But Bronson remained hopeful. The distance between the two cities was a little over 100 miles and there was even an almost direct road — the Cairo — Alexandria desert road — that was virtually all dual carriageway. Once they’d cleared the traffic around Alexandria, providing they didn’t run into the tailback after a major accident, and the driving conditions permitted the taxi driver to really wind it up, Bronson reckoned they ought to cover it in just under two hours. And that would be just enough time.
The biggest problem, really, was getting out of Alexandria.
‘Is this the evening rush hour?’ he asked the driver in English, as he looked through the window at gridlocked lanes in both directions.
The man shook his head, so Bronson tried again, this time in French.
That produced an immediate response, and the two of them had a brief but animated conversation, the driver gesticulating in both directions, but finishing up by pointing ahead of them.
‘What did he say?’ Angela asked.
Bronson half turned in his seat to face her.
‘He knows what the problem is,’ he replied, ‘because he can see it, and there’s been some stuff on his radio as well. A lorry has broken down, just stopped dead, in the middle of the road at the next intersection. He’s going to try to work his way around it, as soon as a gap opens up.’
In fact, a gap didn’t so much open up as be created by the driver. He sounded his horn in a long continuous blare as he swung the steering wheel to the right, sticking the nose of the Mercedes directly in front of a Toyota pickup. The moment the car in front of the pickup moved, he slid further over, angling the taxi towards a side street that appeared mercifully clear of traffic, the entire manoeuvre accompanied by a cacophony of noisy blasts from horns and hooters but, perhaps surprisingly, no angry gestures from the drivers he was inconveniencing. If he’d tried the same manoeuvre in a London street, Bronson guessed it would have ended in blows.
At the end of that street was a set of traffic lights showing red. The driver slowed, but didn’t stop — and neither did the three cars in front of him and the two behind — simply pulling out of the junction, sounding the horn and joining the traffic flow on the cross street. That manoeuvre caused Bronson to press his foot hard down on the imaginary brake in front of him, and take a firm grip of the grab handle on the door. But they didn’t hit anything, and the other cars parted to allow them in.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Stephen muttered from the back seat, invoking the deity yet again.
Bronson waited until they were travelling in a straight line once more, in harmony with the surrounding traffic, before he spoke again to the driver in French.
He listened to the man’s reply, and then laughed.
‘What?’ Angela demanded.
‘He’s just told me he’s heard that in England the drivers always obey the traffic lights. And that in Italy the drivers ignore the traffic lights. But here in Egypt, the traffic lights are only for decoration.’
‘That explains a hell of a lot,’ Angela said darkly.
But that was the last major hold-up they encountered, and within a few minutes the Mercedes was heading away from Alexandria on the desert road. The driver did well, holding the Mercedes saloon at well over an indicated 100 kilometres an hour when he could and travelling as fast as the conditions permitted when he couldn’t. They didn’t meet a significant amount of traffic and they didn’t see a single accident, and they stepped out of the taxi at the departure building at just after nine forty-five. Bronson didn’t count the money, just handed the wad to the driver as he stepped away from the vehicle.
‘Where are we going now?’ Stephen asked.
‘Well, we’ve got the same problem at Cairo as we had at Alexandria,’ Bronson replied. ‘No flights to anywhere where we actually want to go. That’s why we’re heading for Sharm el-Sheikh. But look on the bright side.’
‘There’s a bright side?’ Angela asked.
‘Oh yes. Nobody would realistically expect us to be following the route that we’re taking, so if anyone is after us, they probably have no idea where we are right now, or where we’re heading.’
They caught the flight with minutes to spare, and exactly an hour later the EgyptAir Boeing 737 touched down precisely on schedule in Sharm at half past eleven.
Then Bronson felt they could breathe again, and for the first time since they’d left Kuwait they had time in hand, because the next flight he’d picked — to Milan — wasn’t scheduled to depart until two thirty in the morning.
He insisted that they delayed buying their tickets until about an hour before the flight was due to leave, to minimize the amount of time the opposition would have to work out where they were and to do anything about it. When he decided that the time was right, they again bought return tickets as they’d done on the previous two flights to arouse less suspicion.
They passed through the security check without incident and sat down in the departure lounge. It looked as if the flight would be at least half full, judging by the number of people already waiting at the gate, but they were able to find three seats off to one side where they sat and waited for boarding.
There was, clearly, only one topic of conversation that interested them. None of them could understand the reason for the apparently senseless massacre of their colleagues out at the dig site. They kept their voices low, just in case any of the other passengers, most of whom appeared to be Arabs, could understand English.
‘It just doesn’t make sense,’ Stephen said for about the third time.
‘The inscription in the temple…’ Angela said. ‘Whatever it said has to be really important.’
‘Pity we’ll never know what that was,’ Bronson pointed out, glancing at Angela. ‘Or is there something you should be telling me?’
‘You know me too well, Chris,’ Angela said with a slight smile. ‘You know the way I work. The very first time I went down into the temple I took my camera with me. I have plenty of pictures of the inscription. We can look at them right now if you want. If it is worth killing for, we need to work out why as soon as we can.’
Bronson smiled back.
‘Actually, I thought you might have done something like that, because I know you do enjoy a puzzle.’
‘So do you.’
‘That’s why I’m a copper, I suppose,’ Bronson replied. ‘And this could well be the biggest puzzle we’ve ever got ourselves caught up in. Just as much as you do, I want to find out why the hell that inscription was so important it had to be destroyed, and why everybody who’d seen it was murdered. There’s nobody near us, so can we take a look at the pictures now?’
Angela nodded, glanced around them, then pulled her camera out of her carry-on bag and switched it on. She navigated through the gallery until she found the image she was looking for, and handed the camera to Bronson.
He stared at the small image for a few seconds, then shook his head.
‘It’s not what I was expecting,’ he said. ‘It looks quite rough, like it was done in a hurry, or by somebody copying something unfamiliar.’
‘You can see it better on a big screen, obviously,’ Angela said, taking back the camera, ‘but you’re right: it was quite roughly carved.’
Stephen had barely even glanced at the screen of the camera; he just kept nervously looking around the departure lounge.