by James Becker
‘Are you right handed or left handed?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘It doesn’t really matter, I suppose,’ Abdul replied.
Then, in a blur of action so fast that Mahmoud had absolutely no time to react, Abdul seized the man’s right arm, wrenched it over so that his wrist was resting on the table beside the bed, and slammed his knife straight through the back of Mahmoud’s hand, pinning it to the wood.
The Egyptian’s howl of pain filled the room as blood welled from the penetrating wound, pooled on the table and began to drip onto the wooden floor below. Abdul pressed the bed-sheet over the trader’s mouth, muffling the sound. Kassim jerked in the bed, perhaps trying to sit up, or to reach for the wound with his left hand, but before he could do anything at all, Abdul had produced a second knife and held it firmly against his throat.
‘Quiet,’ the intruder ordered. ‘That just shows how important it is for you to tell me the truth. Make me believe that you’re holding nothing back, and I might just walk away from here. If you lie, you’ll die. It’s as simple as that.’
He moved the second blade slightly away from Mahmoud’s throat until the point rested on the tender area below the man’s left shoulder blade. He changed his grip on the knife very slightly, then slowly began pushing it into Mahmoud’s flesh, the honed and polished double-edged blade easily penetrating about an inch into the man’s body.
Again, Mahmoud howled in muffled agony, his scream barely audible behind the makeshift gag Abdul was applying. His body twitched under the assault and sweat sprang to his brow as the pain increased.
Abdul knew the signs, knew that the man under his knife would do almost anything to make him stop. Now he could find the truth.
‘The first question is easy,’ he said, moving the sheet away from Kassim’s mouth, ‘because the answer is either yes or no. Do you still have that parchment?’
Mahmoud shook his head desperately from side to side.
‘I told you. I sold it to another dealer.’
‘So that would be “no”, then?’
‘No, I mean, yes. I don’t have it. I don’t have it any longer.’
Abdul nodded.
‘So who did you sell it to?’
For additional emphasis, he turned the knife slightly in the wound on Mahmoud’s shoulder, eliciting another anguished cry of pain, quickly muffled.
‘Another dealer,’ he almost shouted. ‘His name is Anum Husani. He deals in old manuscripts and other relics, and he has a shop in Cairo.’
Abdul nodded again, then gave the knife another twist, the point scraping along Mahmoud’s collar bone.
‘The address would be helpful,’ he said, his sentence almost drowned out by the other man’s muffled scream.
His voice quivering and laced with agony, Mahmoud stammered out the address of Husani’s shop, an address which Abdul immediately filed away in his memory.
After a further prod from the knife blade, Mahmoud followed that with a physical description of Husani. But when Abdul asked for the man’s home address, his victim was unable to help, and even twisting the blade in a fresh wound didn’t produce the information he wanted.
‘You’re absolutely certain?’ he asked, altering his grip on the handle of the knife very slightly, and feeling Mahmoud’s body tensing in pointless anticipation of the pain to come.
‘Yes, yes. He has it. I sold it to him, but I don’t know where he lives. Please, no more.’
‘I do have some good news for you,’ Abdul said after a moment, withdrawing the knife from the man’s shoulder and wiping the blood from the blade on the sheet. ‘I believe you. I think you’re telling me the truth.’
He looked down at the man on the bed.
‘But I also have some bad news for you,’ he added, and with another rapid movement he sliced the knife into the left-hand side of Mahmoud’s throat and pulled it all the way across, the blade instantly severing the oesophagus and the carotid artery. Blood spurted from the end of the artery, splashing onto the wall behind the head of the bed.
The man’s body flailed on the bed as his left hand clutched desperately at his throat, but it only took seconds for the light in his eyes to fade away as his brain died.
‘And that was the bad news,’ Abdul muttered, standing clear of the side of the bed and looking down at the corpse.
He wiped the blood off his knife on the sheet, then pulled the other blade out of Mahmoud’s right hand, wiping that as well, but he didn’t replace the knives in their respective sheaths. First, he needed to wash them properly. He stood up and checked that none of the blood he had spilled had got onto his clothing, but he could see no sign of it. The latex gloves were heavily stained, but he would dispose of them after he left the property. To avoid any of the blood being transferred from his gloves to his clothing, he first went into the attached bathroom and washed his gloved hands in the sink, drying the latex on a towel when he’d finished. Then he carefully washed both knives until not a trace of blood was left on them, dried them and put them away in their sheaths. He would bleach everything thoroughly later.
Five minutes later, he was outside the house, having re-locked the rear door, and was making his way through the silent streets of the Cairo suburb.
21
That evening, Angela followed her usual routine once she got back to her apartment. She poured herself a large glass of wine, switched on the TV to inspect the day’s news, and flopped down on the sofa, kicking off her shoes as she did so. Once she’d seen the headlines, she used the remote control to turn off the set, and then opened up her laptop.
She worked her way quickly through her work inbox, marking the vast majority of the emails not simply for deletion, but also to be bounced back to the sender – her way of trying to spam the spammers. As she glanced down the list of senders of the unread emails, one message stood out. She hadn’t heard from that particular person for some months, and the area he worked in was of great interest to her.
