by James Becker
‘And then, in about nine hundred and twenty BC, the Egyptian pharaoh, Shishaq, invaded Judah and laid siege to Jerusalem. That was bad enough for Rehoboam, but what made it worse was that Shishaq had provided refuge to Jeroboam – Rehoboam’s bitter enemy – so his invasion was in support of his ally. And it’s known that to buy off Shishaq and the Egyptians, Rehoboam gave them all the treasures of the Temple.’
‘And that would presumably have included the Ark?’
‘Unless Rehoboam’s priests had managed to hide it somewhere else, yes. And if they’d managed to hide the Ark, why didn’t they also hide the other Temple treasures, which were known to have been seized by Shishaq?’
‘I see what you mean.’
Angela nodded. ‘The counter-argument, if you like, is that the Second Book of Chronicles states that the Ark was present in the Temple of Jerusalem in the reign of Josiah, between about six hundred and forty BC and six hundred and nine BC.’
‘So if you follow this line of reasoning, the story in the Bible about the Ark being seized and hidden in Tanis by Shishaq must be wrong?’
‘Not necessarily. The Bible is inaccurate about almost everything, but especially dates and anything that resembles an historical fact.’
‘So how do you know that the stuff about Shishaq is accurate?’
Angela smiled and sat back. ‘Simple. It’s not just in the Bible. The Egyptians were compulsive record-keepers, and Shishaq’s conquest of Judah is recorded there as well. What we have to do as a first step is to go and check on the only relevant primary sources that I know of. Untranslated primary sources, I mean.’
Their flight was being called, and Bronson stood up. ‘And where are these untranslated primary sources?’
‘The place I mentioned back in my flat: the bas-relief carvings in a small temple dedicated to Amun-Great-of-Roarings at el-Hiba. If I don’t find anything definite there, we may also have to trek a long way south to look at the Shishaq Relief on the Bubastis Portal. That’s outside the Temple of Amun at Karnak. But first, we must track down the man who has the paintings – Hassan al-Sahid.’
As Bronson and Angela vanished from sight, a tall dark-haired man stood up from his seat on the opposite side of the departure lounge. He strode across to the ground stewardess at the barrier and joined the end of the queue. When his turn came, he showed her his passport and handed over his boarding card. She tore off one section, handed the remainder back to him, and wished him a pleasant flight.
The man nodded and smiled at her, then followed the last of the passengers down the ramp and on to the aircraft.
29
Cairo airport had been a surprise. Bronson had been expecting a dusty, crowded and inefficient place, probably fairly ramshackle, but actually it was gleaming and ultramodern, a high-tech steel and glass cathedral dedicated to the needs of the international traveller.
Like all non-Egyptian nationals, they’d needed entry visas but had obviously not had enough time to obtain these before they left the UK. Fortunately, after a few minutes spent queuing at a booth in the terminal building, they were each sold a couple of stamps – entry and exit – that were then applied to a page in their passports. Then they queued again, at a different booth, to get the ‘entry’ visa stamped. That entitled them to fourteen days’ residence in Egypt.
After a short taxi ride they’d checked in to their hotel in the Heliopolis district on the north-eastern side of the city, not too far from the airport, grabbed a late snack at a local restaurant that was still serving food and then fallen into bed.
First thing the following morning Bronson borrowed a copy of the Cairo telephone directory from the reception desk and started looking for Hassan al-Sahid, only to find that al-Sahid was a fairly common name in the area, with about forty or fifty entries in the directory listings.
‘We need to narrow this down a bit,’ he observed. ‘Was there any indication in the stuff you got from Carfax Hall where al-Sahid might live?’
‘Hang on a second.’ Angela put her laptop – she’d bought a new machine at Heathrow and had transferred all her stored files and programs on to it while they’d waited for their flight to depart – on the table and switched it on. Then she flicked through the scanned images until she found the bill of sale for the paintings and magnified the appropriate section of it.
