The Heretic's Treasure by Scott Mariani
‘Café Riche,’ Claudel repeated. ‘Give me half an hour or so.’
Kamal wagged his finger. ‘Tell him to come here.’
Claudel covered the receiver with his hand. ‘I don’t bring business associates up to the house. That’s a rule.’
‘I just broke it,’ Kamal said, raising a warning eyebrow.
Claudel paused, sighed, spoke back into the phone. ‘I can’t make that appointment, Aziz. Come up to the house. You know where it is. Yes, as soon as you can.’
Once the call was over, Claudel and Kamal waited. Paced, checked their watches, paced some more. Nothing was said, tension building like static between them. After an anxious half-hour, Claudel heard the crunch of tyres on gravel and saw Aziz’s car pulling up outside.
Aziz walked into the villa and glanced around him. ‘Nice place,’ he started saying.
But he hadn’t gone three steps inside the marble-floored hallway before Kamal’s men hauled him through to the living room, dumped the panicking man in a chair and surrounded him.
‘You had something to say,’ Kamal told him.
Claudel pushed past, trying hard to hide his fury ‘Let me talk to him.’ He leaned down and looked earnestly at Aziz. ‘I can’t explain, my friend. But it’s very important that you tell me what you know.’
Aziz glanced up at the circle of hostile faces and started babbling nervously, spilling out his story. Four days ago, he’d been hired as a guide by an Englishman who’d introduced himself as Dr Morgan Paxton. The guy had wanted Aziz to drive him out to the pyramid cluster at Abusir, seventeen kilometres south of Cairo.
The tomb complex of Sahure, Claudel thought. The second ruler of Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty of kings, buried a thousand years before Akhenaten’s reign. ‘What for?’ he asked. ‘What did this Paxton want there?’
‘I don’t know,’ Aziz replied. ‘He didn’t say.’
‘Tell me about this Englishman,’ Kamal cut in.
Aziz glanced from one man to the other and babbled on, talking so fast he kept tripping over himself. ‘An academic. Nerdy Sandals and socks and a little blazer. Not the most streetwise kind of guy-didn’t have the sense to cover up his Rolex. When we got there, he wanted to go off on his own. I told him there were snakes. He said he didn’t care about the snakes, and that I was to wait for him in the car. He seemed really cagey about letting me go with him, like he wanted to keep it to himself. But there was no way I was going to sit cooking in the car. So I got out and sat in the shade and waited for him. If the crazy foreign bastard wanted to get himself lost or bitten, that was his problem.’
Claudel was painfully aware of the mounting impatience on Kamal’s face. ‘Just tell us what happened, Aziz.’
‘I waited about an hour. Then I saw him walking back. No, not walking, running. He was covered in dust and cobwebs, all out of breath, red in the face, excited as hell. Like a kid. He was punching the air with his fist. I thought he’d gone crazy. He kept muttering to himself.’
‘Muttering what?’
‘I don’t remember the exact words. But as soon as he said it, I remembered your call that time. That’s why I phoned you.’
‘What did he say?’ Claudel asked feverishly.
‘It was something about Amun being happy. And something about the heretic.’
Claudel felt the blood rush to his face. ‘Amun is content; the Heretic of Amarna shall be denied?’
‘That’s it. That’s what he said.’
Claudel tried to think. What was the connection? ‘Did he say anything more?’
‘No.’
‘You’re absolutely sure about that? It’s important.’
‘I told you, he didn’t say anything. He was just cackling and laughing to himself, like a nut. Then he had me drive him back into Cairo, as fast as I could. He started getting nervous, looking at his watch. Told me to head for the Egyptian Museum, but we missed it by five minutes. He looked pretty pissed off, but he didn’t say why or what he was looking for there.’
And then?’
And then he had me drop him off at his apartment building. Said he’d call me if he needed me again. That’s it.’
‘But he hasn’t called?’
‘No.’
‘But you know where he’s staying?’
Aziz blurted out the address.
Kamal stood over the frightened guide with his arms folded and a cold look in his eye. There was silence in the room.
