by Will Adams
"Chocolate."
He padded naked to his kitchen, discarding his condom into an overflowing wastebasket. A pearly strand depended from his penis, so he wiped it dry with a paper towel, then checked his fridge. "Merde!" He scowled. "No milk."
"Come back to bed," she complained. "I have to go collect Gaille from the airport soon."
"I need coffee," he protested. "I need croissants." He pulled on yesterday's trousers and shirt. "One minute only, I promise."
She watched him walk out the front door. Something like happiness swelled in her chest. All these years of sating her desires with milksops and fops. Christ, but it felt good to have a real man in her life again.
It was hard work staying awake, so Knox bought two cups of sludge coffee for Rick and himself from the first cafe to lift its shutters. Four men and three women in work clothes came down the hotel steps, where they joined a number of Egyptians who had been loitering outside. They all climbed aboard two flatbed trucks, squeezing up front or stretching out in the back. One of the men did a quick head count; then they lumbered away along the road toward the town of Zagazig.
Rick gave them twenty seconds' head start, then followed. Tailing people was easy in Egypt. There were so few roads, you could afford to hang well back. The trucks turned toward Zifta, then down a farm road. Rick waited until they were nothing but a cloud of dust, then headed after them. They drove for another two or three kilometers before they saw one of the trucks parked, and no one in sight.
"Let's get out of here before we're spotted," suggested Knox.
Rick wheeled around and they headed off. "Where now?"
"I don't know about you," yawned Knox, "but I haven't slept in two days. I vote we find ourselves a hotel."
The day had passed with wretched slowness for Mohammed el-Dahab, but now it was late afternoon, and time was almost up. He paced back and forth outside the cancer ward of Alexandria's Medical Research Institute. At times he sucked great heaves of air into his lungs; at others his breathing became so short and shallow he thought he would faint. Waiting for the phone call with the test results had been grueling enough, but nothing like this. He walked to the window, stared blindly out over the night-lit city, the harbor. So many millions of people, none of whom he cared one jot for. Let Allah take them all but leave him Layla.
Dr. Serag-Al-Din had given them good news. He had found an HLA match: Basheer, a third cousin of Nur's mother, who herself had come close to death when her Cairo apartment block collapsed years ago. Mohammed had thought nothing of it at the time, had been completely indifferent to her life or death. But if she had died… He closed his eyes and brought a fist up to his mouth. It didn't bear thinking about.
But the HLA match meant nothing in itself. It mattered only if Professor Rafai now granted Layla a berth for a bone marrow transplant. Mohammed was here to learn of his decision.
"Insha' Allah, insha' Allah," muttered Mohammed again and again. The mantra did him little good. If only Nur were here-someone who understood. But Nur hadn't been able to face it. She was at home nursing Layla, more terrified even than he. "Insha' Allah," he muttered. "Insha' Allah."
The door of the oncology ward swung open. A plump young nurse with huge brown eyes came out. Mohammed tried to read her expression, but it was beyond him. "Will you come with me, please," she said.
Chapter Twenty-five
Kareem Barak's feet were raw and aching. Too much tramping these wretched roads in tight boots with leaky soles. He cursed himself for having answered Abdullah's summons and for agreeing to his terms. One hundred dollars to whoever found this one wretched Jeep! It had seemed too good to be true. But when Abdullah had assigned districts to search, he received this godforsaken stretch of farmland. How the others had sniggered! As if anyone would park out here! He ought just to give up, but those dollars had him by the throat. For Abdullah to offer a one-hundred-dollar reward, he had to be looking to make five or ten times that himself, which meant opportunities for a smart young man like Kareem to exploit. But first he needed some luck.
