“Where am I?” she asked again, this time less defiantly.
He smiled widely, displaying almost all of his perfectly straight, peroxide-white teeth. “You’re not in Kansas anymore,” he grinned, as if sharing a private joke with her.
What the hell was that supposed to mean? She’d never been to Kansas before anyway, so did he mean to say that since meeting with the Professor she’d been there, too? And where did that leave her now?
The man saw the confusion on her face and frowned briefly. “You’re like Dorothy, see?” He could see she didn’t. “Yellow brick road? Toto? The Munchkins?” After each question he paused eagerly, as if they all held the key to his secret code. “Aw, Jesus,” he rolled his eyes. “Have you never seen the Wizard of Oz?”
How could she shake her head with it strapped down? Instead she curled her bottom lip out slightly – which she managed to accompany with a half shrug despite the restraints.
“Really old movie, before World War II,” he offered.
“Before World War II? You expect me to know quotes from a film that’s over a hundred years old?” she laughed bitterly. “Where am I?” she snapped.
His grin faded. “You’re in Florida. Flo-ri-da.” He broke the word down into syllables slowly, as if her not knowing the Wizard of Oz made it likely that she wouldn’t know what that was, either. “In the US.”
Again he turned and left, but no matter how much she shouted, this time he didn’t come back. Instead, the door closed behind him and she found herself alone.
She was still strapped to the bed, and she was supposedly in Florida, and not Egypt. But no matter how strange or unlikely all that seemed she now knew for sure that she wasn’t dreaming anymore.
Now she remembered what the Professor had told her in his office in Cairo: Dr Henry Patterson. And she also remembered where that Patterson worked: near Tampa, Florida. This could only mean that Patterson knew that the Professor had told her, or was going to tell her, the truth about the Amarna books, and was now seeking to ‘buy’ her silence as well; by abducting her and strapping her to a bed! She gritted her teeth and pulled against her restraints with added passion.
Gail couldn’t wait to meet Dr Henry Patterson.
Chapter 49
Cairo buzzed and hummed liked a beehive. Cars streamed constantly through the wide avenues, motorcycles flying between them, weaving their ways this way and that with effortless skill. On the pavements pedestrians swarmed, busy with their daily chores, idle gossip and sightseeing. The tourists were easy to tell apart from the locals, and as George made his way calmly across the road with the hundred or so people he had been waiting with for the little green man, he liked to think that he looked more like one of the locals.
For one thing, he didn’t have a camera grafted to his hand; most of what was worth photographing in Cairo was already on his computer. And for another, he wasn’t wearing insanely conspicuous khaki shorts, shirt and sandals. He shook his head in amusement at the group of visitors in front of him; probably their thinking had been that to visit Egypt, land of the pharaohs, you had to dress like an explorer. To him it was even funnier because that was exactly what the Spaniard Martín had been wearing, and it was exactly what he had been wearing on his first visit to the country, all those years ago. In Egypt, it stood out like a Hawaiian shirt at a wedding.
After crossing the road, he took a left turn and headed down a narrow alley, away from the main flow of the tourist crowd which was probably heading towards the walled compound of Old Cairo.
“Assif!” he said as he brushed past a man on a bicycle. George had managed to memorise a few words of Arabic, which he found added to his casual jeans and t-shirt in distancing him from the tourists. He was still unmistakably foreign – his pale skin soon went lobster-red in the sun.
He turned a corner and stopped in front of a small metal gate. He hovered his index finger over the column of buzzers. None were marked, and he suddenly realised that he couldn’t for the life of him remember which one he’d pressed on his last visit, a couple of years earlier: too much had happened since then. Each of the ten floors had two buttons, a total of eighteen flats, as the first floor was for maintenance and storage. He finally pressed the left button of the seventh floor; he knew it was at least a couple from the top; seven sounded about right. After a short pause, a man’s voice came from the small speaker. George didn’t understand any of it.
“Ma esmouk Ben?” he said tentatively. He didn’t know how to say Is that Ben, and what is your name Ben was the closest he could come up with.
The reply came thick and fast. Obviously not, then, he thought pressing the next one down after a garbled apology.
“Ma esmouk Ben?” he repeated his question as the second person answered.
“La!”
“Hal tatakallum Inglesi?” he stumbled around the sentence. That was it, pretty much the end of his Arabic phrases: it was always suitable to end with Do you speak English. There was a shout from the speaker and the man laughed.
“Siix tooo, not waan; tooo,” came the heavily accented reply.
“Shukran!” Six-2, he thought. Even if he’d remembered that, without labels on the buttons it wouldn’t have helped him: he had no idea, in a country that spoke Arabic, if 2 would have been the button on the left, or on the right.
He pressed the only other button on the sixth row.
“Ben!” he exclaimed with relief as the familiar voice answered.
“Ha! George, yes it’s me! Come up!” Ben sounded ecstatic, and quickly buzzed him through the iron gate.
George remembered that the last time he had visited, the lift had been out of order; Gail and he had stood in it with the door open for a couple of minutes before one of Ben’s neighbours had walked past, laughing. This time, however, it seemed to be working, and the door slid closed silently. The lift’s soft female voice said something in Arabic as he pressed for the sixth floor.
At their first meeting ten years earlier, Ben and George had immediately clicked. His sense of humour matched George’s perfectly, and whilst there were a few years between them, they shared similar hobbies, namely sport, television and computers. Archaeology, it had turned out, wasn’t one of Ben’s strong points anyway.
Over the years, they had seen each other dozens of times. Ben even visited them in England and worked for a year in London, during which time his English had been perfected, which was more than George could say about his Arabic.
But this time was very different; George had never been to see Ben in Cairo without Gail.
When the lift door opened again, he was met by Ben’s familiar grin and wide open arms.
“George!” he exclaimed. “It’s been a long time!”
“A year or two,” George agreed. Instead of a hug, Ben clasped George’s outstretched hand, shaking it vigorously while at the same time gripping his shoulder. No matter how good friends they were, it always took George a moment to adjust to his enthusiasm.
“Sorry I missed your calls,” he said, leading him towards the door of his flat. “How are things? Did you just get here?”
George hesitated. As soon as he’d been told to go back to his hotel by Captain Kamal of the Cairo police, he had tried to call Ben. Unfortunately, there had been no response on the landline, and either Ben had changed his mobile number or it was turned off in a drawer somewhere.
Since then, he had tried once more, the previous evening, again with no success. It had been on his third attempt, leaving the café that morning, that Ben had picked up. In the briefest of conversations, they had agreed to meet at Ben’s flat later that morning.