She clicked it open, and read the fairly short message. The first couple of brief paragraphs were simply a polite catch-up, which her eyes skimmed over as she looked for the meat in the sandwich. Although she didn’t know Ali Mohammed particularly well, she knew that he was not inclined to waste words, nor to contact her simply to ask what she was up to. He would have a very specific reason for sending her a message, and she was keen to find out what it was.
His question was in the final paragraph. A colleague had given him a sheet of parchment to work on. The relic appeared to be old, he explained somewhat unnecessarily, and the writing on it was largely invisible. He would be working on it to try to decipher exactly what the text said, and if it was interesting he would be happy to send her a photograph of the parchment and a copy of the text.
But in the meantime, there were a few words that could be read on the parchment and he thought the subject matter might prove of interest to her, in view of her previous experiences with relics from this period and location. The period, he went on to explain, was most likely late in the first century BC, perhaps a few years earlier, and the location was almost certainly Judaea. Judaea under the Romans, in fact, because the text on the parchment was clearly written in Latin, implying that it had been penned by an official in either the Roman government or the Roman army. And there were, he finished, two proper names which could be read, at least partially, and he would be interested to know if she had heard of them in any relevant context.
The first name, he explained, was ‘ippori’ with two unreadable letters at the start of the word, which suggested it might be ‘Tzippori’. Nothing else he could think of fitted. That had convinced him that the parchment referred to events in ancient Judaea, because Tzippori, as he was sure Angela knew, was the old name for the town of Sepporis, which had been destroyed by the Romans in 4 BC, following the death of Herod. The second name was clearly Jewish in origin, but was also only partially readable, the letters which could be interpreted with certainty being ef bar he, the
bar meaning ‘son of’.
‘Ef bar he,’ Angela muttered to herself, as she read the last paragraph again. It seemed to strike a chord somewhere in her memory, but for the moment she just couldn’t pin it down.
She quickly typed a reply to Ali Mohammed, telling him that she would be interested in reading the complete text of the parchment if and when he was able to decipher it, and assuring him that she would investigate the information he had already given her. She sent the email, closed the laptop and walked briskly to her kitchen. She pulled open the freezer and selected a frozen lasagne. When she was by herself, she never bothered cooking, relying mostly on ready meals of one sort or another.
She decided that she’d eat dinner, then spend some time researching the words Ali Mohammed had seen on the parchment.
But that plan was immediately shelved when Chris Bronson, her ex-husband and best friend, called and asked if she’d like to go out for a bite to eat.
It wasn’t a difficult decision for her to make.
22
‘You seem miles away tonight,’ Chris Bronson said, about three hours later, as he and Angela sat in a quiet corner of an Italian restaurant on the eastern outskirts of Ealing, two coffee cups on the table between them.
Angela was fiddling with the wrapped sugar cubes that had come with the coffee, piling them one on top of the other and then knocking over the small stack with a flick of her elegant forefinger. She paused in her repetitive construction and demolition operation and looked at him.
‘Oh, it’s nothing of any importance. I’ve had an email from a man I’ve worked with in the past, out in Cairo. He’s apparently been given an old piece of parchment to work on – he’s an ancient document specialist – and he’s asked me if a couple of the names in the text mean anything to me.’
‘And do they?’
Angela shook her head in mild irritation.
‘That’s the trouble. One of them is quite obvious – it’s just the old name of a town in Judaea – but the other one is only a partial name, just the middle section, and I’m quite sure I’ve seen or heard it before, but I just can’t think where. It’s not important, or at least I don’t think it is, but it’s just a kind of niggle, you know? Like an itch you can’t scratch.’
‘I’m sure it’ll come to you.’
‘It probably will,’ she replied, ‘and probably at about three in the morning.’
Bronson nodded, then lifted his hands into the air and tried to get the waiter’s attention. The waiter, who had studiously ignored them for most of the meal, finally noticed and disappeared behind the bar, eventually returning with the bill.
It had been raining earlier that evening, but when they stepped out of the restaurant onto the pavement, the slabs were already dry and, despite the illumination provided by the street lamps, a few stars were clearly visible above them.
‘I suppose you were expecting to stay the night?’ Angela asked, as they walked the few hundred yards back from the restaurant to the apartment block where she lived.
Despite their divorce of a few years earlier, Bronson and Angela had remained good friends, sharing holidays and other exploits, occasionally even sharing a bed. Despite this, Angela still insisted she was not ready to have another go at their marriage – indeed at any marriage – though Bronson himself would like nothing better. While this arrangement occasionally caused heartache on both sides, it seemed to be the one that worked best for them both.
‘I’d like to,’ he replied quietly. ‘I’m not working for the next few days,’ he added. ‘I just finished my part of a major investigation, so I’m due some leave.’
‘How nice. You can have a lie-in, then, while I brave the rigours of the District Line to central London,’ Angela said, rather waspishly for her. ‘Unlike you, I have a proper job to go to, with proper working hours, Monday to Friday, nine to five. That kind of thing.’
