Absolution

by Paul E. Hardisty

  13th November 1997. Cairo, Egypt. 09:15 hrs

  Claymore is in the kitchen with Atef. Apparently Atef has a friend in customs at the airport. He is on the telephone to him now.

  The conversation with my friend from the Directorate loops through my mind. I need to write it down. Before we go.

  This was how it went:

  Did you leave a message to call me? I asked.

  Yes, my friend from the Directorate said.

  How did you get the number?

  From the hard drive.

  Al-Gambal?

  No. Another name.

  How did you know? My voice trembled, wondering about the nature of the relationship between my husband and the Kemetic.

  I guessed.

  You have something for me?

  Yes. Prepare yourself.

  Vas-y. By now my heart was pounding, my pulse rapid, my breath short.

  I have been going through the CCTV archives from all the airports, running face-recognition algorithms.

  Yes.

  I found something.

  Me?

  Yes. Geneva. So far, I have managed to bury it.

  Thank you.

  No need to thank me. We are even now.

  We always were.

  Now, yes.

  How long do I have?

  Days. A week perhaps. I will do my best. There are a lot of airports.

  Thank you. Adieu. I made to end the call.

  Wait. There is something else.

  Yes?

  The algorithm threw up another match. The day your husband and son disappeared. Charles de Gaulle airport. Air Egypt to Cairo. A woman. Almost you, but not you.

  Mon Dieu, I gasped.

  She was travelling with a little boy. You can see it clearly in the video. Dark, curly hair, toddler. She had him in one of those carriers you strap across the chest. His eyes are closed. He looks asleep.

  What are you telling me?

  It looks like Eugène.

  I was quiet for a long moment, not believing what I was hearing. My God. Are you sure?

  I can’t be certain. Do you understand? But it looks like him, the last time I saw him. And didn’t you say that a strange woman looking like you drove away with him that day?

  Do you have a name?

  I ran her picture through the airline’s database.

  I was crying now, shaking. Please, tell me.

  The woman was travelling on an Egyptian passport issued to Jumoke Quarah.

  My God.

  There is one more thing.

  Vas-y.

  We have received reliable intelligence that Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya is planning a major attack in Egypt. This man called The Lion has recently taken over as the leader and is pushing for action. We believe the attack is imminent. Days. We are going to share the information with the Egyptians tomorrow. This is why I had to contact you, why I took the risk.

  Merci, mon ami.

  Wait, do you understand? We will share all of the information with the Egyptians.

  Compris.

  My God, could it really be him? Am I fooling myself, allowing my desperation to kindle a faint hope into a blaze of self-deception? Is there any logic to it? Even if it was that woman my friend saw in the CCTV video, why would she have spared my Eugène, risked going through customs with an abducted child? And why take someone else’s child? What could she possibly want with Eugène? No, it all seems too implausible. A set of random coincidences. My mind reels. Perhaps she…

  Defy Gravity, Deny Time

  They took Atef’s car. Atef drove.

  When they reached Giza, Clay told the girls to sink down in their seats and keep their heads below the windows. Rania directed Atef along the corniche and then west, south of and parallel to the market. It was midday and the streets were crowded.

  Atef navigated his way through the swirling Cairo traffic. Clay pulled the cap Atef had given him down close over his eyes. The Kemetic’s building was not far away.

  ‘Turn here,’ said Rania, pointing to a small side street.

  Atef rolled the car to a stop beneath the red canopy of a flame tree.

  Rania donned her burqa and stepped from the car. ‘Wait here,’ she said.

  Clay jumped out of the car.

  ‘Please, Claymore.’

  ‘No chance, Ra,’ he said, closing the door and moving to her. ‘Not this time. We do this together.’

