The Heretic's Treasure (18 page)

Tarek was sprawled in a heap at an angle to him. He had a crushed trachea. It had been stamped on. There were bubbles of blood around the corners of his mouth, trickles of it down to his ears. His eyes were staring up at the slowly rotating ceiling fan.

Farid was sitting in a chair by the desk. One leg was bent under him, the other stretched out in front. His hands lay limply in his lap. His shaved head was on backwards.

The room was eerily undisturbed. Barely a sign of a struggle. The foreigner’s wallet and passport had disappeared.

And so had the foreigner himself.

Kamal’s mouth hung open. He suddenly felt cold, unnerved. Who the hell was this man, to have done this?

He was still standing there agape, his gun dangling loose at his side, when the door swung quietly shut behind him.

Ben clicked the door shut and walked into the room. In his hands was the stubby
AKS
he’d taken from one of the men. He had it trained precisely on Kamal’s head. At this range, he didn’t need to use the sights. A three-shot burst at three yards, and the walls would need yet another fresh coat of paint.

‘Lose the gun,’ Ben said.

Kamal was pale. ‘Who are you?’

‘Lose the gun,’ Ben repeated. ‘Or I’ll kill you. I won’t ask you again.’ As he said it, he could see how fast Kamal was recovering from the surprise. He wasn’t their leader for nothing. He was a far more redoubtable adversary than any of them. Quick, smart and very mean. Ben’s senses were on full alert and his finger was on the trigger. The
AKS
probably had a pull of about six pounds, maybe seven. He had about five pounds on it already.

Kamal frowned. Glanced down at the gun that was still hanging at his side. He relaxed his fingers, and the weapon dropped straight down to the floor, an inch from his feet.

‘Kick it away,’ Ben said. ‘And let’s have that Glock, too.’

Kamal paused a beat.
I’m impressed,
his eyes said. He nudged the
AKS
with his shoe. It slid across the floor. Then, very slowly, he drew back his long coat until it cleared the Cordura holster on his belt. He unsnapped the retaining strap and eased the pistol out between forefinger and thumb. Held it out at arm’s length and flicked his wrist. The gun clattered to the floor a couple of feet away.

He kept his eyes on Ben the whole time. There was a glitter of something in them. As though he found the whole thing
amusing.

‘Now it’s going to be your turn to talk,’ Ben said. ‘I want to know a few things. Like what you want with Morgan Paxton’s research.’

Kamal gazed down the muzzle of Ben’s
AKS
, then looked up, fixing him with a cocky glare. The faintest hint of a smile appeared on his lips. ‘You would just love to know, wouldn’t you?’

‘Then make me happy.’

‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ Kamal said. ‘You all will. The day is coming.’

Ben frowned. ‘What does that mean?’

But Kamal just smiled more widely. He took a step backwards, over one of the bodies, away from Ben, towards the window.

Ben took a step forwards, keeping a steady distance between them. ‘Don’t move any further,’ he warned.

A sudden sound behind him made him whirl around, ready to fire. For an instant he thought there were more of them.

It was the landlord. He was bleary-eyed and unshaven, wearing a vest and shorts. ‘I thought I heard someth—’

His voice trailed off mid-word. He took in the guns. The corpses. His face froze into an expression of horror.

Ben turned back to Kamal, but it was already too late. Two seconds was too long to leave a guy like him unguarded. Kamal plucked his hand from his coat pocket and lobbed something across the room, then turned and crashed through the window and out onto the fire escape.

The object rolled across the floor.

Fragmentation grenade.

Ben dived back through the open door, hauling the landlord with him out into the hallway. The guy was heavy and clumsy. As Ben yanked him out of the way of the impending blast, he crashed down on him with all his weight.

About half a second after that, the grenade detonated in the confined space. The explosion ripped through the apartment. Shrapnel tore into everything and a fireball rolled out of the doorway as the frame and door shattered into a million tumbling splinters. The wall burst outwards into the hallway, pieces of masonry spinning through the air.

