And now, suddenly, their name had pipped up on the radar of a murder investigation.
Did it mean something, he wondered, this unexpected interface between two apparently separate stories? Did it have some wider relevance?
Or was he simply trying to wring significance from a situation where there was none?
He had no idea. His thoughts were muddled, confused.
All he could say for sure was that – coincidence or no coincidence – he suddenly felt an intense personal connection with Ben-Roi’s case. As if he had been dangling his feet in the margins of a whirlpool only to be sucked right into the heart of it. And, also, for reasons he couldn’t begin to explain or rationalize, a sense that helping Ben-Roi solve his case would in some way help him. If not to get over his son’s death, at least move forward from it.
The path back to daylight, it seemed, lay through the Labyrinth.
He sat back, lit the Cleopatra, smoked it all the way down to the filter, tangles of smoke drifting and weaving above him. Then, stubbing out the butt, he picked up the phone and called down to the station car pool.
Yesterday he’d borrowed an ailing Fiat Uno to get him out to Iman el-Badri’s village.
For the journey he was about to undertake, he was going to need something rather more sturdy.
* * *
I have been thinking hard about the forthcoming cleansing. The cleansing of cleansings, if you like. So hard that the news of my failure affected me less than it might otherwise have done. It shook me, of course, to hear that the family were now implicated, to receive words of admonishment. It was not unexpected, though. From the first I had my doubts about the cathedral. I knew I shouldn’t have done it sooner than planned.
That is as it is. The past cannot be rewritten. My energies are now focused on the task in hand. Respect the past, but do not be distracted by it – that was another lesson I learnt from my parents. I am looking to the future. Mine, and the family’s.
Potassium chloride is a possibility. As is insulin. Subtlety is key, and both are untraceable. Although with so little time, procurement could be a problem.
I shall give it more consideration. As things stand, I am leaning towards simplicity. No needles, no baggage, use just what they have in the room. I have put in some practice, testing my wrists and arms, calibrating the best posture to adopt so as to exert force, but not so much of it as to leave bruises. It’s a fine balance, but I should be able to achieve it. And it
would
save me having to look at the face. Ordinarily I have no qualms about such things, but then this is no ordinary cleansing. It is, as I believe they say, a watershed.
Talking of which, I hope I don’t cry. I’m not an overtly emotional person – it doesn’t do in my line of work – but such is the magnitude of the step I am about to take that I cannot discount the possibility. Whatever the outward dynamic, there’s still a bond. And severing it won’t be easy, however necessary the severance.
I shall add tissues to my packing list. Hopefully I won’t need them, but you never know. These are uncertain times. And in uncertain times, preparation is all.
R
OAD
TO
THE
E
ASTERN
D
ESERT
As the crow flies it was less than 140 kilometres from Luxor to the Gebel el-Shalul. Had there been a direct road Khalifa could have been there in an hour.
There was no direct road. There were precious few tracks – just a vast, heat-seared wilderness of mountains, escarpments, gravel pans and
wadis
. A daunting natural labyrinth protecting the man-made labyrinth of the
shemut net wesir
. Even in a Landrover Defender, a vehicle specifically designed for challenging off-road terrain, it was going to be a tough drive. A risky one too, breaking as it did the first rule of desert travel: never, ever go out there on your own.
He had to give it a try, though. Couldn’t wait for Egyptian bureaucracy to wind its interminable course. He wanted to know what was happening at the mine.
Needed
to know. If things got too difficult he could always turn back. And he’d borrowed one of the station satellite phones in case he got into real trouble. It would be fine, he told himself. Difficult, but fine.
Before setting out he stopped off at his apartment, explained to Zenab that he had to drive over to Marsa Alam for work, probably wouldn’t be home till late – a lie, but he didn’t want to worry her. Satellite phone or no satellite phone, people still died out in the Eastern Desert. And she’d already lost a son.
Another couple of stops to pick up supplies – extra fuel, water, a torch, cigarettes, cheese,
taamiya
,
aish baladi
– and he was on his way. On the seat beside him was his friend Omar’s map of the desert’s central highlands. And, also, Samuel Pinsker’s notebook.
Locating the mine wasn’t the problem. It was getting there that was going to be a challenge.
