by James Becker
Khusad ran one stubby finger down the list until he came to the third number which, like all the others, began with a zero. Then he dialled the digits which appeared in a diagonal line running downwards and to the right from that initial number. He heard the ringing tone of the recipient’s phone, and then his call was answered by a soft and heavily accented voice.
‘Si.’
Their rules for communication were simple and inviolable. Unless it was completely unavoidable, neither man would use either his own name or the names of any of the other people involved in the operation, mention any dates or place names, or refer to the relic directly. Both parties doubted if any of their calls were monitored, but it was never worth taking a chance.
‘We don’t yet have it,’ Khusad began, speaking in French, ‘but we think we know where it is.’
‘That is not what I wanted to hear,’ the other man replied. ‘You told me that your agent, this man you had hired, was acting immediately. And that he was competent.’
Khusad had been expecting anger in response to his call, but instead the voice in the earpiece sounded nervous and disturbed, almost frightened.
‘His reputation suggested that he is normally very competent,’ the Egyptian replied, ‘and you will recall your instructions were to employ an outside contractor and not one of my own men to ensure complete deniability. In the event, I do not think a member of my organization would necessarily have fared any better. The man followed my instructions to the letter but in the interval between your orders being issued and him obtaining access to the premises, the goods had been passed on to a third party.’
There was a brief silence while the recipient of the call digested this piece of information.
‘So what of the original custodian? Is he aware of the significance and importance of the object?’
‘As far as we have been able to discover, he had no idea what it was or why anyone would be interested in it,’ Khusad replied. ‘And now he has no knowledge of it whatsoever.’
‘You are quite certain of that?’
‘He will not be telling anyone anything that he knew.’
The man in Italy was silent for a moment, then spoke again.
‘I suppose that has to be considered good news, in the circumstances. And now your agent will be approaching this third party you claim to have identified?’
‘Exactly. I have told him we need to conclude this operation within twenty-four hours.’
‘You may need to retain this agent you have hired for rather longer than that. Our monitoring system here has detected another instance of the same search term being used, and we will expect you to take the same action with this individual as with the first custodian.’
That was a piece of news which Khusad had definitely not expected, or wanted, to hear.
‘Perhaps this other search was initiated by the person who now has possession of the object,’ he suggested.
‘Not necessarily. Do you know the occupation of the new custodian? And I need his name.’
‘I understand that he’s just another market trader. His name is Anum Husani.’
‘Then you will definitely need to take additional action to ensure that this matter remains as confidential as we require. There is now at least one other person involved in this.’
‘How can you be certain of that?’
There was another pause before the reply came.
‘Because the last search that our system detected originated from Cairo Museum. And we are also tracking an email sent by that person. His name is Ali Mohammed.’
25
Antonio Morini, sitting in civilian clothes at a table in a small café near the Tiber, ended the call and slipped the mobile phone back into the pocket of his light jacket. He had been worried about just how specific he should be in his responses, because the Englishman had emphasized so forcefully the need for security in all communications, and especially during telephone calls, to protect everyone involved. But he had come to the conclusion that he needed to risk spelling out the name of the man who’d originated the new search – indeed that he really had no other option. He had to ensure that the correct action would be taken.
The Italian priest was becoming more concerned with every hour that passed. What had seemed at first to be a simple and uncomplicated, albeit brutal, operation – to locate, seize and possibly destroy a piece of ancient parchment, and to ensure that the owner of the relic was in no position to tell anyone anything about it, ever – was beginning to assume unwelcome proportions.
He had prayed for guidance every night, and by summoning up every scrap of his faith he’d been able to rationalize the actions he’d been ordered to take, the instruction to eliminate the market trader in Cairo, telling himself that a dealer in relics was absolutely the last person who should have access to the parchment. If the man had realized what he held in his hands, and decided to sell it to the highest bidder or even went public with the contents, the consequences would have been catastrophic. It was a case of measuring the life of one unimportant but potentially dangerous individual against the spiritual well-being of tens of millions of worshippers around the world.
But now that man was dead, as the Englishman had instructed, and still the parchment hadn’t been recovered. Worse than that, it appeared that another person, a second market trader, in fact, was in possession of the relic, and somehow he had managed to involve a scientist in a museum in Cairo. And that man had contacted a professional colleague about the parchment. Knowledge of the object was spreading uncomfortably fast.
Morini regretted the loss of even one life – as a priest all human life was sacred to him – but the situation he found himself in offered no relief. If he didn’t relay the Englishman’s orders, far more than just a couple of men would die, and he knew it. Feeling a dull ache of revulsion course through his body, he muttered another brief prayer, then took out his mobile again. He knew he had to pass on the latest developments to the Englishman. It would not, he anticipated, be a very enjoyable conversation.
