by James Becker
A very poor quality sketch of a man’s face followed the article, and then a brief word-picture, which described the man as solidly built, a little under six feet tall, with a tanned complexion, thick black moustache and dark hair, and a round face. Which was little enough for any police officer to go on, Angela thought.
She read the report once more, and felt her anger at Ali’s assailant growing more intense by the second. She hadn’t known him well, but what she’d known about the Egyptian scientist she’d liked.
And then she had a realization. Ali had warned her not to get involved with the parchment, and had even hinted that his own life could be in danger because of it. And he had obviously — and very tragically — been absolutely right.
Suddenly, the parchment didn’t seem so important any more, not when two of the people known to have handled it had already been brutally murdered. Angela wondered if Ali’s killing would mark the end of the matter, or if the man he had described as the ‘owner’ was still out there somewhere, on the run from the killers and in desperate fear for his life.
She was about to return to her work when another thought struck her. She hadn’t actually ever seen the parchment in the flesh, as it were, had never been closer than a couple of thousand miles to it as far as she knew, and had certainly never owned it. But she did have a number of high-quality images of it in her possession. Would that fact alone make her a target as well?
That thought was so stunning — and so alarming — that for a couple of minutes she simply sat still at her workbench, staring into space.
Then she shook her head. Surely, whoever had been responsible for killing the two men in Cairo wouldn’t even know that she had been sent the images? But if they did, if they somehow found out what had happened, would they come after her?
44
Abdul had spent the day in the souk and the neighbouring streets, his rationalization for choosing that area of the city for his search being that Husani might well go to ground in the part of Cairo that he knew best. He’d stopped briefly for lunch in a small café, choosing a seat outside so that he would have a clear view of all the passers-by.
He paid the bill and started walking away from the café, but he’d only moved a few metres when his phone rang. Immediately, he stepped to one side, away from the press of humanity, and answered the call.
‘Yes?’
‘He’s left Egypt,’ Khusad stated, without preamble.
‘What? When? And where has he gone?’
‘There is no need for you to know. Suffice to say, he’s gone, and others will take it from here.’
45
‘So she still hasn’t come back to the apartment? Why?’
‘Listen, mate, I’m a hired gun, not a bloody mind reader. How the hell should I know where she is? If you want my guess, she’s shacked up somewhere with that bloke I saw her with last night. You should have let me do her then. Him too.’
In the study of a large semi-detached house on the edge of Norwood, a middle-aged man with a round and almost cherubic pink face drummed his fingers in irritation. His plan had been thwarted the first night by the unexpected presence of Angela Lewis’s male companion, and now tonight she hadn’t returned home at all. There was also, he realized, the very real possibility that she wouldn’t be there over the weekend either, possibly spending the time with him. That could mean that the earliest the contract could be completed would be Monday evening, and that might be far too late. And now his contractor was getting cheeky with him.
For several seconds he sat in silence, considering his options. Then he made his decision. The most vital thing, very obviously, was Lewis’s death: the actual manner of it was of secondary importance.
‘OK. Change of plan,’ he said.
‘Good,’ the contractor replied.
‘We know that the target is still going to work. Get to her that way, and make it look like an accident. If you pull it off, there’s an extra grand in it for you.’
‘Where and when?’
‘That’s up to you, but no later than tomorrow night. You know where she works and what time she’ll leave the building?’
‘Yes to both. Just leave it to me,’ Jeff replied.
46
‘I definitely think you did the right thing,’ Chris Bronson said.
They were sitting side by side on a somewhat tattered leather sofa in the lounge of Bronson’s house in Royal Tunbridge Wells, an unremarkable crime thriller that contained a large number of technical errors being played out on the flat-screen television. Bronson had got so fed up with the programme’s obvious mistakes and clumsy dialogue that a few minutes earlier he’d muted the sound and they’d been half-watching it in silence ever since.
‘As soon as I’d called you I felt so stupid,’ Angela replied. ‘I mean, how can a couple of murders in Egypt possibly be a problem to me here in southern England? How would the killer know anything about me?’
‘Ah, well, that’s the thing,’ Bronson replied, not sounding happy at all. ‘After you rang me, I popped into the station and sent a message to the Cairo police, asking for any information they could supply about the killing of Ali Mohammed. It’s the kind of thing we do all the time with other police forces, though not usually with one as far away as Egypt. I just said that the crime might possibly have links to an on-going investigation here in Britain. I asked if they had recovered the man’s laptop and mobile phone.’
Angela was staring at him with a peculiar intensity.
‘And had they?’ she asked.
‘His mobile, yes, but there was no sign of his laptop in his office. One of the museum security staff recalled that the impostor, the fake police officer, had walked out of the building carrying a bag, quite possibly a laptop case. If Mohammed’s computer was in the bag, it wouldn’t take him more than a couple of minutes to discover that Mohammed had emailed the pictures to you.’
