The Labyrinth of Osiris (68 page)

‘It’s all perfectly doable. The problem’s going to be getting anywhere close to the ship. We can film from a distance, but actually getting on board, maybe nabbing one of the crew – that’s going to be tough given the amount of light and how exposed it is. There might be a way, but we’re not going to know for sure till the ship’s actually in and we can see how it all plays out. Until then we’re just guessing.’

The Dinah woman nodded. Glancing at her watch, she leant forward on to the bonnet and started working through the images, bringing them up one by one, familiarizing herself. Her friends joined her. Khalifa hung back a step. They were the experts. He was just along for the ride.

Several minutes passed, a momentary breeze rattling the palm fronds above them, a distinct salt tang in the air. Then, as one, they came up straight.

‘OK, let’s do it,’ said Dinah.

She turned to Khalifa.

‘We’re going to need someone to hang near the fence, cover our backs in case it all kicks off. You up for it?’

‘I’m coming to the dock,’ said Khalifa, aware that he sounded like a petulant child, but wanting to be at the heart of the action.
Needing
to be at the heart of the action. To his surprise she smiled.

‘Somehow I thought you’d say that. OK, Faz, you’re backstop. Gidi, Tamar, you set up at the end of the dock. Me and our new recruit will take the warehouse position. That’s about as much as we can plan for the moment. Beyond that, we’re going to have to play it by ear.’

They unloaded their equipment – cameras, walkie-talkies, a couple of Uzi sub-machine guns – and divvied it up. Then, each with a knapsack on their back, their hands and face smeared with a rudimentary camouflage of dampened soil to make them less visible – Khalifa would have laughed at himself had the stakes not been so high – they locked the cars and set off on foot. Somewhere out on the river a barge horn sounded. He curled his finger around the Glock’s trigger and gritted his teeth, knowing he was doing the right thing.

Twenty minutes later they were in position. They’d got through the fence without any trouble, come round the warehouses from the rear, climbed on to the crate stack, set up the camcorder. In front of them the dock was awash with light. The crates themselves were set back and sunk in shadow. Khalifa felt curiously secure. Like he wasn’t actually there, was watching the whole scene on television. The other pair radioed in to say that they were also in position, down at the far end of the dock. According to Khalifa’s watch it was 11.42. All they had to do now was wait.

‘You really think we can get them?’ he asked, gazing out across the wharf. ‘That all this will have any effect?’

‘I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t.’

They ducked as a gigantic forklift truck whirred past in front of them. As they came up again he felt her hand on his arm.

‘I should have said earlier: I’m sorry about your son.’

For a moment her face seemed to soften, although her eyes remained cold and unyielding. Then she removed her hand and looked away.

Out in the river mouth, mist was starting to gather, drifting over the water like wafts of steam.

A tunnel of light. That’s what it’s like when I approach a cleansing. A long tunnel of light with me at one end and the target at the other and everything else on the outside. Total focus. Total concentration. Until the job is done and I can step out of the tunnel and back into the daily run of things.

Of course there are differences this time around. I am not alone for a start, as I normally am. And the mess to be cleansed is closer to home.
At
home, in a sense, despite the distances involved. And naturally I have duties to perform, distractions, which is never usually the case.

Despite that, inside my head, I am in the tunnel. No more doubts, no more questions, no more worries. I see my target clearly – how could I not, it’s right beside me! – and I am moving steadily towards it. Soon it will be cleansed and I will be safe out the other side. Although what is
on
the other side remains to be seen. A different order, that’s for sure. Who knows, maybe there will even be children. The patter of tiny feet. I hope so. I have always loved children. They appeal to my sense of . . . goodness.

For a little while longer, though, I must continue to play the part. Keep up the charade. From my face you would never know what I am shortly to do. Never in a million years. I am, and always have been, the consummate performer.

The ship eventually came in shortly before 1 p.m. There was a series of distant horn blasts and the activity on the dock suddenly intensified. A klaxon sounded, motors burst into life, dock workers hurried to and fro.

