The Lost Testament (13 page)

Before she continued with the jigsaw reassembly of what seemed like a million broken pottery vessels, Angela made herself a cup of coffee. She’d decided a while ago that the only way she could guarantee a decent cup, apart from visiting one of the cafés in and around Great Russell Street, was to have her own coffeemaker and buy her own beans.

The routine of grinding the beans in the small electrical gadget beside the filter machine and the pleasurable aroma the whole operation created were things she really looked forward to. The process helped her unwind each morning after the usually fraught journey on the packed Central and Northern lines from Ealing Broadway into central London.

As usual, she ground the beans—that day she had chosen a Blue Mountain roast—and started the water dripping through the loaded filter as soon as she’d closed her office door. Then she opened up her laptop and plugged it in. While she sipped her coffee, she wrote an e-mail to Ali Mohammed, explaining what she thought was the significance of the fragment of the Hebrew name, and asking him to confirm the provenance of the parchment he was working on. She also suggested that the British Museum would probably be interested in acquiring it, should it bear up to expert analysis.

Before she sent the message, she checked the local time in Cairo. Because of the two-hour difference, in Egypt it was just after eleven thirty, so Ali Mohammed should certainly be in his office by that time. She sent the e-mail, then savored the rest of her drink, made herself another cup, and walked out of her office and into the workroom where the boxes of potsherds awaited her attention.

*   *   *

Trying to assemble broken sections of pottery was both mentally and physically tiring. The edges of the fragments only rarely matched exactly because of other damage and there was, of course, never any guarantee that all the parts of a particular vessel were present in the box of bits, so a search for one missing piece could easily be a complete waste of time. She found that her eyes ached if she did the work for more than about two hours at a stretch, so at eleven thirty London time she abandoned her bench for a while and returned to her office, hoping that Ali would already have replied.

He had, but the contents of the message he’d sent were nothing like what she’d expected. The e-mail was short, but she read it twice, with increasing confusion and irritation.

Good morning, Angela,

I am so sorry about the parchment. It was a mistake to have contacted you and the owner has now taken it away from me. Please do not concern yourself any more with the matter.

Regards, Ali

What was going on? She looked again at the message she had sent to Cairo, to ensure that she had made her position clear, that she had emphasized the possible importance of the text on the piece of parchment. Had Ali conveyed any of that to the owner of the relic?

She certainly wasn’t going to simply let it go.

She composed another message to the Egyptian, marked it high priority and sent it immediately. Then she made herself another cup of coffee and sat in her chair while she waited for him to reply.

It didn’t take long.

Hullo again, Angela,

I will not get the chance to explain to the owner what you told me, because I had already returned the relic to him before I read your e-mail. But I doubt if it would have made any difference. There are other forces at work here, and already one man has been killed over this parchment. I am only telling you this so that you will appreciate the seriousness of the matter and please, I beg of you, do not pursue this any further. I have been sworn to secrecy, and I dare not continue this correspondence. Both the owner of the relic and I myself fear for our lives if our involvement becomes known.

Ali

That was hardly the response Angela had been expecting.

She opened up her Web browser and typed “Cairo murder” in the search field. That produced over eighteen million results, but the news item she was looking for appeared right at the top of the list. There were five different reports from a selection of English-language newspapers, and she glanced at all of them before reading the longest and most comprehensive article in full, though the information supplied even by that report was noticeably sparse.

Brutal Slaying in Cairo Suburb

Yesterday police were called to a house on the outskirts of the city in response to an emergency call. A cleaner who worked at the property, owned by a dealer in antiquities named Mahmoud Kassim, had discovered the dead body of her employer when she arrived there that morning.

The property was immediately sealed off by the police while the scene was examined for clues to the perpetrator of the crime. In an initial statement, the chief investigating officer, Inspector Malanwi, explained that they had found one body in the property and that they were treating the death as suspicious.

In an exclusive interview for this newspaper, the cleaner, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our reporters that she had found the body of Mr. Kassim in the bedroom. The corpse was lying in the bed, and he had apparently been attacked during the night. The cleaner stated that he had the most appalling wounds, and she believed they had been inflicted with a knife.

Mr. Kassim was a well-known dealer in antiques and antiquities, and operated his business from a shop in the Khan el-Khalili souk.

That was little enough to go on, but if nothing else the man’s profession suggested that at least Angela was reading the right news item. She looked back at the other reports, but they added little fresh information.

As she read it again, she realized one other fact: Ali said that he’d returned the parchment to the owner on the day
after
the killing, so it can’t have been this Mahmoud Kassim. The relic was still out there, somewhere.

There was one more thing she could do. She knew a bit about Ali Mohammed’s work, and she could guess exactly how he’d handled the parchment when it had been given to him.

She thought carefully for a few minutes, then wrote another e-mail to the Egyptian scientist, read it through to ensure she’d got the right tone, and then sent it.

Five minutes after that, she was back among the potsherds, her actions mechanical and slow, her thoughts thousands of miles and two millennia away.

For the first time in his career, Abdul was beginning to doubt if he would be able to fulfill the contract he had accepted. What made it infinitely worse was that both of the targets he had needed to eliminate were amateurs—just two ordinary market traders. Finding and killing the first man hadn’t been difficult, just rather messy. But the second target, Anum Husani, had simply slipped away from him.

With hindsight, he knew it was his own fault, because his tactics had been wrong. When he’d found that the street door of the house was bolted on the inside, he should have only
pretended
to go around the back of the property, and that would have forced Husani to open the front door to make his escape. But Abdul had thought he could break into the house from the rear so quickly that the other man wouldn’t have time to get away. That had been a mistake.

