Turning round, he examined the corridor. His first assessment of the new engravings from a distance had been pretty accurate. A man, which he assumed to be a leader of some sort, sitting on his floating chair with a big Amarna Stickman staff, seemed to be summoning the others towards the end of the corridor, which Yves hoped would turn out to be a door, beyond which he would find Danny.
On the opposite wall, was an altogether more surprising sight: heading in the same direction as the men were dozens and dozens of animals, of many different species. They weren’t quite going in two by two, but Yves easily recognised elephants, giraffes, wolves, lions and several different kinds of birds. The quality of the engravings was exquisite; they looked so realistic he could almost smell them. He scanned the different animals in the procession, picking up on quite a few he had never seen before; a strange dog-like mammal with a long horn on its nose, and what looked like a bear, but with no fur to speak of and very long, pointy ears. Towards the back, the unmistakable form of a bipedal dinosaur, its short arms held close to its chest and mouth open to reveal rows of razor sharp teeth. The respective sizes of the animals he recognized told him the engravings were to scale. This in turn told him that the dinosaur had to be less than two meters tall, although its body was much longer. He realised his mouth was hanging open, and was about to shut it when he saw an even more familiar sight, marching between a lion and a hippopotamus.
The face looked more elongated at the nose and mouth, the slight hunch at the neck, and the squat, solid legs were far shorter in proportion to the rest of the body, causing the arms to hang weirdly close to the ground. But despite these differences, there was without a doubt an early man walking among these animals.
They were all being led deep underground.
Suddenly, the second door opened, sliding into the ceiling effortlessly like the first, and the corridor was bathed in bright light, which picked the engravings out in striking high-contrast relief.
I’m being led underground with them, he thought.
He hesitated briefly, then took a deep breath and put his right foot forwards, into the light.
Chapter 60
Ben pulled his car up at the entrance of the airport in a space reserved for taxis, of which there were, oddly, none. Seconds later, the muzzle of an assault rifle tapped the window and gestured for it to be opened. He obliged indignantly.
George looked on nervously as Ben proceeded to argue with the armed policeman, who turned out not to be alone. A dozen or so more, all in black uniforms and berets, patrolled the entrance to the airport. Two more detached from a small group inside the main door and walked towards Ben’s car.
“Ben?” he tried to get his friend’s attention. “Ben, I think we should use the short-stay parking.”
The policeman peered down into the car and checked George out, giving him the opportunity in turn to read the badge on the man’s uniform; ‘Tourism Police’. He had seen many Tourism Police during his years visiting Egypt; they were generally, in his experience, unkempt, corrupt and out of shape guards with out-dated weapons that probably didn’t work. They spent most of their time, as was their duty, ‘protecting’ tourists from terrorists; terrorists who had been absent from Egypt for decades.
Gail in particular had pretty strong views on Tourism Police. Omnipresent at mass tourist attractions and minor sites alike, they sometimes guarded supposedly closed-to-the-public areas, but would lift a metal pole blocking your passage for a discrete baksheesh. Invariably, the metal pole would disappear as soon as they did.
These police were different. Not only because they wore black instead of white, but mainly because they seemed well-armed, organised and impeccably presented. Their uniforms were crisp and well-fitted, in contrast to their cousins in white, who sometimes looked like they’d accidentally put on someone else’s jacket and trousers.
“You have flight now?” the man asked him in broken English.
George shook his head. “No, later on. We’re here to catch a friend before he boards his plane.” He suddenly realised he had gesticulated wildly to illustrate what he meant by board and plane. Saying these words to a member of the Tourism Police outside an airport, it was probably fair to say he didn’t need the sign language, so he hid his hands under his legs quickly, a movement which earned him a nervous twitch of the gun from the soldier and a wide-eyed look from Ben.
After a few choice words from the man, the barrel of the gun was lifted from the window sill and Ben put the car into gear, moving away from the taxi rank, leaving it empty save for the patrolling soldiers. Barely five hundred yards later, they joined a long line of traffic waiting to exit the airport, and came to a standstill.
George waited as long as he could before speaking. “What the hell is going on? They didn’t look like Tourism Police?”
Ben looked round the traffic in frustration; there was no other way to downtown Cairo. They were stuck. “Tourism Police don’t have much to do, usually. They used to be everywhere. Before I was born, Egypt had lots of terrorism, religious fanatics, generally people with lots of guns and little sense.” A car joined the queue behind them and beeped. Ben turned in his seat and gesticulated. “I haven’t seen the black uniform ones for a while. We usually get them in and around monuments and mosques or churches, if something happens somewhere else in the world, though they usually wear white. The only place I know that there are always black Tourism Police is on the Sinai Peninsula. It has a border with Israel and is always full of Western and Israeli tourists, so we can never throw too many police at the place to make people feel safe.”
“Why are they here now?”
“All flights have been cancelled, except for those leaving in the next hour. That means Martín will be on his way home now, and we won’t be able to see him. They’re not letting anyone else in the airport. The policeman didn’t say why.” He shrugged and looked at George.
George fished in the pocket of his shorts and got his phone. Picking through his recent calls he singled out Martín’s number and dialled it. They’d hoped to meet in the airport, but traffic had conspired against them. Now, they weren’t even going to be let in.
“Hello?” Martín answered on the first ring. “George?”
“Hi Martín,” he said. “Are you getting on your flight?”
"Already on board, waiting for the doors to close now. It’s crazy here, I don’t know how you’re going to get back to England!”
He briefly wondered the same thing, but it would have to wait. They had more important things to discuss.
“Martín, what the hell is going on?”
“No idea, it only happened in the last half hour or so; the police came in and then suddenly the whole place went into lockdown. We were hurried onto our plane. I’ve tried checking the news but I can’t see anything there.”
George didn’t want to dwell on it; as far as he was concerned, terrorism was a million miles from his concerns.
“The reason we wanted to talk, Martín, is that Kamal came to see me in my hotel room,” he started. “He says Gail isn’t dead, but he can’t tell us where she is. She’s been taken by someone.”
There was a pause. “Sorry, George there must be bad reception. Taken?”
“Yes, taken,” he shouted into the phone. George remembered the first time he had met Martín, the Spaniard had suggested that Gail had been abducted for her knowledge. That had been just before the call from Kamal, asking him to identify her body. It seemed they had come full circle. “All he gave us was a clue as to where she is.”