The Men Behind (10 page)

Owen took the opportunity to slip away. He had qualms about leaving Roper with Plumley. Christ knows what might be happening.

In fact they were talking quietly by the bar. There was already a row of empty glasses in front of Roper and Plumley was looking rather green. He had switched to orange juice; too late.

He looked up with relief as Owen came across.

“Got to go!” he whispered. “Just for one moment.”

He rushed off in the direction of the toilets.

“Funny little bugger,” said Roper, looking after him. “Knows his job, though.”

“I gather you’ve just got back from Gebel Zabarrah.”

“Yeah. Dry place, the desert.”

The bartender added a fresh whisky soda to the row.

Obviously Roper and he had come to some arrangement, for as Roper was finishing one glass another appeared. There was no gap between them.

“How are the emeralds?”

“All right. Don’t know that we’re going to be interested, though. It’s a bit small for us.”

“That’s the trouble with Egypt,” said Owen. “There’s lots of stuff here—emeralds, gold, copper, iron, lead, coal—but it’s all in small amounts.”

“It wasn’t small originally,” said Roper, “but it’s all been worked.”

“Yes,” said Owen. “The Pharaohs, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, they’ve all had a go. There’s not much left now.”

“Of course,” said Roper, “we can go deeper than they could.”

“You think there might be more lower down?”

“Not in emeralds.”

Plumley reappeared, washed out.

“You go easy, son,” Roper advised him. “We’ve got to be out early tomorrow morning.”

Plumley eyed the row of glasses but said nothing. “Don’t worry about me,” said Roper. “It’s just replacing what I’ve lost in sweat.”

“Where are you going?” asked Owen.

“Tomorrow? Down into Minya Province.”

“I thought there was nothing there but salt?”

“Oh no,” said Plumley. “There’s more than that. There’s a lot more than that.”

“Really?”

Roper looked at his watch. “Wasn’t that the bell?” he said. “Time we were back in our seats, old son.”

He moved purposefully away. Owen knew he had been cut short. He shrugged his shoulders. It wasn’t any of his business.

There was a crowd in the doorway and he caught up with Roper and Plumley as they went out. Something came into his mind.

“If you’re going down to Minya,” he said, “watch out for the camels. The Thieves’ Road runs through there and camels have a way of disappearing.”

“I’ll do that,” said Roper. “But I wouldn’t worry, if I were you. I’ve met this kind of thing before. It’s the other people who’ll have to look out—if they don’t want a hole in their head.”

Zeinab didn’t say anything until they got back to their seats. Then she said: “Did you find her?”

“Who?”

“That girl.”

“What girl?”

“The one that man said you were with.”

“I wasn’t looking for her. Anyway, I’d hardly find her in a place like this.”

“Why not?”

“She’s a gypsy girl.”

“Ah, you like the gypsy girls?”

“Not particularly. Look, what is this? I met this girl once, when I was taking Roper to that bloody night club. She came up to our table.”

“What was she doing there, dancing?”

“Picking pockets.”

“Picking pockets?” said Zeinab as if she could hardly believe her ears.

“Yes, and—”

“I know what she was doing there,” said Zeinab, “and it certainly wasn’t picking pockets.”

When Owen received Georgiades’s message it was almost noon and as he walked through the streets the stalls were already closing down. He had chosen to go through the narrow side streets where he could twist and turn. Since his experience on the Masr el Atika he had not been too keen to offer much of a target to potential followers.

Of course in the crowded bazaars or side streets it would be easy for anyone to walk right up to him and shoot him in the back. Somehow, though, he felt less exposed than in the broader streets of the more well-to-do areas.

In the streets like the Masr el Atika you could be shot at a distance. All they had to do was step out of a doorway. Here, where it was more crowded, they would have to come right up to you and he thought he would stand a better chance of seeing them.