It was dusk when he saw the farm track and the ramshackle buildings some two hundred meters along it. The way his feet burned, it might as well have been two hundred kilometers. He had a sudden craving for a huge bowl of his aunt's kushari with extra fried onions, mopped up with great chunks of aysh baladi, then the welcoming embrace of his mattress. No way was the Jeep down there. Enough! He scowled and turned, hobbling painfully back the way he had come. But he'd barely gone twenty steps when a minibus of schoolgirls rattled past. One of them caught his eye and smiled shyly. She had good skin and huge brown eyes and luscious red lips. Staring after her, he forgot all about kushari and bed and aching feet. That was what he truly wanted: a beautiful, coy young woman to call his own. And for all his romantic dreams, he was a realist enough to know he would never have one until he earned some serious money.
He turned yet again and made the painful trudge up the track to the farm buildings.
Mohammed found it difficult even to walk as he followed the nurse. He had to remind himself how it was done: one foot and then the other. She led him to a large office, where Professor Rafai was flicking through the dividers of a white filing cabinet. Mohammed had seen him often on his rounds but had never before been granted a private audience. Mohammed didn't know how to read this. Some men delighted in granting good news; others felt it their duty to break bad. Rafai turned to Mohammed with a bland, professional smile that gave nothing away. "Sit, sit," he said, gesturing to his small round corner table. He pulled out a brown folder and came to join him. "I hope you've not been waiting long."
Mohammed swallowed. Did Rafai truly not understand? Then, suddenly, all Mohammed wanted was to go back outside and wait some more. When hope was all a man had, he fought hard to hold on to it. Rafai opened the brown folder and peered through his half-moon glasses at a sheet inside. He frowned as though he had just read something of which he had previously been unaware. "You understand what a bone marrow transplant would have involved?" he asked without looking up. "You understand what you were asking me to put your daughter through?"
It was a numb feeling, catastrophe. Mohammed felt cold and sick, yet at the same time immensely calm. He wondered bleakly how he would break this to Nur, if Layla would understand what it meant.
Rafai proceeded remorselessly: "We call this procedure bone marrow transplantation, but that is misleading. In ordinary chemotherapy we target only cancerous fast-dividing cells, but in this procedure we deliberately poison a person's entire system in order to destroy all their fast-dividing cells, cancerous or otherwise. That includes the bone marrow. The transplant is not the treatment. The transplant is necessary because after we annihilate all these fast-dividers, the patient will die without new marrow. It is a traumatic and extremely painful experience, without guarantee of success. Rejections occur despite perfect matches. And even if the new marrow takes, convalescence is extensive. Tests, tests, always tests. This is not the treatment of a few days. Scars stay for life. And then there's infertility, cataract blindness, secondary cancers, complications in the liver, kidneys, lungs, heart…"
Mohammed understood something then. Rafai wasn't here because the task was difficult; he was here because he relished exercising power. Mohammed reached forward to push down Rafai's folder. "Say what you have to say," he demanded. "Say it straight. Look me in the eye."
Rafai sighed. "You must understand that we cannot give a bone marrow transplant to every patient who needs it. We allocate our resources on the basis of clinical evidence, on who will be most likely to benefit. I am afraid the lymphoma has advanced so far in your daughter-"
"Because you would not do the tests in time!" cried Mohammed. "Because you would not do the tests!"
"You must understand that everyone here loves your-"
Mohammed rose to his feet. "When did you decide this? Did you decide before we did the tests? You did, didn't you? Why didn't you tell us? Why did you let us go through that?"
"You're wrong," said Rafai. "We didn't make the final-"
"Is there anything I can do?" pleaded Mohammed. "Anything at all? I beg you. Please. You can't do this."
"I'm sorry." He smiled blandly. The interview was over.
Mohammed had never previously understood failed suicides; the ones commonly described as cries for help. But in a moment of insight he realized that some conversations were simply too difficult to broach without some kind of act to demonstrate the overwhelming strength of feeling involved. He couldn't face Nur and Layla with this news. It was beyond him. So he picked Rafai up by the lapels of his jacket instead and slammed him against his office wall.
