The Lost Testament (9 page)

The assassin strode across the room, stopped beside the bed and snapped on the bedside light. He wasn’t sure whether it was the sudden brightness flooding through the room or the noise of his footsteps, but as he took his final pace, Mahmoud woke up with a jerk and a snort.

Instantly, Abdul drew his knife from the leather sheath attached to the waistband of his trousers and held the blade six inches in front of Mahmoud’s face.

The trader’s eyes widened as he looked at the cold steel blade glinting in the light, and then focused his eyes beyond the weapon at Abdul’s face staring down at him.

“You’re the dealer,” he stuttered. “You came to my stall, looking for parchment.”

Abdul nodded.

“You have a good memory,” he said, “and I’m still looking for a sheet of parchment. One parchment in particular. One that I know you have.”

Mahmoud shook his head slightly, panic growing in his eyes.

“I told you. I don’t have any parchments for sale.”

“My information is different. I know that you spent some time searching the Internet for some very specific words, words that could only have come from one source. And you know what that source is as well as I do.”

Mahmoud’s expression changed as realization dawned.

“Oh, that parchment. But I don’t have it anymore. I sold it on, sold it to another trader. But it was almost illegible,” he protested. “Hardly any of the words on it could be read. Why is it so important to you?”

“It’s not important to me at all,” Abdul replied, the point of his knife moving down Mahmoud’s face until it rested lightly and threateningly on the thin skin of his neck below his chin. “But it is very important to the man who’s paying me.”

For a couple of seconds, Abdul considered his next course of action. Mahmoud could well be lying to him, he knew, and the parchment might be concealed somewhere inside the house, in a safe or elsewhere, or the man might genuinely have disposed of it. Before he left that room, he needed to be absolutely certain of the truth. And he was very good at uncovering the truth.

“Are you right-handed or left-handed?” he asked.

“What?”

“It doesn’t really matter, I suppose,” Abdul replied.

Then, in a blur of action so fast that Mahmoud had absolutely no time to react, Abdul seized the man’s right arm, wrenched it over so that his wrist was resting on the table beside the bed, and slammed his knife straight through the back of Mahmoud’s hand, pinning it to the wood.

The Egyptian’s howl of pain filled the room as blood welled from the penetrating wound, pooled on the table and began to drip onto the wooden floor below. Abdul pressed the bedsheet over the trader’s mouth, muffling the sound. Kassim jerked in the bed, perhaps trying to sit up, or to reach for the wound with his left hand, but before he could do anything at all, Abdul had produced a second knife and held it firmly against his throat.

“Quiet,” the intruder ordered. “That just shows how important it is for you to tell me the truth. Make me believe that you’re holding nothing back, and I might just walk away from here. If you lie, you’ll die. It’s as simple as that.”

He moved the second blade slightly away from Mahmoud’s throat until the point rested on the tender area below the man’s left shoulder blade. He changed his grip on the knife very slightly, then slowly began pushing it into Mahmoud’s flesh, the honed and polished double-edged blade easily penetrating about an inch into the man’s body.

Again, Mahmoud howled in muffled agony, his scream barely audible behind the makeshift gag Abdul was applying. His body twitched under the assault and sweat sprang to his brow as the pain increased.

Abdul knew the signs, knew that the man under his knife would do almost anything to make him stop. Now he could find the truth.

“The first question is easy,” he said, moving the sheet away from Kassim’s mouth, “because the answer is either yes or no. Do you still have that parchment?”

Mahmoud shook his head desperately from side to side.

“I told you. I sold it to another dealer.”

“So that would be ‘no,’ then?”

“No. I mean, yes. I don’t have it. I don’t have it any longer.”

Abdul nodded.

“So who did you sell it to?”

For additional emphasis, he turned the knife slightly in the wound on Mahmoud’s shoulder, eliciting another anguished cry of pain, quickly muffled.

“Another dealer,” he almost shouted. “His name is Anum Husani. He deals in old manuscripts and other relics, and he has a shop in Cairo.”

Abdul nodded again, then gave the knife another twist, the point scraping along Mahmoud’s collarbone.

“The address would be helpful,” he said, his sentence almost drowned out by the other man’s muffled scream.

His voice quivering and laced with agony, Mahmoud stammered out the address of Husani’s shop, an address that Abdul immediately filed away in his memory.

After a further prod from the knife blade, Mahmoud followed that with a physical description of Husani. But when Abdul asked for the man’s home address, his victim was unable to help, and even twisting the blade in a fresh wound didn’t produce the information he wanted.