  Rania shrugged, leaned into the car and said something to the girls. Then she turned and started down the street. Clay fell back, following at a distance. Rania moved quickly through the warren of back streets and alleys. He paced her, shadowing her twists and backtracks until he emerged into a lane flanked by a two-metre-high brick wall that ran all along one side. At the far end was what appeared to be the entrance to a parking area. Rania was halfway along the lane, standing near a clutch of browning palm trees and dust-covered sycamores. She looked back at him and then disappeared into the trees. When he came to the place, he saw that she’d climbed up onto a pile of rubble that had been pushed up against the wall and was crouching at the lip. The place was hidden from the lane by the trees, and someone had knocked out a notch in the top of the wall.

  Clay joined her and looked out across a large area of vacant land. A few palm trees clung up against the wall, filmed over with that same dust that blanketed the city, those fine landed particulates that slurried the air. Piles of smoking rubbish hulked up along the edge of the canal, pimpled the open ground between where they stood and the far buildings, perhaps three hundred metres away.

  ‘There,’ she whispered, pointing to the far side of the lot.

  But all he could see were wooden pallets, plastic bags, heaps of strewn and rotting peelings being picked over by a couple of goats, piles of broken masonry and twisted rebar. ‘What am I looking for?’ he said.

  ‘Can you see those shelters, up against the wall?’

  Same view, and now, a different meaning. ‘Yes.’

  ‘That is where the girls live. Where I lived.’

  ‘Good place to hide.’

  ‘Not so good, it turned out.’

  ‘And your friend?’

  ‘She helped me Clay. Without her I would never have been able to find you.’

  ‘Yesterday, at the pyramids.’

  Rania nodded. ‘I think she’s here.’

  ‘That would depend on your two friends.’

  She glanced at his bandaged arm, pushed her gaze deep into his. ‘It was them you fought.’

  ‘I had no choice.’ Another truth hidden.

  She closed her eyes a long moment. ‘Did you…’ she began, but stopped short.

  ‘No, Rania. I didn’t. They’ll need some time to recover, but they’ll live.’

  ‘Al hamdillulah.’

  Clay too gave thanks for this, but called on no divine power. ‘They’re cops, Rania, definitely. But they were carrying a lot of cash. Hard currency. They’re on the take.’

  ‘The Consortium,’ said Rania. ‘It has to be. I must speak to Samira, and we must return her daughters.’

  ‘What if the police still have her?’

  Rania shook her head, didn’t answer.

  ‘Do you trust her, Ra?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Are you sure? How did those cops know where you were going to be?’

  ‘Of course I am. It was Samira’s idea to dress in the burqa to make contact with you at Cheops. In case there were problems.’

  ‘Then she also knew what you’d written in the note. Either they forced it out of her, or she told them freely.’

  Rania shook her head from side to side. ‘No, Claymore. No. She wouldn’t.’

  Clay reached up and touched Rania’s face with his hand. ‘How much does she know, Rania?’

  Rania was quiet a moment, and then took Clay’s hand in hers. ‘I told her everything, Claymore. Almost everything. I…’ she tailed off to a whisper. ‘I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Then we have
to assume that by now, the police know everything she does.’

  Rania hid her face in her hands.

  ‘Everyone breaks, Rania. You know that.’ Clay pulled out his field glasses and scanned the shelters. There appeared to be more than a dozen, ranked side by side like the Johannesburg township slum dwellings he’d glimpsed through the car window of his childhood. This, after all, was still Africa. ‘Which one is yours?’

  ‘Third from the far end. With the blue plastic roof.’

  ‘And hers?’

  ‘Next one to the right.’

  He refocused. In front of the hovels was a small area of packed dirt. It had been freshly swept. Closer to the front of the shelter was a small brazier fashioned from the same dirt, moulded and dried into a horseshoe. A pile of ash smouldered within.

  ‘She’s there,’ he said. ‘Or has been recently.’ He handed Rania the glasses.

  She raised them to her face, twisted the focus knob and looked out a moment. Then she handed them back. ‘I must go to her.’

  Clay grabbed her by the shoulder, pulled her back down behind the wall. ‘Don’t, Rania.’

  She twisted herself away from his grasp. ‘Do not tell me what to do, Claymore.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. But please, Ra, just wait. Think. If the police had her and let her go, they may be waiting for exactly this. We can bring the girls close. They can make their way home by themselves.’