It was a good seven-hour drive from Alexandria to Siwa Oasis, where Elena and Gaille were due to begin a survey of antiquities as cover for their search for Alexander's tomb. It was an uninspiring journey, too, first heading west along the scrubby, overbuilt Mediterranean coast, then south through flat and empty desert, with nothing to see for mile after mile but the occasional service station or herd of wild camels, until they topped a rise and the relentless emptiness was suddenly broken by glittering white salt lakes and orchards of silver-green.
They pulled into Siwa's market square as a muezzin called the faithful to prayer, and the sun vanished behind the dark rose ruins of the old Shali Fortress. The streets here were wide, spacious, and dusty. There were few cars or trucks. People walked, cycled, or took donkey carts. After the bustle of Alexandria, Siwa seemed gloriously leisurely and content. Gaille rolled down her window and inhaled deeply. Her spirits lifted. Siwa was truly the end of the road. There was nothing beyond it but the great Sea of Sand. The oasis had no purpose but itself.
They found available places in a hotel located in a date palm orchard. Their rooms were newly painted, clean, and polished, with sparkling windows and gleaming bathrooms. Gaille took a shower and put on some fresh clothes; then Elena knocked on her door, and they set off to visit Dr. Aly Sayed, Siwa's representative of the Supreme Council for Antiquities.
Knox and Rick ducked down in the front seats of the Subaru as one of the flatbed trucks left for the night, its headlights flickering over the grove of trees where they had hidden. A good day's sleep had recharged Knox's batteries, and his laptop's, too. He reopened it once the flatbed had driven off, resuming his study of the Mallawi papyri, fragments of ancient letters, and other documents.
"I reckon the other one must have already left," said Rick. "I mean, they can't excavate in the dark."
"Let's give it ten minutes, just to be safe."
Rick pulled a face but let it go. "How you getting on?" he asked.
"Not too bad." His laptop screen was old and fuzzy. The photographs had been taken for cataloging purposes, not for decipherment. The lighting was variable, to put it kindly. Most of the papyri were completely unreadable. Yet he could still make out occasional words and even phrases, many of them in a recognizable hand, so written by a single person. Often they were vague, almost deliberately so, such as "and then the thing happened that brought me to Mallawi." Elsewhere, the author referred again and again to "the enlightened," "the truth bearer," "the knowledgeable," "the holder of the secret." And in other places they were downright treasonous. "I don't know who wrote this," he told Rick, "but he wasn't very respectful."
"How do you mean?"
"Ptolemaic pharaohs were all called Ptolemy, so they distinguished themselves by their cult titles instead. For example, the first Ptolemy was known as Soter, the Greek word for 'savior.' But here he's referred to as Sotades."
"Sotades?"
"A scurrilous Alexandrian Greek poet and playwright. Wrote a lot of homoerotic verse, invented the palindrome, then got himself into trouble for mocking Ptolemy Two Philadelphos for marrying his sister. Speaking of which, Philadelphos actually means 'sister lover,' but he's referred to here as 'sin-lover.' Ptolemy Euergetes, 'the benefactor,' is 'the malefactor.' Philopator, 'the father loving,' is 'the lie-building.' Epiphanes, 'the manifest god,' is 'the manifest fraud.' You get the idea?"
"Not exactly the world's greatest satirist, was he?"
"No. But even referring to the Ptolemies like this…"
Rick leaned forward in his seat, squinting through his windshield into the moonlit night, impatient to get moving. "They must have left by now," he muttered, turning on his ignition. "Let's go in."
"Five more minutes."
"Okay," grumbled Rick, turning the engine off again. He leaned across to look at the laptop. "What else are you finding?"
"Lots of place names. Tanis, Buto, Busiris, Mendes. All important Delta towns. But the place that comes up by far the most is Lycopolis."
"Lycopolis. City of the Wolves, yeah?"