Offshore, the mist had been steadily thickening. The river mouth was now shrouded in a dense, gauze-like veil of impenetrable grey. They’d been watching its progress anxiously, fearful it would swamp the dock and make filming impossible. To their relief it had held back, sending out a few lazy tendrils on to the land, fingering the quayside, curling round the base of one of the cranes, but otherwise confining itself to the water. If the wind came up it would be a different story, but for the moment their view was clear. Khalifa’s companion brought the walkie-talkie to her mouth and depressed the speak button.

‘Everyone ready?’

Ready, came the reply.

‘Faz?’

A surly voice announced that a convoy of diesel tankers had just passed through the main gate, but that otherwise everything was quiet behind them.

‘OK, here we go.’

The horn blasts continued – an eerie plaintive bellow emanating from within the fog like the call of some primordial sea monster. Five minutes went by. Then, suddenly, as if it had been cleaved by a giant axe, the mist tore open and the prow of a huge ship loomed into sight away to their left. Slowly it glided towards the dock front, a towering wall of black steel whose stern-end remained lost in the murk even as its prow came level with the shore. On and on it came, more and more of it, impossibly large and threatening until eventually its bridge tower slipped from the mist and the whole vessel was revealed. Three hundred metres long and tall as an apartment block, it dwarfed everything below, making the bustling stevedores look no larger than ants. On its bow was a picture of a mermaid, her blonde hair streaming out as though pulled by the wind. Beside it, in white lettering, was the ship’s name:
Maid of the Ocean
.

The camcorder pinged as his companion started recording the scene.

The vessel drew in flush with the dock, chivvied into place by a pair of tugs. Engines were thrown into full reverse; ropes were flung down and secured; stepped gangways descended fore and aft; there was a roar of hydraulics as giant hatches lifted and retracted. Crane hoists moved into position and dropped.

Another few minutes went by. Then, slowly, metal barrels started to emerge, neatly arranged on huge steel pallets, a hundred to a pallet. They lifted into the night, hovered, then retreated gracefully shoreward where they were lowered on to the giant forklifts and transported down the dock.

‘You getting this?’ crackled the walkie-talkie.

‘Certainly am,’ replied Khalifa’s companion, pressing the handset right against her mouth to be heard above the commotion. ‘All we need is for the fog to hold off a bit longer, then come in strong and blanket the whole place. That way we might have a chance of actually getting on board.’

Even as she spoke, Khalifa felt a sudden whisper of breeze brush across his face. It died, then came back, harder, ruffling his hair, causing the mist in front of them to bulge and drift like a billowing curtain. It started to creep over the ship.

‘Just a few more minutes,’ whispered Khalifa’s companion. ‘Just a few more minutes and then we can—’

She didn’t finish the sentence. One moment she was there beside him, the next she was flying backwards off the crate on which they were standing. He wheeled. The ground behind the stack was thick with shadow and he couldn’t immediately see what was happening. Just that there were two figures down there: the woman, and someone much larger who appeared to be pinning her to the floor. Leaping down, he lifted the butt of his Glock ready to slam it into the attacker’s head only to freeze as a familiar voice rang out.

‘Back off, Khalifa. It’s me.’

A craggy, square-jawed face turned up to him. A face he hadn’t seen for four years but recognized instantly. A beat, then it looked back down at the woman.

‘Now,
Rachel
, I think it’s time we told our friend what you’re really doing here.’

Ben-Roi’s plan, such as he had a plan, had been to get to the dock as quickly as possible, locate Khalifa and pull him out before any harm could come to him.

Security at Alexandria airport had had other ideas. They’d detained him for over two hours, suspicious about the fact that he was Israeli, that his return flight was the next day, that he had no hotel reservation, and above all that he didn’t have an official visa. He could have told them the truth, that he was a policeman here to help one of their own policeman who was at that moment walking blindly into a trap. He sensed that to do so would only complicate matters, tangle him up in an interminable web of explanation. Instead he’d played dumb and stuck to his story: he was meeting an old friend from Luxor, the whole thing had been arranged last minute, the friend was organizing accommodation, he’d been assured he could obtain a temporary visa on arrival. It was flimsy in the extreme, and he had feared they wouldn’t buy it, would take him for some sort of spy. His one hope was that they’d run a check on ‘Yusuf Khalifa’ and find that someone with that name had indeed flown down from Luxor that night, thereby corroborating his story. Which was what, after an agonizing wait, they seemed to have done. There had been suspicious muttering and dark looks – a small insight into how it was for Arab travellers coming into Israel – but in the end they’d stamped his passport and waved him on his way.

