by James Becker
13
‘Can you do it, Ali?’ Anum Husani asked.
He was sitting with a man in a small café near the centre of the city. Ali Mohammed was a slightly overweight man with a round face and delicate, almost effeminate, features and wearing a crisp white suit. He wasn’t Husani’s only contact on the museum circuit in Cairo, but in this case he was the most useful, because he had access to sophisticated testing and investigation equipment in the section of the museum where he worked.
Ali Mohammed took a small sip of the thick, almost black liquid from the tiny cup in front of him. He replaced the cup on the table, looked up at Husani and shook his head.
‘It might not be as simple or as definitive as you seem to think, Anum. I know you believe that I can just switch on some machine, stick a sample in it somewhere and wait for it to tell me everything there is to know about it, but it really isn’t like that. You’ve told me you’ve bought a piece of parchment with some writing on it. A few of the words are legible but the vast majority are not. I do have equipment in the laboratory which can read letters which have faded badly, but it all depends on how and why they’ve faded — whether it’s just because of the age of the piece, or if there’s some other reason, like water damage or bleaching by the sun.’
Mohammed drained the last of his coffee with a single swallow, grimaced as he tasted a few of the grains on his tongue, and took a sip of water to clear his palate.
‘It’s quite possible,’ he went on, ‘that I’ll be able to read everything on the parchment as clearly as if it had been written yesterday. It’s also possible that I won’t be able to decipher any more of the text than you have already read. That’s what you have to understand. I can make no promises at all. Now, do you still want me to go ahead?’
Husani nodded. Every time he had approached Mohammed with requests of this sort, to ask the man to unofficially use some of his laboratory equipment to help date a relic or elucidate some ancient writing, he had had to sit through a similar kind of explanation. He almost knew the words by heart.
But he didn’t mind, because although Mohammed always appeared somewhat reluctant, the man had invariably agreed to carry out every investigation he had requested, and in almost every case he had achieved entirely satisfactory results. In return, Husani had paid him a cash sum which wasn’t so large that it would embarrass the scientist, but certainly big enough to ensure that Mohammed was always pleased to see him.
‘Ali, my friend, of course I want you to go ahead. And if you find that you can’t help me at all, I’m still very grateful that you’re prepared to even try.’
Husani reached down to the beige canvas messenger bag that was resting against one of the legs of the table at which they were sitting.
‘You’ve got it with you?’ Mohammed sounded surprised.
‘Of course I have. It’s only a single sheet of parchment, and weighs almost nothing. I thought that if you decided you were able to look at it, I could hand it over to you straight away.’
He lifted the flap on the bag and removed a piece of thin cardboard folded in half and secured with a couple of large elastic bands to make a rudimentary folder. He slipped off the bands holding it closed and gently spread apart the two sides.
‘This is it,’ he said, unnecessarily.
Mohammed didn’t touch the parchment, but simply bent forward to look at it closely. Fresh parchment is almost white in colour, but it tans with age, eventually turning a dark brown. Unfortunately, many of the early inks shared a similar characteristic, turning from deep black into a brownish colour over the years, making some ancient writings almost entirely illegible without the use of specialized techniques.
‘I can see a few letters,’ he remarked. ‘What have you managed to decipher so far?’
‘A handful of words, no more, and not enough to show what the text is about, except that it appears to describe some kind of military action. I think it’s probably something to do with the Roman Empire, because it’s written in Latin.’
Mohammed nodded slowly.
‘I might be able to do something with this,’ he said. ‘As far as I can tell, the parchment itself isn’t damaged, and that suggests that the ink has simply faded because of the passage of time. How soon do you need the results?’
Husani smiled.
‘The same as always, my friend. Yesterday or, if you can’t do that, as soon as possible. This relic will earn me no money at all while it’s in your laboratory.’
‘Very well. I shall try my best, although I am not promising anything.’
‘Excellent. Thank you, my friend.’
‘It might also be worth getting an accurate estimate of the age of the parchment using radiocarbon dating. I can’t do that at the museum, because we don’t have the expertise or the equipment, but I could send it out to an external laboratory.’
‘I thought that method of testing destroyed the specimen?’ Husani asked.
Mohammed shook his head, then nodded.
‘It does, but these days, with modern techniques, the laboratories need only a tiny sliver of material to work with. So do you want me to try to get a date for the parchment? I could take a very small clipping from the edge. It would hardly be noticeable, and if you can show independent proof of age, that would probably help you when you come to sell it.’
‘Yes, it’s a good idea. Just make sure that the piece you cut off is as small as possible. Let’s meet back here tomorrow at five.’
Minutes later, the two men stood up, exchanged a few last words and then separated, Mohammed walking back to the museum where he worked, while Husani headed in the direction of his home.
From that moment on, both men’s lives were to be changed for ever.
