The Lost Testament

60

George Stebbins arrived at their hotel in the middle of the afternoon. Angela made the introductions, and the document specialist joined her at their table while Bronson collected drinks from the bar.

‘You know this might be a bit of a wild-goose chase, Angela?’ Stebbins said, stirring a cube of sugar into his coffee. ‘It’s not that difficult to fake a piece of text on a parchment.’

He was in his late forties, comfortably plump and almost bald, not even enough hair on his head to attempt a comb-over. He apparently tried to make up for this with a bushy square-cut beard of a slightly reddish hue, which made his head, at least in Bronson’s opinion, look like a large egg resting in a bird’s nest.

‘I realize that, but I have a feeling this is probably genuine. Most of the text only shows up when you bathe it in infrared or ultraviolet light, and I can’t think of any way that could be faked. And, more worryingly, two people who are known to have seen and examined the parchment have been murdered, including one scientist that I knew personally.’

‘What? Murdered? Who was murdered?’

It was suddenly obvious that when Stebbins had been asked to travel out to Madrid to examine the parchment, he hadn’t been given the whole story.

Angela took him through the whole sequence of events, from her first contact with Ali Mohammed to the present situation, including what had so nearly happened to her at the Tottenham Court Road Underground station, and that they were dependent on Anum Husani making contact in such a way that there would be no unwanted third parties at their meeting. When she’d finished, George Stebbins looked positively drained.

‘I had no idea,’ he said. ‘All they told me was that an old piece of parchment had been found, which you were negotiating over, and the museum wanted me to come along as well just to confirm that it wasn’t a recent forgery. Nobody told me people had been killed over it.’

‘Well, the good news,’ Bronson said, ‘is that those two deaths occurred in Cairo, and that’s a hell of a long way from Madrid.’

‘But look what happened to Angela in London.’ Stebbins leaned forward, his hands gripping the table in anxiety. ‘What if they followed her here and are watching us now?’

‘They might well be, but there’s one important difference between here and both London and Cairo. In London, the man who tried to kill Angela followed her from the British Museum and one of the men who was murdered in Egypt was killed in his office at the Cairo Museum. I’m not sure about the other victim, but I’d be prepared to lay odds that he died either in his house or where he worked.

‘The situation here is completely different. We can go and meet this man Anum Husani at any location of his choosing, anywhere in the city, and there’s nothing whatsoever to link either him or us with that meeting place. I can’t imagine they’ll be able to intercept his emails, so there shouldn’t be any way they can find out where we intend to meet.’

Stebbins still didn’t look entirely convinced, but nodded reluctant agreement.

‘You might be right,’ he said. ‘So all we can do for the moment, I suppose, is sit around and wait for this Husani to send us details of the rendezvous.’

‘That, basically, is our plan,’ Angela agreed, ‘but in the meantime you can take a look at the pictures of the parchment and let us know what you think about it.’

‘I’ll need to see the relic in the flesh before I can give you my professional opinion,’ Stebbins said.

Angela nodded.

‘I know that, but at least looking at the pictures will give you a good idea what to expect when we finally meet this Arab.’

But before the man from the British Museum could do anything, Angela’s laptop emitted a tone to show that another email had been received.

‘It’s him,’ she said. ‘He wants to see me in fifty minutes, and he’s given me the address of a café.’