Pharaoh

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  The man looked over her papers and then exchanged a quick knowing glance with his companion.

  ‘Madam,’ he said with a grimly stern voice, ‘where is your friend?’

  Sarah realized she no longer had any way out. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He left over two hours ago and hasn’t come back. I have no idea where he is.’

  ‘You will come along with us to the police station. You can tell us everything you know there. We’ll take care of him later.’

  ‘But I—’

  She tried to say something, but she didn’t have a chance. The man took her by the arm and dragged her out of the room, while his companion stayed inside to gather up the things lying on the bed and around the floor, then all three of them walked down the hall. They hadn’t gone more than a few steps when they ran into two other people who had just popped up from the landing holding pistols with silencers.

  Guessing what was about to happen, Sarah dived for the floor, covering her head with her arms, as the hallway lit up with flashes of fiery orange light and the air was permeated with dense, acrid smoke. There were two dull thuds as the Egyptian policemen collapsed on the floor next to her without so much as a whimper.

  She raised her head and saw one of the two men holding his right hand over his wounded left arm, as the other fellow approached her with his gun still smoking. They were both Egyptians.

  ‘Just in the nick of time, it seems,’ he said as he walked up to her. ‘Sorry about the delay, Miss Forrestall.’ Then, half smiling, he added, ‘But we ran into a little traffic. Where’s your friend?’ You could tell by his sense of humour that he was used to being around Americans, and this reassured her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Sarah. ‘He left to buy some things around nine and still hasn’t come back. I’ve waited this long for him, but I don’t think he’s coming back any more. We can’t stay here any longer, though, and besides, your companion is injured—’

  ‘It’s just a graze, fortunately,’ the other man said. ‘I need to have my arm wrapped tightly. A handkerchief should do.’

  He got some help in this elementary first-aid operation, then put his overcoat back on and headed down the stairs, followed by Sarah and his companion, who was still holding his pistol at the ready.

  An old Arab gentleman who happened to be going up the stairs with the help of a cane murmured under his breath, ‘Salaam alekum.’

  ‘Alekum salaam,’ responded the man with the pistol.

  Sarah couldn’t help giving a start, immediately recognizing Blake’s voice.

  A moment later the same voice was heard again, this time more powerfully from behind: ‘Drop your weapons and get back up here. Now.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘I said drop your weapons!’ Blake repeated emphatically, pointing a pistol at the men.

  Sarah looked closely: it was the pistol he’d taken off the Egyptian he’d killed in the Sinai with his scalpel.

  The two men dropped their weapons, which Blake scooped up. Then they started obediently back up the stairs, followed by Sarah. They stepped over the bodies of the two policemen still lying on the floor in a widening puddle of blood, drenching the carpet.

  ‘Inside!’ said Blake, pointing to the open door of the room. He pulled off the keffiyeh that almost completely covered his face. ‘I noticed some suspicious movement around the boarding house,’ he said to Sarah. ‘So I had to hide. That’s why I wasn’t able to come back up.’

  ‘But why are you holding them prisoner?’ said Sarah in disbelief. ‘They came here to rescue us. One of them was wounded in the fight with the two Egyptian policemen, the ones you saw out in the hall.’

  ‘Mr Blake,’ the other man began, ‘please, be sensible . . . We don’t have any time to waste. We have to get out of here. Don’t you understand?’

  ‘How do you know my name?’ asked Blake, still pointing the gun at them.

  ‘Miss Forrestall told us—’

  ‘That’s not true! The young lady only said that there was another person here with her. How do you know my name?’

  ‘Will, please,’ Sarah implored.

  ‘Sarah, don’t interfere. I know what I’m doing. We can’t trust anyone. The only place my name was listed was in the Warren Mining Corporation’s files. How did it end up at the American embassy? And how did it wind up on the documents those two guys who pulled us off the bus had? Tie them up for now. Get some cord from the curtains and tie them up.’

  Sarah did as he said and, once the two men had been immobilized, Blake went through their pockets. One of them had a mobile phone. He turned it on.