‘I think being a police officer does count as a “proper job” these days,’ Bronson replied mildly. ‘But I’ll get up at the same time as you do and then we can ride the Tube together. There’s some stuff I need to do at my house tomorrow morning, so I can go on from there straight to Tunbridge Wells.’
Angela nodded, but didn’t reply.
‘Is everything OK?’ Bronson asked.
‘Not entirely, no,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps next time you’re pretending to be a gentleman you can escort me to a decent restaurant, one where the waitresses aren’t all tarts.’
‘What?’ Bronson felt entirely confused.
‘I noticed you looking at that waitress, the one with the bum.’
Bronson coloured slightly.
‘I like to look,’ he protested, ‘but I never touch. And so what if she’s got a nice bum?’
‘Well, when you’re with me, Chris, I prefer it if you don’t look, OK? It doesn’t make me feel good about myself when the man I’m sharing a meal with spends most of his time looking at everyone but me.’
Bronson was silent for a moment, conscious that he’d severely ruffled Angela’s feathers, and without even being aware of it. No different to normal, then. And now she was looking at him with a peculiar intensity in her stare that was a good enough warning to concede the point.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘It won’t happen again. I didn’t even know I was doing it.’
Angela dropped her gaze after a moment, then she shook her head.
‘God,’ she muttered. ‘I’m sorry too. I’m a bit oversensitive at the moment. Work is really boring, I can’t find the answer to the question Ali Mohammed asked, and to see you drooling over that dyed-blonde bimbo in a third-rate restaurant was almost the last straw.’
She fell silent for a few seconds, then looked up at him.
‘I will admit one thing, though.’
‘What?’
‘She had got a nice bum. You were right about that.’
‘Yours is better,’ Bronson said immediately.
‘Well, in that case …’ Angela unlocked her door and led the way inside.
23
News, especially bad news, travels quickly in Cairo, and rumours of the torture and killing of a local trader were already sweeping through the souk.
Mahmoud Kassim had a cleaner-cum-housekeeper who visited his property every day, and her echoing screams when she walked into his bedroom had alerted almost everybody in the street. The Egyptian police were already investigating the murder, and had several firm leads, according to the gossip in the coffee houses.
Abdul frankly doubted that, because he had been very careful to ensure he had left no physical traces of his presence anywhere in the property, apart from the dead body. But the uproar over the killing was unwelcome to him and to his employer.
‘You should have disposed of the body, you fool.’
Abdul was not used to being spoken to like that, and immediately his temper flared.
‘I couldn’t dispose of the body. Walking through the streets of Cairo carrying a corpse would have been far more dangerous than leaving him where he died. It’s just unfortunate that this cleaning woman went into the house and found him so quickly.’
‘The word “unfortunate” doesn’t even begin to cover it. You do realize it’s possible that this other dealer, this man Husani, will now be on his guard?’
Abdul shook his head and walked a little further down the deserted alley, holding his mobile phone to his ear.
‘Not necessarily. There is no obvious reason why he should assume that Mahmoud’s death was anything to do with the object he bought from him.’
The deep voice at the other end of the line gave a snort of disbelief.
‘You’d better be right,’ he snapped. ‘You have not fulfilled this contract in a satisfactory manner to date. If you do not resolve this matter, and quickly, we may be forced to take further steps.’
‘Are you threatening me?’ Abdul asked, his voice suddenly cold with barely suppressed anger.
‘Yes, of course I am,’ the man r
eplied simply. ‘You’re not the only contractor in Cairo. Unless you deliver the parchment to me within the next twenty-four hours, we will terminate the contract and issue appropriate orders to another person. Orders that may indirectly include you. You have been warned.’
Before Abdul could even begin to formulate a reply, the other man ended the call.
24
In a large and comfortable house on the southern outskirts of Cairo, Jalal Khusad, a heavily built and prosperous-looking middle-aged man, his face dominated by a large and very black beard, looked at his mobile phone with an irritated expression on his face. Then, with a gesture of disgust, he tossed the phone on to the tooled leather top of his mahogany desk.
Things were not going as he had planned. As a senior member of P2 in Egypt, he knew of the Englishman by reputation, and he didn’t want to disappoint him. He couldn’t afford to.
The matter had seemed simple enough and should not have been difficult to complete. All his contractor Abdul had been told to do was recover a single piece of parchment and eliminate whoever had possession of it. The assassin was well-known throughout Cairo and even elsewhere in Egypt for his success rate. How had he failed?
And now Khusad had to pass the information up the line. A call that he was dreading.
He opened a small notebook bound in red leather and turned to a particular page. On it were a series of numbers. On first appearance they looked like rows of telephone numbers, but were simply a low security way he had devised of concealing the one genuine telephone number – a number that actually ran diagonally across the grid.
Below the grid were three time periods during which the recipient would be available to take his call. Khusad didn’t know precisely who his contact was, but he knew he was a senior person within the Vatican, and assumed that he would have to leave the Holy See in order to use his mobile phone without his conversation being overheard or his location identified. And, allowing for the time difference between Cairo and Rome, the man should be available right now.
