Firebird

by Michael Asher

  ‘Boutros, you’re crazy,’ I said, ‘there’s no need to stay. You’ll be killed.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but I’ve got out of tighter spots than this. I been round a long time, boy. I promised your people I’d protect you with my life, and you ended up saving mine. You think there’s ever a day gone past I haven’t thought about that? Nah, I’m too old to run. At least I can buy you some time. You remember our emergency exit: through the Gents and up the stairs. Now get out of here!’

  I threw my arms round him, hugging the huge weightlifter’s torso. There were tears in my eyes. ‘May the Divine Spirit protect you,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he said, shrugging me off and turning towards the entrance. The last I saw he was crouching behind a brick pillar drawing a bead on a squad of shadows swarming down the stairs.

  32

  By the time I reached the Khan it was sunrise, and the muezzins were chanting out the call to prayers from the minarets through booming speakers. Like Ra, I’d come through the Twelve Hours of the night, descended into a watery Underworld, fought with demons, wrestled with the Great Serpent Apop, survived treachery, trickery and terror. Nothing ever seems so bad in the light of day, and as I watched the sun come up cold between the tortured buildings, its heat diluted by an icy wind and a furrow of ash grey cloud, I rejoiced as the ancient Egyptians must have rejoiced. I suppose it could have been the bennies, but for a minute I almost got on my knees and bowed down in worship. Then I realized I was standing in front of the teashop where they’d slotted Ibram, and I pulled myself together. Sayyidna al-Hussayn square was already full of early—morning crowds and an antique steam roller was grinding through a pall of leaden smoke, followed by a gang of labourers in rotten shoes wielding forks and sweeping brushes. There were plenty of cops about, but I knew the crowds were my best hiding place, and I melted into the stream of unwashed humanity, another unshaven, unkempt nobody in down-at-heel togs. None of them gave me a second glance. All along the Muski there were shawarma stalls, juice sellers with glass globes of tamarind and hibiscus juice like space helmets, and fuul sellers with their big burnished pots on braziers, mounted on gypsy—carts painted garish colours. An untimely ice cream man had moored his float in the middle of the street, and was leaning morosely through his hatch in an overcoat and listening to readings from the Quran that blasted from a battered transistor. It was an incongruous combination, I thought — ice cream and Islam. The air was a compound of delicious smells — grilled meat, fresh bread, spices, but the bennies had taken the edge off my hunger, and I pressed on through the crowds and turned down into the Badestan Gate, a sixteenth century passageway that led straight as a die into the heart of the bazaar.

  The Badestan coffee shop lay at the corner of the street, almost under the eaves of the Badestan Gate. As I turned the corner I suddenly remembered that this was where Sanusi claimed to have seen the ghoul chewing bones. I had laughed at him for Daisy’s sake, but I had grown up in a society where such visions were taken for granted. We’re conditioned what to believe in from birth, and if you happen to be brought up in a society that believes in ghosts and ghouls and things that go bump in the night, they’re as real as apple pie.

  I stood on the corner for a moment, surveying the street. The old gate was one of the early entrances to the bazaar, and the street beyond passed what had been the façade of the original caravanserai. The word ‘Badestan’ derived from the Turkish word ‘Bazzestan’, meaning a market for silk, cotton, linen and precious objects. The gate itself was a saracenic arch made up of fitted blocks, surmounted by a band of dense fractal Islamic calligraphy, but there was no ghoul sitting on it this morning. The coffee shop was sited almost beneath the archway — a place of peeling green paint where men in trench coats, shawls and turbans sat warming themselves with tea and shishas. All the way from the Gezira I’d wondered if Daisy would make the rendezvous. I knew that she could have set me up last night, but it hardly mattered. I knew she could be setting me up now and I might be walking into a spider’s web, but I also knew they wouldn’t kill me until I’d got what they wanted, and at present I only had half of it. I wondered if Daisy and Van Helsing had been working together from the beginning, and if those little scenes at the Mena and in the car last night had been manufactured for my benefit. By the time I’d reached the coffee shop, though, I’d decided she would show whatever happened. Van Helsing had said Daisy was off the case, but whoever and whatever she was, Daisy was a player and I had the feeling she’d see the game out to the bitter end.

