‘She had nothing to do with the Nemesis Agenda,’ she said, figuring he deserved at least a partial explanation. ‘She came down to visit, nothing more.’
‘Spend some time with her daughter.’
She didn’t rise to that.
‘Did she know what you were doing?’ he asked, rattling the wrist cuff.
‘Of course she knew. I trusted her.’
‘Not enough to give her her interview,’ he said. ‘Three years ago. When she wanted to write a piece for her magazine.’
More credit to him. He’d done his homework.
‘She jumped the gun on that one,’ she replied. ‘Told her editor she could get the interview without clearing it with us. She was in a bad space at the time, had lost her job, wasn’t thinking straight. I told her it was too risky – that there was a lot of heat on us, and the moment she did an article like that there’d be a lot of heat on her too. That we’d have to stop meeting. She understood the situation. After that, the Agenda was never mentioned again.’
‘Even on her last visit? Four days before she was killed?’
She hesitated. Credit or no credit he was still a cop and she didn’t want to get drawn into a conversation with him. Keep quiet, never tell, our little secret – that was a lesson she’d learnt the hard way. At the same time there was part of her that did want to talk. Enough at least to set the record straight. He sensed her uncertainty and pressed her.
‘She wanted you to hack Barren, didn’t she? That’s why she came down here that last time. She wanted your help to find out what Barren were doing in Egypt.’
Her stomach clenched, as it always did at the mention of Barren. She stared at him, trying to figure how to play things, calculate what course would best serve her purposes. Then, coming to a decision, she slid the Glock from the back of her jeans. He stiffened, straining at the cuffs.
‘Relax,’ she said. ‘We’re not cop-killers.’
Glancing at her watch, she dropped on to a rock at the side of the track and settled the Glock on her knee. He slumped back and massaged his wrist, which had turned an angry red.
‘Am I right?’
A pause, then she nodded.
‘She told us she’d found a link between Barren and an article she was doing on sex-trafficking. She knew we kept tabs on Barren, had ways of hacking into their system. She wanted us to go in, see if we could find anything about a gold mine in Egypt. And, also, the port of Rosetta.’
His eyes flickered. ‘Did she say why? What she thought she was on to?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think she fully knew herself. Or if she did, she didn’t let on. She could be like that – played her cards close to her chest. We were about to head off somewhere, but I said we’d look into it as soon as we got back. By the time we did, she’d been killed.’
She dipped her head – it didn’t do to show you were hurting, not to strangers, not to anyone – then looked up again.
‘We’ve been trawling Barren ever since, but we’ve drawn a complete blank. No Rosetta, no gold mine, nothing. Whatever’s going on, they’re keeping it well under wraps.’
The cop was still rubbing at his wrist, his forehead crumpled as he worked all this through.
‘Do you know if she contacted Barren? Put any of this to them?’
She shrugged. ‘I doubt it. It wasn’t her style to confront people till she had solid evidence.’
‘Do you think Barren killed her?’
She laughed at that, at the naïve obviousness of the question.
‘Of course they killed her! That’s the sort of thing they do. She found out something about them, they butchered her for it. That’s how they operate. They’re dirty as shit.’
‘And yet you lot have never managed to pin anything on them.’
Another shrug. ‘They’re clever. We’ll get them.’
Along the track, Tamar was approaching, coming at a jog. Enough talking, time to clear out. She stood.
‘You’re out of your depth,’ she told him. ‘You have absolutely no concept how powerful these people are, how . . . disgusting. A hick policeman like you, sticking to the rules, working within the law – you haven’t got a hope in hell of nailing Barren. The only way you bring down a company like that – bring down any of these companies – is to play as dirty as they play. That’s why the Nemesis Agenda exists. To do what the law can’t and won’t do.’
‘So help me,’ he said. ‘Feed me what you find.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s not the way it works, lover-boy. You may be the straightest cop in the world, but you’re still just a cog in the machine. And the machine always looks after the likes of Barren. They’re too valuable. Too embedded. You’re wasting your time. But good luck anyway.’
‘At least tell me what you have found out about them,’ he pushed, fighting to keep the conversation alive. ‘How do you
know
they killed her? What do you mean “disgusting”?’
