The Moses Legacy (15 page)

Sarit's training had involved the advanced driving course, including night driving, but she still felt uncomfortable doing it. Along the way she had evaded a donkey cart and two parked cars and nearly been demolished by a heavily loaded truck that shed some of its load in an effort to overtake her.

And now she caught sight of what she thought was the jeep that Goliath had driven away from the tomb, though it was hard to tell in the darkness. She could make out the form, but not the colour, much less the occupant. In any case, there were too many other cars on this stretch of road to be able to do anything. She would have to bide her time.

But she stayed in contact, keeping several car lengths back. The drive back to Cairo would take seven or eight hours all told, and she had barely been driving for two.

It was some three hours later that she finally got her opportunity. The traffic had thinned out considerably because many people did not want to drive that late, and somewhere along the line it got to the point that she was no longer able to keep other vehicles between them because they were on a stretch of road that
had
no other vehicles. That meant that the time to strike was
now.
She opened the driver's window, knowing that she would not be able to reach over to her passenger window whilst controlling the vehicle,
but this also meant that she could not throw the Molotov cocktail while overtaking him. Instead, she would have to get him to overtake her.

Steeling herself, she overtook him in a highly aggressive manoeuvre and then slowed down in front of him, just sitting there in the single lane, knowing that he was getting increasingly annoyed. She didn't respond when he hooted and flashed his lights at her. But when he started moving out to overtake, she knew the time had come. Holding the steering wheel with her right hand, she lit the rag with her left, dropped the lighter and took the Molotov cocktail out of the side pocket.

As Goliath pulled up level with her and shouted something out at her, she threw the Molotov cocktail as hard as she could through the open driver's window of her car and the passenger window of his. She had been intending to throw it through the rear window, so that it would shatter on impact and explode. But at the last minute, she realized that she couldn't be sure that it would penetrate. It would depend on how strong or reinforced the windows were. Within seconds, the interior of Goliath's car was ablaze, including his clothes, as he screamed with pain and skidded this way and that.

But Sarit had no time to survey the results of her work. She put her foot down and pulled away quickly, casting a brief glance in her rear-view mirror to satisfy herself that the job was done.

What she didn't see was the old man with the donkey and cart on the side road. But he had seen her and was surprised that she didn't stay to help. It was for that reason that he whipped out a pen and wrote down what he remembered of her registration number on his hand.

‘My name is Daniel Klein!' Daniel shouted. ‘I'm a British professor and a friend of Akil Mansoor! This is Gabrielle Gusack! She's also a friend of Professor Mansoor! We're unarmed!'

‘I don't think that's going to help,' said Gabrielle.

‘Why not?'

‘I don't think they're in a mood to listen.'

‘But they surely can't think we did anything to harm Mansoor. We were the ones who summoned help, for God's sake!'

‘Listen, Daniel, there's no time to explain now, but on the count of three, get up and run to the left. There's some cover there by those trees, and then some buildings. We can make it to a side street and get clear of them; they'll have to drive the long way round.'

‘But if we run, it'll just make it look as if we've got something to hide.'

‘And if we
don't
run, we'll be the subject of endless discussions and debates on the news and talk radio long after our funerals.'

And with that she started her quiet countdown. ‘One, two,
three!
'

She raised herself only as high as she needed to in order
to run and sprinted to the left, just like she had said. Danny barely had time to admire her speed, for – against his better judgement – he found himself running too.

Keeping his head down, he couldn't see the flashes of the guns or the streaks of the bullets. Neither could he see where the shots were landing. It was only when the gunfire subsided and he felt safe enough to slow down, that he saw Gabrielle turning back towards him, almost smiling with exhilaration.

For a moment, Daniel's mind returned to the thought that maybe the police
did
think that they had deliberately harmed Mansoor. But even if so, shooting at them
still
made no sense. Why not simply tell them to put their hands up and surrender?

‘I don't understand why they're firing at us,' he said in desperation.

He was about to say more, when he noticed that Gabrielle was bleeding from the shoulder.

‘They're afraid of coming into contact with us,' she said, grimacing from the pain.

The bitch!
thought Goliath.
The fucking evil bitch!

He didn't know who she was. In his agony, with his clothes on fire, all he knew was that she was the enemy.

The searing pain enveloped his body.

Get out!
his mind was screaming.
Get out!
But it was easier said than done. To get out he would have had to use his hands and he couldn't even
feel
his hands.