  Standing on the corner I saw that my hunch had been right. She was sitting at one of the small tables in the street, sipping tea, wearing a heavy dress, a shawl and a weighted headcloth of black muslin that concealed her blonde hair. Nobody was bothering her — at last she’d got the message about keeping a low profile, I thought. Or maybe she’d got it from the beginning and that whole feminist thing was part of the role playing. I did a quick check for hidden eyes and moved in silently, sitting down in the chair next to her before she even looked up.

  ‘I thought you were off the case,’ I said.

  She lifted her eyes to me and I saw a flash of tenderness there. If she wasn’t pleased to see me, she did a damned good act. But then Daisy had always done a good act, I thought. Her eyes were red rimmed and puffy as if she’d been crying and her skin was drawn and pale from lack of sleep. A wan smile flickered around the generous mouth. Van Helsing gave it his best shot,’ she said, ‘but I got the ambassador up in the middle of the night. He wasn’t amused, I can tell you. I pointed out that I was assigned to this case by FBI HQ in the States, and it wasn’t Van Helsing’s right to have me removed. Van Helsing muttered about “renegade agents” but I pled the Fifth about the archives job, and Dracula had no proof.’

  I thought about it. It seemed to me that the ambassador had been very easily swayed. ‘So,’ I said, ‘you blamed it all on me?’

  She looked hurt. ‘Are you kidding?’ she said. ‘That would have been like harakiri. I denied all knowledge, full stop. All Van Helsing saw was a bunch of thugs chasing us down the street on Roda. He reckoned they were Militants himself, so they can’t book me for that.’

  A waiter in a faded gallabiyya, a ragged tweed jacket and a woolly hat shuffled up and I ordered strong black coffee. The bennies were still working my corpuscles over — they’d be on line for a full twelve hours at least, I reckoned, but I couldn’t stop the urge to suck my teeth. It was an effort to keep still, too.

  ‘Whatsamatter?’ Daisy asked. ‘You look agitated.’

  ‘Yeah, well that’s the effect Van Helsing has on me.’

  The waiter brought lukewarm black coffee in a glass with a tiny dish of sugar on a battered brass tray. It wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, but I spooned sugar in and drank it down in gulps. Daisy toyed with her tea and watched me through narrowed eyes. Suddenly she laid a warm hand on mine and fixed me with her hard, ice-coloured eyes. ‘We’re in this together,’ she said, ‘and like Hammoudi said, we’re on the same side.’

  ‘And what side is that?’ I said.

  ‘The side of the angels,’ she said. The way she said it gave me an eerie jolt, and I withdrew my hand abruptly. As far as Daisy went, the jury was still out, I thought.

  ‘Sanusi’s dead,’ I said, ‘my informant too. Fawzi was found to have poison in his system that was introduced from his drip. One of the guys who bushwhacked us last night had a Sekhmet tattoo on his arm, and guess what? Van Helsing has the same thing. Now, do you know any other CIA officer who has the goddess of devastation tattooed on his wrist?’

  For a moment Daisy looked confused. ‘What’s this about, Sammy?’ she asked with a sudden swell of emotion.

  I felt like telling her to drop the little-girl-lost act, but I just stared at her coolly. ‘Ibram was mixed up with U S national security,’ I said. ‘Dracula told me the Sanusiya’s been revived and there are Militant sympathizers in the police and army. Ibram was taken out because he was
supplying information on Militant activities to the U S government. Van Helsing reckoned it was the same mob who came after us last night.’

  ‘What about Cambyses’ army?’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense. OK, finding an ancient Persian army lost for two and a half millennia might make National Geographic, but it wouldn’t explain the national security angle or all the killing — Ibram, Fawzi, now Sanusi and my informant — not to mention the hit on us last night. Think of what we found in the archives — the Operation Firebird file. Why would they leave the Cambyses material in the file when the rest was ripped out? The only explanation is that whoever removed it thought the Cambyses story wasn’t directly relevant.’

  ‘Then why was it there in the first place?’

