The Lost Testament

28

Ten minutes later, Husani closed the front door of his house, slid home the two interior bolts and stepped forward into the cool gloom of the property. He paused for a brief instant, listening intently, but he heard no sound inside the building, nothing to suggest that anyone else was there. His wife was spending a few days with some members of her vast extended family, up the Nile near Aswan, and wouldn’t be back in Cairo for at least two weeks, and the children were with her. So at least they were safe.

Satisfied that he was alone, he ran across the hall to the room he called his study, a small and cramped windowless space at the back of the house, and opened his safe. There was a fat bundle of cash inside, secured with elastic bands and made up of multiple currencies including euros, American dollars and pounds sterling, as well as Egyptian pounds, all of which he’d acquired through his trading activities. He seized the money and his passport and tucked them into the inside pockets of his jacket.

Then he paused for a moment as he looked at the third object in the safe, a small semi-automatic pistol. He’d owned the weapon — illegally, of course — for years, and occasionally took it out into the desert to a quiet area and fired a few rounds through it, just to make sure it still worked. Carrying it might just give him an edge over the man who’d killed Mahmoud Kassim, especially if the murderer only worked with a knife. On the other hand, he wouldn’t be able to take it onto an aircraft with him.

He nodded to himself. It was an easy decision. If he came face to face with the killer somewhere on the streets of Cairo and didn’t have the pistol in his pocket, he probably wouldn’t even make it as far as the airport. He definitely needed the insurance policy that the weapon would provide. He took it out of the safe, extracted the magazine and loaded it from the box of .22 cartridges he also kept there, replaced the magazine in the butt of the weapon, racked back the slide to chamber a round and set the safety catch. Then he removed the magazine again and added one further cartridge to replace the one which was now in the breech, ready to be fired. There was no point in taking the box of cartridges because if he did meet the killer and fired every round at him, he certainly wouldn’t have time to reload his weapon. If a full magazine didn’t stop the man, Husani knew he’d be dead. He was also well aware that the .22 round was hardly classed as a man-stopper, but it was all he had. It would have to do.

He slid the pistol into the pocket of his trousers — he found Western-style clothing much more convenient than traditional Arab dress — locked the safe and left the room.

Then he ran up the stairs to the main bedroom, strode across to the shelves on the opposite side of the room and grabbed a selection of clothes, enough for about a week, plus his washing and shaving kit, and stuffed everything into a small leather suitcase. He closed it, set the catches, and headed back towards the stairs.

He’d only taken a couple of steps across the landing when he heard a knock at the front door of the house.