The Cairo Puzzle

by Laurence OBryan

  The two women who came with us, who’d been with Yacoub at the pyramid, were Sawda and Aisha, named after two of the Prophet’s thirteen wives, or so Aisha said. Her sister, Sawda, did not speak to us in English.

  The front door of the mansion was opened by a man wearing a white turban and a pristine white galabeya. Mike had clearly been here before. He led the way up wide marble stairs to a long room with high windows overlooking the Nile. He spoke fast in Arabic to the doorman who had trailed behind us.

  “I just ordered dates and coffee,” said Mike. I was looking out at the gray expanse of the Nile. Long pleasure cruisers, tugs, and a variety of other craft, both rusty and sleek modern looking, were making their way up and down the wide waterway.

  “Come, sit with us, we must talk,” said Aisha. She led us towards the far end of the room, where three low red sofas were gathered around a huge ornamental marble fire. It had the Sphinx’s head carved in marble above it in white, and two head high red marble pillars on each side. The wide brass grate had a thick pile of embers glowing in it.

  “Surely we don’t need a fire?” I said.

  Aisha crossed her hands in front of her chest, rubbed them up and down her upper arms. “But the summer has not come yet. We feel cold, Mrs. Ryan.” She looked at her sister, who was sitting beside her on the sofa to the left of the fire. Her sister copied her hand movements. Mike and I sat on the sofa on the other side of the fire. A turbaned servant appeared, followed by a second. A red marble table was placed in front of us, coffee was poured into what looked suspiciously like gold cups with solid gold saucers. We were offered sugar from a gold sugar bowl.

  Dates, olives, three types of cheese, small rounds of crusty bread and dips in red, green and yellow were set in front of us.

  I took the coffee handed to me. “How did you come to be working with Mr. Yacoub?” I said, smiling at Aisha.

  She returned the smile. “Our mother was one of Ahmed’s sisters. He had four sisters. She was the youngest. Then she died. We lived by the sea in Alexandria. Our father also died in the car accident that killed my mother. Uncle Ahmed offered us a home, training and most importantly medical treatment for Sawda.”

  Sawda smiled, politely, at the mention of her name. I thought about asking what was wrong with Sawda, but Aisha told me before I could open my mouth.

  “Sawda has acute leukemia. She has been given,” she shrugged, turned to her sister, patted her hand, “only another two years.”

  I was surprised at Aisha’s openness. Sawda looked into the glowing embers of the fire as Aisha spoke. Her sister’s eyes glistened, and her voice trembled as she continued.

  “Our uncle’s research laboratories are the only hope for Sawda. We pray every day that he will find a cure.” She bit her lip. “I don’t want to end up alone.”

  “I hope he does find a cure,” I said. “I feel for you both.”

  Aisha turned to me. “If there is no direct family member to speak for me, uncle has promised to find me a husband.” She looked down at her hands, placed them together, as if in prayer. “He will decide who I shall marry, and where I shall live after that.” She rocked forward. “He has a business in Mecca, a hotel. The manager needs a wife. I have not met him.” Her voice trailed off.

  “Can you say no?”

  Her eyes widened. She shook her head. “For now I am looking after my sister. He will not part us until this is all over.”

  I put down my coffee cup. It’s always a shock when you find out that people, who appear strong and vital, have some hidden secret that’s destroying them.

  Mike had been silent for all of this. Now he spoke. “Mr. Yacoub’s research into blood disease will help millions, I am sure.” He leaned towards me. “This is why we must do whatever it takes to help him succeed.” He took out his smartphone, turned it to me.

  “Do you see these hieroglyphs?” I leaned forward. It was his picture of the glyphs that were painted on the walls of the section of floor that had dropped in the King’s Chamber.

  “You’ve translated them already?”

  Mike smiled at me. “I have. While we were coming here.”

  “And?”

