by Will Adams
Nicolas watched with gratification as people turned to look at one another, murmuring in astonishment. This was indeed their time, he reflected, and it wasn’t a fluke. He’d been working toward it for fifteen years now, his father for forty. They had operatives in every hamlet, town, and village. Vast caches of weapons and food were waiting in the mountains. Veterans of the Yugoslavian wars had trained them in ordnance and guerrilla campaigns. They had sleepers in local and national government, spies in the armed services, friends in the international community and among the Macedonian diaspora. And the propaganda war was in full swing, too. The schedules of Dragoumis TV and radio were crammed with programs designed to stir Macedonian fervor, their newspapers filled with stories of Macedonian heroism and sacrifice, alongside tales of the opulent lifestyles and unthinking cruelty of their Athenian overlords. And it was working. Anger and hatred were building across northern Greece, even among those who had little sympathy with the separatist cause. Civil disturbance, riots, increasing incidents of ethnic assaults. All the telltale trembling of an imminent earthquake. But they weren’t there yet. Much as Nicolas craved it, they weren’t quite there. A revolution needed people so worked up they wanted martyrdom. Break out the guns now, and it would look promising for a while, but then everything would fizzle. The backlash would come. The Greek army would deploy on the streets; families would be menaced, and businesses investigated. There would be arbitrary arrests, beatings, and counterpropaganda. Their cause would be set back years, might even be irreversibly crippled. No. They still needed something more before it could begin. Something particular. A symbol that the Macedonian people would be prepared to fight to the death for.
And it was just possible that his recent phone call from Egypt might provide it.
THE EGYPTIAN ARMY OFFICER was still speaking on the phone. He seemed to be talking for a very long time. He came out with a pen and a pad of paper and crouched to jot down the license number of Knox’s Jeep. Then he went back inside and read it out to whoever was at the other end of the phone.
The Jeep’s keys were in the ignition. For a crazy moment, Knox contemplated driving for it—if Hassan caught him, he was finished anyway. But though the Egyptian soldiers looked cheerful and relaxed enough, that would change in a heartbeat if he fled. The threat of suicide bombers was simply too high around here for them to take risks; he’d be shot dead before he made it fifty yards. So he forced himself to relax, to accept that his fate was out of his hands.
The officer replaced the handset carefully, composed himself, then walked over. He wasn’t swaggering anymore. He looked thoughtful, even apprehensive. He gestured to his men. Immediately, they became alert. He stooped a little to talk through the Jeep’s open window, tapping the spine of Knox’s passport against the knuckles of his left hand as he did so. He said, “I am hearing whispers of a most remarkable story.”
Knox’s stomach squeezed. “What whispers?”
“Of an incident involving Hassan al-Assyuti and some young American man.”
“I know nothing about that,” said Knox.
“I’m glad,” said the officer, squinting down the road to Sharm as though expecting a vehicle to appear at any moment. “Because, if the rumors are true, the young foreigner in question has a very bleak future.”
Knox swallowed. “He was raping a girl,” he blurted out. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Contact the authorities.”
“We were in the middle of the fucking sea.”
“I’m sure you’ll have your chance to tell your side.”
“Ballocks,” said Knox. “I’ll be dead within an hour.”
The officer flushed. “You should have thought of that before, shouldn’t you?”
“I should have covered my arse, you mean? Like you’re doing now?”
“This isn’t my fight,” growled the officer.
Knox nodded. “People in my country, they think that all Egyptian men are cowards and thieves. I tell them they’re wrong. I tell them that Egyptian men are honorable and brave. But maybe I’ve been wrong.”
There was an angry muttering. One of the soldiers reached in the open window. The officer clamped his hand around his wrist. “No,” he said.
“But he—”
“No.”
The soldier retreated, a little shamefaced, while the officer looked down thoughtfully at Knox, clearly uncertain what to do. A pair of headlights crested a hill behind. “Please,” begged Knox. “Just give me a chance.”
The officer had noticed the approaching headlights, too. His jaw tightened as he came to his decision. He tossed the passport onto the passenger seat, then signaled his men to stand aside. “Get out of Egypt,” he advised. “It’s no longer safe for you.”
Knox let out a long breath. “I’m leaving tonight.”
“Good. Now go before I change my mind.”
Knox put the Jeep into gear, accelerated away. His hands began shaking wildly as his body flooded with the euphoria of escape. He held himself back until he was a distance down the road, then he whooped and punched the air. He’d done a stupid, reckless thing, but it looked as though he’d got away with it.
NESSIM, HASSAN AL-ASSYUTI’S HEAD OF SECURITY, arrived in Knox’s Sharm backpacker hotel to find the middle-aged concierge snoring raucously behind his desk. He came awake with a strangled shriek when Nessim slammed down the wooden access hatch. “Knox,” said Nessim. “I’m looking for Daniel Knox.”
“He’s not here,” said the concierge, breathing heavily.
“I know he’s not here,” said Nessim coldly. “I want to see his room.”
“But it’s his room!” protested the concierge. “I can’t just show it to you.”
