The Hidden Oasis (39 page)

In his wood-panelled office Girgis replaced the telephone receiver and sat forward, clasping his hands on top of his desk.

‘Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen. I suspect we’re in for a long night.’

In front of him Boutros Salah, Ahmed Usman and Mohammed Kasri were sitting in high-backed leather armchairs. Salah cradled a balloon of brandy, Usman and Kasri sipped tea.

‘That’s it?’ wheezed Salah in his throaty, cigarette-scoured voice. ‘We sit and wait?’

‘That’s it,’ replied Girgis. ‘I’m assuming the helicopters are fuelled? The equipment ready to load?’

Salah nodded.

‘Then there’s nothing else we can do.’

‘And if they’re giving us the run-around?’

‘Then we allow the twins to do what they do best,’ said Girgis, nodding towards one of the closed-circuit televisions banked up along the side wall. The two brothers could be seen playing snooker in a downstairs room.

‘I don’t like it,’ muttered Salah. ‘I don’t like it, Romani. They could just take off.’

‘You have any better suggestions?’

Salah grumbled, taking a swig of his brandy and a draw on the cigarette he held in his other hand.

‘Then we wait,’ said Girgis, leaning back and folding his arms. ‘We sit and wait.’

Ninety minutes earlier, following Brodie and the girl’s escape from Manshiet Nasser, he had been apoplectic – screaming and shouting, scratching at himself as though thousands of tiny insects were scurrying across his skin. Now he was calm, collected, focused – unrecognizable. It was the aspect of his character those around him found the most disconcerting: the way volcanic rage would suddenly segue into sober composure before equally suddenly switching back the other way. It made him impossible to predict, to know how to deal with. Left his employees constantly wrong-footed. Which is exactly how Girgis liked it.

A servant brought more tea and the four men once again ran through the logistical details, confirming that all the elements of the operation were ready to slot into place if and when any new information emerged. After which Kasri and Usman drifted away – Kasri into the library to work on his laptop, Usman to amuse himself with one of the girls Girgis always kept on tap to service guests and associates – leaving Girgis and Salah alone in the study.

‘I still don’t like it,’ grumbled Salah, stubbing out one
cigarette and immediately firing up another with the lighter that hung from a chain around his neck. ‘It’s leaving too much to chance.’

Girgis smiled. They went back a long way, he and Boutros. Kasri had been with him for twenty years, Usman a mere seventeen. Salah, on the other hand, had been there right at the very beginning, the two of them having grown up together in the same Manshiet Nasser tenement. There at the beginning, and still here now, his closest confidant, the one person in the world he would consider calling a friend, although if it came to it he wouldn’t think twice about having his throat cut. No room for sentiment in this business.

‘It’s all under control, Boutros,’ he said. ‘If Brodie comes up with anything we’ll be the first to know.’

‘He took out four of our people, for fuck’s sake. Nobody does that. Nobody! We should be cutting the bastard’s eyes out, not sitting here tapping our feet.’

Girgis gave another smile. Coming out from behind his desk he clapped his colleague on the shoulder.

‘Trust me, Boutros, we’ll have his eyes, his fingers and his balls as well. And the girl’s eyes too, for good measure. But not until we’ve found the oasis. At the moment that’s all that matters. Now how about a game of backgammon?’

For a moment Salah continued to grumble, before he too broke into a smile.

‘Just like old times,’ he said.

‘Just like old times,’ echoed Girgis, sitting down in one of the leather chairs and sliding a marquetry box from beneath the coffee table between them.

‘Remember that board we used to play on when we were kids?’ said Salah, helping him arrange the pieces. ‘The one old Father Francis gave us.’

‘Whatever happened to Father Francis?’ asked Girgis, laying out his counters.

‘For fuck’s sake, Romani! We had to waste him, don’t you remember? After he found out about the dope, said he was going to report us.’

‘Of course, of course. Silly man.’

They finished setting up. Dropping the dice into the leather shaker, Girgis threw. Double-six. He chuckled. Looked like it was going to be his lucky night.

It was 8.30 p.m. when Flin and Freya left the apartment. Paranoid that Girgis might somehow have tracked them, Flin drove around for ten minutes making sudden sharp turns to left and right, glancing constantly in the rearview mirror to make sure they weren’t being tailed. Eventually, after a lot of toing and froing, they came back onto the same Autoroute they had travelled along earlier in the taxi – or at least it looked the same to Freya, she couldn’t be sure. They continued for another couple of minutes before suddenly, to Freya’s horror, the Englishman yanked the steering wheel hard to the left.

‘What are you doing!’ she screamed, clutching the dashboard as they sliced through a gap in the central reservation and into the opposing lanes of traffic, headlights streaking towards them like tracer fire. There was a cacophony of outraged hooting as cars and pick-up trucks swerved out of
their path, Flin grimacing as he threaded the Jeep through the oncoming rush of vehicles and the wrong way down a slip road. They skidded across another busy highway – more rushing headlights and outraged beeping – and over a strip of manicured grass back into a stream of traffic that was moving in the same direction as they were. Flin slowed and took them into the inside lane, looking in the rearview mirror.

‘Sorry,’ he said, throwing Freya an apologetic glance. ‘I just needed to be sure.’

She didn’t reply, afraid that if she opened her mouth she would be sick. Hanging off a three-hundred-metre rock face would never seem quite so daring again.