It was, however, unpleasant to have to think about such things. It spoiled the walk. Usually there was nothing he liked better than a pretext to wander through the streets of the Old City, smelling its smells, seeing its oddities, catching its conversations. Now it was different.

And if it was different for him, how would it be for other people? How long would it be possible to pretend that things were normal?

There would come a point when the pretense could no longer be maintained. That point, of course, was when he would have to swallow his pride and call in the Army.

He didn’t want to do that; not just because he didn’t like swallowing his own words, but because, or so he told himself, it was the wrong way. Call in the Army, put soldiers everywhere, and everyone would be affected. No one would be able to avoid being reminded that the British were an occupying power. They would be having their noses rubbed in it.

Bringing in the Army was the surest way to stir up massive resistance. You’d have problems right across the board rather than limited, as they still fortunately were at present.

And would you be any nearer catching the ones you really did want to catch? Would the Army be any better at it than he was? Owen didn’t think so. The attacks would surely continue, even increase. The Army would swipe out blindly in all directions, antagonizing even those at present moderately disposed to it. People would resist, the Army wouldn’t be able to tell their resistance from genuine terrorist attacks, would react heavily and everything would get worse.

No, the only thing was to be selective. You had to hit the ones you wanted to hit and take care not to antagonize the population as a whole. Keep things normal, was Owen’s instinct. Normality was his greatest ally, because, despite what politicians said, most people just wanted to get on with their daily lives. Genuine terrorists were few and far between.

Which was all very well, but at the moment so far from things being normal he was scared of his own shadow, and far from hitting those responsible, he had not yet succeeded in hitting anybody.

He found Georgiades sitting down, which he had expected, but on the pile of rubble from the bombed café, which he had not expected. With Georgiades on the rubble were several workmen, who looked as if they might have been working. Part of the rubble was in the shade, however, and offered an opportunity too tempting to be resisted.

“Ah!” said Georgiades, as if he had only been waiting for Owen to arrive before he burst into action. He scrambled down off the heap and pulled something out from under a piece of sacking.

Even Owen could see at once what it was: a length of piping, battered and mangled by some enormous force.

“When you know what you’re looking for,” said Georgiades, “it’s not too difficult.”

Owen turned it over in his mind.

“It’s the same,” he said.

Georgiades nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “When I saw the other one I just wondered.”

“How long did it take you to find it?”

“Two days.”

“Anything else alongside it?”

“If there was, it’s been moved. Since the blast, I mean. The whole pile’s been shifted.” He hesitated. “If you wanted,” he said, “we could go through it again. We haven’t really done it properly.”

“Is there any point? All we’d find is glass.”

“There’s some of that inside.” Georgiades showed him. “There’s some in one of the bodies, too.”

Georgiades sat down on the rubble again. Owen put the pipe back in the sacking and then sat down beside him.

“Send it to the Lab,” he said. “That’s where the other one is. They’ll be able to do tests on it and establish whether the acids are the same.”

“It’s the same principle, anyway,” said Georgiades.

“Yes,” said Owen. “And that surprises me a little. I had expected it to be one of those that work with fuses.”

“Because it was left?”

“Seemed to have been. Not thrown, anyway. Or so I would have said until I saw this.”

“It can’t have been thrown. The man was in the doorway.”

“Unless the person who threw it was inside.”

“Can’t have been. They wouldn’t have had time to get away. They’d have killed themselves at the same time.”

“Are we sure no one else was in there?”

“We haven’t found any other bodies.”

“How about this for an idea: one of them threw it at the other.”

“The same arguments still apply. It would have been suicidal.”

“Maybe that’s what he wanted.”

Georgiades was silent for a little while. Then he said: “I prefer the other possibility. That it was left and set up to explode.”

“So do I. But how did they do that? Setting it up would have taken a lot of skill, a bit of time anyway. There were people coming and going all morning.”

“Of course,” said Georgiades, “if they were really ingenious they might have set it up the night before.”

“They’d have had to be really ingenious. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to count on it exploding at the right time—the right time to get those poor devils.”