In the aftermath of the blast was the stunned, deafened, disorientated silence that follows every explosion. Through the smoke and dust Ben could see his hand lying in front of his face. It was white with powdered masonry, spattered with blood. He struggled to focus. Saw his fingers twitch and contract into a fist, and realised the hand was still connected to his body. Something was pressing down on him, making it hard to breathe. He tried to get up, heave the weight off him. It was the body of the landlord, crushing him. A big arm fell limp at the man’s side.

Ben rolled out from under him. Through the terrible ringing in his ears he could hear the high-pitched whine of smoke alarms and, somewhere beyond that, the screams of a woman. He staggered to his feet. Looked down at the landlord. The man was dead. His chest and face were a bloody mess from where he’d absorbed the blast of lethal shrapnel.

Ben checked himself all over with trembling hands. He knew he could be badly injured, even if he didn’t feel it yet. Smashed nerve endings and pumping adrenaline could mask just about anything in the first moments before you even knew you were hit. But all the blood on him belonged to the landlord. He didn’t have a scratch on him.

Then he remembered.
Kamal.

With his ears still whining from the blast, Ben leaped over the dead man, sprinted down the burning hallway and bounded down the stairs four, five, six at a time. Burst out into the street. A crowd of people had gathered, pointing up at the smoke that poured from the apartment window. Three or four of them were already on their phones, calling for emergency services.

People stared as Ben streaked past, broken glass crunching under his feet. He couldn’t see Kamal anywhere.

An engine revved. The grating roar of a diesel being pushed way too hard. Someone in a desperate hurry. He whipped around just in time to see Kamal peering wild-eyed out of the van window before it lurched away from the kerb across the street and took off, smoke belching from its exhaust.

Ben sprinted after it. Running for all he was worth, he caught up with the van. His straining fingers closed around the black metal handle of the back door, and he felt the joints of his wrist and elbow and shoulder being stretched as the vehicle accelerated manically down the street. He held on. The van picked up more speed and now he was running in giant strides, the road flashing by under his feet. He tried to wrench the door open, so that he could clamber inside and get at the driver.

But the doors were locked. The van kept accelerating, engine screaming up through the gears. Ben lost his footing, stumbled and felt his knee grate on the road as he went down. For a short distance he was dragged along. Somehow he regained his footing and he was running again. His fingers were screaming to let go of the handle.

A blare of horns. The van swerved to avoid an oncoming vehicle. Ben was thrown sideways and the handle was torn from his grip. He tumbled and rolled on the tarmac and came to a stunned halt at the kerbside.

As he looked up, all he could see was the back of the white van rapidly disappearing into the distance. At the top of the street it skidded left, and then it was lost in the traffic and out of sight.

Ben thumped the road with a bleeding fist. He was aware of the people staring at him from the pavement. Someone was yelling in Arabic, words he didn’t register.

He clambered painfully to his feet, and started walking in the same direction as the van. He didn’t look back.

He was half a block away by the time he heard the howl of approaching sirens.

Ben walked for twenty minutes under the hot sun, ignoring the pain from the kick to the ribs, his grazed knee and scuffed hands. The worst of the blood was on his shirt, from where the dead landlord had bled all over him. He covered it with his jacket, and from more than a few yards away he didn’t look too alarming.

He bought a fresh T-shirt, a pair of imitation Levis and a litre of bottled water from a street market. He was thankful he still had his wallet, and just about enough cash to get him out of Egypt. If that was what he needed to do: he wasn’t sure yet what his next move should be.

In a secluded alleyway nearby he stripped off his old clothes, washed himself down as best he could and put on the T-shirt and jeans. He bundled up his old things and stuffed them into a skip, drank what was left of the bottled water and wandered back out into the street feeling a little refreshed.

After a few more minutes of walking, he came to a café-bar with tables and chairs outside. He took a seat in the shade of a parasol and ordered strong black coffee. He drank a pot of it, ordered another, and sat there quietly until the caffeine rush began to focus his thoughts.

He thought about what he’d just done.
Had to do.
There’d been no choice-but that didn’t make him feel any better about it. He’d sworn he was never going to kill again, but just when he’d thought he’d done the right thing by handing Morgan’s assassins over to the police, here he was again being dragged back into the familiar old world that he’d worked so hard to escape from. Could he never get away from it? Was that really his destiny in life?

