by Adam Palmer
He remembered that she had had a bit of a crush on him in those days. She was fifteen when he first started work on his PhD. He had got into University College London’s Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the age of sixteen and graduated with a First in Language and Culture. At twenty he had gone on to do a direct doctorate at Cambridge under Harrison Carmichael. Gabrielle lived in Vienna, but spent her summers in Cambridge with her uncle, while her widowed mother travelled.
Daniel was well aware at the time that Gabrielle had a crush on him. He remembered all too well the constant flirting, the dressing up to look older, the ostentatious way she used to swish past him in a short skirt, desperately trying to catch his attention. He had to admit to himself that at times his eye did rove and his imagination was aroused. But she was a girl on the cusp of womanhood and he was an adult. To take it beyond the occasional acknowledgement of her flirting would have been as improper as it was illegal.
So he had played it cool and somewhere along the line she had grown out of him.
Half an hour into the walk, they tried the mobile phones again. This time, Gabrielle’s face lit up, so that even before she made eye contact with Daniel, he knew that the news was good.
She spoke urgently into the phone and when she was finished, she turned to Daniel with a beaming smile on her face.
‘They’re on their way.’
‘I heard. Did they say which hospital they’re taking him to?’
‘Luxor. But only because it’s nearer.’
‘Okay, well, let’s keep going till we make it to the valley, then see if we can get some sort of transport.’
Gabrielle nodded.
In the quarter of an hour that followed, they heard a helicopter in the distance and glanced at each other for encouragement. Privately, Daniel still had concerns. Would they arrive on time? Was Mansoor still alive?
‘What?’ asked Gabrielle, seeing the look on his face.
‘Nothing.’ He had no wish to worry her too, and no reason to share his fears with her either.
After a time, the land beneath their feet turned from sand and rock to lush green grass, and they knew that they had reached the edge of the Nile Valley. Gabrielle took out Mansoor’s mobile phone and played with the buttons, looking at the display. Daniel wasn’t sure what she was doing, but he decided not to ask until she had finished. In the meantime, he looked around and kept his eyes peeled for a taxi.
A few went past, but they already had fares. Meanwhile, Gabrielle was using Mansoor’s phone to make a call, but Daniel was still too preoccupied with his concerns for Mansoor to ask who she was calling. He hoped that they hadn’t got lost or failed to find Mansoor. Gabrielle had told them the exact location, and he would have had no reason to leave the area. In any case, how far could he have gone?
And then another thought struck Daniel – a frightening thought. Someone had tried to kill them before, by locking them in. What if the killer was still around? What if he was following them?
Daniel quickly dismissed this thought as nonsense. When they got out of the tomb, their jeep had been missing. Whoever had done it would have no reason to come back. But why had they locked them in to begin with? Who was the intended target? Was it Mansoor? Gabrielle? Daniel himself? All three?
It makes no sense!
And there was one more thing that didn’t make sense. Although Gabrielle was holding the phone to her ear, she wasn’t speaking. She was listening… but she wasn’t saying a word. And the look on her face concerned Daniel. It was a look of fear.
He was about to ask her what the problem was when a police van appeared in the distance heading towards them on the main road. Daniel started waving his arms in a desperate attempt to flag it down. The police van screeched to a halt and four police officers leapt out. But what happened next took him by surprise: they drew their guns.
Not sure of what was happening, Daniel opted for the common-sense approach and put his hands up.
‘British,’ he shouted, as if that word conferred some sort of magical protection. But then something happened that Daniel couldn’t believe.
The police started firing!
Instinctively, Daniel hit the ground. Gabrielle did likewise, except that she took half a second longer to react.
Chapter 40
Sarit’s training had involved the advanced driving course, including night driving, but she still felt uncomfortable doing it. Along the way she had evaded a donkey cart and two parked cars and nearly been demolished by a heavily loaded truck that shed some of its load in an effort to overtake her.
And now she caught sight of what she thought was the jeep that Goliath had driven away from the tomb, though it was hard to tell in the darkness. She could make out the form, but not the colour, much less the occupant. In any case, there were too many other cars on this stretch of road to be able to do anything. She would have to bide her time.
But she stayed in contact, keeping several car lengths back. The drive back to Cairo would take seven or eight hours all told, and she had barely been driving for two.
It was some three hours later that she finally got her opportunity. The traffic had thinned out considerably because many people did not want to drive that late, and somewhere along the line it got to the point that she was no longer able to keep other vehicles between them because they were on a stretch of road that had no other vehicles. That meant that the time to strike was now. She opened the driver’s window, knowing that she would not be able to reach over to her passenger window whilst controlling the vehicle, but this also meant that she could not throw the Molotov cocktail while overtaking him. Instead, she would have to get him to overtake her.
Steeling herself, she overtook him in a highly aggressive manoeuvre and then slowed down in front of him, just sitting there in the single lane, knowing that he was getting increasingly annoyed. She didn’t respond when he hooted and flashed his lights at her. But when he started moving out to overtake, she knew the time had come. Holding the steering wheel with her right hand, she lit the rag with her left, dropped the lighter and took the Molotov cocktail out of the side pocket.