14
Before Ali Mohammed began carrying out tests on the parchment, he examined it closely under the bright lights on his workbench. He didn’t know how much of the text Husani had been able to read with the naked eye, but there were certainly several words that could fairly clearly be seen. It was also obvious to him that the text was, indeed, written in Latin, as Husani had indicated at their meeting.
What’s more, two words on the text stood out, because they both appeared to be proper names, and he decided he would quickly check to see if they were significant in the context of Roman history.
The bulk of the data on the Cairo Museum computer system was concerned, predictably enough, with the history of Egypt and the surrounding area, and apart from a single reference to a known place name in ancient Judaea, his search proved fruitless.
Many museums around the world are linked on a kind of academic Intranet — a restricted-access widearea network, to allow scientists and academics in one country to directly research the work of other professionals studying the same field but in different countries — and he did a general search of this resource as well, but with exactly the same result.
Almost as an afterthought, he wrote a brief email requesting specialist assistance, looking up the name of the recipient from his extensive database of contacts around the world, and marked the message as high priority before sending it.
15
The instructions he had been given were clear and unambiguous, and the timescale extremely restricted. Nevertheless, the contractor — the name he was using for this particular job was simply ‘Abdul’ — did not act immediately. That would be the mark of an amateur, and he had always prided himself on his consummate professionalism.
So before he did anything at all, he found a quiet corner on the road a little before noon, a position that gave him a clear view of the house. He placed his begging bowl, with a few coins inside it, on the ground in front of him and sat down cross-legged, his back against the wall behind him. With his ragged brown cloak wrapped around him to conceal his muscular body, the tattered hood covering his head and leaving his face invisible in the shadow, he looked just like any one of the thousands of beggars on Cairo’s streets. He made certain that his hands remained out of sight,
because everyone in his trade knew that hands were the one thing you couldn’t disguise.
He remained in that position, almost motionless, for over three hours, watching the house with a virtually unblinking gaze. He had no photograph to guide him as yet, only a somewhat contradictory description supplied by his current employer, and this address.
When a middle-aged man who roughly matched the description he had received eventually arrived at the house, Abdul still did nothing. He now knew that the information he had been given was correct: the man returned to his home for lunch on most days, rather than visiting a restaurant somewhere in the city. And now he also knew his face.
For about another hour and a quarter Abdul remained sitting against the wall on the opposite side of the street and then, with a look into his begging bowl — a glance that revealed there were a few more coins in it than he had started with — he stood up, wrapped his cloak more tightly around him, picked up his stick and hobbled slowly away, heading in the direction from which the target had approached the house.
Abdul was an expert in surveillance tactics and techniques, and knew that even the most unobservant target might notice a beggar suddenly standing up and following him down the street. So after walking a short distance from the house, he turned into a side street and continued along it a little way before stepping into an alley. He checked all around him to ensure that nobody was in sight, and then with one swift movement dropped the beggar’s cloak to the floor, revealing a somewhat creased and faded white linen suit underneath, the kind of garb worn by many low-level Cairo businessmen. The well-worn suit was a couple of sizes too large for him, deliberately chosen to hide his powerful build. His face was tanned under a thatch of black hair, with regular and unremarkable features. It was a difficult face to memorize, and was one of his most important assets, more or less essential in his line of work.
He had discarded his limp along with the cloak, and, seconds later, strode briskly back to the street, where he stopped and looked in both directions, to check that the target hadn’t left the house in the brief period while he was switching identities.
Abdul walked slowly down the street, intently studying a paper he had taken out of his pocket and unfolded, a bit of supporting camouflage for the image he was trying to create. He should, he hoped, look like a businessman lost in thought as he studied a contract or a list of goods. Occasionally, he stopped for a few moments to apparently study the paper even more intently before walking on.
If his guess was right, the target should be emerging from his house fairly soon to return to his stall in the souk, and would overtake him on the street, which was just what Abdul wanted.
He paused again, as if in indecision, and looked back along the street, back towards the target’s house. Even as he did so, he saw the main door swing open and a figure emerge. He was too far away to confirm the man’s identity, but Abdul had little doubt about who it was. His timing had been almost perfect.
16
Less than five minutes later, after Abdul had turned back towards the centre of Cairo, the paper now tucked away again in his pocket, the target overtook him. Abdul let him get about fifty yards ahead before he began to increase his pace, slowly picking up speed until he was matching the other man. As if linked by an invisible tether, the two men weaved their way through the gathering crowds around the souk.
The moment the target entered the market, Abdul moved closer, now shielded from detection by the mass of people thronging the alleys, because it was vital that he didn’t lose sight of his target. In fact, the task proved easier than he had expected, because he had only gone quite a short distance inside the souk before the target stopped beside a stall and then walked around to the back of it.
Of course, Abdul knew he might just be a friend of the stallholder, and might have dropped in for a chat or something, so he strode on past and then stopped, apparently looking down at a collection of beaten brass trinkets on another stall.
