Текст книги "Keystone"

Автор книги: Luke Talbot

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“Until this morning. When I saw the photos from Mars, it all came back as real as if I had the book in my hands. The smell of the wood, the texture of the pages, the intricate detail of the alien world; none of it was fantasy, it was authentic. That is why I do not think the Stickman on Mars is faked, Gail. I do not believe it is a coincidence. I believe instead that it belongs on Mars, as do the people from the book.”

He stopped talking and they sat in silence for several minutes. He wanted to urge her to respond, but understood that she was overwhelmed by his story and needed time to digest. Eventually, she looked at him.

“Firstly Mamdouh, let me say I do not judge you for what you did. I would probably have done the same as you, otherwise my career as a result would have been entirely different, and I would probably have had to get my doctorate from the Internet rather than from a good university.”

He nodded in reply, as much in gratitude for her understanding as in agreement of her statement.

“Secondly, the photos from Mars prove something else,” she continued.

“What?” he asked. He had not expected her to dwell on the photos from Mars.

 “The fact that the pictures from Mars reached the media at all can mean only one thing: that whatever the agency you dealt with is doing to cover all this up, they’ve made a mistake. Somehow, they weren’t as thorough as they should have been, and if they were trying to stop ‘disastrous repercussions,’ then they’ve failed.”

The Professor was about to speak when a noise from outside his office caught his attention. He quickly placed his index finger against his lips. Gail turned round silently to follow his stare.

Two loud knocks on the solid oak door reverberated round the room.

After a moment’s hesitation, Mamdouh stood up behind his desk.

“Come in,” he said, a slight crackle in his voice.

Chapter 41

George woke up to the phone ringing incessantly in the living room. He looked at his watch: six-thirty in the morning.

Bloody hell, Gail, he thought to himself as he stumbled down the stairs. He searched among the empty cans, bottles and food wrappers on the coffee table before finding the remote. One of his friends emerged from the toilet scratching his head.

“What time is it?” he said.

“Six-bloody-thirty, and where did you come from?” he asked as he answered the call.

“Slept in the bath, mate,” came the reply as he looked enviously at the couch, where another body lay comfortably, still unconscious.

George wasn’t listening. The video wall asked him if he wanted to accept a video-call from a private number in Egypt. He cursed under his breath; the one time that he was home-alone and had friends over for a drink, and Gail had to call him first thing. There was no way he could make the room look even half decent for the camera, so he didn’t even bother trying. Instead, he checked his reflection in the preview screen in the corner of the video wall and accepted the call, before focusing his attention on the caller. It wasn’t Gail.

“Mr Turner?” a man in uniform asked. He was standing against a plain white background, his navy blue uniform immaculate. He didn’t wait for George to confirm his identity, and he didn’t look surprised by his attire. To him, all Englishmen looked as scruffy as the half-naked apparition he was talking to. “I am Captain Ahmed Kamal of the Cairo police department. We are looking for your wife, Mrs Gail Turner?” He used a raised inflection at the end of his statement, prompting an answer.

“Well, I assume you’re closer to her than I am, Captain; she’s in Cairo. I spoke to her yesterday evening, but haven’t heard anything since then.”

“At what time did you speak to her, Mr Turner?” the Captain demanded.

George crossed his arms defensively. Two of his friends were now sitting on the sofa behind him, looking at the video wall in bemusement. “Am I being interrogated here?” he said. “Why are you asking me about Gail? Is she OK?”

The policeman looked beyond the camera, as if checking something going on in the background where he was calling from. “We just need to speak to her, Mr Turner. Telephone recordings reveal that your wife was meeting a Professor Mamdouh al-Misri yesterday evening at his office in the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. We would very much like to find her so that she can answer some questions relating to our enquiries.”

George scratched his head. It was too early for this. “I last spoke to her at about six, that’s eight in the evening your time. She was on her way to meet Mamdouh.”

“Mamdouh?” the Captain raised an eyebrow. “You knew him well?”

“Absolutely, we spend a lot of time there, we stay with him whenever we go to Egypt.”

“That’s very interesting.” He looked behind the camera again and made a slight nodding of the head. “Do you know of any reason for dispute between him and your wife, Mr Turner?”