Claudel’s mind was racing. It was either a disaster, or it was a break. It was clear that this Paxton person knew something. He was an academic. Maybe a history or archaeology scholar of some kind. What had he stumbled on? How much did he know? Who else had he told? The thought made Claudel break out in a cold sweat.
‘I want to talk to this Paxton,’ Kamal said, breaking the silence. He motioned to his men. ‘Emad, Farid, Mostafa, go and fetch him. Bring him here.’
This isn’t your fucking house, Claudel wanted to scream as the three men obeyed instantly and left the room. But he was too afraid to say a word.
Kamal turned back to Aziz. ‘Would you like a drink?’
Aziz glanced nervously at Claudel.
Kamal smiled. ‘Come on. A little glass of something.’ He moved to the drinks cabinet, opened the doors and scooped up one of Claudel’s fine cut-crystal wine glasses.
It had all happened before Claudel could react.
Kamal’s eyes flashed at Tarek, the leathery one, and the burly Youssef, who were standing behind Aziz’s chair. They gripped the man’s shoulders, pinning him down in it. Aziz opened his mouth wide in protest, and Kamal stepped quickly up to him and rammed the glass into it.
Aziz tried to scream. Kamal slowly pushed with his palm against the base of the glass until the guide’s cheeks were bulging and his eyes were darting crazily from side to side in his panic. He struggled and flailed against the hands holding him down.
Kamal let go of the glass, leaving the stem and base sticking out of Aziz’s gaping mouth. He moved his hands either side of the man’s face. Balled them into fists. Then crunched them against Aziz’s cheeks.
Claudel heard the sickening crack of the glass breaking inside Aziz’s mouth. Kamal’s eyes were wide and bright. He pinched Aziz’s nose with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. Used the heel of his right hand against his chin. Aziz was trying to spit, but all he could do was swallow. His screams were stifled against Kamal’s hand. Blood welled out of his mouth, gushing down his throat and chest.
Then Kamal let him go. Aziz writhed screaming out of the chair and collapsed to the floor. A blood-choked gurgle came from his lacerated lips.
Kamal hadn’t stopped smiling the whole time. He watched for a few more seconds, then took the pistol from behind the hip of his jeans. Worked the slide, pointed it down at Aziz’s head.
Aziz stared up. The bottom half of his face was slick with blood. His mouth was contorted. His eyes were pleading, full of terror. Then a hole appeared between them and he slumped to the floor with the back of his skull punched out.
Claudel stood numb with horror, deafened by the gunshot. He gaped down at the bloody corpse, and the stain that was seeping through the cashmere carpet. ‘What did you just do?’
‘He knew too much,’ Kamal said. ‘Get rid of him. Now we’ll soon see what this Paxton knows.’
But an hour later, there had been more bad news. By the time Kamal’s three men had got to the apartment building, police were all over it and there was a bloody corpse on a stretcher being loaded into the back of an ambulance. Dr Morgan Paxton’s corpse.
Someone had got to him first. But who?
The news had said it was a robbery gone off the rails, but Claudel didn’t trust it. He spent six straight hours on the phone, trying to find out more about the Paxton murder. Nobody seemed to know anything, not even his cop contact. Sergeant Hussein of the Cairo Municipal Police had proved a useful, if expensive, ally in the past when Claudel needed information, or for the cops to look the other w
The Frenchman sank deeper into despair. What if the killer had taken information from Paxton? What if someone else beat them to the treasure?
His life would be over. Ended. The way Kamal kept glaring at him, he was scared that that time would come even sooner.
All that had been two months ago. Since then, Claudel had been like a zombie. Time seemed to have stopped. He couldn’t drag himself away from the news, convinced every time he turned on the TV that he’d be greeted with an announcement of a major archaeological discovery out in the desert. He’d driven out to the Abusir pyramids, south of Cairo on the edge of the great sands, desperately searching for whatever it was that this Paxton might have found there. The place was a broken-down wasteland of scattered rocks and dust. He’d spent hours there, wandering among the ruins, digging aimlessly in the sand. To no avail. He just didn’t know what he was looking for.