  ‘Home?’ Rania hissed. ‘You call that a home?’

  Clay recoiled, surprised by the vehemence in her voice. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered.

  ‘I cannot simply leave,’ she said.

  ‘We don’t have time, Rania. Atef’s friend in customs isn’t going to wait for ever. We have to find your boy, if that was him.’

  She stiffened. ‘There is time.’

  Clay filled his lungs, cycled through his breathing. He knew he wasn’t going to win. ‘Okay, Rania. Okay. But let’s check out the area first. Do a recon.’

  Rania turned to him, pushed away his hand. ‘Please do not use that ridiculous language around me.’ Scorn flashed in her eyes. ‘Recon,’ she spat.

  Clay bit down on it, kept quiet, started scanning the area. If the cops were using the woman Samira as bait, they would be nearby, close enough to react, far enough away to be unobtrusive. One thing was sure, it wouldn’t be Tall or Moonface.

  Clay looked back up over his shoulder at the apartment block immediately behind them. A rooftop would be perfect. ‘Will you wait here, Rania? Please?’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  He pointed to the top of the building. ‘Up there.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’ll signal you: thumb up – go and be quick, meet back here; across the throat – danger, go back to the car, I’ll meet you there.’ As he said it, a car trundled down the lane below them, sending up a cloud of dust.

  She closed her eyes, opened them. ‘Oui.’

  He scrambled down to the lane and started towards the building. The back door was unlocked. He took the fire stairs and emerged onto the rubble-strewn rooftop. He was alone. Moving to the lane side he crouched behind the brick safety wall. From here he could see out across the whole neighbourhood, past the fetid bright green of the hyacinth-and-garbage-choked canal to the elevated freeway, the sea of rooftops covering the floodplain in every direction. In the distance, Cheops’ frayed three-thousand-year-old crown pierced the brume, floating on the inversion as if trying to defy gravity, deny time.

  If the cops were here, they could be anywhere. In any one of the cars parked along the road that paralleled the canal. On any of the nearby rooftops. In any of the hundreds of windows and doorways overlooking this small piece of ground in the middle of Cairo. He looked down. There was Rania, just visible in the little clutch of trees. She looked up at him, waved. He waved back. Something fizzed along his spine, echoed a moment in the big muscles of his legs. He raised the binoculars and started scanning, working outwards from the shelters in widening circles, the way he’d been taught. The way Crowbar had taught him. Be methodical. Be sure. There is time to do it right. Don’t miss something that could get one of them killed.

  He’d started his second, expanded, sweep, when he saw Rania wave. He lowered the glasses, looked down at her. She was pointing out towards the shelters. Clay looked up. A man had emerged from Samira’s shelter, was standing with his back turned. The man turned his head left then right and started towards the canal, picking his way between the smouldering heaps of garbage. Clay followed him with the binoculars. The man was moving quickly, with purpose. He reached the canal road, stopped a moment, turned right. As he did, his face came into view. Clay’s heart lurched. It was G.

  Clay looked down towards the clutch of trees. Rania wasn’t there. He looked left and right. Nothing. Then movement, beyond the wall. She had broken cover and was moving across the open ground towards the shelters.

  Clay cursed, swung the glasses back towards G. He’d reached the road and had started along the canal road, walking at the same brisk pace. Seconds later he disappeared behind the nearest building. Clay jumped to his feet, sprinted to the stairwell, took the stairs half a flight at a time, vaulting from one landing to the next, pivoting around the railings. By the time he reached the trees and the wall, Rania was already more than halfway to the shelters. He jumped to the ground and started after her.

  By the time he reached the shelters she had already disappeared inside. He pulled back the flap, peered into the half-lit darkness.

  Rania was there, sitting on the floor. She looked up at him as he entered, but said nothing. Beside her, splayed out on the ground, staring up at the sagging plastic sheeting, was the woman he’d seen being dragged away from the pyramids. Samira.

  14th November 1997. Cairo, Egypt. 02:00 hrs

  Luxor. It is decided. We will leave as soon as we can arrange transport.