  ‘I said not directly relevant. But maybe it was relevant incidentally. Cambyses’ troops were meant to have been marching on Siwa, but why? It was no military threat. Maybe Herodotus got it wrong. Maybe the Persians weren’t going for Siwa at all. Maybe they were looking for something else. What if Cambyses in 525 BC, the Germans in 1916, and the Ibram-Sanusi team this year were all looking for the same thing?’

  She dropped her eyes for a moment and when she lifted them again, they were liquid pools. ‘The only guy who could have told us was Sanusi,’ she said, ‘and he’s dead.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘there is someone else. Christian Monod, and he’s here in the Khan right now.’

  33

  Nobody seemed to know where the Austet Inn was. We asked shopkeepers and pedestrians who looked like they belonged here, and no one seemed to have heard of it. Finally, we found an old man with a terracotta face sitting idly on the bed of a cart, smoking a shisha made out of an oil can. He told us that it was a derelict place that hadn’t been used in years, sited near the Ashrafiyya complex — one of the oldest parts of the bazaar. We found it at the end of a long desolate alley, well outside the populated area, a place strewn with tin cans, bits of rusty engines, derelict cars, horse dung, and piles of old rubble. A sign reading Austet Inn in Arabic still stood over the door, but the place was a shell — the carcass of a building that looked as though it had been worked on by giant vultures. All its orifices had been enlarged by attrition or vandalism, and half its walls had caved in and tumbled into the street outside. The place smelt of goats and human excrement, and the floor was covered in little black balls of goat shit. There were some stairs at the back of the front room leading down into a dark cellar, and I groped for my pocket torch. I flashed the beam down there, and Daisy drew her SIG.

  The cellar was obviously inhabited. The floor had been swept clean and there was a mattress losing stuffing, a sleeping bag and a couple of cowhide covered stools pushed into a corner. A cardboard carton held tinned meat, soup and vegetables, and next to it there was a butane gas cooker, a twenty litre jerry can of water, a couple of oil lamps and some pots and pans. I knelt down to touch the cooker and found it was still warm. ‘Someone’s been here until a few minutes ago!’ I told Daisy. Just then there was a scuffle of heavy feet and a play of shadows as a dark robed woman hurtled out of an invisible alcove. This time it wasn’t a knife but a pick helve she was waving. Daisy stepped in her way, cocked the SIG and thrust it into the veiled face in a single expert movement.

  ‘Stop right there!’ she snapped.

  Monod stopped in mid-flight, dropped the pick helve and pulled off his face veil. ‘What the hell is she doing here?’ he asked me accusingly. ‘You were supposed to come alone.’

  ‘She’s my partner,’ I said, ‘she can be trusted.’

  He glanced at her dubiously, angles of his face highlighted in my torch beam.

  ‘After all, she could have shot you,’ I said. ‘You might have taken our heads off with that thing.’

  Monod eyed me sullenly and I noticed his hand was seriously bandaged where I’d slashed him across the knuckles. ‘You were supposed to come alone,’ he said. ‘The deal’s off.’

  ‘Listen, Monod. Ibram’s dead, like you told me, and now Sanusi’s dead, along with several other people involved. Last night they tried to kill me and Daisy here.

  Hammoudi — the big detective — might well be dead too. If you don’t come clean now, then a lot more people are going to be rubbed out, including myself and you as well. I’d rather avoid that if possible.’

  Monod stood defiantly, feet apart, weighing up the possibilities. ‘How do I know you weren’t followed?’ he asked.

  ‘Even I don’t know that,’ I said. ‘You have to make a leap of faith. You can’t fight this battle alone.’

  He looked at his bandaged hand. ‘Seems I’m required to take a lot on faith,’ he said.

  ‘Look. We’re on your side.’

  ‘And what side is that?’

  ‘The side of the angels.’

  Daisy grinned and Monod relaxed. ‘I was never much for angels,’ he said. He searched my face keenly, then knelt down and pulled a box of matches from his pocket. ‘Point your torch on this will you?’ he asked, gesturing to one of the oil lamps. In my torch beam I watched him flick up the mantle and light the wick with a single match. He turned the wick up slightly and eased the mantle down, then lit the second lamp. A warm earthenware glow spread through the cellar. He pulled out the mattress and pointed to the skin covered stools. ‘That’s all I can offer,’ he said, ‘but it’s better than the floor.’ He sat down heavily on the mattress and Daisy and I arranged ourselves on the stools. I saw that she made sure she was well in sight of the entrance, just in case anyone might sneak up on us. Professional till the end, I thought. She laid the S I G , still cocked, on her knees. Monod sat in a lotus position and blinked at us expectantly. ‘So,’ he said, ‘confession time. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything,’ I said. ‘What is the map about?’

