The cool waters of the well that lay somewhere on the edge of the sand sea were not merely inviting now. They would soon be the difference between life and death.
Girling knew the Israeli Embassy would be little short of a fortress. Israeli embassies always were.
Being the Sabbath, few had entered and left. The fact that it happened to be the Jewish day of rest helped his case, because there were fewer people to watch. He was sure Lazan was in there somewhere. It was just a matter of time before he or she left the building.
Even though he had parked the car in the shade of a large tree, the interior was sweltering. He took another sip of hot Coke and put the tin back on the dashboard.
Using the binoculars to try and peek past the blinds into the windows was a periodic distraction, but it told him next to nothing. A sniper would have been similarly frustrated. The Israelis thought of every-thing. Here, they would be doubly stringent. The Israeli Embassy in Cairo was an island in a sea of potential hostility.
Girling had done stake-outs during his period at The Times. Then, it had been OK to distract himself with music, or to let his gaze drift when a girl walked by, or simply to daydream.
Under the circumstances, boredom was a luxury which he tried to deny himself. His reveries always ended the same way: Stansell shackled by a chain to the wall, in the dark, his cell little bigger than a cupboard. Sometimes a figure with Abu Tarek’s face — eyes wild and black as night — would bring food, or water. And sometimes he would bring a stick, or a steel bar, or a soldering iron attached to a car battery.
He shook his head and the image disappeared. He was left staring at the entrance to the embassy again.
Number 22 Ibn Zanki Street, the place listed as Lazan’s home address, had been an apartment block. Girling had studied every person who left the building between six thirty and nine o’clock. Sitting in the lobby of a hotel opposite, he counted fifteen potential Lazans leaving for work.
Next he picked up a car from a rental firm in one of the major hotels. He went for a BMW, partly because Kelso was paying for it, but also because it was the only car on offer that had a decent turn of speed.
The embassy door was opening. It was a curious air-lock — two parallel reinforced-glass doors bordered by steel frames. Girling raised the binoculars and adjusted the focus. He tweaked the focus another notch and the picture became crystal sharp.
A woman left the building and strolled, hips swinging, towards the main, outer gate. He scanned her face. She was dark, pretty and a little over forty, but he had never seen her before in his life, least of all in Ibn Zanki Street that morning.
The woman waved cheerily to the guard on the gate. They stopped and talked for a few moments, idle chatter by the look of it, before he let her pass. She walked up the line of parked cars on the opposite side of the street until she was parallel with his BMW.
Girling tucked Stansell’s binoculars under the street-map on the passenger seat and removed the can of Coke from the dashboard. He bent over the map and let his brow furrow, as if he was lost. When he looked up, she was getting into the back of a taxi. As the driver sped off she did not give him so much as a glance.
His gaze drifted once more to the entrance.
Of the people who had left Lazan’s apartment block that morning, three had been black-skinned — unusual for Israeli nationals, although not impossible — and seven had all the hallmarks of Egyptian businessmen. Girling left nothing to chance. He ruled no one in or out. He made copious notes on each person, even though he knew he could always fall back on a talent that had assisted him at varying times through-out his life: he had an outstanding memory for faces.
That left five likely Lazan candidates. One was a stern-looking woman in her late thirties wearing shoulder pads under a dark suit that was definitely out of sync with the weather. The second was a little too European-looking, but Girling included him on his list of probables. The third walked with a limp, was tall, frail almost, and wore a colourful waistcoat over an expensive shirt with links in the cuffs. Israelis, even civilians, usually dressed down: sombre trousers, topped by a short-sleeved shirt. This guy was almost trying to draw attention to himself; and in this neck of the woods — bandit country for anyone from Tel Aviv — that wasn’t too bright. The fourth and fifth were his two prime targets. One was tall, wiry, with olive skin, dark hair; about forty years old. The other was somewhat older, short, balding, and fit, judging by the way he darted across the road to his parked car. Looked like a military man, definitely the right profile for the defence attaché.
If he’d had time on his side, Girling would have followed them on successive days until the right one rang the cherries by leading him to the embassy. But he didn’t have time. The only other solution was to watch the apartment and the embassy in turn and wait until he got a match.
Girling wasn’t sure what he would do if and when he identified Lazan. There was no guarantee that Lazan had any of the answers. But one thought gave him hope. The Israelis were the best watch-dogs in the world when it came to their Arab neighbours. They had to be for their own survival. And Stansell had obtained his information from a source of the highest calibre. No one other than a spook backed by a hell of an intelligence organization could have given Stansell the information which set in train the events leading to his abduction.
In the absence of any further help from his father-in-law, Lazan seemed like the next best place to start.
Across the street, a vendor was wheeling a cart full of cold drinks and shouting his wares as he went. A single block of ice protruded from the midst of the trolley. Girling opened the door and crossed the street, reaching into his pocket for some change as he did so.
Fifty yards away, a car rocked slightly, although Girling, his back turned to it, never noticed the movement. Nor did he hear the squeak of its suspension as the driver shifted in his seat and adjusted his camera’s zoom lens.
The well was on the edge of the sand sea, its location marked only by a few piled stones. Behind it, the mountains of the Eastern Desert rose in jagged disarray towards the sky.
Jones and Bitov watched from a safe distance, their vantage point a rocky spur jutting into the sand. Both were in bad shape and neither made any bones about his predicament.
Two bedouin, nomads of the desert, each carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle, sat on the boulders by the well’s edge. A third bedouin, also armed, was standing on the rim, dipping the shadoof in and out of the water. Having filled the jug at the end of the long pole, he transferred it to their goatskins. There were four goatskins in all. One for each of them. The fourth bedouin slept beside his camel in the shade of a rock overhang.
The shadoof operator was too busy telling his animated story to notice or care about the water slop-ping carelessly out of the earthenware jug. The sound of splashing drifted to Jones and Bitov on the hot breeze, drowned periodically by snatches of guttural laughter.
Although they were two hundred yards from the well, Jones could see the sunlight glinting off the droplets. He looked at his watch. They had thirty-five kilometres and a mountain range to negotiate and twenty-four hours in which to do it. Without water, they weren’t going to get fifty feet up the rock face on the other side of the well. Without water, they were going to die.
Their progress had been pitifully slow. While the sun climbed towards its zenith, their water dwindled to nothing. For the last eight kilometres, they had been running on empty. Whatever the map said, Jones was beginning to think the second well had gone the same way as the first when, hugging the mountain ridge for the little shade it offered, they saw it. It was Bitov who spotted the distant circle of stones in the sand that marked the circumference of the well; Jones who saw the nomads and their camels chatting in the shade of the overhang twenty yards beyond.