He turned and shuffled back the way he had come, searching for a side-passage, a way round the shaft. There were none. He reached the room with the bats, went through it, up some stairs, along another passage, further and further from the line of the gallery. He came to a crossways, had a choice of left, right or straight ahead. He chose right. After twenty metres he hit a three-way fork. He stopped, thought about it, then turned on his heel and retraced his steps. He simply couldn’t risk getting lost again. He’d been offered a way out. He was going to have to take it.
The Labyrinth, he suspected, did not give second chances.
Back at the shaft, he threw more stones, trying to build up an echo-picture of the leap he was about to make. Then, crawling, he worked his way back along the passage feeling for rocks and moving them out of the way.
If he was going to have any hope of making the jump, he was going to need a long run-up, and a clear one.
T
EL
-A
VIV
It was past 4 a.m. when Ben-Roi pulled up outside Abu Kabir Prison.
His warder friend Adam Heber met him at the gate.
‘This is on your head, Arieh,’ he said, leading the way across to the cell block. ‘OK? I had no idea what you were going to do.’
‘My head,’ said Ben-Roi.
They entered the block. The place was completely silent. Heber took them down a corridor and up two sets of stairs to the top floor. Halfway down another corridor he stopped in front of a metal door. He produced a set of keys, slipped one carefully into the lock, eased the door open.
‘How long?’
‘Twenty minutes. Call it thirty to be sure.’
‘Make sure you keep the noise down. And remember, I had no idea. Right?’
‘Right.’
He stood aside and let Ben-Roi through.
‘Give him one from me. From all of us.’
The door clicked shut, the lock turned and Heber’s footsteps disappeared down the corridor.
Ben-Roi looked round the cell. There was a table, a chair, a basin, a lavatory, a fold-down bed. And lying on the bed – his eyes covered by a satin sleep-mask against the light from the floodlamps outside – Genady Kremenko. He was snoring loudly.
Moving carefully so as not to wake him, Ben-Roi approached the head of the bed. The pimp’s left arm had slipped from beneath the covers and was dangling with the fingertips touching the floor, a slat of light cutting right across the tattoo on his forearm. Ben-Roi stared at the image, thinking of Vosgi and what she’d been through. Of what all Kremenko’s victims had been through. Then, reaching over to the table, he picked up a plastic water jug. Tipping the lid with his thumb, he emptied its contents over Kremenko’s face.
The pimp jack-knifed awake, a roar of protest erupting from his lungs. Ben-Roi cut the roar short with a sharp, hard rabbit-punch to the prisoner’s solar plexus. He punched him again, in the jaw this time, then locked an arm round his neck and dragged him across to the toilet. Forcing his face into the bowl, he hit the flush with his knee. Water swirled around the pimp’s balding head, immersing it. He bucked and fought, but Ben-Roi was a large, fit, angry cop and more than up to the struggle. He flushed again, and again, screwing Kremenko’s face right down to the bottom of the bowl. Then, as he felt him start to slump and go limp, he heaved him away, flipped him on to his back, clamped a hand around his fleshy throat and pressed him hard into the floor. Sweeping his Jericho from his jeans, he gave the pimp a good hard smack on the side of the head with it and aimed the barrel directly between his bulging eyes.
‘That’s the introductions over with, you fat cunt,’ he hissed. ‘You’re now going to tell me everything you know about Barren Corporation, Rivka Kleinberg and the ship with the mermaid on it. And if you breathe a word of this to anyone I’ll cut your fucking eyes out. Got it?’
‘Yes, sir,’ choked Kremenko.
‘Right, I’m listening.’
T
HE
L
ABYRINTH
Khalifa knew that if he thought too much about it – about how heavy the odds were against him making the jump in pitch darkness, with no clear idea how much distance he had to cover and in a state of complete physical and mental exhaustion – he would never have found the courage to do it, however grim his predicament.
He didn’t think about it. Once he’d cleared the passage floor of rocks and obstructions, he spent fifteen minutes pacing and re-pacing his run-up to the shaft edge to make sure he had it exact to the centimetre – take off too short and he wouldn’t get across, too long and he’d be plummeting headlong into the abyss.
Then, having thrown his Helwan across to minimize his weight, and performed a quick round of prayers, he took up position at his start point and went for it.