Such as he had one, his plan was to cover as much ground as possible on blacktop. Therefore, although it more than doubled the distance he needed to drive, he headed south first, all the way back down to Edfu, where he picked up Highway 212 east towards Marsa Alam and the Red Sea coast. Halfway along its length, 212 looped sharply to the north. By striking out from the apex of that loop, he calculated he would have less than fifty kilometres of desert to navigate before reaching the environs of the mine. Still a long way, given the extreme hostility of the terrain, but every kilometre he saved increased his chances of making it to his destination.
There were two other reasons for choosing that particular route. According to his notebook, it was the direction from which Samuel Pinsker had approached the mine. And the convoy of trucks that the Helwan University surveying team had spotted from the air had been moving across precisely that part of the desert. Whether the convoy had anything to do with the Labyrinth he had no idea, but its presence suggested that the area was at least partially driveable.
The traffic on Route 2 was heavier than it had been the previous evening and it took him almost two hours to reach Edfu. Once he’d turned east on to 212, however, there was nothing, either on the highway or off it. Just a shimmering thread of black tarmac winding through a sun-bleached wasteland of sand and rock. He passed a police checkpoint just outside Edfu, and a couple of small settlements at El Kannayis and Barramiya – forlorn clusters of concrete and mud-brick clamped to the side of the highway as though clinging on for dear life. Otherwise there were no signs of human intrusion. In the hour it took him to reach the highway’s northward loop, he encountered only one other vehicle – an Isuzu pick-up truck crammed with sheep. He might as well have been on Mars.
Eventually, shortly after eleven, he slowed and pulled over. According to Omar’s map, he was now at the road’s closest point to the Gebel el-Shalul. He got out and looked north, shielding his eyes against the sun. In front of him a swathe of gravelly sand lifted into a confusion of low hills which in turn erupted into rearing slopes of yellow-brown rock. The slopes grew higher and steeper the further north you looked, climbing and climbing until eventually they merged into the forbidding mountainous haze of the central highlands.
He lit a cigarette, wondering if this was a bad idea.
Knowing
it was a bad idea. Then, fearful that the more he thought about it the less likely he was to do it, he topped up the tank with diesel, let a little air out of each of the Landrover’s tyres to improve traction and bumped off the highway into the unknown. Someone had left a Mohammed Mounir cassette in the car stereo and he played that over and over to keep his spirits up.
For the first ten kilometres the going was unexpectedly easy. He wound his way through the gravelly foothills, keeping his speed low, staying in second and third, before picking up a broad
wadi
that took him in exactly the direction he needed to go. The hills rose around him, imposing waves of stone boxing him in to either side. The
wadi
bed remained relatively flat, however, and he made good progress.
It didn’t last. Omar’s map showed the
wadi
feeding into an even larger valley that curved to the west before once again pushing north. What it didn’t show was the scatter of huge boulders strung across the
wadi
’s upper end, blocking his progress as effectively as a row of bollards. He tried to move a couple, but he couldn’t budge them, and with the
wadi
slopes way too sheer for him to be able to creep the Landrover round the side of the blockage, he had no choice but to backtrack and try to find a different way forward.
Four hours later he was still trying. Time and again he’d find himself in a
wadi
that seemed to be taking him in the right direction, only for it to suddenly funnel into an impenetrable cleft, or slam up against a vertical rock wall, or curve a hundred and eighty degrees so that he was now driving away from where he needed to get to. At one point his tyres got bogged in a sand drift and he had to spend thirty minutes digging himself out; twice he went all the way back to the highway so as to come at the problem from a different starting point. Pinsker’s notebook was no help – it merely indicated that he’d reached the mine from the south – and for all its topographic detail, Omar’s map seemed to be constantly contradicted by facts on the ground. As the afternoon wore on and the landscape continued to tease and obstruct him, he found himself thinking that maybe he should just call the whole thing off and head home. Leave it to the experts.
Around three o’clock, having pushed fifteen kilometres up yet another apparently promising corridor only for it to peter out at the foot of an impassable, forty-metre-high sand dune, Khalifa stopped the Landrover, cut the engine and got out. He stretched and kicked his legs, took a long glug of water. Then, fetching some binoculars and the bag of food he’d bought back in Luxor, he trudged up to the top of the nearest ridge to get a look at the lie of the land.
