The Lost Testament (11 page)

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 midmorning, 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, glancing 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.

“You kn
ow Mahmoud Kassim?”

It wasn’t so much a question as a statement of fact, because the market trader sitting opposite Anum Husani in the coffeehouse 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 suspected? 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.

He heard the ringing tone in his earpiece, but after about twenty seconds the voice mail system kicked in. As soon as he heard that, Husani ended the call. He wasn’t sure how security conscious Ali Mohammed was, but the last thing he wanted to do was leave a message on an electronic answering machine that could be played back at a later stage by somebody who might not have his best interests at heart.

Husani waited a few seconds, then pressed the redial button to make the call again. This time, the mobile was answered on the second ring.

“Ali?”

“I thought that might be you, Anum, calling a minute or so ago, but you rang off before I could reach the phone. I’m afraid you’re a little too keen. I haven’t had time to finish work on the parchment yet.”

That wasn’t exactly what Husani had been hoping to hear.

“Have you managed to do anything with it?”

“I’ve made some progress, yes, but I certainly haven’t finished.”

“Can you read any more of the text?” Husani asked.

“Yes, a bit, though it still needs a lot more work. I’ve used a couple of the latest techniques on—”

“Sorry, Ali, but I’m in a real hurry now,” Husani interrupted. “Can you meet me at the usual café right away and bring with you the parchment and whatever you’ve managed to decipher?”

The confusion in Mohammed’s voice was clear.

“But the devices and equipment I need are here in the laboratory. I won’t be able to finish if you don’t—”

Husani interrupted again.

“I’ll explain everything when I see you. I’ll be at the café in an hour. Please just get there as quickly as you can. And don’t tell anyone anything about the parchment.”

Ten minutes later, Husani closed the front door of his house, slid home the two interior bolts and stepped forward into the cool gloom of the property. He paused for a brief instant, listening intently, but he heard no sound inside the building, nothing to suggest that anyone else was there. His wife was spending a few days with some members of her vast extended family, up the Nile near Aswan, and wouldn’t be back in Cairo for at least two weeks, and the children were with her. So at least they were safe.

Satisfied that he was alone, he ran across the hall to the room he called his study, a small and cramped windowless space at the back of the house, and opened his safe. There was a fat bundle of cash inside, secured with elastic bands and made up of multiple currencies including euros, American dollars and pounds sterling, as well as Egyptian pounds, all of which he’d acquired through his trading activities. He seized the money and his passport and tucked them into the inside pockets of his jacket.

Then he paused for a moment as he looked at the third object in the safe, a small semiautomatic pistol. He’d owned the weapon—illegally, of course—for years, and occasionally took it out into the desert to a quiet area and fired a few rounds through it, just to make sure it still worked. Carrying it might just give him an edge over the man who’d killed Mahmoud Kassim, especially if the murderer only worked with a knife. On the other hand, he wouldn’t be able to take it onto an aircraft with him.

He nodded to himself. It was an easy decision. If he came face-to-face with the killer somewhere on the streets of Cairo and didn’t have the pistol in his pocket, he probably wouldn’t even make it as far as the airport. He definitely needed the insurance policy that the weapon would provide. He took it out of the safe, extracted the magazine and loaded it from the box of .22 cartridges he also kept there, replaced the magazine in the butt of the weapon, racked back the slide to chamber a round and set the safety catch. Then he removed the magazine again and added one further cartridge to replace the one that was now in the breech, ready to be fired. There was no point in taking the box of cartridges because if he did meet the killer and fired every round at him, he certainly wouldn’t have time to reload his weapon. If a full magazine didn’t stop the man, Husani knew he’d be dead. He was also well aware that the .22 round was hardly classed as a man-stopper, but it was all he had. It would have to do.

He slid the pistol into the pocket of his trousers—he found Western-style clothing much more convenient than traditional Arab dress—locked the safe and left the room.

Then he ran up the stairs to the main bedroom, strode across to the shelves on the opposite side of the room and grabbed a selection of clothes, enough for about a week, plus his washing and shaving kit, and stuffed everything into a small leather suitcase. He closed it, set the catches, and headed back toward the stairs.

He’d only taken a couple of steps across the landing when he heard a knock at the front door of the house.

Treading as carefully and quietly as he could, Husani walked into the bedroom used by his two children and crossed to the window. He kept well back from the glass, positioning himself so that he could just see the lane that ran outside his house, and the area around the front door. He could see the figure of a man.

Husani edged closer to the window as the man outside repeated his knock. He couldn’t make out the face of the figure standing in the road because of the hat he was wearing, the headgear completely obscuring his features.

It could be completely innocent, perhaps somebody wanting to buy or sell a relic, or even a messenger sent by the man who ran his shop, though in either case his assistant would surely have called his mobile to advise him. Husani didn’t believe either scenario for a moment. A feeling of cold dread settled on him, and what happened next confirmed his fear.

The figure outside glanced in both directions along the street and then, with a click that was clearly audible to Husani in the room above, opened a switchblade knife and slid the point between the door and the jamb, obviously attempting to slip the lock. Husani thanked his lucky stars that he’d remembered to close both the bolts: unless the man kicked down the door, he wasn’t going to be able to get inside the house that way. The downside was that the man outside would soon realize that somebody had to be in the property for the door to have been bolted on the inside.

He stepped back from the window, trying to decide what to do. There was a rear door to the house, but to reach it he would have to walk down the stairs that ran close to the front door, and if he did that the man outside would probably hear him, and perhaps guess where he was going.

Husani moved forward again to the window and peered down. As he did so, he saw the figure outside step back from the door and again glance all around him. This time he looked up as well, toward the windows on the first floor of the house that overlooked the street.

Immediately, Husani shrank back. He didn’t think the man had seen him, but he couldn’t be sure, and he muttered a curse under his breath. But he still needed to know what the man was doing, so after a few moments he edged cautiously forward again and looked down.

The man had gone. He wasn’t in sight anywhere along the street. Husani looked in both directions, but the figure had vanished, and there hadn’t been time for him to disappear around a corner or into an alley.

That could only mean one thing. He must have gone around to the back of the house, and Husani was very aware that the rear door offered nothing like the same level of security as the one that opened onto the street. He knew he had just seconds to act.

Heedless of the noise he was making, he ran out of the room and down the stairs, the pistol clutched in his right hand, the suitcase forgotten, abandoned on the landing. He ran across to the front door and wrenched back one of the bolts. Then he stopped. Suppose it was just a trick? Suppose the intruder had simply walked down the side of the house, and ducked out of sight, and was now waiting for Husani to obligingly open the street door so that he could push his way inside?

For a moment he stood there, his body quivering with fear and indecision. He left the second bolt in place and stepped to one side, to a small window that gave a partial view of the street, and looked out.

But almost at the same moment as he did so, he heard a splintering crash behind him, and knew in that instant that the man had broken open the rear door and was now inside the house.

The killer was right behind him