He raised his hand and ordered another café latte. When the drink was on the table in front of him and he was satisfied that nobody was close enough to be able to overhear any part of his conversation, he dialled the number.
As before, the call was answered by a quiet English voice which simply said ‘Yes?’, and Morini glanced around him, checking his surroundings once more before he said anything. Then he briefly explained the new developments. When he’d finished, the man he’d called didn’t respond for a few moments, and when he did Morini could hear the cold, suppressed anger in his voice, though his first words were a surprise.
‘I apologize. With what you’ve told me, it’s very clear that my agent in Cairo and the contractor he selected were inadequate, and I will take steps to remedy this, but only when the present operation has been concluded.’
Morini felt a fresh pang of guilt, guessing that whatever penalties the Englishman intended to visit upon the two men in Egypt would almost certainly be painful and possibly fatal.
‘So we have two further targets to take care of,’ the English voice continued, ‘and the precise location of the relic is still uncertain. It could be in the possession of the second custodian, or with the third, at the museum itself. In a few minutes I will send you a message with further orders. Anything else?’
‘Yes,’ Morini replied. ‘There is one other matter, which concerns the scientist. He has supplied some details of the relic by email to a professional colleague in England.’
‘What details?’
‘According to the intercept program, only two or three words.’
‘It might only be two or three words, but that could be quite enough to be a real threat to you. I will make arrangements to attend to that person as well. As he’s in England, there will be no need for you to get involved.’
‘It’s a woman,’ Morini pointed out.
‘Immaterial. When you reply to my text message, include everything you
know about both the email and the recipient.’
For a couple of minutes after he had ended the call, Morini just sat at the table, the mobile phone still held in his right hand and his eyes staring vacantly in front of him.
He knew he was only acting as a conduit, relaying orders that had been formulated and decided upon by the Englishman who was in overall charge of the operation, as the protocols had stipulated. But he was still fighting a losing moral battle with his conscience. He knew with absolute certainty that the orders he had previously passed on to the man in Cairo had resulted in one death. But on the other side of the coin was the almost inevitable catastrophe of global proportions if the relic could not be recovered and its contents were made public. And that was a possibility that he simply could not tolerate.
Ever since Father Gianni’s revelations, Morini had viewed everything about the Vatican and the Catholic Church in a very different light. But despite that, he still believed in the fundamental goodness of his religion, and knew that he would do whatever was necessary to protect it. The only thing he couldn’t understand was why the damning – and damnable – parchment hadn’t been destroyed centuries earlier.
The reality Morini personally was facing was that if the parchment were not recovered, he would be the one who would have to explain the sequence of events, and the inevitable consequences, to the Holy Father. And that was something he was desperate to avoid, at all costs.
The text message he’d been expecting arrived about five minutes later, and even before he read it, Morini had guessed the contents.
He read the text twice to ensure he hadn’t missed anything, then finished his coffee, paid the bill and left the café. Five minutes later, from another payphone he hadn’t used before, his call to a mobile phone in Cairo was answered, and two minutes after that, he’d passed on the orders he had just been given.
Morini crossed himself as he ended the call, but in truth he was less concerned about the imminent deaths of two men in Egypt than he was about what the scientist had done. Ali Mohammed had emailed a woman in England, a woman – the software had informed him – who worked at the British Museum in London.
The leaks were getting worse and had now spread far beyond the borders of Egypt, and not for the first time he seriously doubted whether the contagion could be contained at all.
26
Abdul was intensely frustrated. He had the name of his quarry – Anum Husani – and the address of the man’s shop, but he had no idea where the trader lived.
He leaned against a wall in a narrow alleyway, a few yards away from the entrance to the shop operated by his target, virtually invisible among the crowds of people strolling up and down. He had already walked into the shop to inspect some of the goods on offer, choosing a time when the trader apparently in charge of the establishment was busy with two other customers, and taking care to keep his face averted. All that had achieved was to confirm what he’d already guessed, that Husani wasn’t on the premises. The description of the man he’d forced out of Mahmoud before he’d killed him was accurate enough for him to be certain of that.
He could wait for him, of course, but that would only work if the man was intending to visit the shop, and as it was already mid-morning that was looking increasingly unlikely. With the news of Mahmoud’s death already coursing through the streets, and the only connection – as far as Abdul knew – between the two men being the ancient parchment, any prudent man would probably decide to lie low for a while. He needed to find out where his target lived, and as quickly as possible, before the trader ran for his life.
Abdul waited until Husani’s shop was empty again, then strode forward briskly, pushed open the door and stepped inside.
‘I have an urgent message for Anum Husani,’ he said, walking across the small shop to the counter at the back, behind which a swarthy and heavily-built man, most of his face invisible behind a thick black beard, the hairs heavily curled with the apparent consistency of wire wool, was sitting and reading an Arabic-language newspaper.
