Hawke gave her a look. “To Professor Khatibi’s place. He needs his notes.”
“Ah… notes,” Ryan said, tapping his temple with his forefinger. “All my notes are up here.”
“Like all your friends, you mean?”
“I do not have imaginary friends!”
Khatibi huffed. “Who are you people?”
Lea showed him her ID, issued by Eden.
“You know Richard Eden?” he said.
“Yes,” Lea said. “We’re all on the same side here.”
“All right,” Khatibi said, beginning to relax. “Where did you get the pictures I saw on this man’s phone?” He gestured to Hawke.
“In Tanit’s tomb,” Ryan said nonchalantly.
“Tanit’s tomb?” Khatibi replied. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“No joke,” Scarlet said, fishing a crumpled packet from her pocket and jamming a bent cigarette in her lip. “True story.”
Khatibi looked at them like they were insane. “Tanit was a goddess…a mythological figure! You are clearly deranged.”
Lea held up her phone and showed him more photos of the symbols Ryan had taken in the Atlas Mountains. Khatibi leaned in closer, a look of interest growing on his face. “Where did you take this photograph?”
“Same place as the others, Doc,” Hawke said. “The Dadès Gorge.”
“You mean the Dadès Gorge in the Atlas Mountains here in Morocco?”
“Yes,” Lea said. “We found the tomb of Tanit there but it was looted by a man named Dirk Kruger.”
Khatibi’s face fell. “Dirk Kruger? I hate that man!”
“Join the club. We think he stole some kind of key, and there was an inscription in the tomb that referred to the Pillars of Hercules, but beyond that we need your help.”
“Are you with us?” Hawke asked.
“Yes but I still need my notes!”
As he spoke, Lexi skidded to a halt outside his house and seconds later they were filing inside his home.
Khatibi called out for his brother but there was no reply. “We don’t have long,” he said. “This is the first place they will look for me.”
Hawke watched as the professor began fumbling about through piles of disordered papers stacked up all over his front room. Clutter filled every corner — cups of cold mint tea, a damaged backgammon board, two broken television sets, at least half a dozen ashtrays and even an old oud being used as a bookend. Above the desk was a fine-looking scimitar, which Khatibi proudly described as an original Ottoman antique.
“Hurry up, professor!” Lea said, glancing nervously out the window.
“I have them!” he said proudly. “My filing system looks messy I know, but I can find everything when I need to — ah wait.”
“What is it?” Hawke said, glancing at his watch.
“These are not the papers we need.” He put them back down and resumed his search through the endless piles of junk.
“Bloody hell, you could lose a corpse in here,” Scarlet said.
“Aha! At last, I have them.” Khatibi waved a thin sheaf of papers in the air victoriously. “We can go.”
“Great, let’s get out of here,” Hawke said.
The professor took a closer look at the papers and shook his head. “No…no — wrong ones. Sorry!”
He crouched down his knees and started going through more stacks under the desk, throwing any unwanted papers out behind him where they drifted back to the floor like giant snowflakes.
“This is ridiculous!” Reaper said.
“This is why you should keep your notes in your head,” Ryan said smugly.
“We’re not all fucking polymorphs, dweeb,” Scarlet said.
“Polymaths, darling,” Ryan replied. “A polymorph is…”
Scarlet pointed a black fingernail in his face. “Shut up!”
“Got it.”
Khatibi finally spoke from beneath the desk. “Now I have them!”
“Are you very sure, professor?” Lea said gently.
“Yes, absolutely… yes!” He crawled out backwards, smacking his head on the bottom of the desk as he emerged back into the light. He cursed in Arabic and then stood and faced them. “Here they are. We may go!”
“Too late,” Reaper said. “Our friends are here.”
The door smashed in and soldiers rushed into the house.
Khatibi looked like he needed to change his trousers and then surrender, but Hawke knew there was no talking your way out of a situation like this. From the authorities’ point of view they had broken into a public building, snatched a citizen currently being held in custody and then fired on both policemen and soldiers. It would take months to sort out and those months would be spent split up from each other and in prisons all over the country.
So he exploded into action, and the rest of the team needed no orders to join him, with only Khatibi scuttling away. He hid back under his desk and covered his head with the sheaf of research papers in his shaking hands.
Camacho grabbed the first man, immediately disarming him and punching him in the face, but he was tougher than he looked and fought back hard, improvising by snatching Khatibi’s scimitar off the wall and whirling around with the vicious blade to get the feel of it.
Camacho took a step back and searched for a defensive weapon while the man grinned and pushed forward. He slashed the blade through the dusty air of Khatibi’s apartment with a metallic whoosh sound and almost took off his head, but the American ducked just in time and staggered backwards away from the sword.
The man pounded closer, but Camacho reacted like lightning and smacked the sword out of his hand. He brought his fist up hard into the man’s temple and knocked him out cold.
Hawke looked up to see Scarlet struggling with another soldier.
“Any help, Cairo?”
“No, I’ve got it thanks.”
She ducked and spun around striking him off balance with the heel of her boot.
“He’s got a hookah pipe, Cairo.”
“I know!” she said excitedly. “That’s even better than a fez.”
“Cairo, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you called Cairo because you were born in Cairo?”
She spun around again and knocked the man out with a second axe kick. “True story, Josiah.”
“So why the mindless amusement about hookah pipes and fez hats?”
“Just trying to lighten the load and put a smile on your face.”
Another soldier burst into the room, and Scarlet snatched up Khatibi’s hookah pipe from the unconscious man’s grip and rammed into her new opponent’s face. The pipe’s windguard tore into his cheek and he howled in agony in response to the wound before knocking the pipe to the floor.
Scarlet snatched the pipe back up. “Don’t you ever break my hookah pipe,” she said, and gripped the pipe by the water jar as she swung it at the man’s head. The hose flicked out like a whip and lashed his eyes, causing him to stumble backward and grunt in pain as he reached up and rubbed his eyes with his hands.
She struck again. It came to a sudden stop when the pipe’s plate smashed the bridge of his nose. With the bone and septal cartilage now crushed down into his nasal cavity, the man’s instinct was to take a step back and reach up to his face with his hands.
As he desperately tried to measure the damage done, Camacho stormed forward, grabbed a heavy marquetry chair and brought it down on the soldier’s head, wincing as the back of the chair smashed to pieces. The man dropped down to the floor, almost out for the count and covered in a shower of mother-of-pearl inlay that had popped out of the teak panel with the force of the blow.
He groaned and tried to get up, but Scarlet seized the day and brought the pipe down on his head. The heavy glass water jar at the base of the hookah shattered on contact with the man’s skull and he went down like a bag of lead weights.