by Stephen Cole
‘Don’t write us off yet,’ said Tye, gritting her teeth. Jonah offered her his arm to lean on but she pulled away.
The distant grizzle of police sirens sounded. As one, the group quickened their step. The car wasn’t far away now.
‘Come on. Let’s pool what we know,’ said Tye. ‘Did you see that snake tattoo on the woman’s hand?’
‘Can’t see nothing without these.’ Motti dangled his crushed glasses in her face. ‘But jeez, man, fists of fury … That guy whupped my ass. Didn’t even have time to pull my blade.’
‘Like you’d really use it,’ Tye muttered.
‘I’ve told you, Motti,’ Con complained. ‘You should wear contacts!’
‘Don’t start telling me what I should –’
‘’Ere, I saw that bird’s tattoo,’ said Patch quickly, heading off the row. ‘What do you reckon, Tye – some kind of gang marking?’
She nodded. ‘Or a cult, maybe. Some kind of religious thing, from the look of that veil she wore.’
‘So we got us a religious broad and two bodyguards,’ said Motti.
‘If someone at the museum was helping them, we could maybe try and find out who tomorrow,’ Jonah suggested.
Motti looked at him like he was about to have a go. Then he just nodded, dabbed again at his leaking nose. ‘Good thinking.’
They’d reached the BMW. Tye fumbled in her pocket for the keys. ‘Jonah got the number of the car that picked them up, too,’ she remarked, crossing round to the driver’s side. ‘Probably stolen or false plates, but it might turn up something.’
‘If only they hadn’t got the lekythos,’ sighed Con.
Motti gave Patch a kick up the arse. ‘If only he hadn’t smashed it to bits.’
Jonah frowned, and Con mimed Patch picking out his eye and lobbing it like a grenade.
‘That bitch was gonna kill Tye!’ Patch complained. ‘I was aiming for her head, all right?’
‘And he saved my life,’ added Tye, smiling at him as she freed the keys. ‘Thanks for that.’ She hit the button on her key fob and the car unlocked, flashing its side lights.
‘Anyway,’ said Patch, reaching into his own trouser pocket. ‘At least we got to take some of the stupid thing away with us.’
He pulled out three large fragments of the funeral vase. A black, crumbly powder coated the pieces. Patch started brushing it away on to the filthy pavement, but Jonah stopped him. ‘I’m guessing that black stuff was inside the vase and not in your pockets?’
‘I just had these jeans washed last week,’ said Patch indignantly. ‘That stuff’s all over my eye, too. Should’ve cleaned it up better.’ He scratched the skin beneath his patch, grimacing. ‘It’s all gritty now.’
‘Would you quit with the eye stuff?’ Motti warned him.
Jonah took two of the pieces from Patch. ‘So was it the vase or the grit they were after?’
‘Got to be the vase, innit?’ Patch argued. ‘Who’d fight like that over some grit?’
‘Over two and a half thousand years, whatever was stored inside could have decomposed,’ Con reasoned. ‘This black stuff is all that’s left. We need to get it studied properly.’
Patch grinned. ‘So we didn’t come out with nothing but bruises after all.’
‘Maybe more than you think,’ Jonah realised as he held together the fragments like two pieces of a jigsaw. ‘That description of the lekythos on the list – “engraved characters, obscure” – remember? I thought they meant like cartoon characters. But look here.’
‘Could we just get inside the damned car?’ said Motti, looking round shiftily.
Jonah ignored him and held up the pieces to Tye across the car roof.
‘It’s like writing,’ she said.
‘I think it’s a cipher,’ said Jonah slowly.
‘You mean it could be the Amrita prescription?’ Con breathed.
Patch laughed. ‘And we’ve got it, they don’t!’
‘We’ve got part of it, anyway,’ said Jonah more cautiously. ‘Let me see those other pieces –’
‘Back at the hotel,’ Motti instructed. ‘Get in the car. You got to drive us back to the hotel, geek.’
‘Me?’ Jonah blanched. ‘I told you, I don’t drive!’
‘Well, I can’t see a damn thing without my glasses,’ Motti retorted. ‘And Tye can barely move that shoulder.’