‘Here we are. It’s hand-written, so the address isn’t that clear, but I think it says he lives in Al-Gabal el-Ahmar, which I presume is a Cairo district or suburb.’
Angela spelt out the name and Bronson ran his finger down the appropriate page in the telephone directory.
‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘no listings at all. Oh, just a second. Could it be spelt Al-Gebel al-Ahmar, not Al-Gabal el-Ahmar?’
Angela looked carefully at the image on her laptop. ‘It’s a bit blurred, but I suppose it could be.’
‘Right. If it is, then there are three al-Sahids there, one actually called Hassan, the second just with the initial “M” and the third named Suleiman.’ Bronson copied down their numbers and addresses, then closed the directory. ‘What we don’t know, of course, is whether Hassan al-Sahid is even alive after all this time, or whether he still lives in the same house. Do you want to telephone, or just turn up at the door?’
‘We’ll go there, I think. There can’t be that many Egyptians who would have spent most of their working lives escorting English archaeologists around sites in the country. Don’t forget Al-Sahid didn’t just work for Bartholomew – he was a professional gang master.’ She got up and turned off her laptop. ‘At the very least we might find someone who remembers him.’
Ten minutes later, they stepped out on to the street. The heat was brutal – Bronson guessed it was probably already in the high twenties – and the traffic driving past the hotel was heavy, horns sounding a discordant melody, dust and smoke billowing everywhere.
The receptionist had told him where the nearest car hire agency was located, and it was only a fairly short walk from the hotel. The only feature the hire car absolutely had to have, as far as Bronson was concerned, was air conditioning, but in fact every vehicle available was equipped either with that or with climate control, so eventually he settled on a white – all the cars at the agency were white – Peugeot 309.
There was a map of Alexandria and Cairo in the glove box, and another route-planning map that covered the whole of Egypt. While he sat in the driver’s seat, both doors wide open, waiting for the air con to haul the internal temperature down to a bearable level, Bronson looked at the latter. Compared to most whole-country charts, it was an unusual map, because almost all the roads, towns and cities were clustered in a fairly narrow T-shape, the top of which ran along the Mediterranean coast from the Libyan border east to Alexandria and then across to the border with Israel. The ‘leg’ of the T then followed the mighty Nile River all the way down to Sudan. To the west of the Nile there was just a vast empty expanse of desert, studded with the occasional settlement, and even the odd airfield. To the east of the Nile, between the river and the Red Sea, lay a ribbon of roads and settlements, but most of the built-up areas were in the north, where the Nile met the Mediterranean, in a rough ‘V’ that encompassed Alexandria, Port Said and Cairo itself.
He switched his attention to the Cairo map and fairly quickly found Al-Gebel al-Ahmar. ‘It’s here,’ he said, pointing to an area on the east side of the city, just east of the Northern Cemetery. ‘Not too far away. Can you navigate?’
‘Of course,’ Angela said briskly.
Bronson closed his door, buckled his seat belt, pulled out of the car hire agency parking lot and tried to turn into the street.
‘Tried’ was the operative word. The traffic was chaotic. Cars, coaches and vans were everywhere, their drivers grimly determined never to give way, never to allow a fellow driver the chance to get in front of them or pass. Bronson looked at the stream of vehicles for a couple of minutes, then decided the only way to beat them was to join them.
‘Just
hold on,’ he muttered, as he waited for the smallest of gaps in the line of vehicles passing down the street. Then he pulled out, accelerating hard. Behind him he heard a sudden squealing of brakes and the inevitable bellows from a selection of car and van horns.
‘Jesus, Chris, was that necessary? Couldn’t you have waited?’ Angela looked pale.
‘If I’d waited,’ Bronson said, with a grin, ‘we’d still be sitting there at the side of the road, and would be for some time. I was just being pragmatic.’
‘Which means what, exactly, in this context?’ Angela asked. ‘Oh, shit,’ she muttered, closing her eyes as a coach shot out of a side road directly in front of them, forcing Bronson – and about a dozen other drivers – to hit the brakes hard.
