The Men Behind Page 13

  He stayed with the trackers for two more days and then returned to Cairo. He couldn’t, he really couldn’t, allow himself to be absent from the city for longer at such a time.

  He almost pulled the trackers out, too, but decided to reprieve them for another week. After that he would offer the small boys of the village a reward if they found the remains and reported them to him. Owen was a great believer in small boys.

  He was not, however, entirely guileless in the matter and knew that if a reward was offered then it would be claimed. Plausible bones would suddenly appear in just the right spot. He would have to find some realist to vet the claims locally.

  That would not be the Mamur, for he was probably corrupt and certainly incompetent. Nor would it be one of the villagers, for they would have a vested interest and would pronounce the claims valid in return for a share in the reward.

  When the time came he would have to go to Ali Osman’s household. The villagers, and certainly the boys, would be wary about going there, however, so another solution would be preferable.

  For the moment the decision could wait. The trackers would continue. Perhaps they would make the decision unnecessary.

  He returned to Cairo and was relieved to find that nothing had happened in his absence. He had feared some further outrage. There had been no progress either, but this, as Nikos pointed out with asperity, did not mean that people had not been working hard.

  The fact was that in terrorist cases all one usually had to go on were the circumstances. It was no good researching, for instance, the background of the victims since motivation was not located in the personal context.

  The circumstances, however, typically yielded little data. While Owen had been away the forensic lab had done a complete analysis on the spent bullets and confirmed that they had come from two guns and that the guns had not been used in previous terrorist offenses. They had found nothing distinctive about the picric or nitric acid used in the two bombs, nor really in the bombs themselves.

  No further eyewitnesses had been found and no further details had emerged from questioning of the eyewitnesses they already had.

  “We’ll just have to wait until more data is available,” said Nikos.

  “You mean until there is another killing?”

  “That’s right,” said Nikos.

  Owen found it difficult to take such a calm view of things and instructed Nikos to analyze reports of current followings in the hope that, having sifted out possibles from totally unlikely ones, they might be able to secondguess the terrorists and anticipate where the next attack might come. This was not very fruitful because of the highly subjective nature of the reports. However, it made Owen feel better.

  He also got Georgiades to check the background of the boys killed in the explosion at Hamada. It was easy to find out about Hamid, but about the other boy, Salah, at this distance in time little could be established.

  He had definitely not been a student of the School of Engineering, nor had he shared a room with Hamid. One or two people thought they might remember seeing him; but that was all.

  On Hamid himself the details gleaned were rather similar to those obtained about Abu, the boy from Hamada killed in the café bombing. He had been a quiet boy who had not stood out in any way, certainly not for academic merit. Like Abu, he appeared to have been lost at first in the great city, overawed and bewildered by it. But this was no different from the countless other country boys sent up by their Pashas to be educated in the High Schools.

  There was, however, one difference between Hamid and Abu. Hamid had definitely been interested in politics. There was a report of his having participated in a student demonstration outside the Abdin Palace. Nikos checked and there had indeed been a demonstration at about the time reported.

  Armed with that information, Georgiades began to make covert inquiries among the older students, but so far without result.

  At the end of a week Owen pulled the trackers out. The bones of the second boy and the fragments of the bomb appeared to have been lost forever beneath the shifting sands of the desert.

  Hamada continued to niggle at him, however. He felt obscurely dissatisfied. Something told him that there was something important to be found out at Hamada. Whatever it was, he had not found it out. Somehow or other he would have to go back.

  The opportunity came about ten days after he had left.

  An urgent message came from Ali Osman Pasha: “They have followed me down here. Come at once.”

  Chapter Eight

  They were waiting for me,” said Ali Osman. “I saw them.”

  “Where was this?”

  “At Nag Balyana. It is across the river,” Ali Osman explained.

  “In the sugar cane?”

  “No, no. Beyond the cane fields. In the hills. I rode around some rocks and there they were.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Two.” Ali Osman looked at him soberly. “As usual.”

  “You have been followed before?”

  “In Cairo,” said Ali Osman. “Not here. Until now.”

  “But were they following? Pardon me, but you said you came upon them.”

  “The following time was past,” said Ali Osman. “Now they were waiting.”

  “They were armed, I take it?”

  “I saw their rifles.”

  “And they were waiting?”

  “Yes,” said Ali Osman. “They were waiting for me.”

  Owen hesitated.

  “Forgive me, Pasha,” he said, “but I need to ask these things. How do you know they were waiting for you? Might they not have been a group of ordinary villagers—?”

  “Fellahin,” said Ali Osman, “do not carry rifles. Nor would they have been in the desert.”

  “Camelherders?”

  “Camelherders do not wear city clothes. Nor, before you ask me, do brigands. Not in Hamada they don’t.”

  “City clothes,” said Owen. “That makes a difference.”