  What number do you report in on?’

  The man just shook his head. ‘You’re nuts. The police could be here any time now.’

  Blake raised the muzzle of his pistol. ‘I want that number!’

  Biting down on his lip, the man dialled the number with some difficulty and the phone began to ring.

  As soon as they answer, say that you have had a shoot-out with the Egyptian police and that the two of us are dead. Have you got that? Dead. And no funny business, if you don’t want to end up like those two out in the hall’

  A voice answered and Blake put his ear up to the receiver so he could hear too. ‘Office “M”, state your business.’

  ‘This is Yussuf. Something’s gone wrong. The Egyptian police were waiting for us and there was a shoot-out. Our friends were caught in the middle of it and both of them were killed. Abdul was wounded, but it’s nothing serious.’

  There was silence at the other end.

  ‘Did you understand what I just told you?’ the man queried.

  ‘I understood, Yussuf. Get out of there immediately. I’ll send an ambulance to the place we agreed upon for the handover.’

  Blake folded the phone back up.

  ‘What are you going to do with us?’ the man named Yussuf asked.

  ‘We’ll send someone to get you,’ said Blake. Then he signalled Sarah to gather up their things and they left the room, locking the door behind them.

  ‘Put this on,’ he said to her, tossing her a dark jellaba. ‘We’ve got to get away from here as soon as possible.’

  They went down the stairs and walked past the elderly owner, who was standing behind the front desk, bewildered and alarmed by the mysterious goings-on.

  ‘Call the police right away,’ Blake told him in Arabic. ‘There are dead and wounded people upstairs.’

  He slipped out into the street, dragging behind him Sarah, who was wrapped in the jellaba, her head and face covered by a veil.

  ‘What in hell possessed you—’ she tried to ask him.

  ‘Not yet. I’ll explain everything later. Right now we’ve got to get out of here and fast. We only have a few minutes.’

  Blake went down a narrow, dark side street, following it to the end, stopping at every intersection to make sure there were no unpleasant surprises waiting for them. There were still a fair amount of people in the bazaar area, sellers and porters for the most part, carrying in goods for the next day. Trade obviously continued, despite the holy war. Every once in a while, the still atmosphere was interrupted by the sound of helicopters or the roar of jets heading towards the battle front. Blake came to an abrupt halt beneath the sooty arch of an old blacksmith’s forge and ducked into the shadows, pulling Sarah in behind him.

  ‘What now?’ the girl asked.

  ‘Pick a god and start praying,’ answered Blake, checking his watch. ‘In just five minutes we’ll know if he or she was listening or not.’

  They stood in frozen silence, keeping their ears peeled for any sound. Five minutes went by, stretching into ten, then fifteen long minutes of agonizing tension. Discouraged, Blake sank to the ground, resting his head on his knees.

  Sarah laid into him. ‘Would you please explain to me what we’re doing here? Why didn’t we just go with those two men? By this time we could have been happily on our way to the American embassy, damn it!’

  ‘By this time
we could also have been dead for all I know. I got suspicious when those Egyptian soldiers arrested us on the bus and we found those papers on them. You felt just as uneasy, if I’m not mistaken. Then this guy pops up, and he knows my name as well. Where did he get that little piece of information?’

  Sarah shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure about anything any more . . . It could have even been me . . .’

  She didn’t have time to finish her sentence. An old black Peugeot 404 appeared from around a corner and pulled up right in front of them.

  ‘Maybe this is him,’ said Blake. ‘I should have known that Egyptians are rarely on time. Quick, get in.’

  He had Sarah sit in the back, while he got in the front, next to the driver: a young Nubian with dark skin who greeted him with a beautiful smile full of gleaming white teeth.

  ‘Salaam alekum, el sidi.’

  ‘Alekum salaam,’ rejoined Blake. ‘You must be Khaled.’

