She switched her torch on. What she had to do now was make sure she didn’t die, entombed with the records, and that whatever she found would not be locked away again.
She pushed down at the edge of the block in front of her. It shifted again. It seemed to have an axis running through the center of the block. She pushed the block more, peered into the space below. It was a pit. A square sided stone pit.
And no matter how much she held the light down into it, she couldn’t see the bottom. Xena sat back, turned the torch off again. What choice did she have now? She’d checked every wall, every floor slab for another way out. Maybe she should check again. She was facing a big decision.
For the next hour she pressed and tapped at every other floor slab and the surrounding ones on the wall. She pushed at where they met the extended far wall and banged hard at the wall slabs that had moved. But in the end it was clear, there was only one way she was going to get out of here. Down into the pit.
But what was down there? Did it extend down to a chamber, to water, or just rock? Was it just a place they used to throw dead bodies? And most importantly, was there a way out down there? And should she wait here, hoping to get rescued, or try to find a way down.
She kneeled, bent her head forward, seeking guidance.
“Abatachin Hoy Besemay Yemitnor
Simmeh Yekedes
Mengistih Timta
Fekadeh Besemay Indehonech.”
She repeated the words five times, then tapped her forehead five times on the stone floor in front of her. She knew what she had to do, but she knew too that it was a throw of the dice. Anything could happen now. Her future would be decided by the architects of the pyramid, and decisions they had made five thousand years ago or more. A coldness moved inside her chest. It had started deep in her stomach.
She remembered this feeling from long ago too, from when she was young and learning the prayers and the secrets. She had been left in the desert, bound by her hands and feet. The woman who left her there had ridden off on a donkey. It had been hours before she got free of the ropes. It had been cold then, and dark. And all she had to guide her were the stars and hope. She had walked for three days before falling into a village with her tongue swollen.
But she had survived.
And she would survive this, too.
She took the torch, turned it on, held it over the center of the pit. She released it. As it fell it illuminated stone walls going down and down and down. It fell for a long time. Then, with a distant echo, the light extinguished.
But there had been a split second where she had seen something. She closed her eyes, brought the memory back. What did it mean?
56
Henry adjusted the resolution on his virtual reality headset. They were still in test mode with them, but watching drone footage from a Camcopter was an ideal application. By turning his head he could see where he wanted to see, rather than asking the drone to turn to face something.
The image of the street outside Ahmed Yacoub’s villa in Cairo, on the west bank of the Nile, between the Nile and the pyramids was pretty good, despite it being the middle of the night in Cairo. Sure, the picture was in shades of gray, but he could see the vehicle they had tracked from Isabel’s last known location,
As he watched, an Egyptian police car raced past the vehicle Isabel was likely to be sitting in. Some incident nearer the Nile was bringing police cars together. Another attempt to assassinate a government minister, most probably.
But it could also be a diversion.
Was some operation underway at Yacoub’s? Two other vehicles from the location this one had come from, were now sitting around the corner from his villa. And the police vehicle that usually cruised this block was gone.
Henry picked up the phone, pressed the speed dial number for the Cairo embassy on his screen. The duty officer answered.
“Initiate a personnel retrieval, please, Tony.”
“Henry, you were always a late bird. I hope this one isn’t a wild goose chase, like our last one.”
“Just following procedure, Tony. An agent is at risk. Let’s do this right this time. No pissing about with getting the ambassador to approve it.”
“Just following procedure, Henry. Make sure you put the right status on it to avoid any problems this time.”
The line went dead.
Henry began typing, fast. He took the location tracking data from the satellite link. As he pressed send, he whispered.
“Stay safe until we get there, Isabel.”
57
My heart was thumping fast as the police car passed us. I half expected them to stop, pull out their guns and order us out of the car.
“Time to go,” said Asim. He pushed my door half open. The boy in the back got out. He fully opened my door. I stepped out. There was a cool wind blowing.
The boy led the way, but he walked beside me as we came up to the steel gate with the buzzer and keypad beside it. He stood next to me as I pressed the buzzer. Nothing happened. I pressed it again. Was everyone asleep?
Or had they a policy of not answering when people came to the gate at night?
The boy reached up, pressed the buzzer, held it down. We waited. Another car passed. I didn’t look at it. I was looking at the security camera above the far corner of the door. I waved at it. Were they assessing whether to open up?
Other thoughts crowded in. Should I make a run for it, ask Henry to send a team into Yacoub’s building to search for Sean? But that would take hours to get ready, at the very least. And it was possible that Asim might get in anyway, whatever I did.
Maybe it would be better for me to stay with this.
I hugged my arms around myself. The boy put his hand on my arm. A shiver passed up through me. I wanted to move his hand. Every instinct told me to, but if I did anyone watching might assume the boy was not a friend. I kept rigidly still, stared up at the camera.
I felt both uncomfortable and stupid now, standing here, with nothing happening. Maybe I should run.
Then, with a scratching noise, the steel door slid open. Two uniformed guards were behind it, one near the door. The other further back. The boy tugged lightly at my jacket.
