The Hidden Oasis (27 page)

‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ yelled Freya.

Flin didn’t reply, just stared fixedly ahead, hammering the horn as they sped towards a massive stone gateway, its central arch flanked by a pair of rearing minarets. The gateway was undergoing some sort of restoration work, its façade covered with a matrix of rickety wooden scaffolding, the planking piled high with sacks of cement and huge blocks of stone.

‘They’re trying to take out the tyres!’ Freya’s voice was desperate, her gaze jerking back and forth between the BMWs and the gateway. ‘Please, Flin, you’ve got to get off this street! You have to do it now!’

Still he said nothing, his eyes locked on the scaffolding, his jaw set. He glanced in the rearview mirror, eased off the accelerator a fraction to draw the BMWs in even closer and then forced it down again, tilting the steering wheel to the right. Freya screamed.

‘What the fuck are you—’

‘Duck and hold on!’ he shouted, smashing the Fiat directly through the wooden props supporting the scaffolding. The structure teetered, slumped and began to collapse. The Fiat and the lead BMW just made it through before the entire structure came crashing down in billows of dust and debris, crushing the second BMW like an egg beneath a sledgehammer.

‘And then there was one,’ said Flin.

He braked and swung left, zigzagging through a labyrinth of ever-widening streets and up onto an elevated carriageway that led back towards the city centre. Although the road was busy, the traffic was still moving swiftly. With plenty of gaps between vehicles Flin was able to push the taxi up to 100 km/hour, swerving back and forth across the three lanes as he threaded his way through the maze of cars and trucks, the towers and advertising hoardings of central Cairo gradually crowding in around them. The BMW may have been faster, but the Fiat – small, box-like, easy to manoeuvre – was better suited to these tight conditions. Slowly and inexorably they started to pull away, the twins falling further and further behind. By the time they eventually
left the carriageway, speeding down a slip road and back into the top end of Midan Tahrir, where the chase had started, they had put the best part of four hundred metres between them and their pursuers.

‘I think we’re going to make it,’ said Flin, glancing over his shoulder.

‘Watch out!’

He swung round, slamming on the brakes: the Fiat skidded to a halt a few centimetres away from the back of a pick-up truck piled with cauliflowers. Ahead, stretching what looked like the entire length of the square, was a solid jam of stationary traffic, blocking all three lanes. He crunched into reverse, thinking to get them into the outside lane from where they could U-turn away from the jam. But a tourist coach came in directly behind them and another one in the outside lane to their left, a cement lorry completing the blockade as it rumbled in alongside them to their right. Suddenly they weren’t going anywhere.

‘Bollocks,’ spat Flin, pounding a fist on the steering wheel. And then: ‘Out!’

He threw open his door and swung his feet onto the tarmac. Freya grabbed her knapsack and followed. Ignoring the shouts of the other drivers, they sprinted through the traffic and up onto the pavement.

They were at the northern end of Midan Tahrir, beside an enormous orangey-pink building surrounded by iron railings. Flin looked back, trying to get a fix on their pursuers, then grabbed Freya’s hand and hurried her around the railings and through a gateway into the gardens at the front of the building. There were ornamental ponds, an array of ancient Egyptian sculpture and statuary, and crowds of
tourists and schoolchildren. White-uniformed policemen stood around, cradling AK-47s. No one took any notice of them. Flin hesitated, eyes scanning back and forth, trying to decide what to do. A row of glass-fronted kiosks stood just inside the gateway, and one of them had just become free. He went over to it and purchased two tickets.

‘Quick,’ he said, steering Freya through the gardens and up the steps towards the building’s arched entrance. As they came to the top she grasped his arm and pointed.

‘Look!’

Back in the square they could just make out the twins’ bobbing heads, the two of them jogging along between the lines of stationary vehicles, still some distance away from the abandoned taxi. They watched for a moment, then went quickly inside.

When Romani Girgis was angry he would shout and break things. When he was very angry he would hurt people, the suffering of others providing a welcome release from his own troubles. When he was truly incandescent, however, the sort of volcanic, white-hot fury that might cause other people to froth at the mouth or scream and rant, something curious happened to him. He would feel cockroaches. Hundreds upon hundreds of cockroaches crawling all over his face and limbs and torso, just as they had done when he was a kid back in Manshiet Nasser.

There were no cockroaches, of course, it was all in his head. Despite that, the sensation was horribly real – the loathsome tickle of their feelers, the scampering of their
legs. He’d seen doctors, and analysts, and hypnotists and even, in his desperation, an exorcist. None of them had been able to help. Still the insects came, just as they had done when he was a child, and just as they did today when he got the call to say they’d lost the girl.

It started as a vague, barely noticeable prickling feeling across his cheeks and, as the call went on and the details came out, swiftly built and intensified until there was no part of him that was free of it, no nook or cranny of his body that hadn’t been invaded: cockroaches on his skin, cockroaches in his mouth, cockroaches underneath his eyelids, cockroaches creeping their verminous way up into his anus – his entire being swamped with cockroaches.

Scratching and slapping at himself, trembling uncontrollably, he finished the conversation and made one further call, informing the person at the other end what had happened, instructing them to do everything they could to track the girl down. Then, throwing aside the phone, he rushed to the nearest shower room. Still fully clothed, he leapt beneath the nozzle and turned the jets on full, slapping at himself as though he was on fire.

