The Moses Legacy

by Adam Palmer

  Instead, she had given him time – time to do his dirty work. Time to kill three more people and time to get the clothing sample that he had been sent there to find. That was far more serious. Three people dead was bad enough, and that was on top of the other killings: Carmichael, Roksana and the nurse at the hospital. If Goliath was allowed to fulfil Senator Morris’s evil scheme it could be the fate of an entire nation.

  So she had to stop him – and stop him now.

  But then another thought came to her. What if he hadn’t killed the people in the tomb? What if he had merely locked them inside? What if they were still alive? Shouldn’t she go there to check?

  Then she realized why she couldn’t do that. First of all, revealing herself to them would compromise her identity and her mission. Secondly, time was of the essence. They could probably survive in the tomb for several days – possibly even weeks if they had enough water. But if Goliath escaped now she might not get a second chance to catch up with him – at least not while it could make a difference.

  Even in a worst-case scenario, they could survive for several hours, and she could always put in an anonymous call alerting the authorities to their whereabouts. But she couldn’t afford to lose Goliath’s trail. He already had a head start, but she was still in contention. Moreover, she had a pretty good idea where he was going.

  She swung the car round and headed back along the spur road in pursuit of her quarry.

  Chapter 37

  ‘His neck’s been broken,’ said Mansoor. The sorrow in his voice was genuine; although he did not know the guardian personally, the man had been loyal. And he almost certainly had a family.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ asked Gabrielle, her fear growing.

  ‘Let’s not panic just yet,’ said Mansoor.

  ‘But no one knows we’re here!’ she replied. ‘You never told anybody! You didn’t phone in or anything.’

  ‘When we don’t make contact tomorrow they’ll know something is up. They’ll know where to look. They’ll see our jeep.’

  ‘If it’s still there,’ said Gabrielle. ‘I heard a car drive off.’

  ‘That must have been the car of whoever did this,’ said Daniel. ‘Whoever locked us in must have got here somehow – presumably by car – and whatever you heard, it was probably them driving off.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Mansoor. ‘It’s possible to walk across from the main valley.’

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Daniel, taking out his mobile phone.

  Almost in unison, the other two whipped out theirs. Daniel pressed the button to illuminate his and noticed that there was no signal. He tried a number, but got nothing. A brief glance at the others confirmed that they had not had better luck. He had hoped that because they were almost at surface level, they would get at least a weak signal – enough to call for help. Then he realized that they were behind an iron door and shielded on all sides by a thick layer of rock. Aside from that, the coverage in this country was none too good at the best of times.

  ‘We’re gonna die here!’ said Gabrielle, breaking down in tears and gasping for breath. Daniel put a comforting arm round her in the hope of calming her fears. Her sobbing declined in intensity and her breathing became shallower. Meanwhile, Mansoor quietly arranged the guardian’s body into some semblance of a dignified position. And then, quite abruptly, a smile graced his lips.

  ‘What?’ asked Daniel.

  Mansoor reached into the tomb guardian’s pockets to produce a giant bunch of keys.

  For a second, Daniel too was caught up in the euphoria, but then reality set in. ‘What good does that do us? We can’t reach the padlock.’

  The door was shut not by a lock that could be reached from inside, but rather by a padlock on the outside. The door could only be unlocked from the other side.

  Then Daniel saw something. ‘Look.’

  The others turned in the direction he was pointing. It was a loose, fist-sized piece of rock, embedded in the wall, but with the break lines clearly visible.

  ‘What?’ asked Gabrielle in confusion.

  Mansoor understood. And as Daniel took out his pocket-knife and opened it to prise the rock out of the wall, Mansoor crouched down to help him. Between them, they managed to free the piece of rock, which was about the size of half a brick and had a nice pointed corner.

  With the rock in his hand, Daniel charged at the iron door and began smashing away at a single point on its surface, near where the lock would be. Iron, when smashed repeatedly with the pressure on a single point, can eventually break. By hitting it repeatedly, Daniel was trying to puncture the iron door and then enlarge the hole sufficiently to reach through it. But after many attempts, all he had managed to do was make a dent in the heavy iron. And he had exhausted himself. Over the course of the next hour, Mansoor took over and then Gabrielle. Finally Daniel took the stone back and went at it with a vengeance.

  ‘There’s a hole!’ he cried with delight, noticing a pinprick of light. It was very small, but it was progress, and it encouraged the others to take over and go at it with similar vigour.

  Daniel wondered why no one heard the noise. To him it was deafening. Having heard the silence of the valley, it seemed strange that such a din did not carry. But then again, he realized that in the main valley the clamour made by the throngs of tourists would surely drown out the noise they were making. In any case, the distance was quite great and the fact that the noise of the tourists did not puncture the peace of the western valley testified to just how far apart those two worlds were.

  But as they continued with their exhausting efforts, Daniel noticed two things. The first was that the hole was getting bigger and the second was that the light that was coming through the ever increasing gap was ebbing. It was getting on for half past six and the sun was setting.

