Firebird (22 page)

28

Daisy crouched in the bottom of the boat as bullets kicked up the dark river around us and punctured the wooden sides, splintering the gunwales to chips. I gripped the tiller, trying to zigzag out of the spotlight. But I knew it was hopeless, and that the —next clip would ignite the engine’s fuel cell and rip
Princess
Maria
apart. We still had our masks and snorkels round our necks and the distance to the bank on Roda Island couldn’t have been more than twenty five metres. I squeezed Daisy’s shoulder through the rubber and yelled, ‘Jump!’ in her ear. She looked at me dazed for a split second, then grabbed her rucksack and rolled over the side into the water. I followed her, and just as I hit the surface there was a shattering explosion as the outboard tore itself to bits.

I dived into the blackness and silence closed in around me, as pristine as the silence of the deepest desert. For a moment it was as if I was hanging there in a weightless limbo between time and space. Then Daisy’s hand groped for mine and I pulled her to me, and swam on powerfully underwater until my lungs were bursting. When we came up for air we were already in the shadow of the apartment blocks on Roda. Incandescent spangles of orange and yellow from the streetlights were shimmering on the oily surface. The last timbers of
Princess
Maria
were fizzling by the bridge, and the police searchlight was scanning left and right across the river — no doubt looking for us. A flotilla of little Nile boats had gathered, and an excited babble of voices drifted over to us, but attention was on the burning hulk, not the shore of Roda. The bank was a matrix of light and shade and we floated to shore gently, lost in the play of shadows.

We dragged ourselves ashore almost under the Manial Bridge, and I helped Daisy to slither up the sloping river wall and into the shelter belt of palm and tamarisk trees that lined the bank here. We slumped down on a patch of grass, and gaped apathetically at the streams of headlights passing only metres away, grateful for their anonymity. For a moment we stared at each other, and Daisy’s eyes strobed from light to dark in the passing headlight beams. There was an icy desert wind blowing, and her teeth began to chatter. ‘Were those the cops?’ she gasped.

‘Yeah. Looks like they were tipped off after all.’

‘Why didn’t they pick you up the first time then?’

‘How the hell would I know?’

Daisy looked at me questioningly, but I was too sick and out of breath to say any more. The rush of adrenaline had cured my nausea for a while, but my head still felt like it’d been whomped by a pair of giant cymbals. We both had rubber flip flops in our gear and we put them on. They wouldn’t be much good if we had to run for it, but they were better than going barefoot in the street. I stood up and took Daisy by the hand.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked distractedly. ‘To my place,’ I said.

It took us almost half an hour to get to my building, dodging across main roads, and by the time we got there our hands and feet had almost turned blue from the cold. There were little squads of blackjackets on the streets and we avoided them like the plague. Well-dressed groups and couples in cloaks and overcoats sauntered down the sidewalks, but they were too self-absorbed to give us a second glance in our rubber suits. The alley behind the block was quiet and crisscrossed by alternating pillars of light and darkness. Few people were out on their balconies — the night was too cold for that. I fumbled for my key, let us in, and led Daisy down the corridor to the iron fire door, this time checking carefully that my wedge was in place. Getting up the stairs was much more effort than I’d anticipated — the adrenaline rush had passed and my muscles felt like jelly, as if I’d just run a marathon in three and a half. I clicked the locks behind us, and led Daisy into the sitting room, which still bore the signs of Monod’s trashing.

‘Man,’ Daisy said, throwing herself down into a ripped up armchair. ‘Have
you
been having a party!’

‘I had a visitor,’ I said, flopping down beside her. ‘Guy named Monod. He was waiting for me when I got back from the medical facility the day before yesterday — the day Fawzi died. The guy had turned over my apartment looking for something.’

Daisy regarded me with eyes that were alert despite our exertion. ‘You mean
Christian
Monod? The guy Andropov said worked with Ibram on the Great Pyramid? The guy Fawzi said Ibram was calling when he was popped?’

