Ben-Roi heard the voicemail through, clutching the phone in his left hand while with his right he fished his red police number plates from the Toyota’s boot, then played the follow-up message.
‘P.S.
Gam ani ohevet ot’cha
. I love you too, big man. Despite my best efforts not to.’
He slammed the boot, locked the car, slapped one of the magnetic plates on to the rear panel, all the while trying to figure out how best to respond to the messages – to convey the fact that although he loved Sarah more than anything, he was, yet again, about to let her down. He couldn’t think how to word it, make it sound anything other than what it was – another brush-off. With time evaporating, he decided to leave it till he’d got himself on board. He gave Khalifa one last try, then pocketed the phone, attached the front number plate and ran full tilt into the departures hall of Ben-Gurion International Airport.
It was a crazy thing to do, insane, but it was the only plan he could come up with at such short notice. The Egyptian wasn’t answering his calls. Same with his friend Danny Perlmann in Inter-Force Liaison, which meant he had no direct line to the Egyptian authorities. And even if he did get a line, what was he going to tell them? That a bunch of anti-capitalist headbangers was about to launch an attack on Egyptian soil? Aided and abetted by one of their own police officers? He couldn’t see that playing particularly well for Khalifa. Even if it did save his life.
In the end, desperate, unable to see any other alternative, he’d called El-Al. They ran a once-weekly service into Alexandria – the one Rivka Kleinberg had been booked on. It didn’t fly till the following night, however, by which point the trap would almost certainly have sprung and Khalifa would be lying face down with a bullet through his head. The only other option was an Egyptian carrier, Air Sinai, a subsidiary of EgyptAir. He’d contacted them, not holding out much hope. His pessimism was misplaced. They had a service that night. At 7.10 p.m. Arriving Alexandria at 8.45 p.m. He’d stalled, frantically trying to think of some easier way of helping his friend. Short of heading down to the Western Wall and praying, he couldn’t come up with one, and with the clock ticking he had booked his seat. He’d spun home to get his passport, then driven like a maniac down to Lod, arriving seventeen minutes before take-off. The rush was probably a good thing. Like Khalifa’s jump in the mine, if he’d really taken the time to think through what he was doing, he would never have done it.
The Air Sinai check-in desks were all empty, the flight’s last call having long since gone out. That close to take-off, a civilian would never have made it on to the plane. With his police ID he was able to skip the red tape and sprint straight through to the gate. He had a stand-up row with the girl checking the boarding passes, who didn’t want to let him on. His details were on the computer, however, and matched his passport, and eventually he managed to hector her into submission. He was still strapping himself into his seat – between an elderly Arab woman and an overweight man with his arm in a sling – as the plane backed away from its stand and started its taxi out to the runway.
He retrieved his mobile. Things were likely to get hectic once he landed in Egypt and he didn’t want distractions. If he was going to respond to Sarah’s messages, he should do it now. He ducked his head and started to dial her number, quickly, hoping the cabin crew wouldn’t spot him, only to change his mind and switch to text. For no reason he could explain – the stress of the situation, most likely – the wording of the message suddenly assumed huge importance to him. He spent the entire length of the taxi thinking it through, and it wasn’t until the plane had wheeled on to the runway and the engines begun to power up for take-off that he finally started to dab at the keypad.
Love U both. More than anything in world. Promise will always B there 4 you. Will call tomorrow. We’ll B the happiest family ever.
He just had time to add kisses and press send as the plane roared down the runway. And then they were off the ground and he was leaving his homeland.
‘You shouldn’t have that on,’ admonished the man in the sling. ‘It can interfere with the controls.’
‘Right,’ said Ben-Roi. ‘Sorry.’
He killed the phone. Easing his seat back, he stared up at the ceiling, his eyes inexplicably pricked with tears.
William Barren was also staring at an aeroplane ceiling, although in his case it was one of the company’s Gulfstream G650s, and his eyes most certainly weren’t pricked with tears. Far from it. He was feeling about as good as he’d ever felt in his life. The climax was fast approaching. All the years of planning and scheming, manoeuvring and groundlaying . . . boy, was it going to be a climax! Better than anything he’d achieved with those underage nigger whores in downtown Houston. Talk about delayed gratification!
