Adam Palmer - The Moses Legacy

‘Daniel!’

They both spun round at the familiar voice.

‘My old friend. How are you?’

It was Walid. He was smiling that constant smile of his. Daniel just wished he hadn’t called his name out loud.

‘I’m fine,’ said Daniel, signalling Walid to join them at the table, preferring to converse with him in muted voices than shouting across a distance of a few feet.

Walid switched to Arabic. ‘Have you solved your problems?’

Daniel hesitated. Walid was trustworthy, but Daniel wasn’t sure how ongoing the duty of silence was. Technically he was no longer in Walid’s ‘tent’.

‘I need to get to Taba,’ Daniel explained.

‘You can go by bus across Sinai,’ Walid explained. ‘Or you can fly to Sharm and then drive north from there. Or you can even drive from here. But it is a long journey.’

Daniel wasn’t worried about the length of the trip, only about the prospect of having to show documentation when he hired a car.

‘We need to get there quietly… without anyone noticing.’

He was about to say that he and Gabrielle had lost their passports, but he didn’t want to lie to Walid again. It would be dishonourable, and honour was a very important thing in local culture.

‘We can’t hire a car, because we daren’t identify ourselves. It could lead to problems. But if you know someone who can drive us… we are ready to pay good money.’

Walid thought for a few seconds. ‘I do not know anyone who can drive you, but I know a group of Bedouin who are going that way on camels.’

‘Passport, please,’ said the Egyptian soldier.

The checkpoint was at the entrance to the Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel, just north of Suez. The mile-long, two-lane tunnel would take them under the Suez Canal into Sinai. But first, the pair of soldiers who had boarded the night bus had to earn their keep. Like the threesome who had searched the bus at the earlier checkpoint, they walked up and down, selecting a few people at random for an ID check. This time, however, Sarit just happened to be one of them.

For locals all they had to produce was an ID card, but for tourists it meant a passport. This might have been worrying, but the fact that it was random meant that they were not looking for Sarit in particular. And the fact that they didn’t have any computer terminal for checking meant that they could only check the passport against the face, not against background information such as a report about a wanted person or a lost passport. But then again, this was only an inland checkpoint, not border control.

She wasn’t too worried about getting to Taba. The hard part would be when she had to cross the border into Israel. She knew that the passport would pass a cursory inspection at least. In the old days it used to be easy to tamper with a passport to make it usable by prising open the plastic, taking out the photograph and carefully inserting a new one before resealing it. Even copying the quadra-circle of the ink stamp by hand with the felt tip was relatively straightforward to someone with a steady hand and a good eye for detail.

But now they had holograms, special sealing plastic and a whole host of other technologies designed to prevent tampering. However, Sarit attacked the problem from the other end, adapting her appearance to the passport. Most modern women know how to change their appearance in a variety of ways and Sarit’s training had augmented this ability considerably. Also, she had selected a target who was in her age range to begin with. Everything else could be changed: hair colour and style, skin tone, even eye colour. In a cosmopolitan city like Cairo, the wherewithal for such a metamorphosis was readily available.

Aside from that, most people don’t look anything like their passport picture and are not even expected to. And most of the border officials in Egypt were men – less perspicacious than women at the best of times and brought up in a culture where the very act of looking at women was discouraged!

So as the night bus sped its way across the Sinai Peninsula, Sarit tried to relax as the bus continued on its night-time drive.

When they arrived at Taba, just before dawn, the driver had done the usual trick of offering to take them the extra six hundred yards to the checkpoint into Israel, for a mere five Egyptian pounds. But like the others on the bus, Sarit had refused. She had no particular desire to be first. She was quite happy to be somewhere in the middle, so that the official who inspected her passport would be tired from the ones he had seen already and yet faced with many more in the queue behind her.

But when she got to her turn things did not go as smoothly as she expected.

‘Miss Harker?’ said the man studying her passport.

‘Yes?’

‘It says here that your passport was reported stolen yesterday.’

Mid-April was towards the end of the tourist season, at least for the southern Nile and the Valley of the Kings. Strictly speaking it was the tourist season all year round, but in the Luxor area, until late September, it would simply be too hot for the Western tourists.

Yes, they would still come and they would still take cruises on the Nile, but they would go with the luxury, air-conditioned vessels not the austere feluccas. Na’if’s father had been lucky to get that job – carrying that Western couple from the Esna Lock to Cairo. Normally the tourists just wanted a two-hour fun trip to get their feet wet, so to speak.

But now with the tourist season nearly over, it would be back to fishing. So now it was Na’if’s duty to clean out the boat and get it ready for a fishing voyage. He always hated this time of year. The tourist season was so much more fun. Not just because the money was better, but also because there was more to do. The tourists were always interesting people to talk to. They came from other lands where they did things differently and it was always fun to hear about foreign lands, and especially to meet the Western girls who showed their bodies in the way they dressed.

He wanted one day to go to the West. Maybe to study in one of their universities or colleges. He had heard that in the West you could study to be a reporter for a newspaper or learn how to play football like David Beckham. It would be nice to do that. If only his father had the money to send him.

It was while he was cleaning out the boat that he noticed something that must have fallen out of one of their pockets. It was a mobile phone, one of those big ones with a fancy display. It belonged to the man – Daniel. He remembered that now. He had two phones, but he never used them. And now he had lost one of them.

It was too late to give it back to him because they had left the boat and could be anywhere in Cairo. Besides, Daniel had two mobile phones; he had seen that. So why did he need both? It wasn’t really stealing because he hadn’t taken it, but merely found it. And he couldn’t give it back to the owner because the owner wasn’t there.

There was no point handing it in to the police. They would never be able to find the owner. So why couldn’t he keep it for himself?

He made up his mind in that moment that this was precisely what he would do.

‘I didn’t actually lose it,’ Sarit was explaining. ‘I just left it in my hotel room by mistake.’

‘But why didn’t you tell the police that you found it?’

Sarit was trying to convince the border official in Taba that it was all just a misunderstanding. But the border official was playing hardball.

‘I phoned the police and told them. But it was late at night when I discovered it and I couldn’t get through to the right person. They said they’d pass on a message.’