“No bus!” The man in the next booth had been watching him. He signalled Alex over. “No bus today. No bus tomorrow. Maybe day after.”
“Why?” Alex felt exhausted. He didn’t know what else to say.
The man shrugged. “You come back another time.”
But Alex realized he might not have another time. He couldn’t go back to the Hotel Neheb. That much was certain. Somebody was looking for him and although there were seven million people in Cairo, he knew that a solitary English teenager would stand out like a sore thumb. He had to be on his way. Could he perhaps take a bus or a train to Alexandria and work his way down from there? Or what about a taxi…?
The man who had brought him here was still waiting outside, hoping for a new passenger. Alex examined the dusty black and white cab with its crumpled side panels and cracked wing mirror. It must be at least thirty years old. Would it even be able to manage a journey of four hundred and fifty miles? He went over to the driver.
“I want to go to Siwa.”
“Siwa far, far away!” The driver rolled his eyes and grinned, showing his missing tooth. “I take you but you pay five hundred dollar.”
“Forget it.” Alex knew that the man was being ridiculous. The bus would have cost less than ten dollars.
“All right, English. How much you pay?”
“Fifty dollars.” Alex had the beginnings of a headache. He just wanted to be on the road.
“Two hundred and fifty.”
“A hundred. If you don’t like it, I’ll find someone else.”
“A hundred dollar is good! I like it!”
“Great.”
Alex got into the car. The driver rubbed his hands gleefully and started the engine. A few seconds later, they were away.
They drove through the night, taking the Alexandria Desert Road west from the city. It took them an hour and a half to leave the street lights and the buildings behind them, and suddenly they were cutting through the desert with nothing except darkness on either side of them. There was very little traffic. Occasionally, a car or a lorry would come shooting past. It seemed every vehicle on the road was going faster than they were. Slumped on the back seat, his arms and legs sticking to the plastic, Alex wished that he’d found time to grab some dinner before they’d gone. They’d stopped once at a garage on the outskirts of Cairo and he’d been able to buy a sandwich and two bottles of water but his stomach still felt empty. He gazed out of the window, pressing his face against the glass. There was no view whatsoever.
Another hour passed. The driver had introduced himself as Yusuf and they had talked a little as they fought their way out of Cairo. But any conversation had dried up like the land that surrounded them and Alex had surrendered himself to the monotony of the journey, the wooden beads and air fresheners swaying hypnotically and the entire car rattling every time they came to a pothole or a bump in the road.
Somehow Alex managed to fall asleep because the next thing he knew, the sun had risen and there were other vehicles on the road. He looked out of the window at the blue sky and the endlessly stretching sand. He saw a cluster of buildings ahead of them.
Yusuf noticed him moving. “Siwa!” he exclaimed.
Alex blinked. Siwa was a small, dusty town in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by palm trees with the mountains stretching out behind. Everything was built of sand-coloured bricks, beaten into different shades of grey and yellow by the desert sun. Yusuf pulled in and parked at a junction with cafés and shops spilling out onto the pavement, oil drums, crates and boxes, great sacks filled with spices and overhead, a tangle of telephone wires that seemed to be holding everything together. Alex noticed that there was a second, more ancient town looming over Siwa on a hillside. It was deserted and, bizarrely, looked as if it had somehow melted. He had read about it on his laptop and knew that it had done just that. The town was called Shali Ghadi and it had been built out of salt and mud bricks. Three days of heavy rain – back in 1926 – had nearly destroyed it.
Yusuf turned off the engine. “Finish!” he said.
Alex shook his head. This wasn’t where he wanted to be. “There’s a place in the desert,” he explained. “A fort. It’s ten miles from here.”
“I don’t drive fort. I drive Cairo to Siwa. This Siwa!”
Alex took out another twenty-dollar bill and handed it to him. “We can ask,” he said. “Someone must know how to get there.”
