The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [69]
They bid their goodbyes to Walid and his crew, wished Allah’s blessings on his family and then set off for Cairo’s Zamalek District.
Zamalek was an island in the Nile, connected to the rest of Cairo by bridges – a sort of Manhattan in North Africa. Heavily developed and built-up, the area was home to several luxury hotels as well as quite a few foreign embassies. It was, all in all, quite an upmarket area. But there was only one thing in the Zamalek District that interested Daniel and Gabrielle: the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Daniel knew that there was a risk of being recognized, but was relieved that their most distinguishing feature had now been negated. There were lots of dark-haired Western men in Cairo and none of them would get a second glance. But Gabrielle’s blonde hair was quite striking, and if the police or anyone else was on the lookout for a tall blonde woman, Gabrielle’s hair would have been more than enough to guarantee that they would get a second glance.
They had considered hiding it under a headscarf, but that was not a sure-fire way of avoiding attention. Her height and Western looks might be enough to make it clear that she was trying to hide her hair. Then the game would be up. So instead she had played the adventurous tourist card and persuaded one of the women in the villages along the Nile to dye her hair with henna.
‘It’s something I’ve always wanted to try,’ she had explained with almost schoolgirlish excitement.
She had considered using henna to darken her skin too, but it was more usually used for tattoos. In any case, she was now covering herself up with a robe, showing very little of her flesh. There was nothing she could do about her height, but now, instead of appearing as a tall blonde, she came over as a tall redhead who could pass for a local. And that was not what the police were looking for.
They hailed a taxi in the street and took the short ride across the city to the Supreme Council of Antiquities. The driver dropped them off at the front of the building, which had been given a modern glass entrance and a silver, metallic grey façade with the words ‘Supreme Council of Antiquities’ emblazoned across the portals in huge Arabic letters as well as somewhat smaller in English. Daniel noted, with silent amusement, that the letter f in the word of had become loose and fallen into a diagonal posture.
He let Gabrielle lead the way up the wide steps to this grand entrance. She introduced Daniel as an Australian professor, hoping that the nationality would throw the guard off if he had heard anything about an Englishman being wanted by the police – which was unlikely. The guard had smiled and said a tentatively English ‘hallo’ – prompting Daniel to respond with his best Aussie ‘g’day’.
And with that, they were inside.
As Gabrielle had predicted, the building was surprisingly empty, even allowing for the fact that this was siesta time. They made their way quickly to Mansoor’s office, which Gabrielle promptly opened with her key. Once inside, they went to work rapidly on the oak desk and the grey metal filing cabinets, taking advantage of the fact that the drawers of the desk were unlocked and the filing cabinets had their keys still in them.
For a while it looked like they weren’t going to find anything and then that old cliché about ‘the last place you look’ kicked in.
‘Found it!’ shrieked Gabrielle, louder than she had intended.
It was actually in the very first drawer that Daniel had searched. Somehow he had managed to miss it, probably because he was grabbing whole wads of paper and not going through the pages individually.
She handed the papers to Daniel who started looking through them. In his mind, he started deciphering one marked ‘Tomb of Ay’, testing his memory of the language and script.
‘Interesting.’
Gabrielle picked up on Daniel’s tone. ‘What?’
‘It says here something about “the Sibolet stores built by my father”.’
‘Sibolet?’
‘Yes. I think it’s a variation of Shibolet. The Hebrew word for grain or at least the grain-bearing part of wheat or corn.’
‘Presumably