The Lost Testament

34

For the first time in his career, Abdul was beginning to doubt if he would be able to fulfil the contract he had accepted. What made it infinitely worse was that both of the targets he had needed to eliminate were amateurs — just two ordinary market traders. Finding and killing the first man hadn’t been difficult, just rather messy. But the second target, Anum Husani, had simply slipped away from him.

With hindsight, he knew it was his own fault, because his tactics had been wrong. When he’d found that the street door of the house was bolted on the inside, he should have only pretended to go around the back of the property, and that would have forced Husani to open the front door to make his escape. But Abdul had thought he could break into the house from the rear so quickly that the other man wouldn’t have time to get away. That had been a mistake.

The other fact Abdul hadn’t bargained for was that the trader would be armed. That had been an extremely unpleasant surprise. From the sight of the weapon and the sound and impact of the shots against the walls of the houses in the street, Abdul guessed it was a very small-calibre pistol, probably a .22 or perhaps a .25, but even such a small bullet could maim or kill. It had thrown him off balance, and then the man had used his knowledge of the souk to make good his escape.

He had not the slightest idea where Husani was, whether he’d gone to ground somewhere in the city, at the house of a friend or acquaintance, perhaps, or was still out on the streets somewhere. Maybe he’d even taken a train or an aircraft out of Cairo and was already miles away. Abdul simply had no way of knowing, or of finding out.

Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. He did have one lead he could follow: Ali Mohammed, the man who worked at the Cairo Museum, if the information Jalal Khusad had passed on to him was accurate.

So now Ali Mohammed was the next man on his list.