‘Make sure you’re on that flight tomorrow,’ one of the security officials had told him menacingly.

‘Trust me, the sooner I’m out of here the better,’ had been Ben-Roi’s muttered reply.

He’d withdrawn a wad of money from a Bank of Alexandria cash-point, taken a taxi out to Rosetta and from there north towards the mouth of the Nile, which was where the Nemesis woman had said the dock was located. As they approached the coast the driver had started jabbering at him in Arabic, signing that the road was a dead end, didn’t lead anywhere, that they ought to turn round and go back. Ben-Roi had brandished a fistful of cash and told him to continue. They’d reached the point where the army security post had loomed into view ahead, whereupon the driver had stopped and refused to go any further.

‘End,’ he said. ‘Soldier. No good.’

Ben-Roi had paid him off and got out. As the taxi had reversed around, the driver shaking his head as if he’d just been dealing with some sort of madman, the headlights had picked out narrow tracks heading towards a palm grove. And, within the grove, a flash of white. Ben-Roi had gone towards it, discovered two Toyota Land Cruisers parked up beneath the trees. The same Toyota Land Cruisers he’d seen back in Mitzpe Ramon, although now carrying Egyptian number plates.

Nemesis were here.

‘Please God don’t let me be too late,’ he’d murmured.

He’d worked his way through the grove, came out twenty metres short of a high chain-link fence. Tubes of razor wire across the top, which was going to make climbing it a big ask. The Nemesis people would almost certainly have cut their way through, but he could spend an age searching for the opening, and time was already stretched to snapping point. He’d followed the edge of the grove back towards the security point, keeping low, thinking maybe he could try to slip through unnoticed. As he’d done so there’d been a rumble of engines and a convoy of ten diesel tankers had come chugging along the road, pulling up in front of the gate. The last one stopped almost level with him and he’d taken his chance. Sticking to the shadows he’d skirted round behind the tanker, scaled the ladder on the back of it and flattened himself on the curve of the tank’s surface. There was a honk and the convoy started to move.

He was through.

A couple of minutes later they’d pulled up behind a line of warehouses. Ben-Roi slipped down the ladder and melted into the shadows. The whole place was much bigger than he’d anticipated, and he'd feared it would take hours to locate Khalifa, by which point it would almost certainly be too late.

As it was, it took him less than twenty minutes. He’d been to one end of the dock, watched the ship coming in from behind a hillock of rusted chains, then doubled back the other way. He found a door in the rear of one of the warehouses, opened it, glanced inside – pitch black with a heavy smell of engine oil. Closing the door, he’d moved on to the end of the warehouse. The next warehouse was five metres away. Between the two buildings a broad grassy alley ran down to the dock, its end blocked with a stack of crates. And there, standing on the crates, facing away from him, two figures. It was hard to be a hundred per cent certain at that distance because the lights from the dock had thrown them into silhouette, but something told him he’d run down his quarry. He thought about shouting out, warning Khalifa from where he was standing, but he knew she’d be armed and the risk was too great. Treading carefully, therefore, the clank and roar of machinery covering the sound of his footfalls, he had moved towards them. Twenty metres away one of the figures had turned to the other and he had seen for sure that it was her. He’d frozen, pressing himself back against the side of one of the warehouses. She’d turned away again and he’d continued forward, coming right up behind them. No fancy stuff. No grand speeches. No hesitation. He had reached out, grabbed her belt and yanked the murdering bitch backwards off the crates and on to the ground.

‘What in God’s name are you doing, Ben-Roi? Get off her! Get out of here!’

Khalifa clawed at the Israeli’s face. Ben-Roi butted his hand away. Yanking the gun from the woman’s grasp, he threw it behind him, hauled her to her feet and propelled her down the alley between the warehouses, away from the dock and deeper into shadow. Khalifa came after them, tried to grab Ben-Roi’s arms. Ben-Roi lashed with his foot, catching the Egyptian in the knee, knocking him over.