"It was the Greek name for ancient Asyut," nodded Knox. Asyut was some fifty miles south of Mallawi, where the papyri had been found, so it made some sense. But all the other place names were in the Nile Delta, well over a hundred miles north of Asyut. Besides, something was knocking at his memory, and it wasn't Asyut.
Another pair of headlights came down the farm track. They both ducked again. "Looks like you were right," grinned Rick, his teeth glowing white. The second flatbed came to a complete stop as it reached the road, waiting for a car to pass. They could hear its turn signal clicking, and the tired banter of laborers in the back, glad that a long day was over. Then it pulled out onto the Tanta road and was gone. "Right," said Rick, turning the ignition on once more. "Let's do it, yeah?"
"Yes."
The moon was bright enough for them to drive with only their sidelights on, not wanting to advertise their presence yet not wanting to look unduly stealthy, either. They reached the line of trees where the flatbed had parked earlier. A stake hammered into the ground declared in Arabic and English that this was a restricted area, reserved by the Supreme Council for Antiquities in partnership with the Macedonian Archaeological Foundation. They retreated a little way, concealed the Subaru in a small copse, then went searching. Rick had been out shopping while Knox had slept, and now he handed Knox a flashlight, though it was light enough not to need it. A cool breeze rustled and whispered in the branches. A bird hooted. They could see the static umber glow of a distant settlement, and yellow headlights crisscrossing on a road. Their boots balled up with soil as they crossed a field. In its far corner they found a site in midexcavation, a honeycomb of roped-off four-by-four-meter pits divided by balk walls, then a series of emptied graves, each a meter deep, their contents removed, their bases hidden in shadow from the slanting moonlight, freshly dug earth by their sides. It took them barely fifteen minutes to check it all out. "Not exactly the Valley of the Kings, is it?" muttered Rick.
"You can't expect them to-"
"Shhhh!" went Rick suddenly, crouching down, a finger to his lips. Knox turned to look at what had caught Rick's eye. Several seconds later, he saw it: a small orange glow moving between the trees. "Two people," whispered Rick. "Sharing a smoke." He motioned at an empty grave, its foot in darkness. Knox nodded. They climbed down inside, watching over the rim as two men in dark uniforms and caps advanced. Private security contractors, rather than army or police, but with black holsters on their belts. One of them was holding the leash of a huge German shepherd, growling and baring its fangs as if it had caught a scent but wasn't yet quite sure of what. His companion was curious enough to turn on his flashlight, which he shone around as they drew closer, discussing some TV movie they both had watched earlier. Rick smeared earth on his hands and the back of his neck and gestured for Knox to do likewise; then they lay motionless and facedown in the grave as the two guards walked right up to them, the German shepherd getting thoroughly excited but being hauled back and cursed at. A flare of light bloomed in the bottom of the grave, then was gone. A still lit cigarette butt landed by Knox's cheek. One of the men, while talking to his companion, unzipped his trousers and took a leak on the earth above, the splash-off spattering around Knox and Rick, while his companion made lewd comments about some actress he fancied
. Then the two men turned and trudged away, dragging the agitated dog with them.
Rick was first to stir. "Fuck me, that was close," he muttered.
"We should get out of here," said Knox.
"Ballocks," said Rick. "Two men and a German shepherd guarding an empty field-I want to see what they're really protecting."
"They had guns, mate," said Knox.
"Exactly," grinned Rick. "This is getting interesting."
"I don't want you getting hurt," said Knox. "Not on my account."
"Fuck that; I haven't had this much fun in years." And he set off before Knox could argue further, keeping low to the ground, using his experience to find the stealthiest path. Knox followed, grateful to have such a friend. The moon made ghostly shadows through the trees as they mounted a gentle but lengthy rise. He glimpsed gray ahead and pointed it out. Rick nodded and motioned for Knox to stay where he was. He vanished for a minute before reappearing out of the shadows. "Two buildings," he whispered. "One large, one small. Made of concrete block. No windows. Steel doors. Padlocks. But both guards are outside the small one. That's the one we need to get inside."