“You’re absolutely certain?” he asked, altering his grip on the handle of the knife very slightly, and feeling Mahmoud’s body tensing in pointless anticipation of the pain to come.

“Yes, yes. He has it. I sold it to him, but I don’t know where he lives. Please, no more.”

“I do have some good news for you,” Abdul said after a moment, withdrawing the knife from the man’s shoulder and wiping the blood from the blade on the sheet. “I believe you. I think you’re telling me the truth.”

He looked down at the man on the bed.

“But I also have some bad news for you,” he added, and with another rapid movement he sliced the knife into the left-hand side of Mahmoud’s throat and pulled it all the way across, the blade instantly severing the esophagus and the carotid artery. Blood spurted from the end of the artery, splashing onto the wall behind the head of the bed.

The man’s body flailed on the bed as his left hand clutched desperately at his throat, but it only took seconds for the light in his eyes to fade away as his brain died.

“And that was the bad news,” Abdul muttered, standing clear of the side of the bed and looking down at the corpse.

He wiped the blood off his knife on the sheet, then pulled the other blade out of Mahmoud’s right hand, wiping that as well, but he didn’t replace the knives in their respective sheaths. First, he needed to wash them properly. He stood up and checked that none of the blood he had spilled had got onto his clothing, but he could see no sign of it. The latex gloves were heavily stained, but he would dispose of them after he left the property. To avoid any of the blood being transferred from his gloves to his clothing, he first went into the attached bathroom and washed his gloved hands in the sink, drying the latex on a towel when he’d finished. Then he carefully washed both knives until not a trace of blood was left on them, dried them and put them away in their sheaths. He would bleach everything thoroughly later.

Five minutes later, he was outside the house, having relocked the rear door, and was making his way through the silent streets of the Cairo suburb.

That evening, Angela followed her usual routine once she got back to her apartment. She poured herself a large glass of wine, switched on the TV to inspect the day’s news, and flopped down on the sofa, kicking off her shoes as she did so. Once she’d seen the headlines, she used the remote control to turn off the set, and then opened up her laptop.

She worked her way quickly through her work in-box, marking the vast majority of the e-mails not simply for deletion, but also to be bounced back to the sender—her way of trying to spam the spammers. As she glanced down the list of senders of the unread e-mails, one message stood out. She hadn’t heard from that particular person for some months, and the area he worked in was of great interest to her.

She clicked it open, and read the fairly short message. The first couple of brief paragraphs were simply a polite catch-up, which her eyes skimmed over as she looked for the meat in the sandwich. Although she didn’t know Ali Mohammed particularly well, she knew that he was not inclined to waste words, nor to contact her simply to ask what she was up to. He would have a very specific reason for sending her a message, and she was keen to find out what it was.

His question was in the final paragraph. A colleague had given him a sheet of parchment to work on. The relic appeared to be old, he explained somewhat unnecessarily, and the writing on it was largely invisible. He would be working on it to try to decipher exactly what the text said, and if it was interesting he would be happy to send her a photograph of the parchment and a copy of the text.

But in the meantime, there were a few words that could be read on the parchment and he thought the subject matter might prove of interest to her, in view of her previous experiences with relics from this period and location. The period, he went on to explain, was most likely late in the first century
BC,
perhaps a few years earlier, and the location was almost certainly Judea. Judea under the Romans, in fact, because the text on the parchment was clearly written in Latin, implying that it had been penned by an official in either the Roman government or the Roman army. And there were, he finished, two proper names that could be read, at least partially, and he would be interested to know if she had heard of them in any relevant context.

The first name, he explained, was “ippori” with two unreadable letters at the start of the word, which suggested it might be “Tzippori.” Nothing else he could think of fitted. That had convinced him that the parchment referred to events in ancient Judea, because Tzippori, as he was sure Angela knew, was the old name for the town of Sepporis, which had been destroyed by the Romans in 4
BC
, following the death of Herod. The second name was clearly Jewish in origin, but was also only partially readable, the letters that could be interpreted with certainty being
ef bar he
, the
bar
meaning “son of.”

“
Ef bar he
,” Angela muttered to herself, as she read the last paragraph again. It seemed to strike a chord somewhere in her memory, but for the moment she just couldn’t pin it down.

She quickly typed a reply to Ali Mohammed, telling him that she would be interested in reading the complete text of the parchment if and when he was able to decipher it, and assuring him that she would investigate the information he had already given her. She sent the e-mail, closed the laptop and walked briskly to her kitchen. She pulled open the freezer and selected a frozen lasagne. When she was by herself, she never bothered cooking, relying mostly on ready meals of one sort or another.