She waved the questions away. She’d said all she wanted to. She stared down at him – a picture of frustrated impotence with his cuffed joints and sweat-stained armpits – then Tamar came up and the two of them headed back to the compound. Faz was loading tech gear into the second Land Cruiser; Gidi had just finished laying the charges. While he and Tamar headed off to gather their stuff, she went from building to building sloshing petrol and setting the timers. Once she was done she took a final walk around. Then, on a whim, she unzipped her holdall, flicked through one of the files and pulled out a sheet of paper. By the time she’d folded it and slipped it into her pocket, the Land Cruisers were loaded and they were ready to go.
Gidi and Faz set off immediately. She and Tamar rolled out to the cop’s car and stopped. They left him a couple of bottles of water and an empty jerrycan to urinate into. His mobile, car keys and the keys to the cuffs they threw into the boot. They wet-wiped everything, cuffs included, to ensure they left no prints.
‘We’ll give ourselves a couple of hours to get clear,’ she told him, ‘then call the police in Mitzpe, let them know you’re here.’
‘Very kind,’ he muttered.
‘We’ve rigged explosives in all the buildings,’ she went on. ‘Nothing too heavy, but if I were you, around four p.m. I’d get my head down. Just in case.’
He grumbled something. He seemed to have given up on the mother stuff.
‘Don’t bother trying to trace the number plates because we’re going to change them. And don’t bother trying to trace us. We’re too clever for you.’
With his free hand he flicked her a finger, which made her smile. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the folded sheet of paper and dropped it in his lap.
‘That’s all the help you’re going to get from us. It’s a list of the companies Barren have links to in Egypt. There might be something there. There might be nothing. You’re the detective. You find out.’
She turned for the Land Cruiser. He called after her.
‘What is it with you and Barren? Why the grudge?’
She slowed. How could she tell him? How could she tell anyone? Even her crew didn’t know the truth. Some motivations were best kept secret. Some identities too. It was her mission, that was all that mattered. Explanations were superfluous.
‘They hurt someone close to me,’ she murmured, too low for him to hear. He called again, repeated the question, but she ignored him. With a final look back at the compound, she climbed into the Land Cruiser, slammed the door and, with a nod at Tamar, they roared off in a cloud of dust.
In the end it was the best part of four hours before a patrol car from Mitzpe Ramon eventually arrived to release Ben-Roi, by which point the sun was dipping below the horizon, the cluster of buildings had been reduced to heaps of smouldering rubble and he was in the mother of all bad moods.
‘I need a phone,’ he snapped as he struggled out of the Toyota, hobbling on his swollen ankle. ‘One that actually works out here.’
‘In our car,’ said one of the uniforms, an attractive girl with dark skin and a model’s figure. Which somehow made the whole thing even more humiliating.
‘Get over there and see if you can find anything,’ he ordered, waving them across the remains of the buildings. Less because he thought they
would
find something than because he wanted a bit of privacy. ‘And take that smirk off your face!’
He glowered at her, then limped over to the patrol vehicle, snatched up the car phone and dialled. A quick one to Sarah first, just to check in. She sounded pleased to hear from him, asked if he wanted to come over for a meal the following night, just the two of them. In other circumstances he would have been delighted by the offer – she hadn’t cooked him dinner since they’d split. Right at the moment, romantic candlelits were the last thing on his mind. He said great, he’d love to come, his voice sounding way less enthusiastic than he was trying to make it, and got her off the line. Second call to Dov Zisky.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ asked Zisky. ‘I’ve been trying to contact you all afternoon.’
‘Tied up,’ said Ben-Roi curtly, the pun unintended. ‘Did you speak to Barren?’
Zisky had. A meeting had been set up for later that evening – 9 p.m., to allow high-ups in Houston to join in.
‘But if you’re still down in Mitzpe there’s no way you’ll—’
‘I’ll be there,’ cut in Ben-Roi, glancing at his watch. ‘Anything on Prospecto?’
Not much. The company had been a subsidiary of Barren, established in the 1990s to explore possible gold-mining opportunities in Egypt. It had been wound up after only a couple of years. William Barren had been CEO, which was interesting.
Ben-Roi listened, then told Zisky to get over to Rivka Kleinberg’s flat.
