The Lost Testament - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора James Becker (43) #45

43

Angela decided to ring Ali again at lunchtime. But this time there was no answer at all, and eventually the call went through to voicemail. She tried twice more over the next half-hour, with the same result. There wasn’t much else she could do.

Then a thought struck her. Egypt, she knew, was still quite volatile, with occasional riots and other forms of civil disturbance. Maybe something had happened in Cairo which could have prevented him getting to work that day. She hadn’t been near a TV or radio since yesterday. She opened her web browser and typed ‘Cairo news’ into the search field.

The results were disappointing, or encouraging, depending on your point of view. As far as she could tell, there had been no riots or any other significant happenings in the city.

Then another result, towards the bottom of the screen, caught her eye. It was headlined ‘Savage murder of museum worker’, and the moment she saw that she felt a sudden sense of foreboding. With trepidation, she clicked the headline and watched as the story loaded.

Savage murder of museum worker

A manhunt is under way across Cairo today following the discovery of a murder victim at the Egyptian Museum. Police were called to the building after a member of the administrative staff found the body of Dr Ali Mohammed, a specialist in ancient documents, lying in his office. It is understood that he had been killed with a knife. The reason he was murdered is uncertain and, although his personal laptop was missing, a police spokesman stated that robbery seemed an unlikely motive.

It has been established that Mr Mohammed received a visitor that afternoon shortly before he was murdered, a man who claimed to be a police officer and who showed a form of identification to security staff at the museum to gain entrance. It is now known that this identification was a forgery, and a description of the alleged perpetrator has been circulated to all police stations and military units in and around the city. Members of the public are urged not to approach this man under any circumstances, but to call the police immediately.

A very poor quality sketch of a man’s face followed the article, and then a brief word-picture, which described the man as solidly built, a little under six feet tall, with a tanned complexion, thick black moustache and dark hair, and a round face. Which was little enough for any police officer to go on, Angela thought.

She read the report once more, and felt her anger at Ali’s assailant growing more intense by the second. She hadn’t known him well, but what she’d known about the Egyptian scientist she’d liked.

And then she had a realization. Ali had warned her not to get involved with the parchment, and had even hinted that his own life could be in danger because of it. And he had obviously — and very tragically — been absolutely right.

Suddenly, the parchment didn’t seem so important any more, not when two of the people known to have handled it had already been brutally murdered. Angela wondered if Ali’s killing would mark the end of the matter, or if the man he had described as the ‘owner’ was still out there somewhere, on the run from the killers and in desperate fear for his life.

She was about to return to her work when another thought struck her. She hadn’t actually ever seen the parchment in the flesh, as it were, had never been closer than a couple of thousand miles to it as far as she knew, and had certainly never owned it. But she did have a number of high-quality images of it in her possession. Would that fact alone make her a target as well?

That thought was so stunning — and so alarming — that for a couple of minutes she simply sat still at her workbench, staring into space.

Then she shook her head. Surely, whoever had been responsible for killing the two men in Cairo wouldn’t even know that she had been sent the images? But if they did, if they somehow found out what had happened, would they come after her?