The Hidden Oasis

by Paul Sussman

  ‘Legend or no legend, the Egyptian authorities take a pretty dim view of antiquities theft,’ Flin continued. ‘There was a trial, I had to give evidence, they decided to make an example of him. Gave him six years, banned him from ever excavating again. This for a man whose whole life was archaeology.’

  He shook his head again, sweeping a hand through his hair and rubbing the back of his neck.

  ‘And as if all that wasn’t bad enough Hassan somehow convinced himself I’d engineered the whole thing. Turned him in because I wanted to take over his dig. I tried to go and see him in prison, explain things, tell him how sorry I was, but the moment he spotted me he went berserk, screaming and shouting – the guards had to escort me out. I haven’t seen or heard from him since. Only discovered he’d got out a couple of days ago. Broken, by all accounts.’

  He slowed as a brightly lit police roadblock loomed into view ahead of them; just a few oil drums arranged across the highway with a pair of single-storey guardhouses to either side. A car was being waved through by the policeman manning the block. Flin came up behind it and pulled to a halt. Lowering the window all the way down, he spoke to the guard in Arabic and indicated the Embassy ID on the windscreen. There was some chatter and then they too were waved on their way, the policeman scribbling their registration number on the clip-board he was holding.

  ‘And you think he’s going to help us?’ asked Freya once they were through, picking up the conversation where it had left off. ‘After everything that’s happened? You really think that?’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘Not for a moment. I ruined the man’s life, for Christ’s sake. Why should he want to do me a favour?’

  ‘So why are we going to see him?’

  ‘Because Hassan Fadawi told a colleague of mine he knew something about the oasis, and with fifty kilos of highly enriched uranium up for grabs I reckon even the longest of long shots is worth exploring.’

  He looked across at her, then forward again, beeping and overtaking the car that had been in front of them at the checkpoint. Freya dropped her feet from the dashboard and, reaching out, turned up the volume on the CD player. The gravelly whine of Dylan’s voice again filled the Jeep’s interior, singing something about violence and Egypt, which in the circumstances seemed distinctly appropriate. She glanced at the dashboard clock – 9.35 p.m., they’d been on the road just over an hour – and leant her head against the window. The moonlit desert drifted by, shadowy and nondescript. Far away in the distance a tiny orange flame flickered near the horizon – some sort of oil or gas rig, she guessed.

  ‘What was the first mistake?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘You said you’d made two catastrophic mistakes in your life. What was the first?’

  Flin didn’t answer, just increased the pressure on the accelerator, the Cherokee’s speedometer pushing up past 140 km/hour.

  ‘Only another fifteen minutes,’ he said.

  CAIRO

  The news about Angleton, that after twenty-three years the Sandfire ring-fence appeared to have been breached, had come as a bolt out of the blue to Molly Kiernan, not least because she and her colleagues had taken every precaution to ensure the whole operation remained watertight.

  Once the initial shock had passed however, which it did pretty quickly, she had simply knuckled down and got on with things: tough, focused, unflappable. Molly Marble, as Charlie had jokingly used to call her. ‘Hard as stone and just as beautiful!’

  She had made the necessary calls to the States – her mobile was but one of many communication channels available to her – alerting everyone who needed to be alerted to what was going on, passing Angleton’s name across for further investigation. And while her thoughts and prayers were very much with Flin and Freya, it was Angleton who was most on her mind now as she sat in the back of the taxi on her way home to her bungalow in the Maadi district of the city. Who was he? Why was he getting involved? What did he want? She held up the card Flin had given her, mouthing the name to herself. Then, dipping into her bag, she removed the pocket King James Bible she always carried – a 31st birthday gift from her beloved Charlie – and flipped through the pages until she reached Psalm 64.

  ‘Preserve my life from fear of the enemy,’ she recited, the passing streetlights streaking the paper with bars of light and shadow. ‘Hide me from the secret counsel of the wicked, from the insurrection of the workers of iniquity who whet their tongue like a sword.’

  She read it again, then flicked through more pages, to the start of the Book of Nahum:

  ‘God is jealous and the Lord revengeth. The Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies.’