George was taken aback; what a question. “Not really, no. They were both pretty shocked by the photos from Mars yesterday; Mamdouh called her and arranged her flight to Cairo, he wanted to see her as soon as possible.” The policeman was annoying him now, what he really wanted was to call Gail on her mobile to check she was OK. “Anyway, she will be at his house now, they were meeting at the museum but she was going to stay with him as usual. He lives nearby. You’ll find her there, Captain” George had a quick rummage on the coffee table before finding his mobile phone.  He tried to call her, out of view of the Captain, but the network immediately informed him that her phone was switched off. “Otherwise, I suggest that you ask the Professor where she is.”

The Captain looked carefully at George for a few moments. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Mr Turner. You see, Professor Mamdouh al-Misri was murdered, late last night in his office at the museum. Your wife is missing, and until she is found she is our closest link to the killer.”

George’s two friends slid out of the room into the kitchen, leaving him alone.

He sank to the sofa and shook his head. The camera embedded into the video wall followed him.

“Mamdouh’s dead?” he said in disbelief. “And there’s no sign of Gail at all?” he asked more in the direction of the officer.

“I’m afraid not, Mr Turner,” came the dispassionate reply. “I understand that this has come as quite a shock to you. To help in our investigation, I would appreciate it if you could try to remember any details about your conversation with your wife yesterday evening.”

He shook his head. Now he was extremely concerned about Gail; she usually sent him numerous messages when she was away, to say goodnight, good morning, and to update him on anything interesting in between. His phone and video wall both told him she had done nothing of the sort since twelve hours earlier when she had landed in Cairo. The only other call he had received was from the man from the space agency.

“I had one other call last night,” he started slowly. “A man called from the European Space Agency wanting to speak to her. I gave him the Professor’s phone number and told him to call there.”

The Egyptian didn’t look surprised, but instead nodded his head approvingly. “A Mr Martín Antunez, I believe? Yes, he called the museum yesterday evening as you suggest. We found his details written on a note in the Professor’s office.” He was getting fidgety, as if he felt he would get no further and did not wish to divulge more about his case. “We have already spoken to him, Mr Turner. Anyway, I have sent you my business card, if anything else comes to you, or if you hear from your wife, then please let me know immediately.”

He was about to reply when the screen went blank, replaced momentarily by the telephone company logo, which in turn was replaced by the placeholder reel of the video wall, a mountain slope overlooking a wide rain-swept valley through which a river wound its tumultuous path. He stared at the scene for several minutes before standing up and moving towards the kitchen.

Opening the door he interrupted his friends, their sudden silence betraying the subject of their conversation.

“Well?” the one who had slept in the bath said. The look on his face and rasping voice both suggested he had not slept very well. “Is she alright?”

He glanced at them both and reached for the percolator. Sensing its lack of heat, he poured a cup of the thin black liquid and placed it in the microwave. Removing it seconds later, he sipped the piping-hot coffee and looked at them both again.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m going to Egypt to find out,” he added resolutely.

He left the kitchen and his friends in silence as he returned to the video wall to book his flight.

Chapter 42

You did not need to come to Egypt, Mr Turner,” Captain Kamal repeated in an unfriendly tone. “Our investigations have been progressing well during the day; your presence is simply not required.”

He seemed much smaller in person than on the video wall, which had the annoying tendency of making callers much larger than life. It could be quite intimidating at times, which was why George usually only made voice calls except when speaking to Gail. The added dimension of seeing any other caller was not something he saw much point in, though many people insisted on using the function – in particular for business or official calls.

Standing next to the diminutive officer, he couldn’t help thinking that he looked like a much reduced version of Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther films. The fact that his accent was not dissimilar didn’t help. Had the whole situation not been so serious and the man so unpleasant, George would have found him more than a bit comical.

“My wife has disappeared in your country, how could I not come here to help you find her?” he asked. “Speaking of which, are you any closer to finding her?”

“We will let you know as soon as we find her, Mr Turner. In the meantime, I suggest that you return to your hotel where we can easily find you, should that be necessary.”