  A renewed sense of urgency set in and it manifested itself in the vigour with which Daniel wielded the stone as he attacked the hole. Finally, he stopped, exhausted. He held out the stone to Gabrielle, but she refused to take it. She was looking straight past him.

  ‘I think it’s big enough,’ she said.

  Daniel turned and looked. It was hard to tell. The poor light inside the tomb and the dimming light outside made it hard to assess the size, and the jagged edges made it uncertain how safe it was to put one’s hand through, not to mention one’s wrist. Daniel would personally have preferred to enlarge the hole before trying, but he was ready to defer to Gabrielle.

  ‘Do you think you can reach through that?’ he asked.

  Gabrielle stared at him, not answering.

  ‘No, she can’t,’ said a voice behind him. ‘But I can.’

  Daniel turned round to see Mansoor holding the key ready and realized that he was right. Gabrielle, because of her hand size and well-developed wrists, would not be able to reach through and neither could Daniel. But the more slender Mansoor might just be able to.

  ‘Please don’t drop it,’ said Daniel.

  It wasn’t intended to sound patronizing, but Mansoor responded with a withering look. Then, very slowly and carefully, he reached through with the key and tried to angle it towards the padlock. The other two saw the pained expression on his face as he rotated his arm in a desperate effort to get the key to where they needed it. And then he felt the key slipping in his sweaty fingers. He tried to pull his arm back in, but in his haste he cut his wrist on the jagged metal. Blood spurted from it and he cried out in pain.

  The others watched in horror as they realized that both his hand and the key it was struggling to hold on to were still on the other side of the door, trapped in the jagged-edged hole.

  Chapter 38

  Driving at night along the Nile Valley was a dangerous business. The main ‘highway’ was a single lane in which vehicles parked at night with their lights off, and donkey carts with neither lights nor red markings or reflectors to make them visible trundled along invisibly. Added to that, there were also trucks with unsafe loads and long-distance taxis
, driven with a brazen disregard not only for the speed limit but even for the laws of physics.

  This meant that drivers had to make a hard choice between high speed, to mingle with the flow of local motorized traffic, and low speed to avoid the pitfalls of the stationary vehicles and donkeys. Navigating a middle course between those two perils was difficult.

  But Sarit didn’t really have a choice.

  She had followed Goliath back to Luxor, thinking that he was going to ditch the jeep and either fly back to Cairo or take the overnight train. But instead he proceeded to drive north along the Nile Valley, presumably intending to make it to Cairo by road. This was understandable – the further he took the jeep away from the western valley, the less likely Mansoor and the others were to be found. And this made Sarit more convinced that they were still alive.

  Sarit calculated that she had two options – either to press on and try to catch Goliath, or to turn back to save the people she was supposed to protect. The drive back would take several hours and it was already dark. On the other hand, she had had to stop for petrol and was not sure if she was still in with a chance of catching up with Goliath. He might be driving fast, in excess of the speed limit. Of course she could do the same, but what if she was stopped by the police? The last thing she wanted to do was come to the attention of the authorities.

  Finally, she made a decision. She pulled over by the roadside and logged on to the Internet via her mobile phone. Lacking the time for the usual photograph and steganography routine, she put a message on the wall of her social network page that said: I’m looking for big man. She just hoped that Dovi or someone at the Mossad would get it and give her a real-time update on his whereabouts.

  Right now she didn’t have time to wait for an answer. Instead, she restarted the car and drove on, keeping to the main road north. After a while she got a message on her phone that a friend had commented on her wall. She pulled over again, logged on and saw a message that said: You’re only two kilometres away from the man of your dreams. Maybe you’ll have to chase him faster, but keep going the way you are and you’ll meet him.

  She smiled and realized that Mossad were tracking both her and Goliath via the GPS on their mobile phones. The message implied that a slight acceleration would be all that she needed to catch up with him.

  Looking at the terrain, she realized that she might find a quiet spot without witnesses where she could deal with Goliath once and for all. Then she remembered that this was a petrol car, not diesel and that meant she could nip this problem in the bud. Instead of restarting the car immediately, she got out, opened the tank and siphoned off some petrol into the soft drink bottle she had retained from the gas station. Using a rag from the boot of the car, which she soaked in petrol, she created a Molotov cocktail. She got back into the car and shoved it into the door compartment.

  Now all she had to do was drive fast, without attracting the attention of the police. She realized that the way others were driving, she might just get away with it.

  Chapter 39

  Ignoring the blood and struggling desperately not to let the key slip from his fingers, Mansoor made another turn of his hand and just about managed to find the insert point of the padlock. But he still had to twist the key with his fingers to rotate it to the right angle to get it in. For a minute he thought it was going to slip from his sweaty grasp, but then he felt something catch and he realized that the key was in.

  Now it was just a matter of turning it… turning it some more… and some more…

  Yes!

  The padlock was open. He pulled on the heavy lower part to disengage it, then he turned the bottom away ninety degrees. Finally he removed the whole thing and let it drop to the floor.

  ‘Quick! Let’s get him out!’ Daniel yelled to Gabrielle. Mansoor was hardly able to speak.