He aborted the first run halfway through, some sixth sense warning him his stride-pattern was fractionally off what it needed to be. Same with his second run. His third one felt good and he kept on going, counting each footfall out loud, building up speed, accelerating all the time, barrelling crazily through the blackness. He had twenty-nine strides to reach maximum velocity before jumping on thirty. At twenty-six an alarm bell went off in his head telling him he was off-stride again. He had built up too much momentum, was too close to the edge to do anything about it. He had just enough time to think
God help me!
and then his foot slammed down on thirty and with a hopeless, despairing howl of ‘
Allah-u-akhbar!
’, he launched himself into the void.
He knew straight away he was doomed. Even in the blackness he could sense he was well short of the shaft edge, hadn’t achieved anything close to the amount of lift he needed to carry himself over. For a fleeting instant it was as if he had crossed into a separate reality, an alternative dimension comprised of nothing but blank space – no light, no form, no weight, no time.
Then he crossed back and collided with something solid.
He scrabbled frantically, his hands and arms on a flat surface, his legs and feet against a vertical one, which told him he’d hit the shaft’s opposite rim. His foot found some sort of protrusion, he put his weight on it, the protrusion gave, his leg kicked into empty space. He clawed and slapped, searching for a hand-hold, something to grip on to. There was nothing, just flat, dusty floor. He felt himself slipping.
‘Please God, please God!’
He drove his elbows and forearms into the ground, tried to lever himself up. He didn’t have the strength. He tried to swing his leg on to the rim. He couldn’t reach it. His nails scraped on bare rock; his feet kicked at the shaft wall. He felt himself sliding.
I’m dead
, he thought.
This is it. I’m dead
.
He continued to rake at the wall, his breath a helpless choke, his grip weakening all the time. With a final, desperate effort, he splayed his leg out to the left. His foot hit something solid. Something metal. A pinion? A spike? He had no idea what it was. He didn’t care what it was. All he cared was that it was a foothold, could take his weight. He pushed against it, muscles screaming, his arms and fingers just moments from giving out, somehow heaved, clawed, dragged and fought his way up over the edge of the shaft and on to flat ground. He rolled away from the hole and slumped face down on the tunnel floor, gasping for air.
‘Thank you, God,’ he gasped. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you.’
For a couple of minutes he just lay there, allowing his heart to settle, at once both traumatized and euphoric. Then, not wishing to remain in the mine a moment longer than he had to, he felt around for his Helwan, stood and fumbled his way down the tunnel. After thirty metres he felt the walls disappear to either side of him. At the same moment his ankle hit metal track and his nose caught a distant hint of garlic.
He was back in the main gallery.
He stepped over the track, turned right, started to climb. When he’d come down this way before – it seemed like days ago, weeks, an entire lifetime – he’d felt dread growing with every step. Now he felt it diminishing. Up and up he went, closer and closer to the entrance, further and further from the horrors below until eventually the floor flattened out and his fingers brushed one of the legs of the metal loading platform. He passed beneath it, shuffled his way across the cavernous chamber at the top of the mine, banged up against the sliding metal doors.
When he had entered the mine he had left them open. Now they were shut tight, presumably by whoever had sent the barrels rolling down the tracks. He worked his fingers into the gap between the panels and heaved, not caring if there was anyone out there, not caring about anything other than seeing the sky and breathing fresh air.
The panels parted an inch. Suddenly there was light. Dim, muffled, brown. At first he was confused. Then he realized the canvas tarpaulin must have been put back in place to cover the doors. He poked at it, felt it billow. And with the billow, a waft of clean air. He poked again. Then, standing back, he aimed the Helwan through the gap and shot away the new padlock with which the doors had been secured. He tugged off the chain, heaved the doors open, bent and pulled up the hem of the tarpaulin. Light exploded into his face, dazzling him.
He stumbled out, dropped to his knees, lifted his arms to the sky and praised Allah for his life.
Then, standing again, he stumbled towards his car.
B
ETWEEN
J
ERUSALEM AND
T
EL
-A
VIV
Ben-Roi was halfway back to Jerusalem, still digesting what Genady Kremenko had told him, when his cell phone rang. When he saw the caller’s number he damn nearly swerved off the highway.
