The Hidden Oasis

by Paul Sussman

  ‘Not ideal circumstances, I know,’ he said. ‘But I’m glad to meet you at last.’

  She nodded, but said nothing.

  ‘Alex told me a lot about you,’ he went on. ‘About your climbing and everything. Scared the shit out of me, to be honest. I get vertigo just standing on a step-ladder.’

  She gave the faintest of smiles.

  ‘Did you know her well?’

  ‘Pretty well,’ he replied, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his jeans. ‘We shared an interest in the desert. Became friends. Good friends.’

  She glanced at him, raising her eyebrows.

  ‘You and Alex were … ?’

  ‘Christ no!’ Flin gave an amused snort. ‘Neurotic English bookworms weren’t her thing at all. As far as I could make out she was more into the hippie-surfer type.’

  An image of Greg, Alex’s former fiancé, flashed into Freya’s mind – blond, tanned, toned. She shook her head to dislodge it.

  ‘She was very good to me,’ Flin was saying. ‘Helped me through some … difficult times. She was more like a sister than a friend.’

  He kicked at a stone in the path, then turned to her, frowning.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean … inappropriate analogy.’

  She waved a hand to indicate that the apology was unnecessary. Their eyes met and held a moment before they both looked away again. The path led them through a shadowy olive grove, the ground carpeted with manure pats and dusty black olives, before at last bringing them to Alex’s house.

  Someone – the housekeeper, Freya assumed – had laid out a simple breakfast on the table in the main room: cheese, tomatoes, onions, beans, bread and flasks of coffee. They gathered round and picked at it, only Zahir and his brother showing any real appetite, faltering bursts of conversation petering out into extended silences. Thirty minutes passed, then both Flin and Kiernan announced that they had to be leaving to catch their flight back up to Cairo.

  ‘You’re sure you’ll be all right?’ Kiernan asked as they walked out to Zahir’s Land Cruiser, her arm threaded through Freya’s. ‘I could hang around if you like.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ Freya replied. ‘I’m going to stay here for a couple of days, get Alex’s stuff together, then head home. My flight’s not till Friday.’

  ‘Why don’t I meet you at the airport when you come back into Cairo?’ said Kiernan. ‘We can have lunch, say goodbye properly.’

  Freya agreed and they embraced, the older woman kissing her on the cheek before pulling away and climbing into the Toyota’s rear passenger seat. Flin stepped forward and handed her a card: Professor F. Brodie, American University in Cairo, Tel: 202 2794 2959.

  ‘I doubt it’ll happen, but if you ever find yourself at a loose end do look me up. You can scare me with climbing stories and I can return the compliment by boring you rigid with tales of Neolithic rock inscriptions.’

  He leant forward and for a moment it looked as if he was going to embrace her. As it was, he just gave her a quick peck on the cheek and, walking round the other side of the 4x4, heaved himself up beside Kiernan. Zahir and his brother climbed in the front, the engine roared into life and they were just moving away when Freya suddenly reached through the open window and grasped Kiernan’s wrist.

  ‘She didn’t suffer, did she?’ Her voice had become choked, urgent. ‘When she … Alex … you know, the morphine … When she took it. It was quick, wasn’t it? No pain.’

  Kiernan squeezed her hand.

  ‘I don’t think there was any pain at all, Freya. From what I heard it would have been very swift, and very peaceful.’

  Beside her Flin seemed about to add something, his mouth half opening before closing again. Freya withdrew her hand.

  ‘I just needed to know,’ she mumbled. ‘I couldn’t bear it if …’

  ‘I understand, dear,’ said Kiernan. ‘Believe me, Alex didn’t suffer in any way. Just a small prick when the needle went in and that was it. No pain, I promise.’

  She leant forward and touched Freya’s arm, then nodded to Zahir and they drove off. Only when they had disappeared among the trees and Freya was walking back towards the house did it strike her exactly what the older woman had said. She spun round, the colour draining from her face.

  ‘Alex would never have …’

  But the roar of the engine had faded away, leaving just the hum of flies and, in the distance, the soft coughing of the irrigation pump.

