The Cairo Puzzle Read online

  THE CAIRO PUZZLE

  LAURENCE O’BRYAN

  Copyright © 2017 Laurence O’Bryan

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

  Ardua Publishing

  5 Dame Lane,

  Dublin 2,

  Ireland

  http://arduapublishing.com

  Ordering Information: Contact the publisher.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  “Who determined its measure, surely you know?

  And who laid its cornerstone?

  While the morning stars sang together, and your angels shouted for joy?”

  JOB 38:5-7

  1

  The chanting was louder now. It seeped through the closed windows of the taxi, competing with the Arabic pop music the driver had been swaying along to since we’d left the airport. As we jolted forward another foot he turned to me, shrugged. Sweat prickled on my brow. He grinned. His teeth stood out, ivory white, against the dark stubble on his bony, sun beaten face.

  I stared out the window at the line of policemen blocking the traffic heading into Tahrir Square. They were dressed all in black and had their helmet visors down. They held long metal sticks in front of them. Anxiety twisted in my gut. Henry’s words came back to me, as if he was behind me, whispering in my ear. I’d called him just before the British Airways flight to Cairo took off.

  “If you go to Cairo you might well get yourself killed, Isabel.”

  The taxi lurched forward. Horns blared around us. Men in black t-shirts moved past us. Some of them held black flags. One of them noticed me. He shook his fist in my direction. My jaw tightened. I looked away. I’d read the stories about the attacks on foreign women, during the violent demonstrations when the current military ruler had taken power. I felt for the stainless steel pen in my bag. It was still there. If some bastard with a hard on for a Western woman smashed the taxi window to try to pull me out, he’d find out that not every female was easy prey.

  “We get to hotel soon, madam. Don’t worry.” The driver’s grin lasted longer than it should have, as if he was enjoying our situation.

  A boom shook the taxi. The chanting hesitated, but only for a second. Then it returned, with added roars of defiance. Someone banged the roof right above my head. I stared out the front window, holding the steel pen tight to my thigh. The driver was unlikely to help me if they tried to break in. Was I crazy, coming here? In the distance, the afterburner of a fighter jet blazed like a comet through a purpling evening sky.

  The muzzle of a shiny black pistol appeared at the window to my left. It was pointed straight at my face. My lips opened, but no sound came out. Don’t move if a gun is pointed at you was the memorable, though obvious advice I’d received on a kidnap prevention course in my way too distant past. My mouth dried as I waited, as if I’d stuffed it with blotting paper.

  Would I ever find Sean? Would I ever see his face again? I stared into the muzzle of the gun. I knew I’d never see the flash that killed me, but I was calm, as my hand slid towards the door handle.

  2

  One Week Earlier

  It was April 30th, a month since my husband Sean Ryan fell into that water filled pit in Nuremberg. His body had still not been found. I’d been told he could have been swept far down the river Pegnitz, and might eventually be found by a fisherman, months from now, tangled in the reeds that grew along the bank.

  I’d flown back to London three days after I left the hospital in Nuremberg. Alek, my son, needed me. The chance of finding Sean alive had passed, the kindly German policewoman said. The black hole inside me hadn’t.

  How I’d survived the past four weeks I had no idea. I’d been prescribed Xanax by my doctor, but after taking half a tablet I threw the rest away. Mostly, Alek had kept me sane. He asked about his father every day, and I almost burst into tears every time he did, but it’s not right to burden a seven year old with despair. I could see in his face that he knew there was something going on. Something bad.

  Jenny, my sister, had also kept me sane. But I would have to admit the truth to Alek soon, and to myself. It was time arrange a service for Sean. Time to make arrangements.

  But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I was angry. Angry at the German police. Angry at their whole damn country. And angry at myself, most of all. And now I was clutching at any old straw that floated by. This was my time for clutching at straws.

  I looked up at the red brick building. The east end of London had changed since I’d been there, the Olympics had forced it to, but Charnal Street, near Hoxton Square, hadn’t been penetrated by even one shiny new street lamp.

  I pulled my jacket collar tight against chilly rain and pressed the dirty plastic buzzer beside Dr. Candio’s card. Some of the other buzzers had scrawled out names beside them. One had a card with a smiling woman’s face on it. Two had their buzzers missing completely.