As Goliath pulled up level with her and shouted something out at her, she threw the Molotov cocktail as hard as she could through the open driver’s window of her car and the passenger window of his. She had been intending to throw it through the rear window, so that it would shatter on impact and explode. But at the last minute, she realized that she couldn’t be sure that it would penetrate. It would depend on how strong or reinforced the windows were. Within seconds, the interior of Goliath’s car was ablaze, including his clothes, as he screamed with pain and skidded this way and that.
But Sarit had no time to survey the results of her work. She put her foot down and pulled away quickly, casting a brief glance in her rear-view mirror to satisfy herself that the job was done.
What she didn’t see was the old man with the donkey and cart on the side road. But he had seen her and was surprised that she didn’t stay to help. It was for that reason that he whipped out a pen and wrote down what he remembered of her registration number on his hand.
Chapter 41
‘My name is Daniel Klein!’ Daniel shouted. ‘I’m a British professor and a friend of Akil Mansoor! This is Gabrielle Gusack! She’s also a friend of Professor Mansoor! We’re unarmed!’
‘I don’t think that’s going to help,’ said Gabrielle.
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t think they’re in a mood to listen.’
‘But they surely can’t think we did anything to harm Mansoor. We were the ones who summoned help, for God’s sake!’
‘Listen, Daniel, there’s no time to explain now, but on the count of three, get up and run to the left. There’s some cover there by those trees, and then some buildings. We can make it to a side street and get clear of them; they’ll have to drive the long way round.’
‘But if we run, it’ll just make it look as if we’ve got something to hide.’
And with that she started her quiet countdown. ‘One, two, three!’
She raised herself only as high as she needed to in order to run and sprinted to the left, just like she had said. Danny barely had time to admire her speed, for – against his better judgement – he found himself running too.
Keeping his head down, he couldn’t see the flashes of the guns or the streaks of the bullets. Neither could he see where the shots were landing. It was only when the gunfire subsided and he felt safe enough to slow down, that he saw Gabrielle turning back towards him, almost smiling with exhilaration.
For a moment, Daniel’s mind returned to the thought that maybe the police did think that they had deliberately harmed Mansoor. But even if so, shooting at them still made no sense. Why not simply tell them to put their hands up and surrender?
‘I don’t understand why they’re firing at us,’ he said in desperation.
He was about to say more, when he noticed that Gabrielle was bleeding from the shoulder.
‘They’re afraid of coming into contact with us,’ she said, grimacing from the pain.
Chapter 42
The bitch! thought Goliath. The fucking evil bitch!
He didn’t know who she was. In his agony, with his clothes on fire, all he knew was that she was the enemy.
The searing pain enveloped his body.
Get out! his mind was screaming. Get out! But it was easier said than done. To get out he would have had to use his hands and he couldn’t even feel his hands.
Neither, for that matter, could he see. His eyes were closed and his eyeballs were so hot it was as if they were melting in their sockets.
He heard the door opening and felt hands upon him, under his armpits. The hands were small, yet their grip was surprisingly strong.
‘Wa ismaholiya mousa’a aidatica.’
He didn’t understand the words. But he could tell from the tone that someone was trying to help. He allowed himself to be dragged from the car. Once outside, his instinct was to run, to escape from the flames that engulfed him, but he knew that running would merely fan the flames and feed them with oxygen.
Instead, he allowed the man to push him to the ground and roll him. He continued to roll by himself, sensing that it was working. He felt a soft blow to a wide area of his torso. Fabric on flesh. The stranger was trying to beat out the flames. Eventually, it became clear that the flames had subsided, but the searing pain on his flesh lingered on. The only thing he knew for sure was that he was alive.
But he felt his consciousness slipping away.
Chapter 43
‘It’s just a flesh wound,’ said Gabrielle with a smile, tying her headscarf around her shoulder.
Harsh as the situation was, Daniel couldn’t fail to see the humour in it.
‘You’ve been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies. We’ve got to get you to a doctor.’
‘With those guys trying to kill us? Are you crazy?’
They were moving in the shadows, avoiding the pools of light thrown by the street lamps. They weren’t sure if they were still being followed, but it was clear that the cops – if indeed they were cops – were in no mood to listen to them.
‘So what do you suggest, Gaby? You’re bleeding.’
‘It’s Gabrielle to you.’
‘Oh, cut it out! You’ll always be Gaby to me.’
‘Whatever! Anyway it’s not bleeding.’
‘So what’s that then?’
He pointed to the blood on the scarf.
‘It’s congealed blood.’
‘Covering quite an area. And blood doesn’t coagulate that quickly.’
‘It was never bleeding in the first place. It was a scraping injury, the bullet just grazed me. There was blood but no bleeding. It’s like when you scrape a limb on a rough surface.’
