by Wilbur Smith
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 knew.
‘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 Guddabi.
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 white cotton from his face, and with a shock 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.
In the horror and desolation of D
uraid’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-girl-lost 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.
As soon as she was alone in her single room she phoned British Airways reservations. There was a flight to Heathrow the following morning at ten o’clock. She booked a one-way economy seat and gave them the number of her Mastercard.
It was after six o’clock by then, but the time difference between Egypt and the UK meant that it would still be office hours there. She looked up the number in her notebook. Leeds University was where she had completed her studies. Her call was answered on the third ring.
‘Archaeology Department. Professor Dixon’s office,’ said a prim English school-marm voice.
‘Is that you, Miss Higgins?’
‘Yes, it is. To whom am I speaking?’
‘It’s Royan. Royan Al Simma, who used to be Royan Said.’
‘Royan! We haven’t heard from you for an absolute age. How are you?’
They chatted for a short while, but Royan was aware of the cost of the call. ‘Is the Prof in?’ she cut it short.
Professor Percival Dixon was over seventy and should have retired years ago. ‘Royan, is it really you? My favourite student.’ She smiled. Even at his age he was still the randy old goat. All the pretty ones were his favourite students.
‘This is an international call, Prof. I just want to know if the offer is still open.’
‘My goodness, I thought you said that you couldn’t fit us in, what?’
‘Change of circumstances. I’ll tell you about it when I see you, if I see you.’
‘Of course, we’d love to have you come and talk to us. When can you manage to get away?’
‘I’ll be in England tomorrow.’
‘My goodness, that’s a bit sudden. Don’t know if we can arrange it that quickly.’
‘I will be staying with my mother near York. Put me back to Miss Higgins and I will give her the telephone number.’ He was one of the most brilliant men she knew, but she didn’t trust him to write down a telephone number correctly. ‘I’ll call you in a few days’ time.’
She hung up and lay back on the bed. She was exhausted and her arm was still hurting, but she tried to lay her plans to cover all eventualities.
Two months ago Prof Dixon had invited her to lecture on the discovery and excavation of the tomb of Queen Lostris, and the discovery of the scrolls. It was that book, of course, and more especially the footnote at the end of it, that had alerted him. Its publication had caused a great deal of interest. They had received enquiries from Egyptologists, both amateur and professional, all around the world, some from as far afield as Tokyo and Nairobi, all of them questioning the authenticity of the novel and the factual basis behind it.
At the time she had opposed letting a writer of fiction have access to the transcriptions, especially as they had not been completed. She felt that the whole thing had reduced what should have been an important and serious academic subject to the level of popular entertainment, rather like what Spielberg had done to palaeontology with his park full of dinosaurs.
In the end her voice had been over-ruled. Even Duraid had sided against her. It had been the money, of course. The department was always short of funds to conduct its less spectacular work. When it came to some grandiose scheme like moving the entire Temple of Abu Simbel to a new site above the flood waters of the Aswan High Dam, then the nations of the world had poured in tens of millions of dollars. However, the day-to-day operational expenses of the department attracted no such support.
Their half share of the royalties from River God, for that was the book’s title, had financed almost a year of research and exploration, but that was not enough to allay Royan’s personal misgivings. The author had taken too many liberties with the facts contained in the scrolls, and had embroidered historical characters with personalities and foibles for which there was not the least evidence. In particular she felt he had portrayed Taita, the ancient scribe, as a braggart and a vainglorious poseur. She resented that.
In fairness she was forced to concede that the author’s brief had been to make the facts as palatable and readable as possible to a wide lay public, and she reluctantly agreed that he had succeeded in doing so. However, all her scientific training revolted against such a popularization of something so unique and wonderful.
But she sighed and put these thoughts out of her head. The damage was done, and thinking about it only served to irritate her.
She turned her thoughts to more pressing problems. If she was to do the lecture that the Prof had invited her to deliver, then she would need her slides and these were still at her office in the museum. While she was still working out the best way to get hold of them without fetching them in person, exhaustion overtook her and she fell asleep, still fully clothed, on top of the bed.
In the end the solution to her problem was simplicity itself. She merely phoned the administration office and arranged for them to collect the box of slides from her office and send it out to the airport in a taxi with one of the secretaries.
When the secretary handed them over to her at the British Airways check-in desk, he told her, ‘The police were at the museum when we opened this morning. They wanted to speak to you, Doctor.’
Obviously they had traced the registration of the wrecked Renault. She was pleased that she had her British passport. If she had tried to leave the country with her Egyptian papers she might have run into delays: the police would probably have placed a restriction order on all passport control points. As it was, she passed through the checkpoint with no difficulty and, once she was in the final departure lounge, she went to the news-stand and studied the array of newspapers.
All the local newspapers carried the story of the bombing of her car, and most of them had resurrected the story of Duraid’s murder and linked the two events. One of them hinted at fundamentalist religious involvement. El Arab had a front-page photograph of herself and Duraid, which had been taken the previous mont
h at a reception for a group of visiting French tour operators.
It gave her a pang to see the photograph of her husband looking so handsome and distinguished, with herself on his arm smiling up at him. She purchased copies of all the papers and took them on board the British Airways flight.
During the flight she passed the time by writing down in her notebook everything she could remember from what Duraid had told her of the man that she was going to find. She headed the page: ‘Sir Nicholas Quenton-Harper (Bart).’ Duraid had told her that Nicholas’s great-grandfather had been awarded the title of baronet for his work as a career officer in the British colonial service. For three generations the family had maintained the strongest of ties with Africa, and especially with the British colonies and spheres of influence in North Africa: Egypt and the Sudan, Uganda and Kenya.
According to Duraid, Sir Nicholas himself had served in Africa and the Gulf States with the British army. He was a fluent Arabic and Swahili speaker and a noted amateur archaeologist and zoologist. Like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, he had made numerous expeditions to North Africa to collect specimens and to explore the more remote regions. He had written a number of articles for various scientific journals and had even lectured at the Royal Geographical Society.
When his elder brother died childless, Sir Nicholas had inherited the title and the family estate at Quenton Park. He had resigned from the army to run the estate, but more especially to supervise the family museum that had been started in 1885 by his great-grandfather, the first baronet. It housed one of the largest collections of African fauna in private hands, and its ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern collection of artefacts was equally famous.