Kamal’s eyes were expressionless. He reached down to his belt and Claudel screamed as his hand came up clutching the double-edged combat knife.
During the next fifty-five seconds, Pierre Claudel’s worst nightmares were realised in a way that even he hadn’t been able to imagine. He died horribly, bloodily and in extreme terror.
Kamal stood up and wiped blood off his face with his sleeve. His eyes were bright with the triumph of the kill as he turned to Youssef in the hallway below.
‘Get everybody together. Get the vehicles and the weapons. We have a train to catch.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
The Cairo-Aswan night train
As the train rumbled through the darkness, carving its path between the Nile corridor and the desert, Ben sat pensively on the top bunk of the double sleeper compartment he was sharing with Kirby. He could hear the historian’s soft, rhythmic snores coming from the lower bunk, mingling with the steady clatter of wheels on tracks. He was still fully dressed and, even though his body was crying out for sleep, he just couldn’t turn off his restless mind.
It was less than an hour since the night express had departed from Cairo, but it felt like weeks. Time was dragging so slowly that it seemed to him almost as if it were being deliberately cruel. Seven days to complete his task, and the third day would soon be dawning. With nothing to do but sit and fret for the next few hours, the gnawing inactivity brought him face to face with his darkest thoughts and fears.
He reflected on the events of the last couple of days. He’d come a long way, but there was an even longer road ahead of him and no way of knowing what he was going to find at the end of it. Was he getting close now? The fact was, he just couldn’t say. That was the worst thought of all.
Suddenly galvanised into action, he clambered down the bunk’s ladder, grabbed his wallet and left the compartment. Out in the narrow, neon-lit corridor that ran along the right side of the sleeper car, he passed a uniformed guard and a guy in plain clothes who had the look of a policeman about him. Ben’s eye picked out the shape of the concealed pistol on his hip. There was probably a separate security car at the front of the train with three or four more plainclothes detectives posted to protect the tourist passengers from terrorist attacks.
A few yards further down the corridor, Ben’s phone vibrated in his pocket and he fished it out.
It was Paxton, and he got straight to the point. ‘Have you found it?’
‘I know where it is,’ Ben replied, keeping his voice low.
‘Well done. You’re making good progress. I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’
‘If it’s even there,’ Ben added. ‘If it really exists, and if it hasn’t been looted away to nothing by Sudanese militia or Bedouins, or anyone else who might have stumbled on it any time during the last thirty-odd centuries. You’re taking a big gamble on that.’
‘You’d better hope you find it,’ Paxton said. ‘You know what’ll happen if you come back empty-handed.’
‘What if I do find it? How the hell do you expect me to transport it all by myself? I wouldn’t get halfway back up the Nile.’
‘You let me worry about the logistics. Your job is to locate the treasure, make sure it’s safe and bring me proof and co-ordinates. I’ll take care of the rest.’
‘You don’t think a truck convoy full of gold is going to draw attention?’
Paxton chuckled. ‘I have ways of moving things around unnoticed, Benedict. It’s what I do. Leave that part to me.’
‘And when I bring you the proof, you’ll release Zara?’
‘I’m a man of my word. You honour your end, and I’ll honour mine.’
‘A man of scruple. A shining example to us all.’
The amicable tone dropped from Paxton’s voice. ‘Don’t test me. I expect to hear from you soon, with the news I want. Remember you’re on the clock, Benedict.’ He ended the call.
Ben put his phone away and walked on down the length of the swaying, juddering train towards the restaurant car. It was closed, but he’d been more interested in the adjoining bar that he knew remained open through the night.
There had been just a thin smattering of passengers gathered on the station platform in Cairo to board the night train, and so Ben wasn’t surprised to find the bar empty. The white-jacketed attendant had dark circles under his eyes, and served the double Scotch he asked for without a word. He sat there for a while, lost in thoughts that he hoped the drink would help to chase away. He wasn’t sorry when he sensed a movement behind him and turned to see another passenger wander into the bar. He was about thirty-five, dressed in a denim shirt and pressed jeans. He perched himself on one of the fixed stools, glanced amicably at Ben and asked the barman for a beer. He sounded Canadian, maybe from Toronto. Ben remembered him from the railway station where he’d been boarding the train with his wife and young son.
It wasn’t long before they were engaged in the kind of easy, loose, noncommittal dialogue fellow travellers fall into to pass the time. The man’s name was Jerry Novak, and he was a computer salesman touring Egypt with his wife, Alice, and their boy, Mikey, who was seven. For the purposes of the conversation, Ben was a freelance travel journalist checking out the Cairo-Aswan rail route for a magazine.
Drinks finished, they bade each other goodnight, and Ben started making his way back to his sleeping compartment. As he walked from carriage to carriage, he sensed that the train had slowed right down to a crawl. Up the corridor from his compartment, he met the guard coming back, accompanied this time by two plainclothes cops.
‘Is there a problem with the train?’ Ben asked the guard as he passed them.
‘Nothing to worry about, sir. We are experiencing minor engine trouble. Engineers are waiting at the next station, and we hope to be able to resume normal progress presently.’
Back in the compartment, Kirby was still fast asleep on the bottom bunk. Ben clambered quietly up to the top and lay back on the narrow mattress, frustrated at the slow pace of the journey.
Time passed, the luminous hands of his watch ticking slowly around. The train seemed to take forever to crawl to the next station and it was a long time before they got moving again. He could hear the voices and clinking tools as workmen fixed the engine problem. Eventually the whine of the diesel started up again, and the carriages gave a jerk as the locomotive took up the slack and moved off. The rumbling clatter grew as the train picked up speed again and Ben lay staring up into the darkness, feeling the vibration of the wheels on the tracks pulsating through the bunks and the thin plywood partition wall next to him.
Sleep escaped him for a long, long time. Then, as the first fiery streaks of dawn began to light up the sky, he closed his eyes and felt himself drift. His body rocked gently with the motion of the train. His breathing was slow and shallow, his eyes closed. In his dreams, he was far away.
The air was cool and tangy and the sea sparkled under the sun. He was standing on the polished white wood deck of a yacht. Warmth on his face. The whisper of the blue-green waters lapping at the hull.
He heard a voice, and turned slowly to see where it was coming from.
Standing at the end of the deck, the endless expanse of water behind him, was Harry Paxton. He wore a friendly smile, and his old military battledress from Makapela Creek.
In front of him, her back clasped tightly to his body, was Zara. She was struggling against his grip, eyes full of fear. Against her right temple was the muzzle of the pistol Paxton was holding.
Ben started running towards them, shouting ‘No! Let her go!’ But his voice was weak and, the faster he ran, the further Paxton and Zara seemed to shrink away from him, until the deck stretched out between him and them for hundreds of yards.
Then it seemed to slope upwards more and more, so they appeared far above him. He clambered desperately up it, sliding back, struggling onwards, sliding back again, shouting ‘No! No!’ as he saw Paxton’s finger tighten on the trigger.
The shattering gunshot made Ben jerk upright in his bunk and crack his head on the low ceiling of the sleeper compartment.
Only a dream.
