He lifted the flap on the bag and removed a piece of thin cardboard folded in half and secured with a couple of large elastic bands to make a rudimentary folder. He slipped off the bands holding it closed and gently spread apart the two sides.
‘This is it,’ he said, unnecessarily.
Mohammed didn’t touch the parchment, but simply bent forward to look at it closely. Fresh parchment is almost white in colour, but it tans with age, eventually turning a dark brown. Unfortunately, many of the early inks shared a similar characteristic, turning from deep black into a brownish colour over the years, making some ancient writings almost entirely illegible without the use of specialized techniques.
‘I can see a few letters,’ he remarked. ‘What have you managed to decipher so far?’
‘A handful of words, no more, and not enough to show what the text is about, except that it appears to describe some kind of military action. I think it’s probably something to do with the Roman Empire, because it’s written in Latin.’
Mohammed nodded slowly.
‘I might be able to do something with this,’ he said. ‘As far as I can tell, the parchment itself isn’t damaged, and that suggests that the ink has simply faded because of the passage of time. How soon do you need the results?’
Husani smiled.
‘The same as always, my friend. Yesterday or, if you can’t do that, as soon as possible. This relic will earn me no money at all while it’s in your laboratory.’
‘Very well. I shall try my best, although I am not promising anything.’
‘Excellent. Thank you, my friend.’
‘It might also be worth getting an accurate estimate of the age of the parchment using radiocarbon dating. I can’t do that at the museum, because we don’t have the expertise or the equipment, but I could send it out to an external laboratory.’
‘I thought that method of testing destroyed the specimen?’ Husani asked.
Mohammed shook his head, then nodded.
‘It does, but these days, with modern techniques, the laboratories need only a tiny sliver of material to work with. So do you want me to try to get a date for the parchment? I could take a very small clipping from the edge. It would hardly be noticeable, and if you can show independent proof of age, that would probably help you when you come to sell it.’
‘Yes, it’s a good idea. Just make sure that the piece you cut off is as small as possible. Let’s meet back here tomorrow at five.’
Minutes later, the two men stood up, exchanged a few last words and then separated, Mohammed walking back to the museum where he worked, while Husani headed in the direction of his home.
From that moment on, both men’s lives were to be changed for ever.
14
Before Ali Mohammed began carrying out tests on the parchment, he examined it closely under the bright lights on his workbench. He didn’t know how much of the text Husani had been able to read with the naked eye, but there were certainly several words that could fairly clearly be seen. It was also obvious to him that the text was, indeed, written in Latin, as Husani had indicated at their meeting.
What’s more, two words on the text stood out, because they both appeared to be proper names, and he decided he would quickly check to see if they were significant in the context of Roman history.
The bulk of the data on the Cairo Museum computer system was concerned, predictably enough, with the history of Egypt and the surrounding area, and apart from a single reference to a known place name in ancient Judaea, his search proved fruitless.
Many museums around the world are linked on a kind of academic Intranet — a restricted-access widearea network, to allow scientists and academics in one country to directly research the work of other professionals studying the same field but in different countries — and he did a general search of this resource as well, but with exactly the same result.
Almost as an afterthought, he wrote a brief email requesting specialist assistance, looking up the name of the recipient from his extensive database of contacts around the world, and marked the message as high priority before sending it.
15
The instructions he had been given were clear and unambiguous, and the timescale extremely restricted. Nevertheless, the contractor — the name he was using for this particular job was simply ‘Abdul’ — did not act immediately. That would be the mark of an amateur, and he had always prided himself on his consummate professionalism.
So before he did anything at all, he found a quiet corner on the road a little before noon, a position that gave him a clear view of the house. He placed his begging bowl, with a few coins inside it, on the ground in front of him and sat down cross-legged, his back against the wall behind him. With his ragged brown cloak wrapped around him to conceal his muscular body, the tattered hood covering his head and leaving his face invisible in the shadow, he looked just like any one of the thousands of beggars on Cairo’s streets. He made certain that his hands remained out of sight, because everyone in his trade knew that hands were the one thing you couldn’t disguise.
He remained in that position, almost motionless, for over three hours, watching the house with a virtually unblinking gaze. He had no photograph to guide him as yet, only a somewhat contradictory description supplied by his current employer, and this address.
When a middle-aged man who roughly matched the description he had received eventually arrived at the house, Abdul still did nothing. He now knew that the information he had been given was correct: the man returned to his home for lunch on most days, rather than visiting a restaurant somewhere in the city. And now he also knew his face.
For about another hour and a quarter Abdul remained sitting against the wall on the opposite side of the street and then, with a look into his begging bowl — a glance that revealed there were a few more coins in it than he had started with — he stood up, wrapped his cloak more tightly around him, picked up his stick and hobbled slowly away, heading in the direction from which the target had approached the house.
Abdul was an expert in surveillance tactics and techniques, and knew that even the most unobservant target might notice a beggar suddenly standing up and following him down the street. So after walking a short distance from the house, he turned into a side street and continued along it a little way before stepping into an alley. He checked all around him to ensure that nobody was in sight, and then with one swift movement dropped the beggar’s cloak to the floor, revealing a somewhat creased and faded white linen suit underneath, the kind of garb worn by many low-level Cairo businessmen. The well-worn suit was a couple of sizes too large for him, deliberately chosen to hide his powerful build. His face was tanned under a thatch of black hair, with regular and unremarkable features. It was a difficult face to memorize, and was one of his most important assets, more or less essential in his line of work.
He had discarded his limp along with the cloak, and, seconds later, strode briskly back to the street, where he stopped and looked in both directions, to check that the target hadn’t left the house in the brief period while he was switching identities.
Abdul walked slowly down the street, intently studying a paper he had taken out of his pocket and unfolded, a bit of supporting camouflage for the image he was trying to create. He should, he hoped, look like a businessman lost in thought as he studied a contract or a list of goods. Occasionally, he stopped for a few moments to apparently study the paper even more intently before walking on.
If his guess was right, the target should be emerging from his house fairly soon to return to his stall in the souk, and would overtake him on the street, which was just what Abdul wanted.