  “It made a difference to me,” said Ali Osman. “I turned my horse and bolted.”

  “You were on a horse?” Owen could not keep the surprise out of his voice.

  “How else would I get to Nag Balyana?” asked Ali Osman rather tartly.

  “Forgive me, Pasha. I had not thought of you as a desert man.”

  “One has one’s roots,” said Ali Osman with dignity.

  “Of course. It was just that, well, I wasn’t sure that you had recovered so completely from the bruising you received.”

  “Battering,” said Ali Osman, “battering. At the hands of the mob.”

  “I am glad to see you so recovered. May I ask what was taking you out to Nag Balyana?”

  “Sport. Yes, sport. I was hunting hare.” Sensing that this sounded unlikely, Ali Osman modified his claim. “And duty. I was combining pleasure with duty. It is a part of the estate I seldom visit. Justifiably. There is nothing there, mon cher, absolutely nothing there. All the same, they should have an opportunity of seeing their Pasha. Occasionally, that is. Very occasionally,” said Ali Osman with emphasis.

  “It was a kind of regal progress?”

  “Exactly.” Ali Osman was pleased by the thought. “I am, after all, their king,” he said modestly.

  “And while you were—showing yourself, so to speak, you came upon these men?”

  “Afterwards. I couldn’t take too much of it, you know. The heat!” Ali Osman fanned himself at the mere thought. “In the fields it was terrific. After a while I had had enough. So I went hunting here.”

  “Not unaccompanied, I trust?”

  “Naturally I had a few servants with me. My retinue,” said Ali Osman, still enjoying the regal image.

  “And they were with you when you came upon the men?”

  “Of course. Though not for long. They departed from th
e spot even more quickly than I did.”

  “Could you show me the spot?”

  “They could. I see no reason to return personally to that detested place.” He clapped his hands and spoke to a servant. “They will be waiting for you outside. It will do them good to have to return to a spot they quit in so cowardly a fashion.”

  The servants, however, when Owen questioned them on the way to Nag Balyana, were unabashed.

  “They were bad men,” they said, shaking their heads vigorously, “oh, very bad men.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We could see at once.”

  “They were not from these parts.”

  “They were dressed like foreigners,” put in an older man.

  “So they could not have been brigands?”

  “Oh no.” The men were definite. “We know the brigands. They are friends of ours.”

  “I see.”

  “Besides, the brigands stay in the sugar cane.”

  Ahead of them Owen suddenly caught sight of the river. It was about half a mile wide at this point, blue and glinting in the sun.

  They walked the horses down to the water’s edge and stood waiting for a boat. One or two of the men dismounted and splashed water over their heads. The rest stayed on their horses enjoying the cool river breeze.

  The boat when it came was a small one and could take only two horses at a time. Owen crossed first with the oldest servant and had a long wait on the other side. They let their horses nibble at the sparse grass on the river bank and squatted down on the baked earth.

  “It always takes a long time,” said the servant, watching the boat tacking back through the sandbanks, “especially when there are a lot of you. When we are with the Pasha, it takes forever.”

  “It is fortunate that you don’t have to do it often,” said Owen, commiserating.

  “Often enough lately,” said the servant. “Since the Pasha came down we have been going almost every day.”

  “Every day?” said Owen, surprised. “Not with the Pasha, surely?”

  “Oh yes. It surprised us. He wasn’t so fond of riding when he was here before.”

  “There can’t be that many villages on this side.”

  “There aren’t any. Well, there’s one further up the river. You see, the cultivation on this side of the river is fairly recent. In the old Pasha’s time there wasn’t any. It’s only in the last twenty years that they’re starting growing over here. The villages are all on the other side, where the house is. People come over here to work.”

  “What’s the Pasha doing over here, then?”

  “There’s a holy shrine on the slopes of the jebel. He goes to that.”

  “Every day?”

  The servant shrugged. “He’s become very holy all of a sudden.”

  “It’s a bit out of the way, isn’t it?”

  “That makes the shrine more powerful, of course. Perhaps the Pasha needs a powerful saint to intercede for him.”

  “He doesn’t come over here to hunt for hare?”

  “Hare?” The servant looked at him as if he had gone off his head.

  ***

  When at last the party was all across they mounted their horses again and rode on through the sugar cane. On this side the cane grew more thickly. Even on horseback they were not high enough to see over it. It was like riding through a tunnel.

  Owen was glad when he saw the desert ahead of him. The horses were glad too and perked up. When they emerged into the open they burst of their own accord into a little gallop.

  Ahead of him, some way off across the sand, Owen could see the rocky outline of the jebel, rising like a tooth out of the flatness of the desert.

  The jebel was further off than it looked and the horses soon slowed to a walk. There was a slight but firm desert wind which blew all the time. At first, after the enclosed heat of the sugar cane, they found it very pleasant. Soon, however, the servants and the trackers wrapped a fold of their galabeahs across their faces.

