Adam Palmer - The Moses Legacy

‘What?’ asked Gabrielle, seeing the look on his face.

‘Nothing.’ He had no wish to worry her too, and no reason to share his fears with her either.

After a time, the land beneath their feet turned from sand and rock to lush green grass, and they knew that they had reached the edge of the Nile Valley. Gabrielle took out Mansoor’s mobile phone and played with the buttons, looking at the display. Daniel wasn’t sure what she was doing, but he decided not to ask until she had finished. In the meantime, he looked around and kept his eyes peeled for a taxi.

A few went past, but they already had fares. Meanwhile, Gabrielle was using Mansoor’s phone to make a call, but Daniel was still too preoccupied with his concerns for Mansoor to ask who she was calling. He hoped that they hadn’t got lost or failed to find Mansoor. Gabrielle had told them the exact location, and he would have had no reason to leave the area. In any case, how far could he have gone?

And then another thought struck Daniel – a frightening thought. Someone had tried to kill them before, by locking them in. What if the killer was still around? What if he was following them?

Daniel quickly dismissed this thought as nonsense. When they got out of the tomb, their jeep had been missing. Whoever had done it would have no reason to come back. But why had they locked them in to begin with? Who was the intended target? Was it Mansoor? Gabrielle? Daniel himself? All three?

It makes no sense!

And there was one more thing that didn’t make sense. Although Gabrielle was holding the phone to her ear, she wasn’t speaking. She was listening… but she wasn’t saying a word. And the look on her face concerned Daniel. It was a look of fear.

He was about to ask her what the problem was when a police van appeared in the distance heading towards them on the main road. Daniel started waving his arms in a desperate attempt to flag it down. The police van screeched to a halt and four police officers leapt out. But what happened next took him by surprise: they drew their guns.

Not sure of what was happening, Daniel opted for the common-sense approach and put his hands up.

‘British,’ he shouted, as if that word conferred some sort of magical protection. But then something happened that Daniel couldn’t believe.

The police started firing!

Instinctively, Daniel hit the ground. Gabrielle did likewise, except that she took half a second longer to react.

Sarit’s training had involved the advanced driving course, including night driving, but she still felt uncomfortable doing it. Along the way she had evaded a donkey cart and two parked cars and nearly been demolished by a heavily loaded truck that shed some of its load in an effort to overtake her.

And now she caught sight of what she thought was the jeep that Goliath had driven away from the tomb, though it was hard to tell in the darkness. She could make out the form, but not the colour, much less the occupant. In any case, there were too many other cars on this stretch of road to be able to do anything. She would have to bide her time.

But she stayed in contact, keeping several car lengths back. The drive back to Cairo would take seven or eight hours all told, and she had barely been driving for two.

It was some three hours later that she finally got her opportunity. The traffic had thinned out considerably because many people did not want to drive that late, and somewhere along the line it got to the point that she was no longer able to keep other vehicles between them because they were on a stretch of road that had no other vehicles. That meant that the time to strike was now. She opened the driver’s window, knowing that she would not be able to reach over to her passenger window whilst controlling the vehicle, but this also meant that she could not throw the Molotov cocktail while overtaking him. Instead, she would have to get him to overtake her.

Steeling herself, she overtook him in a highly aggressive manoeuvre and then slowed down in front of him, just sitting there in the single lane, knowing that he was getting increasingly annoyed. She didn’t respond when he hooted and flashed his lights at her. But when he started moving out to overtake, she knew the time had come. Holding the steering wheel with her right hand, she lit the rag with her left, dropped the lighter and took the Molotov cocktail out of the side pocket.

As Goliath pulled up level with her and shouted something out at her, she threw the Molotov cocktail as hard as she could through the open driver’s window of her car and the passenger window of his. She had been intending to throw it through the rear window, so that it would shatter on impact and explode. But at the last minute, she realized that she couldn’t be sure that it would penetrate. It would depend on how strong or reinforced the windows were. Within seconds, the interior of Goliath’s car was ablaze, including his clothes, as he screamed with pain and skidded this way and that.

But Sarit had no time to survey the results of her work. She put her foot down and pulled away quickly, casting a brief glance in her rear-view mirror to satisfy herself that the job was done.

What she didn’t see was the old man with the donkey and cart on the side road. But he had seen her and was surprised that she didn’t stay to help. It was for that reason that he whipped out a pen and wrote down what he remembered of her registration number on his hand.

‘My name is Daniel Klein!’ Daniel shouted. ‘I’m a British professor and a friend of Akil Mansoor! This is Gabrielle Gusack! She’s also a friend of Professor Mansoor! We’re unarmed!’

‘I don’t think that’s going to help,’ said Gabrielle.

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t think they’re in a mood to listen.’

‘But they surely can’t think we did anything to harm Mansoor. We were the ones who summoned help, for God’s sake!’

‘Listen, Daniel, there’s no time to explain now, but on the count of three, get up and run to the left. There’s some cover there by those trees, and then some buildings. We can make it to a side street and get clear of them; they’ll have to drive the long way round.’

‘But if we run, it’ll just make it look as if we’ve got something to hide.’

‘And if we don’t run, we’ll be the subject of endless discussions and debates on the news and talk radio long after our funerals.’

And with that she started her quiet countdown. ‘One, two, three! ’

She raised herself only as high as she needed to in order to run and sprinted to the left, just like she had said. Danny barely had time to admire her speed, for – against his better judgement – he found himself running too.

Keeping his head down, he couldn’t see the flashes of the guns or the streaks of the bullets. Neither could he see where the shots were landing. It was only when the gunfire subsided and he felt safe enough to slow down, that he saw Gabrielle turning back towards him, almost smiling with exhilaration.

For a moment, Daniel’s mind returned to the thought that maybe the police did think that they had deliberately harmed Mansoor. But even if so, shooting at them still made no sense. Why not simply tell them to put their hands up and surrender?

‘I don’t understand why they’re firing at us,’ he said in desperation.

He was about to say more, when he noticed that Gabrielle was bleeding from the shoulder.

‘They’re afraid of coming into contact with us,’ she said, grimacing from the pain.

The bitch! thought Goliath. The fucking evil bitch!

He didn’t know who she was. In his agony, with his clothes on fire, all he knew was that she was the enemy.