The Deceit

15

Ryan stared at her. ‘You have the Sokar Hoard?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. Or rather, I have part of it. I found some of the documents. They had been scattered. The bag was ripped open. A jackal maybe. Or just wind, I do not know. They were everywhere, in chaos. I picked up a few pages, and then …’

‘Then what?’

Helen glanced over her shoulder, and nodded in greeting. Then she looked back at Ryan. ‘Ryan, meet Albert Hanna.’

The name chimed a bell in Ryan’s mind, but he was so full of questions and puzzles that he couldn’t recall it. Helen hurried on, as the dapperly dressed man pulled up a chair and sat down.

‘Albert has been helping me. I met him during my weeks in Cairo, when I was researching Sassoon. I have promised him a share in the profits, of the film, if we solve the puzzle.’

This was enough. Ryan chopped the air with a hand. ‘So tell me, show me the texts.’

Helen Fassbinder shook her head. ‘There is one more chapter to the story. Then I will show you.’ She blinked, and hurried on. ‘You see, I picked up some pages, when I was in the cave. But then, as I was gathering these pages, I heard noises outside. I realized the Bedouin had gone, so it was not him. And the noise was … loud, deafening. It was whump whump whump.’

‘Sorry?’

‘A helicopter. Landing outside. That distinctive noise. Whump whump whump, just landing in the desert.’ She shrugged. ‘Soon as I heard the helicopter, I knew it was serious. Dangerous. I found a place to hide, in the cave. Right at the back, it was … not nice. Frightening. I had to just lie there in the dark. Then the men came in. The soldiers.’

‘Egyptian soldiers?’

She shook her head. ‘Israelis.’

‘What?’

‘They spoke Hebrew. They must have been Israeli soldiers. Or police. Mossad. I do not know.’

The tea-house seemed to have darkened; everything seemed to have darkened. He leaned closer, as she continued.

‘They gathered all the other pages of course, everything I had not got. They took the bulk of the Sokar Hoard. But they left the body. And then they ran out. Just like that, to their helicopter. Whump whump whump!’

‘They didn’t find you?’

‘I was well hidden. And maybe they saw the Bedouin running away, on his bike, so they thought everyone had gone. They were in a hurry, too.’

‘But how did they know where to go? How did they find the cave?’

‘Following our bike trails? A satellite? Probably. We did try to hide our tracks at the end. My motorbike was concealed, five hundred metres away. In case.’

‘Smart, very smart.’

She ignored his remark. ‘I waited for a while, to make sure they were gone, but then the Egyptian police came. Suddenly it was like a rush hour. And still I hid. I had to stay there. For hours. I thought I was going to die. I had one bottle of water. Then at last they left with the body. And I got on my bike and drove back to Nazlet in the dark.’

Ryan gazed at her with admiration. She had real courage; it was quite a story.

She didn’t seem to notice, or care. ‘But the next morning the police did a sweep. Arresting anyone foreign or suspicious in Nazlet. Like you. Of course the Israelis were long gone. But they did it anyway. They took me too. I was getting ready to leave town. I told them I was a tourist, an academic on holiday.’

‘In Nazlet?’

‘A decade ago they found some ancient bones here, thirty thousand years old. In the caves. So I pretended I had an interest in palaeontology.’

‘OK …’

‘My story made sense. To them. They do get the occasional scientist. So they questioned me for a while, then held me. In that room where we met.’

The last corner of the puzzle was revealed.

‘They never searched you. Wow.’

‘They did not search me. They had no suspicions. So, I still have them in here, the pages I collected. The Sokar Hoard, or part of it. Here. Let us go outside. And now you can see. I think I need your help to decipher the texts.’

The hitherto silent Mr Hanna waved over the tea-boy, and paid the minuscule bill. As he did so, Ryan clocked his accent: middle-class, Cairo, probably Coptic. What was he doing here? But that question was swamped by the bigger desire, the impending revelation. The Sokar Hoard.

Together and in silence they walked to a discreet street corner, deserted apart from a water-seller sleeping in the dusk, his back to a bare unplastered wall. The nocturnal traffic of Tahta buzzed in the background.

Reaching into her rucksack, Helen Fassbinder pulled out a file. She opened it in the mosquito-ridden streetlight, and showed the first precious page to Ryan.

He took it, his fingers slightly trembling.

It was unquestionably old. It was written on papyrus, fragmented at the edges but still essentially intact. The calligraphy was faded yet legible; the script looked like ancient Coptic demotic, Akhmimic, certainly extremely archaic. Dating from maybe the sixth or seventh centuries.

With a juddering sense of bitter defeat, Ryan Harper realized that he couldn’t understand a single word.