  CAIRO

  Using his elbow Angleton nudged shut the door of Flin Brodie’s apartment. The rhythmic slap of the caretaker’s plastic slippers slowly faded on the stairwell outside as he descended to the ground floor again. He’d wanted to stick around, see what Angleton was up to, but the American had added an extra wad of notes to the money he’d already paid him for opening the door and told him to scoot. He was old and dirty and clumsy and Angleton didn’t want him moving stuff around, alerting Brodie to the fact he’d had visitors. This was business, not just a bit of casual snooping. Keep it professional, keep it focused. That’s what they paid him for. That’s why he was the best.

  The door closed with a muted click. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a pair of latex gloves and tugged them on, the rubber hissing and snapping as he stretched it up over his wrists. Along with the shoe covers he’d donned on the landing outside, they would ensure there were no traces, no indication of any sort, that he’d been there. He was almost certainly being over-cautious. Brodie had no reason to expect an intrusion of this sort, or to be on the lookout for one on his return. You could never be too careful, though. On the thousand-to-one chance the Englishman was more paranoid than Angleton was giving him credit for – and with his background the possibility was always there – he wasn’t going to risk blowing the whole operation by leaving unnecessary clues.

  He glanced at his watch – plenty of time; the Dakhla flight hadn’t even taken off yet – and started wandering around. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just trying to get a feel for Brodie, a sense of what he knew, how he tied in with the whole Sandfire thing. Living room, kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms, study: he examined them all, snapping shot after shot with his digital camera, recording his thoughts on a handheld Olympus Dictaphone.

  To the untrained eye the apartment wouldn’t have revealed a great deal about its owner: a self-contained, bachelor Egyptologist with an interest in classical music, desert exploration, current affairs – particularly Middle Eastern current affairs – and, judging by the scarf and signed team photograph in the living room, El-Ahly Football Club. Those and a few other details – Brodie kept himself fit, read at least five languages, steered clear of alcohol and had a social conscience (thank-you letters from a children’s orphanage in Luxor and a Zabbaleen outreach programme over in Manshiet Nasser) – would probably have been about the sum total of things. A join-the-dots sort of portrait, giving a basic character outline but without any great depth or meat to it.

  But Angleton’s eye was trained. As he moved around the rooms he was able to read between the lines of their contents, teasing out the underlying information. In the bathroom, for instance, tucked into one of Brodie’s heavily worn Kayano trainers, he found a state-of-the-art speed and distance monitor, its computerized memory recording details of all the Englishman’s runs over the last fortnight. Ten kilometres in 36:02 minutes, 20 kilometres in 1:15:31, 15 kilometres in 53:12 – Brodie, it seemed, wasn’t just fit, but seriously so. In the bedroom the battered lamp on the bedside table, the marks on the wall directly behind it, the three-quarters-empty pack of Xanax tablets, all likewise spoke to Angleton. Brodie, they told him, was someone who had nightmares, flailing in the dark for the light switch before popping anti-anxiety pills to calm himself down again. All confirmation of what the American’s research had already told him about the man.

  The photo of Alex Hannen in the living room was interesting. Whether the two of them had been lovers or not Angleton couldn’t be sure. On balance he’d say no – love
rs, in his experience, usually possessed multiple images of each other, especially if they lived separately, whereas here there was only the one photo. Brodie clearly cared for her – deeply, to judge by the expensive silver frame in which the picture was enclosed – but if pushed Angleton would have gone for close friendship over romance.

  Either way, what intrigued him more were the telling little clues tucked away in the corners of the photo. It had clearly been taken out in the remote desert – the western desert, he assumed, given their mutual interest in the place – and by Brodie himself, whose reflection could just be made out in the mirrored lenses of Hannen’s sunglasses.

  In the background, off to the left and slightly blurred, were a couple of orange equipment cases (there was a similar case in the apartment hallway, containing some sort of radar or sensing device). Even more intriguing, behind Brodie in the reflection in Hannen’s shades, almost invisible – Angleton had to peer very hard with the mini-magnifying glass he always carried – was what appeared to be the tip of some sort of wing or sail, way too small for a plane. A kite? A hang glider? A microlight? He couldn’t tell, and there wasn’t time to take the photo away for digital enhancement. It was informative nonetheless, suggesting, when you factored in the equipment cases and remote desert setting, that as well as being personally close, Brodie and Hannen had also been working together in some way. A one-off trip? Part of some bigger project? Again, he couldn’t be sure, but it was another fragment of the picture. Piece by piece by piece.