He swirled his bourbon round the tumbler.
It had been a spontaneous decision to fly out. Although his presence wasn’t strictly required, he had felt a sudden need to be close to the action. Not in the middle of it – others were doing the dirty work – but close. A few hours ago he’d been lounging in his penthouse. Now he was well on his way. It was what the company had long needed, a bit of spontaneity. His father’s decision processes were glacial. He didn’t do spur-of-the-moment. That would all be changing when he, William, was in charge. A bit more gut-instinct, a bit more flexibility. Under him, Barren would be a very different company. Although still a top predator. Some things didn’t change. Some things were hardwired.
He sipped the bourbon and tapped his mobile on the seat’s armrest. One of the crew came through and gave him an update on their progress. They were ahead of time, would be landing twenty minutes earlier than planned. William thanked him and sank back into the white leather, gazing at the phone. The special phone. The one on which he’d soon be getting the call.
Forty-eight hours and all family business would be settled. He smiled and took another sip, the cabin vibrating gently around him. As good as he’d ever felt in his life.
A
LEXANDRIA
Had Khalifa looked up as he strode into the arrivals terminal of Alexandria Nozha just after 9 p.m., he would have seen a familiar figure remonstrating with security officials on the far side of the hall. And had he gone over and spoken to that figure, much subsequent heartache might have been avoided.
He didn’t look up. He was too busy on his mobile, listening as the Nemesis woman relayed details of where they were going to meet him. By the time she was off the line he was already pushing through the airport exit doors, and the one fleeting chance of averting tragedy had been missed.
Outside the terminal he waved down a taxi and, as instructed, told the driver to take him east towards Rosetta. The man tried to engage him in conversation, asking about his family, what he was doing in this part of the world, what he thought of the new government. Khalifa’s answers were grudging mumbles, and after a few kilometres, tiring of the man’s questions, he pulled out his police badge and flashed it. Thereafter they drove in silence.
It took a while for them to get out of the city. Only when they had crossed a long causeway over a reed-fringed lake did the tenements and factories and oil refineries finally drop off behind them, giving way to a patchwork landscape of sandy scrub, cotton fields and palm and citrus groves. Khalifa smoked, and stared out of the window, and thought about his son.
Halfway to Rosetta – just as the Nemesis woman had described – they passed a neon-lit Mobil petrol station followed by two giant roadside hoardings: one advertising Pierre Cardin shoes, the other KFC. Ordering the driver to pull over, Khalifa counted out the fare, got out, walked fifty metres further down the road and took up position beside a wigwam-shaped stack of cut reeds. Thirty minutes passed. Then, from nowhere, a white Toyota Land Cruiser swerved off the highway and skidded to a halt in front of him. At the same moment there was a crunch of footsteps in the palm grove behind and a young woman emerged from the shadows.
‘In,’ she said, chopping a hand towards the Land Cruiser’s open rear door.
Khalifa did as he was told. The woman slid into the front passenger seat and the driver – a slim, Arab-looking man with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth – took them back on to the highway.
‘I was starting to think you weren’t coming,’ said Khalifa as they picked up speed.
‘We needed to watch a while,’ explained the woman, swivelling to face him. ‘Make sure you weren’t being tailed.’
She flipped out a hand.
‘Dinah. And this is Faz. Glad you could join us.’
Khalifa took the hand.
‘Yusuf Khalifa.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘We’ve been listening to your calls, remember. That the notebook you were talking about?’
She indicated the leather-bound volume peeping out of Khalifa’s jacket. He nodded.
‘Keep it safe. We’ll decide what to do with it later.’
‘It’s just the two of you?’
‘The others are up at the coast. Reccying the dock.’
‘What’s the plan?’
She gave a noncommittal shrug.
‘Right at the moment there isn’t one. The ship’s due in at midnight. From what we picked up on the Zoser system, it comes in once a month, offloads the waste then goes to get more while Zoser barges work in relays ferrying what’s already been delivered up the Nile. What the whole operation actually looks like on the ground, though . . .’ Another shrug. ‘We’re making this one up as we go along.’
Turning, she fumbled in the glove compartment and passed a gun back to Khalifa.
