by Adam Hamdy
‘You’ve questioned him?’
‘His name was Ismail Mahmoud,’ Salah replied sadly. ‘He died in here with all the others.’
‘Is there video of the kitchen stores?’ Pearce asked.
Salah shook his head, but it was Yousef who answered. ‘The camera was broken. A replacement was scheduled to be fitted the following week.’
‘There was nothing wrong with that camera,’ Salah remarked angrily. ‘It was sabotaged.’
‘So you keep saying,’ Yousef responded. ‘You will have the opportunity to think about all the incidents that caused this terrible atrocity during your retirement.’
Pearce sensed the hostility between the two men.
‘A commander cannot stay after something like this,’ Salah said. ‘So I’ve taken early retirement. No man of honour could remain in his job after such an atrocity.’ He looked pointedly at Yousef.
‘Is there a search log?’ Brigitte asked.
‘Of course,’ Salah replied.
Chapter 17
Pearce was glad to be out of the cafeteria. They were still in their stifling masks, but were no longer surrounded by the upturned chairs and disarray that marked horrific mass murder.
‘Here,’ Salah said, leading Pearce and Brigitte to a booth in the austere concrete guard room.
The booth had a window that was covered by a metal grille. Access was through a locked metal door, which Salah opened. Inside was a desk, an old plastic chair and shelves stacked with papers, folders and large ledgers.
‘All search reports go to the duty officer,’ Salah said, opening the ledger that lay on the desk. He flipped to a page near the back of the book. ‘This is a log of the most recent searches of the food stores.’
‘What’s that?’ Pearce asked, noting an Arabic signature in an adjacent column.
‘When a search is carried out, the guard who does this writes his name here,’ Salah replied.
‘Ismail Mahmoud,’ Pearce said, sounding out the Arabic letters. ‘May I?’
Salah nodded. ‘Of course. Your colleagues and the Egyptian security forces have already conducted their forensics.’ He stepped back and allowed Pearce to get to the desk.
Pearce leafed through the book, only partly aware of Kamal and Yousef’s conversation in the corridor outside. The former colonel had asked the deputy governor what changes he’d make to the prison if he was promoted and the pompous man’s voice echoed off the concrete walls as he rattled through a catalogue of failings and recriminations, most of which were aimed at his boss. Pearce focused on the ledger and felt a familiar pang of excitement as he spotted something tiny, but very significant.
‘Captain, could you look at this?’
Salah peered over his shoulder and Brigitte crowded in and looked from the other side.
Pearce flipped from the page Salah had shown him to one from three days earlier. He pointed at the signature next to the most recent search log entry and then at Ismail Mahmoud’s earlier scrawl.
‘Do you notice anything?’ Pearce asked.
Salah looked clueless, but Brigitte spotted the discrepancy immediately. ‘The swirl above the line goes in different directions.’
‘It’s called a hamza,’ Pearce remarked. ‘Above the alif, it is written like a five, rather than a two.’
Salah studied the lettering of the two signatures and nodded. Alif was the first letter of the Arabic alphabet and was often written with a tiny hamza at the top, like the dot on an ‘i’. Pearce flipped through the book and pointed out more of Ismail’s signatures.
‘He wrote all his hamza like a two, except on this one day,’ he noted. ‘Whoever did the forgery got it almost perfect.’
Pearce carried on leafing through the ledger until he saw what he was looking for. ‘Karim Halabi,’ he said. ‘The only guard who writes his hamza like a five. Was he one of those killed?’
‘No,’ Salah replied, his face suddenly hardening. ‘He and all the other guards who worked on this block have been signed off for health reasons.’
Yousef sensed something was up and broke off his speech to sidle over. ‘What’s this?’
‘Someone might have forged the search records,’ Pearce said. ‘Possibly a guard called Karim Halabi.’
‘Then we must call internal security,’ Yousef responded excitedly, no doubt imagining the political advantage he’d obtain. ‘He must be interrogated.’
‘If it’s all the same, we’d like to talk to him first,’ Pearce said.