‘I was actually just leaving the office,’ said Zisky. ‘I’m meeting—’
‘Cancel it and get over there,’ growled Ben-Roi, not in the mood for playing Mr Understanding. ‘There’s a photo in the bedroom. A girl. I think it’s Kleinberg’s daughter. Currently going under the names Dinah Levi and Elizabeth Teal. I need you to find out everything you can about her. And take a look at the other photo as well, the one of Kleinberg on her National Service. We should have done all this ten days ago.’
Meaning ‘I’ should have done all this. He’d screwed up, not been as thorough as he should have been. Which, if he was honest, was as much a cause of his bad mood as the fact that he’d been chained up in a car for the last four hours pissing into a jerrycan.
He told Zisky to text him details of the Barren meeting and rang off. Calling over the two uniforms, he gave them the number plates of the Land Cruisers and descriptions of their four occupants, told them to get them circulated. Almost certainly a waste of time, but you had to go through the motions. Once that was done he stomped back to his Toyota, started the engine and sped off in a shower of dust and gravel. Two hundred metres along the track he slewed to a halt, threw open the passenger door and lobbed out the jerrycan. The mother of all bad moods.
L
UXOR
‘And you’ve not seen anything unusual out there? Buildings, machinery, lorries . . . ?’
A man’s voice echoed down the line, informing Khalifa that no, he had seen nothing out of the ordinary. Just rock, sand and more rock – exactly what you’d expect to find in the middle of a desert.
‘Although to be fair, the landscape’s so twisted and mountainous, you could pass within a hundred metres of a football stadium and not clock it was there.’
‘People?’
Definitely no people. No fauna of any description aside from the occasional ibex and desert hare. The region was so remote even the Bedouin didn’t go there.
‘Have you
heard
anything unusual?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Mining sort of noises? Digging, drilling, hammering?’
‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Sure?’
‘Positive.’
Sighing, Khalifa thanked the guy for his time, hung up and wandered over to the window, a Cleopatra dangling disconsolately from the corner of his mouth. The man ran a small desert safari company based out of Hurghada, one of the few such outfits to venture anywhere near the central uplands of the Eastern Desert. Over the course of the day, Khalifa had spoken to every one of them. None had seen or heard anything that might suggest an active gold-mining operation. None had seen or heard anything that might suggest an
inactive
gold-mining operation. Same story with the air companies who ran flights across the desert from Luxor to Hurghada and Port Safaga, and the various balloon-ride outfits who took tourists up to watch the sunrise over the Red Sea mountains. The Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources could add nothing to what they’d already told him; he was still waiting on a call back from the Raissoulis, although he wasn’t holding out much hope – if they’d seen anything untoward he would have expected them to mention it during their conversation the previous night.
There had been just two possible hints that he wasn’t on a complete wild-goose chase. One of the adventure safari companies he’d spoken to had reported coming across lines of heavy tyre tracks in one of the remote
wadis
running down off the Gebel el-Shalul. In itself that didn’t tell him much – in the immutable stillness of the desert, where nothing moved and nothing changed, such tracks could have been laid down decades ago. Then, however, just on the off-chance, he had spoken to the team at Helwan University who were conducting the aerial survey of the hydro-conductive cracks his friend Omar had mentioned. Although they had seen nothing that might suggest the presence of a working gold mine, a few months back one of their pilots
had
spotted what looked like a convoy of trucks moving west across the wilderness between the central uplands and the Nile Valley. Where they were coming from or going to the pilot hadn’t been able to say, but there had been a lot of them. At least twenty, maybe more. Something? Nothing? Khalifa had no idea. One thing was for sure – if Barren
had
found the Labyrinth and started working it again, they were keeping the whole operation miraculously well disguised.
He let out another sigh, wondering why he should have got himself so damned obsessed with this case – a case that wasn’t even his to obsess about. Then, dragging off the last of his cigarette, he leant his arms against the window pane and gazed out. Five hundred metres away across an expanse of rubbish-strewn scrubland, he could see his apartment block: shabby, whitewashed, half screened by a row of dusty casuarina trees. Beyond that the town’s eastern fringes petered away into fields, which in turn gave way to the drab yellow nothing of the desert. A jet had just taken off from Luxor airport and was climbing steeply towards the south, presumably on its way to Aswan, or maybe Abu Simbel; way out to the east, right on the edge of sight, the desert mountains seemed to hover in the air like a rising brown mist. And somewhere beneath those mountains . . .