There's no such thing as too great a risk for a man living on borrowed time.
Gideon Crew is out of a job.
It is the least of his worries: his doctor has just told him he has only months to live.
His employer, Effective Engineering Solutions, has shut up shop; its enigmatic boss has disappeared without a trace. There's no other option for Gideon and his colleagues but to clear their desks.
And that's when Gideon and Manuel Garza discover a computer programme that, left running for five years, has finally cracked the code it was attacking. It has deciphered the infamously enigmatic hieroglyphs of the Phaistos Disk. For a century, the ancient stone tablet defied interpretation, but now Gideon and Manuel have a lead on an undiscovered civilization, long-lost beneath the sands of the Egyptian Sahara.
As a man doomed by an inevitably fatal brain syndrome, Crew needs little persuasion to embark on one final adventure.