‘Get away!’ he screamed. ‘Get off me! Disgusting! Disgusting, disgusting, disgusting!’

Dabbing at his forehead with a handkerchief, Cy Angleton waddled up the steps to the main entrance of the American University, pausing a moment to take in the half-dozen police cars parked on the street outside before moving forward to the security desk blocking the threshold.

‘The university is closed,’ the guard on the desk informed him. ‘No one allowed in or out.’

There had been an incident, he explained, the police were investigating, Angleton would have to come back later once the all-clear had been given.

Angleton was used to dealing with these sort of minor officials – all part of the job – and knew from experience there were two ways you could go: turn on the charm and try to sweet-talk them, or play the authority card and intimidate them into giving you what you needed. He eyed the man, sizing him up, calculating which option was going to work best in this case, then launched in.

‘I know there’s been a goddam incident,’ he snapped, whipping out his ID and thrusting it forward. ‘Cyrus J. Angleton, US Embassy. Just had a call from the principal. Apparently one of our nationals was involved.’

He was expecting at least a bit of resistance. As it was, the man crumpled immediately, apologizing and waving him straight through the rectangular arch of a metal detector which clearly didn’t work because he had keys and pens and all sorts of other metal shit in his pockets and it didn’t go off, not even a peep.

‘You wanna get this thing fixed,’ he said, banging a fist against the side of the machine. ‘I’m not having American lives put in danger because your goddam security equipment doesn’t work. Understand?’

The man whined an apology, said he’d get someone to look at it immediately.

‘Do that,’ said Angleton, glaring at him before turning and setting off across a long vestibule. Heavy brass lamps hung from the ceiling, their yellow glow giving the place a
curiously soporific, dreamlike feel. At the end of the vestibule he climbed a couple of steps to the lift, which also seemed to be out of order. Forced to take the stairs, he puffed and wheezed his way up to the fourth floor.

There was a crowd of police up here, standing around not seeming to do very much. A line of yellow tape stretched across the lift’s open door; there were bloodstains on the floor and back wall. He took all this in in a glance, then strode purposefully across to Brodie’s office and threw open the door, as if he had every right to be there. Stepping inside, he pushed the door closed. Not one of the police said anything or tried to stop him.

He wasn’t expecting to find anything in the office and he didn’t. The one potentially useful piece of information came when he pressed the phone’s redial button to discover that the last call Brodie had made had been to a mobile. He didn’t bother taking the number down, didn’t need to, recognized it instantly: Molly Kiernan.

He snooped around, opening drawers, poking in filing cabinets, having a quick look through the essays piled on Brodie’s desk, then went back out into the corridor. Two newcomers had appeared while he was in the office, plain-clothes detectives – you could always tell. One of them asked what he was doing.

‘Just leaving some essays for Professor Brodie. We teach a class together. Say, is everything OK? There’s a lot of police around.’

No, everything wasn’t OK, said the detective. He shouldn’t be up here, this was a crime scene.

‘A crime scene!’ Angleton was all wide-eyed shock and amazement. ‘Oh my goodness! Was somebody hurt?’

That’s what they were looking into, the detective explained.

‘Oh my goodness,’ Angleton repeated. ‘Please tell me nothing’s happened to Flin. Professor Brodie.’

They weren’t yet sure what had happened, the detective replied, although yes, Professor Brodie did seem to have been involved in some way.

‘Oh my goodness!’ said Angleton a third time, clasping a hand to his chest, for all the world the bumbling academic. ‘Can I be of any assistance? I mean Flin’s a good friend of mine, we work in the same department. If there’s anything I can do, anything at all …’

And from there it was all plain sailing, like stealing candy from a baby. The detective started asking him questions about Brodie, he improvised the answers, playing the concerned friend. In the process he wheedled out of the detective everything they knew about the afternoon’s events – Brodie’s female companion, the chase, the twins, the taxi theft, all of it.

‘And no one has any idea where they are now?’ Angleton asked innocently. ‘You’re sure about that?’

Absolutely sure, the detective replied. If Professor Brodie happened to get in touch …

‘You’ll be the first to know,’ the American assured him. ‘Flin’s a dear friend and I know he’ll want to clear this up as soon as possible.’

Afterwards he went out onto the roof and walked the route of the chase, ending up at the side gate on the far side of the university campus, which also had a yellow police tape stretched across it. He got chatting to various people along the way, picking up a couple more titbits
of information – the girl’s knapsack was clearly important – but nothing that radically altered the picture the detective had given him or, more importantly, provided any clue as to where Brodie and the girl might be. He wandered around for a while longer, then decided to call it a day. Ducking under the police tape tied across the gate he set off down the street, prodding a number into his mobile and holding it to his ear.

‘This is the museum, isn’t it?’ said Freya as they passed through the security point inside the entrance, the adrenalin of the car chase still pumping through her system. ‘The Antiquities Museum.’

It was a statement of the obvious, given the array of statues and sarcophagi displayed all around them, and Flin simply nodded, leading her forward beneath a high domed rotunda. Long galleries ran away to right and left; ahead, down a set of steps, stretched a cavernous glass-ceilinged atrium. From its far end two colossal seated figures – one male, one female – gazed stonily back at them.