Gabrielle held out Mansoor’s phone. ‘There’s a message. You might like to listen to it.’
He took the phone and held it to his ear.
‘Hallo Professor Mansoor, this is the Minister of Health, Farooq Mahdi. We have a little problem on our hands. We understand that you are travelling in the company of a British man called Daniel Klein and a woman called Gabrielle Gusack. Please be very wary of them. There is an arrest warrant out for Daniel Klein after he jumped bail on a murder charge. We believe that he could be very dangerous. There is also evidence that they are both carrying the same contagious disease as the volunteers at the dig. The Gusack woman is known to have been in contact with a curator at the British Museum and he later succumbed to the same disease. Please get away from them as soon as possible and contact us.’
Now he realized why Gabrielle had been so determined to get him to run. As far as the cops were concerned, they were a dangerous health hazard and the police didn’t want to go anywhere near them – even if shooting them was the only alternative. The fact that Daniel was also suspected of being a murderer on the run, made it easier for them to take that shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach. Daniel knew that in these circumstances, there was no point trying to reason with them.
But why on earth should anyone think they were carrying a disease? They weren’t showing any symptoms themselves. This had to be some sort of mix-up. But there evidently was an outbreak and there had had to be some cause.
However, until such time as they could approach the authorities without getting themselves shot, they’d have to keep a low profile. They needed breathing room… time to unravel the mystery and work out a plan.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Daniel.
Chapter 44
Sarit arrived in Cairo sometime after four in the morning. She parked her car and took an invigorating shower to rouse herself from the lethargy that was engulfing her.
She put on the white bathrobe supplied by the hotel and made her way to the bed, still feeling an intense desire to sleep. But she had something to do before that: she had to report in. She switched on her computer and uploaded the tourist-style pictures she had taken of her day in the Valley of the Kings. Then she connected the laptop to the hotel’s broadband and prepared the message for embedding into one of the pictures: Goliath locked Klein, Gusack and Mansoor in tomb in western valley and stole their jeep. May have killed them, but I suspect not. Arrange for them to be freed. I followed Goliath on road to Cairo and disposed of him with homemade incendiary.
She embedded the text in the picture, then wiped the text file and uploaded the picture to her social network account for all her ‘friends’ to see. Then she ran the utility to delete any temporary files and overwrite unused areas of the hard disk.
Then she did what she had wanted to do for hours: crash out on the bed.
Sometime later, she was awakened from her uneasy sleep by an aggressive banging on the door. She barely had time to throw on a robe before the door was flung open and three Egyptian policemen walked in.
‘Miss Stewart, you are under arrest for leaving the scene of a motor accident.’
Chapter 45
Daniel had let Gabrielle do the talking. After a sleepless night in the open by the Nile, just outside a small village, they had made their way to the riverbank in search of the means to escape. And they found it in the feluccas – the local riverboats that operated on the Nile both as fishing vessels and as cheap tourist rides.
Gabrielle was so much more persuasive than he could have ever been. First of all, it was obvious that Walid, the dark-skinned, southern Egyptian owner of the felucca, found Gabrielle very attractive, as did the other two crew members who were there with him – his teenage son Na’if and someone else who was either Walid’s younger brother or his cousin. Secondly, they seemed to be impressed by her fluent, almost classical Arabic. Daniel could have spoken Arabic equally well, but somehow hearing it from a pretty blonde foreigner – and a woman too – was considerably more impressive, and they warmed to her immediately.
Gabrielle had warned Daniel that it would be risky to try to join a normal tourist river cruise without arousing suspicion. Not that there would have been any shortage of room on a northbound cruise; holidaymakers tended to prefer the shorter cruises between Aswan and Luxor, and in any case the tourist season was almost over. Joining a cruise without a booking at the last minute, though, might arouse some suspicions. For all they knew, the riverboats and car hire firms might have been alerted to watch out for them.
But travelling by felucca was another matter. Those old, narrow, engineless riverboats were used both by fishermen and by canny locals to ferry tourists on short trips.
‘We want to get the authentic local experience,’ Gabrielle had explained. ‘Or rather my husband does.’
She realized, quite spontaneously, that the afterthought was a nice little touch to make it sound convincing. She knew that Walid and his crew could well relate to that. The Western city slicker who wants to get his hands dirty, and the educated, dutiful wife reluctantly going along with her adventurous husband’s wishes.
‘And you want to go all the way to Cairo?’ Walid asked by way of clarification.
‘Yes.’
If they could make it to Cairo, they had several options, including going to their respective embassies and asking them to liaise with the Egyptian authorities – even if it meant Daniel being returned to the UK and arrested. But what they really wanted was to have a look at the papyrus from the tomb of Ay that Mansoor had told them about – the one at the Cairo Museum. Daniel was hoping that it was the one that Harrison had mentioned – the one that described the resurgence of the plague. It might hold the key to why Harrison was killed and why someone had locked them in the tomb.
‘You know there is no toilet on boat, yes?’
‘We understand,’ Gabrielle confirmed, giving Daniel a dirty look as if to say: Why are you forcing me to go through this?
‘Okay, you have American dollars?’
‘No, only sterling or Egyptian pounds.’
‘Okay, give me twelve hundred pounds.’
He meant Egyptian pounds. But that was still too much – even allowing for the fact that it would take them about five or six days to make it to Cairo.
‘I’ll give you five hundred,’ said Gabrielle.
Daniel smiled; it was obvious that she knew how to haggle a lot better than he.
‘Five hundred?!’ The mock-indignation in Walid’s tone was almost theatrical. ‘For one person I do for five hundred. Give me thousand, I take you all the way to Cairo.’
‘A thousand? Look, we’re not first-timers. This is my fifth trip and my husband’s third. I’ll give you six hundred.’
‘Okay, give me eight hundred,’ he said with a smile. ‘I do for you for eight hundred.’
‘Seven hundred,’ she replied, matching smile for smile.
‘Why you do this to me? Where else you find beautiful boat like mine?’
That was not exactly the way she would have described it; ramshackle old dinghy might have qualified. But she had to be careful not to overplay her hand. Most of the feluccas operated south of the Esna lock, between Luxor and Aswan. They wanted to get to Cairo and there were very few feluccas trying to compete with the cruise ships on that northern stretch of the Nile. So it was a case of beggars can’t be choosers. But the competitive streak in her made her decide to have one last try.
‘Seven hundred,’ she said firmly.
‘Seven fifty.’
‘Okay,’ she said. If he had stuck at eight hundred, she would have said seven fifty herself. Still, it was better