  His gaze lingered a little too long on my breasts. For a second I wondered if I’d left a shirt front button open. I put up a hand to check. It was fine. His gaze snapped up to meet mine. There was an almost apologetic look on his face.

  “It was easy. These are hieroglyphs for death and life. One after the other all along one side. Here we have the sons of Horus, one after the other, and the symbol of Ka, the life force that comes into us with our first breath. What’s more interesting, is what’s below that stone. I want to find out.”

  “Do you think the authorities will let you?”

  “That’s why we have Yacoub. I’ve never encountered anything that couldn’t be done without his help in Egypt.”

  A trilling noise filled the room. Sawda pulled a phone from a side pocket. She put it to her ear, spoke quickly in Arabic, then listened for a while. We all watched her.

  She put her phone away and spoke fast to Aisha. Mike listened intently. After a minute he turned to me. “We will wait here. Yacoub is negotiating for us to re-enter the pyramid tonight.” He rubbed his hands together. “I told you this man can do anything here.”

  It all felt a little hurried to me, as if Mike and Yacoub were going to get one last look at what they’d opened, before the whole project was shut down and the Egyptian government took over.

  “Can you call Yacoub and ask him about my husband,” I said.

  Aisha leaned toward me. “It must be wonderful to be able to marry for love,” she said.

  “It is, but…” I couldn’t go on. I bit my lip. It was too painful to talk about love, while I was searching for Sean.

  “If your uncle can help me find him, I will be grateful forever.”

  Aisha turned to Sawda and spoke. Sawda’s expression was hard, unmoving. Aisha seemed to be trying to convince her of something. Then she turned to me.

  “What is your husband’s name?”

  “Sean Ryan.”

  “He was American, yes? What height is he?”

  What did she need to know that for? “He’s six foot two, and so handsome I had to beat other women off for him.” I had a strange feeling, as if I was groping towards something in the dark. “Have you met an American like this in Cairo recently?” I waited for an answer, anxiety tightening my throat.

  Aisha looked as Sawda, spoke fast. I heard the word American somewhere in the middle of the stream of Arabic.

  “No.” Aisha looked me straight in the eye. Her expression was passive, her gaze fixed, as if she was trying hard not to say more.

  I opened my mouth to ask her again, but refrained. I simply looked at Mike, asked him the same thing, but in the back of my mind I was thinking fast. So maybe they had seen him, but where? And why wouldn’t they tell me?

  Mike shook his head. “No, I ain’t seen anyone like him and I meet a lot of the expatriates who pass through here. They all want to know the latest on our research in the Great Pyramid. I’ve never met an American who came here, who didn’t want to know what we are up to.”

  I leaned towards Aisha. “You must help your uncle a lot.” I gave my best impression of a stupid smile, as if I’d completely missed her weird expression when she’d answered my question.

  She stared at me. My heart was thumping lightly, as if a distant train was on the horizon, coming towards me, and on it was someone I loved. My spirits felt lifted. I had two things to go on. The nurse’s sighting, and this denial. It was thin grounds for believing Sean was still alive, but it was something, and it all needed an explanation.

  All my instincts said he was here in Cairo. But was I right?

  Or was I fooling myself? Was this irrational optimism?

  “Would you like to see some of the work he does?” said Aisha.

  I nodded, instinctively. What harm could it do? I expected to be shown a YouTube video or a vi
rtual reality tour of his manufacturing plants. Aisha stood up, motioned me to follow with her fingers. Mike and I stood. Aisha turned to Mike, put a hand up.

  “This is for us women only, professor.”

  Sawda was ahead of her, opening the tall double doors at the end of the room. I wondered where they were going to take me. Beyond the doors was a wide marble staircase with an empty feel, as if no one ever used it. But it was spotlessly clean, as was the glass chandelier that hung above it. Each section of the chandelier was an Ottoman style curved glass lamp, which you could put a candle inside.

  32

  The King’s Chamber fell silent. The scream that had echoed, and then cut off, was long gone. The only noises that could be heard now were the chopping sounds of a meat cleaver.