‘It means that we’re in Egypt,’ Bronson said, ‘so I think the best option is to drive like an Egyptian. And that means all the normal rules about giving way and leaving a safe distance behind the car in front – all the stuff I was taught as a police driver, in fact – go right out of the window. Over here, if you leave a gap of more than about three feet in front of you, a driver will absolutely force his way into it.’
‘Aren’t there any rules here?’
Bronson nodded. ‘I checked,’ he said. ‘Basically, there’s just one – the car in front has right of way. So if the guy next to us gets his bumper one inch ahead of mine, and then swings across in front of me, he’s in the right. That’s why they never give way, and never leave a gap.’
Angela dragged her unwilling gaze from the melee in front of them and glanced across at her ex-husband as he changed lanes, braked hard, accelerated and changed lanes again before pulling the car to a halt behind a line of unmoving vehicles which were somewhat surprisingly waiting at a red light. Traffic lights only appeared in Egypt in about 1980, and most of the locals still tended to ignore them.
‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ Angela said accusingly.
Bronson took his eyes off the road for an instant and grinned at her. ‘Absolutely. It’s like dodgems, but with full-sized vehicles; great fun. Now, stop complaining about my driving and tell me where you want me to go.’
About a hundred yards behind them, a Mercedes with tinted windows was following. In the driver’s seat, JJ Donovan flipped open a pack of Marlboros and extracted one, then pressed the dashboard lighter. Once he’d lit the cigarette, he cracked the window slightly to let the smoke escape, and concentrated on the traffic in front of him.
He’d watched Bronson and Angela Lewis step out of their hotel that morning, followed them to the car hire agency and then sat waiting in his own vehicle until they drove out. Then it had been a simple case of keeping tabs on them as they headed towards the centre of Cairo.
In fact, ‘simple’ wasn’t quite the right word. Donovan was used to driving in the States, but even fighting his way through the Los Angeles traffic a couple of times every day hadn’t prepared him for the reality of the morning rush hour in downtown Cairo. The two good things were that the Merc had an automatic box, so all he had to do was steer the big car, and he was used to driving on the right-hand side of the road, though Egyptian drivers seemed to drive more or less wherever and however they wanted.
Donovan knew Bronson was driving, and it looked as if he was pretty competent. A couple of times the smaller Peugeot had nipped through gaps that the Mercedes wouldn’t have fitted in, and were barely large enough for the French car, but there was so much traffic that losing sight of his quarry had never really been likely.
And, even if he did lose contact with Bronson’s car, it wasn’t going to be that much of a problem. Donovan just loved technology. After he’d questioned Jonathan Carfax in the kitchen of the old house in Suffolk, he’d walked out of the room, taking Bronson’s mobile with him. Out in the hall, he’d quickly opened the phone and installed a sophisticated GPS tracking chip, then gone back into the kitchen and replaced the Nokia on the table. He didn’t think Carfax even noticed what he’d done.
Powered by the phone’s own battery, and virtually undetectable unless the user knew exactly what his mobile’s circuit board should look like, the chip computed its position from signals received from the GPS satellites, and radiated that position to the GSM cellphone network. Donovan could then monitor the chip’s signal from his laptop using a combined tracking and mapping program. The chip was one of the latest generation, and allowed him to pinpoint the position of the phone – and by implication its owner – to within about thirty feet anywhere on the surface of the earth.
The chip had allowed him to follow them to Heathrow, and because neither Bronson nor Angela Lewis had even seen his face, he’d been able to get close enough to hear what they were saying to each other. He had actually flown out to Cairo with them on the same plane.
He settled down to follow Bronson’s Peugeot. He had a full tank of fuel, his laptop was sitting in its case on the seat beside him, and built into the computer was a WWAN adapter – a wireless wide area network card – that meant he could access the mobile phone network to surf the internet. So wherever Bronson went, he would be able to follow, as long as he was within range of a cell.
