The Lost Testament

20

The assassin strode across the room, stopped beside the bed and snapped on the bedside light. He wasn’t sure whether it was the sudden brightness flooding through the room or the noise of his footsteps, but as he took his final pace, Mahmoud woke up with a jerk and a snort.

Instantly, Abdul drew his knife from the leather sheath attached to the waistband of his trousers and held the blade six inches in front of Mahmoud’s face.

The trader’s eyes widened as he looked at the cold steel blade glinting in the light, and then focused his eyes beyond the weapon at Abdul’s face staring down at him.

‘You’re the dealer,’ he stuttered. ‘You came to my stall, looking for parchment.’

Abdul nodded.

‘You have a good memory,’ he said, ‘and I’m still looking for a sheet of parchment. One parchment in particular. One that I know you have.’

Mahmoud shook his head slightly, panic growing in his eyes.

‘I told you. I don’t have any parchments for sale.’

‘My information is different. I know that you spent some time searching the Internet for some very specific words, words that could only have come from one source. And you know what that source is as well as I do.’

Mahmoud’s expression changed as realization dawned.

‘Oh, that parchment. But I don’t have it any more. I sold it on, sold it to another trader. But it was almost illegible,’ he protested. ‘Hardly any of the words on it could be read. Why is it so important to you?’

‘It’s not important to me at all,’ Abdul replied, the point of his knife moving down Mahmoud’s face until it rested lightly and threateningly on the thin skin of his neck below his chin. ‘But it is very important to the man who’s paying me.’

For a couple of seconds, Abdul considered his next course of action. Mahmoud could well be lying to him, he knew, and the parchment might be concealed somewhere inside the house, in a safe or elsewhere, or the man might genuinely have disposed of it. Before he left that room, he needed to be absolutely certain of the truth. And he was very good at uncovering the truth.

‘Are you right handed or left handed?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t really matter, I suppose,’ Abdul replied.

Then, in a blur of action so fast that Mahmoud had absolutely no time to react, Abdul seized the man’s right arm, wrenched it over so that his wrist was resting on the table beside the bed, and slammed his knife straight through the back of Mahmoud’s hand, pinning it to the wood.

The Egyptian’s howl of pain filled the room as blood welled from the penetrating wound, pooled on the table and began to drip onto the wooden floor below. Abdul pressed the bed-sheet over the trader’s mouth, muffling the sound. Kassim jerked in the bed, perhaps trying to sit up, or to reach for the wound with his left hand, but before he could do anything at all, Abdul had produced a second knife and held it firmly against his throat.

‘Quiet,’ the intruder ordered. ‘That just shows how important it is for you to tell me the truth. Make me believe that you’re holding nothing back, and I might just walk away from here. If you lie, you’ll die. It’s as simple as that.’

He moved the second blade slightly away from Mahmoud’s throat until the point rested on the tender area below the man’s left shoulder blade. He changed his grip on the knife very slightly, then slowly began pushing it into Mahmoud’s flesh, the honed and polished double-edged blade easily penetrating about an inch into the man’s body.

Again, Mahmoud howled in muffled agony, his scream barely audible behind the makeshift gag Abdul was applying. His body twitched under the assault and sweat sprang to his brow as the pain increased.

Abdul knew the signs, knew that the man under his knife would do almost anything to make him stop. Now he could find the truth.

‘The first question is easy,’ he said, moving the sheet away from Kassim’s mouth, ‘because the answer is either yes or no. Do you still have that parchment?’

Mahmoud shook his head desperately from side to side.

‘I told you. I sold it to another dealer.’

‘So that would be “no”, then?’

‘No, I mean, yes. I don’t have it. I don’t have it any longer.’

Abdul nodded.

‘So who did you sell it to?’

For additional emphasis, he turned the knife slightly in the wound on Mahmoud’s shoulder, eliciting another anguished cry of pain, quickly muffled.

‘Another dealer,’ he almost shouted. ‘His name is Anum Husani. He deals in old manuscripts and other relics, and he has a shop in Cairo.’

Abdul nodded again, then gave the knife another twist, the point scraping along Mahmoud’s collar bone.

‘The address would be helpful,’ he said, his sentence almost drowned out by the other man’s muffled scream.

His voice quivering and laced with agony, Mahmoud stammered out the address of Husani’s shop, an address which Abdul immediately filed away in his memory.

After a further prod from the knife blade, Mahmoud followed that with a physical description of Husani. But when Abdul asked for the man’s home address, his victim was unable to help, and even twisting the blade in a fresh wound didn’t produce the information he wanted.

‘You’re absolutely certain?’ he asked, altering his grip on the handle of the knife very slightly, and feeling Mahmoud’s body tensing in pointless anticipation of the pain to come.

‘Yes, yes. He has it. I sold it to him, but I don’t know where he lives. Please, no more.’

‘I do have some good news for you,’ Abdul said after a moment, withdrawing the knife from the man’s shoulder and wiping the blood from the blade on the sheet. ‘I believe you. I think you’re telling me the truth.’

He looked down at the man on the bed.

‘But I also have some bad news for you,’ he added, and with another rapid movement he sliced the knife into the left-hand side of Mahmoud’s throat and pulled it all the way across, the blade instantly severing the oesophagus and the carotid artery. Blood spurted from the end of the artery, splashing onto the wall behind the head of the bed.

The man’s body flailed on the bed as his left hand clutched desperately at his throat, but it only took seconds for the light in his eyes to fade away as his brain died.

‘And that was the bad news,’ Abdul muttered, standing clear of the side of the bed and looking down at the corpse.

He wiped the blood off his knife on the sheet, then pulled the other blade out of Mahmoud’s right hand, wiping that as well, but he didn’t replace the knives in their respective sheaths. First, he needed to wash them properly. He stood up and checked that none of the blood he had spilled had got onto his clothing, but he could see no sign of it. The latex gloves were heavily stained, but he would dispose of them after he left the property. To avoid any of the blood being transferred from his gloves to his clothing, he first went into the attached bathroom and washed his gloved hands in the sink, drying the latex on a towel when he’d finished. Then he carefully washed both knives until not a trace of blood was left on them, dried them and put them away in their sheaths. He would bleach everything thoroughly later.

Five minutes later, he was outside the house, having re-locked the rear door, and was making his way through the silent streets of the Cairo suburb.