Back at the villa, Kamal came and went, sometimes staying a couple of days at a time, sometimes disappearing for a week. Claudel did his best to avoid him, and didn’t even want to think about what he might be up to during his absences. Each time he saw the van pull in through the gates he had the same chilling fear that today was the day Kamal would finally give up on him and put a bullet in his head. Claudel felt more and more as if he was living on borrowed time. It was like waiting for death.
He stood there on the balcony, his mind returning to the present as he watched the lazy red disc of the sun slowly begin its climb in the eastern sky. He sighed.
His phone rang on his bedside table. He wandered over to it, picked it up wearily and stabbed the reply button. Who could be calling him at this time of the morning?
It was the cop, Hussein.
‘You know what time it is?’ Claudel said irritably.
‘This can’t wait. I thought you’d want to know.’
Claudel tutted. ‘What?’
‘You know you asked me about the Paxton business?’
A faint glow of hope crept into Claudel’s burnt-out brain. ‘Yes?’ he replied cautiously. He listened as Hussein talked, and his eyes began to widen.
‘A citizen’s arrest, you say?’
‘Brought in trussed up like a couple of chickens,’ Hussein said. ‘And the way things are looking, they’re dead certs for the Paxton killing. They confessed inside of ten minutes. Probably swing for it. But here’s the strange bit. While we were locking them up, one of them was raving about the guy who brought them in. This crazy foreigner who’d stormed into their place, interrogated them about Paxton, beaten the crap out of them and stolen all their stuff.’
‘Who the hell is he?’
‘Somebody professional,’ Hussein said. ‘By all accounts, he mowed them down like grass.’
Suddenly there was blood flowing in Claudel’s veins again. ‘You have a name for this guy?’
‘I can do better than that,’ Hussein said. ‘A police car just took him back to his apartment. Not five minutes ago. He’s staying at the same place Paxton did.’
Chapter Twenty
Ben was drifting in and out of a doze as the unmarked car drove him back. It pulled up outside the grim apartment building. He thanked the driver for the lift, got out and watched the police car’s taillights disappear down the street. It would soon be dawn. He wearily climbed the stairs, let himself into the rented flat, switched on the lights and flopped in an armchair.
He felt suddenly deflated, melancholy. Morgan’s killers had been taken care of, but what good was it going to do anyone? The whole thing had been depressing and ugly, and now he was glad it was over. All he wanted to do was go home.
His eyes were heavy. Sleep beckoned, but he didn’t want to use the bed. Kept imagining Morgan’s body sprawled over it. But there was a sofa in the living room that seemed comfortable enough. He’d slept in a lot of worse places in his time.
He turned off the main lights and put on a small corner lamp that flooded the room with a soft glow and almost made it seem cosy. He settled down on the sofa, letting his muscles relax and exhaustion take over.
But it was no use. He knew he couldn’t sleep until he’d taken a look at the computer. Jumping up, he grabbed his bag and carried it back to the sofa. Sitting on the edge, he pulled out the laptop. It was still rolled up inside the striped blazer.
As he unwrapped it, a small scrap of paper fell out of the blazer’s breast pocket and spiralled down onto the carpet. He laid the computer down next to him on the sofa and bent to pick up the paper. Unfolding it, he saw it was a receipt stub from a Cairo grocery store, showing the purchase of some tinned food and a bottle of beer. Across the pale columns of figures, someone had scribbled a phone number in biro.
Ben read the number three times before his tired eyes registered that it was a UK landline number. The area code was 01334. It wasn’t one he knew. Then there was the main number, and below that was what looked like a three-digit extension number, maybe for an office-345.
It might be important, or it might not. Ben folded the receipt and replaced it in the blazer pocket, making a mental note to tell Harry about it when he saw him. He bundled the blazer back in his bag, slipped the gold Rolex off his wrist and dropped it inside as well. He laid the bag on the floor, settled back on the sofa with cushions propped behind his head and the slim computer resting on his stomach. He flipped open the lid and pressed the power button. Waited as it loaded itself up.
