by James Becker
Satisfied that he was alone, he ran across the hall to the room he called his study, a small and cramped windowless space at the back of the house, and opened his safe. There was a fat bundle of cash inside, secured with elastic bands and made up of multiple currencies including euros, American dollars and pounds sterling, as well as Egyptian pounds, all of which he’d acquired through his trading activities. He seized the money and his passport and tucked them into the inside pockets of his jacket.
Then he paused for a moment as he looked at the third object in the safe, a small semi-automatic pistol. He’d owned the weapon — illegally, of course — for years, and occasionally took it out into the desert to a quiet area and fired a few rounds through it, just to make sure it still worked. Carrying it might just give him an edge over the man who’d killed Mahmoud Kassim, especially if the murderer only worked with a knife. On the other hand, he wouldn’t be able to take it onto an aircraft with him.
He nodded to himself. It was an easy decision. If he came face to face with the killer somewhere on the streets of Cairo and didn’t have the pistol in his pocket, he probably wouldn’t even make it as far as the airport. He definitely needed the insurance policy that the weapon would provide. He took it out of the safe, extracted the magazine and loaded it from the box of .22 cartridges he also kept there, replaced the magazine in the butt of the weapon, racked back the slide to chamber a round and set the safety catch. Then he removed the magazine again and added one further cartridge to replace the one which was now in the breech, ready to be fired. There was no point in taking the box of cartridges because if he did meet the killer and fired every round at him, he certainly wouldn’t have time to reload his weapon. If a full magazine didn’t stop the man, Husani knew he’d be dead. He was also well aware that the .22 round was hardly classed as a man-stopper, but it was all he had. It would have to do.
He slid the pistol into the pocket of his trousers — he found Western-style clothing much more convenient than traditional Arab dress — locked the safe and left the room.
Then he ran up the stairs to the main bedroom, strode across to the shelves on the opposite side of the room and grabbed a selection of clothes, enough for about a week, plus his washing and shaving kit, and stuffed everything into a small leather suitcase. He closed it, set the catches, and headed back towards the stairs.
He’d only taken a couple of steps across the landing when he heard a knock at the front door of the house.
29
Treading as carefully and quietly as he could, Husani walked into the bedroom used by his two children and crossed to the window. He kept well back from the glass, positioning himself so that he could just see the lane that ran outside his house, and the area around the front door. He could see the figure of a man.
Husani edged closer to the window as the man outside repeated his knock. He couldn’t make out the face of the figure standing in the road because of the hat he was wearing, the headgear completely obscuring his features.
It could be completely innocent, perhaps somebody wanting to buy or sell a relic, or even a messenger sent by the man who ran his shop, though in either case his assistant would surely have called his mobile to advise him. Husani didn’t believe either scenario for a moment. A feeling of cold dread settled on him, and what happened next confirmed his fear.
The figure outside glanced in both directions along the street and then, with a click that was clearly audible to Husani in the room above, opened a switchblade knife and slid the point between the door and the jamb, obviously attempting to slip the lock. Husani thanked his lucky stars that he’d remembered to close both the bolts: unless the man kicked down the door, he wasn’t going to be able to get inside the house that way. The downside was that the man outside would soon realize that somebody had to be in the property for the door to have been bolted on the inside.
He stepped back from the window, trying to decide what to do. There was a rear door to the house, but to reach it he would have to walk down the stairs which ran close to the front door, and if he did that the man outside would probably hear him, and perhaps guess where he was going.
Husani moved forward again to the window and peered down. As he did so, he saw the figure outside step back from the door and again glance all around him. This time he looked up as well, towards the windows on the first floor of the house that overlooked the street.
Immediately, Husani shrank back. He didn’t think the man had seen him, but he couldn’t be sure, and he muttered a curse under his breath. But he still needed to know what the man was doing, so after a few moments he edged cautiously forward again and looked down.
The man had gone. He wasn’t in sight anywhere along the street. Husani looked in both directions, but the figure had vanished, and there hadn’t been time for him to disappear around a corner or into an alley.
That could only mean one thing. He must have gone around to the back of the house, and Husani was very aware that the rear door offered nothing like the same level of security as the one that opened onto the street. He knew he had just seconds to act.
Heedless of the noise he was making, he ran out of the room and down the stairs, the pistol clutched in his right hand, the suitcase forgotten, abandoned on the landing. He ran across to the front door and wrenched back one of the bolts. Then he stopped. Suppose it was just a trick? Suppose the intruder had simply walked down the side of the house, and ducked out of sight, and was now waiting for Husani to obligingly open the street door so that he could push his way inside?
For a moment he stood there, his body quivering with fear and indecision. He left the second bolt in place and stepped to one side, to a small window which gave a partial view of the street, and looked out.
But almost at the same moment as he did so, he heard a splintering crash behind him, and knew in that instant that the man had broken open the rear door and was now inside the house.
The killer was right behind him.
30
Angela Lewis often found that her subconscious mind was rather good at solving problems that her conscious mind for some reason had failed to cope with.
