The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [59]
But why on earth should anyone think they were carrying a disease? They weren’t showing any symptoms themselves. This had to be some sort of mix-up. But there evidently was an outbreak and there had had to be some cause.
However, until such time as they could approach the authorities without getting themselves shot, they’d have to keep a low profile. They needed breathing room… time to unravel the mystery and work out a plan.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Daniel.
Chapter 44
Sarit arrived in Cairo sometime after four in the morning. She parked her car and took an invigorating shower to rouse herself from the lethargy that was engulfing her.
She put on the white bathrobe supplied by the hotel and made her way to the bed, still feeling an intense desire to sleep. But she had something to do before that: she had to report in. She switched on her computer and uploaded the tourist-style pictures she had taken of her day in the Valley of the Kings. Then she connected the laptop to the hotel’s broadband and prepared the message for embedding into one of the pictures:
Goliath locked Klein, Gusack and Mansoor in tomb in western valley and stole their jeep. May have killed them, but I suspect not. Arrange for them to be freed. I followed Goliath on road to Cairo and disposed of him with homemade incendiary.
She embedded the text in the picture, then wiped the text file and uploaded the picture to her social network account for all her ‘friends’ to see. Then she ran the utility to delete any temporary files and overwrite unused areas of the hard disk.
Then she did what she had wanted to do for hours: crash out on the bed.
Sometime later, she was awakened from her uneasy sleep by an aggressive banging on the door. She barely had time to throw on a robe before the door was flung open and three Egyptian policemen walked in.
‘Miss Stewart, you are under arrest for leaving the scene of a motor accident.’
Chapter 45
Daniel had let Gabrielle do the talking. After a sleepless night in the open by the Nile, just outside a small village, they had made their way to the riverbank in search of the means to escape. And they found it in the feluccas – the local riverboats that operated on the Nile both as fishing vessels and as cheap tourist rides.
Gabrielle was so much more persuasive than he could have ever been. First of all, it was obvious that Walid, the dark-skinned, southern Egyptian owner of the felucca, found Gabrielle very attractive, as did the other two crew members who were there with him – his teenage son Na’if and someone else who was either Walid’s younger brother or his cousin. Secondly, they seemed to be impressed by her fluent, almost classical Arabic. Daniel could have spoken Arabic equally well, but somehow hearing it from a pretty blonde foreigner – and a woman too – was considerably more impressive, and they warmed to her immediately.
Gabrielle had warned Daniel that it would be risky to try to join a normal tourist river cruise without arousing suspicion. Not that there would have been any shortage of room on a northbound cruise; holidaymakers tended to prefer the shorter cruises between Aswan and Luxor, and in any case the tourist season was almost over. Joining a cruise without a booking at the last minute, though, might arouse some suspicions. For all they knew, the riverboats and car hire firms might have been alerted to watch out for them.
But travelling by felucca was another matter. Those old, narrow, engineless riverboats were used both by fishermen and by canny locals to ferry tourists on short trips.
‘We want to get the authentic local experience,’ Gabrielle had explained. ‘Or rather my husband does.’
She realized, quite spontaneously, that the afterthought was a nice little touch to make it sound convincing. She knew that Walid and his crew could well relate to that. The Western city slicker who wants to get his hands dirty, and the educated, dutiful wife reluctantly going along with her adventurous husband’s wishes.
‘And you want to go all the way to Cairo?’ Walid