Adam Palmer - The Moses Legacy

‘Okay, but some people evidently are getting ill. And your uncle did say something about it when I went to see him on the morning I flew out here, just before he was…’

‘That’s the other thing, Daniel. Too many bad things seem to be happening at once. People are getting killed. First Uncle Harrison and the maid. Then the guardian of the tomb. And of course whoever did that also tried to kill us – and Mansoor. I’m just wondering if they’re connected.’

‘We don’t actually know who they were trying to kill. It might have been any one of us.’

‘The question is, Daniel… what are we going to do?’

‘Can you hear me?’

The big man on the bed didn’t want to hear him. He didn’t want to do anything. All he wanted to do was sleep. But he couldn’t sleep any longer; the time for sleeping was over.

Goliath opened his eyes. There were maybe half a dozen people in the room. Two of them were nurses. The rest…

They were in white.

Doctors? Policemen?

At the back of his mind, he remembered seeing Egyptian policemen in their white summer uniform.

‘Mr Carter? Can you talk?’

He felt the bandages upon him. Where was he? Hospital. He remembered what had happened to him. Fire… driving…woman… she threw something…

‘Yes,’ he muttered.

Through blurred vision, he fancied that he saw one of the nurses smiling. Was she happy because he could talk? Or was she cunning and scheming, like most women?

‘Do you know what day it is?’ asked one of the men in white coats.

What day is it?

He couldn’t think. How long had he been here? He had been slipping in and out of consciousness.

‘Mr Carter…’

Goliath turned his head and tried to sit up, but he couldn’t.

‘We need to ask you about the car you were driving… the car… it was destroyed by the fire. But we need to ask where you got it?’

‘The woman…’

‘The woman? The woman gave you the car?’

The man who had asked the question looked at his colleague. The other man shrugged.

‘But didn’t the woman have another car? Her own car?’

‘Petrol bomb…’

‘What?’

‘She threw it into my car…’

‘The woman threw a gasoline bomb into the car?’

Goliath made a slight nodding motion.

‘Did you know the woman, Mr Carter?’

Goliath said nothing, just looked at the policeman blankly.

‘Mr Carter, we need to know what’s going on. That jeep you were in was hired by our Deputy Minister of Culture. Someone tried to lock him in a tomb.’

Something flickered in Goliath’s mind when he heard the words ‘ tried to lock him’ – did that mean that he had failed?

‘Was it you, Mr Carter? Was it you who killed the guardian and locked him in the tomb? Or was it the woman?’

‘Captain, this man is extremely weak,’ said one of the doctors. ‘He needs time to recover.’

‘I need answers!’ snapped the captain.

‘He isn’t going anywhere. You can ask him when he’s stronger.’

‘I will ask him now!’

‘Look, Captain, it’s obvious that he isn’t fully conscious. At the moment he’s in no position to give you any answers. Give me a day or two to get him better and you can have all the answers you want.’ The tone was as appeasing as the words.

‘All right. You have one day.’

And with that the captain turned and left, followed by another man.

Goliath felt an itch on his nose and tried to rub it. It was then that he noticed that his left hand was handcuffed to the iron bed frame.

On the felucca, the rest of the day drifted by uneventfully as Daniel and Gabrielle sat on deck with Walid and his two-man crew, chatting and watching the scenery go by. They even both had a go at smoking through the narghilla, which neither of them liked, though Daniel pretended to.

The evening meal was a light affair, after the very filling lunch. As the evening descended upon them, Daniel amused them with his Wild West, cowboy style of harmonica playing. The harmonica belonged to Walid, but he confessed, with some embarrassment, that he had never learnt to play it. But despite the cultural differences, they seemed to enjoy Daniel’s rendition of ‘Clementine’ and ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’.

A few hours later, they were shown to their sleeping quarters – a space on the open deck. Daniel and Gabrielle had the privilege of sleeping in the semi-covered part of the boat, although the cover was little more than a tarpaulin thrown over a metal frame. Walid and his crew slept at the other end of the boat, under the moonlight, affording their Western guests at least a modicum of privacy. But the quilt that Walid had offered them to soften the discomfort of the wooden deck was not the cleanest of items, and it seemed to have lost most of its padding a long time ago.

As he lay there in the darkness, with only the stars, the moon and the lights from the riverbank for company, he saw Gaby as she was now, rather than as the teenage girl that he remembered from his student years. They were lying together like two spoons, him behind her. But even though she was fully clothed, he could see her firm arms and strong shoulders – the powerful build of the swimmer who had won the silver medal in the student games. And he realized how incredibly sexy he found her. Daniel was never one to be drawn to thin, spindly women, but nor was he particularly enamoured of the fat women favoured by some Eastern cultures. He admired fitness and his ideal women were athletes, not sexless supermodels.

And Gabrielle was one such woman. It amazed him to realize now that she had been like this for some time, yet he hadn’t realized even when he worked with her on a dig in Jerusalem. Thinking about her as she was now, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to make love to her or wrestle with her. And if he did wrestle with her, he was equally unsure if he would want to win or lose. Then again, perhaps it really made no difference.

As if sensing his eyes upon her, she rolled over on to her back and then turned another ninety degrees to face him.

‘Have you got something on your mind?’ she asked.

He felt embarrassed, almost as if she actually knew what he had just been thinking.

‘I was wondering, maybe we should turn ourselves in to our respective embassies when we get to Cairo.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, Daniel.’

‘It’ll get us out of immediate danger. Maybe we can be tested for whatever they think is causing this illness. If they’re still worried that we’re infectious they’ll let us stay in the embassies or arrange to have us quarantined instead of shot by trigger-happy cops.’

Gabrielle was looking at him with that same implacable look as before. ‘That’s all right for me, but what about you? That message on Mansoor’s phone said there’s a warrant out for your arrest in England. Do you want to be extradited back to London to face a murder charge before we can figure this out?’

‘I don’t think I will be facing a murder charge.’

‘Then why did they issue a warrant?’

‘Probably because I breached my bail conditions. That’s an offence in its own right.’

‘You may be right, but if they arrest you and send you back, you’ll be putting yourself in their hands – and we don’t know for how long. In the meantime you’ll be treading water, waiting for someone else to solve the mystery. The way I see it, whoever killed Uncle Harrison is probably the same person who locked us in the tomb and we need to find out-’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘I think it’s a reasonable starting point. And then there’s the small matter of these manuscripts that you’re supposed to be translating for our joint paper. This could be the biggest thing in our careers. Do you think the British authorities will let you work on academic papers while you’re a guest of Her Majesty? I can just see the citation: “Daniel Klein is currently the Professor of Semitic Languages at Wormwood Scrubs. He is sharing a cell with a pyramid salesman who…”’