Yusuf took the money reluctantly, stuffing it in his shirt pocket, then went across the road to a coffee bar where a group of men were sitting, smoking cigarettes and talking. Alex went into a shop and bought himself a can of Coke. The shopkeeper had taken it out of a fridge but it was cool rather than cold and tasted well past its sell-by date. He noticed that Yusuf was busily talking to two of the men outside the coffee bar, but something was wrong. The men weren’t looking at Yusuf. They were looking past him, their eyes fixed on Alex. And they didn’t look pleased.
Both the men were Berbers, North Africans rather than Arabs, clean-cut, slightly European-looking. Most of the people in Siwa were wearing traditional Arab clothes but these men were dressed in a modern style – jeans and loose-fitting shirts – although one of them had a skullcap and the other an ornate silver cross around his neck. As Alex watched, a third man got to his feet and stepped forward. He was bearded, scowling, with thick arms and a paunch. He had recently been injured. There were grimy bandages wrapped around his neck. He muttered something and Yusuf nodded slowly.
Alex finished his Coke. Yusuf came back over. “What was all that about?” Alex asked.
“I ask the way,” Yusuf explained but there was something in his eyes that made Alex wonder if he was telling the whole truth. “They say fort bad place,” he added.
“It is a bad place,” Alex agreed. “Do you know how to get there?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s go.”
They got back into the cab and with one last glance in the direction of the coffee bar, Yusuf started the engine. A road that was little more than a dirt track led out of the town and into the great emptiness of the surrounding desert. Alex had never driven on it before. On both occasions when he had been taken to the fort, he had flown in by helicopter. They left the palm trees and the mountains behind them and, for a while, there was only sand stretching out in every direction. Heat haze shimmered ahead of them, obscuring the view.
And then, quite suddenly, Alex saw the outer walls of the fort rising up in the distance. He had known that the first sighting would be difficult but it was worse than that. It was like being punched in the head. His heart felt as if it was beating at twice the right speed.
Perhaps Yusuf understood something of what Alex was going through. He was muttering what might have been a prayer in Arabic as he steered the cab round to the great arched gateway that was the main entrance. The wooden gates were hanging open but he didn’t drive in. He pulled up outside and waited for Alex to get out.
“I’ll be about an hour,” Alex said. In fact, he thought he might be longer but he had given Yusuf twenty dollars … more than enough for his time. It also occurred to him that the taxi driver might be hoping to take him back to Cairo, earning a second fare.
Yusuf said nothing. Alex began to walk towards the gateway.
His legs felt heavy. It was as if the sand was dragging him down. He saw the sun-bleached walls looming up in front of him, still pock-marked with machine-gun bullets from the night when Unit 777, the Egyptian counter-terrorism squad, had launched its attack. Not wanting to, but knowing that he had to, Alex turned his head and looked for the burnt-out Land Rover that Jack had been driving moments before her death. It wasn’t there. Someone had cleared it away.
He reached the gates and was trying to find the strength to walk through when he heard the sound of a car engine starting up. He turned again, just in time to see Yusuf reversing away from the fort, the wheels of his taxi spinning in the sand. The car twisted round, then shot off. Alex opened his mouth
to call out, then realized there was no point. The taxi disappeared very quickly, swallowed up by the desert.
What was that all about? It didn’t matter. Alex had all his things in his backpack. He knew the way back to Siwa. He would make the return journey later that evening, as soon as the sun began to set.
He took a breath, steeling himself for what lay ahead. Then he went in.
NIGHTMARE LAND
It was the worst place in the world.
Alex could never have imagined coming here again. He had done everything he could to keep the fort out of his mind. He had dreaded going to sleep in case he saw it in his dreams and even during the day he had felt its shadow stretching out towards him. His counsellor had told him that it would be better to confront what had happened at Siwa – but what could she possibly know, sitting in her comfortable office in a modern San Francisco school?
Well, he was confronting it now. Here it was, right in front of him – and suddenly he was seeing everything again. The wires attached to his chest. Razim’s mad eyes and the glowing tip of his cigarette. The knives and the scalpels in the brightly-lit room and the television screen that was going to make everything so much worse.