  ‘That’s right, I’m Khaled, el sidi. Selim told me I’d find you here and he told me to bring you back to his house in Cairo as quickly as possible. He will join you tomorrow from Luxor. We’ll have to drive all night, because we’re taking a very indirect route, sticking to the back roads so we won’t run into any soldiers or policemen. There’s some food for you in the plastic bag. You must be famished.’

  ‘You said it,’ answered Blake. ‘It’s been days since we’ve had a decent meal.’

  He took out some Arab bread stuffed with vegetables and minced lamb and handed it back to Sarah, who bit into it with relief and delight.

  Khaled drove slowly and very carefully, taking secondary roads where there was practically no traffic.

  ‘I’ll be glad to keep you company as you drive,’ said Blake, ‘but my wife is dead tired and needs to sleep.’

  He reached back to where Sarah was sitting and took her hand, holding it for a long time. He leaned back then against his seat, listening to the chugging of the old engine and watching the road as it was slowly devoured by the headlights.

  Khaled almost immediately got off the tarmacked highway, taking a dusty dirt road full of bumps and holes, heading into the fertile delta plain. Now and then they would pass through a sleeping village with mud-brick houses topped by roofs made from bullrushes, just like in the days of the Exodus. Blake could smell manure and mud, the same smell that permeated the villages of Upper and Lower Egypt, Mesopotamia and the valley of the Indus. The scent of places forgotten by history.

  The biblical city of Ramses, whence the great migration originated, couldn’t be far away: they were crossing the land of Goshen.

  At midnight, Khaled turned on the car’s radio to listen to the news and Blake could hear the triumphant tone of the speaker as he described how Israel was surrounded on every side; a country whose fate was already sealed! Next they interviewed a politician who declared that after the Arab victory, the few surviving Jews who could prove they were born in Palestine would be allowed to remain by becoming Palestinian citizens and swearing loyalty to the new flag.

  Blake fiddled with the dial in search of a European or Israeli station, but there was too much static, making listening impossible.

  Around one o’clock they stopped along the bank of one of the Nile’s many distributaries there in the delta and Khaled got out to urinate; Blake followed suit. The nearly full moon was lolling just above the horizon, leaving most of the heavenly vault to the teeming array of twinkling stars. A gentle gust of wind nudged the tufted manes of the papyrus plants, gleaming silvery in the pale moonlight, their shaggy crowns reflecting like jellyfish tentacles on the placid surface of the water.

  The spell was broken by the dull thud of artillery against the eastern horizon, pulsating with terrible rhythmic flashes. A deafening roar pierced the profound peace of the night sky as four jet fighters flourishing the Star of David swooped low over the canebrakes, extruding long trails of ghostly white exhaust fumes: Israel was reacting angrily to the provocation. Blake couldn’t help but recall the implacable law that had guided this long-memoried people for thirty centuries in dealing with its enemies: an eye for an eye.

  Khaled dropped the hem of his jellaba, which he had raised to his belt, letting it float back to the toe of his shoe. After taking a quick look inside the parked car to make sure that Sarah was asleep, he took a letter out of his pocket and handed it to Blake.

  ‘Selim wants you to read this alone,’ he said. ‘Stay out here. I’ll turn on the side lights.’

  Blake crouched down on his heels in front of the car and with each line he read he felt the blood boiling up in his veins as he broke out in a sweat. When he had finished, he fell forward onto his knees, covering his face with his hands.

  He felt Khaled’s hand on his shoulder. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘We’ve still got a long road ahead of us.’

  Khaled had him get into the car and then sat back down behind the wheel, ready to continue their journey, unruffled. The remotest outskirts of Cairo began to appear against the pearly grey sky around five in the morning, just in time to hear the eerie chant of the muezzin echoing stentoriously through the deserted city from the slender spires of the minarets, more like a call to arms than to prayer.

  Khaled stuck to the more obscure winding streets of the sprawling metropolis’s suburbs. After what seemed to be hours of pointless, labyrinthine meandering, they stopped at the end of a dusty little street lined with shabby buildings made from reinforced concrete and bricks without any stucco, unruly metal bars sticking out here and there menacingly. The pavement was a disaster, more rubble than pathway.