Donovan leaned back in his seat, picked up a bottle of water from the cup-holder in the centre console and took a swallow. He was deliberately trying to avoid drinking too much, because he didn’t want to have to stop until Bronson and Angela Lewis also pulled up. He needed to find out as soon as possible where they were going and what it was they were looking for.
Angela studied the map of Cairo, then looked out of the window. ‘Where are we now?’ she asked.
Bronson glanced away from the road for the split second it took to register a direction sign.
‘That sign said we’re just about to reach Abbassiyya,’ he said. ‘If I were you I’d forget about road names and numbers and just work out the districts we need to drive through.’
‘Good thinking,’ Angela said, and looked again at the open map. ‘If you’re right and we are in Abbassiyya, it means we must have been heading south-west, more or less. When you can, take any street on the left, because we have to cross the main road, the Salah Salem. Failing that, just follow the signs to Al-Gebel al-Ahmar, obviously, or the Northern Cemetery, Manshiyet Nasr or even Muqattam City. Any of those will get us into the right general area.’
A few seconds later, a slight gap opened up in the traffic on their left and Bronson slid his car expertly into the space. He was rewarded with a cacophony of blasting horns. Then he swung down a fairly narrow street, dodging parked cars, dogs and children, and at the end turned right. Here the road was wider, better surfaced and properly marked, and almost entirely full of virtually stationary traffic.
‘Bugger,’ Bronson muttered. He was completely surrounded.
‘It doesn’t matter. Once we get off the main road, I’m sure there’ll be a lot less traffic.’
‘Well, there could hardly be more traffic, could there? This is supposed to be a three-lane road but I can see four lanes of traffic heading in each direction.’
Just then it all started moving again – slowly, but it was moving – and Bronson eased the car forward, keeping it no more than eighteen inches behind the battered rear bumper of the vehicle in front. They came to a stop again, then began inching forwards once more.
‘It’s more modern here than I anticipated,’ Bronson said, after a few moments, looking at the slightly grubby skyscrapers that lined both sides of the road.
‘In the centre and in Cairo proper, I guess that’s true, but I imagine that if you went out of the city you’d see houses that have hardly changed for half a millennium.’
About a quarter of an hour later, Angela spotted a sign for Al-Gebel al-Ahmar, and Bronson hacked his way through the traffic to make the turn. Angela had been right – once they cleared the main road and started heading south, the traffic was much lighter.
They crossed a railway line and kept moving, Angela checking the street signs as they passed.
‘That�
�s the first address,’ she said, pointing to the left as Bronson drove past the end of a minor road. ‘That’s where Hassan al-Sahid – or at least a Hassan al-Sahid – lives.’
‘Right,’ Bronson said, swinging the car round in a U-turn to retrace their steps. ‘Let’s find out.’
30
‘Your name is Suleiman al-Sahid?’
The young man standing in the doorway of the large whitewashed house on the eastern side of the Al-Gebel al-Ahmar district looked puzzled. He hadn’t been expecting any visitors, and certainly not a black-suited American priest carrying a large and apparently heavy suitcase, with a thick plaster covering most of his left ear.
‘It is,’ he replied in heavily accented English, ‘but I—’
‘You don’t know me,’ the priest interrupted, ‘but I know your father, Hassan. How is his health these days?’
Suleiman shook his head. ‘He died a few years ago,’ he replied. ‘But I—’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. I also know the Wendell-Carfax family, from England. Now, I have an important message for you from them, so may I come inside?’
Suleiman nodded, and stepped to one side. The priest picked up the suitcase and followed Suleiman into the house.
‘You have a message for me, you said? And what is your name?’
‘Daniels. Father Michael Daniels.’ The priest extended his hand. ‘You have a lovely home here,’ he added, glancing around the spacious hallway.
‘Thank you.’
‘Now, Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax entrusted your father with two large oil paintings. Were you aware of that?’
Suleiman nodded. ‘Yes. My father left very specific instructions about them. They’re hanging in this room.’
He turned and led the way into a room just off the hall, dominated by a large dining table surrounded by eight chairs.