‘Khalifa!’ he cried, slamming the phone to his ear. ‘Is that you?’
It was.
‘
Toda la’El!
Thank God! Where the fuck have you been?’
‘Long story,’ came the Egyptian’s voice. It sounded rough, croaky. ‘I’ll fill you in later. Listen, I know what’s going on. I’ve been in the mine. They’re not working it. They’re—’
‘Dumping.’
A fractional pause. ‘You know?’
‘Long story at this end too.’ Ben-Roi angled into the slow lane and dropped his speed right down. ‘I only found out forty minutes ago. Barren are using the Labyrinth as a toxic dump. They’re running a gold mine in Romania. They’re supposed to be transporting all the waste back to the US. But they’re cutting corners and ditching it instead. Shipping it to Egypt, transferring it on to Zoser barges, taking it up the Nile, then trucking it out to the mine. They’ve been doing it for years.’
Even as he described it, Ben-Roi was still struggling to get his head round the scale of the scandal.
‘The captain of the tanker that’s bringing the waste in – his brother’s a big Tel-Aviv pimp. Guy called Genady Kremenko. The two of them were running a sideline in sex-trafficking. Piggy-backing their own operation off Barren’s one. They’d load girls on to the ship on the way down from Romania, offload them with the waste in Rosetta, smuggle them across the border into Israel . . .’
‘God Almighty.’
‘The whole operation was mothballed after Kremenko got arrested a couple of months back, but Rivka Kleinberg met one of the girls who’d already been trafficked and picked up on the whole story. Barren are on the verge of securing a multi-billion-dollar gas field deal with the Egyptian government. If Kleinberg had gone public, it would have fucked the deal, fucked Barren’s image, fucked everything. So they killed her. There’s still a lot of gaps to fill in, but that’s the basic picture. Now tell me what the hell happened to you? I’ve been—’
‘We can get them, Ben-Roi.’
‘What?’
‘You and me. Barren and Zoser. We can get them. I know where the mine is, I’ve seen it. There’re a million barrels down there. We can get the bastards!’
Suddenly there was an edge to Khalifa’s voice. A manic edge. Like he was strung out. Or drunk.
‘We can talk it through later,’ said Ben-Roi. ‘I can tell you’re tired—’
‘I’m not tired!’ The handset seemed to jump at the sharpness of the Egyptian’s retort. ‘I’ve never felt less tired in my life. They killed my son and now we can bring them to justice.’
‘Come on, Khalifa, we don’t know—’
‘Of course we know! My son was killed by a barge carrying Barren’s toxic waste. And now we can get them. For the first time in nine months I actually feel like I’m awake!’
He was gabbling, his voice jittery with a sort of breathless euphoria. Ben-Roi started to tell him to calm down, but Khalifa cut him short again.
‘I have to phone Zenab. And then get back to Luxor. I’ll call you this afternoon and we can work out what to do. We can get them, Ben-Roi. You and me. Working together. The A-Team. Just like old times!’
There was a brief burst of what sounded like laughter, and then the line went dead. From behind Ben-Roi there was a furious honking as a lorry driver warned him he was drifting out of his lane.
T
HE
E
ASTERN
D
ESERT
Maybe it was the exhaustion. Maybe the dehydration. Maybe the cumulative trauma of everything he’d been through in the mine. Khalifa didn’t analyse it. Didn’t see there
was
anything to analyse. His boy had been killed by a Zoser river barge. And it now turned out those same river barges were being used to run toxic waste up the Nile and illegally dump it. Ergo, his son had been killed by a barge loaded with barrels of contaminated dust. It was obvious, clear as daylight. That’s why Zoser had stymied any investigation into the accident. Maybe it hadn’t even
been
an accident. Maybe the boys had been killed deliberately, to stop them finding out what the barge was carrying. It was all meshing in Khalifa’s head. All falling into place. They’d murdered Ali. Barren and Zoser. And now he and Ben-Roi were going to blow the whole scandal wide open. Right a terrible wrong. His son’s death would not have been in vain.
He called Zenab, spun her a line about having broken down in the desert.
‘I’m on my way back now,’ he assured her, his voice sounding strangely unfamiliar to him, like it was someone else talking. ‘It’s all going to be OK. Everything’s going to be just fine.’