  Monod hesitated and eyed Daisy’s piece. ‘Would you mind,’ he said, ‘it’s like having the Sword of Damocles hanging over you.’ Daisy removed the magazine expertly and ejected the round from the chamber right into her hand. She fed the round into the mag, slipped it back into the butt and put the S I G away. Monod watched her, then let out a long sigh. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘The map shows the location of Firebird.’

  ‘What is Firebird?’ I asked.

  Monod paused as if debating how to start. ‘Have you ever heard of the secret Books of Thoth?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘they were thought to contain all the wisdom the Egyptian priesthood had accumulated over the millennia. But they’re only a legend, aren’t they?’

  ‘They were a legend. But a few years back, fragments of a manuscript were discovered in the library of a monastery in Cairo, by a British Egyptologist. It was written in Coptic, and was probably a copy of a copy of a copy and so on. The professor who found the text was certain it formed part of the missing Books of Thoth, but before he could publicize the find, he died in a motor accident. The manuscript vanished from the public domain but turned up in the collection of an American, who allowed it to be studied in great secrecy by a select few. Doctor Adam Ibram was one of the few. The text was by no means complete, of course, but Adam pieced things together and realized that the Books of Thoth weren’t an accumulation of wisdom or a record. They were a blueprint — a detailed plan made by the initiates called the Shemsu-Hor — probably the forerunners of the Ra Brotherhood — for a project they had put into effect over eight thousand years — the Rostau or Firebird project.’

  ‘Eight thousand years!’ Daisy said. ‘How could anyone put a plan into effect over such a long time?’

  ‘These guys thought big, and they had patience. They were working on the scale of the cosmos, not on the scale of our petty, materialist lives. By studying the astronomical material in the text, Adam came to the conclusion that the project had been initiated in the Age of Leo, around the time when the constellation Orion reached its nadir — that is about 10,500 BC. This, he realized, was the period the ancient Egyptians referred to as Zep-Tepi — the First Time. There were re
ferences in the text to the Great Sphinx at Rostau, which we now know as the Giza Plateau.’

  ‘You mean the Sphinx goes back to 10,500 BC ?’

  ‘Yes, in fact there’s now scientific evidence to support the idea. The Great Sphinx has signs of water erosion that could only have been made during a pluvial period that started in about 8000 BC, meaning that it’s at least as old as that, and probably older. The fact that it was built in the form of a lion suggests that it may have been carved during the Age of Leo, which would put it at about 10,500 BC. The head it has now — which may or may not be Khafre — was probably carved later.’

  ‘I always thought the head was too small for the body!’

  ‘Exactly, and you’re not the only one to have made that observation. Now, if the Sphinx was carved in the Age of Leo, then Giza had been chosen as a sacred site long before Old Kingdom times. But Adam went further. He said the manuscript proved that the whole complex — pyramids and all — had been planned in minute detail back in the Age of Leo and not completed until eight thousand years later.’

  ‘Seems a heck of a long time to wait.’

  ‘Yes, but the programme was directed by astronomical data. The Shemsu-Hor were waiting for a certain alignment of stars that would only occur around 2500 BC. The Books of Thoth were handed down from high priest to high priest over the ages to make certain the plan was never lost. The Shemsu-Hor and their successors, the Ra Brotherhood, were wheeling and dealing everything behind the scenes.’

  ‘But what purpose could have been worth waiting for all those millennia?’

  ‘Unfortunately the text didn’t reveal that, but obviously it had to have been some very big deal, to say the least. What Adam did discover was that the central object of the whole show wasn’t the Sphinx or the Great Pyramid — they were just accessories. The centrepiece was the Benben Stone, which was supposed to have fallen to earth from the stars, and was kept in the sacred Firebird Temple at Heliopolis for millennia, right up to about 2500 BC, when it was moved to Giza and set up as the capstone of the Great Pyramid.’