“If they wanted to get those two. Maybe they just wanted an explosion and weren’t particular about which poor devils it got.”

“If that was the way it was,” said Owen, “then they weren’t very nice.”

“Whichever way it was,” said Georgiades, “they were going to get students.”

“Yes,” said Owen. “That’s what it all comes back to.”

It was among the students that, for the moment, they were pursuing their inquiries. It was about the only avenue open to them.

The Fairclough case was at a standstill. Mohammed Bishari had sent his notes around as promised, but, as he had warned, they contained little hard information. Owen did not blame him for that. His own men had failed to unearth anything either.

Similarly with the Jullians case. The trackers had remained in the Law School for over a week but had failed to spot anyone resembling the two men they had followed. It was expensive using good trackers in this way and Owen didn’t dare do it for too long. He pulled one of them out altogether. The other he kept there but only for half of each day, varying the time.

Georgiades, too, continued to hang around the Law School in his spare moments, maintaining the impression that he was somehow part of the proceedings.

Owen took care not to use him for ordinary inquiry work on the case. This was a pity, for Georgiades was far and away the best man that he had. But the Greek had achieved a position on the inside of student life which he didn’t want him to compromise. It might pay dividends later. As in the case of the tracker, Owen was making an investment.

He had not really expected the routine inquiries his men were making to produce anything, but surprisingly they did.

Checking the backgrounds of the two students who had been killed in the bomb blast, Owen’s agents came across someone who knew them a little better than the previous informants. They brought him to the Bab el Khalk.

Owen went down and took him for a walk under the trees of the square rather than seeing him in his office, which was often inhibiting for Arabs and might be especially so for a student.

He was a tall boy, a student, in his third year at the School of Engineering. His face was pocked with smallpox scars, and although he had been for some time in the city he was still suffering from bilharzia, which was endemic in the country districts.

“Yes,” he said, “I knew Abu. He came from near us, from a village at the other end of the estate. The Pasha sent him to the School, as he did me.”

“How was it that the Pasha’s choice fell upon you two?” asked Owen.

The boy shrugged. “We were cleverer than the others at the school, I suppose. Our teacher spoke for us. And then the Pasha owed my father something. It was like that for Abu, I expect.”

“Abu came to the great city the year after you, is that not so?”

“It is so. He looked me out when he arrived, for my father had spoken to his father. For the first weeks he slept on the floor of my room. But then he found his own room and I did not see so much of him.”

Owen asked if it was about this time that Abu had taken up with Musa, the other boy killed in the bombing.

“It was soon after. I know, because the first time I went to see Abu in his room he was alone and finding it expensive. He said he would have to leave it or else find someone to share with him. When I went again, he was sharing with Musa.”

Owen inquired about Musa.

“Musa? He was a boy like Abu. Like him, he came from the country, but it was north of us. His Pasha had sent him too, I think. But he did not like his Pasha and seldom spoke of him. He and Abu were like brothers. They went to lectures together, they studied together, they ate together, they worked and played—”

“What did they do in the evenings?”

The boy stopped short. “What did they do in the evenings? I do not know. Worked, I expect. They did not go out much. They had no money, of course.”

“Had they friends?”

“Few.”

“What were they doing over in Ali’s café? It is a long way from the School of Engineering.”

“I do not know. Perhaps they wished to work quietly, without interruption from other Engineering students.”

“They did not go to meet friends.”

“They
had
a friend in the Law School. Perhaps they went to meet him.”

“Do you know him?”

“Alas, no. But I remember Abu speaking of him. He was the friend of a friend. The friend must have spoken to Abu of him, for as soon as he reached the city, Abu went over to see him. Perhaps someone in the village had given Abu his name, the way someone gave him mine. It is right for country boys to stick together.”

“Was he a good friend? Did Abu see him often?”

“He spoke of him warmly. But I do not know how often he saw him.”