  Three blue plastic boxes with hermetic seals stood to one side. Two of them were closed. The woman wielding the cleaver took the arms and head of the man she had dismembered and threw them in the box. She took the blood splattered rubber mat she had worked on and poured the last of the blood into the container, then folded the rubber and put it into the box, sealing it with the clamps on each edge.

  Not even the Ministry official’s mother would be able to find him now. She stacked the three boxes near the exit passage. Yacoub would have them removed before dawn. Questions would be asked, but everyone had seen the man go home to his apartment in the suburb of El-Monib, five miles from the Pyramids, after the events of the day had concluded.

  And he was known to visit a mosque near his home most nights. Such cases of men going missing in Cairo, where the local mosque said they rarely saw the man, were put down to the existence of a second wife or mistress, who the man had decided to leave his first wife for, and trouble with her relatives.

  The fact that he was involved in some project at the Great Pyramid would be of little interest to the local and overworked El-Monib police.

  When everything was ready and not even a trace of the man’s presence in the room thirty minutes before could be found, she went over to the newly revealed step down in the floor at the far corner of the chamber. She bent down close to peer at the lines of hieroglyphs around the square drop in the floor.

  She ran her finger along the hieroglyphs. She imagined the priestesses who had been present when this keystone had been put in place. Another priestess in the same direct line of descent had to be present when this keystone was removed and the path down to the secret chamber unlocked.

  Yacoub had been right to argue with this official and to give her a message to finish him and watch his expression change from proud to terrified as she pulled her hood back and approached him with the small cleaver she had taken from where it had been strapped to the inside of her thigh.

  She enjoyed such moments, as the men who thought themselves far above her met their end.

  A scraping noise coming from the exit tunnel made her turn her head. Yacoub was emerging from the tunnel awkwardly. She rushed to help him.

  “I am good,” said Yacoub, brushing her away, after she had helped him. He surveyed the room quickly. “Good, our friend will not trouble us anymore with his calls for foreigners to be here when the secret chamber is opened.”

  She bowed, spoke softly. “When will we look to enter the chamber?”

  “Tonight,” he said. “It must be tonight. Another official will be appointed by Monday and our guards will all change tomorrow morning. They will be able to say they saw nothing.”

  “Will we be able to take away anything we find?”

  He nodded. “There are four trusted workers available to us all night to take away whatever we want.” He put his hand on her bare brown arm.

  “This is what we have been working towards for years, Xena. Everything has led us to here. Be happy for this moment.”

  She shrugged. “If we find the secret room of the priestesses I will be happy. This will make everything worthwhile.”

  33

  The shrill siren of an ambulance filled the upper landing. Sawda was leading the way. She turned left, into a wide corridor with a red, oriental patterned carpet and black framed views of old Cairo on the walls. I saw a picture of a pharmacy with YACOUB in large western script above the door and Arabic script beside it. A man standing in the doorway had on a Turkish fez.

  This must have been where Yacoub’s family money was founded, back in the Ottoman era in Egypt, which had lasted for almost four hundred years, until 1914.

  Other pictures showed old cars in the streets of Cairo, men in military uniform and an ancient looking laboratory with glass vessels on tables. One of the men in that picture looked Nordic. The other was Egyptian, with a well cropped beard.

  At the end of the corridor, Sawda stopped. She pointed at a door. Aisha came up beside me.

  “This is where our uncle takes all foreign visitors. I am sure he would have taken you here himself, if he wasn’t busy.”

  Sawda opened a set of white double doors with gold paint along its edge. Well, I assumed it was gold paint. It could have been gold leaf. The door handles looked like gold, too.

  The room we walked into was the width of the building, with windows on three sides. It looked as if it had been a ballroom. In the center of the room was a replica of the sphinx, but complete, with nose and beard intact and rounded, not weather beaten shoulders. It, too, looked to be made of gold.

