by James Becker
‘I do, Charles,’ she replied, ‘but at the moment there’s just so much work piling up here that I simply can’t see the end of it. And, of course, with summer leave now virtually upon us, there isn’t anybody else I can ask to come and give me a hand. I’d love to be able to get out of here and look at something else for a few days.’
She gestured to the two large open cardboard boxes sitting close to her on the workbench. Her job as a ceramics conservator had always fascinated and infuriated her in almost equal measure. There were few feelings to compare with the profound sense of satisfaction she always found when she was able to reassemble a pot or a jar from a collection of shattered fragments. But every time she was presented with a new task, the feeling of frustration mounted.
Charles Westman grinned in acknowledgement at her words. His particular speciality was ancient weaponry, which only rarely involved the reassembly of anything. In fact, he was only in the laboratory to check that a Saxon sword that had recently been found in a field in East Anglia was being properly cleaned before preservation work started on the metal.
‘I thought you’d have had enough of gallivanting around the world tracking down ancient relics with that ex-husband of yours.’
‘I don’t think I’m away from the museum as much as you are, Charles. This is really only a part-time job for you, isn’t it?’
Westman nodded.
‘I’m fortunate in that respect, yes, my dear. I don’t actually have to work, but the job here is still useful for all sorts of reasons. But I think Chris Bronson — that is his name, isn’t it? — is a bad influence on you. Whenever he comes into the picture, things always seem to take a turn for the worse and you end up running for your life. Surely a bit of normality is a welcome change?’
Angela bridled slightly.
‘That’s as may be,’ she replied, ‘but one thing you can say about Chris is that time spent with him is never boring. Life-threatening, yes, occasionally, but boring, never. And this’ — she pointed again at the boxes of potsherds awaiting her attention — ‘is very definitely boring.’
Westman smiled at her. When Angela was in this kind of mood, he knew exactly which buttons to press to get a rise from her.
‘But you have to look on the bright side,’ he said. ‘Just think how pleased the museum will be when you’ve assembled another anonymous pot which they can put on a display alongside dozens of other anonymous pots. Every time you walk past it you’ll get a warm fuzzy feeling of tremendous satisfaction.’
Angela lowered the fragments of pottery to the workbench and glared at him.
‘If this relic wasn’t almost two thousand years old, and I hadn’t signed for the blasted thing, I’d be very much inclined to throw it at you,’ she snapped.
Westman’s smile grew broader.
‘Just winding you up, my dear, doing my bit to keep up your spirits. In fact, I really think you could do with a break before you start throwing things around and hurting people. Now, I’ve got nothing much to do for a while, so do you fancy a cup of coffee?’
‘Canteen or proper coffee out in the streets somewhere?’
Westman looked slightly insulted.
‘Proper, obviously. What kind of a man do you take me for?’
Angela snapped off the desk lights, stood up and eased her aching back.
‘You really don’t want me to answer that, do you, Charles? I’ve known you for too long,’ she teased, wondering, and not for the first time, about Westman’s personal circumstances.
He was unlike most of her other colleagues at the museum, who tended to be casually and comfortably scruffy. Westman was about six feet tall and slightly overweight, carrying just a few extra pounds, but always clean-shaven and immaculately dressed in a three-piece suit, a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and his shoes buffed to a high shine. He wasn’t handsome in the conventional sense, his nose a little too big and slightly crooked, but with friendly grey eyes and a ready smile, and he had always been pleasant company.
In fact, Angela had a sneaking suspicion that he fancied her, which presumably meant he wasn’t gay as she’d first suspected, but he’d never made any overt move that could confirm this.
She took a last glance at the pottery crowded together on her workbench and shook her head.
‘At times like this,’ she said, ‘I almost wish I’d become a palaeontologist. At least they get to spend some of their time out in the field.’
Charles Westman shuddered elaborately.
‘Far too crude, my dear, all those bones and teeth and fossilized poo. And sunburn — if you’re lucky — and too much dirt under your fingernails. No, not really your style at all, I think.’
Just after they’d left the laboratory, Angela’s laptop computer emitted a musical tone. She’d received an email.
18
The souk never really closed, but as the heat of the afternoon sun diminished slightly and the shadows around the stalls deepened and lengthened, most of the tourists and serious buyers began to leave. And by the middle of the evening most of the stallholders and traders had followed their example, locking away their goods in their storerooms or chests or other secure locations, and leaving the area to enjoy their evening meal.
So when Abdul returned, a couple of hours before midnight, the souk was virtually deserted. Just a handful of traders were still in evidence as they locked up their shops or tried to interest any remaining tourists in some last-minute bargains. He ignored all their blandishments and strode swiftly along the narrow alleyways until he reached Mahmoud’s stall.
It was, as he had expected, deserted, the storeroom door closed and locked. But that wouldn’t be a problem. When he’d been talking to the Egyptian trader earlier that day, Abdul had glanced at the keyhole on the storeroom door and the bunch of keys that Mahmoud had placed casually on the stall itself. The ability to get inside a locked room was more or less one of the qualifications of his profession, and he knew this one wouldn’t be difficult. He knelt down in front of the door, virtually invisible to anyone passing unless they looked over the top of the stall, and removed an L-shaped lock pick, a tool known as a twirl, from his pocket. Then he set to work.
