by Alan Baxter
Chapter 3
Lily Black’s apartment, Harrow on the Hill, London
It was late in the afternoon by the time Crowley and Rose arrived at Lily’s apartment building. Crowley liked Harrow on the Hill, a suburb in the northwest of London. Lots of narrow streets, green hedges and trees, tightly packed pale brown brick buildings with dark gray slate roofs. A number of shops they had passed on the high street had been whitewashed, classic old London suburbia. He could have afforded it, not on his teacher’s salary, but with the other money. However, it didn’t seem the sort of place one went to live a lonely bachelor’s life.
“Nice spot,” Crowley said.
Rose nodded, lips pursed. “Lily bought this place a few years ago. No idea how she afforded it, but like I said, I don’t know much about her life. I wish I did, now more than ever.”
They entered the building and took a double flight of stairs up to the second story. Rose pointed. “That’s her place. You really going to break in?”
Crowley laughed softly. “Don’t be so shocked, Miss Black. When we first met I told you about how I demobbed from the army, young and stupid, and ran with a few London hoodlums. Nearly ended up in prison.”
“Oh yeah, you did tell me that.”
“So let’s just say I picked up some useful skills back in those days.” He crouched by the door, used his body to mask his furtive activity with a highly illegal lock-pick kit. He enjoyed Rose’s closeness as she stood behind, watching over his shoulder. She regularly glanced back to ensure they remained alone in the hallway.
A sharp click and Crowley stood. “And there it is.” He flashed a grin back over his shoulder and pushed Lily’s door open. Rose followed him in and shut the door behind them.
He paused in the spacious lounge room, scanning the décor. A number of Egyptian themed artworks adorned the walls, a few vases and other ornaments clearly resonant of the pyramids, mummies and sarcophagi. A mirror hung above the mantelpiece, framed in alternating blue and gold bands, the top a spreading pair of wings in three shades of blue. Above the wings a cobra emerging from each side of a large red ball.
“That’s a little…” Crowley wasn’t sure how to describe it.
“Ostentatious? Pretentious?” Rose suggested.
“Yeah. That. Both of those.”
“I feel weird, breaking in here,” Rose said. “We were never welcome, never invited.”
“Sure, but if we’re going to find your sister, this is the only lead we have, right?” Crowley pointed to a wall of bookshelves. “Lots of Egyptology titles here, and lots of books on the occult and secret societies.”
Rose joined him. “No surprise for someone doing a doctorate in archeology, I suppose.” She ran a finger along a shelf of hardback spines.
“Guess not.”
Crowley gestured towards a glass-topped table against one wall, supported by two proud leopards coated in gold leaf. Beside it sat a large rosewood chest inlaid with gold and turquoise tiles. “These things look expensive. Like genuine artifacts. Or at least, very valuable modern recreations.”
Rose frowned. “What are you implying?”
“Well, I’m just surprised a PhD student can afford this stuff, not to mention this apartment.”
“Yes, but like I said, I have no idea what she did before she went back to do her doctorate,” Rose said. “She could have made a fortune on the stock exchange for all I know.”
Crowley walked towards a desk in one corner. “Or maybe they’re gifts from someone. A man, perhaps?”
Rose made a non-committal sound. “No idea.”
Crowley moved behind the desk and opened a laptop lying there. He hit the power button and waited while it booted up only to be faced with a password. “Well, that’s irritating, but not unexpected. You got that mail the neighbor gave you?”
Rose reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and pulled out a wad of a dozen or so envelopes. “Not much use, I don’t think.”
Crowley shuffled through the white and brown windowed packets. “No personal correspondence.”
Rose laughed. “Like letters? How old are you? Fifty? No one writes letters anymore.”
Crowley couldn’t help laughing along. “Yeah, I can’t remember the last time I wrote one. Probably not since my Gran died. Just hopeful, I guess.” He turned over the last one and saw it was a credit card bill. “But this might be useful.”
He slit the envelope open, pulled the bill out, and scanned the transactions. “I think I know where your sister has gone.”
“Just like that?” Rose hurried to his side, looked at where he pointed to a line from a travel agent.
“She bought a plane ticket to Cairo.”
Rose looked up from the bill to Crowley. “That doesn’t explain why she isn’t responding to her messages, though. She often makes me wait a day or two when I try to start a conversation, but she always replies. Even if she’s not using her phone overseas, she checks email regularly, and I’ve sent a dozen emails in the past week alone.”
Crowley rubbed a hand back over his close-cropped dark hair. He wasn’t sure about any of this. “Let’s keep poking around.”
In the immaculately tidy bedroom, he found a small safe tucked into one side of the wardrobe. “Check this out,” he called out.
Rose came through from the kitchen, looked into the dim cupboard. “Hmm. Now that’s more interesting.”
“It needs a four-digit code, though. Locks I can pick, but this has millions of possible combinations. Beyond my skills.”
“Nineteen thirty-five,” Rose said, without hesitation. “Our grandfather’s year of birth. No one in the world meant more to her than he did. She was devastated when he died.”
“Huh.” Crowley punched in the year and the safe door popped open. He shared a smile with Rose. “First bit of luck we’ve had!”
