‘Not necessarily. There is no obvious reason why he should assume that Mahmoud’s death was anything to do with the object he bought from him.’
The deep voice at the other end of the line gave a snort of disbelief.
‘You’d better be right,’ he snapped. ‘You have not fulfilled this contract in a satisfactory manner to date. If you do not resolve this matter, and quickly, we may be forced to take further steps.’
‘Are you threatening me?’ Abdul asked, his voice suddenly cold with barely suppressed anger.
‘Yes, of course I am,’ the man replied simply. ‘You’re not the only contractor in Cairo. Unless you deliver the parchment to me within the next twenty-four hours, we will terminate the contract and issue appropriate orders to another person. Orders that may indirectly include you. You have been warned.’
Before Abdul could even begin to formulate a reply, the other man ended the call.
24
In a large and comfortable house on the southern outskirts of Cairo, Jalal Khusad, a heavily built and prosperous-looking middle-aged man, his face dominated by a large and very black beard, looked at his mobile phone with an irritated expression on his face. Then, with a gesture of disgust, he tossed the phone on to the tooled leather top of his mahogany desk.
Things were not going as he had planned. As a senior member of P2 in Egypt, he knew of the Englishman by reputation, and he didn’t want to disappoint him. He couldn’t afford to.
The matter had seemed simple enough and should not have been difficult to complete. All his contractor Abdul had been told to do was recover a single piece of parchment and eliminate whoever had possession of it. The assassin was well-known throughout Cairo and even elsewhere in Egypt for his success rate. How had he failed?
And now Khusad had to pass the information up the line. A call that he was dreading.
He opened a small notebook bound in red leather and turned to a particular page. On it were a series of numbers. On first appearance they looked like rows of telephone numbers, but were simply a low security way he had devised of concealing the one genuine telephone number — a number that actually ran diagonally across the grid.
Below the grid were three time periods during which the recipient would be available to take his call. Khusad didn’t know precisely who his contact was, but he knew he was a senior person within the Vatican, and assumed that he would have to leave the Holy See in order to use his mobile phone without his conversation being overheard or his location identified. And, allowing for the time difference between Cairo and Rome, the man should be available right now.
Khusad ran one stubby finger down the list until he came to the third number which, like all the others, began with a zero. Then he dialled the digits which appeared in a diagonal line running downwards and to the right from that initial number. He heard the ringing tone of the recipient’s phone, and then his call was answered by a soft and heavily accented voice.
‘Si.’
Their rules for communication were simple and inviolable. Unless it was completely unavoidable, neither man would use either his own name or the names of any of the other people involved in the operation, mention any dates or place names, or refer to the relic directly. Both parties doubted if any of their calls were monitored, but it was never worth taking a chance.
‘We don’t yet have it,’ Khusad began, speaking in French, ‘but we think we know where it is.’
‘That is not what I wanted to hear,’ the other man replied. ‘You told me that your agent, this man you had hired, was acting immediately. And that he was competent.’
Khusad had been expecting anger in response to his call, but instead the voice in the earpiece sounded nervous and disturbed, almost frightened.
‘His reputation suggested that he is normally very competent,’ the Egyptian replied, ‘and you will recall your instructions were to employ an outside contractor and not one of my own men to ensure complete deniability. In the event, I do not think a member of my organization would necessarily have fared any better. The man followed my instructions to the letter but in the interval between your orders being issued and him obtaining access to the premises, the goods had been passed on to a third party.’
There was a brief silence while the recipient of the call digested this piece of information.
‘So what of the original custodian? Is he aware of the significance and importance of the object?’
‘As far as we have been able to discover, he had no idea what it was or why anyone would be interested in it,’ Khusad replied. ‘And now he has no knowledge of it whatsoever.’
‘You are quite certain of that?’
‘He will not be telling anyone anything that he knew.’
The man in Italy was silent for a moment, then spoke again.
‘I suppose that has to be considered good news, in the circumstances. And now your agent will be approaching this third party you claim to have identified?’
‘Exactly. I have told him we need to conclude this operation within twenty-four hours.’
‘You may need to retain this agent you have hired for rather longer than that. Our monitoring system here has detected another instance of the same search term being used, and we will expect you to take the same action with this individual as with the first custodian.’
That was a piece of news which Khusad had definitely not expected, or wanted, to hear.
‘Perhaps this other search was initiated by the person who now has possession of the object,’ he suggested.
‘Not necessarily. Do you know the occupation of the new custodian? And I need his name.’
‘I understand that he’s just another market trader. His name is Anum Husani.’
‘Then you will definitely need to take additional action to ensure that this matter remains as confidential as we require. There is now at least one other person involved in this.’
‘How can you be certain of that?’
There was another pause before the reply came.
‘Because the last search that our system detected originated from Cairo Museum. And we are also tracking an email sent by that person. His name is Ali Mohammed.’
25
Antonio Morini, sitting in civilian clothes at a table in a small café near the Tiber, ended the call and slipped the mobile phone back into the pocket of his light jacket. He had been worried about just how specific he should be in his responses, because the Englishman had emphasized so forcefully the need for security in all communications, and especially during telephone calls, to protect everyone involved. But he had come to the conclusion that he needed to risk spelling out the name of the man who’d originated the new search — indeed that he really had no other option. He had to ensure that the correct action would be taken.
The Italian priest was becoming more concerned with every hour that passed. What had seemed at first to be a simple and uncomplicated, albeit brutal, operation — to locate, seize and possibly destroy a piece of ancient parchment, and to ensure that the owner of the relic was in no position to tell anyone anything about it, ever — was beginning to assume unwelcome proportions.
He had prayed for guidance every night, and by summoning up every scrap of his faith he’d been able to rationalize the actions he’d been ordered to take, the instruction to eliminate the market trader in Cairo, telling himself that a dealer in relics was absolutely the last person who should have access to the parchment. If the man had realized what he held in his hands, and decided to sell it to the highest bidder or even went public with the contents, the consequences would have been catastrophic. It was a case of measuring the life of one unimportant but potentially dangerous individual against the spiritual well-being of tens of millions of worshippers around the world.