She decided that she’d eat dinner, then spend some time researching the words Ali Mohammed had seen on the parchment.

But that plan was immediately shelved when Chris Bronson, her ex-husband and best friend, called and asked if she’d like to go out for a bite to eat.

It wasn’t a difficult decision for her to make.

“You seem miles away tonight,” Chris Bronson said, about three hours later, as he and Angela sat in a quiet corner of an Italian restaurant on the eastern outskirts of Ealing, two coffee cups on the table between them.

Angela was fiddling with the wrapped sugar cubes that had come with the coffee, piling them one on top of the other and then knocking over the small stack with a flick of her elegant forefinger. She paused in her repetitive construction and demolition operation and looked at him.

“Oh, it’s nothing of any importance. I’ve had an e-mail from a man I’ve worked with in the past, out in Cairo. He’s apparently been given an old piece of parchment to work on—he’s an ancient document specialist—and he’s asked me if a couple of the names in the text mean anything to me.”

“And do they?”

Angela shook her head in mild irritation.

“That’s the trouble. One of them is quite obvious—it’s just the old name of a town in Judea—but the other one is only a partial name, just the middle section, and I’m quite sure I’ve seen or heard it before, but I just can’t think where. It’s not important, or at least I don’t think it is, but it’s just a kind of niggle, you know? Like an itch you can’t scratch.”

“I’m sure it’ll come to you.”

“It probably will,” she replied, “and probably at about three in the morning.”

Bronson nodded, then lifted his hands into the air and tried to get the waiter’s attention. The waiter, who had studiously ignored them for most of the meal, finally noticed and disappeared behind the bar, eventually returning with the bill.

*   *   *

It had been raining earlier that evening, but when they stepped out of the restaurant onto the pavement, the slabs were already dry and, despite the illumination provided by the streetlamps, a few stars were clearly visible above them.

“I suppose you were expecting to stay the night?” Angela asked, as they walked the few hundred yards back from the restaurant to the apartment block where she lived.

Despite their divorce of a few years earlier, Bronson and Angela had remained good friends, sharing holidays and other exploits, occasionally even sharing a bed. Despite this, Angela still insisted she was not ready to have another go at their marriage—indeed at any marriage—though Bronson himself would like nothing better. While this arrangement occasionally caused heartache on both sides, it seemed to be the one that worked best for them both.

“I’d like to,” he replied quietly. “I’m not working for the next few days,” he added. “I just finished my part of a major investigation, so I’m due some leave.”

“How nice. You can have a lie-in, then, while I brave the rigors of the District Line to central London,” Angela said, rather waspishly for her. “Unlike you, I have a proper job to go to, with proper working hours, Monday to Friday, nine to five. That kind of thing.”

“I think being a police officer does count as a ‘proper job’ these days,” Bronson replied mildly. “But I’ll get up at the same time as you do and then we can ride the Tube together. There’s some stuff I need to do at my house tomorrow morning, so I can go on from there straight to Tunbridge Wells.”

Angela nodded, but didn’t reply.

“Is everything OK?” Bronson asked.

“Not entirely, no,” she replied. “Perhaps next time you’re pretending to be a gentleman you can escort me to a decent restaurant, one where the waitresses aren’t all tarts.”

“What?” Bronson felt entirely confused.

“I noticed you looking at that waitress, the one with the butt.”

Bronson colored slightly.

“I like to look,” he protested, “but I never touch. And so what if she’s got a nice butt?”

“Well, when you’re with me, Chris, I prefer it if you
don’t
look, OK? It doesn’t make me feel good about myself when the man I’m sharing a meal with spends most of his time looking at everyone but me.”

Bronson was silent for a moment, conscious that he’d severely ruffled Angela’s feathers, and without even being aware of it. No different to normal, then. And now she was looking at him with a peculiar intensity in her stare that was a good enough warning to concede the point.

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “It won’t happen again. I didn’t even know I was doing it.”

Angela dropped her gaze after a moment; then she shook her head.

“God,” she muttered. “I’m sorry too. I’m a bit over-sensitive at the moment. Work is really boring, I can’t find the answer to the question Ali Mohammed asked, and to see you drooling over that dyed-blond bimbo in a third-rate restaurant was almost the last straw.”

She fell silent for a few seconds, then looked up at him.

“I will admit one thing, though.”

“What?”

“She
had
got a nice butt. You were right about that.”

“Yours is better,” Bronson said immediately.

“Well, in that case . . .” Angela unlocked her door and led the way inside.