Moments later, he relaxed. The target had taken a set of keys from his pocket, unlocked a storeroom situated behind the stall and disappeared inside it. When he re-emerged, he took up station behind the stall itself, dismissing the man who had previously been manning it.
Abdul had successfully identified the stall operated by his target, and more importantly the storeroom behind the stall where he presumed the man would keep some of his more valuable items under lock and key. But there was nothing more he could do for the moment, because of the crowds milling around in the souk.
However, being aware that the easiest option was always the best, he walked up and took a careful look at the goods being offered by his target, just in case the item he’d been told to recover was actually on sale in the stall. The most cursory glance showed that the man had nothing resembling the relic for sale.
After a moment, Abdul decided that asking a few questions was a viable option, so he picked up a curved and ornamented dagger and looked at it closely.
Clearly scenting a sale, the target — he knew the man’s name was Mahmoud Kassim — immediately stepped close to Abdul and pointed at the knife he was holding.
‘You have a good eye, my friend,’ he began, opening his sales pitch. ‘That, as I’m sure you already know, is a genuine Persian dagger, at least two hundred years old, and in almost perfect condition.’ He nodded approvingly as Abdul slid the blade out of the sheath and studied the metal. ‘Very few knives of this sort ever come onto the market, and those that do are almost always very well used and often incomplete, perhaps missing the sheath or some of the decoration. That dagger would be an excellent investment for you.’
Abdul looked at him with a slight smile, slid the knife back into the sheath and tossed it back onto the stall.
‘You needn’t bother trying to deceive me,’ he said, ‘because I’m in the trade. You and I both know that this so-called Persian dagger was made in the back streets of Cairo about a month ago, and is almost worthless. But even if it was the real thing, I wouldn’t be interested in it. I only deal in old documents, parchments and scrolls and relics of that sort.’
Having planted the seed, Abdul fell silent, hoping that Mahmoud would mention the ancient parchment he had been told the trader possessed. But the Egyptian’s response disappointed him.
‘You should have said you were a dealer, and then I wouldn’t have wasted my time with you. I don’t deal with scrolls or any other objects like that. I’m sorry.’
Abdul nodded.
‘Can you recommend any other traders in the souk who might have such relics for sale?’
Mahmud shook his head, the scowl still on his face.
‘If you are a specialist in that field, you are most unlikely to find anything here to interest you. Much like my Persian knife, most of the scrolls for sale in this market are aimed at tourists, and are produced to order by a handful of people who make a living by manufacturing these objects. I don’t think you’ll find a genuine antique scroll for sale anywhere here.’
‘And no pieces of parchment either?’
Again, Mahmoud shook his head.
‘Not in this souk, no. Not as far as I know.’
As Abdul strode away, he was beginning to wonder if his employer hadn’t made a serious mistake. He knew the way that the Egyptian mind worked — being a member of that nation, he could consider himself something of an expert on the subject — and he was absolutely certain that if Mahmoud Kassim actually had the relic in his possession, he would definitely have offered it to him for sale, and that meant one of two things.
Either his employer, the man whose contract he had accepted very late the previous evening, had got it wrong, and the relic was actually in the possession of some other trader in the area, or for whatever reason the target had decided to keep the parchment for himself, and it was no longer for sale.
Before he did anything else, Abdul decided that he would contact his employer and raise his concerns.
He walked some distance away from the souk be
fore finding a quiet spot and taking out his mobile phone. There were no numbers stored in the memory. All of the telephone numbers Abdul used were held either in his head or on his computer in a hidden and encrypted directory that could only be accessed by the application of a twelve-digit key, a key which he changed every month. In this case, he had committed the man’s number to memory, and dialled it.
His call was answered almost immediately.
‘Do you have it?’
Neither man would mention any names or anything else that could possibly incriminate them. Calls from one mobile to another were fairly secure, but it simply wasn’t worth taking a chance.
‘No,’ Abdul replied. ‘I have spoken to the man and he says he does not have it. By his manner, I don’t think he was lying — unless he is a much more sophisticated man than I think. How certain is your information?’
‘An intercept was performed yesterday. We know that it must be in his possession.’
Abdul thought for a moment before replying.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘all that information proves is that he has come across it. It doesn’t prove that he still has it.’
‘Perhaps. But he is the only lead we have, so you are to continue as we discussed. It is essential that we find and recover the object.’
‘And the man?’ Abdul wanted to be absolutely clear of the course of action he was to follow.
‘He is expendable. All other considerations are secondary to the object’s recovery.’
17
‘I’ll be quite glad when I’ve finished this,’ Angela Lewis remarked, to nobody in particular.
‘I thought you liked being busy?’ the man standing almost opposite her on the other side of the long workbench asked.
Angela put down the magnifying glass she had been using to examine the badly crazed surface of a potsherd and rubbed her eyes.