The Englishman left, albeit reluctantly, and Captain Kamal shook his head in disapproval. Police matters were not to be meddled with by members of the public, he firmly believed. Particularly not this police matter.

Why this Englishwoman was so important, he had no idea, but now he had a murder scene and an irate husband to deal with, it seemed that this was all going to be more trouble that it was worth.

A routine murder such as this would be over quickly enough. It was a high profile case, thanks to the murder-victim himself being such a high-profile member of the academic community, but that did not detract from his ultimate goal. Kamal was a focussed and experienced policeman, and he already had three of the four pieces of his murder puzzle handed to him on a plate.

The first piece was the victim: Professor Mamdouh al-Misri, of the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. An Egyptologist with a keen interest in Amarna texts, he had been the General Director of the Museum for nearly four years.

The second piece of the puzzle was the weapon: the sharp corner of the General Director’s solid mahogany desk had broken the man’s skull at his left temporal bone as he had fallen. This caused an internal haemorrhage that had placed pressure on his brain and killed him within minutes, the autopsy report told him.

The third piece was the motive: a collection of extremely rare texts, dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were conspicuous by their absence from the General Director’s office. On the black market, they would in total fetch upwards of three million dollars, and he had been reliably informed by other employees at the museum that there would be no lack of willing bidders.

Which left him with one final piece to find: the murderer.

There were three ways this could end. She could turn herself in, or be found by the police on the streets. He knew that wasn’t going to happen, of course. Or she may never be found, instead disappearing into the ether, never to be seen again. In a city of thirty million people, who would question such an outcome?

But no, now Kamal had met the husband he knew that it wouldn’t end that way. He knew people, and he had seen the look in the Englishman’s eyes: he wouldn’t let this go. If she wasn’t found, he would be a thorn in his side.

Which only left one possible outcome: Cairo was a heaving great overweight animal of a city; and overweight animals can have very dirty underbellies. A pretty woman, alone on the streets late at night, on the run after committing a crime, would be simply asking for trouble.

All he needed was a body.

This is all more trouble than it’s worth, he thought again as he put his phone to his ear and made all the necessary plans.

George almost ripped the pocket of his shirt as he dug frantically for his ringing phone. His heart sank as he saw the number wasn’t Gail’s; it was identified generically as French mobile.

“Yes?” he said impatiently. He’d been running this way and that for hours, desperately trying to get any scrap of information possible that would lead him to Gail.

“Is that Mr Turner?”

A foreign accent, but it didn’t sound French, although George’s knowledge of accents was limited to the same old films from which he had characterised the Egyptian policeman.

“Speaking,” he said.

“My name is Martín Antunez, from the European Space Agency. I need to meet with you urgently,” he continued.

George wasn’t surprised at the name. He had expected another call from him sooner or later. “Hello Mr Antunez,” he said, still struggling with the name, “I’m afraid I don’t know where my wife is. Did you not speak to her last night?”

“No, I’m afraid not, I left a message with a man at the museum.”

“Professor al-Misri? He’s dead.” George added. In his search for Gail he hadn’t spent much time thinking about the Professor, and the fact stumbled out, emotionless.

“I heard that; the police told me this morning,” he replied, slightly taken aback by the Englishman’s bluntness. “Mr Turner, I know that your wife has disappeared, and I believe these circumstances are too coincidental not to be linked.”

“What?” George was exasperated, tired of people trying to get hold of Gail, when all he wanted was to get hold of her himself. The last thing he needed was a riddle.

There was a pause, short enough for George not to have to check his phone’s signal, but too long to be caused simply by the long distance call bouncing into space and back on its way from France.

“Mr Turner, a massive cover-up is underway at the moment, and what is happening on Mars is somehow linked to your wife, and the finds that she made in Egypt. The reason I needed to speak to her was to talk about this and see where it would lead. I am not the only one who believed that your wife has the answers, Mr Turner, and I am sure that she has been taken.”

George bit his bottom lip. “Kidnapped?” The police had said nothing of kidnapping, in fact his impression had been that she was being treated as a suspect rather than as a victim. “Why do you think that? Who would do such a thing?”

