The Cairo Puzzle

by Laurence O'Bryan

  The situation in Cairo was tense. Isabel Ryan was on the point of being rescued, but the team involved was not British or American. He would have to watch carefully to make sure they carried out their task swiftly and release her to the British Embassy as soon as possible.

  He had another concern now, too. The lead story in both the Washington Times and the London Sunday Times was a profile of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt and still agitating there and across the Middle East against Israel.

  He clicked to the story the journalist in the Sunday Times had leaked to him. It showed a picture of Ahmed Yacoub. Behind him a crowd held up the green flag of the Brotherhood, with its crossed scimitars.

  Much of the article was old news, but the fact that Yacoub, who was tipped to be the next civilian president of Egypt, had such strong ties to the Brotherhood was worrying.

  Extremely worrying. The new U.S. administration would draw the line on sending further military and other aid to Egypt if the story was true, and that could lead to an implosion in the Egyptian economy, and a mass movement of millions of refugees towards Europe, which would make the crisis over the Syrian refugees look like a prelude.

  The Syrian population had been twenty million before their war started. About two million had become international refugees. Egypt’s was eighty-five million. If ten percent of that decided to leave, that would be about eight million people heading for Europe. Europe would not be able to cope. Its military and immigration services would buckle. Italy and Greece would face an existential crisis, which could start a chain reaction of heavily indebted states looking for bail outs.

  He read the article:

  The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna. Al-Banna was twenty-two at the time. Soon after, he sent letters to Adolf Hitler seeking support for his new party and explaining how he agreed with Hitler’s views on the Jews.

  When Hitler and the Nazi party assumed power in Germany they agreed to support the Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood became one the Nazi regime’s most important supporting groups in the Middle East. In 1938 membership of the Muslim Brotherhood reached two hundred thousand.

  Activists in the Muslim Brotherhood became spies for Nazi Germany. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a senior supporter of the Brotherhood, moved to Berlin. He was treated as a VIP and lived in Germany from ‘41 until the end of the war. Facing arrest by the Allies, he fled to Egypt in ‘46. Prior to that, the Grand Mufti had a controlling role in launching several Muslim divisions within Nazi Germany’s armed forces. These were incorporated into the Waffen SS as the war continued.

  Other prominent Arabs also came to be influenced by Nazi ideology and to admire the extreme violent racism emanating from Germany at that time. The founders of the Ba'ath movement, which later came to power in Iraq and Syria, where the founding Assad family still holds power, are among those who also came to adopt Nazi ideas.

  The Muslim Brotherhood numbered 500,000 members by the late ‘40’s. They were responsible for the assassination of the Egyptian Prime Minister al-Nuqrashi and took a prominent role in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, which sought to destroy the emerging state of Israel.

  The Muslim Brotherhood was later responsible for the creation of Hamas, the leading Palestinian terrorist group currently, as designated by the U.S., E.U., Canada and Japan, because of its record of attacks against Israel and a refusal to renounce violence.

  Under Hamas’ charter it is committed to the destruction of Israel. Its policies would likely lead it to be designated as a Neo-Nazi party, should it exist with the same charter in modern day Germany.

  In addition, a Muslim Brotherhood educated Saudi, Osama bin Laden, was the chief conspirator in the destruction and mass murder at the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001, which caused the death of 2,996 people and, up to this date, is still the most serious terrorist attack on the United States ever conducted. A direct line from Adolf Hitler to 9/11 can therefore be drawn.

  Should Mr. Ahmed Yacoub come to power, supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, a number of significant after effects would occur. These include a speedy realignment in Egypt’s relationships with the USA, the EU and Israel.

  This possibility represents a clear and present danger to British citizens, business interests and those of our allies.

  Recommended further actions: See Appendix 1AA.

  68

  Xena launched herself forward, pushing hard and fast to get as far into the hole as she could.

  She landed on her side, her ribs smashing into the stone edge of the hole. The winding effect almost saw her pass out, but her scrabbling hands caught the edge and she was hanging over it, half her body in the tunnel beyond, the other half hanging down into the pit with the rats. She felt herself slipping and jerked forward, even though she could feel that the tunnel she was entering was slanted, like the passage up to the King’s Chamber.

  Only this didn’t have wooden slats on the floor to stop you sliding. Or the reassurance of knowing where you would slide to, if you did go down it head first.

  Xena put her arms in front of her and said a prayer to the Queen of Heaven. She was sliding now, her momentum building, any chance of working her way back up the slope diminishing with every second.

  But what sent her mind reeling was that she might be the first person in five thousand years or more to come this way.

  The slide seemed to go on forever. Her heart was pounding fast and her elbows and knees scuffed by the granite walls and floor of the tunnel, the skin brushing away until it felt as if her bones would be exposed soon.

  Her head was pounding, as if she was going underwater. Occasionally she was pushed through cobwebs by her momentum. She didn’t want to think about the thin desert rats and the deadly yellow-limbed stalker scorpions, which lived in the sand dunes around Cairo.

