60
George Stebbins arrived at their hotel in the middle of the afternoon. Angela made the introductions, and the document specialist joined her at their table while Bronson collected drinks from the bar.
‘You know this might be a bit of a wild-goose chase, Angela?’ Stebbins said, stirring a cube of sugar into his coffee. ‘It’s not that difficult to fake a piece of text on a parchment.’
He was in his late forties, comfortably plump and almost bald, not even enough hair on his head to attempt a comb-over. He apparently tried to make up for this with a bushy square-cut beard of a slightly reddish hue, which made his head, at least in Bronson’s opinion, look like a large egg resting in a bird’s nest.
‘I realize that, but I have a feeling this is probably genuine. Most of the text only shows up when you bathe it in infrared or ultraviolet light, and I can’t think of any way that could be faked. And, more worryingly, two people who are known to have seen and examined the parchment have been murdered, including one scientist that I knew personally.’
‘What? Murdered? Who was murdered?’
It was suddenly obvious that when Stebbins had been asked to travel out to Madrid to examine the parchment, he hadn’t been given the whole story.
Angela took him through the whole sequence of events, from her first contact with Ali Mohammed to the present situation, including what had so nearly happened to her at the Tottenham Court Road Underground station, and that they were dependent on Anum Husani making contact in such a way that there would be no unwanted third parties at their meeting. When she’d finished, George Stebbins looked positively drained.
‘I had no idea,’ he said. ‘All they told me was that an old piece of parchment had been found, which you were negotiating over, and the museum wanted me to come along as well just to confirm that it wasn’t a recent forgery. Nobody told me people had been killed over it.’
‘Well, the good news,’ Bronson said, ‘is that those two deaths occurred in Cairo, and that’s a hell of a long way from Madrid.’
‘But look what happened to Angela in London.’ Stebbins leaned forward, his hands gripping the table in anxiety. ‘What if they followed her here and are watching us now?’
‘They might well be, but there’s one important difference between here and both London and Cairo. In London, the man who tried to kill Angela followed her from the British Museum and one of the men who was murdered in Egypt was killed in his office at the Cairo Museum. I’m not sure about the other victim, but I’d be prepared to lay odds that he died either in his house or where he worked.
‘The situation here is completely different. We can go and meet this man Anum Husani at any location of his choosing, anywhere in the city, and there’s nothing whatsoever to link either him or us with that meeting place. I can’t imagine they’ll be able to intercept his emails, so there shouldn’t be any way they can find out where we intend to meet.’
Stebbins still didn’t look entirely convinced, but nodded reluctant agreement.
‘You might be right,’ he said. ‘So all we can do for the moment, I suppose, is sit around and wait for this Husani to send us details of the rendezvous.’
‘That, basically, is our plan,’ Angela agreed, ‘but in the meantime you can take a look at the pictures of the parchment and let us know what you think about it.’
‘I’ll need to see the relic in the flesh before I can give you my professional opinion,’ Stebbins said.
Angela nodded.
‘I know that, but at least looking at the pictures will give you a good idea what to expect when we finally meet this Arab.’
But before the man from the British Museum could do anything, Angela’s laptop emitted a tone to show that another email had been received.
‘It’s him,’ she said. ‘He wants to see me in fifty minutes, and he’s given me the address of a café.’
61
Bronson stood up and turned to face Angela and George.
‘Right, we only have a short time, so we need to plan quickly. This is a potentially dangerous situation that we’re walking into, and I want to make sure that we have the means of getting away from it as quickly as possible. So we’ll be taking the car, and ideally I’d like you two to meet this man while I stay in the vehicle, somewhere with a good view of the rendezvous position. That way, I’ll be able to carry out surveillance of the whole area, and provide immediate back-up and a quick way of getting out of there if anything untoward happens.’
Throughout Chris’s speech, George Stebbins had been squirming uncomfortably in his seat, and now he spoke, directing his concerns at Angela.
‘Look, I’m not all that happy about going ahead with this. My understanding was that I simply had to examine a piece of parchment. Nothing more, nothing less. I expected to be able to do this in the comfort of my hotel room or some other sensible and civilized location. I was never told that there was a possibility that there might be violence involved.’
Then he swung round to look at Bronson.
‘It’s easy enough for you to say it’ll be safe. You won’t even be at the rendezvous. You’ll be sitting in the car somewhere and able to drive away at the first sign of trouble.’
There was steel in Bronson’s voice when he replied.
‘Angela knows me very well,’ he said, ‘and she knows that there’s absolutely no way I would just drive away, as you put it. I only suggested that I wait in the vehicle because that would enable me to provide surveillance of the entire area and react if anything happened. I’m a police officer. I’m trained in surveillance and I’m a Class One police driver, so I’m the best person to have in the car. If you’d rather we did it the other way round, and you wait in the car while Angela and I meet with Husani, that’s fine by me.’
‘You might be happy to do that, Chris, but I’m not,’ Angela snapped. ‘The only reason George is here at all is to give his opinion of the parchment, and he can’t do that if he’s sitting in a car fifty yards away. Either you come to the rendezvous with me, George, or there’s no point at all in you being here. The clock’s ticking. If we don’t leave here within the next few minutes, we’re not going to make it on time. It’s time to piss or get off the pot.’
She paused for a moment, her glance switching between the two men.
‘So what’s it to be?’
Stebbins looked somewhat sheepish, then shook his head.
‘I think I’ll get a taxi back to my hotel,’ he said quietly. Then he stood up and walked out of the bar.
Bronson and Angela watched him go.
‘So it’s just the two of us again,’ Bronson said, turning back to look at Angela, ‘and personally I think it’s better that way. Now, we need to go.’
62
As Bronson had hoped, the location which Anum Husani had specified was positioned on a street that offered ample parking on both sides of the road, providing plenty of places to view their meeting from. He reversed the car into the spot he’d chosen, so that he would be able to drive away immediately if the circumstances dictated.
‘We’re still about ten minutes early,’ Bronson said, ‘so I’ll come over with you and check there are no surprises at the café itself.’
There weren’t as far as he could tell. The café was just a café, probably chosen by Husani because it could be approached from multiple directions. As a rendezvous position, it wasn’t bad.