Are you ready, Alex? There’s something I want you to see…
They had killed Jack Starbright and they had forced him to watch. Standing here, with his heart thundering in his chest and his head pounding, Alex knew how much they had hurt him. He would never fully recover.
Unless Jack was alive.
It was hope that had brought him here and now it spurred him on. He had to do this – for her. Clenching his fists, he forced himself to continue forward, leaving the ruined gate behind him. His feet made no sound as they brushed against the sand. He felt the sun beating down on his neck.
He was surrounded once again by the four walls of the fortress and even though the gate was open and there was nobody in sight, he still felt trapped. Guard towers rose up at each corner and he could imagine Razim’s men with their machine guns watching his every step. A movement caught his eye and he froze. But it was only a scrap of paper floating in the breeze.
He glanced towards the chapel that stood at the far end of the compound: circular, with a white dome. It looked small, even picturesque. But he knew that this was the one building he wouldn’t be able to enter, no matter what happened.
The screen.
The car exploding.
Julius Grief laughing. Wasn’t that great! Wasn’t that cool!
Swallowing hard, Alex turned his head away.
Where to start? The entire fortress was unnaturally still and silent. It hadn’t just been abandoned. It had been completely forgotten and stood here now, a fading memory of itself. Alex needed to get out of the sun and he walked purposefully towards the nearest open door. It led into the old bakery, which had been the control centre for all the sophisticated machinery that Razim used to protect himself. The chimney, which had once risen from the oven, was now broken in half, the brickwork smashed. Alex had thrown the grenade that had done the damage, knocking out the lights and the power supply and making it possible for the Egyptian special forces to invade. Once again he heard the machine-gun fire and the explosions all around him as he padded into the gloomy interior. There was nothing here but it was cooler in the shade. Alex stood still for a moment. His pulse was still in overdrive. He took several breaths, forcing himself to calm down.
It was obvious that the entire fortress had been stripped bare. Alex guessed that the Egyptian authorities had been in. They would have taken away the TV cameras, the computers, the security lights, the huge arsenal of weapons, which included machine guns, rocket launchers and flame-throwers. What about the rest of it? The local people wouldn’t have been very far behind. Alex could imagine the free-for-all after the last government vehicle had left. Televisions, furniture, fridges, coffee machines, even the stone table that had once stood outside Razim’s home … everything would have gone, probably ending up in the many street bazaars in Alexandria or Cairo.
He went out into the sunlight. His backpack was weighing down on his shoulders but he was glad that he hadn’t left it in the cab. He turned up his collar to protect his neck. It was even hotter than he remembered. What now? He looked around him. The building where Razim had lived was over to the right but the fountain which had once given the illusion of cool was broken and still. The dwarf palms in front of the house were dead but there was a cactus garden that had survived. A clothes line hung between two trees. There was no sign of any clothes.
Why had he actually come here? What was he expecting to find? Alex had convinced himself that Jack was alive but he knew that he would need proof if he was going to persuade anyone else – and this was the only place he was going to find it. If the car explosion had been faked in some way, surely he would stumble across a clue or something that would tell him how it had been done. Even now he could see the route that the Land Rover had taken, across the courtyard and out the gate. Jack was smart. If she had somehow survived, she would have wanted him to know and he was certain that she would have left some sort of message behind.
That was what he had thought. But now that he was here, standing alone in the empty fort, he wasn’t so sure. A single bird, some sort of vulture, swooped overhead, silhouetted against the sun. It seemed to mock him. There was nothing here. He didn’t even have a lift back to Siwa.
Alex crossed the courtyard, past a well, making for the entrance to a long, narrow building with barred windows and a slanting roof made out of sheets of grey plastic. This was the prison block. It was where he and Jack had been held and it was an obvious place to start. It was also where he had seen her for the last time. I’ll come for you. I promise. He remembered the last words she had spoken to him and at the same time it struck him that it was actually the other way round. He had come for her. He quickened his pace, shaking off the sense of helplessness that he had been feeling only moments before. He had to make this journey. He owed it to her.