When she’d read Ali Mohammed’s email the previous day, she knew she’d seen or read the partial name ef bar he somewhere else but, like a library with no filing cards or index system, she simply couldn’t retrieve it from her memory. Her searches on the Internet hadn’t helped either. But almost as soon as she got up that morning, she had remembered exactly where to look.
While Bronson was still in the shower, tunelessly singing some awful pop song from the seventies, she opened up her laptop and carried out a couple of swift searches, both of which yielded somewhat sparse results. But at least she now had something to send out to Ali in Cairo, which might help him in his work. Her best guess at the significance of ef bar he was that it was the middle section of the Hebrew name Yusef bar Heli, and that alone made the parchment quite an important find. But it was the inclusion of the name of the Judaean town of Tzippori — assuming Ali Mohammed had read the word correctly — which suggested the relic could potentially be a discovery of great importance.
The only names that had been associated with that particular individual were purely apocryphal, with virtually nothing in the historical record to support any of them. However, it was widely believed that the individual had spent at least some time in Tzippori. Depending upon which source was consulted, the man had either been called Yusef bar Heli — or Yusef ben Heli, both bar and ben translating as ‘the son of’ — or Yusef bar Yacob or Yusef ben Yacob. The man’s father had most probably been named either Heli or Yacob — the historical record was unclear on that point — though his own name, Yusef, was fairly well established. If the parchment was contemporary with this man’s life, and if the fragment of the name did in fact refer to this specific individual, historians might for the first time be able to establish something of the man’s family tree. And if that proved to be possible, the ramifications could be simply astonishing.
If Angela was right, that single piece of parchment sitting in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo could be one of the most significant finds since the Nag Hammadi Codices or the Dead Sea Scrolls.
31
Almost sobbing in terror, Husani fumbled for the second bolt and pulled it back. He wrenched open the door, slamming it back against the frame and the wall beside it. He dashed into the street outside and started running for his life.
As he did so, he heard heavy footsteps behind him, pounding across the wooden floor of the house, and then the sudden crack of a pistol shot, the bullet crashing into the wall of the house on the opposite side of the road, a bare couple of metres behind him. Shards of stone flew around him as he ran, a couple nicking the skin of his face.
Husani was sufficiently familiar with pistols to realize he was still within accurate range of the killer’s weapon, and the next shot, he knew, could bring him down. Without breaking his stride, he swung his right arm back towards his house, clicked off the safety catch on his own weapon and pulled the trigger three times in quick succession. He couldn’t aim the pistol properly, but he didn’t care about that. All he was trying to do was scare the other man enough to make his escape.
Another shot rang out, but the bullet missed him, again hitting the wall of a house on the street, and then a group of men stepped into view from a side alley, just a few metres in front of him. They’d obviously heard the sound of the shots and were peering about them cautiously, clearly wondering what was going on.
Instantly, Husani slid the pistol into his trouser pocket, out of view of the men, and dodged around them. As he did so, he risked a glance behind him. The man who’d shot at him was running down the street in pursuit, but was about fifty metres back. In that briefest of instants, Husani saw that his pursuer had also tucked his weapon out of sight.
The group of men had stopped in the street and were staring at the spectacle unfolding in front of them, as Husani fled down the street, the other man running hard after him.
Husani dodged right into an alleyway, then almost immediately left, down one that was even more narrow. These were his streets, a part of Cairo he knew well. What he didn’t know was whether or not his pursuer was also a local, a man who might have an equally comprehensive knowledge of the area.
The alleyway was unusually quiet, nobody in evidence, which wasn’t what Husani had expected — or wanted. He knew that safety lay in numbers, in being able to lose himself in the crowds. There was another crack from behind him, as the killer risked one more shot at his prey, but as both the shooter and his target were running hard, accurate shooting was impossible. That, at least, was what Husani was hoping as he dodged and weaved his way down the narrow passage.
The alleyway ended at a blank wall, but a few metres before he reached it there was a narrow opening to the left, which Husani sped down, scattering a pile of cardboard boxes from one side of it as he did so, hoping that might delay his pursuer slightly. But still he could hear the pounding of footsteps behind him. And if anything they seemed to be getting closer.
At the end, a kind of safety beckoned, a crowd of people milling about in a small square. He burst out of the alley, immediately turned right and increased his speed, forcing his way through the crowd.
In a country where almost nobody moved quickly, a running man was bound to attract attention: two men doubly so. As Husani pushed his way through the mêlée, he registered the expressions on the faces of men he was passing, expressions which ran the gamut of emotions from shock to amusement.
On his left, Husani saw an old man pushing a handcart, loaded with sacks of some kind of produce. He reacted instinctively, spinning around behind the cart and tipping it over in one fluid movement.
The old man bellowed his rage, but Husani simply ran on, now with a couple of other men who’d seen the incident starting to chase him as well. That would have muddied the waters, he hoped, and the overturned cart might give him a few more seconds’ breathing space. And he needed that, because now his breath was coming in short gasps. His lungs felt as if they were on fire and there was a sudden sharp, stabbing pain in his side from his exertions.