  Then she was falling, without any walls or floor, swinging her arms wildly for something to hold onto, her mouth open, a scream echoing for a second, until she hit a stone floor with a thud that blew all the air out of her and left her sprawled on the coldest, wettest stone floor she had ever touched.

  She turned over, looked around. Everything was black. She could have been in a tiny hole, or a massive chamber. She felt in her pocket for the torch. Then felt in her other pocket. It was gone.

  69

  I kept my gaze on Asim, my expression slightly wide eyed, using the genuine fear bubbling inside me to show him I was no threat.

  His expression was hard, his lips pressed tight, his gaze jumping about as he moved around me, trying to keep the sniper he knew was trying to get a bead on him, at bay. It wouldn’t be easy to get a clear shot, with him circling fast around me.

  He turned his head, shouted something in Arabic.

  That was when I took my chance.

  I jerked my hand up, gripped his gun, turned the barrel upwards in one movement. He had his finger on the trigger and pulled it as the barrel moved, but he was too late. Bullets whistled high into the air and from the look of pain on his face he would be releasing his gun any second.

  That was the least of Asim’s worries.

  Something rustled through my hair and a red dot appeared in the middle of his forehead. A second later a thud echoed through the air and an inch wide red hole, with a jagged white rim appeared where the red dot had been. His expression crumpled. He fell forward.

  Someone was screaming. I closed my mouth. The screaming stopped. A woman in a green hospital uniform, with a silver emergency blanket in her hands was rushing towards me.

  I went down on my knees. Asim’s body was twitching in front of me, his leg muscles exhibiting involuntary death spasms. A pool of blood grew around his head. Another pool of piss grew around his trousers.

  Someone was whispering in my ear, pulling me backwards. I went with her. She had her arms around me. There were black clad bodies behind her.

  “You’re alright now, madam,” she was saying, over and over. As
we walked towards a white ambulance with a green stripe along its side, which had appeared at the end of the road, men in black outfits, with black steel helmets and bird symbols, walked slowly past us. I glanced back. A group of them were standing in a circle around Asim.

  An assistant was opening the back doors of the ambulance. I looked behind again. A man, he looked like an officer, was walking fast towards us. When we reached the ambulance door I put my hand up, to indicate I needed to stop.

  The woman who was holding me up touched my forehead, at the side. Her fingers felt wet as she touched me. She pulled them away and put them up in front of me. They were covered in blood.

  My blood?

  I nodded. She led me up into the ambulance. Had I been grazed by a bullet from Asim’s gun? My knees were weak. I put a hand out to stop myself falling.

  “Mrs. Isabel Ryan,” came a man’s voice in my ear. He had an almost perfect English accent. I looked to the side. He had a round baby face, a black moustache and close cropped hair under a black baseball hat with that bird emblem on the front.

  “Yes.” My voice was shaky, even saying just one word.

  “Did they harm you, in any way? Did they torture you, or inflict any of their depraved demands on you?”

  I knew what he meant. Had they raped me.

  “No.”

  He put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m glad. You will go to the hospital now. We will interview you later.”

  The woman who had led me to the ambulance put her arm around me. She motioned for me to lie down on the trolley in the ambulance. It had stainless steel bars and an orange rubber mattress. There was a white sheet, folded up, at the end.

  Above the stretcher was a shelf with electronic equipment. Wires dangled waiting for me to be connected up. The woman motioned me again to lie down. For a hopeful moment I wondered if I was well enough just to walk away from this. Then the woman took a plastic dish from a rack and came towards me with a white bandage roll in one hand and the dish in the other.

  She motioned me to put my head back. I did. The doors of the ambulance closed with a bang and a few moments later we jerked forward and the siren was turned on.

  The woman ambulance assistant placed rolls of gauze on the mattress beside me, opened one roll with scissors and began dabbing at my forehead with cotton wool. When she pulled the cotton wool away I saw dark red blood. I closed my eyes. She kept dabbing at me.

  A graze from a bullet can cause long term damage, especially if your skull had been fractured. I could be in a far worse condition than I thought. Shock often set in after injuries from bullet wounds, which could even lead victims to believe that they hadn’t been shot at all.

  And one part of me didn’t even care about what had happened to me. I had gone along too easily with Asim, because I’d thought he knew something about where Sean was. But all that had proved to be a mirage. It was possible Asim had made up the whole thing about Sean being held in Yacoub’s villa, simply because he wanted me to cooperate.

  So what was he looking for in the villa, if it wasn’t Sean? Had we missed Sean, possibly by minutes? It certainly looked as if we had discovered that Yacoub did experiments on people. Was that all legitimate? Was it allowed under Egyptian law?

  With every wail from the siren coming from the ambulance I felt myself more dazed, as if I was moving further and further away from where I wanted to be. I wanted to go back to Yacoub’s, and I needed someone to help me search his place properly. If only I had my phone. I could call Henry, or whoever was on duty back in London. They could arrange for some help from the Embassy.

  That led me to wondering if Henry had already intervened. Had the Egyptian security forces turned up because of a tip off from him?

