The Messiah Secret

He bent down and rummaged through the bits and pieces one more time, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter and touched the flame to the edge of the canvas. In the extreme midday heat, the old and dry fabric caught almost immediately. Killian waited a few moments, making sure that the fire was well established, piled the remains of the picture frames and stretchers on top of the flames, then walked back to his car.

At least he now knew exactly what he must do. Bronson and Lewis obviously had the information he needed and they had to be somewhere in Cairo. He simply had to find them and recover the clues. And then he’d kill them. He smiled, the pain from his ear receding a little. The deaths he was planning would be long and lingering.

34

JJ Donovan had watched the excitement of the house fire – an event which made no sense to him – and the arrival of the fire engines, and then started his car and eased out after Bronson as they drove away from the scene.

Now he watched with irritation as Bronson pulled off the road. He daren’t stop there as well, because it was too small a place, and Bronson was a police officer, which meant he’d been trained in observation skills. Donovan knew that if he stopped at the bar Bronson would notice and remember him, and he definitely didn’t want that to happen.

So he carried on another quarter of a mile or so and then eased his car off the road and on to the verge. He stopped the engine and waited for a few seconds, watching the scene in his rear-view mirror carefully. When it was obvious that Bronson and his companion were going to have a drink at the roadside café, he realized that he would have to wait, too. And the obvious way to do that was to stage a breakdown.

Donovan dropped all the windows on the Mercedes – it was going to get very hot inside the car without the engine and the climate control running – but the heavily tinted glass was a possible identification feature. With the windows lowered, it was just another light-coloured midsized Mercedes saloon, one of thousands on the roads around Cairo.

Then he stepped out of the car and lifted the bonnet. There was very little to see inside the engine compartment, apart from a massive sculpted aluminium plate that covered the top of the motor, but that didn’t matter. With the bonnet lifted, any passing driver would simply assume the car had stopped because of some fault – mechanical or electrical.

Then he got back inside the car and sat down, all his attention focused on the café-bar about five hundred yards behind him. The other thing he needed to do was make sure Bronson didn’t get a look at the car’s number plates as he drove past, and that meant lifting the boot lid. But he couldn’t do that until the Peugeot started moving, because his best view of the café was using the interior mirror and, when he lifted the boot, that view would vanish.

So all he could do was wait. Wait and watch.

Bronson switched off the engine and he and Angela got out of the car, the heat hitting them like the blast from a furnace. About half a dozen men, all wearing either traditional Arab dress or white shirts and trousers, were already sitting at the tables, drinks in front of them. They eyed the two Westerners with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion as Bronson steered Angela through them towards a couple of vacant seats at a table close to the side of the bar, where the noise from the generator was loudest.

‘What would you like to drink?’ he shouted.

‘What I’d really like is a long, cold gin and tonic with bags of ice, but I guess that’s not an option here,’ she said. ‘Get me anything non-alcoholic, a Coke, Fanta, something like that. No glass and no ice, obviously.’

‘Right,’ Bronson said. A couple of minutes later he returned to the table with two cans of Coke, moisture beading the outside of the metal. He sat down beside her and they both drank thirstily. ‘So this el-Hiba place,’ Bronson said. ‘Why don’t you tell me what you know about it?’

‘It used to be called Tayu-djayet, which simply meant “their walls”, because of the massive stone walls out there. Hang on a second . . .’ She rummaged in her bag, brought out a notebook and flicked through the pages that were covered in her neat and precise script until she found what she was looking for. She took a pencil and a blank sheet of paper, and drew a series of shapes on it.

‘Time for your first lesson in hieroglyphics,’ she said, turning the paper round so Bronson could see it.

She’d sketched a half-moon shape, a vulture, two leaves, what looked like a young chicken, an obelisk, two more leaves and a half-moon surmounting a cross in a circle.

‘And this is what?’ Bronson asked.

Angela smiled at him. ‘That’s the hieroglyphic equivalent of Tayu-djayet. The first symbol, this half-moon,’ she said, indicating the shape with the end of her pencil, ‘is a “T”, the vulture is “A” or “AH”, one leaf is “I”, but two together like that mean “Y”.’