Aggressor (22 page)

Girling felt his pulse quicken. ‘How did Uthman know about Stansell? The police have tried to keep it a secret.'

Old Mansour shrugged. ‘He works part-time at Mukhabarat headquarters in Shubra, working on the bodies - ‘

‘Autopsies,' Girling prompted.

‘Yes. While there one night earlier this week, he heard about the kidnapping. It came as a great shock when Uthman told me. I liked Stansell very much; you know that, Mr Tom.'

‘Yes, I know.'

‘But now you are here. And you have come for him, I think. This gives me great hope.'

Girling didn't answer directly. ‘I am hoping you may be able to help, Mansour.'

‘Me? Of course, anything.'

‘Stansell's contact book,' Girling said. ‘In emergencies, did he continue to leave it in your keeping after you left the Metropolitan Club?'

Old Mansour's watery eyes glazed for a moment. ‘The little book of names and telephone numbers?'

Girling knew the old man knew exactly what he meant. ‘Yes.'

‘Maybe he did, Mr Tom.'

‘Do you have it now?'

‘I...it was a sacred arrangement, Mr Tom.'

‘It was the police he wanted you to hide it from, Mansour, not me.'

Girling reached out and pressed a ten-pound note into Mansour's hand.

Mansour examined the money for a moment before looking up into Girling's eyes. ‘You know me better than this, Mr Tom.'

Old Mansour's expression darkened. He walked past Girling and headed out through the curtained doorway.

‘Shit,' Girling said to himself. The tenner was as much as Mansour made in a month. But money did not yet buy everything in this city. Some people were above bribery. He cursed himself.

He was about to follow after Mansour when the curtain parted again. Mansour was silhouetted against the lights at the front of the shop. He held the mock sherry keg in his hands.

‘After the Metropolitan Club... dismissed me, they threw this out, too,' the old man said.

‘The book, Mansour...'

‘If you ask for it, Mr Tom, then it must be important.'

Mansour twisted a catch at the base of the cask, opened it and pulled out a small pocket-sized volume, its covers held together by an elastic band. He handled it with reverence, as though it was the Koran, his fingers avoiding the dog-eared corners. The book looked as if it would crumble at the slightest touch. He passed it reverently to Girling. As he did so, Girling noticed the edge of the ten-pound note poking above Old Mansour's waistcoat pocket.

‘In any case, it will be better in your hands,' the old man said. ‘It will not be the Mukhabarat that finds him. Uthman says they have put a Captain Al-Qadi on his case.'

‘Do you know him?' Girling asked.

‘Not me, thank God. But Uthman says he has a certain reputation.'

Girling opened the book carefully. Stansell lived a disorganized existence in most respects, but in his professional life he maintained a rigorous discipline. Against each surname was a first name or an initial, a job title, a date - presumably the day of their first meeting - an address, and a telephone number. From a brief glance Girling estimated there were several thousand entries. Maybe finding the contact book wasn't the great coup he had cracked it up to be.

‘When did Stansell give you this, Mansour?'

‘Five nights ago, Mr Tom.'

The night he was taken, Girling thought. ‘Did Stansell say where he had come from, or where he was going?'

‘He was in a great hurry. We hardly talked. He used to come here to smoke a little. But not that night. He handed me the book, just like he used to do at the Metropolitan sometimes, and told me he would be back for it when it was safe to come back.'

‘How did he look, Mansour?'

‘That night? Like you had never gone away, Mister Tom.' Old Mansour paused. ‘With Stansell everything used to be laughter, you remember? But many things changed after you left Cairo. When you find Stansell, will you stay?'

‘I don't know, Mansour.' Girling opened and closed the book as he spoke. ‘Where did he go when you stopped working at the Metropolitan Club? They said this morning that they hadn't seen him there for a long time. I know he used to meet people at the Club on business. Did he tell you where he used to go instead?'

‘I only know of Andrea's.'

‘Where is Andrea's?'

‘Out by the Pyramids. When Stansell was here last... not counting the other night, he asked me why our beer was not cold like the Stellas at Andrea's. He had been at Andrea's that morning. He came here afterwards to smoke. For the digestion, you understand.'

‘I see,' Girling said. Andrea's. Maybe it was something worth checking.