Morgan’s screensaver was a shot of some archaeological dig in the sands. Ben clicked on the ‘My Documents’ icon and a list flashed up. It was a short one. He scrolled down, looking for anything promising. Then he came to it.
THE AKHENATEN PROJECT
Akhenaten. Ben dimly recalled the name from his theology studies. The so-called heretic pharaoh whose turbulent reign, more than a thousand years before Christ, had wrought havoc on Egypt’s economy and morale. Was this the subject of Morgan’s research? So this was what it was all about-some obscure pharaoh? Hardly a big deal. Ben clicked on the document, wondering what he was about to find.
The screen suddenly went blank. A box flashed up, asking him to enter a user name and password. Above it, a curt line of text informed him: Automatic access disabled. This file is stored in a password-protected vault.’
Access denied. He tried again.
Same response. The way was barred.
He gazed at the screen for a second. Shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. Harry might be able to access the document-if Morgan had talked about it, he might know the password or be able to guess it. But there was no way Ben was going to get in, and he didn’t care that much. He yawned.
But then he thought about Harry, far away, sitting surrounded by all that luxury and probably unable to relax for a single moment as he waited for Ben to report back to him. The man’s whole life was on hold.
Then Ben remembered that the apartment had Internet access. What the hell. Now was as good a time as any. He kicked his legs off the sofa, stood up and carried the whirring laptop over to the desk. He found a curled-up wire hanging out of a phone socket, and on the end of it a plastic mini-connector that matched up to a port on the side of the computer. He clicked it into place, and in a few moments he was online. He logged on to his webmail account and typed up a quick message:
Harry-Job completed. Coming back tomorrow, will talk soon. In the meantime, attached is Morgan’s research file. Encrypted document, hope you can access. B
He attached the Akhenaten Project file to the message, hoping it would work. It did, and when he hit ‘send’ the message disappeared into the ether with no problems.
That was it, then. He’d done his best.
He yawned again, more deeply this time, walked back over to the sofa, turned out the side-light and stretched out. A couple of hours’ sleep was all he could expect before heading to the airport. Then back to San Remo to deliver Morgan’s belongings to Harry, and then on to Normandy and Le Val. He relished the idea.
What
That was his last thought before he drifted off.
Outside his window, dawn was breaking over Cairo. The city was beginning to grind back into life, the traffic rumble slowly building and the heat returning as the sun began its climb over the desert.
Ben slept. In his dreams he heard the gunfire and the screaming again. Saw the faceless man, the eyes full of hate behind the gun. He saw Zara, smiling at him through a haze.
Then he was waking in a panic and springing to his feet as the door of the apartment burst open and four heavily armed men crashed into the room.
Chapter Twenty-One
Ben stood, frozen, disorientated. There was nowhere to run, nothing to hand that he could use to defend himself and he could only watch as the men swarmed into the room and positioned themselves around him.
Four gun muzzles pointed right at his head. AKS-74U assault weapons, the radically cut-down version of the Kalashnikov rifle. The Russian military had nicknamed the gun the ‘okurok’-the ‘cigarette stub’. Uselessly random and inaccurate at long range, but devastating at close quarters as a high-capacity, high-powered submachine gun, it was a favourite tool of terrorists. Whoever these guys were, their armament alone told him they were serious. And he could see from the way they moved, slick and professional like trained soldiers, that they’d done this kind of work before.
‘Search the place,’ said the one in the long black coat.
Ben knew instantly that he was the leader. The other three were the brawn, but he was the brains. He wasn’t the kind who felt he had to pump iron or shave his head to look scary. It was all in the eyes. There was a wild ferocity in them, an imperious air of complete self-belief. Ben had no trouble believing that this guy would be the first to hose a full magazine of 5.45mm high-velocity rounds into him if he so much as twitched a finger. There was no doubt he was the most dangerous man in the room.