The Shroud Key (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Slowly, I lower the pistol.

While I’m doing it, I gaze down into the glass. It was right in front of me the entire time. A small mirror, about the size of my palm. One side of it is jagged from having been broken off from the identical half-mirror I’m now carrying in my right trouser pocket.

“Drop the gun,” the first, pony-tailed man insists. By the sounds of it, he’s an American. He cocks the hammer on his revolver.

“Do it,” demands his partner. A man who is most definitely Egyptian. “Or we won’t hesitate to shoot you here and dispose of your body in the desert.”

“Don’t I know you fellas?” I say.

I lower the 9mm, go to set it onto the glass counter. But rather then set it gently, I swing the barrel down hard, shattering the glass.

Pony-Tail shoots, misses, the bullet shattering the storefront window.

Amun screams, drops to his knees beside the glass counter.

I point the 9mm at the two goons, depress the trigger, fire at will. I hit the heavier one in the chest. He drops like an obelisk onto the floor while Pony-Tail runs for cover behind an upright wood Pharaoh’s coffin.

I reach down into the counter, grab the mirror and the map, stuff them both into my pocket while the rounds from Pony-Tail’s revolver whizz by my head.

“I’ll be seeing you in all the filthy places, Amun,” I shout, as I make a flying leap out the shattered storefront window.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I land on my right side just as a donkey is trotting past, pulling a wood cart behind it.

I roll my body under the cart and, emerging out the opposite side, get back up onto my feet at the very same moment Pony-Tail starts shooting at me from out of the shattered storefront. People scream, scatter about in every direction. It’s the kind of confusion and cover I need as I make an all-out sprint for the center of the market.

I don’t get far before I make out another shot and sense a round shooting past my right ear. I duck into a shop that sells rugs, take a quick glance over my shoulder.

Pony-Tail is coming at me down the center of the narrow road, the Arabs moving out of his way, like he owns the place. Thumbing the clip release, I allow the metal clip to drop to the store floor. I reach into my jacket pocket, pull out a fresh one, slap it home.

The store owner is jabbing at my back. He wants me to leave his store. He doesn’t care that I’m holding a loaded gun. I reach into my left-hand pocket, pull out some Egyptian pounds, toss them at him. Then, sucking down a breath, I jump back out into the street.

I aim the gun at Pony-Tail.

There’s a shot. He drops to his knees, then onto his face.

I look one way and the other. With all the people scattering all about, screaming and shouting for help, I can’t make out who did the shooting.

Until she reveals herself.

Anya.

“Got your back, Ren Man,” she says, smiling.

She runs to me.

“Question is,” I say, “who’s got yours?”

I don’t have time for an answer before I hear the wail of sirens and the screeching of truck tires.

“Where’d you get the gun?” I ask her while we make a sprint for Sameh’s car.

“Our fixer is very fixed,” she shouts in between breaths. “He’s helping me protect my investment.”

“Should have guessed,” I say. Then, as Sameh pulls up in front of us, breaking the car so hard it fishtails on the gravelly road, “I think I know where your husband is.”

I open the door for her.

She jumps in.

I go around, get into the front.

“Drive,” I say to Sameh.

“Where to?”

“Just point the car towards Libya,” I say. “And don’t stop.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“We need better transport,” I say to Sameh, as he weaves in and out of the slow moving vehicles, making his way to the above-ground highway that will lead us some of the way to the Giza urban interior.

“What do you suggest we do?” he says. “Go car shopping?”

“Cairo’s too hot. We need something that will take us into the desert. A four-by-four. A truck, van, suburban … Something, anything. But not this.”

“Hold onto the wheel,” Sameh instructs.

“What? In this traffic?”

“Just hold the wheel please, Chase. Traffic is light today.”

This is what he calls light?

I reach over and do it. He’s still got his foot on the gas, so I’m doing my best to avoid smashing into the slower moving cars that we are constantly tailing. Using only my left hand, I turn the wheel to the right, then back to the left, then straight, then a quick right again. I feel like I’m caught inside a real action, real-time video game. Meanwhile Sameh searches his cell phone for a number. When he finds it, he speed-dials the number, takes back the wheel.

“Thank you, Dario Franchitti,” he says, not without a smile. Sameh the jokester. Somehow I imagine a world famous pro auto racer like Mr. Franchitti has an easier time winning the
Indianapolis 500
than he would negotiating the roads of Cairo. But then, what the hell do I know?

“Yes, thank you, Dario for scaring the living crap out me,” Anya scolds from the back seat. She is not smiling. If she possessed an Adam’s apple, it would be bobbing up and down inside her neck.