‘But do you really think that the man who’s murdered those two people in Cairo would come after me in England? I mean, wouldn’t an Arab assassin stand out a bit in London?’
Bronson smiled grimly at her.
‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but about the only language you don’t hear spoken on the streets of central London these days is English. Arabic, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian and a whole flock of Eastern European languages, yes, but English, no. I don’t think an Egyptian killer would be any more noticeable than any other type of killer in this city. But, actually, I doubt very much if that man will be heading this way any time soon, because he probably won’t need to.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve already told me that what’s written on that parchment might have potentially significant connotations, and would certainly attract international attention if knowledge of it ever became public. And if—’
‘I don’t know that for certain, because there’s still a lot of the text I can’t even see, far less translate.’
‘OK, but you are quite certain it’s an important find. What’s happened in Cairo is proof positive that some person or organization is actively looking for it, and eliminating anyone who knows too much about it. If they decided that you knew too much to be allowed to live, I imagine that some local contractor would be appointed to carry out the job here in Britain.’
Angela shivered.
‘A “contractor”? You make hiring an assassin sound like arranging to have an extension built on your house.’
There was no trace of humour in Bronson’s expression or voice when he replied.
‘That’s the terminology which is used. A contract is offered, and the man who accepts it is, logically, the contractor. And the really sad part about it is that it can actually cost less, sometimes quite a lot less, to have somebody murdered than to build an extension. It all depends on the profile of the victim. Killing a politician or somebody who’s nationally known will be expensive because it’s risky. The assassin will possibly be going up against armed and trained b
odyguards, and there are far more likely to be witnesses around if the victim has a face that everybody knows. But I’m afraid that you, my dear, are a nobody in this kind of context, and to arrange for your demise would cost no more than a few thousand pounds.’
‘That’s absolutely disgusting! Are you actually saying that London is full of murderers for hire?’
‘No, not really. Britain isn’t anything like as bad as some other countries, but if you decide you do want somebody to vanish permanently, and you’ve got the money to pay for it, it’s not that difficult to find somebody to do the job. I can’t remember who said it — it might even have been Agatha Christie — but the reality is that the only reason anybody is alive today is because nobody wants them dead badly enough.
‘People vanish from Britain’s streets every single day. Usually, it’s an entirely voluntary act, but there are lots of cases where the disappearance is involuntary and permanent. For children and young women, the obvious suspects are paedophiles and the kind of lowlifes who run prostitution rings, but when it’s an adult male or female, and there are no apparent family problems, in many cases we suspect that they’ve been done away with, even if we never find the body.’
‘Is it that easy to get rid of a body?’ Angela asked.
Bronson nodded.
‘There are lots of places where you can hide a corpse so that it will probably never be found. A good deep grave in the middle of a wood isn’t a bad choice, but that’s quite hard work for the murderer. Easier options are under a new road or in a concrete bridge support. Or if the killing takes place near the coast you provide the corpse with a set of concrete boots or a length of heavy chain and then drop the body a few miles offshore. Human remains don’t last very long in the sea. Or you can even bury it in a graveyard. Find a fresh grave where the coffin’s only been in the ground a day or two.’
Bronson leaned forward.
‘But when it’s a case of an assassin working for hire, it’s different and they don’t get rid of the body, because there’s no point. They actually want the corpse to be found, because that proves that they’ve carried out the contract and then they can collect the fee. So when we find somebody shot or knifed to death with an absence of witnesses and the body left pretty much where it fell, we always cast a very wide net to try to find anyone who might have wanted that person out of the way.’
Angela looked at him for a moment, then reached for her mug of coffee.
‘You’re not exactly filling me with confidence here, you know.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Bronson said, ‘there is one difference.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Here, they’ll have to go through me first to get to you.’
47
Anum Husani’s route to the centre of Spain had been somewhat tortuous.
Almost as soon as he’d walked away from the meeting with Ali Mohammed with the retrieved parchment and the photographs, he’d flagged down a cab and headed straight for the airport. He’d been careful — paranoid might be a better word — to check all around him before he even got in the vehicle, and had spent most of the journey peering out of the rear window, trying to see if the cab was being followed. Of course, in the Cairo traffic that was an almost impossible task, but he’d done his best.
He’d paid off the driver at the airport, gone inside and found a vacant spot on one of the rows of back-to-back metal seats, and for almost an hour he’d just sat there, watching the crowds ebb back and forth in front of him, and trying to decide where to go. Again, nobody had appeared to be paying him the slightest attention. As far as he had been able to tell, he was safe.