His expert probing fingers quickly identified the mortise lock as having only three levers — barely adequate for an interior door in a house, and certainly not sufficient for a storeroom that quite probably held valuable artefacts. One after the other, the levers fell prey to his twirl, and in a little over a minute he was able to stand up, glance around to ensure that he was still unobserved, then open the door and step inside.
He pulled the door to behind him and checked that the storeroom had no windows through which torch light could be seen. But the space was in total darkness.
Abdul took a slim pencil torch from his pocket and switched it on. He first looked all round to ensure that there were no signs of an alarm system, though the quality of the door and its lock suggested to him that this was unlikely. Satisfied, he then began searching the contents of the storeroom.
The search wasn’t easy because, although he knew exactly what he was looking for, he had no idea what it would be stored in. Some objects he knew he could ignore. His employer had explained that the parchment would be fairly fragile and certainly would not be rolled and placed inside a jar or anything of that sort. So Abdul could not even look at the contents of two of the shelves, because they only held pottery vessels of different sizes. But that still left a large number of boxes whose dimensions were large enough to contain the relic. Checking each of those took him a considerable length of time. In fact, it took him so long that he had to change the batteries on his torch halfway through.
He finally gave up just after midnight, stood for a few moments in the open space in the centre of the cramped and crowded storeroom and shone his torch methodically at everything in it. Then he nodded in satisfaction. He had checked every possible hiding place and container that was big enough to take the parchment, and his conclusion was obviou
s. If — and Abdul still wondered just how big an ‘if’ this was — the trader Mahmoud had the parchment, he hadn’t secreted it in either his storeroom or the stall itself, which was completely empty.
The only other place left to look was the target’s house, so that’s where he was going to go next.
19
Minutes later, Abdul was standing in a doorway across the road from Mahmoud’s house, carrying out a final reconnoitre. No lights were burning, and he could hear no sound emanating from the building.
He checked carefully up and down the street, then crossed the road and walked silently down the alley that ran along one side of the property, continuing his surveillance. Again he noted nothing to alarm him, and so with one swift movement he vaulted over the low wall at the back of the house, to land in Mahmoud’s tiny rear courtyard.
As he had expected, both the back door and the two windows that looked onto the courtyard were closed and locked. Using his torch, he examined the lock on the door, and then the catches on the windows. Immediately, he ruled out the windows. There were no external keyholes, and the only way in using that route would be to break the glass, which would be fairly noisy.
The lock on the door was far less of a problem. Abdul didn’t bother with a lock pick this time, just took an object shaped rather like a small pistol from his pocket, stuck the end of it in the keyhole, applied a gentle turning force to the tool and then pulled the trigger half a dozen times. The professional-quality gun pick did its job efficiently. After a second or two he was able to turn the tool in a complete circle, and was rewarded by a click as the deadlock retracted.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of latex surgical gloves and carefully slid them onto his hands. They were longer than normal, the cuffs extending about halfway up his forearms, and were another essential tool of his often messy trade. Then, cautiously, he opened the door just wide enough to allow him to slide his body through the gap, and pushed the door closed behind him.
There were, Abdul knew, two possible approaches to locating the missing relic. First, he could wander about the house, looking in every room and hoping to see it lying on a table or a desk somewhere, or perhaps spot whatever box or protective sleeve Mahmoud had placed it inside. But that could take all night and there was absolutely no guarantee that the search would be successful. If Mahmoud knew that the parchment was valuable, he might well have locked it away in a safe or strongbox somewhere.
The second approach was what might be termed the direct option. Instead of trying to find the parchment, Abdul would find Mahmoud himself and make him hand over the relic. And that option appealed to him far more.
His footsteps barely audible, he moved from room to room on the ground floor, thoroughly checking each one in turn to ensure that nobody was in them. Then he found his way to the wooden staircase which ran through the centre of the house and made his way up it as quietly as he could, keeping close to the wall on the right-hand side, where he hoped the treads would creak as little as possible. Every two or three steps he paused and just listened, but heard nothing.
On the landing, he saw four doors. Two were closed and the other two were standing open. He inspected the open ones first, finding that one was just a small storeroom, and the other a bathroom. Then he stepped across to the first of the two closed doors and pressed his ear against the wood, listening intently. There was no sound from inside the room that he could detect, so he grasped the handle and turned it cautiously, easing the door open as soundlessly as he could.
The room was apparently a spare bedroom, equipped with two single beds, neither of them made, just two wooden frames and mattresses visible in the pale moonlight filtering through the thin curtain at the window.
That was good news. Abdul was a professional and always tried to avoid causing collateral damage. If there had been a couple of children sleeping there, he would probably have had to kill them as well. As it was, he assumed that Mahmoud either lived alone or at worst had a wife sleeping beside him.