  They pushed the door open and Daniel rushed round to the other side to help free Mansoor’s hand, gently guiding it through so that the sharp metal didn’t tear into the flesh any further.

  But it was already clear from the blood pouring out that an artery had been opened. Mansoor sat down and lifted his arm above the level of his heart while Daniel applied arterial pressure using his belt to stem the flow of blood.

  ‘I still can’t get a signal,’ said Gabrielle, frantically moving her mobile phone this way and that in the hope of getting it to work. She tried the same with Daniel’s phone, and Mansoor’s, but she was unable to get a signal.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ll have to walk. Go that way,’ said Mansoor, pointing west towards the Nile Valley. ‘Leave me here and get help.’

  ‘We have to take you with us,’ said Daniel, brushing off Mansoor’s selflessness.

  ‘We haven’t got a stretcher.’

  ‘You can still walk, can’t you?’

  ‘I can still walk, but I’d only slow you down.’

  Daniel looked at Gabrielle. She had been panicking before when she thought that they were going to spend their last few days dying of starvation in the unused tomb of an ancient pharaoh, but now that her own life was no longer under threat, her concern turned to her former teacher.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t be in any danger here?’

  He looked around and pointed this way and that contemptuously. ‘My dear girl, do you see any predators around here? Any lions or tigers, perhaps? Or maybe a wild camel?’

  It was true that male camels could become violent to the point of killing during the mating season, if anything got between them and the fertile females, but aside from that, there was no danger out here in the desert.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was just concerned.’

  She was none too bothered by his irascible response. She knew his character very well after all these years.

  ‘I’ll be all right, just as long as you get help. Make sure you tell them my exact location.’

  ‘Should we ask them to use a helicopter?’ asked Daniel, suddenly feeling unsure.

  ‘They’ll know what to do!’ snapped Mansoor. ‘Just tell them my circumstances. Now go!’

  For a split second, Daniel and Gabrielle hesitated, meeting each other’s eyes, as if seeking the other’s approval for what might seem like a callous act. Then Daniel took the initiative, nodded and set off, followed a second or two later by Gabrielle.

  ‘Wait!’ Mansoor cried out.

  They froze and turned to see the Egyptian holding out his mobile phone.

  ‘Take my phone. Keep checking it. As soon as you get a signal, call the number I’ve keyed into it. It’s the nearest hospital.’

  ‘We can do that on our phones,’ said Daniel. ‘Just give us the number.’

  ‘My phone is better in these conditions. Also the pair of you kept checking your e-mail, like little Western nerds. You’re probably low on juice.’

  ‘But we can’t leave you without a phone,’ said Gabrielle, her voice weak with guilt.

  ‘A phone doesn’t do me any good without a signal.’ He held out the mobile to Daniel. ‘Now, get going! And make it quick.’

  And with that, they were off. It was one of those walks that seemed to become less tiring as it continued. After the first couple of hundred yards, they already felt sore, perhaps because of muscle cramps. They had spent several hours immobile in the tomb and when they came out into the open, the night air was cooler than they had expected now the sun had gone in. But as they continued and their muscles warmed up, it became easier.

  But it was the psychological exhaustion that made it truly tiring – the thought of how much depended on them getting help in time. Also Daniel felt worn-out at the thought of how long they would have to walk even to get to the edge of the Nile Valley. It was a five-mile walk, but the terrain was rough and Daniel knew that even at their current brisk pace it would take them at least an hour. It wasn’t so much the prospect of an hour’s walk that worried him: it was concern for what would happen to Mansoor in the meantime.

  How long did he have?
How rapidly was he losing blood?

  Daniel looked over at Gabrielle and saw from the look on her face that she too was concerned. Without any exchange of words, she seemed to pick up on his suggestion and whipped out her phone. The look in her eyes said it all even before she put it away again. He tried to get a signal with his, but had no more luck, and Mansoor’s proved no better, despite his confidence.

  They carried on more in desperation than hope, Gabrielle taking the lead.

  ‘I wish I’d followed my nephews’ advice and got into shape sooner,’ said Daniel, trying to make light of the situation.

  ‘You’re pretty fit,’ said Gabrielle.

  ‘Not like you.’

  ‘Flattery, flattery.’

  He quickened his pace and lengthened his stride to catch up with her, just in time to catch the smile on her face before it vanished.

  ‘You know, I always wanted to be like you,’ she said.

  ‘What? A man?’

  ‘Ha fuckin’ ha. No, I mean when I used to visit Uncle Harrison during the summer… when you were working on your dissertation.’

  ‘So how come you went into Egyptology instead of Semitic languages?’

  ‘That came later. No, at the time, I wanted to be a magician.’

  ‘A magician?’

  ‘Yes. Remember all those tricks you did with cards and coins and all that?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. That was something I did at school. It was the only way I could make friends. I didn’t know you were interested in that.’

  ‘Oh God, yes! I used to spend hours practising… hoping I could be as good as you.’

  ‘And were you?’

  ‘Did I ever show you my magic skills?’

  ‘Not as far as I recall.’

  ‘Then there’s your answer. Rest assured, Daniel, if I’d thought I could have impressed you in those days, I would have done.’