days – possibly even weeks if they had enough water. But if Goliath escaped now she might not get a second chance to catch up with him – at least not while it could make a difference.
Even in a worst-case scenario, they could survive for several hours, and she could always put in an anonymous call alerting the authorities to their whereabouts. But she couldn’t afford to lose Goliath’s trail. He already had a head start, but she was still in contention. Moreover, she had a pretty good idea where he was going.
She swung the car round and headed back along the spur road in pursuit of her quarry.
Chapter 37
‘His neck’s been broken,’ said Mansoor. The sorrow in his voice was genuine; although he did not know the guardian personally, the man had been loyal. And he almost certainly had a family.
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Gabrielle, her fear growing.
‘Let’s not panic just yet,’ said Mansoor.
‘But no one knows we’re here!’ she replied. ‘You never told anybody! You didn’t phone in or anything.’
‘When we don’t make contact tomorrow they’ll know something is up. They’ll know where to look. They’ll see our jeep.’
‘If it’s still there,’ said Gabrielle. ‘I heard a car drive off.’
‘That must have been the car of whoever did this,’ said Daniel. ‘Whoever locked us in must have got here somehow – presumably by car – and whatever you heard, it was probably them driving off.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Mansoor. ‘It’s possible to walk across from the main valley.’
‘I’ve got an idea,’ said Daniel, taking out his mobile phone.
Almost in unison, the other two whipped out theirs. Daniel pressed the button to illuminate his and noticed that there was no signal. He tried a number, but got nothing. A brief glance at the others confirmed that they had not had better luck. He had hoped that because they were almost at surface level, they would get at least a weak signal – enough to call for help. Then he realized that they were behind an iron door and shielded on all sides by a thick layer of rock. Aside from that, the coverage in this country was none too good at the best of times.
‘We’re gonna die here!’ said Gabrielle, breaking down in tears and gasping for breath. Daniel put a comforting arm round her in the hope of calming her fears. Her sobbing declined in intensity and her breathing became shallower. Meanwhile, Mansoor quietly arranged the guardian’s body into some semblance of a dignified position. And then, quite abruptly, a smile graced his lips.
‘What?’ asked Daniel.
Mansoor reached into the tomb guardian’s pockets to produce a giant bunch of keys.
For a second, Daniel too was caught up in the euphoria, but then reality set in. ‘What good does that do us? We can’t reach the padlock.’
The door was shut not by a lock that could be reached from inside, but rather by a padlock on the outside. The door could only be unlocked from the other side.
Then Daniel saw something. ‘Look.’
The others turned in the direction he was pointing. It was a loose, fist-sized piece of rock, embedded in the wall, but with the break lines clearly visible.
‘What?’ asked Gabrielle in confusion.
Mansoor understood. And as Daniel took out his pocket-knife and opened it to prise the rock out of the wall, Mansoor crouched down to help him. Between them, they managed to free the piece of rock, which was about the size of half a brick and had a nice pointed corner.
With the rock in his hand, Daniel charged at the iron door and began smashing away at a single point on its surface, near where the lock would be. Iron, when smashed repeatedly with the pressure on a single point, can eventually break. By hitting it repeatedly, Daniel was trying to puncture the iron door and then enlarge the hole sufficiently to reach through it. But after many attempts, all he had managed to do was make a dent in the heavy iron. And he had exhausted himself. Over the course of the next hour, Mansoor took over and then Gabrielle. Finally Daniel took the stone back and went at it with a vengeance.
‘There’s a hole!’ he cried with delight, noticing a pinprick of light. It was very small, but it was progress, and it encouraged the others to take over and go at it with similar vigour.
Daniel wondered why no one heard the noise. To him it was deafening. Having heard the silence of the valley, it seemed strange that such a din did not carry. But then again, he realized that in the main valley the clamour made by the throngs of tourists would surely drown out the noise they were making. In any case, the distance was quite great and the fact that the noise of the tourists did not puncture the peace of the western valley testified to just how far apart those two worlds were.
But as they continued with their exhausting efforts, Daniel noticed two things. The first was that the hole was getting bigger and the second was that the light that was coming through the ever increasing gap was ebbing. It was getting on for half past six and the sun was setting.
A renewed sense of urgency set in and it manifested itself in the vigour with which Daniel wielded the stone as he attacked the hole. Finally, he stopped, exhausted. He held out the stone to Gabrielle, but she refused to take it. She was looking straight past him.
‘I think it’s big enough,’ she said.
Daniel turned and looked. It was hard to tell. The poor light inside the tomb and the dimming light outside made it hard to assess the size, and the jagged edges made it uncertain how safe it was to put one’s hand through, not to mention one’s wrist. Daniel would personally have preferred to enlarge the hole before trying, but he was ready to defer to Gabrielle.
‘Do you think you can reach through that?’ he asked.
Gabrielle stared at him, not answering.
‘No, she can’t,’ said a voice behind him. ‘But I can.’
Daniel turned round to see Mansoor holding the key ready and realized that he was right. Gabrielle, because of her hand size and well-developed wrists, would not be able to reach through and neither could Daniel. But the more slender Mansoor might just be able to.
‘Please don’t drop it,’ said Daniel.
It wasn’t intended to sound patronizing, but Mansoor responded with a withering look. Then, very slowly and carefully, he reached through with the key and tried to angle it towards the padlock. The other two saw the pained expression on his face as he rotated his arm in a desperate effort to get the key to where they needed it. And then he felt the key slipping in his sweaty fingers. He tried to pull his arm back in, but in his haste he cut his wrist on the jagged metal. Blood spurted from it and he cried out in pain.
The others watched in horror as they realized that both his hand and the key it was struggling to hold on to were still on the other side of the door, trapped in the jagged-edged hole.
Chapter 38
Driving at night along the Nile Valley was a dangerous business. The main ‘highway’ was a single lane in which vehicles parked at night with their lights off, and donkey carts with neither lights nor red markings or reflectors to make them visible trundled along invisibly. Added to that, there were also trucks with unsafe loads and long-distance taxis, driven with a brazen disregard not only for the speed limit but even for the laws of physics.
This meant that drivers had to make a hard choice between high speed, to mingle with the flow of local motorized traffic, and low speed to avoid the pitfalls of the stationary vehicles and donkeys. Navigating a middle course between those two perils was difficult.
But Sarit didn’t really have a choice.
She had followed Goliath back to Luxor, thinking that he was going to ditch the jeep and either fly back to
