Adam Palmer - The Moses Legacy

The searing pain enveloped his body.

Get out! his mind was screaming. Get out! But it was easier said than done. To get out he would have had to use his hands and he couldn’t even feel his hands.

Neither, for that matter, could he see. His eyes were closed and his eyeballs were so hot it was as if they were melting in their sockets.

He heard the door opening and felt hands upon him, under his armpits. The hands were small, yet their grip was surprisingly strong.

‘ Wa ismaholiya mousa’a aidatica.’

He didn’t understand the words. But he could tell from the tone that someone was trying to help. He allowed himself to be dragged from the car. Once outside, his instinct was to run, to escape from the flames that engulfed him, but he knew that running would merely fan the flames and feed them with oxygen.

Instead, he allowed the man to push him to the ground and roll him. He continued to roll by himself, sensing that it was working. He felt a soft blow to a wide area of his torso. Fabric on flesh. The stranger was trying to beat out the flames. Eventually, it became clear that the flames had subsided, but the searing pain on his flesh lingered on. The only thing he knew for sure was that he was alive.

But he felt his consciousness slipping away.

‘It’s just a flesh wound,’ said Gabrielle with a smile, tying her headscarf around her shoulder.

Harsh as the situation was, Daniel couldn’t fail to see the humour in it.

‘You’ve been watching too many Clint Eastwood movies. We’ve got to get you to a doctor.’

‘With those guys trying to kill us? Are you crazy?’

They were moving in the shadows, avoiding the pools of light thrown by the street lamps. They weren’t sure if they were still being followed, but it was clear that the cops – if indeed they were cops – were in no mood to listen to them.

‘So what do you suggest, Gaby? You’re bleeding.’

‘It’s Gabrielle to you.’

‘Oh, cut it out! You’ll always be Gaby to me.’

‘Whatever! Anyway it’s not bleeding.’

‘So what’s that then?’

He pointed to the blood on the scarf.

‘It’s congealed blood.’

‘Covering quite an area. And blood doesn’t coagulate that quickly.’

‘It was never bleeding in the first place. It was a scraping injury, the bullet just grazed me. There was blood but no bleeding. It’s like when you scrape a limb on a rough surface.’

‘It must hurt like hell.’

‘I’m a woman. We’re biologically programmed to pass an infant’s fifteen-centimetre cranium through a ten-centimetre passage. Do you think a little scraping on my upper arm is going to bother me?’

‘If it was me I wouldn’t be so stoic.’

‘I guess you’re handicapped by what you’ve got between your legs.’

Daniel smiled. ‘I take it back, what I said about Clint Eastwood. It’s too many reruns of Xena: Warrior Princess.’ If she could keep this up, in the face of what must have been at least moderately painful, then at least he didn’t have to worry about her any more. ‘So what happened to that frightened little girl from the tomb back there?’

‘It’s not the pain that bothers me. It’s not being in control. I guess I can take danger, I just can’t take confinement.’

Daniel nodded, approving of the logic. ‘The thing I don’t understand is why they were shooting at us.’ He looked at her expectantly. She said nothing. He had another go. ‘You said something about them not wanting to come into contact…’

Gabrielle held out Mansoor’s phone. ‘There’s a message. You might like to listen to it.’

He took the phone and held it to his ear.

‘Hallo Professor Mansoor, this is the Minister of Health, Farooq Mahdi. We have a little problem on our hands. We understand that you are travelling in the company of a British man called Daniel Klein and a woman called Gabrielle Gusack. Please be very wary of them. There is an arrest warrant out for Daniel Klein after he jumped bail on a murder charge. We believe that he could be very dangerous. There is also evidence that they are both carrying the same contagious disease as the volunteers at the dig. The Gusack woman is known to have been in contact with a curator at the British Museum and he later succumbed to the same disease. Please get away from them as soon as possible and contact us.’

Now he realized why Gabrielle had been so determined to get him to run. As far as the cops were concerned, they were a dangerous health hazard and the police didn’t want to go anywhere near them – even if shooting them was the only alternative. The fact that Daniel was also suspected of being a murderer on the run, made it easier for them to take that shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach. Daniel knew that in these circumstances, there was no point trying to reason with them.

But why on earth should anyone think they were carrying a disease? They weren’t showing any symptoms themselves. This had to be some sort of mix-up. But there evidently was an outbreak and there had had to be some cause.

However, until such time as they could approach the authorities without getting themselves shot, they’d have to keep a low profile. They needed breathing room… time to unravel the mystery and work out a plan.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Daniel.

Sarit arrived in Cairo sometime after four in the morning. She parked her car and took an invigorating shower to rouse herself from the lethargy that was engulfing her.

She put on the white bathrobe supplied by the hotel and made her way to the bed, still feeling an intense desire to sleep. But she had something to do before that: she had to report in. She switched on her computer and uploaded the tourist-style pictures she had taken of her day in the Valley of the Kings. Then she connected the laptop to the hotel’s broadband and prepared the message for embedding into one of the pictures: Goliath locked Klein, Gusack and Mansoor in tomb in western valley and stole their jeep. May have killed them, but I suspect not. Arrange for them to be freed. I followed Goliath on road to Cairo and disposed of him with homemade incendiary.

She embedded the text in the picture, then wiped the text file and uploaded the picture to her social network account for all her ‘friends’ to see. Then she ran the utility to delete any temporary files and overwrite unused areas of the hard disk.

Then she did what she had wanted to do for hours: crash out on the bed.

Sometime later, she was awakened from her uneasy sleep by an aggressive banging on the door. She barely had time to throw on a robe before the door was flung open and three Egyptian policemen walked in.

‘Miss Stewart, you are under arrest for leaving the scene of a motor accident.’

Daniel had let Gabrielle do the talking. After a sleepless night in the open by the Nile, just outside a small village, they had made their way to the riverbank in search of the means to escape. And they found it in the feluccas – the local riverboats that operated on the Nile both as fishing vessels and as cheap tourist rides.

Gabrielle was so much more persuasive than he could have ever been. First of all, it was obvious that Walid, the dark-skinned, southern Egyptian owner of the felucca, found Gabrielle very attractive, as did the other two crew members who were there with him – his teenage son Na’if and someone else who was either Walid’s younger brother or his cousin. Secondly, they seemed to be impressed by her fluent, almost classical Arabic. Daniel could have spoken Arabic equally well, but somehow hearing it from a pretty blonde foreigner – and a woman too – was considerably more impressive, and they warmed to her immediately.