The Seventh Scroll tes-2

by Wilbur Smith

  The police had come to the flat and taken her statement, and she had

  tidied up most of the disarray. She had even glued the head back on her

  white queen. When she left the flat and climbed into the green Renault

  her arm was feeling easier, and, if not cheerful, she was at least a

  great deal more optimistic, and sure of what she had to do.

  When she reached the museum she went first to Duraid's office and was

  annoyed to find that Nahoot was there before her. He was supervising two

  of the security guards as they cleared out all Duraid's personal

  effects.

  "You might have had the consideration to let me do that," she told him

  coldly, and he gave her his most winning smile.

  "I am sorry, Royan. I thought I would help." He was smoking one of his

  fat Turkish cigarettes. She loathed the heavy, musky odour.

  She crossed to Duraid's desk, and opened the top right hand drawer. "My

  husband's day book was in here. It's gone now. Have you seen it?"

  "No, there was nothing in that drawer."Nahoot looked at the two guards

  for confirmation, and they shuffled their feet and shook their heads. It

  did not really matter, she thought. The book had not contained much of

  vital interest. Duraid had always relied on her to record and store all

  data of importance, and most of it had been on her PC.

  "Thank you, Nahoot," she dismissed him. "I will do whatever remains to

  be done. I don't want to keep you from your work."

  "Any help you need, Royan, please let me know." He bowed slightly as he

  left her.

  It did not take her long to finish in Duraid's office. She had the

  guards take the boxes of his possessions down the corridor to her own

  office and pile them against the wall.

  She worked through the lunch-hour tidying up all her own affairs, and

  when she had finished there was still an hour until her appointment with

  Atalan Abou Sin.

  If she was to make good her promise to Duraid, then she was going to be

  absent for some time. Wanting to take leave of all her favoUrite

  treasures, she went down into the public section of the huge building.

  Monday was a busy day, and the exhibition halls of the museum were

  thronged with groups of tourists. They flocked behind their guides,

  sheep following the shepherd.

  They crowded around the most famous of the displays.

  They listened to the guides reciting their well-rehearsed spiels in all

  the tongues of Babel.

  Those rooms on the second floor that contained the treasures of

  Tutankhamen were so crowded that she spent little time there. She

  managed to reach the display cabinet that contained the great golden

  death'mask of the child pharaoh. As always, the splendour and the

  romance of it quickened her breathing and made her heart beat faster.

  Yet as she stood before it, jostled by a pair of big-busted and sweaty

  middle-aged female tourists, she pondered, as she had so often before,

  that if an insignificant weakling king could have gone to his tomb with

  such a miraculous creation covering his mummified features, in what

  state must the great Ramessids have lain in their funeral temples.

  Ramesses II, the greatest of them all, had reigned sixty-seven years and

  had spent those decades accumulating his funerary treasure from all the

  vast territories that he had conquered.

  Royan went next to pay her respects to the old king.

  After thirty centuries Ramesses II slept on with a rapt and serene

  expression on his gaunt features. His skin had a light, marble-like

  sheen to it. The sparse strands of his hair were blond and dyed with

  henna. His hands, dyed with the same stuff, were long and thin and

  elegant. However, he was clad only in a rag of linen. The grave robbers

  had even unwrapped his mummy to reach the amulets and scarabs beneath

  the linen bandages, so that his body was almost naked. When these

  remains had been discovered in 1881 in the cache of royal mummies in the

  cliff cave at Deir El Bahari, only a scrap of papyrus parchment attached

  to his breast had proclaimed his lineage.

  There was a moral in that, she supposed, but as she stood before these

  pathetic remains she wondered again, as she and Duraid had done so often

  before, whether Taita the scribe had told the truth, whether somewhere

  in the far-off, savage mountains of Africa another great pharaoh slept

  on undisturbed with all his treasures intact about him.

  The very thought of it made her shiver with excitement, and goose

  pimples prickled her skin and raised the fine dark hair at the nape of

  her neck.

  "I have given you my promise, my husband," she whispered in Arabic.

  "This will be for you and your memory, for it was you who led the way."

  She glanced at her "Wrist-watch as she went down the main staircase. She

  had fifteen minutes before she must leave for her appointment with the

  minister, and she knew, exactly how she would spend that time. What she

  was going to visit was in one of the less-frequented side halls.

  The tour guides very seldom led their charges this way, except as a

  short-cut to see the statue of Amenhotep.

  Royan stopped in front of the glass-fronted display case that reached

  from floor to ceiling of the narrow room. It was packed with small

  artefacts, tools and weapons, amulets and vessels and utensils, the

  latest of them dating from the twentieth dynasty of the New Kingdom,

  1100 BC, whilst the oldest survived from the dim ages of the Old Kingdom

  almost five thousand years ago. The cataloguing of this accumulation was

  only rudimentary. Many of the items were not described.