Abdul eased his way out of the empty bedroom and stepped across the landing to the other closed door. Again he listened, and this time he could detect a faint sound, a rhythmic gentle snoring that was clearly audible even through the thickness of the closed bedroom door. That was all he needed to know.
There was a small automatic pistol tucked away in Abdul’s pocket, but he really didn’t want to have to use that weapon because of the noise that it would make. His knives would be just as effective and completely silent. And, in reality, he much preferred the personal contact a knife offered.
He seized the door handle and began to turn it very gently. It was possible that Mahmoud had bolted or locked the door on the inside, and it would not have surprised him if the door hadn’t budged. But in fact, it swung open easily on its hinges, and he immediately stepped into the bedroom.
This was by far the biggest room on the upper floor of the house, large enough to accommodate a substantial double bed, a couple of freestanding wardrobes and three chests of drawers. On one side of the room was another door standing ajar, and through the opening Abdul could see the white gleam of sanitary fittings. Clearly the room possessed an en suite. Abdul smiled slightly to himself. When he’d met Kassim briefly in the souk, the trader hadn’t struck him as a man used to such comparatively luxurious surroundings.
His heart rate increased just slightly. It was now time to get the information, and the relic, which he had been paid to do. The time for stealth was over.
20
The assassin strode across the room, stopped beside the bed and snapped on the bedside light. He wasn’t sure whether it was the sudden brightness flooding through the room or the noise of his footsteps, but as he took his final pace, Mahmoud woke up with a jerk and a snort.
Instantly, Abdul drew his knife from the leather sheath attached to the waistband of his trousers and held the blade six inches in front of Mahmoud’s face.
The trader’s eyes widened as he looked at the cold steel blade glinting in the light, and then focused his eyes beyond the weapon at Abdul’s face staring down at him.
‘You’re the dealer,’ he stuttered. ‘You came to my stall, looking for parchment.’
Abdul nodded.
‘You have a good memory,’ he said, ‘and I’m still looking for a sheet of parchment. One parchment in particular. One that I know you have.’
Mahmoud shook his head slightly, panic growing in his eyes.
‘I told you. I don’t have any parchments for sale.’
‘My information is different. I know that you spent some time searching the Internet for some very specific words, words that could only have come from one source. And you know what that source is as well as I do.’
Mahmoud’s expression changed as realization dawned.
‘Oh, that parchment. But I don’t have it any more. I sold it on, sold it to another trader. But it was almost illegible,’ he protested. ‘Hardly any of the words on it could be read. Why is it so important to you?’
‘It’s not important to me at all,’ Abdul replied, the point of his knife moving down Mahmoud’s face until it rested lightly and threateningly on the thin skin of his neck below his chin. ‘But it is very important to the man who’s paying me.’
For a couple of seconds, Abdul considered his next course of action. Mahmoud could well be lying to him, he knew, and the parchment might be concealed somewhere inside the house, in a safe or elsewhere, or the man might genuinely have disposed of it. Before he left that room, he needed to be absolutely certain of the truth. And he was very good at uncovering the truth.
‘Are you right handed or left handed?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘It doesn’t really matter, I suppose,’ Abdul replied.
Then, in a blur of action so fast that Mahmoud had absolutely no time to react, Abdul seized the man’s right arm, wrenched it over so that his wrist was resting on the table beside the bed, and slammed his knife straight through the ba
ck of Mahmoud’s hand, pinning it to the wood.
The Egyptian’s howl of pain filled the room as blood welled from the penetrating wound, pooled on the table and began to drip onto the wooden floor below. Abdul pressed the bed-sheet over the trader’s mouth, muffling the sound. Kassim jerked in the bed, perhaps trying to sit up, or to reach for the wound with his left hand, but before he could do anything at all, Abdul had produced a second knife and held it firmly against his throat.
‘Quiet,’ the intruder ordered. ‘That just shows how important it is for you to tell me the truth. Make me believe that you’re holding nothing back, and I might just walk away from here. If you lie, you’ll die. It’s as simple as that.’
He moved the second blade slightly away from Mahmoud’s throat until the point rested on the tender area below the man’s left shoulder blade. He changed his grip on the knife very slightly, then slowly began pushing it into Mahmoud’s flesh, the honed and polished double-edged blade easily penetrating about an inch into the man’s body.
Again, Mahmoud howled in muffled agony, his scream barely audible behind the makeshift gag Abdul was applying. His body twitched under the assault and sweat sprang to his brow as the pain increased.
Abdul knew the signs, knew that the man under his knife would do almost anything to make him stop. Now he could find the truth.
‘The first question is easy,’ he said, moving the sheet away from Kassim’s mouth, ‘because the answer is either yes or no. Do you still have that parchment?’
Mahmoud shook his head desperately from side to side.
‘I told you. I sold it to another dealer.’
‘So that would be “no”, then?’
‘No, I mean, yes. I don’t have it. I don’t have it any longer.’
Abdul nodded.
‘So who did you sell it to?’
For additional emphasis, he turned the knife slightly in the wound on Mahmoud’s shoulder, eliciting another anguished cry of pain, quickly muffled.