‘Yeah, that Monod. He was dressed up as a Bedouin woman — the same one I spotted at the Mena Palace and the medical facility — the same one who was stalking us in Khan al-Khalili the other night. He tried to kill me. I had him but I let him go.’

‘You’re kidding! Why the hell? He could have been a suspect.’

‘My intuition told me he was on the up and up.’

‘You mean after he stalked us, walloped you in the street and trashed your pad? Some intuition.’

I caught my breath. Daisy didn’t need to know the real reason I’d let Monod go, and I decided to keep it to myself for the time being.

She puzzled over it for a moment, blinking water-swollen eyes. ‘Why did he trash your place?’ she asked. ‘I mean what the hell was he looking for?’

‘I’d guess it was Ibram’s map. Said a lot of other people are mixed up in this business too — you guys, the CIA — even the Egyptian police.’

‘That’s bullshit.’

‘Is it? Then how do you explain the fact that the cops are there waiting for us tonight? How do you explain the fact I’ve been stalked leaving my apartment? Why is there an alert out for me, when it hasn’t even been proved I’m responsible for Fawzi’s death? Why has Marvin been so quiet in this case, when Van Helsing’s breathing down his neck, and why did the CIA take Ibram’s suitcase instead of following protocol?’

‘Come on, Sammy! You really believe there’s a vast international conspiracy just to get hold of a map? And not even a whole map — it’s only half of one!’

I stopped suddenly, and we stared into each other’s eyes for a moment. ‘You’re right! I keep on thinking of it as a whole map. But it’s not. There’s two halves to it. What if Ibram passed Monod half of it, and we’ve got the other half? He was searching my place to find the missing portion.’

Daisy stared at me again and I could almost follow her train of thought from the twitch of her facial muscles. ‘So you’re saying Ibram keeps half the map and gives the other half to Monod,’ she said. ‘Ibram leaves his half in his hotel room and after he gets rubbed out, somebody goes there looking for it.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘Mr Dracula Van Helsing and his thugs. That must have been what they wanted. That’s why Van Helsing was so ready to break protocol by taking the suitcase. They thought the map was inside, but they lucked out. By chance it was in another case, and just out of sheer ornery cussedness, the front desk man passes it to us instead.’

‘How did Monod know we’d got it?’

‘He was at the Mena that night, disguised as a woman. I saw him, remember? He must have been watching and spotted Abd al-Alihanding over the attached case. Monod’s right — the CIA’s in on this, maybe your own boss, Marvin, too, and certainly the Egyptian police.’

‘What about Hammoudi?’

‘What about you? What about me? We’ve got to trust somebody, and I’d stake my life Hammoudi’s not in on it. Right now he’s the only guy knows where our half of the map is, and if he’s in on it why not just give it to Van Helsing?’

‘Why would the CIA want it?’

‘Cambyses’ army. Maybe that’s what the Operation Firebird file was about.’

‘What
is
Cambyses’ army?’

‘Cambyses II was a king of Persia, who successfully invaded Egypt in 525 BC. After he’d taken the capital, Babylon — which was just across the river from here — he sent a force of fifty thousand men across the desert to bump Siwa Oasis. Actually they started from Thebes —the modern Luxor — and marched through a place called “Oasis”, which was almost certainly Kharja. They got about halfway to Siwa — in the
Bahr
Bela
Ma
— when a sandstorm blew up and buried the whole column.’

‘I never heard of a sandstorm that could bury an army.’

‘Neither have I. It’s just a legend, of course, and Herodotus is the only source. Fifty thousand men in armour with all their chariots and camels would be a pretty big show to hide, even in the Western Desert, and the remains of the column’s never turned up. If it did it would be one of the most sensational archaeological discoveries of all time.’

‘Why did they want to attack Siwa?’

‘That’s the big mystery. It wasn’t much more than a village, and it was only famous because it was the home of a well-known oracle. It posed no conceivable military threat to Cambyses.’

Daisy eyed me dubiously, and I realized suddenly that my body was still wet under the rubber suit. I opened the French windows on to the balcony to let in the chill night air, and gazed out at the Nile. The never-ending carousel of headlights was still flowing down the Corniche opposite, but I could see no sign of the burning
Princess
Maria
, or the police launch downstream. I stripped off my wetsuit jacket and felt the icy breeze on my skin. I shivered.