‘You know how to use one of these?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m hoping it won’t be needed, but we can’t take any chances. We don’t know what we’re going to run into up there.’
Khalifa weighed the gun in his hand. A Glock, by the look of it. She watched him, her pale, intense face looming in and out of shadow as lights came and went alongside the highway. There was a silence, then:
‘You’re taking quite a risk coming here. Throwing in your lot with us. Like your friend said, we’re dangerous. Lunatics.’
‘Ex-friend,’ corrected Khalifa, laying the gun aside and pulling out his Cleopatras. ‘And I’ll take my chances.’
For a moment their eyes held. Then, with a nod, she turned and faced forward. Khalifa dropped his window and lit a cigarette. Nothing more was said for the rest of the journey.
They came into Rosetta twenty minutes later, just after 10.30. Faz the driver seemed to know where he was going, navigating confidently through a tangle of noisy, brightly lit streets and out the other side of town, where they picked up a narrow tarmac road north to the coast. The Nile tracked them to their right – broad and black and dotted with boats and the pontoons of floating fish farms. There were scattered houses and barns, and, strung along the shoreline, a succession of brickworks, their smoke-darkened chimney stacks silhouetted against the night sky like the remains of some blasted forest. Once they were past the village of Qaitbay the buildings disappeared, leaving nothing but maize fields, the odd palm grove and, ahead in the distance, a fuzzy, dome-shaped glow that suggested a concentration of light somewhere near the mouth of the Nile. The Zoser dock, guessed Khalifa. His pulse quickened.
They continued for another few kilometres, watchful now, cutting the lights, keeping the speed right down, the glow growing brighter all the time. Then, as some sort of illuminated security point loomed into view ahead, they turned off the road on to a narrow track. After a couple of hundred metres it petered out in a clearing in the middle of a palm grove. The spot seemed to have been prearranged because another Land Cruiser was waiting for them. Two people were standing beside it: a fit-looking man and a crop-haired woman. They pulled up behind and got out. Introductions were made.
‘So how are we looking?’ asked the Dinah woman.
‘Not as bad as it could be,’ said the man, ‘although we could really do with more time.’
‘We haven’t got more time. It’s either tonight or we have to wait another month.’
The man acknowledged the point and waved them over to a laptop sitting on the bonnet of the second Land Cruiser. On the screen was a mosaic of some forty photographs, presumably the fruit of the reccying mission he and the short-haired woman had undertaken. He enlarged the first image: the security point they’d just seen. A high chain-link fence stretched off to either side of it, topped with loops of razor wire. In the background, facing towards the river, were what looked like a row of warehouses, crane-tops peeping above them.
‘The fence goes right the way round the site,’ he began, ‘three guards on the gate . . .’
‘Army?’ asked Khalifa.
The man nodded.
‘They’ll be conscripts. Just going through the motions.’
‘That’s certainly the way it looked. One of them was asleep, the others were watching TV. There’s a couple of guys patrolling inside, but they didn’t seem particularly interested and there’s a lot of distance between them. The fence isn’t electrified, and there are no security cameras we could see. We cut through without any problem.’
‘How far from there to the dock?’ asked the Dinah woman.
‘About seven hundred and fifty metres. It’s open ground, but there are dunes and scrub which provide decent cover. We got across without any trouble.’
He called up another photo. A long expanse of concrete wharf, bounded on one side by warehouses, on the other by a vista of choppy, moonlit water where the Nile issued into the sea. A hundred metres offshore a ridge of enormous concrete cubes had been sunk to create a protective breakwater. On the dock itself there were three huge gantry cranes with cantilevered jibs projecting out over the water.
‘As you can see it’s brightly lit, and there are people around. Dock workers mainly, although there’s some security.’
He clicked on the laptop again. A telephoto image came up of a burly man in a leather jacket, toting a Heckler & Koch MP5 sub-machine gun.
‘Private contractor, by the look of it. Nothing we can’t handle. There are good filming positions here, at the near end of the dock –’ he returned to the previous image – ‘and here, from between these warehouses.’ Three more photos: a long shot of a pile of crates stacked in the gap between two warehouse buildings; a close-up of the crates; a shot taken from behind the crates, looking across the centre of the dock towards the water.