We make it to the highway, and Sameh guns the sedan up the entry ramp. For the first time since we started driving, we enjoy a relatively open road. He presses the pedal to the floor while, with his cell phone pressed to his right ear, he speaks something loud in Arabic.

I shoot a glance at Anya. She shoots me a tentative look back.

With my eyes back on the road, I see the many people who line the shoulder of this three-lane highway. They’re waiting for anyone who might decide to play taxi cab driver and, for a price, stop alongside the road and give them a ride. There seems to be no shortage of people who are willing to carry passengers for money, as the cars and pickup trucks randomly pull off to the side. Some of them do it without warning, so that Sameh must skillfully veer to the left in order to avoid smashing into them as they brake and decelerate without warning.

Maybe three minutes pass of this reckless, almost suicidal driving until the sun-soaked horizon changes into something remarkable. The red orange ball of sun is no longer alone as it kisses the tops of three pyramidal stone structures.

The pyramids of Giza.

I’ve been in the presence of the pyramids a few times before. I could say that they still take my breath away. Or that they fill me with awe and wonder and excitement. But these are weak pedestrian descriptions. Truer to say that whenever I am in the presence of the ancient pyramids at Giza, I feel slightly uncomfortable. Like I would with a girlfriend or a wife who is truly beautiful, truly well constructed, amazingly intelligent, but who nonetheless possesses secrets which she greedily guards. And for this reason, no matter how much I love her, I will never fully trust her.

Anya sits up, pokes her head between the opening between the two front seats.

“I’ve only seen them in pictures and in film,” she whispers to no one in particular, as the three pyramids take on more form and no longer become a part of the horizon, but the horizon itself.

“Take a good look,” I say. “Because there lies ours and your husband’s future, should we luck out and actually find him.”

“Alive,” she says, setting her hand on my arm. “Don’t forget the alive part.”

“Yes,” I nod. “Very much alive … Let’s hope.”

Sameh pulls up to a garage with an old fashioned gas pump mounted to a concrete pad out in front of it. My guess is the pump no longer does the job it was originally intended to do so many decades ago. But the automotive garage certainly is. There are two bays, both of which are occupied with vehicles set up on hydraulic risers. With the overhead doors opened, I can make out the teams of robed Arabs tending to the undersides of the two vehicles. Leaning against the old brick building are all sorts of automotive parts, from exhausts to full engines. Set beside those is a pile of used tires.

A man comes out to greet us. He’s tall, slim, dressed in blue jeans and a light button-down shirt. He’s wiping grease from his hands with an oil-stained rag as he comes around to the driver’s side of the sedan. I take him for the garage owner and the man Sameh was talking with on the cell phone earlier. He and Sameh greet one another with the usual, “As-salam alaykum,” which means, “Peace be upon you” as much as it does, “Hey, what’s up?”

While the two men exchange a few more words, the garage owner picks at his black goatee and takes occasional glances at myself and Anya. After a minute or two of this, Sameh turns to me.

“This man’s name is Nisbah. He can provide us with a Toyota Land Cruiser. A 1979 model which is greatly favored in the desert. More so than newer models.”

In my mind I picture the boxy-looking but fully functional four-by-four, since I’ve driven them more times than I can count.

“Precisely what we require,” I say. “And a full tank, plus four extra cans of gasoline.”

“Nisbah will provide what you need for your journey into the desert. However, he will accept only cash. Trust is a commodity these days in post-revolutionary Egypt.”

Pulling out the pile of cash from my trouser pocket, I pose, “How much?”

“Three hundred dollars,” Sameh says. “U.S. dollars.”

“I have plenty of Egyptian pounds,” I say, holding them up.

The goateed Nisbah shakes his head, waves the pounds away like they smell of skunk.

“Egyptian pounds are no good to him,” Sameh explains. “They are not worth the paper they are printed on in this the day of the new Pharaohs.”

“I understand,” I say. “But I have only pounds and Euros, since I haven’t been back to the States in some time.” Then, to Anya. “How much cash do you have?”

She reaches into her bag, produces a small wallet. She comes back out with three, crisp one hundred dollar bills. She holds them up.

“Will this do?”

“Thanks for holding out on us, money bags,” I say, snatching them from her hand and, reaching across Sameh, handing them directly to Nisbah.

He nods, smiles.

“Pull in, please. Your ride awaits you. So does the unrelenting Egyptian desert.”

He laughs so hard when he backs away from the car, I think he might double over. But nothing is funny about the desert. It is dead land, and only the dead thrive there.