Girling glanced down at the open pages of the book. There, halfway down, was a name, a date, and two telephone numbers. But it was the address which had caught his eye. 22 Ibn Zanki Street was the address that had been ringed and underlined on the map he had found inside the stray volume of
Dispatches
in Stansell's apartment.

‘By the way,' Girling said. ‘I never asked you how you got the keg back.'

Mansour's eyes twinkled. ‘Stansell found it in the rubbish outside the Metropolitan Club. It was he who returned it to me. Please find him, Mr Tom. It is not the same around here with him gone.'

As soon as he arrived back at the apartment, Girling went to the phone. Referring to Stansell's little black book, he dialled in the second of the two numbers, the one listed for Mr Lazan's place of work. At that time of night, past eleven thirty, he didn't expect anyone to answer, but there might just be...

There was a click as the call connected... an answering machine.

The woman's voice, very smooth, almost robotic, talked to him in a language he did not understand, before switching to English.

‘You have reached the Israeli Embassy. There is no one here currently to...'

Girling gently replaced the receiver.

‘Gotcha!' he said.

CHAPTER 11

Sergeant Jones worked his tongue between his teeth. It had ceased to feel like a tongue, more like the crust of a dried-out swamp bed back home. They had been jogging for just over four hours. One tenth of the time allowed to them. And already halfway. But for the water situation, it wasn't so bad.

Shabanov's last little surprise before they boarded the helicopters had been to restrict each pair to just one water bottle. One fucking bottle between two men. To compensate for this, each team was supplied with a map that supposedly marked all the wells in that section of the Eastern Desert. Some swap.

In the darkness, they had missed the first well. Bitov wanted to turn back for it, but Jones persuaded the Russian otherwise. Now he was beginning to regret it.

He was thirsty as hell, but he tried to convince himself he'd been thirstier. Their situation could have been worse, he told himself. The bottle was still half full and the sun wouldn't be up for another half-hour or so; and the next well wasn't so far off now, probably around twenty-five kilometres.

On paper, sixty kilometres was good progress. But in a few hours the heat would descend on them and they would have no choice but to hole up for the rest of the day. In this sort of terrain and with daytime temperatures rising a hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit, marching by night was the only option.

The terrain here was flat. They had managed to skirt around the mountains so far, but the map indicated that towards the end of the journey there was a solid ridge between them and the air base. And there was no way around it. They would have to go over the top. Half-way in one tenth of the time wasn't beginning to sound so good after all.

Jones kept one eye on Bitov's outline, a little to his left and in front. He was impressed by the Russian's stamina, but then Bitov was no ordinary man. Six foot five and built like an armoured personnel carrier, he was the ugliest son of a bitch Jones had ever seen. He was damned if he was going to let the Ivan get the better of him.

Suddenly Bitov stopped.

They dropped onto their haunches. Jones scanned the skyline for movement, but could see nothing.

The Russian turned his head to the wind. Whatever was bothering him, it was off towards the west.

‘There!' Bitov said softly.

Jones heard only his heart pounding against his ribs.

‘Two of them, I think,' Bitov said.

Now Jones heard the deep
wok-wok
of the blades. He peered against the night, but they were too far away, at least five miles off.

‘What are they?'

Bitov shrugged. ‘Too far for identification.'

There were Mils and Sikorskys out looking for them that night. Jones's mind worked against the fatigue. The difference was critical.

‘It's OK, they are far from here,' Bitov said. He started to march again. ‘Let's go.'

Jones stayed down. He heard the helos' change of direction. Those turboshafts were distinctive now. They were headed straight for their position at a hundred and ninety-five miles per hour. He picked himself off the ground, drove his feet through the sand, and launched himself at Bitov. He hit the Russian at waist height, his two hundred and twenty-five pounds knocking the
starshina
to the ground.

Bitov reacted instinctively. He swung his arm round and grasped Jones's face between thumb and finger, the claw of his left hand.

‘Don't fight me and don't stand, whatever you do,' Jones snarled. ‘Just start digging. We've got about a minute and a half before those helicopters are on us.'

Bitov wasted vital seconds as he contemplated Jones's distorted face in the vice-like frame of his fingers. Then he released his grip.

Jones's fingers tore into the sand. He linked both hands and shifted pounds at a time, in great scoops. It took Bitov vital extra seconds before he began to copy the American, the fingers of his good hand partially aided by the mutilated stump of the other.