“I’m sorry. I left my phone behind when I was here earlier today. Did you find it? I’m really sorry to disturb you in the middle of the night, but I really need my phone. It has my ticket details for going home and all my photos. Please, can you ask about it?” I was talking too much. He was probably getting more suspicious by the second.
The security guard had droopy eyes, a half beard and a belly that was pushing out his shirt above his waistband. He probably had a wife and three or four children all waiting for Dada to come home. I didn’t want any part in something horrible happening to him, no matter what Asim was threatening would happen to me. I put my hand on the boy’s shoulder, gripped it hard. Perhaps there was a way to turn this around.
With a shrug the boy slipped from my fingers. He stepped forward, his head bent down, as if looking at the guard’s feet. The guard went back, but he was too slow. The boy’s hand went up in a smooth movement and a splutter of blood and a moan came from the guard’s mouth.
The guard behind was raising his machine pistol, stepping back. The boy went around the first guard and ran, as if spring loaded, to the second. That guard let off three deafening bullets before the boy’s knife was buried in his throat.
The bullets echoed in the road, like an earthquake. I imagined every house on the road waking up.
Then everything slowed as the reality of what had happened struck me. The gunfire echoed into silence. Dogs barked in reply. A circle of dogs seemed to be instantly calling to each other. A car started up down the road. Someone shouted in Arabic. Asim was walking towards us and from the end of the street a car was cruising in our direction. I looked back at the carnage in the passageway leading into the Yacoub building. The boy was pushing the bodies to the side. Blood was flowing. A pang of revulsion turned my stomach sour. I felt a
slap on my back.
“I thought you might run. I am glad you didn’t. We would have had to kill you. That would have been a terrible waste.” He pushed past me.
I followed him, vowing to make sure these bastards got what they deserved.
A clatter of feet sounded behind us. Four men with black scarves around their heads and mouths pushed past us. I followed them towards the villa. The boy, still behind, closed the steel door to the outside world and stayed with the bodies. The last I saw was him rifling through their pockets.
Asim gripped my arm, led the way to a side door in the villa, down a set of marble steps. The door opened without a key and we streamed in. A corridor led into the building. Was it possible the two guards were the only security presence?
We moved fast past closed doors on either side. We passed a security camera high up on a wall. It pointed towards us. If there were any other guards here, they’d be well aware of our presence now. Asim opened a door at the end of the corridor.
The men were all around me. One was behind me. I got a sudden thought that I would be a bargaining tool if they were pinned down.
We went through the door. I knew where we were. This was the ornate staircase leading to the basement levels, which I had been in earlier that day. Asim went down, pushing me ahead of him. His men followed. The iron rich smell of blood was still in my nostrils. Revulsion was still tightening my throat.
I half expected a troop of guards to appear from below or above. I kept shooting glances over the banisters, but it appeared there was no one else in the building. The only sound was the clump of shoes on the marble stairs.
We passed the first basement floor and pushed on down. At the next level Asim pressed his ear to the door, then leaned away. One of the men was standing beside me. We formed a semi-circle around him. He’d clearly been tasked with watching me when Asim wasn’t.
Asim motioned at one of the other men. He tried the door handle. Then, when it didn’t open, he reached into a small backpack he’d placed on the floor. He opened a plastic lunch box and placed what looked like putty near the handle. It had a small electronic timer embedded it. The man waved us to go back, then tapped at the timer.
We were all back and up the stairway, out of sight of the door, when the explosion went off. My ear drums reverberated, as if my skull was a bell. I’d opened my mouth before the explosion went off, but my ears were still affected and every noise was muffled. The dull wail of an alarm started up. I looked at the others, spotted ear plugs in their ears.
They had protected themselves. My arm was grabbed again and I was pushed forward and down the stairs. Asim was ahead. He had opened the door. It had a hole blown out of it about a foot wide, where the lock had been. Jagged pieces of metal littered the ground. A black stain covered the wall, the floor and the ceiling. Smoke lingered in the air and a strong smell of burnt plastic.
The others followed Asim. I went through too.
The corridor beyond was empty. A flashing red warning light lit up the corridor with an eerie glow. The alarm wailed. My head was still reverberating, but I was focused. I too wanted to know what was in this corridor.
Asim was walking ahead, opening the doors on one side of the corridor. One of the other men was opening the doors on the other side. I followed, peering in the doors. My blood cooled. In the middle of the first room stood a steel operating table. Around the room stood hospital equipment. Steel tables lined one wall. On them were blue sample boxes, a small fridge, small pieces of steel and white medical equipment. This was a facility to experiment on humans.
Asim had been right.
A shout rang out from the corridor. I knew what it meant.
They had found someone.
58
Xena rocked back and forward on her heels. She knew what she had to do. She’d seen the bottom of the pit. It had looked like sand. But the light had gone out too quickly for her to be sure.
And even if it was sand, it was a long way down. And the sand could be a thin layer above bedrock. And it didn’t mean there was a way out.
