thirty-five-hundred-year-old scavenger hunt originating in North Africa.”

“We’re pursuing the tale of Princess Meritaten.” Summer explained their discoveries in Egypt. “We found evidence that a plague struck Egypt in the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten, yet a group of slaves were spared on account of the Pharaoh’s daughter.”

“The evidence is intriguing,” Dirk said.

“Meritaten seemed to help the slaves, known as the Habiru,” Summer continued. “They survived the plague because Meritaten gave them something called the Apium of Faras—an ancient remedy based on a plant called silphium.”

“Never heard of it,” Brophy said.

“That’s because it’s extinct,” Dirk said. “We found a reference on a shrine in Faras, Egypt, that the apium came from a plant grown in a place called Shahat. Our research found only one matching ancient place-name—in Libya.”

“It’s a place high in the forested uplands of northeast Libya,” Summer said, “and was the only region where silphium was known to grow. The locals harvested it after it gained widespread use as a seasoning and a medicine. The Egyptians even had a glyph that represented the plant.”

Brophy took another drink and kept listening.

“The Greeks and Romans valued silphium highly,” Dirk said. “Hippocrates and Pliny the Elder wrote of its power over a wide range of ailments. In fact, silphium may have gone extinct on account of Roman demand. The plant couldn’t be cultivated, so its wild growth was likely overharvested. It was so valuable that Caesar stored some in the Roman treasury, and legend has it that the last stalk was presented to Nero. Today, we can only speculate about the plant’s characteristics. Some botanists think it was related to fennel.”