The prison block door was open, hanging off its hinges, and he walked into a corridor, following it past the empty cells. Ahead of him, a scorpion froze for a moment, then scurried into the shadows. There were eight cells, all of them identical, but he recognized his own from its position, two down on the right. He didn’t go in. The room with its four blank walls, barred window and wooden bunk held only bad memories. Jack had been kept a little further down, on the opposite side. Her cell was easy enough to find. It was the one with a bar missing from its window. Jack had prised it free, thinking she was escaping when all she was doing was walking into Razim’s trap. Fighting his emotions, doing his best to stay calm, Alex stepped inside. His eyes swept over … nothing. Apart from the window, the cell was no different to his own, an empty box. Even the mattress on the bunk had been taken away.
Still, he went in. He pulled himself up to the window and looked out. There was a drop of four or five metres to the ground and suddenly – a jolting flash of memory – he saw Jack falling after she had made her way out. He closed his eyes, then set about searching the room. Briefly, he examined the walls. He found nothing. The bunk was a bare slab of wood. He knelt down and looked underneath it.
And that was when he saw it. There were scratch marks on the wall, right in the corner, close to the ground. He tried to move the bunk but it was screwed into place. He could make out letters. There was a G followed by an R and maybe an N. He reached into his backpack and took out a bottle of water, splashed some on his hands and crawled under the bunk. When he was close enough, he wiped his hand across the wall, removing the surface dust. Now he could read what had been written. It wasn’t an N. It was an M. Part of a name.
GRIMALDI
The letters were about one centimetre high and might have been carved with a loose nail. Still on his knees, Alex considered what it might mean. First – the most obvious question – was this the message from Jack that he had hoped for or was it simply the name of someone who had been held in the cell befo
re her? After all, it was something that prisoners often did. They would carve their name in the wall to show that they had once been there.
On the other hand, why would they have chosen the wall under the bunk, where it wouldn’t be seen? That suggested someone trying to pass on a secret. It was impossible to tell if this was Jack’s handwriting and even if she was responsible, what was she trying to tell him? Grimaldi could be a person or a place. It sounded Italian. What exactly would that signify … in the middle of Egypt? Alex had his laptop with him but he would need to get back to the town to get a signal – then, maybe, the Internet might provide an answer.
He heard something outside. The slightest sound carried across the desert and this was very distinct. It was a car approaching. Well, that was something anyway. It seemed that Yusuf had changed his mind and had come back to pick him up. Alex used his mobile phone to take a picture of the name, then got to his feet, dusting himself down. Before he left, he took one last, quick look around the cell. There was nothing else. He put the phone away, lifted the backpack over his shoulders and followed the corridor back to the main door.
As he emerged, blinking, into the sunlight, he saw that he was wrong. It wasn’t Yusuf. An old dumper truck with flat tyres and rusting bodywork had driven right into the fort and even as Alex watched, it pulled up beside the well. There were four men squatting in the back and two more in the front. The driver got out and Alex recognized him. It was the man he had seen in the town, the Berber with the dirty bandages around his neck.
He was carrying a rifle.
In fact, all six men were armed. Two of them had knives. The others were carrying different sorts of clubs including, bizarrely, a brightly-coloured American baseball bat. The man with the silver cross and the man with the skullcap were part of the group. Alex knew instantly that he had been set up, that they had come for him. Yusuf had agreed to bring him here and then to abandon him; he was probably well on his way back down the road to Cairo. The men he had spoken to had collected a few friends and together, they had driven out to the fort. Why? Had they once worked for Razim? If so, it was possible that they had recognized him when he returned to Siwa – but even so, he couldn’t see what they hoped to gain. Beating him up or killing him wouldn’t change anything. Razim was dead. Game over.