  At the furthest end, on the bottom shelf, was a display of jewellery and

  finger rings and seals. Beside each of the seals was a wax impression

  made from it.

  Royan went down on her knees to examine one of these artefacts more

  closely. The tiny blue seal of lapis lazuli in the centre of the display

  was beautifully carved.

  Lapis was a rare and precious material for the ancients, as it had not

  occurred naturally in the Egyptian Empire. The wax imprint cut from it

  depicted a hawk with a broken wing, and the simple legend beneath it was

  clear for Royan to read: "TAITA, THE SCRIBE OF THE GREAT QUEEN'.

  She knew it was the same man, for he had used the maimed hawk as his

  autograph in the scrolls. She wondered who had found this trifle and

  where. Perhaps some peasant had plundered it from the lost tomb of the

  old slave and scribe, but she would never know.

  "Are you teasing me, Taita? Is it all some elaborate hoax? Are you

  laughing at me even now from your tomb, wherever it may be?" She leaned

  even closer, until her forehead touched the cool glass. "Are you my

  friend, Taita, or are you my implacable adversary?" She stood up and

  dusted off the front of her skirt. "We shall see. I will-play the game

  with you, and we shall see who outwits whom," she promised.

  The minister kept her waiting only a few minutes before his male

  secretary ushered her into his presence. Atalan Abou Sin wore a dark,

  shiny silk suit and sat at his desk, although Royan knew that he

  preferred
a more comfortable robe and a cushion on the rugs of the

  floor. He noticed her glance and smiled deprecatingly. "I have a meeting

  with some Americans this afternoon." .. She liked him. He had always

  been kind to her, and she owed him her job at the museum. Most other men

  in his position would have refused. Duraid's request for a female

  assistant, especially his own wife.

  He asked after her health and she showed him her bandaged arm. "The

  stitches will come out in ten days."

  They chatted for a while in a polite manner. Only Westerners would have

  the gaucherie to come -directly to the main business to be discussed.

  However, to save him embarrassment Royan took the first opportunity he

  gave her to tell him, "I feel that I need some time to myself. I need to

  recover from my loss and to decide what I am to do with the rest of my

  life, now that I am a widow. I would be grateful if you would consider

  my request for at least six months' unpaid leave of absence. I want to

  go to stay with my mother in England."

  Atalan showed real concern and urged her, "Please do not leave us for

  too long. The work you have done has been invaluable. We need you to

  help carry on from where Duraid left off." But he could not entirely

  conceal his relief She knew that he had expected her to put before him

  her application for the directorship. He must have discussed it with his

  nephew. However, he was too kind a man to relish having to tell her that

  she would not be selected for the job. Things in Egypt were changing,

  women were emerging from their traditional roles, but not that much or

  that swiftly. They both knew that the directorship must go to Nahoot

  Ouddabi.

  Atalan walked with her to the door of his office and shook her hand in

  parting, and as she rode down in the lift she felt a sense of release

  and freedom.

  She had left the Renault standing in the sun in the Ministry car park.

  When she opened the door the interior was hot enough to bake bread. She

  opened all the windows and fanned the driver's door to force out the

  heated air, but still the surface of the driver's seat burned the backs

  of her thighs when she slid in behind the wheel.

  As soon as she drove through the gates she was engulfed in the swarm of

  Cairo traffic. She crawled along behind an overloaded bus that belched a

  steady blue cloud of diesel fumes over the Renault. The traffic problem

  was one that seemed to have no solution. There was so little parking

  available that vehicles lined the verge of the road three and four

  deep," choking the flow in the centre to a trickle.

  As the bus in front of her braked and forced her to a halt, Royan smiled

  as she recalled the old joke that some drivers who had parked at the

  kerb had to abandon their cars there, for they were never able to

  extricate them from the tangle. Perhaps there was a little truth in

  this, for some of those vehicles she could see had not been moved for

  weeks. Their windscreens were completely obscured with dust and many of

  them had flat tyres.

  She glanced in the rear-view mirror. There was a taxi stopped only

  inches from her back bumper, and behind that the traffic was backed up

  solidly. Only the motorcyclists had freedom of movement. As she watched

  in the mirror, one of these came weaving through the congestion with

  suicidal abandon. It was a battered red 200 cc Honda so covered with

  dust that the colour was hardly recognizable. There was a passenger

  perched on the pillion, and both he and the driver had covered the lower

  half of their faces with the corners of their white headcloths as

  protection against the exhaust fumes and dust.

  Passing on the wrong side, the Honda skimmed through the narrow gap

  between the taxi and the cars parked at the kerb with nothing to spare

  on either side.

