"La Santa trades in pretty girls, among other things. A pretty white girl like Miss Blackstock would be a bonus."
"Where would he take her?" Rafi asked angrily.
"Put the gun down and I'll tell you," said Tidyman.
"Do it," ordered Holliday sharply.
Rafi lowered the weapon.
"Where is she?" Rafi repeated.
"La Santa has its headquarters in Corsica, that's all I know for sure."
"Is she there or not?" Rafi demanded.
"Neri sends girls everywhere. They travel to Albania and from there they're sent all over Eastern Europe. It's the same with the drugs. There's a network."
"What about the trade in artifacts?" Holliday asked.
"They go through Corsica to either Marseille or Rome, depending on the final destination," answered Tidyman. "Beyond that I have no idea."
"That son of a bitch," Rafi said through gritted teeth, "I'll kill him!"
"Alhazred?" Tidyman said. "Not if I find him first."
"What's your beef with him?" Holliday said. "I thought you two were partners."
"I had no choice," explained the Egyptian. "He kidnapped my wife and daughter in Cairo, held them hostage." Tidyman shook his head. "He said I needed an incentive to help him dispose of the gold. When he found out that you were on his trail he threatened to rape and kill Habibah and my Tabia if I didn't bring both of you to him."
"What changed your mind?" Holliday asked.
In the faint light from the control panel Holliday saw tears forming in the corners of the Egyptian's eyes.
"I flew into Bardai, in Chad, yesterday for supplies," said Tidyman, staring dully out through the windscreen at the star-filled night sky, his mind and his heart somewhere else. Far below them the dunes of the desert unrolled like a landscape in an endless dark dream, lit by the rising moon. "I managed to telephone my neighbor in Cairo. I learned that my wife had been killed trying to escape."
"And your daughter?"
"Al'hamdu'li'Allah, thanks be to God, Tabia managed to get away. My friends have hidden her. She is safe. I was on my way to kill Alhazred in his quarters when the helicopters came. I went to you instead. You did not deserve to die for that man's perfidy." The Egyptian cleared his throat but made no move to wipe the tears he was shedding for his wife. "His name is not even Alhazred."
"What is it?" Holliday asked.
"Bobby Ayoub. He was born in Ottawa."
"His parents, the doctors?" Rafi asked from the back of the plane.
"He told you that story?" Tidyman laughed coldly. "His father owned a delicatessen on Elgin Street and his mother was part owner of a bakery. They specialized in pita bread. Both of them died in a traffic accident on New Year's Eve. A drunk driver. Bobby was an only child. He inherited everything, including the insurance. He went to Lebanon with the money and played the big shot; tried to join Hezbollah and the Abu Nidal group but they didn't want him. Tried to go to university there but they wouldn't have him, either."
"We figured him for a phony," Holliday said and nodded.
"The bit about Trajan being Vespasian's son was a neat trick," Rafi said. "Especially since Trajan wasn't even born until about fifty years after Vespasian died." Rafi sneered. "He flubbed a lot of other stuff as well, and he couldn't read hieroglyphics, either. He was no archaeologist."
"He was crazy. Delusions of grandeur. According to him he was destined for great things. A Mahdi for the twenty-first century, sent by God to free his people from the yoke of tyranny, et cetera, et cetera. In reality he was a baker's child and the son of a man who made smoked meat sandwiches."
"Hitler's father was a customs inspector," said Rafi. "Great oaks from little acorns and all that."
"He was a wannabe terrorist who nobody wanted," said Holliday. "So he made up the Brotherhood of Isis."
"Something like that," Tidyman said and nodded, nudging the yoke a little, watching their course on the compass. "Crazy, just like I said." The little pressurized plane was flying at twenty thousand feet now, its optimum altitude for long-distance flight. They were flying so high they couldn't see the flitting batwing moon shadow of their flight across the dunes.
Tidyman lifted his shoulders in a shrug.
"The Tuaregs didn't care; they'd been vandalizing tombs and robbing archaeological sites for years, not to mention raiding the odd caravan. Alhazred, or Ayoub or whatever he calls himself, just made it easier for them to sell their stuff to the smugglers and provided them with better weapons. The lying little bastard brought organized crime to the desert, that's all." Tidyman sighed and lifted his shoulders wearily again. "Terrorism isn't about ideals anymore; Gandhi has been dead too long for that. It's just ego and money these days, and that's Bobby Ayoub in a nutshell."
"You think he'll get away?" Holliday asked.
"Yes," said Tidyman simply. "He would have had some kind of bolt hole arranged, some kind of plan B. He always did."
"And when he finds his airplane gone?" Holliday said. "Will he figure it out and come after us?"
"Count on it." The Egyptian nodded. "When he doesn't find our bodies he'll know. He had an awful temper when he didn't get his way. This will put him right over the edge. He'll come for us with blood in his eye, believe me."
Flying at just under one hundred and fifty miles an hour to conserve fuel, the eight-hundred-mile flight over the desert took them until just past midnight to complete. The moon was at its zenith as they crossed the Libyan border, throwing the landscape beneath their wings into sharp relief.
"The only thing I know about modern Tunisia is that George Lucas shot the Tattooine scenes on Luke Skywalker's home planet in a real place called Tattooine," said Holliday, looking down at the desert landscape below. It didn't look any different from most of Libya.
"That's here, in the south of the country," replied Tidyman. "The country's divided in half: the bottom is barren desert, the top is good farmland, Mediterranean, like the south of Spain or Greece, lots of hills and fertile valleys. They do pretty well for such a small country sandwiched between two big ones."
"Carthago delenda est," said Rafi, half dozing in the seat behind the copilot's spot. " 'Carthage must be destroyed'; first thing I ever learned in Latin."
"The Kasserine Pass," offered Holliday. "The first time American soldiers met up with the Germans in World War Two. We got our asses handed to us on a plate. One of the worst defeats in American military history."
"Good thing you were quick learners," said Tidyman. He eased the yoke forward and the little airplane went into a shallow dive, the sound of the fore and aft engines deepening.
"Why are we going down?" Holliday asked.
"Trying to get under the radar," explained Tidyman.
"Will they be looking for us?" Rafi asked.
"Not likely," said the Egyptian. "But the commercial airport at Tunis or the smaller one at Bizerte might pick us up accidentally; we're up pretty high for a light plane; they might be a little suspicious if we suddenly pop up on their screens coming out of the desert."
"Then take us down by all means," said Holliday.
They dropped steadily until they were flying at less than a thousand feet above the dunes and arid plains of the desert. Ahead, visible now in the far distance, the wall of the jagged Atlas Mountains stood like a blank, black shadow blocking out the star-lit skies. Abruptly the landscape changed. The desert vanished, replaced by small farms, roads and scattered settlements. The plains became more undulating, spotted with wooded hills that climbed straight-walled, like fortresses still waiting for an ancient enemy. Slowly but surely Holliday watched as the needle of the illuminated compass on the control panel swung to the east.
"Where is this airfield?" Holliday asked at the end of their fourth hour in the air.
"Matfur," replied Tidyman. "It was a fighter base in a dry lake bed," he explained. "Both sides occupied it at one time or another during the war. My father called it Muddy Matfur. Originally German, I think. Nobody uses it anymore, of course, it's just a line in the dirt really."