Neither, for that matter, could he see. His eyes were closed and his eyeballs were so hot it was as if they were melting in their sockets.

He heard the door opening and felt hands upon him, under his armpits. The hands were small, yet their grip was surprisingly strong.

‘
Wa ismaholiya mousa'a aidatica
.'

He didn't understand the words. But he could tell from the tone that someone was trying to help. He allowed himself to be dragged from the car. Once outside, his instinct was to run, to escape from the flames that engulfed him, but he knew that running would merely fan the flames and feed them with oxygen.

Instead, he allowed the man to push him to the ground and roll him. He continued to roll by himself, sensing that it was working. He felt a soft blow to a wide area of his torso.
Fabric on flesh. The stranger was trying to beat out the flames. Eventually, it became clear that the flames had subsided, but the searing pain on his flesh lingered on. The only thing he knew for sure was that he was alive.

But he felt his consciousness slipping away.

‘It's just a flesh wound,' said Gabrielle with a smile, tying her headscarf around her shoulder.

Harsh as the situation was, Daniel couldn't fail to see the humour in it.

‘You've been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies. We've got to get you to a doctor.'

‘With those guys trying to kill us? Are you crazy?'

They were moving in the shadows, avoiding the pools of light thrown by the street lamps. They weren't sure if they were still being followed, but it was clear that the cops – if indeed they
were
cops – were in no mood to listen to them.

‘So what do you suggest, Gaby? You're bleeding.'

‘It's Gabrielle to you.'

‘Oh, cut it out! You'll always be Gaby to me.'

‘Whatever! Anyway it's not bleeding.'

‘So what's that then?'

He pointed to the blood on the scarf.

‘It's congealed blood.'

‘Covering quite an area. And blood doesn't coagulate that quickly.'

‘It was never bleeding in the first place. It was a scraping injury, the bullet just grazed me. There was blood but no bleeding. It's like when you scrape a limb on a rough surface.'

‘It must hurt like hell.'

‘I'm a woman. We're biologically programmed to pass an infant's fifteen-centimetre cranium through a ten-centimetre passage. Do you think a little scraping on my upper arm is going to bother me?'

‘If it was me I wouldn't be so stoic.'

‘I guess you're handicapped by what you've got between your legs.'

Daniel smiled. ‘I take it back, what I said about Clint Eastwood. It's too many reruns of
Xena: Warrior Princess
.' If she could keep this up, in the face of what must have been at least moderately painful, then at least he didn't have to worry about her any more. ‘So what happened to that frightened little girl from the tomb back there?'

‘It's not the pain that bothers me. It's not being in control. I guess I can take danger, I just can't take confinement.'

Daniel nodded, approving of the logic. ‘The thing I don't understand is why they were shooting at us.' He looked at her expectantly. She said nothing. He had another go. ‘You said something about them not wanting to come into contact…'

Gabrielle held out Mansoor's phone. ‘There's a message. You might like to listen to it.'

He took the phone and held it to his ear.

‘Hallo Professor Mansoor, this is the Minister of Health, Farooq Mahdi. We have a little problem on our hands. We understand that you are travelling in the company of a British man called Daniel Klein and a woman called Gabrielle Gusack. Please be very wary of them. There is an arrest warrant out for Daniel Klein after he jumped bail on a murder charge. We believe that he could be very dangerous. There is also evidence that they are both carrying the same contagious disease as the volunteers at the dig. The Gusack
woman is known to have been in contact with a curator at the British Museum and he later succumbed to the same disease. Please get away from them as soon as possible and contact us.'

Now he realized why Gabrielle had been so determined to get him to run. As far as the cops were concerned, they were a dangerous health hazard and the police didn't want to go anywhere near them – even if shooting them was the only alternative. The fact that Daniel was also suspected of being a murderer on the run, made it easier for them to take that shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach. Daniel knew that in these circumstances, there was no point trying to reason with them.

But why on earth should anyone think they were carrying a disease? They weren't showing any symptoms themselves. This had to be some sort of mix-up. But there evidently was an outbreak and there had had to be
some
cause.

However, until such time as they could approach the authorities without getting themselves shot, they'd have to keep a low profile. They needed breathing room… time to unravel the mystery and work out a plan.

‘We've got to get out of here,' said Daniel.

Sarit arrived in Cairo sometime after four in the morning. She parked her car and took an invigorating shower to rouse herself from the lethargy that was engulfing her.