He took out the small pile of documents from the top shelf of the safe and moved back into the light of the bedroom. A frown creased his brow. “Well, this only raises more questions.”
“What is it?”
Crowley held up Lily’s passport for Rose to see. “Not only her passport, but her other ID, driver’s license, credit cards.”
“How could she have left the country without those?” Rose asked.
Crowley held up another envelope, clearly showing the logo and name of the HM Passport Office. “This might explain it. The address is this apartment, but it’s not for Lily Black.”
“Who then?”
“You ever heard of Iris Brown?”
Chapter 4
Lily Black’s apartment, Harrow on the Hill, London
Crowley agreed with Rose when she suggested that Iris Brown was a pretty lame fake name.
“It’s keeping the family theme, though,” Rose said. “Our English names have always been flowers since my paternal grandmother, and she was Iris. So that’s where she picked it from, I expect.”
“That’s why you guys are Rose and Lily.”
“And my dad was called Rowan. It’s been that way for generations on that side of the family. The boys are trees and the girls are flowers. My mother’s English name was Jasmine; she adopted that when she met my dad.”
“So you have a Chinese name as well?”
Rose smiled. “Of course. Most Chinese immigrants take on a western name, but we all have Chinese names too. Well, maybe not all, but most.”
Crowley tilted his head, considering that. “I can’t imagine you as anything but Rose.”
“Not surprising.” Rose wore a half-smile, clearly enjoying his discomfort at this cultural avenue he had never been down before.
“So, er… what’s your Chinese name?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you one day. Maybe not.”
Crowley laughed, shook his head. “You’re incorrigible.” He turned back to the safe, frustrated despite the amusement. He wanted to know everything about Rose and wondered how much more there might be to surprise him like this. The second shelf of the safe
had more documents and he began shuffling through them.
“Lots of photocopies here of official forms. Applications for a driver’s license, stuff like that.” With a grin of triumph he held up a collection of small envelopes and note paper, all handwritten. “Aha! People do still write letters.”
Rose rolled her eyes. “If they’re love letters or something, let’s not pry any more than necessary.”
“Yeah, that stuff should stay private. But it might give us a clue as to where she’s gone if there’s a lover involved.”
“Let me see them.”
Rose spent several moments reading through the opening paragraphs of the half-dozen or so letters, her brow furrowed in concentration. Crowley stayed on his knees in front of the safe, looking up at her. He’d missed the sight of her more than he cared to admit.
“Mostly talking about organizing the false documents,” Rose said eventually. “It’s all addressed to Iris and in a kind of code, but given we know she has another identity, it’s pretty clear.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t burn those then,” Crowley said.
“Unless she’s keeping them in case of trouble. You know, perhaps to use against whoever this John Smith is who’s signed off on them all.”
“You think she’s that devious?”
Rose handed the letters back. “Lily is really smart and cunning, Jake. She ran rings around me when we were kids, always getting me into trouble. I never saw through her clever schemes. Of course, we were kids, so they weren’t that clever, in hindsight. But for a mind that young? Yes, she was devious. If she took the same kind of thinking into adulthood, I wouldn’t put anything past her. And we know she’s up to something, right? Why else would she have a fake ID?”
“Yeah, she must be doing something weird,” Crowley agreed. He held up a few credit card statements from the bottom of the safe. “And these are all in the name of Iris Brown, going back several months. She’s obviously had this other ID for a while.”
“But what else does that tell us? Does it help us find her?”
Crowley used his phone to snap a photo of one of the bills, then put everything back in the safe and closed the door. He stood up, looked around the neat bedroom. “Not really, no.”
“Unless we use the credit card account to track her movements?” Rose said.
“You think it’s maybe time to call up old friend Cameron Cray, huh?”
“He’s your army intel, buddy, so you tell me,” Rose said. “He really helped us with all that Landvik stuff, so it might be worth a call.”
Crowley saw desperation in her eyes. He couldn’t blame her. But still… “We don’t have any hard evidence to show that Lily is in trouble, though. I agree the false identity is odd for an ordinary grad student, but perhaps she’s perfectly happy and doing these things for a good reason.”
“But she’s still missing!”
“I know. But maybe that’s what she wants. Missing doesn’t necessarily mean she’s in trouble.”
Rose let out an explosive breath of frustration. “I get that, sure. And I hardly even know my sister, rarely even talk to her. But something is up. I can just feel it. Can you trust me on this?”
“Sure, okay. But let’s look around more first.”
They moved out into the main lounge of the apartment again. Lots of other artifacts besides those Crowley had originally noticed adorned the walls and shelves. Taken individually, several looked to hold significant value. Together, the collection seemed well beyond the means of any regular person, let alone a grad student. As Rose had said, they had no way to know how much wealth Lily might possess, but it was an incongruous décor nonetheless.
“Is it possible Lily was involved in black market antiquities?” he asked.
Anger flashed in Rose’s eyes, but quickly faded. She sighed. “I don’t want to think that of her, but I suppose anything is possible.” She glanced around the room, lips pressed together. “I can understand why you ask. But don’t you think Lily would live in a nicer flat if that were the case?”