‘They will never see us, Jones.'

‘Wrong,' Jones panted. ‘Those are our MH-53Js and unlike your birds, they carry FLIR - Forward Looking Infra-Red. Worse, they just picked us up.'

‘From eight kilometres? Impossible.'

‘We stand out like two virgins in a whorehouse against this cold desert floor,' Jones said.

Bitov stopped digging long enough to hear the surge in sound.

‘Dig! You big son of a bitch!' Jones shouted. ‘I don't want to end up a passenger on this operation.'

As Bitov tore into the sand again, he ripped a nail clean off a finger on his good hand. He ignored the pain. He knew now what Jones was trying to do.

Jones pushed the starshina into the hole.

‘Hold your breath and trust me,' the American said, throwing his bush hat over Bitov's face. He heaped the sand on top of the Russian's body, praying that the grains, cooled by the bitter-chill tempera-ture of the night, were enough to fool the Sikorsky's heat-sensor.

Jones saw two shadows moving against the stars. From their engines, the helos were now less than two miles away, easily within identification range. They seemed impossibly close already, when he hurled himself into his hole and shovelled the sand over himself. Jones took a last, deep lungful of air and pressed back into his makeshift grave. He heaped sand over his face and the grains poured into his ears and up his nose. He fought an overpowering urge to break free from his claustrophobic tomb and plunged his arm into the cool sand beside him. As he lay in his barrow, Jones felt every minute rock particle vibrate against his skin as the rotors beat the ground above him.

Jones's lungs were at bursting point when at last he felt the change in tempo as the MH-53s began their climb-out. He no longer cared which way the FLIR turrets were pointing when he punched out of his grave.

Bitov followed a moment later coughing up dust.

The sound of the Jollies receded to the west. Jones guessed that the FLIR operator would be doing some fast talking, trying to convince his crewmates that he really had picked up two human signatures on his TV FLIR display. The others would be berating him for confusing a couple of desert foxes for soldiers. There would be a few jokes. Some asshole would wise-crack something about it being easy, mistaking animals for special forces.

‘How did you know?' Bitov asked.

‘You learn that kind of thing in the Pathfinders,' Jones said.

They took a drink and resumed their trek across the desert, settling back into the monotony of the march. For Jones the action would have provided a welcome distraction, but for the shortage of water. He shook the bottle. The unexpected expenditure of energy had pushed up their water needs. He had had no choice but to sanction double rations. They were dangerously low now.

He went back to a detailed examination of the sores in his mouth and tried to forget about their predicament.

The cool waters of the well that lay somewhere on the edge of the sand sea were not merely inviting now. They would soon be the difference between life and death.

Girling knew the Israeli Embassy would be little short of a fortress. Israeli embassies always were.

Being the Sabbath, few had entered and left. The fact that it happened to be the Jewish day of rest helped his case, because there were fewer people to watch. He was sure Lazan was in there somewhere. It was just a matter of time before he or she left the building.

Even though he had parked the car in the shade of a large tree, the interior was sweltering. He took another sip of hot Coke and put the tin back on the dashboard.

Using the binoculars to try and peek past the blinds into the windows was a periodic distraction, but it told him next to nothing. A sniper would have been similarly frustrated. The Israelis thought of every-thing. Here, they would be doubly stringent. The Israeli Embassy in Cairo was an island in a sea of potential hostility.

Girling had done stake-outs during his period at
The Times
. Then, it had been OK to distract himself with music, or to let his gaze drift when a girl walked by, or simply to daydream.

Under the circumstances, boredom was a luxury which he tried to deny himself. His reveries always ended the same way: Stansell shackled by a chain to the wall, in the dark, his cell little bigger than a cupboard. Sometimes a figure with Abu Tarek's face - eyes wild and black as night - would bring food, or water. And sometimes he would bring a stick, or a steel bar, or a soldering iron attached to a car battery.

He shook his head and the image disappeared. He was left staring at the entrance to the embassy again.

Number 22 Ibn Zanki Street, the place listed as Lazan's home address, had been an apartment block. Girling had studied every person who left the building between six thirty and nine o'clock. Sitting in the lobby of a hotel opposite, he counted fifteen potential Lazans leaving for work.

