34
JJ Donovan had watched the excitement of the house fire – an event which made no sense to him – and the arrival of the fire engines, and then started his car and eased out after Bronson as they drove away from the scene.
Now he watched with irritation as Bronson pulled off the road. He daren’t stop there as well, because it was too small a place, and Bronson was a police officer, which meant he’d been trained in observation skills. Donovan knew that if he stopped at the bar Bronson would notice and remember him, and he definitely didn’t want that to happen.
So he carried on another quarter of a mile or so and then eased his car off the road and on to the verge. He stopped the engine and waited for a few seconds, watching the scene in his rear-view mirror carefully. When it was obvious that Bronson and his companion were going to have a drink at the roadside cafe, he realized that he would have to wait, too. And the obvious way to do that was to stage a breakdown.
Donovan dropped all the windows on the Mercedes – it was going to get very hot inside the car without the engine and the climate control running – but the heavily tinted glass was a possible identification feature. With the windows lowered, it was just another light-coloured midsized Mercedes saloon, one of thousands on the roads around Cairo.
Then he stepped out of the car and lifted the bonnet. There was very little to see inside the engine compartment, apart from a massive sculpted aluminium plate that covered the top of the motor, but that didn’t matter. With the bonnet lifted, any passing driver would simply assume the car had stopped because of some fault – mechanical or electrical.
Then he got back inside the car and sat down, all his attention focused on the cafe-bar about five hundred yards behind him. The other thing he needed to do was make sure Bronson didn’t get a look at the car’s number plates as he drove past, and that meant lifting the boot lid. But he couldn’t do that until the Peugeot started moving, because his best view of the cafe was using the interior mirror and, when he lifted the boot, that view would vanish.
So all he could do was wait. Wait and watch.
Bronson switched off the engine and he and Angela got out of the car, the heat hitting them like the blast from a furnace. About half a dozen men, all wearing either traditional Arab dress or white shirts and trousers, were already sitting at the tables, drinks in front of them. They eyed the two Westerners with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion as Bronson steered Angela through them towards a couple of vacant seats at a table close to the side of the bar, where the noise from the generator was loudest.
‘What would you like to drink?’ he shouted.
‘What I’d really like is a long, cold gin and tonic with bags of ice, but I guess that’s not an option here,’ she said. ‘Get me anything non-alcoholic, a Coke, Fanta, something like that. No glass and no ice, obviously.’
‘Right,’ Bronson said. A couple of minutes later he returned to the table with two cans of Coke, moisture beading the outside of the metal. He sat down beside her and they both drank thirstily. ‘So this el-Hiba place,’ Bronson said. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you know about it?’
‘It used to be called Tayu-djayet, which simply meant “their walls”, because of the massive stone walls out there. Hang on a second . . .’ She rummaged in her bag, brought out a notebook and flicked through the pages that were covered in her neat and precise script until she found what she was looking for. She took a pencil and a blank sheet of paper, and drew a series of shapes on it.
‘Time for your first lesson in hieroglyphics,’ she said, turning the paper round so Bronson could see it.
She’d sketched a half-moon shape, a vulture, two leaves, what looked like a young chicken, an obelisk, two more leaves and a half-moon surmounting a cross in a circle.
‘And this is what?’ Bronson asked.
Angela smiled at him. ‘That’s the hieroglyphic equivalent of Tayu-djayet. The first symbol, this half-moon,’ she said, indicating the shape with the end of her pencil, ‘is a “T”, the vulture is “A” or “AH”, one leaf is “I”, but two together like that mean “Y”.’
‘Hang on, let me work this out,’ Bronson said. ‘That makes “TAY”. What about this chicken here?’
‘That is
‘Like a rebus, you mean?’
Angela blinked. ‘I’m impressed,’ she said. ‘Though I have to confess that I don’t know exactly what a “rebus” is – apart from being the name of Ian Rankin’s detective, of course.’
‘It’s a modern type of pictorial statement,’ Bronson said. ‘Kids’ stuff really. Like a drawing of an eye, followed by a heart, followed by the letter “U”. That means “I love you”,’ he said, firmly holding Angela’s gaze as he said the words.
She blushed, and looked away. ‘OK – back to the hieroglyphics. The determinatives simply eliminated any confusion over the way the other letters – the consonants – were to be sounded and what they meant.’ She gestured towards the paper again. ‘Next is another two leaves – a “Y” – and finally a “T” with another determinative – the cross in the circle, which means a city.’
‘You said you read hieratic and demotic script from right to left, but hieroglyphics are from left to right, just like English?’ Bronson asked.
‘Not necessarily. In fact, they were usually written from right to left, but they could also be read from left to right, or downwards.’
‘Wonderful. So how did anyone know where to start?’
‘That was really easy,’ Angela said, and pointed at the drawing she’d done. ‘See the vulture and the quail chick?’ Bronson nodded. ‘There were a lot of animal symbols used in hieroglyphics – birds and snakes, and so on – and they were always drawn in profile. The two birds in this hieroglyphic word are facing to the left, so that’s the end you start reading from. If they’d been facing to the right, you’d have to read the word from right to left.’ She drained the last of her Coke and stood up. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you as we drive. We’ve still got a long way to go.’
Donovan had got steadily hotter and more irritated as the minutes passed, but kept his eyes fixed on his rear-view mirrors. Two figures were now moving slowly across the cafe’s dusty parking lot towards their car.
He pressed the button to open the boot, checked the mirror to ensure that it had lifted – that would make the number plate on the boot lid itself effectively unreadable – and walked around to the front of his Mercedes. He stood right beside the front number plate to shield that as well. As Bronson’s car accelerated past him, heading south, he lifted his arm to the front of the bonnet to make sure his face was invisible to the occupants of the passing car. In his white shirt and light-coloured trousers he would, he hoped, look like just any other motorist with a broken-down vehicle, wondering what the hell to do next.
When they were safely past him, he closed the bonnet and boot of his car and walked back to the driver’s side door, sitting down gratefully in the seat and switching on the engine, relishing the blast of ice-cold air that almost immediately poured out of the dashboard vents.
He waited until three other cars had passed him, then pulled back out on to the road. Bronson’s Peugeot was now at least five hundred yards in front of him, but still clearly visible.
All he had to do now was to find out where they were going.