In amongst the agitated crowds, Husani dodged and dived, weaved and ducked, but his movements were slower and more laboured than before, and he knew he’d have to stop soon or he’d just collapse. When he’d skirted around another large group of people, he halted abruptly and looked back. He was sure the man was back there somewhere, but at that moment he couldn’t see him.
Husani seized the opportunity, and ran over to a small store on the right-hand side of the street. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him and retreated to the back wall, the proprietor looking at him curiously.
Husani glanced at him, and made the first excuse that came into his head.
‘My wife’s lover,’ he panted. ‘Chasing me. Trying to kill me.’
The store owner nodded in sympathy, suggesting that perhaps he too had had experience of such matters.
‘Use the back door,’ he said, and gestured behind the counter. ‘Through here.’
Husani didn’t hesitate.
‘Shokran,’ he replied simply, ‘thank you.’ Then he stepped behind the counter and out into another narrow alleyway that ran behind the row of shops.
He looked both ways, but it was deserted. He turned and headed back the way he’d come, paralleling the street he’d run down, and walking quickly. Then he took the first cross-passage he came to, putting as much distance between himself and the killer as he could. Husani glanced back frequently, but saw no signs of pursuit, and after five more minutes he was convinced he’d made good his escape. He was now just one more middle-aged man wearing Western clothes in a city with a population of about twenty million people. Finding him now, Husani knew, would be significantly more difficult than tracking down a needle in a haystack.
At last he allowed himself to relax, and began walking a little more briskly. He didn’t want to be late for his appointment with Ali Mohammed.
32
Husani sighed with relief, and for the first time since he’d sat down in the corner of the small café he released his grip on the butt of his pistol. Approaching the building was the familiar and somewhat rotund figure of Ali Mohammed, a battered brown leather briefcase tucked under one arm. Husani stepped to the door and waved to attract the man’s attention. Moments later, the scientist stepped inside the café and sat down in the chair opposite Husani, a puzzled frown on his face.
‘You have brought the parchment?’ Husani asked, the tone of his voice betraying his concern.
Mohammed nodded and pointed at the briefcase, which he’d placed on the vacant chair beside him.
‘Of course I have. It’s in there, along with the photographs I’ve been taking to try to reveal more of the text, and a memory stick containing copies of the pictures. But why the sudden change of plan?’
For a moment, Husani toyed with the idea of explaining exactly what had happened to the previous owner of the piece of parchment, but decided that would be a bad idea, at least for the moment. He suspected that the scientist lived in a somewhat cloistered world, divorced from the harsh reality of life on the streets of Cairo, and the knowledge that a vicious killer was roaming the city looking for the relic tucked inside the briefcase beside him would comprehensively ruin not only his day but possibly the rest of his year.
It was better, he reasoned to himself, simply to make an excuse, even though he already knew that that would require him to sit through another lecture.
‘I won’t bother you with the details, Ali, but I have to go away unexpectedly, and I want to take the relic with me when I leave. That’s why I’m in such a hurry.’
A tall and excessively thin Arab, his face burned almost black by the sun and wearing a white thawb, the long tunic that is the traditional dress for Arab men, approached their table, a grubby white cloth held in his left hand. Husani and Mohammed both ordered coffee and glasses of water, Mohammed
a small selection of sweet cakes, and the waiter retreated.
‘So what have you found?’
‘First, I need to explain a little about the parchment itself,’ Mohammed said.
Husani stifled his impatience. Although he knew that time was crucial, he also needed to hear everything that the scientist could tell him about the relic.
‘You probably noticed,’ Mohammed began, ‘that the parchment is dark brown in colour. That’s an indication of its age, because when it’s freshly prepared parchment is almost pure white. Unfortunately, simply looking at the colour does not enable a researcher to estimate the likely age of the object, because the speed of the colour change depends upon the conditions in which the parchment has been kept. The temperature, the humidity, amount of sunlight and so on. It will last longest if it is stored in a dark and very dry place and at a fairly constant temperature, although the temperature is not as important as the relative humidity.
‘The colour change of the parchment is one factor, and the ink is the second. Although the writing on the object now looks brownish in colour, originally it would have been a deep black, and very easy to read against the white parchment. Because the writing is obviously Latin, it’s reasonable to assume that the text was written by a Roman or perhaps by a scribe employed by the Romans, and so the ink used would most probably have been a form of atramentum.’
Mohammed raised his hand to forestall Husani’s obvious question.
‘That isn’t actually any one particular type of substance,’ he said. ‘The Latin word simply means a black-coloured medium, so in Roman times an atramentum could be produced from cuttlefish ink, for example, or soot from a chimney or charcoal from a fire, the pigment then being mixed with water. Using soot or charcoal gave rise to a type of ink known as carbon black, for obvious reasons. Different sorts of atramentum could be used for other purposes, not just writing, such as dyeing leather or in painting, but the type used for writing became known as atramentum librarium.’
