“What was the clue?”
“DEFCOMM. Does that make any sense to you?”
“DEFCOMM?” Martín paused for thought. “Are you sure he said DEFCOMM?”
“I have it written down in front of me.”
“I’ll need to look it up to know precisely, but DEFCOMM are responsible for an array of satellites owned by the US government. They’re built by many different people. That’s how NASA gets so much funding, by distributing its contracts throughout the States; if all the funding went to one state, then it wouldn’t do opinion polls any good, so by sharing the funding and jobs as much as possible, huge amounts of funding can be passed without having such a negative impact on the government’s popularity.
“DEFCOMM is more of an umbrella term; no one company is responsible, so it could be any one of three dozen companies in nearly fifty different cities!” Martín said in frustration. “His clue doesn’t really narrow it down enough!”
“Well, it must give us something!” George urged. “Why would he go to all the trouble of leaving a clue only to give us a dead-end?”
“To get back at you for punching him in the face?” Ben muttered beside him.
Martín was silent for a few moments. “Did he say anything else?”
“No.”
“George, I have to go, but I’ll look into this as soon as I land. Call and leave a message if you find out more!”
George closed the phone and looked around.
Their car had been idling, but Ben now decided to turn the engine off, as had many of the other drivers.
A strange kind of calm descended on the queue of traffic; the engine noise had mostly gone, even the pointless horn-beeping had reached a relative lull.
The only pedestrians he could see were carrying guns over their shoulders, with the now familiar black uniform of the Tourism Police. He was about to make a remark about how surreal this was when he heard a loud boom. A fraction of a second later, the car shook from side to side, and somewhere behind them a car alarm was set off.
A couple of policemen ran across the road in the direction of the noise, holding their guns across their chests.
“What the -” George began, but he was interrupted by another explosion.
This time it was on the road they were on, barely two hundred yards ahead of them over a crossroads. A car flipped into the air backwards, landing upside-down on top of the car behind it; blocks of stone and plaster flew into the air and across the road. Their car lurched in the shockwave, and moments later a splattering of small stones and plaster fragments hit their windshield.
Instinctively, Ben turned the wipers on.
They looked at each other in disbelief. “What the hell?” George said.
“Terrorists,” Ben said.
“What did they blow up?” he said looking towards the building ahead of them, where dust was now billowing out in a huge cloud, obscuring the scene.
“I have no idea.”
Around them the road suddenly filled with activity and in the distance, sirens began wailing. People ran from street to building and back again, cars ignored the queues and mounted the curbs. Debris from the blast littered the road and pavements. Ahead, a tongue of flame darted briefly out of the dust cloud.
Ben checked his mirrors; the car that had stopped behind them had already gone, so he put his car in reverse and retreated back towards the slip road. Turning the car round, he gunned the engine and made for the ring road, back to the airport. As the car hit the dual-carriageway, two more distant explosions reached them, and when the road swooped round in a wide arc to flyover an older district of the city, they glimpsed the scale of the attacks: half a dozen columns of smoke were dotted around the city ahead of them. A couple of helicopters were already circling above, probably filming for the local TV channels.
He was on the wrong side of the dual carriageway, and he hugged the central reservation as he negotiated the oncoming traffic.
“Where are we going?” George said through gritted teeth, his hand firmly gripping the foam of his seat.
“Airport!” Ben said as he dodged a lorry.
“But they wouldn’t let us in. It was closed!”
“Different terminal, George. The old one is a little further, but worth trying anyway. The police said there are still flights for the next hour – if Gail’s been taken to America then you won’t get there from Egypt now that bombs are going off! You have to get back to Europe!” Ben turned on the radio and put the volume on high.
Even in Arabic, George could understand the tone in the reporter’s voice: people were panicking. “What’s he saying?” he asked.
“Shhh!” Ben listened intently, his head tilted down towards the radio, in spite of the speakers being in the doors. Every now and then he lifted his head to see where he was going, in time to adjust course and speed to avoid crashing.
“He’s saying that there are reports of six explosions: the United States Embassy, a couple of hotels, a private American expatriate school – that’s the one we just saw – and two Christian churches. Dozens of people, if not hundreds dead.” Ben turned the radio down and concentrated on the road. The central barrier disappeared as the dual carriageway went down to single lanes, and he took the opportunity to join the right side of the road.
George gave a sigh of relief. “Which hotels?”
“Not yours. The Hilton and the Sheraton, big tourist places,” he replied.
“Who did it? Why?” George asked.
“By the sound of those targets, I’d guess at some fundamentalist group or another.”
“Fundamentalists? I didn’t think there were any of them left!”
Ben glanced at George and scoffed. “Just because nothing’s blown up for a while doesn’t mean there aren’t any fundamentalists left. Egypt is on a knife-edge between East and West, Africa and Asia, Islam and Christianity. Growing up here, you learn that close by there’s always someone crazy enough to blow something up.”
“Add to that the findings on Mars,” George commented, “and a police chief prepared to kidnap Gail, and there’s more crazy here than I think I can take right now.”
Ben pulled up to the old airport terminal. Predictably the Tourism Police and their guns were there, too; after the explosions they would probably be twitchier and even less friendly.
They were directed to park the car in front of a policeman, who aimed his gun straight at them.
“Ben?” George asked, apprehensively.
“Don’t worry. Just let me do the talking, and we’ll have you on a plane in no time.”
George’s earlier encounter with the police had taught him that where he put his hands was crucial, so he placed them in plain view on the dashboard. As Ben was guided out of the car by the barrel of an automatic weapon, he thought about how lucky it was he had his passport and luggage with him. They were packed and ready to go to Ben’s anyway – the airport had originally been a detour.
His door opened and he was escorted to the bonnet of the car, where Ben was already being searched. Two other policemen were going through the car, presumably in search of explosives or some evidence that could link them to the explosions.
As they did their work, his mind wandered to the mysterious DEFCOMM and Gail. It had been a horrid week, during which he had lost her forever, and then been given hope from nowhere that she was alive.
But right now, with Cairo airport closed and an armed police officer frisking him, he felt further away from her than ever before, and his heart sank.
Chapter 61
“I’m glad you’re settling in well,” said Dr Patterson. “I was afraid you may have resented me because of your situation. But you can see that I didn’t want you to be brought here under these horrible circumstances, can’t you?”
Gail smiled across the table. “Sure.” She put her fork down after toying with the chunk of meat on her plate and looked at her guest across the table in her new quarter’s modest dining room-cum-kitchen-cum-living room.