They made their way back into central Cairo and crossed the Nile, picking up a broad, traffic-clogged avenue on the other side. Finally, after numerous jams and hold-ups, they drove out past the Pyramids and the city dropped away behind them, housing projects and apartment blocks giving way to empty sand and scrub, bright lights and neon to a monochrome expanse of moonlit desert. Everything became very quiet and very still, the only sounds the soft purr of the engine and the hiss of the wheels on tarmac. A sign drifted past announcing it was 213 kilometres to Alexandria. They picked up speed.

‘You might want to put on some music,’ said Flin, tapping a CD rack beneath the Jeep’s stereo. ‘We’ve still got a way to go.’

Freya flicked through the rack’s contents, passing on the various hymn and sermon compilations – of which there seemed to be quite a number – before settling on Bob
Dylan’s
Slow Train Coming.
She slotted the disc into the system, a low, slow pulse of guitar and bass echoing from the speakers, playing in the opening track.

‘So who is this Hassan Fadawi?’ she asked, settling back and putting her feet up on the dashboard. A staggered string of tail-lights stretched off into the distance ahead of them – small red punctures in the mercury nightscape.

‘Like I told you at the museum, he’s the guy who found the Imti-Khentika papyrus,’ Flin replied, flicking the indicator and pulling out around a battered pick-up truck. ‘The greatest archaeologist this country’s ever produced. A living legend.’

‘A friend of yours?’

Flin’s hands seemed to clench a little tighter around the steering wheel.

‘Former friend would be more accurate,’ he said after a pause, a tension in his voice, as though the subject pained him. ‘Now he wants to cut off my balls and kill me. With some justification, to be fair.’

Freya looked across at him, raising her eyebrows, inviting him to tell her more. He didn’t, not immediately, just indicated again, this time overtaking a service taxi with a crush of black-robed women in the back. The lugubrious nasal grating of Dylan’s voice filled the Cherokee’s interior. Giant billboards flashed by, adverts for the Bank of Alexandria, Pharaonic Insurance, Chertex Jeans, Osram Light Bulbs looming momentarily in the car’s headlights before disappearing again. She was beginning to think the conversation was closed when, with a sigh, Flin reached out and turned down the music.

‘To date I’ve only made two really catastrophic mistakes
in my life,’ he said. ‘Three if you count sleeping with my housemaster’s wife at school. And of those mistakes the most recent was getting Hassan Fadawi banged up in prison.’

He sat back from the wheel and stretched out his arms, wincing slightly. Whether from distaste at the memory or because his lacerated forearm was hurting, Freya couldn’t tell. A lorry hurtled past in the opposite direction, its buffeting slipstream causing the Cherokee to veer and judder. There was another pause.

‘We met when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge,’ he said eventually, his eyes fixed on the road ahead, his voice low. ‘Ironically, at almost exactly the same time Girgis’s uranium consignment was plummeting into the Hidden Oasis. Hassan was at the university on a year’s visiting fellowship and we got to know each other. He took me under his wing, became a sort of mentor figure – taught me everything I know about field archaeology. Given the age difference it was never really a relationship of equals, and he could be a difficult bastard when he wanted, but you forgave him because he was just such a brilliant scholar. I would never have finished my Ph.D. without his help. And when my MI6 career went tits-up it was Hassan who swung me the lecturing job at the American University, persuaded the Supreme Council of Antiquities to grant me an excavation concession out in the Gilf. He saved my career, basically.’

‘So why did you get him sent to prison?’

Flin shot her an annoyed looked.

‘Well I certainly didn’t do it intentionally. It was more a sort of …’

He waved a hand, trying to find the right word. He
couldn’t come up with it and instead reached over and lowered the electric side window a few centimetres, his hair flicking and flipping in the breeze.

‘It happened three years ago,’ he went on. ‘I was working with Hassan on one of his projects down at Abydos, re-excavating around the Khasekhemwy funerary enclosure – I won’t bore you with details. About halfway through the season he was asked to help with some conservation work in the Temple of Seti I, the main monument at Abydos. The Supreme Council needed a report on the condition of the temple’s internal sanctuaries, Hassan was already on site, he was experienced in that sort of thing …’

He broke off, slowing and tooting as a pair of shaggy-haired camels appeared in the Cherokee’s headlights, wandering directly across the highway. Startled, the animals swung and galloped back into the desert.

‘To cut a long and depressing story short,’ Flin resumed once they were past, ‘Hassan went off to work in the Seti temple and I took over the day-to-day running of the Khasekhemwy dig. Almost immediately I started noticing that objects were going missing from our finds magazine – the secure storage hut where we kept everything we discovered on site. I alerted our site inspector, he put a watch on the magazine, and four nights later they caught someone rummaging around inside, pocketing objects.’

Freya shifted in her seat so she could look directly at him.

‘Fadawi?’ she asked.

Flin nodded, the glow of dashboard lights illuminating his face with a ghostly sheen.

‘Hassan claimed he was just taking the objects away to study,’ he said. ‘That he was always going to bring them
back. But when they searched his lodgings they found a load of other things hidden in his bags and it just escalated from there. Seemed he’d been stealing stuff for decades, from every site he’d ever worked on. Hundreds of the bloody things, thousands of them. Even had some Tutankhamun pieces he’d filched when he was working in the Cairo museum.’

He shook his head, gripping the wheel as another lorry thundered past on its way back to Cairo, its headlights on full beam, briefly dazzling them. Away to their right what looked like an army camp appeared: row upon row of floodlit huts surrounded by barbed wire and with a line of sand-coloured tanks parked beside the main gate, their cannons levelled menacingly at the road.