‘It’s not so bad –’ she broke off, gasping as she tried to open the driver’s door.
‘It is so bad,’ Motti told her. ‘And Con won’t drive us nowhere.’
Patch was watching her as she got in the front passenger side. ‘Grand Theft Auto is my game, guys. Maybe I should try!’
‘You know you can’t judge distance good with just one eye, man,’ Motti said with surprising tenderness. ‘Geek, it’s down to you. It’s only a couple of miles.’
Tye handed Jonah the key.
He got into the driver’s seat, tried turning the ignition. The car lurched into life, strained forwards before the engine died.
‘Needs to be in neutral,’ Tye told him.
‘What’s neutral?’ said Jonah nervously.
‘That’s it, I’m walking,’ Con announced. ‘No way am I going anywhere in this car.’
Motti sighed. ‘Look, I could sit up front and work the gearshift if you’d just –’
‘And I’m not going in the back, either,’ she snapped.
‘OK, let’s not stress over this,’ said Tye wearily, shifting in the seat, trying to get more comfortable. ‘We’ll just have to hang here in the car for a while and hope the cops don’t find us. There’ll be a bus or something when it gets light.’
A tense silence settled over them.
‘This is bollocks,’ said Patch at last. ‘Five so-called talents and we can’t even drive a car between us!’
‘I know.’ Motti gave a grudging snigger. ‘We’re like, total crap!’
‘Totally.’ Patch tittered, dabbing his eye.
‘It’s not funny,’ Con said hotly. ‘Coldhardt will be expecting us to call in.’
Motti nodded seriously. ‘We could maybe tell him we were stuck in traffic.’
This time he and Patch dissolved into guffaws of laughter. Con turned away and looked grumpily out of the window.
Tye yawned. ‘Welcome to the family, Jonah.’
He nodded, half-smiled, looked down at the fragments of pottery in his hands. Pondered the characters and curlicues scratched beneath the glaze, and the secrets they were keeping.
Jonah woke with a start, a dull stiffness in his neck. He was still in the car, a whiff of stale sweat now about the expensive upholstery. The drone of the traffic that had lulled him to sleep had risen to a low roar, and the sun was a fat orange perched on the boxy horizon.
Motti lay snoring softly in the back, a grisly sight with his face and goatee caked in dried blood. Otherwise the car was empty.
Suddenly his door was opened sharply and he jumped.
It was Tye. ‘Morning!’ she said.
‘I s’pose it must be.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘You feeling better?’
‘Good enough to drive, I think,’ she said. ‘Just been stretching my legs. Took a walk with Patch and Con back down to the museum.’
‘Back to the scene of the crime?’
‘Since we’re here. Working day’s beginning. Thought I could check out the reactions of the people working there, watch their body language. See who knew more about the break-in than they were letting on.’
‘And did you?’
‘Didn’t have to. The chief janitor’s freaking out there ’cause his early-shift assistant hasn’t shown, and he’s got so much crap to clean up. Seems it’s the first day this guy’s missed in almost a year.’
‘Coincidence?’
‘Con got the address out of the janitor. It’s local, so her and Patch, they’re going to check it out.’ She looked at him meaningfully. ‘Now do you want to shift over? I need to see what I can do with this shoulder. I’ve got
a plane to fly.’
‘Stiff, is it?’ Jonah shifted into the passenger seat. ‘Need a massage?’
She looked at him warily. ‘No thanks.’
‘Then how about you give me one?’
‘I’ll give your head a massage with this gear stick if you don’t watch it.’ She got awkwardly into the car. ‘But Patch said to give you these.’ She passed him some more red-brown clay fragments. ‘Cleared out his pockets. The last bits of the vase he picked up.’
‘More parts of the puzzle. Cool.’ He took them and arranged them on his lap. While Tye slowly flexed her arm, breathing deeply and calmly, he picked up some of the black crumbs and placed them inside an old sweet wrapper. Only one of the fragments showed any more of the cipher – if it even was a cipher. The rest showed only bits of people. One showed a man’s head, thrown back in grief like he was wailing.
‘You have no idea,’ Jonah muttered.