“I don’t want to say more over the phone, we have to meet.”

Chapter 43

Café du Corail was a French-style affair that, like many in Cairo, harked of a different era. George imagined that it hadn’t changed in a hundred years, and by the looks of it neither had its clientele.

Whilst a lot of Cairo seemed to be constantly re-modelling itself with building sites that never seemed to end, many of the older areas still remained.

The great marketplace of Khan el-Khalili was one of the most famous; a sprawling, maze-like network of narrow streets, the awnings of open shop-fronts reaching across the cobbled alleyways, drawing in endless streams of lobster-faced tourists with bum-bags. There, the bartering started three times higher than anywhere else, though few were tempted to shop around too much, lest the tour bus leave without them.

Café du Corail was not in Khan el-Khalili. It was on the other side of the busy main street via a dank-looking footbridge, away from the kitsch, in what the tourist-guides referred to as the local market. To say it had a different atmosphere was to take understatement to the extreme. It was practically impossible to walk in el-Khalili without being offered something, or if you were a woman, without being propositioned. Here, in contrast, if you didn’t speak Arabic, or didn’t know exactly what you wanted, it was surprisingly difficult to buy anything at all.

On the subject of price, all that needed to be said was that people bought in the local market, and sold on el-Khalili.

But the biggest difference, and the exact reason why George and Gail liked it so much, was that the local market was, indeed, where you found true Cairenes. El-Khalili had its charm, it was bright and colourful and full of happy smiling people who spoke English, Spanish and a dozen other tourist languages. But here, you were actually in Cairo, not in a tourist-sustained bubble.

To George, the Café now provided a quiet shai served without a smile by a man whose interpersonal skills extended only to waving the flies away from his face. A few minutes later a water-pipe, or shisha, was set down beside him, hot coals were placed above the tinfoil wrap on the top, and the long pipe hooked onto the little lid that covered it. A small plastic packet containing a single-use mouthpiece was placed on the table.

George sat just inside the entrance and waited. He had chosen the café as he was sure no tourists ever went there, and as such he was certain that it would be the last place anyone would look for an Englishman; Martín Antunez had been quite specific that secrecy was highly important.

However, his main reason for choosing the Café du Corail was that he always went there with Gail when they visited Egypt. If she was in trouble, she would see him there, he was sure of it.

“Mr Turner?”

He looked up and saw the man in the doorway; he looked exactly as he had imagined, with the exception that his skin was not pale as he expected a Frenchman’s to be, but olive-brown instead. Even George would have admitted that he was handsome.

“Good afternoon,” he stood up and offered his hand limply. He felt drained, both emotionally and physically.

It was eagerly accepted, and they both sat down at the round table. His guest eyed the tea, and George made a signal to the nonplussed waiter, who brought a second cup, along with a second mouthpiece for the shisha. Martín served himself from the small teapot.

“So you are Mr Antunez?” George said, looking at the man intently.

“Yes, please call me Martín.”

“You don’t sound French.”

“I’m Spanish,” he explained.

“And how do you know my wife?” Despite the civilised surroundings, he couldn’t help but sound bitter and accusing.

“Mr Turner, I am on your side,” Martín defended himself.

“I wasn’t aware that there were sides?”

“I’m sorry, Mr Turner,” he held up his hands. “I forget that while you are coming into this cold, I have already been involved in this for several months now.”

George gave a short laugh. “You can say that again. Cold is definitely the word.”

“I don’t really know your wife; we met briefly many years ago at one of her lectures in London.” He had a sincere tone that George found quite disarming, despite his bad mood. “I have not spoken to her since I asked her to sign a copy of her book.” He placed the book on the table and offered the inscription on the inside of the cover as proof.

George looked at the inscription and recognised his wife’s handwriting. It proved nothing; she had probably signed hundreds of books in the last few years. “Why are you looking for her now?”

“As I explained over the phone: because of the finds on Mars. I work for the European Space Agency. We released the pictures to the press.”

“And you want to speak to my wife because the Mars finds are like those she found in Egypt, like all the other reporters. All you want is a statement, and when you couldn’t find my wife, you thought you’d get hold of me instead. The scoop’s almost as good, isn’t it? Egyptologist goes missing – husband has no idea?” he said scornfully.