‘Got to get out of this thing,’ Daisy said, standing up. I watched from the balcony as she unzipped the rubber jacket carefully, letting her firm, tanned breasts emerge, wriggling slightly, giving a glimpse of trim shoulders. For me, shoulders are the most arousing features of a woman’s figure, and hers were perfect, as brown as the rest of her body and covered in little clusters of freckles. She sat down and pulled the rubber trousers off. Her legs were smooth, almost hairless, and under the wetsuit she was wearing only a tiny white bikini that showed off the full curves of her body, the flat brown stomach, the slight, athletic flare of the hips. It hit me suddenly that I’d guessed right about her figure at first glance — her loose-fitting mannish clothes had never done it justice. She was sleek and spare, like a long distance runner, but with all the right curves in all the right places. I stepped closer to her and touched the damp blonde hair that fell in two tresses either side of her face, then I bent and kissed one of the clusters of freckles on her right shoulder. I kissed the base of her neck and she raised her head slightly, then gasped. I realized that I felt incredibly turned on. I’d read that closeness to death could make you horny, but this was the first time I’d encountered it first-hand. I was burning to hold her, and I groaned as I fought to suppress it, but lost. I took her smooth body in my arms and ran my hands down the cleft in her back and across the flat of her stomach. She held me and gasped again through her slightly parted lips, her fingertips stroking my neck. I shivered and kissed her shoulder once more, feeling the muscles quiver. She touched the barely healed bullet wound on my chest where the Shadowmen had zapped me, and ran her fingers down my back, tensing suddenly as she felt the long scars there. She turned me round gently and examined them — whip scars running diagonally across my back from the base of my neck to the cleft in my buttocks.

‘Holy shit!’ she whispered. ‘Where did you get those?’

‘It’s a long story,’ I said. I took her head softly in both hands and kissed the brooding, trembling lips, pressing them hard and desperately, exploring her mouth with my tongue. It was a long kiss. Her rich lips seemed to envelop mine, sending eddies of pleasure through me — a vortex of patterns inside patterns, variations inside variations. After what seemed a while, though, she pulled away and drew a finger gently across my mouth.

‘Wait, Sammy,’ she whispered. ‘This is crazy. How do you know they won’t find us here?’

‘I don’t, but
carpe
diem
, as they say.’

She stepped back a little, dropped her arms and pulled her moist hair out of her eyes. I swallowed hard and forced a smile. ‘There’s a shower in there,’ I said pointing to the bathroom. ‘We’re shattered. I’ll fix up some coffee and eats.’

She was about to say something but I stopped her and moved aside.

A second later I heard the shower sizzling. I groaned again, and felt my head: my ears were still ringing from the blast of Daisy’s baton rounds. I went into the bedroom, stripped off my wetsuit trousers, dried myself with a towel from the airing cupboard. I put on a fresh pair of trainers, socks, a clean T-shirt and stretch jeans. By the time Daisy emerged from the bathroom dressed in the chinos and patch pocket safari shirt she’d carried in her rucksack, I was pouring fresh coffee at the living room table. I’d set out a meal of Egyptian bread, hummus, cheese, pickles and black olives — all I could find in the kitchen that could be disposed of quickly. She came out still drying her hair, shaking her head slightly. I watched her entranced.

‘That was good,’ she said, standing by the French windows, taking in the rush of traffic, the lights, the caravans of barges passing by far below on the river. ‘I feel better.’ She sat down on my sea grass sofa, and I poured her coffee with more than a dash of cognac. She nodded at it approvingly. ‘By God,’ she said, ‘I need that!’

I poured myself coffee and cognac and sat down next to her. For a moment we drank and ate. I poured more coffee and we lay back. The cognac had made me feel warm and more relaxed and I finished it and looked at Daisy. Her eyes glowed and her lips parted slightly giving me a glimpse of even teeth. ‘Thanks, Sammy,’ she said softly.