The district was called Faggala, though Patch reckoned ‘Fag End’ might be more appropriate. It was a slum neighbourhood, with a diesel reek about it. Prayer recordings blasted out from crumbling mosques, a wake-up call to the masses, warbling through rusting loudspeakers. Panicked chickens ran about in the soiled gutters as traffic rumbled through. Somewhere in the rooftops, a cock was crowing over the din.
It was the kind of place people did their best to believe did not exist – a sick, smelly dumping ground for life’s unluckiest victims.
Patch glanced at Con, who was attracting more than a few glances in her figure-hugging black. ‘Glad we’re just visiting,’ he said.
Con strode through the decay, aloof. ‘Some nights I used to lie awake and wonder if I’d end up in a place like this.’
Patch was surprised by the confession. ‘What, when your parents died you mean?’
‘Each time I was packed up and shipped out to the next relative on the list, I was sure…Sure that this time the trick would be played,’ she shrugged, ‘and I’d be here.’
‘We are here.’ Patch stopped, checked a street sign. ‘This is the Rue Kamel Sidqi. The bloke we want is somewhere down here.’
In Arabic, Con asked a dumpy woman in a flowery shawl and djellaba if she’d heard of a man named Muneeb. She waved to a second-storey apartment a little way up the road. Patch led the way till they reached the gaping doorway, and an odour of piss and orange peel. Then he stepped aside so she could go first.
Patch followed her slowly up the creaking wooden steps, which felt like they might give way beneath him at any time. The gloomy atmosphere was oppressive. The sounds of the street were muted in here, the prayers reduced to a low, deranged jangle.
The door stood ajar. Patch watched Con tense herself and put on her biggest smile, ready to waltz in and charm the Egyptian pants off Muneeb.
But as she stepped inside, he heard her gasp. Peering over her shoulder, he saw the body on the crumpled bed.
The man lay on his back, clearly dead, his sightless eyes fixed on the cracked ceiling. His dirty white nightgown was stained almost black with blood. A wound gaped in his neck like an obscene smile.
‘You’d think he’d have called in to work and told them he was ill,’ joked Patch weakly.
Con walked further inside the filthy room. There was a note on the bed, scrawled in Arabic on a torn piece of paper. She closed the dead man’s eyes with the tips of her fingers, then picked it up.
Patch hovered in the doorway; he didn’t want to follow her in. ‘What does it say?’
‘“A warning to those who would seek to follow us,”’ she read.
‘Love from …?’
‘There’s no signature. Just a pattern of dots.’ She folded it away in her pocket. ‘Our friends from last night, I think, yes? They must have realised we’d know it was an inside job.’
‘Poor old Muneeb.’
‘He told them how to get inside,’ Con agreed. ‘This is how they repaid him.’
Patch glanced around the cramped, poky room but there was nothing else to see.
Con kicked a bedpost. ‘Once again, they have got here ahead of us.’
‘And that’s what we can expect if we run into them again,’ said Patch, drawing a finger slowly across his throat.
Chapter Ten
Jonah supposed there was nothing more to keep them in Cairo. Motti had used his flash mobile to call Coldhardt on speakerphone, told him the facts of last night’s escapades just as they’d happened – apportioning no credit and no blame. Coldhardt had endured the telling stoically – even the news that a man had been murdered in connection with the stolen lekythos. Now he wanted to inspect the pottery and the powder they’d recovered. Jonah imagined he’d soon be working on the cipher fragments, and felt a tingle of anticipation.
But they weren’t going back to Geneva. While they’d been gone, Coldhardt had relocated to his smaller base of operations in Siena – more convenient for the next stages of the operation, he said. He told them to fly there at once.
The plane had been berthed at a private airfield. Tye dropped the owner a stack of cash for the use of the facilities, for refuelling the King Air – and to keep him quiet.
‘Coldhardt always move around so much?’ asked Jonah, settling into the big, squashy chairs on board the plane.
‘Standard security,’ Motti told him. ‘Plus it’s closer to Samraj’s place in Florence, the place we’re turning over.’
‘That’s where she’s meant to keep her part of the recipe for this eternal life juice, right?’
‘Uh-huh. The Amrita.’
‘You honestly believe in that immortality stuff?’