She put on the white bathrobe supplied by the hotel and made her way to the bed, still feeling an intense desire to sleep. But she had something to do before that: she had to report in. She switched on her computer and uploaded the tourist-style pictures she had taken of her day in the Valley of the Kings. Then she connected the laptop to the hotel's broadband and prepared the message for embedding into one of the pictures:

She embedded the text in the picture, then wiped the text file and uploaded the picture to her social network account for all her ‘friends' to see. Then she ran the utility to delete any temporary files and overwrite unused areas of the hard disk.

Then she did what she had wanted to do for hours: crash out on the bed.

Sometime later, she was awakened from her uneasy sleep by an aggressive banging on the door. She barely had time to throw on a robe before the door was flung open and three Egyptian policemen walked in.

‘Miss Stewart, you are under arrest for leaving the scene of a motor accident.'

Daniel had let Gabrielle do the talking. After a sleepless night in the open by the Nile, just outside a small village, they had made their way to the riverbank in search of the means to escape. And they found it in the
feluccas –
the local riverboats that operated on the Nile both as fishing vessels and as cheap tourist rides.

Gabrielle was so much more persuasive than he could have ever been. First of all, it was obvious that Walid, the dark-skinned, southern Egyptian owner of the
felucca
, found Gabrielle very attractive, as did the other two crew members who were there with him – his teenage son Na'if and someone else who was either Walid's younger brother or his cousin. Secondly, they seemed to be impressed by her fluent, almost classical Arabic. Daniel could have spoken Arabic equally well, but somehow hearing it from a pretty blonde foreigner – and a woman too – was considerably more impressive, and they warmed to her immediately.

Gabrielle had warned Daniel that it would be risky to try to join a normal tourist river cruise without arousing suspicion. Not that there would have been any shortage of room on a northbound cruise; holidaymakers tended to prefer the shorter cruises between Aswan and Luxor, and in any case the tourist season was almost over. Joining a cruise without
a booking at the last minute, though, might arouse some suspicions. For all they knew, the riverboats and car hire firms might have been alerted to watch out for them.

But travelling by
felucca
was another matter. Those old, narrow, engineless riverboats were used both by fishermen and by canny locals to ferry tourists on short trips.

‘We want to get the authentic local experience,' Gabrielle had explained. ‘Or rather my husband does.'

She realized, quite spontaneously, that the afterthought was a nice little touch to make it sound convincing. She knew that Walid and his crew could well relate to that. The Western city slicker who wants to get his hands dirty, and the educated, dutiful wife reluctantly going along with her adventurous husband's wishes.

‘And you want to go all the way to Cairo?' Walid asked by way of clarification.

‘Yes.'

If they could make it to Cairo, they had several options, including going to their respective embassies and asking them to liaise with the Egyptian authorities – even if it meant Daniel being returned to the UK and arrested. But what they really wanted was to have a look at the papyrus from the tomb of Ay that Mansoor had told them about – the one at the Cairo Museum. Daniel was hoping that it was the one that Harrison had mentioned – the one that described the resurgence of the plague. It might hold the key to why Harrison was killed and why someone had locked them in the tomb.

‘You know there is no toilet on boat, yes?'

‘We understand,' Gabrielle confirmed, giving Daniel a dirty look as if to say:
Why are you forcing me to go through this?

‘Okay, you have American dollars?'

‘No, only sterling or Egyptian pounds.'

‘Okay, give me twelve hundred pounds.'

He meant Egyptian pounds. But that was still too much – even allowing for the fact that it would take them about five or six days to make it to Cairo.

‘I'll give you five hundred,' said Gabrielle.

Daniel smiled; it was obvious that she knew how to haggle a lot better than he.

‘Five hundred?!' The mock-indignation in Walid's tone was almost theatrical. ‘For
one
person I do for five hundred. Give me thousand, I take you all the way to Cairo.'

‘A thousand? Look, we're not first-timers. This is my fifth trip and my husband's third. I'll give you six hundred.'

‘Okay, give me eight hundred,' he said with a smile. ‘I do for you for eight hundred.'

‘Seven hundred,' she replied, matching smile for smile.

‘Why you do this to me? Where else you find beautiful boat like mine?'

That was not exactly the way she would have described it; ramshackle old dinghy might have qualified. But she had to be careful not to overplay her hand. Most of the
feluccas
operated south of the Esna lock, between Luxor and Aswan. They wanted to get to Cairo and there were very few
feluccas
trying to compete with the cruise ships on that northern stretch of the Nile. So it was a case of beggars can't be choosers. But the competitive streak in her made her decide to have one last try.