  “Wow,” I said. I assumed I was supposed to be impressed, and I was.

  Aisha touched my arm. She pointed at the side wall.

  “Do you like this?”

  My breath almost caught in my throat. A golden emblem stood out in the middle of the wall. It was a square, with an arrow inside it pointing up. I’d last seen this symbol on Sean’s computer. He’d been looking for occurrences of this worldwide, before he’d gone missing. He’d found it in the logo of a Japanese bank, in the foyer of a German one, and in the emblem of a little known American oil industry association.

  What the hell was it doing here?

  “You know this?” said Aisha.

  My hands became fists, as I sought to stop them shaking.

  “I know this very well. My husband was researching this symbol before he went missing.”

  Aisha nodded. “Yes, our uncle told us you were involved in finding the book this symbol was taken from. You found the book in Istanbul, yes, with your husband?”

  “Yes.” I stared at her. She knew more about this puzzle than I had thought.

  “Is that why this symbol is here, because it was in that book?” I let my breath out.

  Aisha nodded. “My uncle says the book you found is the most important record of Egyptian medical treatments ever discovered.” She bowed. “Its discovery will help save millions of lives.” Sawda bowed as well.

  I walked towards the gold symbol on the wall. Below it, to the right, was a small white plaque. That was when I figured out where Aisha might have seen Sean’s face. There was a headshot of him and an inscription that read:

  The Symbol of the Life Force was discovered in Istanbul by Sean Ryan, a director of the Institute of Applied Research at Oxford University

  It crossed my mind to tell them that it should also state I was involved in finding the book the symbol was in, but I didn’t care. They could put what the hell they liked on the plaque.

  “So you knew about Sean before I came here?”

  Aisha stared at me, as if trying to work out if I was trying to trick her. “Yes, we did.”

  I wasn’t sure now whether to trust them or find a way to get out of this place as quickly as possible.

  I turned to the other exhibits in the room. “I am sure this symbol is on many walls around the world.”

  “Yes, I am sure, but…” Aisha hesitated.

  I stared at her. Was she about to reveal something?

  Sawda said something fast in Arabic. She had pulled a part of her head covering which covered her face aside. Her skin was honey brown, her lips full, pink.

  “Go on,” I said.

 
; “Our uncle said there are pages missing from the digital copy of the book he received. He said your husband would be able to confirm this.” She smiled.

  I didn’t see it as a smiling matter. “Did he try to contact my husband?” Was this what was going on?

  Aisha shook her head. “I do not know. But if he wanted to speak to your husband he would have contacted him through the Institute he worked for, I am sure. Uncle Ahmed always does things the right way.”

  I walked over to the nearby window. It had a view over the Nile. Boats were passing up and down, and the sun was casting shadows across the gray green water. What the hell was I to make of all this?

  Aisha came up beside me, touched my shoulder. “Our uncle is a good man. He only wants to help people.”

  34

  The screen on Henry’s desk blinked. Freddie Jones reappeared. He was looking over his shoulder.

  “What’s up, Freddie? Are you used to the Egyptian beer yet?”

  “It’s not their beer I’m worried about. It’s the whole bloody country going up in flames. You know if Egypt gets torn apart the wave of refugees from Syria, which pushed into Germany, will be like a warm-up lap. There’s ninety plus million people here. And at the current rate of growth it will be one hundred and eighty million people in twenty-five years. That’s a faster growth than the whole of Western Europe.”

  Henry shrugged. “I’ll be long retired by then, Fred. What I’m concerned about is what’s happening now. Is there anything else you can tell me about this Yacoub character, which isn’t in his official file?”

  “Yacoub. It’s about time someone back home paid attention to this guy. Did you see his press conference this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s was one clever publicity stunt. I reckon he’s been taking lessons from one of Trump’s advisers.”

  “So you don’t think he’s likely to actually find anything in the Great Pyramid?”