Nessim reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet, making sure that the concierge caught a glimpse of his shoulder holster while he was at it. He took out fifty Egyptian pounds and set them down on the counter. “This is me asking nicely,” he said.
The concierge licked his lips. “Just this once, I suppose.”
Nessim followed the fat man upstairs, still brooding on what had happened on the boat, the humiliation of being bested by some beach bum foreigner. At first, he had thought that Knox would be easy to track down, but it wasn’t proving that simple. He had word back from a contact in the army that Knox had somehow bluffed his way through a checkpoint. When he heard about that, he had felt a spike of intense anger and frustration. How simple it might have been! But he knew better than to make waves. Only a fool took on the army in Egypt, and Nessim wasn’t a fool.
The concierge unlocked and opened Knox’s door, looking around nervously lest other guests see what was happening. Nessim went inside. He had one night to capture Knox, and he had that only because Hassan was on morphine to manage his pain. When he woke in the morning, he would demand to know what progress had been made.
He would want Knox.
Nessim fingered the shabby clothes hanging in the wardrobe, checked the side pockets of the red canvas bag in the bottom, crouched to inspect the books lined up on the floor against the walls—a few comic novels and thrillers, but mostly academic works on Egypt and archaeology. There were CDs, too—some music, others for his laptop. He picked up a comb-bound document. The front page, in both English and Arabic, read:
Mallawi Excavation
First Season Notes
Richard Mitchell and Daniel Knox
He flipped through it. Text and photographs of an excavation near an ancient Ptolemaic settlement a few kilometers from Mallawi in Middle Egypt. He put it back thoughtfully. Why would an Egyptologist be working as a dive instructor in Sharm? He checked a few more documents. Maps and photographs of reef systems, as best he could make out. He took the canvas bag from the wardrobe and packed all Knox’s documents inside. Then he packed up Knox’s laptop, too, and his work-related CDs and floppy disks. In the top drawer of Knox’s desk, he found photocopies of his passport and driver’s license, presumably in case he lost the originals, and a strip o
f color passport-size photographs, no doubt for one of the myriad documents foreigners needed to work in Sinai. He scooped these up and tucked them away in his jacket pocket. Then he picked up the canvas bag and laptop to take away with him. The concierge gave a little whimper. “Yes?” asked Nessim. “Is something the matter?”
“No,” said the concierge.
“Good. A word of advice. I’d clear the rest of his stuff out if I were you. I very much doubt your friend will be coming back anytime soon.”
“No?”
“No.” He handed him one of his business cards. “But call me if he does.”
Chapter Five
THE MOSQUITOES were in a malevolent mood that evening. Gaille had buttoned her white chemise tight around her throat and wrists, tucked her long trousers into her socks, then sprayed all her remaining exposed skin to a shine with repellent; yet they still somehow found a way to feed off her and then boast of it afterward with that infuriating trumpeting of theirs, retreating to the high hotel ceiling well out of range of reprisal even when she stood on a chair. Whatever had happened to the notion of sisterhood? There it was again, that gloating buzz behind her ear. She slapped at her neck, but only as a gesture to punish herself for being so easily caught. The damage was done. The side of her right hand began to pulse and redden. Her mouse hand was an easy target as she typed up these damned excavation notes every night. She paused momentarily and glanced at her window. Just one night off wouldn’t hurt. A cold beer and a little conversation. But if Elena caught her in the bar . . .
Her door opened without warning, and Elena herself strode in as though she owned the place. She had no regard for anyone else’s privacy, but heaven help you if you dared so much as knock on her door without first giving two weeks’ written notice! “Yes?” asked Gaille.
“I’ve just had a phone call,” said Elena. She squinted belligerently at Gaille, as though she found herself at a disadvantage and expected Gaille to make the most of it. “Ibrahim Beyumi. You know him? He’s head of the Supreme Council in Alexandria. Apparently he’s found a necropolis. He thinks part of it may be Macedonian. He wants me to check it out with him. He also said he was putting together a team for possible excavation, and asked if I could provide specialist support. I had to remind him I had my own excavation to run. Still, I mentioned you were available.”
Gaille frowned. “He needs support with languages?”
“It’s an emergency excavation,” snorted Elena. “The job is to record, remove, process, and store. Translation will come later.”
“Then… ?”
“He needs a photographer, Gaille.”
“Oh!” Gaille felt bewildered. “But I’m not a photographer.”
“You’ve got a camera, haven’t you? You’ve been taking pictures for us, haven’t you? Are you telling me they’re no good?”
“I only took them because you asked me to—”
“So it’s my fault, now, is it?”
Gaille asked plaintively, “What about Maria?”
“And who will we be left with? Are you claiming to be as good a photographer as she is?”
“Of course not.” The only reason she had brought her camera at all was to photograph badly faded ancient ostraca, so that she could use her laptop’s image software to make the writing clearer. “I just said I’m not a—”
“And Maria doesn’t speak Arabic or English,” pointed out Elena. “She’d be useless to Ibrahim, and all on her own. Is that what you want?”
“No. All I’m saying is—”
“All you’re saying is!” mocked Elena spitefully, imitating her voice.
“Is this about what happened earlier?” asked Gaille. “I told you, I didn’t see anything down there.”