Brigitte nodded at Kamal. The former colonel pulled Yousef aside and Pearce only caught the first couple of words of their whispered conversation. ‘Ya habibi . . .’ it began. My good friend; the words used to prime countless corrupt deals in the Middle East. Pearce wasn’t interested in what grubby arrangement Kamal made to ensure Yousef didn’t escalate the discovery. He was thinking about what he’d do when he met Karim Halabi.
Chapter 18
Leila was locked in a quiet windowless room, searching for inspiration. She could hear Wollerton’s breathing nearby and the low hum of activity coming from elsewhere in the building, but the technical analysis laboratory was otherwise silent and the microscopes, spectrometers and computer scanners stood idle. They were inside one of the most secure buildings in Cairo, the headquarters of Keta El Amn El Watani, the Egyptian National Security Agency. Many Egyptians referred to it as the Mukhabarat, a common catch-all term across the Middle East for the state intelligence agencies, but Egypt’s NSA was separate from the nation’s true Mukhabarat, the General Intelligence Directorate, in that it focused purely on domestic threats. Lacking the budgets and technological sophistication of its western counterparts, the Egyptian NSA still relied heavily on human intelligence, and Leila had heard rumours that it had over 100,000 informants concealed within the general population. She could only begin to imagine the complexities of managing a network of that size, but Egypt faced serious social and political challenges and was fighting an ongoing campaign against violent Islamic militants in the Sinai and elsewhere. The very foundations of its republic were under threat, so she could understand the resources the Egyptian government was prepared to throw at its intelligence organizations. She had lived through the failure of a state and had to cope with the aftermath every single day.
However large its network, the NSA hadn’t been able to identify the source of the canister lying inside the isolation tank directly in front of her. She had her hands inside the tank’s inbuilt rubber gloves, but had given up manipulating the canister – there were no machining markings or evidence of calibrations of any kind. The canister had been inside a false can of Coca-Cola, but that too offered no traceable secrets.
According to Amina, the lab technician who had gone for a coffee with their Egyptian handler, Sharif, the canister was made of steel and had been cast rather than milled, no doubt to further reduce the chances of its origins being traced. The trigger was an electrical charge delivered to a tiny quantity of propellant. It worked like a large party popper.
‘Anything?’ Wollerton asked.
Leila shook her head slowly. She was frustrated by the puzzle, but at least it took her mind off her sister. She couldn’t get over the ease with which they’d infiltrated Egypt’s NSA and was more convinced than ever that Kamal, the former colonel, and his associate had ties to the Egyptian intelligence community. Sharif had been able to get them into the building with no more than a coronavirus test and a quiet conversation with a senior executive. Leila knew familial and tribal ties trumped all else in the Middle East, but Sharif’s relationship and ease of access had to be based on something more. The nameless executive who was never introduced to Leila or Wollerton had instructed Amina to be their liaison and give them unrestricted access to the case files and evidence.
The young woman had the thoughtful demeanour of a priestess, but she wore a patterned floral dress and matching hijab, and stored her pens and personal tools in a large Minnie Mouse pencil case that looked out of place on the counte
r next to the isolation tank. Amina had told them that searches for the identities of the two men had yielded nothing; not a single photo match on any database the Egyptians had access to, or on the Internet.
Leila had been troubled by this digital invisibility ever since Blaine Carter had told them the American prisoner had no photo record of any kind. That sort of anonymity could only be achieved by one of the larger intelligence players – the CIA, America’s NSA, Russia’s FSB or SVR, or China’s MSS. And even they would struggle. Digital invisibility was almost impossible in the era of constant surveillance, omnipresent cameras and cloud computing.
There had been no physical evidence at the scene other than the men’s fingerprints, which had yielded just as much of a blank as their images.
‘No marks?’ Wollerton asked.
‘Nothing,’ Leila replied. ‘Just their prints, which lead nowhere.’
‘Why didn’t he use a grenade?’ Wollerton asked. ‘It’s mechanical, less to go wrong with it. Same result and you’d have the benefit of destroying the delivery device in the process.’
