To George, the Café now provided a quiet shai served without a smile by a man whose interpersonal skills extended only to waving the flies away from his face. A few minutes later a water-pipe, or shisha, was set down beside him, hot coals were placed above the tinfoil wrap on the top, and the long pipe hooked onto the little lid that covered it. A small plastic packet containing a single-use mouthpiece was placed on the table.
George sat just inside the entrance and waited. He had chosen the café as he was sure no tourists ever went there, and as such he was certain that it would be the last place anyone would look for an Englishman; Martín Antunez had been quite specific that secrecy was highly important.
However, his main reason for choosing the Café du Corail was that he always went there with Gail when they visited Egypt. If she was in trouble, she would see him there, he was sure of it.
“Mr Turner?”
He looked up and saw the man in the doorway; he looked exactly as he had imagined, with the exception that his skin was not pale as he expected a Frenchman’s to be, but olive-brown instead. Even George would have admitted that he was handsome.
“Good afternoon,” he stood up and offered his hand limply. He felt drained, both emotionally and physically.
It was eagerly accepted, and they both sat down at the round table. His guest eyed the tea, and George made a signal to the nonplussed waiter, who brought a second cup, along with a second mouthpiece for the shisha. Martín served himself from the small teapot.
“So you are Mr Antunez?” George said, looking at the man intently.
“Yes, please call me Martín.”
“You don’t sound French.”
“I’m Spanish,” he explained.
“And how do you know my wife?” Despite the civilised surroundings, he couldn’t help but sound bitter and accusing.
“Mr Turner, I am on your side,” Martín defended himself.
“I wasn’t aware that there were sides?”
“I’m sorry, Mr Turner,” he held up his hands. “I forget that while you are coming into this cold, I have already been involved in this for several months now.”
George gave a short laugh. “You can say that again. Cold is definitely the word.”
“I don’t really know your wife; we met briefly many years ago at one of her lectures in London.” He had a sincere tone that George found quite disarming, despite his bad mood. “I have not spoken to her since I asked her to sign a copy of her book.” He placed the book on the table and offered the inscription on the inside of the cover as proof.
George looked at the inscription and recognised his wife’s handwriting. It proved nothing; she had probably signed hundreds of books in the last few years. “Why are you looking for her now?”
“As I explained over the phone: because of the finds on Mars. I work for the European Space Agency. We released the pictures to the press.”
“And you want to speak to my wife because the Mars finds are like those she found in Egypt, like all the other reporters. All you want is a statement, and when you couldn’t find my wife, you thought you’d get hold of me instead. The scoop’s almost as good, isn’t it? Egyptologist goes missing – husband has no idea?” he said scornfully.
Martín shook his head fiercely. “No, I am not a reporter. I am a scientist. And I do not want a story, although I am sure my boss would.” He added the last statement almost as an afterthought. “My Agency uncovered the images from Mars and released them to the press because someone involved in the Mars mission was covering them up. Without us, they would never have been seen. We believed that it would be important to speak with your wife to seek more information about the symbols, to understand how they came to be on Mars, to see if she could help unravel the mystery of why this is being covered up.”
“Except you were too late?” George asked.
“Unfortunately, yes. It is reasonable to assume that whoever is responsible for the cover up would also want to stop anyone from contacting your wife, and would therefore seek to have her kidnapped.”
“Or murdered,” George said. The thought had crossed his mind a few times in the past day but he always pushed it away quickly. This time, he felt a huge weight descend on his stomach and his eyes dropped involuntarily.
“No, I don’t think so, at least not yet,” Martín reassured him. “She knows more about her field than anyone, I expect she is as useful to them as she would be to us.”
The man’s belief did little to settle him. “And who are these people who are supposed to have kidnapped my wife?”
“We don’t know that much, but we do know that they are most likely to be based in the United States. It’s even possible, though I think highly improbable, that they are working from within NASA.”
“You’re saying NASA kidnapped my wife?” George said in disbelief.
“No, not at all. At the most they may be members of NASA who work for someone else also. NASA is as innocent as the other Space Agencies in this cover up.”
George sat in silence for a while before letting out a long sigh.
He hadn’t ordered the shisha, but neither had he had the energy nor presence of mind to refuse it. Maybe the owner had assumed from the look of him that he needed it. Now, he found himself unwrapping the mouthpiece and attaching it to the pipe. He looked at it vacantly for some time before lifting it to his lips and sucking on it tentatively, until the water bubbled gently and the glass chamber near his feet filled with thick white smoke. He then took a long, slow inhale, the satisfying crackle of the coals under the lid coming slightly before the thick, warm apple-smoke filled his mouth, throat and lungs. He exhaled slowly, pointing his nostrils towards the ceiling like a curious dragon.
It had been a hellish twenty-four hours. He’d spent the previous evening sick with worry in his hotel room, without a word from the police. In the morning, he’d visited Captain Kamal, who had done his best to outdo himself on the previous day’s unpleasantness scale. The afternoon so far had been no better, and now this Spaniard was telling him his wife had been kidnapped by some unknown conspirators.
From what he understood, shisha was simply tobacco soaked in apple; there was nothing druggy about it. And yet it made him sink into his chair. Only the fact that he couldn’t find Gail remained clear in his mind.
And here, he thought, is a man who’s trying to help find Gail. He slipped his mouthpiece out and passed the pipe over. Martín accepted it nervously, fumbling the mouthpiece from its wrapper and taking a quick suck of the pipe. He didn’t seem to enjoy it, and managed to hook it back on the shisha lid clumsily.
“Did you tell all this to the police?” George asked.
“Not the entire story, no,” he said. “But I relayed my fears that many people may want to talk to your wife, and that she may have been taken. The Egyptian police officer seemed very interested in my theory.”
At that moment George’s phone rang, vibrating its way along the metal table. He picked it up, listened in silence for a long minute, then put it down gently. His fingers were like lead as they released the device and his hand slumped down on the table beside it. He felt his whole body sag like a wet teabag. He’d felt despondent before the shisha, numb during and now, after the call, he didn’t know how he felt. Helpless, still. More numb.
Empty.
Now there was nothing. No shisha, no shai, no el-Khalili.
No kidnapping.
He closed his eyes and felt his bottom lip begin to tremble.
“Mr Turner?” Martín said, almost whispering.
No kidnapping.