The Hidden Oasis (58 page)

‘Get them away! Please, get them away!’

He just grasped her wrists and locked his legs around
hers as if they were wrestling, his cheek pressed against the back of her head, his full weight pushing down on her, pinning her to the floor. She felt one hornet crawling up inside her trouser leg, another creeping over her closed eyelid, two more on her lips, her worst nightmare made real, beyond her worst nightmare. But there were no more stings, and while it was all but unbearable to have them on her skin like that, she managed, with a supreme effort of will and the aid of Flin’s bodyweight on hers, to remain motionless. On and on it went, hornets battering them from all sides – how could there possibly have been this many of them crammed inside a single skull? – before, as unexpectedly as the swarm had materialized, it started to dissipate. The buzzing faded: the insects on her face and leg were suddenly no longer there. She remained flat on the floor, frozen, her eyes and mouth clamped shut, fearful that the least movement on her part would bring them rushing back again. Flin must have been thinking the same thing because it was a long time before she felt him raise his head and look around. There was a pause, then his weight lifted.

‘It’s OK,’ he said, reaching down and helping her to her feet. ‘They’ve gone.’

She pressed herself into his chest, trembling, the sting on her neck burning viciously.

‘It’s OK,’ he repeated, arms wrapping around her, his voice calm and reassuring. ‘You’re safe. There’s no danger. Everything’s fine.’

For a moment, just a moment, it seemed that he was right. Then, from outside, there came a low, malicious chuckle.

‘Unfortunately, Professor Brodie, that’s not really the
case. Not really the case at all. From your point of view at least. From mine, on the other hand …’

The figures flitted through the undergrowth, two of them, moving swiftly, hugging the side of the gorge. Every fifty metres or so they stopped and squatted down behind whatever tree, bush, wall or statue presented itself, pausing a moment to listen and catch their breath before scurrying on again. Their brown robes merged seamlessly with the surroundings so that even the birds scarcely seemed to notice their passing, the one discordant note being an occasional flash of white Nike trainers as they hoisted their
djellabas
to clamber over rocks and leap streams. They didn’t speak, instead communicating with hand gestures and chirruping whistles, and seemed to know exactly where they were going, continuing down through the oasis until they had reached its midway point, whereupon they veered in towards the centre of the valley. They went even more cautiously now, working their way from one piece of cover to the next, looming briefly before melding back into the landscape. They came to a giant dum palm and one of them clambered nimbly up its trunk, hunkering down among the umbrellas of foliage at its crown. The other went a little further before also going to ground behind a colossal granite arm. They popped their heads up and nodded at each other, raising their rifles. Then, as a line of men appeared below, moving through the trees towards them, they ducked and were gone. It was as if they had never existed.

For a moment Flin and Freya remained locked together, too startled to move. Then, as one, they dropped down behind the seats, peering out through the nearest window. It was reasonably free of vegetation and they had a clear view of Romani Girgis standing in the clearing outside, immaculately dressed and grinning. He was flanked by the ginger-haired twins in their Armani suits and red-and-white El-Ahly football shirts, and two other men – one tall and bearded, the other thickset and lumpen, with a cigarette clamped between his teeth and a bushy, nicotine-stained moustache. There seemed to be others moving around in the background, although they couldn’t see exactly how many or what they were doing.

‘How the hell did they find it?’ whispered Freya.

‘God knows,’ said Flin, trying to get a better view of what was happening outside. ‘Maybe they already had people out here watching the rock, maybe they sent people out the moment Angleton saw us taking off … I’ve no fucking idea.’

‘What do we do?’

‘You will please come out,’ came Girgis’s voice as if answering her question, although he couldn’t possibly have heard her. ‘And you will please keep your hands where they can be seen.’

‘Shit,’ groaned Flin.

He looked frantically around, eyes wheeling up and down the cabin before coming to rest on the mummified corpse. It was still fully clothed, the designer shirt and
jacket contrasting sharply with the shrunken, blackened body beneath. Peeping out from beneath the jacket was the butt of a pistol. Crawling over, Flin pulled it from the shoulder holster, broke out the clip and checked the mechanisms. Remarkably, it still seemed to be in working order.

‘You will please come out,’ came Girgis’s voice again. ‘There’s really nothing you can do, so why play games?’

‘Can we hold out?’ she asked. ‘Till Molly’s people get here?’

‘Two hours with a single Glock and a fifteen-round clip?’ Flin gave a derisive snort. ‘Not a hope. This isn’t a Hollywood movie we’re in here.’

‘So what? What do we do?’

He shook his head helplessly, eyes again scanning the Antonov’s interior. They settled on the three metal cases sitting between the seats behind him. He hesitated, then, laying the handgun on the floor, he leant across, grabbed the handle of the nearest case and hauled it over to him, struggling with the weight.

‘What are you doing?’

He ignored her question, fiddling with the case’s twin locks, trying, and failing, to get the lid open.

‘What are you doing?’ she repeated.

Still Flin didn’t reply. Instead, retrieving the Glock, he leant back, shielded Freya with one arm and fired off two shots, shattering the locks. He laid the gun aside again and yanked the case open. Inside, held tight in a nest of foam padding, were what looked like two silver cocktail shakers. He eased one out and, holding it in both hands to support the weight, came to his feet.