  To find Eugène, we must find the woman, Jumoke Quarah. Customs records show her arriving in Cairo, just as my friend said, on 26th October, from Paris. With her, as an accompanied minor, was Said Qarrah, aged three years. There were no photographs or video from the airport, but Atef’s friend gave us a printout of the two passport photo pages. I have them here in my hand now, as I write this.

  It is him. My little boy. Eugène.

  And she … The resemblance is remarkable. As if I had a twin sister.

  According to Egyptian government records she obtained a visa to go to France in April of this year and travelled there in September. She went alone. Mon Dieu! How did the authorities not pick that up? Atef’s friend cross-referenced the name in the Egyptian government database, and confirmed that such a person is indeed registered in the Governorate of Luxor. He could provide no address or contact details, however.

  Is this the woman who murdered my husband? Was she sent by this group that everyone refers to as the Consortium? Could it even have been the AB? Is it something to do with the court case involving Yusuf Al-Gambal and the Kemetic? Can these things be related? And if so, what could they possibly want with Eugène? Has he become one more example of the ancient tradition of stealing the enemy’s children and enslaving them – if not physically, then ideologically? If he is a hostage, then why have they not contacted me? Perhaps they have been trying, and by running from them I have missed the chance to barter for his life. It is me they want, surely. None of it makes any sense.

  I am living a nightmare.

  We are at Atef’s apartment for another night. I know it worries you, Claymore. You do not want to expose your friend, as I did not want to expose mine.

  Earlier tonight you told me that Jean-Marie was dead. You would not tell me what happened, only that he died helping you. Mon Dieu, it does not seem possible. I wept for a long time. I wept for Hope and her unborn baby. I wept for you, mon amour, for the loss of your closest remaining friend. I cried for us all.

  I lie here, unable to sleep, and I watch you as I write this. You are lying on the floor, as you did last night
. You are on your side. Your head is crooked in your right arm. You are looking up at me. You have been that way since I started. You are silent. You do not interrupt me, just lie there caressing me with those smoke-grey eyes. I know you want so much more from me, Claymore. I can feel the power of your desire. But you let me write, allow me this time. You are a good man, despite everything, despite what you believe about yourself. You know I need time to come to terms with all that has happened.

  I glance up at you now, and you smile at me. It is not a broad smile. I have never seen such a thing from you. It is partial, hesitant, half apology, half acknowledgment, as if you cannot allow yourself the full pleasure of the thing. And yet, for you, it is a smile, and the meaning of it warms me.

  For I am cold. Despite the warm November, I shiver. I know I could go to you now and speak to you, instead of writing to you. But I do not. The future frightens me, Claymore, holds me back. And the glowing warmth of knowing that my son is alive – alive! – is replaced now by the chill of the knowledge that he is among strangers, far from home and those who love him. Where are they keeping him? Is he being cared for? Mon Dieu, he is only a little boy. Who could do such a thing? And to what end?

  We are animals, Claymore. Base and vile creatures. It is the only explanation. Driven by lust and greed, the basest of instincts, the urge to kill nestles deep within us, encoded in our genes. I know this to be true, now. I would gladly kill again to get my son back, to keep him safe. Gladly. And yet, what is it that makes us human? Is it not our ability to rise above these forces, to aspire to a higher purpose? Is this not the word of Allah, brought to us through the writings of the prophet Mohamed? Is this not the real truth?

  ‘What is the worldly life except the enjoyment of delusion?’

  And so, I deny you your desire, as I deny my own. You will have to wait. I know not how long. Perhaps forever. Before God, I renounce myself to the delusions of this life. For Allah deprives as suddenly as he gives.

  The girls are sleeping now, finally. I told them the truth – that their mother is dead. I did not tell them why she died, only than that it was the will of Allah, and that she was a good person, and long-suffering, and a true believer, and so she is now in paradise. They are young, but they seemed to understand this. And yet, something Ghada, the little one, said to me today haunts me. I cannot bear to think about it.