He sighed. Then his thoughts turned to Morgan Paxton. One thing was clear now. Whatever this apparently unassuming, naïve academic was into, it was obviously much bigger than just scholarly research. A man like Kamal could have been attracted to this Akhenaten Project for only one reason. Money, or the promise of it. And when the prospect of wealth and ancient history were brought together in the mix, that amounted to a formula that could produce only one simple answer.

A treasure hunt.

The question was, had Morgan known just how big this was? Ben thought about it for a while. He retraced Morgan’s steps in his mind. The guy had come to Egypt on his own. Not as part of some research team, but independently-and he’d encrypted the file on his computer. That didn’t look like the behaviour of an ordinary academic researcher. In all kinds of other ways, Morgan might have been the typical egghead scholar, but this looked like deliberate, calculated secretiveness. People didn’t actively protect information unless they thought it had special value. He’d known what he was into, for sure.

But then there must have been leaks in Morgan’s security. He might have been acting cautious, but he was still an amateur at this game. And he was a stranger in a strange land. The kind of guy who could draw-and had drawn, fatally-all kinds of the wrong attention. Maybe he’d needed help for his project. Maybe he’d been foolish, talked to the wrong people to get that help. People who knew people, one thing leading to another until, next thing he knew, he had someone like Kamal on his trail.

Kamal. Ben visualised the man’s face. Who was he? Someone committed, dedicated-but to what?
The day is coming,
he’d said. Ben didn’t know what he’d meant by that-but it didn’t sound good.

And now he had to figure out his next step. One thing he couldn’t avoid was the call to Harry. A call he wasn’t looking forward to making.

He took out his phone and dialled Harry Paxton’s personal number. Paxton picked up after three rings.

‘Harry. It’s Ben.’

‘I got your email,’ Paxton said.

‘Were you able to open the attachment?’

‘I haven’t tried. I was more interested in hearing what you had to report. So tell me, Benedict. It’s over? You’ve done it?’

Ben paused and bit his lip. There was no easy way to tell Paxton this. Start at the start. ‘I found the men who killed Morgan,’ he said. ‘They were just petty thieves who got in too deep. They still had some of his things.’

‘And you dealt with it? The way we talked about?’

‘Yes, I did deal with it, Harry. But not quite the way you intended.’

There was a silence. Then, ‘What do you mean?’

Ben let out a long breath. ‘I couldn’t go through with it, Harry. I told you at the time, it’s not what I do. They’re in police custody now. They’ll be on murder, firearms and drugs charges that’ll see them locked away for a long, long time. Drugs alone carry a twenty-five-year hard labour sentence in Egypt. They might well even get the rope for it. But it’s out of our hands now.’ He paused. ‘I’m sorry. I know it’s not what you wanted. But it’s the best I could do.’

Paxton was quiet for a few moments, and Ben could feel him thinking. Adjusting to the idea.

‘I suppose you had to do what you felt was right,’ Paxton said eventually. ‘I appreciate that. I admire your integrity. I really do. You’re a good man, Benedict.’

‘I have to warn you,’ Ben said. ‘There’s more to it. Complications. There are other people interested in Morgan’s research. Very dangerous people. They weren’t the ones who killed him, but I think they would have if there hadn’t been the robbery. It was just a question of who would get to him first. I’m sorry. I know this is painful to hear.’

‘I’m stunned,’ Paxton said after a moment’s silence. ‘Are you sure about this?’

‘Pretty sure,’ Ben said, feeling his bruised ribs. It hurt to breathe, and it hurt even more to move. He ran through what had happened. ‘And so I’ve lost most of what I retrieved,’ he finished. ‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Never mind the computer and the watch,’ Paxton said. ‘The important thing is that you’re all right. But who are these people?’

‘I don’t know. I just know that Morgan’s research went a little beyond pure academic interest. And I think he knew it, too.’

‘It must all be in the file you sent me,’ Paxton said.

‘I’m sure it is. Did he ever mention something called The Akhenaten Project to you?’

‘I don’t recall. I don’t think so, but then again he was always talking about names and dates from history. This god, that pharaoh. I never really paid it much heed.’