‘Professor Brodie?’ Girgis’s voice echoed in from outside, sounding more intrigued than alarmed. ‘Please tell me you haven’t shot yourself. I have men here who will be extremely disappointed if they’ve been denied the chance—’

Flin stretched across the seats and smacked the container hard against the window, making a loud thudding noise, cutting the Egyptian off mid-sentence.

‘Do you see this, Girgis?’ he shouted, hammering again, drawing the attention of those outside, making sure they could see what he was holding. ‘This is a canister of highly enriched uranium.
Your
highly enriched uranium. You come a step closer I’m going to open it up and empty it all over the inside of this plane. Same with the other canisters. You hear? Come an inch closer, I’ll turn this place into a radioactive oven!’

Freya had come up behind him, her fingers digging into his shoulder.

‘I thought you said uranium wasn’t dangerous!’ she hissed.

‘It isn’t,’ he replied, keeping his voice low. ‘But I’m counting on Girgis not knowing that – he’s a businessman, not a physicist. And even if he
does
know that, his men probably won’t. At the very least it’ll make them think twice before coming in here and blowing our heads off.’

He gave another hammer on the window, really pounding the Perspex, then clasped the canister’s screw-lid and gave it a turn, exaggerating the movement so that it was crystal clear what he was doing.

‘You watching, Girgis? Want to see some uranium? Find out what it smells like? Because so help me God you’re
about to if you don’t back off! Roll up, roll up, to the great radioactive poisoning show!’

He gave the lid another turn, and another, and another, waiting for some reaction from outside. None came. Girgis and his men just stood there, their expressions half amused, half bemused. There was a pause, the cheerful twitter of birds providing an incongruously melodic backdrop to the stand-off, then, suddenly, a peal of laughter. Not from Girgis, but from the trees behind him. Soft, vaguely feminine laughter.

‘Professor Brodie, you really are a hoot! Now why don’t you put that down and come outside and we can talk this through. We’re all friends here.’

Ibrahim Kemal was seventy-three years old, and for sixty-five of those seventy-three years he had fished the same short stretch of the Nile just north of Cairo. And in all those sixty-five years he had never, ever encountered a fish as big as the one he now felt tugging on the end of his line.

‘What the hell is it?’ asked his grandson, arms wrapped around the old man’s waist to steady him against the rocking of their boat. ‘A catfish? A perch?’

‘A whale more like,’ sputtered the old man, wincing as the line cut into the palms of his hands (a length of nylon with a hook on the end, that’s all he used, nothing fancy like a rod). ‘I landed a 150-pound perch when I was your age and it wasn’t half as heavy as this. It’s a whale, I tell you, a whale!’

He paid out some line, giving the fish a bit of slack, allowing it to run, then started heaving again. Their simple wooden skiff rocked alarmingly, wavelets of river water sloshing across the gunwales.

‘Maybe we should let it go,’ said the younger man. ‘It’s going to turn us over.’

‘It can take us down to the bottom for all I care!’ grunted Ibrahim, drawing the line in, hand over hand, eyes popping with the strain. ‘I’ve never lost a fish yet and I’m not about to start now.’

Again he eased off, lulling his adversary, again started pulling, the rocking of the boat growing ever more pronounced, exacerbated both by the eddying current and the bubbling wake of a Nile cruiser ploughing its way upstream over by the opposite bank.

‘Come on, my beauty,’ coaxed Ibrahim. ‘Come on. That’s a good girl.’

The line was coming easier now – whether because his quarry had given up the fight or was playing a game of its own Ibrahim couldn’t say. He reeled in some more line, stopped to get his breath and adjust his stance, heaved again, teasing the monster from the depths, drawing it slowly up towards the surface until his grandson let out a yell and pointed.

‘There! There it is! Holy God, it’s huge.’

Away to the left, between them and a raft of Nile weed drifting downriver, the outline of a fish had emerged just below the surface, although it was unlike any fish they had ever seen before – bulbous and pale and curiously still. Ibrahim continued to pull, slower now, a quizzical look on his face. His grandson released his waist and leant out over
the side of the boat, landing net in one hand, billhook in the other, ready to draw the fish in once it was close enough. As he did a wave slapped hard against the creature’s flank, pushing it towards them and rolling it, turning it belly-side up so that for the first time they got a clear view of what it was they had caught. It was not a catfish, or a Nile perch, or even a whale, but a man. Enormously fat, he was wearing a bow-tie and a cream-coloured jacket that wafted and swayed in the eddies of the river. A single neat bullet-hole was punched clean through the centre of his forehead.

He drifted right up to the side of the boat and knocked against it, peering up at them through sightless eyes. Ibrahim met the dead man’s gaze, shaking his head.

‘I think this is one we’re not going to be selling at the fish market,’ he muttered.

‘Molly! I don’t bloody believe it!’

For a moment Flin continued peering out of the window, stunned, convinced his ears had deceived him. Then, seeing that it really was Kiernan who had spoken, he returned the uranium canister to its case and, beckoning Freya to follow, hurried back through the plane towards the exit.

‘How the bloody hell did you get here so quickly?’ he cried, jumping out and turning to help Freya after him. ‘I thought you’d be at least another two hours. Talk about the cavalry arriving in the nick of time.’

He was excited, hyped-up. Swinging Freya to the
ground, he turned back to Kiernan, a broad grin on his face.

‘Honestly, Molly, I can’t believe it. I mean I knew you lot were on top of your game but even so – I only activated the beacon ninety minutes ago. There’s just no way you could have got here this quickly, no way. It’s … it’s … it’s …’