Elena shook her head. “This has nothing to do with that. It’s very simple. The head of the Supreme Council in Alexandria has asked for your help. Do you really want me to tell him you refused?”
“No,” replied Gaille miserably. “Of course not.”
Elena nodded. “We’re doing an initial survey first thing tomorrow morning. Make sure you’re packed and ready to leave at seven.” She took a look round Gaille’s messy hotel bedroom, shook her head in exaggerated disbelief, then slammed the door behind her as she left.
IT SADDENED KNOX to abandon his Jeep in long-term parking. It had been his one constant companion since he’d been in Egypt. Eight hundred thousand already on the clock, and more left beneath the hood. You grew to love a car when it had done that well for you. He left his keys and the parking lot receipt beneath the seat. He’d give one of his Cairo friends a call, see if they wanted it.
The airport was busy. There was so much refurbishment going on that everything was squeezed into half the space. Knox pulled his baseball cap down over his eyes, though it seemed unlikely that Hassan’s people would be ahead of him. He had a choice of flights. Many planes arrived in Egypt late at night, turning around to reach their home airports around dawn. He wandered along the bank of check-in desks. New York? Screw that. When you’d fucked up your life, the last thing you wanted was to be reminded of it by the success of old friends. Athens was out, too. When he’d lost his marbles in the wake of family tragedy, Greece had been put off limits to him. London? Stuttgart? Paris? Amsterdam? The thought of such places depressed him horribly. A dark-haired woman in the queue for Rome caught his eye and smiled coyly. It seemed as good a reason as any. He went to the inquiries counter to see if there were tickets. The man in line ahead of him was moaning about freight surcharges for his computer, but Knox tuned him out. “Go home,” that checkpoint officer had urged. But Egypt was his home. He’d lived here ten years. He’d grown to love it, for all its heat, discomfort, chaos, and clamor. He loved the desert most of all: its searing clean lines, its extraordinary gift of solitude, the kaleidoscopic sunsets and the chill mists in the dune valleys in the moments before dawn. He loved the hard labor of excavation, the thrill of potential discovery, that glorious kick it gave you getting out of bed each morning. Not that he ever got the chance to excavate anymore.
The man ahead of him finally paid up. Knox stepped forward, fluttery with nerves. If he was going to have problems, this was where he’d find out. The booking clerk smiled blandly. He asked about seats; she assured him there were plenty. Knox handed across his passport and a credit card. She tapped keys, glanced up. “Mi scusi un momento.” She took his passport and card and vanished through a door at the back of her booth. He leaned forward to see what it said on her screen. He saw nothing to alarm him. He looked around the concourse. Everything appeared normal. The clerk returned. She wouldn’t quite meet his eye. She kept his passport and credit card in her hand, fractionally out of his reach. He glanced around again. Teams of security guards appeared almost simultaneously through doors at either end of the concourse. Knox lunged forward to snatch his passport and card from the startled clerk, then turned, ducked his head, and walked briskly away, his heart pumping wildly. To his left, a security guard yelled. Knox abandoned all pretense and raced for the exit. The doors were automatic, but they slid open so slowly that he turned shoulder-first and still crashed into them, forcing his way through, spinning around. A guard on duty outside unslung his rifle from his shoulder so hastily that he fumbled it and it fell clattering to the floor. Knox fled left, away from the bright lights of the terminal building and into the darkness beyond. He vaulted a rail, ran down a steep embankment to a poorly lit airport bus stop, leaped between a group of young travelers sitting on their backpacks, then smashed into the wall of an underpass, grazing his palm. Two uniformed janitors sharing a cigarette looked at him in astonishment as he ran between them, the whiff of their black tobacco catching in his throat. He turned left, sprinting hard, ignoring the shouting and the sirens. There were trees to his left; he ducked into their cover, running for another ten minutes until he couldn’t manage anymore, and came to a stop, bent double, hands on his knees, heaving for air. Car headlights were slowly patrolling the roads, flashlights swee
ping through the trees. The sweat on his shirt cooled; he shivered as he caught the scent of himself. This was bad. This was truly fucking awful. If the police got to him, it wouldn’t matter that he could prove his case—Hassan would already have him by the balls. He thought through his options. The air- and seaports were clearly on alert. Border crossings would have his photo. You could get any document in the world forged in Cairo, but Hassan’s reach was long. He’d soon know Knox was in Cairo, and he’d put out the word. No. He needed to get away as quickly as possible. He could flag down a taxi or a bus, but the drivers would remember him. Trains were often packed with soldiers and police. Better to risk going back for his Jeep.
There was shouting from his left, a single gunshot. Knox flinched and ducked. It took him a moment to realize they were shooting at shadows. He had his breath back now, and his bearings. He crouched and kept moving until he reached the perimeter wire fence of long-term parking—high but not barbed. He climbed it by a concrete post and dropped down the other side, the joints of his fingers raw from the thin mesh. He ran low between the pools of light and the ranks of parked cars. The place was deserted. Departing passengers were already in the terminal; arrivals had long since driven off. Once back in his Jeep, he drove up to the booth and handed money to a sleepy attendant. The barrier lifted.