She closed her eyes, felt forward to the edge of the slab, pressed it down, moved her hand around the edge, looking for hand holds, any indication that people had gone down this way thousand of years ago. She took her time. She listened, too. It was a long way to the nearest buildings beyond the pyramid compound, but there was the possibility that there could be running water deep down, underground rivers flowing into the Nile.
It was one of the things she’d heard Yacoub talking about, that water courses fed out from the Giza plateau to the river.
Now she was finished working her way around the hole.
She said a prayer, turned, extended her feet into the hole. If she was going down this way she would have to do it quickly. Her hands trembled. She gripped them together. The muscles in her arms and legs were tightening, as if she was getting ready to run through the desert, as she had done when she was a child.
She remembered the village women ululating when a baby was born, or when a villager died. She remembered how they’d taken care of her.
She believed in the fate her mothers had taught her would be hers and hers alone. She was the chosen one, the one who would find what had been lost.
She held her hand over the edge of the hole. There was definitely a slight breeze. There had to be a way to the outside down there. She pushed herself over the edge, let go quickly before the stone swung back into place and crushed her hands.
And she was falling into the blackness.
59
I went into the room. My heart wanted to stop beating. There was a body under a white sheet on a hospital trolley in the middle of the room. The siren had just stopped, creating an eerie silence.
Asim was standing by the body. He was bent over, as if whispering to it. I walked slowly towards him. When I reached the body a hush descended on the room. Two of the other men who’d come with us stood behind me. They’d been talking in Arabic. They stopped as I lifted the sheet from the face.
My heart was heavy, and I wanted to slow time, for it to go backwards, to not be here at all.
But the face wasn’t Sean’s. My hand shook so much I dropped the sheet back down.
Asim said something to one of the other men. He took a smartphone from his pocket and took a picture of the face I’d looked at. The face looked caved in, as if something had eaten it from the inside. Was that what they had done to Sean? I turned, ran for the door. I had to check every other room.
“Mrs. Ryan,” Asim called, but I ignored him. I looked at the other doors. The one nearest me was open. I ran to it. The hospital trolley inside the room had no one on it. I ran to the next door, opened it. There wasn’t even a trolley in this room. It was a store room.
There was only one more door. Asim was near me, walking fast towards it. He had his hands up, as if warning me not to follow. I didn’t hesitate for one second. He may have been conditioned to think women should obey what men say, but there was no way I was going to put up with this bullshit.
I went through the door. There was another body on a table covered in a white sheet, but this was definitely a woman. Asim turned and growled at me, waved at me, as if he wanted me out of the room. Then he strode to the table and pulled the sheet away, exposing the head and breasts of a young woman, perhaps twenty-five. Her face was disfigured. Where her nose had been there was a bloody hole.
I reached for the sheet, pulled it from Asim’s hand and placed it back over the woman’s body.
The men grunted.
Asim shouted something in Arabic. They all trooped out of the room. I said a quick prayer over the woman and followed. Asim was at the end of the corridor, back where we’d come in.
“Be quick, Mrs. Ryan,” he shouted.
We went down the stairs again. On the next level the door was open. As we passed through it I saw that all the doors, on both sides, were also open. Asim walked fast past them. I waited at the door back out to the stairs. One of Asim�
�s men waited with me. He had an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. His hand was cradling it. He looked ready to use it.
He was now staring at me. Did all Arab men think Western women are easy, that they’ll sleep with anyone?
I turned away from him. God only knew what would happen if we were in a firefight. Men have a nasty habit of letting their most repulsive instincts out when death is staring them in the face.
But where were Yacoub’s other guards, and where were his two nieces I’d seen earlier? They had to have heard the gunshots up above. Then it came to me. They’d have gone to a safe room as soon as they knew they were under attack. They were probably waiting for reinforcements to arrive.
If Asim wasn’t careful he’d be trapped down here.
He may have come to the same conclusion, because he ran back to where I was standing.
He shouted something in Arabic and we headed down again. The door on the next floor opened easily. This floor was just a large concrete open area, as if the rooms on this level hadn’t been installed yet.
The next floor down was the floor where I’d been shown that video of the ancient history of Cairo. The door to that floor was open too. I ran fast to the end of the corridor. If Sean had been upstairs, they may have taken him somewhere down here when they heard the attack on the building.
Perhaps they had a panic room at this level. Perhaps it was linked to the room where they’d shown me the videos. There had been two doors on one side of the room.
I reached the door at the end first. Only Asim was behind me. The other men were checking rooms along the corridor. I tried the steel door handle. The door was locked. Asim came up beside me. He leaned his ear up to the door. Then he smiled, waved me to join him, to listen at the door too.
60
Xena hit the sand with a bone jarring thud. It felt as if every joint and socket in her body had been opened and closed. She’d been in a crouching position as she fell, and he fingers had come near enough to the wall on each side, that she could sense it rushing past.
The Cairo Puzzle Page 16
