Mohammed shrugged his shoulders and raised his arms, palms upwards, a universal gesture.
‘I have no idea. I don’t think he has any friends or family outside the country he could visit. But as long as he has a passport he could probably go anywhere.’
Dalani nodded slowly.
‘That isn’t what I wanted to hear, but what you say does make sense. Now, Dr Mohammed, to the other matter. Did Husani talk to you about the parchment? Did he ask for your opinion, or for your help?’
Mohammed opened his mouth to reply, but before he could do so Dalani spoke again.
‘Could I just say first that we already know — and I can’t tell you exactly how because it’s confidential — that he contacted you about this relic. So all I want to know is what help, if any, you were able to give him.’
That information shocked Mohammed, and he was sure that his face showed his surprise. Despite Husani’s earlier warning to him, there was, he realized, very little he could do now except tell this police officer the truth.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re right. Anum Husani did contact me about the parchment he had bought.’
‘And?’ Dalani prompted him.
‘It was very old and faded. Only a handful of the words on it — it was written in Latin — were legible. He asked me if I could use some of the equipment here at the museum to decipher the rest of the text, and I agreed to do what I could to help him. He let me have the parchment for a few hours, and I performed a number of operations on it. Non-invasive, of course.’
Dalani leaned forward.
‘And were your attempts successful?’ he asked.
‘I think so. I used a number of different techniques to enhance the writing, including bathing the parchment with infrared and ultraviolet illumination, and that certainly made more of the letters and words legible. But I haven’t had time to study the results yet.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because I had an urgent call from Anum Husani asking me to return the relic to him, which I did immediately, of course.’
‘When?’
‘Just this morning. I’ve only just printed the photographs I took while I had the parchment in my possession.’
As he said this, Mohammed tapped the pile of pages beside him on the desk.
‘May I see them?’ Dalani asked.
‘Of course.’
Mohammed passed the pages across the desk to the detective, who flicked through them rapidly, glancing at each image for a few seconds.
‘Are these the only copies?’ he asked.
For the first time since the detective had walked into his office, Mohammed was slightly puzzled by the direction his questions were taking.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I gave one set to Husani, as he had asked me to do, because it was his parchment I was studying. And of course the originals are on my computer. I transferred them to the hard disk from the memory card in my camera.’
‘So that’s three sets in all?’ Dalani asked. ‘These, the copies Husani presumably has with him, and those on your computer. You mean your laptop, I assume?’
‘Yes. I don’t do private work on the museum’s desktop computer, obviously.’
‘Just the three sets?’ Dalani persisted.
‘No. There is one other,’ Mohammed admitted, with a trace of embarrassment. ‘There were some aspects of the parchment, or rather the few words on it that could be read with the naked eye, that puzzled me, and I consulted a colleague about it.’
‘Are you talking about somebody here at the museum?’
Mohammed shook his head.
‘No. A colleague in London, at the British Museum. She’d expressed her professional interest in the parchment and so I decided to send her copies of all the photographs I had taken of the relic. I sent the email just a few minutes before you arrived, actually.’
For a few seconds Dalani just stared at him across the desk. Then he shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was harsher, but the tone almost sorrowful.
‘Now that was a really stupid thing to do, Mohammed.’
A prickle of unease swept through the scientist.
‘What do you mean?’
Dalani smiled wolfishly at him.
‘I’m talking about your stupidity in sending photographs of the parchment to London. And your stupidity in getting involved with Husani in the first place. Some lessons are only learned the hard way, as you’re about to find out.’
Dalani stood up, and in that instant Mohammed belatedly realized two things. First, there was no way that the Cairo police could possibly have known that Husani had contacted him about the relic. And second, he had no idea what a genuine Cairo detective’s identification looked like.
But suddenly he knew exactly who the man sitting in front of him really was.
38
Desperately, Mohammed grabbed for the telephone, but the other man moved like a striking snake, leaping out of his chair and pinning his arm to the desk while with his other hand he pulled out a lethal-looking knife, the blade a strange shade of off-white.
Mohammed saw the knife and knew he had bare seconds to live. He opened his mouth to scream, but before he could utter a single sound the knife slammed into the left side of his torso, just below his ribs, and a surge of agony swept through him. He gasped for air and his world collapsed into waves of unbearable pain as his killer twisted the knife in the wound.
Mohammed fell backwards, but his attacker followed him, leaping nimbly over the desk as the scientist crashed to the ground. He felt another searing pain as the knife was pulled out of his body, and stared up into the man’s dark, almost black, eyes.
‘Death improves a lot of people,’ the killer said, his tone light and conversational, ‘and I think you’re one of them.’
Less than a second later, the man slid the point of his ceramic knife into the side of Mohammed’s neck and drove it home, slicing through the arteries and oesophagus. A huge gout of blood spurted out of the fatal wound.
As the light faded from Mohammed’s eyes, the man stood up and inspected himself critically. There was a fair amount of blood on his right arm and hand — it was almost inevitable given what he had just done — but nothing anywhere on his clothing. That was why he’d removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves as soon as he’d entered the office. He’d known from the start exactly the way the interview was going to end, and had made his preparations accordingly. And at least he hadn’t had to torture or threaten the man to obtain the information he needed. His deception had worked perfectly. He’d extracted all the man’s knowledge of the parchment, and he would take the photographs of the relic, and the laptop, with him when he left the office. Another loose end had been snipped off.
Somebody else would need to deal with the woman at the British Museum.
The only downside was that he still had no idea where he could find Anum Husani and the parchment.
There was a small sink in one corner of the room. Abdul stepped over to it, washed his hands and arms, and the ceramic knife, and dried both himself and the weapon thoroughly. Then he re-sheathed the knife, pulled on his jacket, and walked back behind the desk to look down at Mohammed.
Abdul bent down and seized the dead man’s legs, moving the body slightly so that it was invisible from the doorway. Anyone looking into the office would probably just assume that the scientist was somewhere else in the building.
Then he extracted the data-cards from three digital cameras that were lined up on a shelf behind the desk, picked up Mohammed’s laptop and charger and slipped everything into a computer bag he found leaning against the wall behind the desk. He slid the colour photographs into a side pocket of the bag and left the office, pulling the door closed behind him.
Three minutes later, he walked out of the museum into Tahrir Square and strolled away. As soon as he found a quiet side street, he walked down it and, when he was sure he was unobserved, pulled off his jacket and reversed it, turning the white jacket into a dark blue one. He took a wide-brimmed floppy hat from his jacket pocket and put it on his head and then, after another glance around him, pulled off the fake moustache he had been wearing and removed the soft plastic cheek pieces he’d inserted inside his mouth to change the shape of his face.