Sharko let himself fall on his side, exhausted, his back aching horribly. Eugenie had moved closer to Abd el-Aal and looked at him with a grimace.
“That’s your life all over. Corpses, fear, suffering… I’m not even ten yet, Franck, and just look at what you’ve made me witness in all these years. It’s disgusting.”
In his ungainly position, Sharko had dragged himself to the knives, clutching onto them with his fingers.
“I’ve never kept you here. I never forced you to come with me. Don’t say it isn’t true.”
He managed without too much difficulty to undo his bonds. Standing up, he leaped at the fat water gourd and drank until his thirst was slaked. The liquid dribbled down his chin and chest, where the clumps of hair had been singed. He smelled of char, of cinder. With a piece of cloth, he wiped his nose and walked up to the still-breathing Atef. Sharko looked through his torturer’s pockets: papers, wallet, a cigarette lighter. He took the keys to the car, reclaimed his cell phone, and poured gasoline over the Arab’s head. The dying man’s eyes still found the strength to open wide.
Sharko turned toward Eugenie, sitting in a corner.
“You don’t have to watch this.”
“I want to watch you. I want to see what horrors you feed on to keep living.”
“He deserves it. Can you understand that?”
Sharko clenched his jaws, hesitating. Slowly, his furious eyes rose toward Atef’s. He came within inches of his lips.
“I’ve hunted down garbage like you all my life. I would have killed every last one of you if I’d had the chance. I loathe people like you from the depths of my soul.”
He flicked the lighter and smiled:
“Thanks for the clue about the hospitals. And this is for your brother, you son of a dog.”
He stood there, not moving. He wanted the Arab to go to hell with the image of his face as the last thing he saw. He was still smiling when Atef contorted in a final breath, when his skin began to crackle. Then, with no longer a thought for Eugenie, he charged forward, head down. All around him was the apocalypse. The desert was churning; you couldn’t see farther than ten yards. The black smoke mixed with the swirling sand. Sharko spotted the 4×4 and took shelter in it. He had to wait half an hour for the sandstorm to end, which headed off west like a giant steamroller. A search of the car hadn’t yielded anything—not a cell phone, not a handwritten note. Just a pen and some Post-its. The caramelized pig had been careful. As for the message on his own phone, it was just Henebelle. Sharko would call her when he got back to Paris.
The vehicle contained a GPS that could be set to English. The policeman tried out “Cairo center.” And crazy as it seemed, the machine calculated and indicated a direction—some ten miles away, six of them over the burning stones of the desert. They wouldn’t find Abd el-Aal for quite some time.
He looked at his hands. They weren’t trembling. Steady. He had burned a man alive in cold blood, without repulsion, driven by no more than a dangerous hatred. He hadn’t thought he was still capable of it, but the shadows were still within him, alive as ever. You never got rid of things like that.
Before setting off, Sharko carefully noted the GPS coordinates of where he was, though he doubted he’d ever have to come back here.
Very soon, he recognized the first foothills of the Mokattam Mountains, as well as the Saladin Citadel. Once in the city, he tossed the GPS out the window and stashed the 4×4 in an abandoned corner near the Necropolis, leaving its doors unlocked. Given the area and the number of auto parts resellers per square yard, it would take less than an hour for the vehicle to be stripped.
He was lucky. In France, he would have had trouble getting away with such a crime, with the police force’s technical know-how and its doggedness in uncovering the truth. But here, between the heat, the desert, the vultures, and above all the incompetent cops…
On foot, Sharko rejoined the wider streets on the other side of the citadel. For once, the rumble of traffic had a calming effect. A taxi honked, and Sharko raised his arm. The driver stared at him strangely when he climbed in back.
“That’s okay?”
“That’s okay.”
Sharko asked for the Salaam Center, in Ezbet el-Nakhl.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
He rubbed a handkerchief over his face and it came away covered in sand and blood. Every time he moved he heard a whining sound, even down in his shoes.
Initially, he’d considered telling everything to Lebrun, then thought better of it. He couldn’t quite picture himself confessing to the French embassy that he’d killed a man in self-defense on Egyptian soil. No one would believe his story; Noureddine had it in for him. He wouldn’t get any special treatment. He’d be risking a diplomatic incident, prison time. Egyptian jail—no, thanks, he’d had enough torture. No choice in the matter: he had to keep his secret, act alone. And, consequently, forgo the chance to gain information by digging into Atef Abd el-Aal’s past.
On the way, he tried to put some order into that convoluted story.
Fifteen years ago, a killer with medical training violently murdered three girls, leaving behind no visible traces. The case quiets down, but a scrupulous Egyptian policeman persists, picks up the trail, and fires off a telegram to Interpol. The killer, or people in contact with the killer, become aware of it. Are they cops? Politicians? Top-level executives with access to privileged information? Whatever the case, these people decide to make Mahmoud disappear along with most of his evidence. They employ his brother, who essentially becomes their lookout on Egyptian soil. Here, anything can be bought. The silent partners know what hatred lies between the brothers. Time goes by. The discovery at Gravenchon gives a new kick to the anthill. The link with Egypt, tenuous as it might be, is established. Sharko flies over; the Arab contacts his employers, probably after the meeting on the building rooftop. “They” ask him to dig a little deeper, try to find out what the French cop intends to do. And they probably give him final instructions: eliminate the policeman if he sticks his nose any deeper into the case. To capture Sharko and make him fall into the net, Abd el-Aal tells him about his uncle before trying to get rid of him the next day.
In his interrogation, the Arab had mentioned a Syndrome E. “How much do you know about Syndrome E?” What was lurking behind that chilling term? And what discovery was making the men behind this business so afraid?
With a sigh, Sharko felt his arms and cheeks. He was here, alive. Maybe his brain was on the tilt, but his carcass still had some gas in its tank. And despite the small rolls of flesh that had comfortably settled onto his midriff, his bones that often screamed in pain, he was proud of this body that had never let him down.
Today, he had once again become a street cop.
An outlaw.
27
Claude Poignet’s killers hadn’t escaped the Locard exchange principle, which states: “One cannot go to and return from a place, or enter and leave a room, without bringing in or leaving behind something of oneself, and without taking away something that was previously in the place or room.” No one is infallible or invisible, not even the most thoroughgoing bastard. In the darkroom, the forensic technicians had found a minuscule blond eyebrow hair, as well as traces of sweat around the eyecup of one of the 16 mm cameras used to film the murder. Though evaporated, the sweat had left enough dried skin cells, picked up by the CrimeScope, to allow for DNA analysis. Not much chance of the killer’s name popping up in the fingerprint database, but at least they’d now have a genetic profile, which they could use for comparison in a subsequent arrest.