He was now well west of the point at which he’d first ventured into the desert. To the south the tarmacked ribbon of Route 212 wound off towards the coast; to the north the central highlands bulged lumpily in the distance – a shimmering fortress of hazy brown rock that was no nearer now than it had been four hours ago. In between, as though he was gazing out across the top of some gigantic maze, spread a churning sea of ridges and scarps and slopes and hilltops, with no obvious passage through to the high
gebel
beyond.
‘Bloody dammit,’ he muttered.
He surveyed the scene despondently. Then, sitting cross-legged on the ground, he draped a
shaal
over his head against the sun and started unpacking his food. He’d give it another couple of hours, he reckoned, try coming in from yet another direction, then call it quits. Night descended fast in the desert, and although the Landrover was fitted with a pair of A-bar mounted spotlights in addition to its regular lights, he didn’t fancy the idea of being stuck out here after dark.
He folded some cheese into a piece of
aish baladi
and bit into it, his gaze tracking across the arid nothingness before dropping down into the
wadi
on the other side of the ridge. It ran parallel to the one in which he’d left the jeep, although it was wider and, rather than continuing directly north, curved round towards the east. There was a tree down there, an acacia, its trunk gnarled and twisted, its dish-shaped canopy tilting at a precarious angle as though exhausted by the heat. It was the first sign of life he’d seen out here and he found himself staring at it as he munched his sandwich, grateful to have something to focus on other than dust and rock. He became quite absorbed, wondering how old the tree was, how on earth it survived in such merciless conditions, and it was only after several minutes that he became aware of the marks running along the ground on the opposite side of the
wadi
. A lot of marks. Deep, compacted, straight, as if someone had scratched a giant fork through the sand.
Tyre tracks.
He stood and lifted the binoculars. The land was so folded it was impossible to tell where the
wadi
came from or went to. He scanned the ridge-top, looking for a way through from the
wadi
in which he’d left the Landrover. He couldn’t see one. Like two roads separated by a high wall, with no linking spur between them. He homed in on the tracks. They were wide – way too wide for a 4×4 or a pick-up – and noticeably ridged, as though the tyres that made them had a particularly thick tread. Trucks, no question. Large ones, by the look of it. The same trucks the Helwan surveying team had spotted? He had no idea, but it was definitely worth taking a look where they led. Descending to the Landrover, he started the engine, turned the vehicle round and headed back down the
wadi
, searching for a gap in the wall.
He had to go almost four kilometres before he found one. The ridge dropped suddenly at this point, bowing down into a deep saddle before rising again and continuing on its way. A dune had blown up against the side of the saddle, creating a smooth incline up which he was able to gun the Landrover. It took him four goes to get to the top, the wheels sliding and churning on the sand, but he made it eventually and was able to bump down the rocky slope on the far side and into the adjacent
wadi
.
After that the going improved dramatically. Whatever they were doing out there, the trucks seemed to have been using the
wadi
frequently, for their tracks were densely compacted. Slotting the Landrover’s wheels into the grooves gave him almost as good a driving surface as if he was on a proper road. He was able to get his speed up to fifty and in places sixty kilometres an hour, shunting back and forth through the gears, the mellifluous strains of Mohammed Mounir wafting from the car stereo. Ten kilometres on, the
wadi
linked into another
wadi
, and then another, and then others beyond that, drawing Khalifa into an increasingly complex spider’s web of dried-up watercourses within which he would soon have become hopelessly lost had he not had the tracks to guide him. Each successive
wadi
was slightly narrower than its predecessor, the slopes rising ever steeper to either side, the landscape wrapping ever tighter around him. Sometimes he found himself bearing towards the west, sometimes the east. Always, however, the overall direction was north, deeper and deeper into the secret heart of the massif, closer and closer to his goal, further and further from what now felt like the relative populousness of the highway. He felt increasingly small, and increasingly alone. And, also, increasingly nervous. If the tracks
were
leading to the mine – and with every passing kilometre it seemed less and less likely they could be going anywhere else – and if the mine
was
being worked illegally, the remoteness of the locale was going to be the very least of his worries. He cut the stereo, made sure the satellite phone was ready beside him. And, also, his Helwan 9mm, its safety disengaged.