  Electric wires were strung along the unfinished walls like bizarre garlands and some of the pylons were still lying in the middle of the street, eloquent testaments to the totally out-of-control expansion and impossible urban planning situation of the largest city on the African continent.

  Khaled pulled a big bundle of keys out of his pocket and opened the main door to the building, escorting his companions to the second floor, where he opened a door off the landing and showed them into a modest, rather barren apartment, which was nevertheless surprisingly clean and tidy, free of the usual gaudy frills that tend to clutter Egyptian homes. There was a telephone, a little television and even a portable typewriter on a desk.

  Blake checked all the windows, one by one, to assess how the building was situated. Upon opening the door leading to the little balcony at the back of the apartment, he was surprised to see the imposing silhouettes of Giza towering in the distance: the tip of the enormous pyramid and the head of the Sphinx rose majestically out of the squalid grey sea of wretched hovels.

  A shiver went up his spine. The monuments which loomed so suddenly before him reminded him of the same shapes, fashioned by nature, on the desolate landscape of Ras Udash. The circle had closed and he, William Blake, was the fragile point of union in this magical, ill-omened ring.

  Khaled heated up a little milk and made Turkish coffee for his guests, but Blake drank only a cup of milk.

  ‘If you’d like to rest, there’s a bed in there,’ said Khaled. ‘I’ll wait up until it’s time to get Selim.’

  ‘I rested in the car,’ said Sarah. ‘I’ll stay up with Khaled. Why don’t you get some sleep?’

  Blake would have liked to stay awake as well, but decided to surrender to the incredible drowsiness that had hit him after drinking the warm milk. He was out like a light as soon as he hit the mattress.

  He was awakened much later by a ringing sound in the dark, deserted apartment.

  GAD AVNER leaned over the stainless-steel railing and let out a sigh as he looked at the enormous illuminated topographic model at the centre of the underground bunker. A giant virtual screen displayed the movements of the armed forces deployed in the field like some harmless video game. The realistic three-dimensional design of both the territory depicted and the various moving objects gave the observer the impression of being right in the middle of the action.

  You could see the towns and
villages where prophets had once preached: the heights of Gelboe, where Saul and Jonathan had fallen in battle, Lake Genezareth and the River Jordan, where Jesus and John the Baptist had once spoken, and, further off, the inviolable fortress of Masada, surrounded by the ruins of ancient Roman siege ramps and traces of military fortifications and bulwarks, a monument to that horrible human sacrifice offered in the name of freedom.

  You could also see the Dead Sea encased by its shimmering salty shoreline, burial ground of Sodom and Gomorrah, and further out, at the edge of the desert of the Exodus, Beersheba, the dome of Sheol and the cavern of Armageddon.

  At the very centre, between the waves of the Mediterranean and the Judaean desert, was Jerusalem itself on its rock, with its golden dome, the Old City wall and towers.

  A voice interrupted his reverie. ‘Quite a toy, isn’t it?’

  Avner found himself face to face with the imposing figure and unusually grim countenance of General Yehudai.

  ‘Look,’ he continued, ‘it’s obvious that the enemy’s efforts are directed at surrounding Jerusalem, as if they were trying to lay siege to it by cutting off every point of access.’

  A young officer sat at the controls of an enormous computer, simulating, at the behest of his commander, the movements of armoured divisions and low-flying fighter bombers. The computer was able to elaborate any number of attack and defence scenarios for any area involved in a particular battle.

  This was nothing like the Six Day War. The failure to make a pre-emptive strike on the enemies’ air forces while they were still on the ground had resulted in an almost even match between the opposing forces, degenerating – with every hour and day that passed – into a dangerous stalemate, with destructive artillery battles and constant bombardment by rockets from mobile launchers.

  The continuing infiltration of commando squads into Israeli territory was demoralizing the civilian population and playing real havoc with the country’s communications system. The necessity of carrying out air attacks on all fronts was putting superhuman demands on the pilots due to their numerical inferiority and the lack of replacement personnel.