The other fact Abdul hadn’t bargained for was that the trader would be armed. That had been an extremely unpleasant surprise. From the sight of the weapon and the sound and impact of the shots against the walls of the houses in the street, Abdul guessed it was a very small-caliber pistol, probably a .22 or perhaps a .25, but even such a small bullet could maim or kill. It had thrown him off balance, and then the man had used his knowledge of the souk to make good his escape.

He had not the slightest idea where Husani was, whether he’d gone to ground somewhere in the city, at the house of a friend or acquaintance, perhaps, or was still out on the streets somewhere. Maybe he’d even taken a train or an aircraft out of Cairo and was already miles away. Abdul simply had no way of knowing, or of finding out.

Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. He did have one lead he could follow: Ali Mohammed, the man who worked at the Cairo Museum, if the information Jalal Khusad had passed on to him was accurate.

So now Ali Mohammed was the next man on his list.

Abdul sat outside a small café on one side of Tahrir Square, near the center of the city on the east bank of the Nile and looked across at his next objective. Over a coffee and a sweet cake, he glanced through the guidebook he’d picked up and considered the potential problems the museum posed for him.

The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, more commonly known as the Egyptian Museum or sometimes just the Cairo Museum, is the largest museum in Egypt and one of the most popular in the country. The guide claimed that it was visited by over one and half million tourists every year, as well as about half a million Egyptians, the main attraction being the Tutankhamun exhibition, especially the celebrated death mask of the boy-king, an image that has become virtually synonymous with the glory days of Ancient Egypt. This exquisitely fashioned solid gold mask, arguably the most beautiful ancient treasure ever recovered, weighs almost twenty-five pounds, and was placed on Tutankhamun’s shoulders almost three and a half millennia ago, before his corpse was conveyed to its final resting place in the Valley of the Kings. The tomb had been discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter and the Earl of Carnarvon, and the array of treasures and artifacts, relics of incalculable value and outstanding historic importance, have since then resided in their new home on the upper floor of the Cairo Museum.

What Abdul didn’t know, and didn’t actually care about, was that the body of the boy-king himself was once again lying in the Valley of the Kings, in his burial chamber, having been taken back there in November 2007, exactly eighty-five years to the day after the discovery of his tomb. He was laid to rest there for the second time after his death in about 1323
BC
, this time for eternity, but instead of the warm darkness of the original chamber in which he lay, surrounded by some three and a half thousand artifacts intended to assist him in the afterlife, his wrapped mummy is now on display in a climate-controlled glass box, a move intended to reduce the rate of decomposition of his body.

The guide also pointed out that it wasn’t just Tutankhamun’s treasures that made the museum a popular destination. The building also housed the mummies of eleven Egyptian kings and queens in a single hall, and there was a huge array of statues, jewels, coins, papyrus, sarcophagi, scarabs and a host of other relics covering the entire span of time from the predynastic and Old Kingdom periods right up to the Greek and Roman eras, a total of some 120,000 items, all contained within the museum’s hundred-plus chambers, either on display or in storage.

Abdul closed the section of the guide he’d been reading and looked again at the museum. Getting inside the building wouldn’t be a problem: he would simply have to buy a ticket at the door. Getting through the metal detectors could be a little more difficult.

But Abdul had a solution, intended for just such a situation. In fact, he had two solutions, one elegant, the other less so. A couple of years earlier, he had received a small package through the regular mail, sent from a mail-order firm in America to one of his post office boxes in Egypt. Inside the package were three knives of a most unusual type. They were almost entirely ceramic in construction, the only metal piece being the hinge pin on the clasp knife, but the other two knives, with fixed blades, contained no metal whatsoever. They were just as sharp and lethal as steel-bladed weapons, but were guaranteed to be invisible to metal detectors, and virtually undetectable by X-ray scanners as well. They were a gift to terrorists, and Abdul had been surprised just how easy it had been to purchase them.

Once inside the museum, he would have to get into the man’s office or laboratory, which would presumably be in a part of the building to which the public had no access. But the more elegant option would ensure he could walk into the building carrying both his pistol and one of his knives, and be told exactly where Ali Mohammed worked.

And that was the option he was going to take, despite one obvious disadvantage. But he knew he could do something about that.

Ali Mohammed read the latest e-mail from Angela Lewis with growing concern. If she was right, and Mohammed suspected that she probably was, if only because of the events that had taken place in Cairo over the last couple of days, then the relic was too important to be forgotten about.

And that realization placed him in something of a quandary. Anum Husani had been adamant that he should just walk away, forget about the parchment altogether, for his own safety. But Mohammed was a scientist, and a part of his creed—part of the creed of every scientist, in theory if not always in practice—was the pursuit of knowledge. What Angela Lewis had suggested about the parchment was simply too compelling to ignore. He owed it to his own conscience, to the tenets of his profession, to investigate the truth of her suggestion.

What’s more, he had the tools to do so. Although he’d given the photographs he’d taken of the parchment to Husani, the originals were stored on the hard disk of his laptop.

For another couple of minutes he sat at his desk, silently contemplating the situation; then he nodded to himself. Decision made. He selected all the photographs of the relic, and sent them to his laser printer. Studying the images of the parchment on his laptop wasn’t really an option: he needed to have the pictures in his hands.

Printing the twenty or so pictures he’d taken would be a lengthy process, so he decided to reply to Angela’s e-mail. When he’d finished the message, he paused, wondering if he was doing the right thing. Then, exhaling rapidly, he added a final short paragraph, and pressed Send.

But almost as soon as the e-mail vanished from his screen, Mohammed had an abrupt change of heart. He muttered to himself, typed rapidly, and sent another message. He knew he really had no choice.