Adam Palmer - The Moses Legacy

She pulled down the latch and opened the long thin window. Then she inserted her head and hands and then arms and began pulling herself through. Now came the tricky bit. She was thin enough to get through, but the problem was landing safely. The building was set over different levels and this window opened out on to a stretch of roof. But it was an eight- or nine-foot drop from the window to the roof.

Falling head first would probably break her neck. Of course if she slid through slowly and lowered herself as she did so, the actual drop would be less than that. And of course, she could also take the fall on her hands, albeit at the risk of a broken wrist or worse. But then she noticed some kind of a utility box against the wall. By putting her hands on this as she hung there, she was able to angle her body, swing her legs round and…

Yes!

She landed on her feet, albeit awkwardly, like a springboard diver whose dive had gone horribly wrong. But there were no points to be had here; it was all about escape and survival. Right now she was on a section of the roof. She didn’t know how long it had been, but she realized that if her escape hadn’t been discovered yet, it pretty soon would be. And escape was perhaps not quite the right word. She had escaped from the toilet, but she had not yet escaped from the building.

She looked for a way down, realizing that if there was a utility box on the roof then there had to be a ladder or some other way of reaching the ground. All large public buildings must have accessible roofs to enable work to be done. The question was where was it? And would it simply take her back into the building, which would almost certainly be locked down before she could affect a complete escape?

Then she saw it: a fire escape, diagonally across the roof from where she was standing. She raced towards it, but as she did she thought she heard someone shouting out to her in Arabic.

Breakfast on board Walid’s boat was shakshouka – fried eggs in a thick sauce made from fresh tomatoes, onions and chillies, that he had bought from a riverside vendor. As they ate, they listened to the radio in the background. It was tuned to some local music station, lulling Walid and his crew into a state of restfulness. But it was coming up to the hour and the news came on.

Daniel and Gabrielle both listened out just in case anything was said about the tomb incident. The first two items were about local politics and the third was about the United States. But then another item came on that caught them by surprise.

‘Police in Luxor are looking for a Western couple after an attempt was made on the life of Akil Mansoor, the Deputy Minister for Culture and Head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. Professor Mansoor was locked in a tomb together with the Western couple in an apparent attempt to kill him, but the three of them managed to escape. The couple, however, then abandoned Professor Mansoor and ran away when confronted by the police. Professor Mansoor is now recovering in hospital from the incident.’

Daniel sighed with relief at the news that Mansoor was okay. He exchanged eye contact with Gabrielle and saw that she shared his feelings.

‘The couple are Daniel Klein, an Englishman, believed to be an expert on Semitic languages, and Gabrielle Gusack, an Austrian professor of Egyptology. They are also being sought over other matters, concerning a recent death in England. Professor Klein is forty years old, brown haired and of average build. The woman is blonde, thirty-five years old and speaks with a slight Austrian accent.’

Even before they looked up from the radio, Daniel and Gabrielle knew that Walid and the other two were looking straight at them.

‘We thought we should warn you. If she was trying to kill you then she might try again.’

The police captain was talking to Goliath, who had now fully regained consciousness. The doctors were treating his burns and the police were treating him with compassion and humanity. But he remained handcuffed to the bed frame as a precaution.

‘Thank you for telling me.’

‘You have no need to worry, of course. We will post extra guards outside your room and at the entrances to the hospital. If she does try to come here, she will be arrested before she gets anywhere near you. But we thought that you should be informed.’

‘Thank you.’

‘But having got that out of the way, the best way we can protect you is if you tell us the truth. Why did this woman try to kill you? And why were you driving the jeep that was rented by our Deputy Minister of Culture?’

At that moment a man in a suit entered the private hospital room, flanked by a couple of soldiers. The police captain and the uniformed officer by the bed both leapt to their feet in an obvious sign of deference to the visitor.

A vociferous exchange in Arabic followed; the new arrival appeared to be throwing his weight around and the police captain appeared to be pleading or at least arguing from a position of weakness. Eventually, both men calmed down and the police captain looked – and sounded – beaten.

He took out his evident frustration on a subordinate, barking an order to the unformed policeman, who produced a key and unlocked the handcuffs from Goliath’s wrist and the bed frame. Goliath rubbed his wrist while the uniformed policeman put away the handcuffs. The police captain looked embarrassed at his sudden loss of authority.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Goliath.

‘It would seem, Mr Carter, that you have friends in high places. I have been ordered to release you. You are, of course, free to go at any time. However I would strongly advise you to stay here in the hospital to continue with the silver nitrate treatment for the burns.’

‘I’m telling you – we didn’t have anything to do with it,’ Gabrielle was saying in Arabic. ‘We were locked in the tomb and stuck there for several hours.’

Walid’s brother and son were looking at her like they wanted to believe her. But Walid himself was hard to read, like he had been around the block a few times and was a natural sceptic about everything except his religion.

‘Then how did you get out?’

‘We used a stone to smash a hole in the door. Then we used the key. That’s why Mansoor is in hospital. He cut his wrist on the metal of the door.’

‘Then why are the police looking for you? And why did you run away?’

‘Because the police started shooting at us! They didn’t even give us a chance to talk.’

She was worried that he was going to ask why the police would do that. This could be a problem. If she told him that the police thought they were carrying a contagious disease, he would hardly be inclined to carry them further. All she knew was that they hadn’t spread this news in the radio reports – presumably because they did not wish to start a panic. In the face of such restraint, it would hardly make sense to share the police’s belief with the very person they were still hoping would help them get to Cairo.

‘Okay, I know our police can sometimes be a bit… overzealous. But I still don’t understand why you abandoned Professor Mansoor.’

Daniel finally decided to step in. The reporter had already blown his cover and revealed that the Englishman was an expert on Semitic languages, so there was no reason not to show his fluent command of Arabic.

‘We didn’t actually abandon him. We left him temporarily because it was a five-kilometre walk to get help and he’d cut his wrist badly. We bandaged it up as best we could and then set off to get help.’

Walid did not seem surprised by the quality of Daniel’s Arabic. ‘Couldn’t you have called for help? Don’t you have mobile phones?’