  The taxi-driver made an obscene gesture with thumb and forefinger, and

  called on Allah to witness that the driver was both mad and stupid.

  The Honda slowed slightly as it drew level with Royan's Renault, and

  the' pillion passenger leaned out and dropped something through the open

  window on to the passenger seat beside her, Immediately the driver

  accelerated so abruptly that for a moment the front wheel was lifted off

  the ground. He put the motorcycle over into a tight turn and sped away

  down the narrow alleyway that opened off the main thoroughfare, narrowly

  avoiding hitting an old woman in his path.

  As the pillion passenger looked back at her the wind blew the fold of ck

  she recognized the man she had last seen in the headlights of the Fiat

  on the road beside the oasis.

  "Yusuf!" As the Honda disappeared she looked down at the object that he

  had dropped on to the seat beside her.

  It was egg-shaped and the segmented metallic surface was painted

  military green. She had seen the same thing so often on old TV war

  movies that she recognized it instantly as a fragmentation grenade, and

  at the same moment she realized that the priming handle had flown off

  and the weapon was set to explode within seconds.

  Without thinking, she grabbed the door handle beside her and flung all

  her weight against the door. It burst open and she tumbled out in the

  road. Her foot slipped off the clutch and the Renault bounded forward

  and crashed into the back of the stationary bus.

  As Royan sprawled in the road under the wheels of the following taxi,

  the grenade exploded. Through the open driver's door blew a sheet of

  flame and smoke and debris. The back window burst outwards and sprayed

  her with diamond chips of glass, and the detonation drove painfully into

  her eardrums.

  A stunned silence followed the shock of the explosion, broken only by

  the tinkle of falling glass shards, and then immediately there was a

  hubbub of groans and screams.

  Royan sat up and clasped her injured arm to her chest. She had fallen

  heavily upon it and the stitches were agony.

  The Renault was wrecked, but she saw that her leather sling bag had been

  blown out of the door and lay in the street close at hand. She pushed

  herself unsteadily to her feet and hobbled over to pick it up. All

  around her was confusion. A few of the passengers in the bus had been

  injured, and a piece of shrapnel or wreckage had wounded a little girl

  on the sidewalk. Her mother was screaming and mopping at the child's

  bloody face with her scarf The girl struggled in her mother's grip,

  wailing pitifully.

  Nobody was taking any notice of Royan, but she knew the police would

  arrive within minutes. They were geared up to respond swiftly to

  fundamentalist terror attacks. She knew that if they found her here she

  would be tied up in days of interrogation. She slung the bag over her

  shoulder and walked as swiftly as her bruised leg would allow her to the

  alleyway down which the Honda had disappeared.

  At the end of the street was a public lavatory. She locked herself in

  one of the cubicles and leaned against the door with her eyes closed,

  trying to recover from the shock and to get her confused thoughts in

  order.
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  In the horror and desolation of Duraid's murder she had not until now

  considered her own safety. The realization of danger had been forced

  upon her in the most savage manner. She remembered the words of one of

  the assassins spoken in the darkness beside the oasis "We always know

  where to find her later!'

  The attempt on her life had failed only narrowly. She had to believe

  that there would be another.

  I can't go back to the flat," she realized. "The villa is gone, and

  anyway they would look for me there."

  Despite the unsavoury atmosphere she remained locked in the cubicle for

  over an hour while she thought out her next movements. At last she left

  the toilet and went to the row of stained and cracked washbasins. She

  splashed her face under the tap. Then in the mirror she combed her hair,

  touched up her make-up, and straightened and tidied her clothing as best

  she was able.

  She walked a few blocks, doubling back on her tracks and watching behind

  her to make sure she -was not being followed, before she hailed a taxi

  in the street.

  She made the driver drop her in the street behind her bank, and walked

  the rest of the way. It was only minutes before closing time when she

  was " shown into the cubicle office of one of the sub-accountants. She

  withdrew what money was in her account, which amounted to less than five

  thousand Egyptian pounds. It was not a great sum, but she had a little

  more in her Lloyds Bank account in York, and then she had her

  Mastercard.

  "You should have given us notice to withdraw an article from safe

  deposit," the bank official told her severely.

  She apologized meekly and played the helpless little-girllost so

  convincingly that he relented. He handed over to her the package that

  contained her British passport and her Lloyds banking papers.

  Duraid had numerous relatives and friends who would have been pleased to

  have her to stay with them, but she wanted to remain out of sight, away

  from her usual haunts.

  She chose one of the two-star tourist hotels away from the river where

  she hoped she could remain anonymous amongst the multitudes of the tour

  groups. At this type of hotel there was a high turnover of guests, for

  most of them stayed only for a few nights before moving on up to Luxor

  and Aswan to view the monuments.