‘Seven hundred,' she said firmly.

‘Seven fifty.'

‘Okay,' she said. If he had stuck at eight hundred, she would have said seven fifty herself. Still, it was better this way. It was always better to let the man name the final figure and then agree to it.

After the money had changed hands, they boarded the
boat and within minutes were drifting downriver. Sails were useless in this environment as the prevailing wind was almost always southerly, taking the boats upstream. Hence the rule of the Nile: sails
up
stream, current
down
stream.

All of this made for a very energy-efficient, and gentle mode of transport along the Nile. The vessel had no engine, no ‘indoors' and no shower or toilet. It was this, as much as the Western preference for comfort, that made most tourists prefer the luxury cruises on offer from the numerous tourist companies, to the Spartan austerity of a
felucca
.

Walid insisted on making a pot of strong Turkish coffee for them. Having these interesting foreigners on his boat was something of a social occasion, and it was clear that he wanted to get the most out of it. As they drank the coffee, they were content to let Walid tell them about his beautiful fat wife and five wonderful daughters. He was sad that he only had one son, but if that was Allah's will then he must accept it.

Listening to this man, well past his prime, talk with loving affection about his family, Daniel felt safe for the first time in several hours. It was unlikely that a
felucca
owner eking out his living on the Nile would sit with his ears glued to the radio to hear the news. To Walid, the things that mattered most were the weather and the exchange rate.

‘So what you do here?' asked Walid in English, addressing Daniel.

‘Well, my wife is a professor of Egyptology and she has to come here often because of her work. I'm a businessman myself. I don't really have time for all this academic stuff. I've been here a couple of times before and the first time I saw the pyramids and the Sphinx and the Valley of the Kings. But the second visit, I spent most of the time scuba-diving
in Sharm el-Sheikh, so this time the missus here challenged me to see the real Egypt. And I figured if I'm going to see the
real
Egypt, I may as well go the whole way.'

He looked around at the scenery to emphasize the point.

‘What business you do?' asked Walid.

‘Computer software,' said Daniel. He figured it would sound suitably Western and wouldn't prompt too many questions.

‘Ah, Microsoft,' said Walid.

‘They're our competitors,' Daniel replied, laughing. ‘They're much bigger than us.'

‘I have an X-box,' said Na'if, obviously anxious to add something to the conversation.

 

‘This is
goooood
!' said Daniel, as he sampled the lamb stew that Walid had prepared for lunch. Walid looked relieved by his reaction. He had apologized for the fact that it wasn't as good as his wife's lamb stew. He explained that his wife made the best stew in the world and Daniel and his wife should visit them in Cairo sometime and taste it. He also explained that when he wasn't taking people on his boat, he usually existed off fish, caught in the river and grilled over an open flame in the metal bucket and grill rack that doubled as a barbecue.

After lunch, Walid and the crew took a siesta on deck, leaving Daniel in charge of the helm.

‘We should have turned ourselves in when we had the chance,' said Daniel. ‘We might have been able to sort this out if we hadn't run away.'

Gabrielle's Nordic face held a cold, implacable look. ‘You seem to be forgetting one thing: they
didn't
give us the chance. They started shooting before we could say a word.'

‘I guess they must have panicked because of that story
about us carrying some disease. That message on Mansoor's phone said that you infected that curator at the British Museum.'

‘I know, but that doesn't make any sense. I haven't got any symptoms.'

‘Maybe it only affects men.'

‘But Mansoor said it affected the volunteers.'

‘Only a few. They put them all in quarantine, but not all of them were infected – and he didn't say anything about the gender of those who were.'

‘And what about you? And Mansoor? Neither of you have shown any symptoms and you've had at least as much exposure as the curator in London.'

‘Okay, but some people evidently
are
getting ill. And your uncle did say something about it when I went to see him on the morning I flew out here, just before he was…'

‘That's the other thing, Daniel. Too many bad things seem to be happening at once. People are getting killed. First Uncle Harrison and the maid. Then the guardian of the tomb. And of course whoever did that also tried to kill
us
– and Mansoor. I'm just wondering if they're connected.'

‘We don't actually know
who
they were trying to kill. It might have been any one of us.'

‘The question is, Daniel… what are we going to do?'