Leila pondered the question. People usually opted for the least troublesome, quickest solution to any problem. Wollerton was right, a grenade would have been the better option, so why use a bespoke canister? She picked it up and manipulated it with the thick rubber gloves. The lid contained a tiny lithium battery and wiring that ran to the interior charge in the base, but what if the button on the top wasn’t the only way to detonate the device?
Feeling a rush of excitement, Leila turned the canister over. The base was almost certainly thick enough.
‘Can you find Amina?’ Leila said. ‘Ask her if they’ve X-rayed it.’
Wollerton nodded, unlocked the door and left the lab.
Leila held the top of the canister in one glove and grabbed the base with the other. She tried to twist the base off, but it didn’t budge. She put the canister down, withdrew her hands from the protective gloves and locked the lab door. As she limped back to the isolation tank, she studied the grey receptacle. She pushed her hands into the gloves and picked it up. She gripped the top again, but this time she held the very edge of the bottom of the canister. She tried to turn the base, but it didn’t give. She tried the other way and a hairline appeared less than half a centimetre from the bottom. She hurriedly unscrewed the base and was gratified to see tiny wires running from the main chamber to something in the base. It was a computer chip. She took her hands out of the gloves, ignored the hazard warnings on the outer airlock and opened the isolation tank. The toxin within the canister had become a harmless carbonate, so the isolation tank was just a precaution. Or at least that’s what Leila told herself as she opened the inner airlock.
She heard the door handle rattle and turned to see figures in the frosted panel window. The door caught against the lock.
‘Leila?’ Wollerton said from the other side.
She ignored him and reached into the tank. She snatched the chip from the base and slipped it into her pocket.
Wollerton tried the door again. ‘Hello?’ he said.
‘I have a key,’ Amina told him, and Leila saw the figures shift position.
She hurriedly reattached the base to the canister and closed the inner airlock. She kicked her cane to the floor as she shut the other hatch. When the door opened and Amina, Wollerton and Sharif entered, she was stooping to recover it. The three of them looked at her in puzzlement and there was a trace of suspicion in Amina’s face.
‘Sorry,’ Leila said. ‘I dropped my stick.’
She didn’t care whether they believed her. All she cared about was the tiny silicon wafer in her pocket. Featureless metal containers couldn’t be traced, but computer chips left a trail she could read.
Chapter 19
Yousef had grumbled the whole way to the City of the Dead. The deputy governor was unhappy they weren’t calling the authorities, but Kamal had convinced him to give them a chance to question Karim Halabi, the guard Pearce believed had forged the search log. The man who might have been responsible for getting the canister into Al Aqarab. Yousef had produced his phone a number of times and threatened to call the agent at Egypt’s NSA who was leading the investigation. As they’d travelled through Cairo in the Land Rover, Kamal had coaxed, cajoled and in the end threatened, saying Yousef wouldn’t want the NSA probing around all his dealings. Whatever information the former colonel had on the deputy governor must have been damaging because the pompous man had finally put his phone away and stopped talking about his duty to the nation. Pearce wondered what secrets Kamal knew and how he’d got them.
According to Salah, the captain of the prison guards, Karim Halabi was from an extremely poor peasant family, one of many who moved from the Nile Delta to Cairo in search of a better life. What Halabi’s family had found was a home among Cairo’s graves, the sprawling cemetery known as the City of the Dead, which lay between the grand citadel of the Mosque of Mohammed Ali and the medieval Khan el-Khalili bazaar. Families such as Karim’s built shanties in the six-kilometre-square necropolis and earned money by tending the monuments of wealthier Egyptians. Each family worked a patch and might earn the equivalent of five dollars per month for each mausoleum they tended.
A few lucky inhabitants managed to get jobs outside the cemetery and could escape the narrow walkways that zig-zagged between the haphazardly arranged stone tombs. But jobs were hard to come by, particularly when many people considered these families to be social outcasts who attracted bad fortune by virtue of their association with the dead. So dozens of people of all ages were consigned to live in impoverished conditions and spent their lives tending to crypts that were often larger and better cared for than the shacks they lived in.
