The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [36]
‘And how are you going to find out? Are you planning on consulting a medium?’
He looked at her in shock. She was being surprisingly cold and heartless considering that it was her uncle who was dead – the uncle with whom she had spent so many summers as a child and later as a teenager. But he sensed that she was using aggression to keep her grief at bay.
‘If I leave now I’m breaching my bail conditions. That’ll make me a more credible suspect in their eyes.’
Gabrielle was shaking her head.
‘I don’t think it’ll make a difference one way or the other.’
‘What if they stop me when I try and pass through to airside?’ he asked nervously.
‘You think they’ve got a list of everyone who is out on bail?’
‘In this day and age? It wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘Well, you can quit worrying. They may have a list of people who have jumped bail or people who have outstanding warrants against them. But they wouldn’t have a list of everyone on bail. If they did that, they wouldn’t have needed to hold on to your passport.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘I am right. Now stop worrying. Let’s check in and get airside. Then we can see if we can track down a copy of Uncle Harrison’s paper. If he sent it to an American journal, someone must know about it.’
What Daniel didn’t realize was that now that he had switched on his mobile phone, it was transmitting his location again. That meant that someone thousands of miles away was tracking him.
Chapter 22
The curator was sweating, but it wasn’t just from the heat. It wasn’t such a warm day and the air conditioning was on. It was something on the inside and he felt like he was going down with flu. And it had started soon after that visit from Gabrielle Gusack.
It must be swine flu. Damn!
He decided to check the symptoms online. Fever, sweating, headache, aching muscles, limb and joint pain, tiredness. On the other hand there was no diarrhoea, no sore throat, no runny nose and no sneezing. And there was something else. He was itching all over his torso, like he had measles or even chickenpox. But he had had both of those as a child.
He opened his shirt and looked at his torso only to be confronted by a frightening sight. His body was covered in red marks – not streaks but more like the elongated letter S or several such letters strung together. He touched one and his mind shrieked with pain, like he was burning. But now he realized that with this fever, his whole body felt like it was burning. The touch only made it worse.
A wave of fear swept over him. His mind panicked as he wondered what it could be. He had come into contact with people from a foreign country where hygiene standards are not so high and now he was going down with something that produced these S-shaped marks and a fiery pain on his flesh.
He felt his legs going weak.
Is that just fear or the disease itself?
Whatever it was, he knew that he had to act quickly. He leaned over to grab the phone and called 999.
‘Emergency services, which service do you require?’
‘Ambulance,’ he rasped as he felt the heat rise up in his stomach. He wanted to say more, but he felt his vision go blurry and could no longer support himself.
The last thing he remembered before passing out was his body slumping to the floor.
Chapter 23
‘It couldn’t have come from the Aswan High Dam excavations,’ said Mansoor.
‘Why not?’ asked Daniel, defensively.
‘Because I’ve been thinking about why the jar and papyrus are undocumented and I think I know the reason.’
In Mansoor’s office at the SCA, Daniel and Gabrielle sat forward.
‘Which is?’ Daniel prompted.
‘The most likely cause of an artefact not getting recorded would be if it were found round about the time when the museum moved to a new location. The museum was built in 1835 and has moved twice, first to the Boulaq district in 1858 and then to its present location at Tahrir Square in 1902. But the High Dam wasn’t constructed till the 1960s.’
Daniel thought for a moment about Mansoor’s comment.