He shrugged. ‘In this game it can be as dangerous to believe as to disbelieve, man. Me, I treat the unknown with respect. So should you.’
Jonah hadn’t expected such a considered response from Motti. He felt a little shiver snake down his back. ‘Sorry, I s’pose I –’
‘Don’t forget, Jonah, those tattooed types killed a man over this stuff. Killed him like it was nothing – maybe just to scare us away.’
‘And to think I went chasing after those people.’
Motti sniffed, dabbed at his bruised nose. ‘Something big is going down, all right.’
‘And will Coldhardt let us be scared away?’
‘What do you think?’
Jonah dwelled on the thought for a time. Then for the sake of his gooseflesh, he decided to change the subject. ‘So, anyway, Samraj’s house …?’
‘Big mansion, well-protected,’ said Motti. ‘Gonna be a real challenge, but I think I got it taped for the most part.’
Jonah raised an eyebrow. ‘Already?’
‘Sure, already!’ Motti grinned. ‘What did you think I was studying on the flight out to Cairo, geek?’
‘I thought you were working out how to crack that museum.’
‘That was, like, five minutes!’ The amusement faded from his face. ‘But this place … it’s a whole other league. Some serious security.’
Jonah looked out of his window, at the sea of cloud stretching out to the distant blue horizon. It looked so solid you could stand on it.
‘This whole thing has got a bit serious for me,’ he murmured.
Tye landed the plane at a small airfield in Siena where a car was waiting to collect them. Jonah stared out of the window at fields of wheat and poppies, at sleepy Tuscan villages nestling on hilltops beneath the faultless blue sky.
None of the others gave the surroundings more than a glance.
The base here was no less opulent than the Geneva headquarters. Coldhardt owned his own medieval castle overlooking fat sweeps of countryside. Huge palm trees flanked the front gates, towering above a line of sculpted topiaries like they were trying to peep over the castle walls.
‘Don’t people think it’s weird,’ Jonah wondered aloud, ‘people like us rolling up to a place like this?’
‘Pretty much the whole area is given over to tourist accommodation,’ said Con. ‘People think the castle is a luxury conference centre.
And the neighbours change every couple of weeks so no one gets suspicious. It’s perfect.’
Certainly the driver didn’t even blink when his ragged passengers got out and trailed into the magnificent grounds of the twelfth-century castello.
Jonah was shown to his room, an apartment in a converted farmhouse in the shade of a sprawling mulberry tree. It was like some luxury holiday home – and certainly for now he was strictly a tourist, as the others were summoned to Coldhardt without him. Presumably they would brief the big man on Jonah’s performance, such as it was, as well as handing over the bits and pieces they’d managed to collect in Cairo.
Jonah was too tired to worry or care much about it. It was weird how fast you adapted, he thought. And it was hard to worry about the future when it was so sunny and warm and the pillow on your four-poster was so soft …
He caught up with the others later that afternoon in a quiet courtyard, the centrepiece of which was a fabulous outdoor pool. Con was sprawled on a sunlounger wearing a tiny red bikini, which probably explained why Patch was lying on his front to watch her. Regardless of the blazing sunshine, Motti was wearing his usual black jeans and T-shirt, reading a magazine through dark glasses. Tye was in the water, wincing as she exercised her bad shoulder.
‘How’d it go with Coldhardt?’ he wondered.
None of them seemed eager to talk about it.
‘It went OK,’ said Tye. ‘Considering.’
‘So can we pick up the self-defence class again?’ Jonah asked brightly. ‘With your shoulder out, I might stand a chance of beating you.’
‘Yeah, right,’ drawled Motti, turning a page. ‘You couldn’t beat an egg.’
‘He took you down,’ Con reminded him. Ignoring the finger he raised in her direction, she looked at Jonah over her shades. ‘Tye’s still too sore for a workout. But I could show you some moves, yes?’
Jonah smiled nervously. ‘You could?’
She got up slowly, teeth bared in a sharp smile. ‘Sure. I’ve got some great moves.’
Motti glanced over at Patch. ‘Don’t you dare start humping that sunlounger again.’
‘You know, maybe I’ll pass,’ said Jonah, with a brief smile at Tye. ‘I think I was kicked into the pool enough times yesterday.’