‘You’re pretty fit,’ said Gabrielle.
‘Not like you.’
‘Flattery, flattery.’
He quickened his pace and lengthened his stride to catch up with her, just in time to catch the smile on her face before it vanished.
‘You know, I always wanted to be like you,’ she said.
‘What? A man?’
‘Ha fuckin’ ha. No, I mean when I used to visit Uncle Harrison during the summer… when you were working on your dissertation.’
‘So how come you went into Egyptology instead of Semitic languages?’
‘That came later. No, at the time, I wanted to be a magician.’
‘A magician?’
‘Yes. Remember all those tricks you did with cards and coins and all that?’
‘Oh, yeah. That was something I did at school. It was the only way I could make friends. I didn’t know you were interested in that.’
‘Oh God, yes! I used to spend hours practising… hoping I could be as good as you.’
‘And were you?’
‘Did I ever show you my magic skills?’
‘Not as far as I recall.’
‘Then there’s your answer. Rest assured, Daniel, if I’d thought I could have impressed you in those days, I would have done.’
He remembered that she had had a bit of a crush on him in those days. She was fifteen when he first started work on his PhD. He had got into University College London’s Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the age of sixteen and graduated with a First in Language and Culture. At twenty he had gone on to do a direct doctorate at Cambridge under Harrison Carmichael. Gabrielle lived in Vienna, but spent her summers in Cambridge with her uncle, while her widowed mother travelled.
Daniel was well aware at the time that Gabrielle had a crush on him. He remembered all too well the constant flirting, the dressing up to look older, the ostentatious way she used to swish past him in a short skirt, desperately trying to catch his attention. He had to admit to himself that at times his eye did rove and his imagination was aroused. But she was a girl on the cusp of womanhood and he was an adult. To take it beyond the occasional acknowledgement of her flirting would have been as improper as it was illegal.
So he had played it cool and somewhere along the line she had grown out of him.
Half an hour into the walk, they tried the mobile phones again. This time, Gabrielle’s face lit up, so that even before she made eye contact with Daniel, he knew that the news was good.
She spoke urgently into the phone and when she was finished, she turned to Daniel with a beaming smile on her face.
‘They’re on their way.’
‘I heard. Did they say which hospital they’re taking him to?’
‘Luxor. But only because it’s nearer.’
‘Okay, well, let’s keep going till we make it to the valley, then see if we can get some sort of transport.’
Gabrielle nodded.
In the quarter of an hour that followed, they heard a helicopter in the distance and glanced at each other for encouragement. Privately, Daniel still had concerns. Would they arrive on time? Was Mansoor still alive?
‘What?’ asked Gabrielle, seeing the look on his face.
‘Nothing.’ He had no wish to worry her too, and no reason to share his fears with her either.
After a time, the land beneath their feet turned from sand and rock to lush green grass, and they knew that they had reached the edge of the Nile Valley. Gabrielle took out Mansoor’s mobile phone and played with the buttons, looking at the display. Daniel wasn’t sure what she was doing, but he decided not to ask until she had finished. In the meantime, he looked around and kept his eyes peeled for a taxi.
A few went past, but they already had fares. Meanwhile, Gabrielle was using Mansoor’s phone to make a call, but Daniel was still too preoccupied with his concerns for Mansoor to ask who she was calling. He hoped that they hadn’t got lost or failed to find Mansoor. Gabrielle had told them the exact location, and he would have had no reason to leave the area. In any case, how far could he have gone?
And then another thought struck Daniel – a frightening thought. Someone had tried to kill them before, by locking them in. What if the killer was still around? What if he was following them?
Daniel quickly dismissed this thought as nonsense. When they got out of the tomb, their jeep had been missing. Whoever had done it would have no reason to come back. But why had they locked them in to begin with? Who was the intended target? Was it Mansoor? Gabrielle? Daniel himself? All three?
It makes no sense!
And there was one more thing that didn’t make sense. Although Gabrielle was holding the phone to her ear, she wasn’t speaking. She was listening… but she wasn’t saying a word. And the look on her face concerned Daniel. It was a look of fear.
He was about to ask her what the problem was when a police van appeared in the distance heading towards them on the main road. Daniel started waving his arms in a desperate attempt to flag it down. The police van screeched to a halt and four police officers leapt out. But what happened next took him by surprise: they drew their guns.
Not sure of what was happening, Daniel opted for the common-sense approach and put his hands up.
‘British,’ he shouted, as if that word conferred some sort of magical protection. But then something happened that Daniel couldn’t believe.
The police started firing!
Instinctively, Daniel hit the ground. Gabrielle did likewise, except that she took half a second longer to react.
Chapter 40
Sarit’s training had involved the advanced driving course, including night driving, but she still felt uncomfortable doing it. Along the way she had evaded a donkey cart and two parked cars and nearly been demolished by a heavily loaded truck that shed some of its load in an effort to overtake her.
And now she caught sight of what she thought was the jeep that Goliath had driven away from the tomb, though it was hard to tell in the darkness. She could make out the form, but not the colour, much less the occupant. In any case, there were too many other cars on this stretch of road to be able to do anything. She would have to bide her time.
But she stayed in contact, keeping several car lengths back. The drive back to Cairo would take seven or eight hours all told, and she had barely been driving for two.
It was some three hours later that she finally got her opportunity. The traffic had thinned out considerably because many people did not want to drive that late, and somewhere along the line it got to the point that she was no longer able to keep other vehicles between them because they were on a stretch of road that had no other vehicles. That meant that the time to strike was now. She opened the driver’s window, knowing that she would not be able to reach over to her passenger window whilst controlling the vehicle, but this also meant that she could not throw the Molotov cocktail while overtaking him. Instead, she would have to get him to overtake her.
Steeling herself, she overtook him in a highly aggressive manoeuvre and then slowed down in front of him, just sitting there in the single lane, knowing that he was getting increasingly annoyed. She didn’t respond when he hooted and flashed his lights at her. But when he started moving out to overtake, she knew the time had come. Holding the steering wheel with her right hand, she lit the rag with her left, dropped the lighter and took the Molotov cocktail out of the side pocket.
As Goliath pulled up level with her and shouted something out at her, she threw the Molotov cocktail as hard as she could through the open driver’s window of her car and the passenger window of his. She had been intending