  He spent almost twenty minutes poring over the photo before glancing again at his watch – still plenty of time – and heading back into the study. He’d already given it the once-over, but it was clearly the nerve centre of Brodie’s world so he wanted to have another nose round before he left, see if anything more could be gleaned from it.

  He stared again at the framed print on the wall behind the desk, repeating its legend – The city of Zerzura is white like a pigeon, and on the door of it is carved a bird – into his Dictaphone even though he’d already done so on his earlier sweep of the room.

  The wooden filing cabinets lined up beside the desk also received a second inspection. Each was divided into five drawers, each drawer crammed with sheaves of notes, articles, photographs, charts, print-outs and maps, separated out into alphabetically headed sections, starting with Almasy in the top drawer of the first cabinet, and finishing with Zerzura in the bottom drawer of the last one.

  There was way too much stuff to go through it all in detail. Instead he contented himself with opening each drawer in turn and walking his latex-gloved fingers over the protruding section headings, pulling out a folder here, a folder there – Bedouin; Khepri; Long Range Desert Group; Pepi II; Wingate – before moving on again, never lingering too long on any one subject, skimming.

  Only two files caused him to pause for a more in-depth perusal. One, labelled Gilf Kebir/Satellite Imaging, contained a sheaf of colour pictures. Starting with wide-scale shots of the entire south-west corner of Egypt, the images homed in, in ever greater detail, on specific areas of the Gilf, the desert landscape becoming progressively clearer and more defined. The last twenty or so shots were so sharp Angleton could make out the actual cliff faces along the Gilf’s eastern edge. Occasionally there would be a prick of green – probably just a couple of trees or a clump of desert bushes – but otherwise the area was utterly lifeless and empty. No sign, certainly, of Brodie’s mysterious oasis.

  The other file that caught his attention was labelled Magnetometry Data (was that what the sensing device in the hallway was? A magnetometer?). The file’s contents – sheet after sheet of meaningless monochrome speckles and smudges – meant nothing to him. The data itself wasn’t important. What gave him pause for thought was the fact that Brodie was using a magnetometer at all. Magnetometers, so far as Angleton was aware, were used for sub-surface imaging and metal detection. And yet in his talk the other evening Brodie had specifically stated that the Stone Age inhabitants of the Gilf had not yet developed metal-working technology. There was doubtless some perfectly innocent explanation, but all the same it was curious.

  ‘Why the magnetometer?’ he drawled into his Dictaphone, pausing the machine before almost immediately pressing Record again.

  ‘And where does he get all the satellite stuff from? NASA? Oil companies? Check who would have this material.’

  He finished going through the cabinets and ran his eyes over the bookshelves again. It was all Egyptology, so far as he could see, save for one section devoted to current affairs – lots of stuff on Iraq – and, slotted in behind a row of leather-bound volumes on ancient Egyptian architecture, which is why he’d missed it before, a book on, of all things, Russian aeroplanes.

  ‘Osprey Encyclopedia of Russian Aircraft,’ he intoned into his recorder. ‘What the hell’s that doing here?’

  He returned to Brodie’s desk last. It was a large affair, old-fashioned, polished oak, with a phone, lamp, blotter, paper tray, pen holder – all the usual stuff, neatly arranged. No desktop computer, which suggested the Englishman worked off his laptop. And he must have taken his laptop with him to Dakhla since there was no sign of it in the flat. Annoying. Angleton scouted around for a memory stick in case Brodie had backed his work up but there was no sign of one. With time ticking away he abandoned the search, turning his attention first to the contents of the paper tray, none of which were especially revealing, and then, finally, to the book sitting on the blotter at the centre of the table: Cuneiform Texts of The Hermitage Museum.

  There was a sheet of A4 paper sticking up about halfway through. Opening the book at that page Angleton found himself looking down at a photograph of a toffee-coloured clay tablet, badly eroded and covered in rows of small wedge-shaped marks. Underneath was a caption: ‘The Egypt Tablet. Royal archive of Lugal-Zagesi (c. 2375-50 BCE). Uruk. From collection of N. Likhachev’.