‘It must hurt like hell.’
‘I’m a woman. We’re biologically programmed to pass an infant’s fifteen-centimetre cranium through a ten-centimetre passage. Do you think a little scraping on my upper arm is going to bother me?’
‘If it was me I wouldn’t be so stoic.’
‘I guess you’re handicapped by what you’ve got between your legs.’
Daniel smiled. ‘I take it back, what I said about Clint Eastwood. It’s too many reruns of Xena: Warrior Princess.’ If she could keep this up, in the face of what must have been at least moderately painful, then at least he didn’t have to worry about her any more. ‘So what happened to that frightened little girl from the tomb back there?’
‘It’s not the pain that bothers me. It’s not being in control. I guess I can take danger, I just can’t take confinement.’
Daniel nodded, approving of the logic. ‘The thing I don’t understand is why they were shooting at us.’ He looked at her expectantly. She said nothing. He had another go. ‘You said something about them not wanting to come into contact…’
Gabrielle held out Mansoor’s phone. ‘There’s a message. You might like to listen to it.’
He took the phone and held it to his ear.
‘Hallo Professor Mansoor, this is the Minister of Health, Farooq Mahdi. We have a little problem on our hands. We understand that you are travelling in the company of a British man called Daniel Klein and a woman called Gabrielle Gusack. Please be very wary of them. There is an arrest warrant out for Daniel Klein after he jumped bail on a murder charge. We believe that he could be very dangerous. There is also evidence that they are both carrying the same contagious disease as the volunteers at the dig. The Gusack woman is known to have been in contact with a curator at the British Museum and he later succumbed to the same disease. Please get away from them as soon as possible and contact us.’
Now he realized why Gabrielle had been so determined to get him to run. As far as the cops were concerned, they were a dangerous health hazard and the police didn’t want to go anywhere near them – even if shooting them was the only alternative. The fact that Daniel was also suspected of being a murderer on the run, made it easier for them to take that shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach. Daniel knew that in these circumstances, there was no point trying to reason with them.
But why on earth should anyone think they were carrying a disease? They weren’t showing any symptoms themselves. This had to be some sort of mix-up. But there evidently was an outbreak and there had had to be some cause.
However, until such time as they could approach the authorities without getting themselves shot, they’d have to keep a low profile. They needed breathing room… time to unravel the mystery and work out a plan.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Daniel.
Chapter 44
Sarit arrived in Cairo sometime after four in the morning. She parked her car and took an invigorating shower to rouse herself from the lethargy that was engulfing her.
She put on the white bathrobe supplied by the hotel and made her way to the bed, still feeling an intense desire to sleep. But she had something to do before that: she had to report in. She switched on her computer and uploaded the tourist-style pictures she had taken of her day in the Valley of the Kings. Then she connected the laptop to the hotel’s broadband and prepared the message for embedding into one of the pictures:
Goliath locked Klein, Gusack and Mansoor in tomb in western valley and stole their jeep. May have killed them, but I suspect not. Arrange for them to be freed. I followed Goliath on road to Cairo and disposed of him with homemade incendiary.
She embedded the text in the picture, then wiped the text file and uploaded the picture to her social network account for all her ‘friends’ to see. Then she ran the utility to delete any temporary files and overwrite unused areas of the hard disk.
Then she did what she had wanted to do for hours: crash out on the bed.
Sometime later, she was awakened from her uneasy sleep by an
aggressive banging on the door. She barely had time to throw on a robe before the door was flung open and three Egyptian policemen walked in.
‘Miss Stewart, you are under arrest for leaving the scene of a motor accident.’
Chapter 45
Daniel had let Gabrielle do the talking. After a sleepless night in the open by the Nile, just outside a small village, they had made their way to the riverbank in search of the means to escape. And they found it in the feluccas – the local riverboats that operated on the Nile both as fishing vessels and as cheap tourist rides.
Gabrielle was so much more persuasive than he could have ever been. First of all, it was obvious that Walid, the dark-skinned, southern Egyptian owner of the felucca, found Gabrielle very attractive, as did the other two crew members who were there with him – his teenage son Na’if and someone else who was either Walid’s younger brother or his cousin. Secondly, they seemed to be impressed by her fluent, almost classical Arabic. Daniel could have spoken Arabic equally well, but somehow hearing it from a pretty blonde foreigner – and a woman too – was considerably more impressive, and they warmed to her immediately.
Gabrielle had warned Daniel that it would be risky to try to join a normal tourist river cruise without arousing suspicion. Not that there would have been any shortage of room on a northbound cruise; holidaymakers tended to prefer the shorter cruises between Aswan and Luxor, and in any case the tourist season was almost over. Joining a cruise without a booking at the last minute, though, might arouse some suspicions. For all they knew, the riverboats and car hire firms might have been alerted to watch out for them.
But travelling by felucca was another matter. Those old, narrow, engineless riverboats were used both by fishermen and by canny locals to ferry tourists on short trips.
