The Moses Legacy

Chapter 56

‘Passport, please,’ said the Egyptian soldier.

The checkpoint was at the entrance to the Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel, just north of Suez. The mile-long, two-lane tunnel would take them under the Suez Canal into Sinai. But first, the pair of soldiers who had boarded the night bus had to earn their keep. Like the threesome who had searched the bus at the earlier checkpoint, they walked up and down, selecting a few people at random for an ID check. This time, however, Sarit just happened to be one of them.

For locals all they had to produce was an ID card, but for tourists it meant a passport. This might have been worrying, but the fact that it was random meant that they were not looking for Sarit in particular. And the fact that they didn’t have any computer terminal for checking meant that they could only check the passport against the face, not against background information such as a report about a wanted person or a lost passport. But then again, this was only an inland checkpoint, not border control.

She wasn’t too worried about getting to Taba. The hard part would be when she had to cross the border into Israel. She knew that the passport would pass a cursory inspection at least. In the old days it used to be easy to tamper with a passport to make it usable by prising open the plastic, taking out the photograph and carefully inserting a new one before resealing it. Even copying the quadra-circle of the ink stamp by hand with the felt tip was relatively straightforward to someone with a steady hand and a good eye for detail.

But now they had holograms, special sealing plastic and a whole host of other technologies designed to prevent tampering. However, Sarit attacked the problem from the other end, adapting her appearance to the passport. Most modern women know how to change their appearance in a variety of ways and Sarit’s training had augmented this ability considerably. Also, she had selected a target who was in her age range to begin with. Everything else could be changed: hair colour and style, skin tone, even eye colour. In a cosmopolitan city like Cairo, the wherewithal for such a metamorphosis was readily available.

Aside from that, most people don’t look anything like their passport picture and are not even expected to. And most of the border officials in Egypt were men – less perspicacious than women at the best of times and brought up in a culture where the very act of looking at women was discouraged!

So as the night bus sped its way across the Sinai Peninsula, Sarit tried to relax as the bus continued on its night-time drive.

When they arrived at Taba, just before dawn, the driver had done the usual trick of offering to take them the extra six hundred yards to the checkpoint into Israel, for a mere five Egyptian pounds. But like the others on the bus, Sarit had refused. She had no particular desire to be first. She was quite happy to be somewhere in the middle, so that the official who inspected her passport would be tired from the ones he had seen already and yet faced with many more in the queue behind her.

But when she got to her turn things did not go as smoothly as she expected.

‘Miss Harker?’ said the man studying her passport.

‘Yes?’

‘It says here that your passport was reported stolen yesterday.’