  He stared at the photograph, then turned his attention to the A4 sheet. On it Brodie had painstakingly transcribed the wedge-marks on the tablet, or at least those that were legible. Beneath he had then written out what Angleton assumed was a transliteration of the original cuneiform, rendering the text phonetically into Latin characters. And beneath that – again Angleton was guessing, although it seemed a fairly safe bet – a straight English translation, with rows of dots where the cuneiform was marred or damaged, and bracketed guesses and question marks alongside the words of whose meaning Brodie seemed to be uncertain:

  … west beyond kalam (Sumer) beyond the horizon … great river artiru (Iteru/Nile) and the land of kammututa (Kemet/Egypt) … 50 danna from buranun (Euphrates?) … rich in … cows, fish, wheat, geshnimbar (date palms?) … city called manarfur (Mennefer/Memphis?)… king who rules all … in great fear by his enemies for … tukul (weapon?) called … from an (heaven/sky?) in the form of a lagab (stone?) and carried into battle before the king’s armies … bil (burn?) with a blinding light and u-hub (deafen?) … pain and dizziness … With this thing the enemies of kammututa in the north are destroyed and in the south are destroyed … east and west are beaten into dust so that their king rules all the lands around artiru and none shall stand against him nor come against him nor ever defeat him for in his hand is the mitum (mace?) of the gods … most terrible … ever known to … beware and go not ever against the king of kammututa for in his wrath he will … utterly destroyed.

  Angleton read through this a couple of times, unable to make head or tail of it.

  ‘Weird shit about stones,’ he said into his recorder, shaking his head in bemusement at the things people found interesting. He paused a moment, then added: ‘Probably not relevant.’

  Replacing the A4 sheet he closed the book and shifted it fractionally across the blotter so that it was exactly as he had found it. He gave the room one last sweep, planted the GSM listening devices – one in the phone, one behind the bookcase, one underneath the living room sofa – and left the flat. He’d been in there for just under ninety minutes, and by his
reckoning Brodie’s flight wouldn’t even be halfway back to Cairo yet. Good, precise work, he thought to himself. That’s what they paid him for. That’s why he was the best.

  DAKHLA

  ‘Alex would never have injected herself. Not in a million years. There’s something wrong here. You have to believe me. There’s something wrong.’

  Dr Mohammed Rashid furrowed his brow, tweaking at his left earlobe.

  ‘You have to believe me,’ Freya repeated. ‘Alex had a phobia about needles. I would have said something before but I assumed she’d swallowed pills or drunk something. She could never have injected herself. Never.’

  She was wound up, agitated, had been ever since Molly Kiernan’s parting comment about the needle prick. The moment she’d registered what Kiernan had said she’d tried to call Zahir on his mobile, ask him to come back, explain things to her. His phone had been switched off. The same with Kiernan’s and Brodie’s. She hadn’t bothered leaving messages. Frantic, she had just grabbed her knapsack and started running, through the palm and olive groves and along the desert track back towards the main oasis. She didn’t know what she was going to do, just knew that something was terribly wrong and she had to do something. After about a kilometre she heard a rattle and a clatter behind her and a donkey-drawn cart had come up alongside, driven by the elderly, toothless man she and Zahir had passed on their way to Alex’s house the previous afternoon – Mohammed, Mahmoud, something like that. Zahir had warned her not to have anything to do with him, but too worked up to care she accepted his offer of a ride, desperate to get to Mut as swiftly as possible. He had jabbered at her and squeezed himself up unnecessarily close, allowing his hand to brush against her thigh, but she had barely noticed.

  ‘Mut,’ she kept saying to him. ‘Please, Mut, hospital, quickly.’

  In the mud-brick village at the head of the track he had pulled up in front of the Kodak shop with its ‘Fast Foto devilp’ sign and flagged down a pick-up truck which had driven her the rest of the way. Dr Rashid was on his ward round, they had told her when she reached the hospital, wouldn’t be available until past midday. She had insisted on seeing him, had made a scene, and eventually calls had been made, pagers bleeped and he’d come down and led her up to his office.