Martín shook his head fiercely. “No, I am not a reporter. I am a scientist. And I do not want a story, although I am sure my boss would.” He added the last statement almost as an afterthought. “My Agency uncovered the images from Mars and released them to the press because someone involved in the Mars mission was covering them up. Without us, they would never have been seen. We believed that it would be important to speak with your wife to seek more information about the symbols, to understand how they came to be on Mars, to see if she could help unravel the mystery of why this is being covered up.”

“Except you were too late?” George asked.

“Unfortunately, yes. It is reasonable to assume that whoever is responsible for the cover up would also want to stop anyone from contacting your wife, and would therefore seek to have her kidnapped.”

“Or murdered,” George said. The thought had crossed his mind a few times in the past day but he always pushed it away quickly. This time, he felt a huge weight descend on his stomach and his eyes dropped involuntarily.

“No, I don’t think so, at least not yet,” Martín reassured him. “She knows more about her field than anyone, I expect she is as useful to them as she would be to us.”

The man’s belief did little to settle him. “And who are these people who are supposed to have kidnapped my wife?”

“We don’t know that much, but we do know that they are most likely to be based in the United States. It’s even possible, though I think highly improbable, that they are working from within NASA.”

“You’re saying NASA kidnapped my wife?” George said in disbelief.

“No, not at all. At the most they may be members of NASA who work for someone else also. NASA is as innocent as the other Space Agencies in this cover up.”

George sat in silence for a while before letting out a long sigh.

He hadn’t ordered the shisha, but neither had he had the energy nor presence of mind to refuse it. Maybe the owner had assumed from the look of him that he needed it. Now, he found himself unwrapping the mouthpiece and attaching it to the pipe. He looked at it vacantly for some time before lifting it to his lips and sucking on it tentatively, until the water bubbled gently and the glass chamber near his feet filled with thick white smoke. He then took a long, slow inhale, the satisfying crackle of the coals under the lid coming slightly before the thick, warm apple-smoke filled his mouth, throat and lungs. He exhaled slowly, pointing his nostrils towards the ceiling like a curious dragon.

It had been a hellish twenty-four hours. He’d spent the previous evening sick with worry in his hotel room, without a word from the police. In the morning, he’d visited Captain Kamal, who had done his best to outdo himself on the previous day’s unpleasantness scale. The afternoon so far had been no better, and now this Spaniard was telling him his wife had been kidnapped by some unknown conspirators.

From what he understood, shisha was simply tobacco soaked in apple; there was nothing druggy about it. And yet it made him sink into his chair. Only the fact that he couldn’t find Gail remained clear in his mind.

And here, he thought, is a man who’s trying to help find Gail. He slipped his mouthpiece out and passed the pipe over. Martín accepted it nervously, fumbling the mouthpiece from its wrapper and taking a quick suck of the pipe. He didn’t seem to enjoy it, and managed to hook it back on the shisha lid clumsily.

“Did you tell all this to the police?” George asked.

“Not the entire story, no,” he said. “But I relayed my fears that many people may want to talk to your wife, and that she may have been taken. The Egyptian police officer seemed very interested in my theory.”

At that moment George’s phone rang, vibrating its way along the metal table. He picked it up, listened in silence for a long minute, then put it down gently.  His fingers were like lead as they released the device and his hand slumped down on the table beside it. He felt his whole body sag like a wet teabag. He’d felt despondent before the shisha, numb during and now, after the call, he didn’t know how he felt. Helpless, still. More numb.

Empty.

Now there was nothing. No shisha, no shai, no el-Khalili.

No kidnapping.

He closed his eyes and felt his bottom lip begin to tremble.

“Mr Turner?” Martín said, almost whispering.

No kidnapping.

He wanted to get up and leave, but his limbs were unresponsive, dead. He wanted to run, to jump back in time, to stop Gail, to call her, to hold her. To have anything but this.

He could vaguely sense the Spaniard touching his arm, looking at him, asking him something. It didn’t matter anymore.

He knew where Gail was, now.