His choices of destination had been fairly limited. At that time of day, late afternoon, most of the flights heading out of Cairo International Airport had been to places that he didn’t want to go, like Dubai or Kuwait. He’d really wanted to get somewhere in Western Europe. Eventually, he’d bought a ticket for cash for the 18.00 Egypt Air flight down to Sharm el-Sheikh, the popular Red Sea holiday resort, got himself over to Terminal 3, lost himself in the crowds and had then boarded the flight without any problems. He had guessed there would be international flights out of Sharm that he could take, even if he had to wait until the following day.
Absolutely the last thing he’d done, before he walked through the security check and into the departures lounge, was lock his pistol in one of the small left-luggage containers. The weapon had very probably saved his life in his headlong flight from his house in Cairo, and he’d decided he didn’t want to just throw it away.
The flight took almost exactly an hour, and as soon as he was on the ground, Husani had checked the departures board at Sharm. What he’d seen hadn’t been quite what he’d expected. What he’d really wanted was somewhere like Paris or Madrid, but the only destinations on offer in Western Europe had been London, Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin. To be cooped up in an island like Britain wouldn’t, he’d believed, give him the freedom of movement he might need.
But he’d recognized that he needed to keep moving, to get out of Egypt, and so eventually he’d taken the 21.15 flight to London’s Gatwick Airport. The aircraft had been somewhat delayed on departure, not leaving until almost ten that evening, and hadn’t arrived at Gatwick until just after two thirty on Thursday morning.
There had been no point in trying to find a hotel at that hour, and there were no outbound flights either, so Husani had bought himself a selection of snacks and drinks from a machine, consumed his purchases and then tried his best to get some sleep, stretched out on another unyielding metal seat.
48
As Husani had blearily opened his eyes, his mind had already been working hard. He needed to travel further, because once he revealed details of his find to the world, the spotlight would fall on him no matter where he went to ground. That was why he still wanted to get to Madrid.
And so, at a few minutes after ten that morning, he’d leaned back and tried to relax in his seat in the economy section of the Air Europa 737–800 for the two-hour flight to the capital of Spain.
Finding a hotel after he’d landed had been easy: he’d taken a cab ride to the centre of Madrid and just picked one of the cheaper-looking ones at random. Then he’d taken a nap in his room before finally opening up the tattered briefcase that comprised all his luggage. He’d spent a few minutes looking at the photographs Ali had supplied for him, slightly disappointed that several sections of the text on the parchment were still illegible, then he’d locked away both the photographs and the relic in the room safe and ventured out onto the streets of Madrid to do some shopping.
He needed clothes and washing gear, obviously, plus a bag or suitcase of some sort to keep them in, but he also wanted to find a good-quality case with decent locks for the parchment. The clothing wasn’t a problem, but tracking down a small and secure case was rather more difficult. Eventually he located something he thought was ideal in a specialist shop on the outskirts of the city centre. It was a normal-looking small briefcase, but far heavier than its appearance suggested.
This was because both the base and the lid were lined with steel plates, each with a double layer of Kevlar for additional security. The case was, the shop assistant explained to him, virtually impossible to get into without a key. Levers and hammers would have almost no effect on it, and even high-speed drills would find it difficult to penetrate the multiple layers of protection. It would even deflect a bullet from a pistol, thanks to the Kevlar, he claimed.
It was a very expensive item, and would have made such a huge dent in Husani’s remaining supply of euros that he took a chance and used his credit card to complete the purchase. He was going public quite soon with details of the relic, and so it really didn’t matter if anyone knew he was now in Madrid.
The other expensive purchase was a netbook, also bought with the plastic card. He would need to use the Internet, and probably use it a lot, over the next day or so.
Weighed down with his new purchases, Husani ret
urned to his hotel and locked the door behind him. Then he booted the netbook, ran through the initiation sequence for the new machine, and started looking for an online Latin dictionary. Once he’d found one that seemed comprehensive enough, he started deciphering some of the sections of writing on the parchment.
By eight that evening, he’d translated about a quarter of the text that was legible, but what he’d read had only served to confuse him. It wasn’t what he’d expected, though in truth he didn’t really know what he’d expected. The sections he’d translated contained what sounded like legal arguments, none of which seemed either particularly interesting or revealing.
He locked the parchment, the photographs and his partial translation back in the safe, walked out of the hotel and found a quiet restaurant nearby where he ate a simple meal, his thoughts distracted and confused.
When he returned to his room, he looked again at what he’d so far managed to decipher, conflicting emotions coursing through him. Nothing he’d read on the parchment seemed important enough to justify the extreme measures that had been taken back in Cairo. Was he missing something? There had to be some vitally important piece of information, some dark and dangerous secret, hidden away within the text. He just hadn’t found it yet.
Perhaps, he mused, as he fell gratefully into bed, he would ask Ali Mohammed’s advice about how best to proceed. With his greater experience he would be able to read more of the Latin and find out why the parchment was so important. And he was in the business, and might well be able to come up with a few suggestions about who might be worth approaching first with a view to selling the relic.