Kamal parked the Land Rover Discovery on El-Soultan Ahmed Street, which ran through the heart of the City of the Dead, and Salah pointed out Karim’s home; a ramshackle breezeblock construction with a corrugated roof. Not much larger than the Discovery, Salah told them the tiny place was home to Karim, his mother, his sister, her husband and their three children. Pearce felt sorry for the guard. If he’d been looking for a way into Al Aqarab, Karim would have been top of his list of guards to turn. Desperation made people’s morals malleable.
‘How would you like to proceed?’ Kamal asked.
‘You, Salah and Brigitte get into position in case he tries to make a break for it, and I’ll go for the collar,’ Pearce said. ‘If he runs, one of you takes him.’
Salah nodded and Kamal said, ‘OK.’
But Yousef shook his head and leaned across Pearce, who suddenly caught a blast of overpowering cologne.
‘There are families in there,’ Yousef said, pointing at the shanties that stood beyond the Land Rover’s opaque windows. ‘What if he has another device? Or if he takes a child hostage? We should draw him out.’
Salah sighed, but Pearce didn’t react.
‘He will respect me,’ Yousef said. ‘I will tell him he’s needed for questioning at the prison. A routine interview to check facts. I’ll bring him to the car and you can do what you want.’
Pearce pursed his lips and studied the sprawling necropolis. If Karim made a run for it, there was no guarantee they could counter his local knowledge of the labyrinthine city. He could vanish north towards the ancient bazaar or south towards the grand old mosque.
‘OK,’ Pearce said. ‘You bring him to the car.’
Yousef nodded and stepped out. Pearce watched him hurry across the road.
‘If you’ll excuse me,’ Kamal said. ‘I think this is a bad idea. That man is not to be trusted.’
‘Why?’ Pearce asked.
Kamal tilted his head and raised his eyebrows. ‘He has expensive habits.’ He looked sideways at Salah, who was all ears.
‘Are you saying he’s corrupt?’ Brigitte asked.
‘He supplies oxycodone into the prison,’ Kamal replied.
Salah’s eyes widened, and he unleashed a string of curses.
‘Why didn’t you sa
y something sooner?’ Pearce asked.
‘Sometimes it’s more useful to have a pliable asset than it is to punish corruption,’ Kamal said.
‘I will report him,’ Salah said.
‘With what proof?’ Kamal responded.
‘How do you know this?’ Salah asked, but Kamal ignored the question.
‘I don’t care what you do with him,’ Pearce said, ‘but it’s clear he’s not to be trusted. Let’s move.’ He didn’t wait for a response and stepped into the heat of an autumn day. Brigitte got out of the front passenger seat and Kamal and Salah followed.
They jogged across the dusty street, and entered the vast necropolis through a hole in the crumbling perimeter wall. They picked their way round some of the smaller family tombs on the edge of the cemetery and approached Karim’s home.
Pearce knew something was wrong the moment he saw Karim emerge. The tall, thin guard cleared the low doorway and as he straightened from a stoop, he caught sight of Pearce and the others and his eyes widened. But it wasn’t Karim’s reaction that sent a chill down Pearce’s spine, it was the sight of Yousef following him out of the tiny breezeblock structure. When the deputy governor emerged, inches behind Karim, he had his hand inside his jacket. It was the pose of amateurs, one Pearce had seen in countless movies – Yousef was reaching for a gun.
An old woman – presumably Karim’s mother – appeared in the doorway, her face wizened by a life of poverty and the harsh beat of a relentless sun. Her craggy features crumpled in dismay as the horror began.
Pearce started running and cried out as Karim turned on his heels and sprinted away from them. The prison guard’s sandaled feet pounded the dusty ground and the hem of his striped black and white galabeya whipped around his ankles. Brigitte had also reacted and was a couple of paces ahead of Pearce.
Yousef already had the gun in his hand. ‘Stop!’ he yelled in English, no doubt for the benefit of his audience.
Karim ignored him and kept running. He was yards from the nearest monument, a low stone structure about half the area of a tennis court. More people had emerged from the neighbouring shanties and they watched aghast as Yousef took aim.