Crowley shrugged. “I don’t know. This isn’t a cheap area, but it may not be her only property. If she has more than one identity…”
Rose’s eyebrows lifted as she considered that. “A whole new set of possibilities opens up if we follow that line of thinking. But you know what, even if that’s all this is, Lily involved with the black market, that’s reason enough for me to want to find her. Who knows what kind of criminal she might have run afoul of in some shady deal.”
Crowley nodded, realizing the immediate future was being laid out before him. His teaching semester was almost over and if he declared a personal emergency he could get a substitute to cover exams for him. He couldn’t deny he felt protective of Rose after what they’d been through together. And he really wanted to be close to her again, to understand why she cut off contact if nothing else.
“You can get leave from the museum to look into this?” he asked her.
“I have to, don’t I? Will you take time off to help me? Can you?”
“I can.” Crowley smiled. “So maybe let’s start by giving Cameron a call and see what we can learn.”
Chapter 5
Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo, Egypt
Crowley and Rose stood outside the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, looking up at the large white arched entrance surrounded by deep ochre walls. Matching arched windows, running down to ground level, marched off to the left and right. Flags fluttered far above in the hot breeze. The place was a little rundown, but a new museum was under construction, the activity loud and feverish. A hot, dry breeze pulled at Crowley’s clothes, carrying with it the scent of traffic and metal, and the noise of the busy city.
A tour of this place was one of the last things on “Iris Brown’s” credit card, as hacked by Crowley’s old army buddy, Cameron Cray, who still worked the intel game, though for private enterprise as much as the Defense Force these days. Cameron’s contacts and levels of access were high, though Crowley had no idea how the man managed his activities. But that was Cameron’s business. He had given Crowley some grief about getting involved in new shenanigans so soon after the last adventures.
His work had led them to the Cairo Museum, on this hot, dry day.
“Let’s see what we can learn,” Crowley said, and approached the entrance.
Rose put a hand on his arm, stopping him. “Let me go first. My museum contacts can circumvent the usual issues.” She approached the entrance, had a quiet conversation with someone behind the glass, then smiled and waved Crowley in.
Crowley gave the official-looking man behind the desk a smile as he passed, but the man simply glowered from beneath thick, black brows. “I don’t think he approves of your access.”
Rose shrugged. “I suspect he doesn’t approve of my gender, but there’s nothing he can do about etiquette between museum employees. Dr. Phelps, my boss at the Natural History Museum, remember him?”
“I do.”
Rose winked. “He’s been pulling strings for me again, so we get to wander uninhibited.” She flashed a pass, laminated, and hung it from her neck by an attached lanyard.
They went into the large, cool interior of the main lobby and looked around. Pale stone floor stretched out before them, enormous arches along both sides of the giant space leading off to other exhibition spaces.
“There are two main floors,” Rose said. “Ground and first. Down here there’s a huge collection of papyrus and coins from the ancient world. Most of the papyrus is in broken fragments, sadly, decayed over the last two thousand years. But lots of different languages are in evidence: Greek, Latin, Arabic, ancient Egyptian.” As with her lectures in the Natural History Museum where she worked, she was perfectly at home in this place, so similar but so different, thousands of miles from home. He grinned. What she called her museum brain, her incredible recall of facts and figures, her easy nature with sharing it all, had kicked in.
“I’ve always wanted to come here,
” she said, “though I wish the circumstances were different.” They passed a large glass cabinet of coins and she was instantly distracted. “The coins here are mostly gold, silver, and bronze, but not only Egyptian. Look there, ancient Greek, Roman. Those are old Islamic currency.” She glanced up at him. “This is your field, actually. Historians have done great research of the history of Ancient Egyptian trade methods from the study of these.”
“I read recently about a new discovery relating to Islamic trade in the region. I’ll have to look it up again, now it has greater significance. Maybe I’ll run a unit on this stuff next term.”
Rose made a soft sound of enchantment as they approached a display of large, intricately decorated sarcophagi. “These are artifacts from the New Kingdom period, between 1550 and 1069 BCE. Can you imagine? Three and a half thousand years old! Upstairs they have artifacts from the last two great dynasties of Egypt. They’ve got stuff from the tombs of Thutmosis III, Thutmosis IV, Amenophis II, Hatshepsut, artifacts from the Valley of the Kings. They have material from the tombs of Tutankhamun and Psusennes I, which were originally found intact, not looted or damaged at all. We have to go upstairs! They have two special rooms with New Kingdom mummies, kings and their royal family members.”
Her excitement was palpable, but Crowley held up a hand. “Let’s take our time. Remember, we’re here to find Lily first and foremost, right?”
Rose’s face fell. “Of course. But I can’t help getting carried away in a place like this.”
“Me too, but let’s go slowly. Ask around a bit.”
Crowley approached a security guard leaning laconically against the upright of one arched entrance halfway down the large main room. The man looked at Crowley disdainfully as he approached.
Crowley swallowed his annoyance at the guard’s attitude and held up a picture of Lily they had taken from her apartment. “We’re looking for a missing person,” he said. “This woman. Have you seen her?”