Next he picked up a car from a rental firm in one of the major hotels. He went for a BMW, partly because Kelso was paying for it, but also because it was the only car on offer that had a decent turn of speed.

The embassy door was opening. It was a curious air-lock - two parallel reinforced-glass doors bordered by steel frames. Girling raised the binoculars and adjusted the focus. He tweaked the focus another notch and the picture became crystal sharp.

A woman left the building and strolled, hips swinging, towards the main, outer gate. He scanned her face. She was dark, pretty and a little over forty, but he had never seen her before in his life, least of all in Ibn Zanki Street that morning.

The woman waved cheerily to the guard on the gate. They stopped and talked for a few moments, idle chatter by the look of it, before he let her pass. She walked up the line of parked cars on the opposite side of the street until she was parallel with his BMW.

Girling tucked Stansell's binoculars under the street-map on the passenger seat and removed the can of Coke from the dashboard. He bent over the map and let his brow furrow, as if he was lost. When he looked up, she was getting into the back of a taxi. As the driver sped off she did not give him so much as a glance.

His gaze drifted once more to the entrance.

Of the people who had left Lazan's apartment block that morning, three had been black-skinned - unusual for Israeli nationals, although not impossible - and seven had all the hallmarks of Egyptian businessmen. Girling left nothing to chance. He ruled no one in or out. He made copious notes on each person, even though he knew he could always fall back on a talent that had assisted him at varying times through-out his life: he had an outstanding memory for faces.

That left five likely Lazan candidates. One was a stern-looking woman in her late thirties wearing shoulder pads under a dark suit that was definitely out of sync with the weather. The second was a little too European-looking, but Girling included him on his list of probables. The third walked with a limp, was tall, frail almost, and wore a colourful waistcoat over an expensive shirt with links in the cuffs. Israelis, even civilians, usually dressed down: sombre trousers, topped by a short-sleeved shirt. This guy was almost trying to draw attention to himself; and in this neck of the woods - bandit country for anyone from Tel Aviv - that wasn't too bright. The fourth and fifth were his two prime targets. One was tall, wiry, with olive skin, dark hair; about forty years old. The other was somewhat older, short, balding, and fit, judging by the way he darted across the road to his parked car. Looked like a military man, definitely the right profile for the defence attaché.

If he'd had time on his side, Girling would have followed them on successive days until the right one rang the cherries by leading him to the embassy. But he didn't have time. The only other solution was to watch the apartment and the embassy in turn and wait until he got a match.

Girling wasn't sure what he would do if and when he identified Lazan. There was no guarantee that Lazan had any of the answers. But one thought gave him hope. The Israelis were the best watch-dogs in the world when it came to their Arab neighbours. They had to be for their own survival. And Stansell had obtained his information from a source of the highest calibre. No one other than a spook backed by a hell of an intelligence organization could have given Stansell the information which set in train the events leading to his abduction.

In the absence of any further help from his father-in-law, Lazan seemed like the next best place to start.

Across the street, a vendor was wheeling a cart full of cold drinks and shouting his wares as he went. A single block of ice protruded from the midst of the trolley. Girling opened the door and crossed the street, reaching into his pocket for some change as he did so.

Fifty yards away, a car rocked slightly, although Girling, his back turned to it, never noticed the movement. Nor did he hear the squeak of its suspension as the driver shifted in his seat and adjusted his camera's zoom lens.

The well was on the edge of the sand sea, its location marked only by a few piled stones. Behind it, the mountains of the Eastern Desert rose in jagged disarray towards the sky.

Jones and Bitov watched from a safe distance, their vantage point a rocky spur jutting into the sand. Both were in bad shape and neither made any bones about his predicament.

Two bedouin, nomads of the desert, each carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle, sat on the boulders by the well's edge. A third bedouin, also armed, was standing on the rim, dipping the shadoof in and out of the water. Having filled the jug at the end of the long pole, he transferred it to their goatskins. There were four goatskins in all. One for each of them. The fourth bedouin slept beside his camel in the shade of a rock overhang.

The shadoof operator was too busy telling his animated story to notice or care about the water slop-ping carelessly out of the earthenware jug. The sound of splashing drifted to Jones and Bitov on the hot breeze, drowned periodically by snatches of guttural laughter.