  She nodded, closed the bible and clutched it to her chest.

  ‘Too damn right,’ she whispered.

  THE ROAD TO ALEXANDRIA

  The landscape to either side of Highway 11, the main axis road between Cairo and Alexandria, is almost exclusively desert – a low featureless expanse of sand and gravel through which the highway slashes like a line of stitching across a vast sheet of hessian. Occasionally, though, out of nowhere, incongruous swathes of lush green suddenly appear – a golf course, a grove of date palms, a beautifully landscaped garden – muscling aside the emptiness for a brief distance before equally suddenly disappearing as though swept away by the desert’s irresistible tide.

  As they came level with one such burst of greenery – in this case a large banana plantation – Flin slowed the Cherokee and swung right onto a dusty track that ran perpendicular to the main road. Walls of floppy green leaves pressed in around them like curtains, chandeliers of ripening fruit dangling amidst the foliage.

  ‘Hassan’s family used to own Egypt’s biggest banana export business,’ he explained as they bumped along, the darkness retreating in front of them in the glare of the Jeep’s headlamps. ‘Sold it decades ago for an absolute fortune which is why he was always able to fund his own digs. Whatever else he’s lost at least he’s never going to go hungry.’

  They jolted onwards, the track disappearing behind them in a fog of dust, moths and other night-time insects slapping against the windscreen, smearing the glass. After about a kilometre the banana plants gave way to mango trees which in turn came to an abrupt halt at a low picket fence. Beyond, bathed in an eerie wash of moonlight, an improbably neat, manicured lawn stretched away towards a large whitewashed house with shuttered windows and a weathervane on the roof. Flin followed the track around the lawn and pulled up on a parking area in front of the building, cutting the engine. A light was on in one of the downstairs rooms; thin strips of illumination seeped out from between the slats of the shutters.

  For a while he just sat there, fingers drumming on the steering wheel as if reluctant to leave the security of the Cherokee’s interior, the only sounds the chirrup of cicadas and the crack and ting of cooling metal. Then, opening the door, he swung himself out, feet crunching on gravel.

  ‘Probably best you wait here,’ he said, looking back in at Freya. ‘I’ll go and speak to him and if things work out I’ll come and get you.’

  ‘If they don’t?’

  ‘Then I guess we’re on our way to the airport.’

  He bounced his fist on the Jeep’s roof, steeling himself, then turned and started towards the front door, covering about half the distance before he was suddenly enveloped in a glare of light as a security lamp clicked on. At almost the same instant a deafening crack of gunfire shook the night and the ground at Flin’s feet exploded upwards in a shower of dirt and pebbles. He froze, then took a careful step backwards. Another shot tore up the ground directly behind him. He froze again. There was the click of a gun being broken open, and then a voice: rich, cultured, slightly tremulous.

  ‘Oh God, this is sweet justice! Oh God this is just so sweet!’

  A figure emerged from the darkness at the side of the building, dressed in nothing but a pair of baggy pyjama bottoms, slotting cartridges in
to the twin barrels of an ancient-looking shotgun. He came forward to the edge of the circle of light thrown by the security lamp and stopped, snapping the gun shut and raising it to his shoulder. He aimed directly at Flin’s head.

  ‘On your knees, Brodie! Like the bastard scheming rat you are!’

  ‘Hassan, please …’

  ‘Shut up and get on your knees!’

  Flin threw a glance towards the Jeep, raising his palm slightly to indicate that Freya should stay where she was and not make any sudden moves. Then he dropped slowly to the ground, hands hanging at his sides. The man chuckled – a feral, throaty sound, unhinged, like a dog panting – and took another step forward into the floodlight’s harsh glare.

  ‘Three years I’ve waited for this and finally … Grovel, you treacherous piece of shit!’

  To judge by his high forehead and gleaming blue eyes, and the long narrow ridge of his nose, he must once have cut a distinguished figure. Now he resembled nothing so much as a disintegrating scarecrow, his hair wild, grey and unkempt, his face haggard and lined, half lost beneath a five-day veil of stubble.

