No less than six cars emptied officers wearing the winter khaki of the municipal police and black of the assault-rifle-carrying Central Security Forces. They surrounded the area of the dig. Lang wasn’t going to just fade into the background as he had hoped.
Two men were in plain clothes. Rossi’s crew, both Italians and Egyptians, chattered in a polyglot tumult of languages and dialects. Piecing words and phrases together, Lang understood four men in Bedouin robes had appeared at the dig. Two had held the crew at gunpoint while the other two had detonated some sort of explosive. There were nearly as many versions of what had happened thereafter as there were those telling them.
Lang had left the QBZ in the mausoleum. There had been too many witnesses to his brief gun battle with the Asian in the robes. Even in the confusion that was likely to reign for hours, the police were going to seek him out at some point. His main concern was slipping away from the scene unnoticed before then. Although he had little doubt his forged passport back at the hotel would survive scrutiny, being detained had unhealthy implications. He was fairly certain the attempt to kill all those belowground had been aimed specifically at him, and at least two of the four who had made the effort were still at large. In the custody of the police, he would be an easy target.
Within minutes, Rossi was engaged in an animated conversation in English with one of the men in plain clothes while the other wore a dubious expression as he peered into the chamber below. Lang reached the tent, glancing around. He spied a camera, one used to photograph objects in situ. Slinging the camera’s strap around his neck, it took him only a few minutes to find a pen and pad. So equipped, he approached Rossi and his interrogator.
He shouldered his way between them, holding up his wallet so only the archaeologist could see he was showing nothing more than a driver’s license. “Dr. Rossi? I’m Ben Towles, Egyptian correspondent for the New York Times.”
As verification of his bona fides, Lang thrust the camera into Rossi’s face, snapping a picture before doing the same to the policeman. He had no idea if the paper even had such a position on its staff but he was fairly sure the Egyptian cop didn’t either. Rossi’s eyes opened wide in surprise, his expression showing he thought there was a chance Lang had gone nuts.
Lang didn’t give him an opportunity to express that or any other opinion. “I understand you were involved in a shooting just a few minutes ago. Do you think Muslim fundamentalists were involved?”
Rossi cleared his throat, giving himself an extra second to think. “Er, I do not know. I…”
The policeman was taking a few seconds of his own to recover from the surprise of having a reporter interrupt a police investigation. A member of Egypt’s own media would have expected to have his skull cracked for such impertinence, but the influence and power of American news was as world famous as its insolence. The last thing the officer wanted was a diplomatic incident on his hands.
He finally asserted himself, showing a badge. “And I,” he said in British-accented English, “am Major Hafel Saleem of the Alexandria security police. I have many questions for this man. You may ask yours when I am finished.”
“But I have a deadline,” Lang protested, shoving the major aside. “What kind of fascist regime does Egypt have? Have you never heard of freedom of the press?”
It was exactly the wrong thing to say, which of course was the right thing, under the circumstances.
Major Hafel Saleem’s eyes burned into Lang’s as the policeman grabbed him by the shirtfront. “You are not in America; you are in Egypt. Your precious ‘freedom of the press’ does not run police investigations here. I do.” He shoved Lang, sending him stumbling backward. “Now get out of my sight before I decide to have you arrested for interfering with a police investigation!”
Lang considered threatening a complaint to the American embassy or any of the things the American media is likely to do when confronted with a system where the Fourth Estate is treated as less than privileged. He decided he had achieved his goal and didn’t need an arrest or a beating to go with it. Doing his best imitation of sullen, he slunk away to the street to hail one of the city’s ubiquitous cabs.
Minutes later, the car was stalled in traffic, surrounded by exhaust fumes, noise and smells Lang did not want to even try to identify.
He hardly noticed. How in hell had those guys known where he was? He had taken a random cab to be less obvious than the Mercedes. During the ride, he had taken a look behind the taxi, making reasonably sure they were not followed. Admittedly, in Alexandria’s traffic, a tail would be as difficult to spot as to maintain. He had told no one where he was going. Even if Rossi’s message had been read before delivery to him… No, there had been no time or date.
Then what…? He was recalling every move he had made since arrival here.
The call to Manfred on the BlackBerry!
How careless can you get?
The thought brought him straight up in the cab’s seat. All cell phones, including this one, communicated with one or more relay facilities when taking or making a call. For that matter, the phone, even not in use, was constantly searching for the nearest relay station. Where there were a number of relays, as in a city, the search signals could be triangulated to place the particular cell phone in an area of a few square feet.
He took the BlackBerry from his shirt pocket, scowling at it accusingly. His first impulse was to throw the perfidious device out of the cab’s window. Second thought gave him a better idea. He leaned forward and changed the directions he had given the cabby.
The taxi pulled up in front of a DHL office whose red and yellow logo announced its ability to deliver anywhere worldwide. The criterion Lang had requested had been somewhat more simple: the closest shipping office, FedEx, UPS or DHL. The cab stopped at the curb, provoking a cacophony of angry horns, which the driver ignored along with the shouted insults and rude gestures of Alexandria’s ever-impatient drivers.
Minutes later, Lang was back in the cab, his BlackBerry on a voyage of its own. He could only hope the battery lasted long enough to complete its way to a weather station in Chilean Patagonia, that isolated end of the world where South America yields to Antarctica. He remembered the area from a map he had once perused. Spanish names that translated into things like Desolation Land, Gulf of Sorrows, Cape of Torments.
Just the places you’d want your enemies to visit.
Cemetery of Terra Santa
An hour later
Major Hafel Saleem of the Alexandria security police was frustrated. He had gotten 90 percent of the pertinent facts in the first twenty minutes of his arrival at the cemetery. The other 10 percent, perhaps the most important 10 percent, eluded him.
Four men in Bedouin attire had appeared at the site of a duly permitted archaeological dig. Nothing unusual about that. There were always these types of explorations going on around the city. The four men had suddenly produced weapons. Not as rare an event as the major would like to think. These desert nomads were frequently armed, if not with firearms, then with knives. Violence was not uncommon. Insults, real or imagined, to family, feuds, vengeance, it really didn’t matter. They killed or maimed each other on a regular basis. The only truly unusual facet of the incident was the unique automatic weapon in the burial chamber. Saleem had never seen one quite like it.
At one time it had been the major’s hope that Egypt’s Bedouins would eventually be so successful in killing each other, there would be none left. But alas, they moved to the city and took up city ways, peacefully stealing and cheating each other instead of killing.
But the men with the weapons at this site had not come to kill other Bedouins. In fact, the dead man and the one who had fallen into the hole weren’t Bedouins at all. Though the dead man, the one shot by the American, was beyond the major’s interrogation techniques, the living one was not. The fact he had broken a bone or two in the fall would ensure he would answer questions with less effort on the major’s part.
Saleem was confident that before calls to evening prayer blared from the mosques’ minarets, he would know who these men were, why they had attempted to either drown or suffocate a dozen or so people, and other matters of interest, particularly who the American was.
Antonio Rossi, the Italian in charge of this dig, had been cooperative but less than helpful. The American’s name was Henry Roth, supposedly an archaeologist from one of those big American universities, the one in California. Saleem had phoned this information into his staff for verification by Internet or otherwise, only to learn within minutes (1) there were several big universities in California, (2) none of them were currently involved in a dig in Alexandria, Egypt, (3) all but one had never heard of, much less employed, a Dr. Roth in their archaeological
