Then he paused for a moment as he looked at the third object in the safe, a small semi-automatic pistol. He’d owned the weapon — illegally, of course — for years, and occasionally took it out into the desert to a quiet area and fired a few rounds through it, just to make sure it still worked. Carrying it might just give him an edge over the man who’d killed Mahmoud Kassim, especially if the murderer only worked with a knife. On the other hand, he wouldn’t be able to take it onto an aircraft with him.
He nodded to himself. It was an easy decision. If he came face to face with the killer somewhere on the streets of Cairo and didn’t have the pistol in his pocket, he probably wouldn’t even make it as far as the airport. He definitely needed the insurance policy that the weapon would provide. He took it out of the safe, extracted the magazine and loaded it from the box of .22 cartridges he also kept there, replaced the magazine in the butt of the weapon, racked back the slide to chamber a round and set the safety catch. Then he removed the magazine again and added one further cartridge to replace the one which was now in the breech, ready to be fired. There was no point in taking the box of cartridges because if he did meet the killer and fired every round at him, he certainly wouldn’t have time to reload his weapon. If a full magazine didn’t stop the man, Husani knew he’d be dead. He was also well aware that the .22 round was hardly classed as a man-stopper, but it was all he had. It would have to do.
He slid the pistol into the pocket of his trousers — he found Western-style clothing much more convenient than traditional Arab dress — locked the safe and left the room.
Then he ran up the stairs to the main bedroom, strode across to the shelves on the opposite side of the room and grabbed a selection of clothes, enough for about a week, plus his washing and shaving kit, and stuffed everything into a small leather suitcase. He closed it, set the catches, and headed back towards the stairs.
He’d only taken a couple of steps across the landing when he heard a knock at the front door of the house.
29
Treading as carefully and quietly as he could, Husani walked into the bedroom used by his two children and crossed to the window. He kept well back from the glass, positioning himself so that he could just see the lane that ran outside his house, and the area around the front door. He could see the figure of a man.
Husani edged closer to the window as the man outside repeated his knock. He couldn’t make out the face of the figure standing in the road because of the hat he was wearing, the headgear completely obscuring his features.
It could be completely innocent, perhaps somebody wanting to buy or sell a relic, or even a messenger sent by the man who ran his shop, though in either case his assistant would surely have called his mobile to advise him. Husani didn’t believe either scenario for a moment. A feeling of cold dread settled on him, and what happened next confirmed his fear.
The figure outside glanced in both directions along the street and then, with a click that was clearly audible to Husani in the room above, opened a switchblade knife and slid the point between the door and the jamb, obviously attempting to slip the lock. Husani thanked his lucky stars that he’d remembered to close both the bolts: unless the man kicked down the door, he wasn’t going to be able to get inside the house that way. The downside was that the man outside would soon realize that somebody had to be in the property for the door to have been bolted on the inside.
He stepped back from the window, trying to decide what to do. There was a rear door to the house, but to reach it he would have to walk down the stairs which ran close to the front door, and if he did that the man outside would probably hear him, and perhaps guess where he was going.
Husani moved forward again to the window and peered down. As he did so, he saw the figure outside step back from the door and again glance all around him. This time he looked up as well, towards the windows on the first floor of the house that overlooked the street.
Immediately, Husani shrank back. He didn’t think the man had seen him, but he couldn’t be sure, and he muttered a curse under his breath. But he still needed to know what the man was doing, so after a few moments he edged cautiously forward again and looked down.
The man had gone. He wasn’t in sight anywhere along the street. Husani looked in both directions, but the figure had vanished, and there hadn’t been time for him to disappear around a corner or into an alley.
That could only mean one thing. He must have gone around to the back of the house, and Husani was very aware that the rear door offered nothing like the same level of security as the one that opened onto the street. He knew he had just seconds to act.
Heedless of the noise he was making, he ran out of the room and down the stairs, the pistol clutched in his right hand, the suitcase forgotten, abandoned on the landing. He ran across to the front door and wrenched back one of the bolts. Then he stopped. Suppose it was just a trick? Suppose the intruder had simply walked down the side of the house, and ducked out of sight, and was now waiting for Husani to obligingly open the street door so that he could push his way inside?
For a moment he stood there, his body quivering with fear and indecision. He left the second bolt in place and stepped to one side, to a small window which gave a partial view of the street, and looked out.
But almost at the same moment as he did so, he heard a splintering crash behind him, and knew in that instant that the man had broken open the rear door and was now inside the house.
The killer was right behind him.
30
Angela Lewis often found that her subconscious mind was rather good at solving problems that her conscious mind for some reason had failed to cope with.
When she’d read Ali Mohammed’s email the previous day, she knew she’d seen or read the partial name ef bar he somewhere else but, like a library with no filing cards or index system, she simply couldn’t retrieve it from her memory. Her searches on the Internet hadn’t helped either. But almost as soon as she got up that morning, she had remembered exactly where to look.
While Bronson was still in the shower, tunelessly singing some awful pop song from the seventies, she opened up her laptop and carried out a couple of swift searches, both of which yielded somewhat sparse results. But at least she now had something to send out to Ali in Cairo, which might help him in his work. Her best guess at the significance of ef bar he was that it was the middle section of the Hebrew name Yusef bar Heli, and that alone made the parchment quite an important find. But it was the inclusion of the name of the Judaean town of Tzippori — assuming Ali Mohammed had read the word correctly — which suggested the relic could potentially be a discovery of great importance.
The only names that had been associated with that particular individual were purely apocryphal, with virtually nothing in the historical record to support any of them. However, it was widely believed that the individual had spent at least some time in Tzippori. Depending upon which source was consulted, the man had either been called Yusef bar Heli — or Yusef ben Heli, both bar and ben translating as ‘the son of’ — or Yusef bar Yacob or Yusef ben Yacob. The man’s father had most probably been named either Heli or Yacob — the historical record was unclear on that point — though his own name, Yusef, was fairly well established. If the parchment was contemporary with this man’s life, and if the fragment of the name did in fact refer to this specific individual, historians might for the first time be able to establish something of the man’s family tree. And if that proved to be possible, the ramifications could be simply astonishing.