  I opened my eyes. The woman had stopped dabbing at my forehead. She was opening a green bandage package. As I watched she held it in her plastic gloved hands and placed it on the side of my forehead, securing it with a roll of white gauze going around my head a few times, like a sweatband.

  The ambulance stopped. The intensity of the siren went up another few degrees. The driver blew the horn a few times. Then we were moving again. We lurched to the right, then to the left, as if we were rounding some obstruction. The journey was taking longer than I thought. Had we been that far from a hospital, or was the traffic that bad in the middle of the night in Cairo?

  I closed my eyes, leaned back. All this chasing around. All these people dead. My taxi driver among them. Was I responsible for all these deaths?

  I shook my head. No, I didn’t kill any of them. The driver didn’t have to suggest I meet Asim’s crew. He could have dropped the whole thing. And anyway, I didn’t pull the trigger. The person who did that was the killer.

  The ambulance stopped, waited about thirty seconds, then started again and moved forward slowly. I got the impression we had passed through a security gate, and that we would pull up soon. Great, I could get access to a phone. I could call London. I could end all this. Get them to book me on the next flight out.

  The ambulance stopped. The back doors opened. Floodlights hurt my eyes. I blinked. The view was not what I expected. We weren’t at a hospital.

  We were at Yacoub’s research facility on the Giza plateau, near the pyramids.

  70

  Xena felt all around her, slowly. She didn’t want to miss anything. She knew there were tunnels in the Great Pyramid, which had been lost for thousands of years. There could, without doubt, be a way to the surface, or to some chamber near it, where she might be able hear the tourists and the guides the next morning and alert them to her presence.

  She’d been told when she was young that there were secret chambers in the Great Pyramid, waiting to be re-discovered. The proof was in a book by a Greek historian, Herodotus, the father of history, who was in Egypt in the fifth century before Christ. He wrote about vaults under the Great Pyramid and an island underneath it, where the body of a pharaoh lies.

  The only current entrance to the pyramid, created in the early ninth century by Caliph al-Ma'mun's workmen, was the only time a tunnel had been cut into the heart of the pyramid. A Victorian Egyptologist had, apparently, tried to bore his way into the Great Pyramid, then to clear a way in with gunpowder, but he was stopped by his workmen, who were unwilling to see the pyramid destroyed. He only got as far as damaging a few of the outer stones.

  If more tunnels were cut in the other faces of the pyramid, they would find hidden passages and rooms, but such work had long been outlawed.

  She slowed her breathing, listening for sounds. The place where she had landed could be a long-lost chamber with the treasure of a pharaoh all around her, or it could be the Hall of Records said to be under the Great Pyramids by ancient commentators, such as Plutarch. He claimed the Hall of Records under the Great Pyramid held papyrus scrolls describing the founders of Egypt, as well as golden scrolls with a history of the lost city of Atlantis. Could that be true?

  She felt sand on the stone floor all around her. In some places it was in drifts, as if it had moved around. In other places there was hardly any. Her right knee and shoulder were throbbing, from where she’d hit the floor. Gradually she expanded her search, moving one step forward, then one back in each direction.

  And then she touched it. It was her torch. It had to be. She felt all over it quickly. The battery door was open. Her heart sank. The batteries had come out. They were somewhere on the floor around her. She had to work methodically. Even if she did find the batteries, the top of the torch was deeply cracked. That might mean the bulb was cracked and useless.

  She recited her prayer to the great mother over and over as her hands reached out around her. The mother had helped her many times in the past. She would help her again. Xena was confident of that.

  It took maybe half an hour for her to find both batteries. One rolled away from her when she touched it. The other one was way further from her starting point than she expected. Persistence helped.

 
; When she was about to put the last battery in, she hesitated. What would be revealed? Had she fallen into the Hall of Records, or just some empty foundation hole?

  Would she be surrounded in gold or unclimbable walls of granite, or skeletons?

  She pushed the final battery in.

  Nothing happened.

  She felt for the switch, pressed it.

  71

  I reached for a handle inside the ambulance and clung to it.

  “Why are we here, not at a hospital?” My voice was shakier, and I sounded more paranoid than I expected.

  “Please come, madam. We have the best doctors and the best medical facility here. Please, Mr. Yacoub explicitly said we must bring you here. No payment will be required.”

  I hesitated. My head was throbbing. I also knew it wasn’t unusual in the Middle East for a large corporation to have its own ambulance and its own medical facility. But I’d wanted to find a phone, to get Henry or someone else from head office to meet me. That mightn’t be possible here.

  The nurse looking up at me had been joined by the ambulance driver. He was looking at me as if I was mad. A side door I hadn’t noticed in the building had opened and two other men, in green medical gowns, were pushing a steel wheeled stretcher towards me.

  I touched my forehead, looked at my fingers. They were red, wet. My blood was oozing through the bandage. I stepped down from the ambulance, looked around. The siren stopped. A second ambulance man, tall and with a bushy beard, was stepping out of the ambulance.

  That was when it crossed my mind that there were no other patients visible, or cars. It was a very quiet medical facility. He had a lot of staff here for just the occasional company patient.