‘He’s not here,’ the man replied, glancing up from his paper, ‘and he might not be here all day. Give it to me and I’ll see he gets it as soon as he arrives.’
‘No,’ Abdul said. ‘I have to deliver it in person, and he must get it today.’
The idea of such unseemly haste clearly puzzled the trader.
‘But he isn’t here, so you can’t,’ he stated.
‘Then I’ll have to deliver it to his home address. Where does he live?’
The man put down his newspaper and looked at Abdul for a long moment, then he shrugged his shoulders, picked up a pencil and a small piece of paper from the counter in front of him, scribbled something on it and handed it to Abdul.
‘He might not be there,’ he warned.
‘Thank you,’ Abdul replied, glanced at what the man had written. Then he turned and left the shop.
He now had a good chance of concluding the contract that day – well within the tight timescale he had been given. And he hadn’t even had to kill anyone to get this vital piece of information.
27
‘You know Mahmoud Kassim?’
It wasn’t so much a question as a statement of fact, because the market trader sitting opposite Anum Husani in the coffee house in central Cairo had been involved in at least one deal with both men in the past.
Husani nodded.
‘Of course,’ he replied.
The other man glanced around him before he said anything else.
‘Then you know that he’s dead?’ he said, leaning forward and lowering his voice.
‘What?’
‘Somebody broke into his house last night,’ the Arab trader explained, smacking his lips with something like relish. ‘I heard that he was so badly cut about with a knife that the police weren’t even certain it was his body. Wounds everywhere, apparently, and his throat slashed open to the spine. The bedroom floor was covered in blood.’
For a few moments, Husani said nothing as he processed what he had just been told. Even allowing for the normal exaggeration and dramatization that would have occurred as the startling news was passed from one person to another along the alleyways of the souk, the news chilled him.
Of course, Cairo had its fair share of violence, including not infrequent murders, but what had been done to the Arab trader sounded as if it was a far cry from the kind of casual brutality meted out on the streets between rival factions, or the depredations of even the most violent mugger. Those deaths, when they occurred, were usually quick, the fatal wound being administered by a single blow from a knife or, increasingly commonly, by a couple of shots from a pistol.
‘What do the police think?’ he asked. ‘Was he attacked by a gang of men, burglars? Or what?’
The trader shrugged his shoulders and took another sip of thick black coffee then replaced the cup in the saucer.
‘I only know what I’ve heard, what the story is on the streets, but it sounds as if a gang might have been involved. Anyway it wasn’t just a killing, and he didn’t die quickly. They cut him about first, maybe to try to make him talk, and then they slit his throat.’
Husani nodded, and finished his own coffee, his mind whirling.
The introduction of torture added a new dimension to the killing, a dimension that was alarming on a number of levels.
Whoever had taken Mahmoud’s life had clearly been after information of some sort and, presumably having obtained it, had then decided that the trader knew too much to be allowed to live. And the man was little more than a small-time market trader, successful in his own limited field, but most unlikely to possess any information of the slightest importance to almost anyone else. So his killer had to be after something very specific.
He was suddenly certain that Mahmoud hadn’t just been the victim of an unusually aggressive and dangerous burglar. It was something much, much more than that.
Could the piece of ancient writing material be more significant than he had ever s
uspected? If so, it wasn’t a big jump for him to guess that he was most probably the next name on the killer’s list.
But there was, of course, another way of looking at it, an aspect that instantly appealed to his commercial instincts. If somebody was prepared to kill to possess the relic, then it obviously had to be of considerable value. The more Husani thought about it, the clearer his course of action became. Mahmoud would certainly have told his killer who had bought the parchment from him: anyone with a knife sticking into his body will tell the man holding it whatever he wants to hear. So the murderer would already be looking for him. If he was caught, he had no doubt he would suffer the same brutal treatment as Mahmoud Kassim, and whether or not he had the relic in his possession probably wouldn’t make the slightest difference to his fate.
He had to act immediately.
Husani nodded to his companion, glanced at his watch and then stood up.
‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘If you hear anything else about Mahmoud’s death, please leave a message for me at my shop.’
Almost before the other man had time to reply, Husani turned and in moments was lost to sight in the crowd of pedestrians on the street outside.
As he walked away, weaving around the tourists and shoppers and traders, Husani did his best to try to see if he was being followed, glancing back frequently and looking to both his left and his right. He saw nothing and as far as he could tell nobody was paying him the slightest attention, but that could just mean that he was being watched by a professional. Or that he wasn’t under surveillance at all. He had no possible way of telling which.
He reached into his jacket pocket and took out his mobile phone. Keeping one eye on where he was walking to avoid colliding with other pedestrians, he opened up the contacts directory and used his thumb to scan swiftly down the list until he reached the entry for Ali Mohammed.