  Owen wished he could do the same. When he had ridden patrol in the north he had worn the same headdress as the other men and he wished he could do that now. Although the wind was slight, there was the perpetual small sting of particles on his skin, and he had virtually to close his eyes against both the sand and the sun.

  He was carried back to his early days in Egypt, when he had just transferred from India and was exhilarated by the space and emptiness of the desert after the dense, close-packed humanity of the Indian coastal towns.

  Very soon, however, he was being reminded uncomfortably that it was some time since he had last done much riding. He wondered how Ali Osman had found it.

  Why all the story about showing himself to the villagers and hunting hare? The Pasha was obviously a fantasist. Perhaps he had invented it all to compensate for the comparative austerity of provincial life. Or perhaps beneath the hedonism was buried a remnant of the traditional harshness and sparseness of the desert.

  Perhaps the Pasha was going out into the desert like some modern Elijah or Elisha to commune alone in the hope of spiritual renewal.

  Or perhaps that was how he saw himself. That was more likely. Another expression of his fantasy. Extruded from the great city which was his natural element, perhaps the only way in which he could come to terms with a place like Hamada was by adopting a role which translated the exile into a great personal drama.

  Somehow Owen could not quite see Ali Osman as a spiritual explorer. What he could see him as was someone playing at being a spiritual explorer.

  Provided that this did not involve too great an affront to the flesh. The journey to Nag Balyana was just about right: sufficiently far and sufficiently uncomfortable for Ali Osman to be able to persuade himself that he was donning a spiritual hair shirt, not so far that he could not return at night to the comforts of his cushions and his people and the coolness of his house.

  For a long time the jebel did not seem to come any nearer at all and Owen slumped into the daze which seemed an inherent part of any lengthy desert expedition. But then he emerged from the daze to find the rock looming up in front of him.

  The ground had become stonier and they were riding now over just buried rock. The hooves of the horses tapped sharply on the hard ground.

  The rocks began to break through the surface and the horses had to wind their way through them. Ahead the jebel rose steep and sheer.

  It was a ridge of low, rocky hills which ran across in front of them for not much more than a mile. At first the line of the rock seemed unbroken but as they drew closer they could see gaps and recesses, outcrops which they had to skirt and which could easily conceal someone.

  Owen began to understand how it was that Ali Osman had come so suddenly on his pursuers.

  If, indeed, they had been pursuing him. Owen would have dismissed the whole thing long ago as another figment of Ali Osman’s fantasizing had it not been for one thing: the fact that the men had been dressed in city clothes.

  They were riding parallel to the face of the jebel now. The horses instinctively took the easiest way through the rocks. In the sand Owen could see marks that other horses had traveled that way before.

  Or perhaps the same horses. The trackers weren’t interested.

  They came around an outcrop and then the leading servant pointed. Unnecessarily; the trackers had already seen.

  They slipped from their horses and walked in towards the main face of the rock. A few yards short of it some large slabs lay in an extended curve around the foot of the cliff, bending back into a rift. The trackers stopped at the sharpest point of the bend and stood looking at the ground.

  Owen walked across to join them. The sand was chewed up by the feet of several camels and to Owen it seemed that all individual tracks had been obliterated.

  “Six camels,” said the leading tracker, “two
of them baggage camels being led. I think the foreigners would have been on these camels.” He showed Owen some indistinct sets of pad prints. “They stopped here and then they turned and went back.”

  “How long ago?” asked Owen.

  “Three days,” said the tracker.

  One of the trackers started following the tracks around into the rift.

  Was it worth following the trail? Owen could not make up his mind. In three days the men could be a long way away, halfway down the Thieves’ Road. There must be at least four of them. The three trackers were all armed. Owen, as usual, wasn’t. The Pasha’s servants certainly weren’t and were keeping well back.

  The men were probably simple camel thieves and the threat to the Pasha a product of his own easily alarmable imagination. Owen couldn’t afford to spend a long time away from the city. Perhaps he should leave it at that.

  He would have but for one thing.

  “Can you tell from the tracks whether any of them were city men?” he asked the trackers.

  “Oh yes. This one and this one,” said the trackers, pointing to the pad prints again.

  “How do you know?”

  The tracker found it hard to put into words.

  “It is the way they ride,” he said. “You can see that they have backed up into the rocks here, which is a silly way to ride. And then they are not sitting properly.” He thought hard and then spread his hands helplessly. “You can just see that they were not brought up with camels.”

  “Very well,” said Owen. “We will go after them. A little,” he amended.

  They went back for their horses and then rode on round the face of the jebel.

  High up in the rocks there was the flash of something white.

  “What’s that?”

  “A shrine,” said one of the trackers indifferently.

  “It is the shrine of the Haji Abbas,” said one of the servants.