  ‘Brodie,’ he said, and then again ‘Brodie’, and then a third time, his voice rising with each repetition until on the last it had worked itself up into a high-pitched yell, like the cry of some tormented animal.

  ‘For God’s sake, Hassan,’ hissed Flin, sweat rising on his forehead, his eyes glued to the shotgun, the way it was trembling in Fadawi’s hands. ‘Just put the bloody … Shit!’

  He ducked, flinging his arms up in front of his face as the gun thundered twice more in quick succession. Sprays of lead shot roared over his head and disappeared into the darkness of the mango orchard. For several seconds he remained motionless as Fadawi broke open the gun and replaced the spent cartridges. Then slowly, hesitantly, Flin lowered his arms and came back up onto his knees.

  ‘Please, Hassan,’ he said, struggling to keep his tone calm and measured, trying to ignore the twin barrels that were once again pointing directly at him. ‘Just put the gun down. Before you do something you regret. Something we both regret.’

  Fadawi’s breath was coming in short ragged gasps, his eyes manic and dilated.

  ‘Please,’ repeated Flin.

  No response.

  ‘Hassan?’

  Nothing.

  ‘What the fuck do you want me to say?’

  Fadawi just glared at him, teeth bared.

  ‘That I’m sorry? That I wish I’d done things differently? Not a day goes by when I don’t wish it. You think what happened gave me pleasure? Some sort of perverse kick to screw up the life of someone who’d done so much to help me?’

  Still Fadawi didn’t respond. Flin rolled his eyes in exasperation, looking up at the bright silver disc of the moon as if it might provide him with some clue as to how to proceed.

  ‘Look, I can’t turn the clock back,’ he tried again, ‘I can’t change the past, I know what you’ve been through …’

  ‘Know!’

  Fadawi came forward another couple of steps so that he now stood directly over the Englishman, the shotgun muzzle just inches from his temple. Inside the Jeep Freya started to reach for the door handle, intending to get out, to try to help. Flin saw what she was doing and gave a barely perceptible shake of the head. Fadawi’s finger tightened around the trigger.

  ‘Know what it’s like to share a cell with murderers and rapists, do you?’ he hissed. ‘To go to sleep every night not knowing if you’ll still be alive in the morning?’

  Now it was Flin who was silent.

  ‘To spend twelve hours a day sewing mail sacks? To have the shits for three years because you can’t get any clean water to drink? To be beaten so badly you urinate blood for a week?’

  Actually Flin did know what the last of these was like, but kept it to himself. He stared at the ground as Fadawi raged on, the gun muzzle brushing his ear like a pair of nostrils sniffing at him.

  ‘You have no concept of what hell’s like, Brodie, because you’ve never been to hell. I have …’

  The Egyptian stamped his foot on the ground, grinding his bare sole into the gravel as if trying to crush something.

  ‘… and it was you that sent me there! It was your fault, all your fault! You destroyed my career, my reputation, my life. You … destroyed … my … entire … fucking … liiiiiiiiife!’

  He spelt out each word of this last sentence, hurling them at Flin like projectiles, his voice, unlike before, descending the scale, starting as a cry and growing steadily more husky until on the final ‘life’ it had drawn itself out into an extended, bestial growl. Flin kept his eyes on the ground, allowing Fadawi to talk himself out. Then, slowly, he looked up.

  ‘You destroyed your life, Hassan.’

  ‘What? What was that?’

  The Egyptian’s left eye had started to twitch.

  ‘You destroyed your life,’ repeated Flin, reaching up and gently pushing the gun muzzle away from his head. ‘For as long as I live I’ll regret not talking to you before going to the authorities, and I’m so desperately sorry for what you’ve been through, but at the end of the day it wasn’t me who stole the stuff.’

  Fadawi’s face creased into a snarl, the features seeming to crowd themselves down around the mouth as he swung the gun back towards Flin’s head, pointing it right between his eyes. There was a silence, even the screech of cicadas seeming to drop away. Then, again, Flin raised a hand and carefully nudged the shotgun barrel aside.

  ‘You’re not going to shoot me, Hassan. However much you want to, however much you blame me for what happened. You might want to scare me – and trust me, you’re doing exactly that – but you’re not going to pull that trigger. So why not put the gun down and let’s at least try and talk.’

  Fadawi continued to glare at him, his eye twitching, his face contorting as if trying to settle on a suitable expression before finally, unexpectedly, it arranged itself into a smile.

  ‘I know what you want to talk about.’

  Suddenly his tone was light, cheery almost, the polar opposite of what it had been just a few seconds before. It was as if a different person was speaking. ‘You’ve seen Peach, haven’t you?’

  Flin fought to keep his face blank, but it was impossible to hide the fact that Fadawi’s words had struck a chord. The Egyptian’s smile broadened.

  ‘He told you about the oasis, didn’t he? That I’ve discovered something. And you want to know what it is. Need to know what it is. That’s why you’ve come up here.’

  He was grinning now, sensing the effect his words were having, enjoying it, turning the screw.

  ‘I knew you’d come eventually, of course, but so soon? You must be desperate. Really desperate.’

  Flin bit his lip, the gravel digging into his knees.

  ‘It’s not what you think, Hassan. It’s not just for me.’

  ‘Oh heavens no! It’s for the greater good of mankind! It’s to save the world! You always were an altruist.’

  He chuckled, motioning Flin to stand.

  ‘Something wonderful it was,’ he crowed. ‘Something extraordinary. Something that will tell us more about the wehat seshtat than all the rest of the scattered pieces of evidence put together. The greatest find of my career. And you know what makes it even more satisfying?’

  He beamed.

  ‘The fact that you are never going to find out what it is. Not from these lips. The most important discovery since Imti-Khentika and it’s all in here.’

  He lifted the gun and tapped its butt against his temple.

  ‘Which is exactly where it’s staying.’

  Flin was standing now, fists clenched impotently at his sides. He didn’t know what to say, how to turn the situation round.

  ‘You’re bluffing,’ he muttered.

  ‘Am I? Either way, you’re never going to know. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not ever.’

  Again Fadawi tapped the gun butt against his head.

  ‘All up here, safe and sound, under
lock and key. Now if you don’t mind I’ve had a difficult three years, I’m not as young as I used to be and so, delighted as I am to see you, I’m going to have to cut this little reunion short. Goodnight, my old friend. Have a safe drive home.’

  He laid the gun in the crook of his arm, patted Flin on the shoulder and, with a final grin, turned and started towards the front door of his house.

  ‘Please help us.’

  The voice was Freya’s. Up to this point she had remained silent in the Jeep, leaving the two men to play out the scene between them. Now, unable to stop herself, she pushed open the door and stepped out onto the gravel.

  ‘Please,’ she repeated, coming forward to Flin’s side. ‘We need your help.’

  Fadawi stopped and turned, cocking his head. Although he had been standing just a few metres from the Cherokee, his attention had been focused so unswervingly on Flin that he hadn’t even noticed her. ‘Dear me,’ he said, tutting and shaking his head as he looked her up and down. ‘I knew you were lacking in self-respect, Flinders, but to involve a young lady in this grubby business … And such a pretty young lady, too.’

  Suddenly his manner was all charm and politeness; a transformation that, since he was standing there in nothing but his pyjama bottoms, came across as not so much endearing as outright creepy.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce us?’ he said to Flin.

  ‘Leave it, Hassan,’ snapped the Englishman, clearly not amused by the turn of events.

  ‘Freya. My name’s Freya Hannen.’

  Fadawi smiled at this, although at the same time a slight frown creased his forehead.

  ‘Not …’

  ‘Her sister,’ said Flin, fixing Fadawi with a stony look. ‘You won’t have heard but Alex died.’

  The smile remained, but Fadawi’s frown deepened, as though different parts of his face were registering different emotions, the one contradicting the other.

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ he said, his gaze flicking from Freya to Flin and back again. ‘Very sorry indeed. Your sister was a fascinating woman.’