  I was regretting coming here.

  I could be home in Fulham. Jenny was cooking tonight. She’d been staying over almost every second day for the past week as I sunk lower. I bit my lip, listened, as the ember of hope died slowly. All I could hear was the animal thrum of traffic from Old Street, the traffic artery leading out of the City of London. I pressed the bell again, hard. Then I took out my smartphone to check Dr. Candio’s website. Again.

  Indian Astrological & Mantra Card Reading & Psychic Consultations, 2PM to 8PM, read the symbol cluttered page. I peered closer.

  A loud bang sounded from above, as if a window had been shut. I looked up. Rain pelted down.

  “Who?” said an angry voice from a tiny speaker near the buzzers.

  “Isabel Ryan. I called earlier.”

  Nothing happened.

  I stamped my feet. I wanted to bang the door. I bit my lip again instead.

  The faded black, heavily scuffed door opened with a squeak. I caught a glimpse of a snarl on the face of the man standing behind it. He was six foot three, at least, thin, wiry-haired, pale complexioned. His face was elongated, rat like. He was wearing a dirty kaftan, which went down to just above his ankles.

  “Doctor Candio?”

  He nodded.

  A young man appeared behind Doctor Candio. He brushed past him, heading out. He was disheveled, sunken eyed, slack jawed. He stumbled into me, smiled, like a junkie looking for meal ticket. An aroma of urine filled my nostrils. I stepped back. He shook his head, staggered away.

  The stairs Dr. Candio led me up were dark. The carpet covering them oozed with dirt. You could no longer tell what shade it had originally been or if the stains on it were patterns.

  His room was on the top floor. It had a low ceiling, the walls covered in large symbols scrawled in black and red on the yellowing wallpaper. I took them in, uneasiness growing inside me. There were swastikas, swords, cups, squares, circles, diamonds, crosses, moons, spaceships, Celtic swirls and Egyptian looking hieroglyphs.

  On shelves half filling the walls to the left and right, on four low tables in the corners of the room, and on a big old cabinet between the high windows that looked out onto the thin trees of the square, there were statues of multi-armed gods, brass pots, incense holders, dusty glass bottles, beads hanging in ropes, ivory elephants, statues of Jesus and Mary in various sizes. The array glistened in the light from a bare, single yellow bulb above our heads. It felt as if I’d entered a shrine. But to what?

  “What do you want?” asked Doctor Candio. He gave me a wide smile
, as if he was practicing something he’d been told to do, which he didn’t believe in. The gaps in his teeth, on both sides, on the top row, made the remaining ones stand out like tombstones.

  “Has your husband left you, for another?” A deck of black cards appeared in his hands. He shuffled them. His hands moved fast, almost in a blur, as he cut them again and again. After a few more seconds he placed them on the red Formica kitchen table in the middle of the room and motioned for me to sit.

  I wanted to leave.

  I sat.

  He took the chair opposite, shuffled the cards again, arrayed them in a semi-circle in front of me. He smiled. I half expected him to leap over the table at me.

  “I will pay you for a reading, but I also have a question for you.” I paused, unnerved for a moment by Doctor Candio’s wide eyed glare.

  Now he was moving his facial muscles, as if exercising them. Flashes of anger and peacefulness, ugliness and fear appeared, then passed away in a second.

  “One hundred pounds is the reading fee.”

  I paid him from the purse in my handbag.

  “What is your question?”

  “Why do you use this symbol?” I pointed at one of his business cards. It was lying scruff-eared on the dirt-ingrained table. The symbol was in the form of a single flame inside a square, but the shape was the same as the symbol they’d found in that room under Nuremberg. The symbol that no one I’d asked in Germany had any clue about.

  “Why do you ask?” Candio leaned towards me, his face coming to within a foot of mine. I could smell urine. His expression was curious, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open. Drool was gathering on his lower lip.

  “It was in a room where my husband disappeared.”

  “Where was that?” His smile had a lustful grin to it now.

  “Nuremberg, in Germany.”

  “Why do you think this has any relevance to your husband’s disappearance?” He pointed at the symbol on his card.

  I took a slow breath. Should I reveal more? What harm could it do?

  “My husband was researching this symbol.”

  Candio leaned back, picked a card from the array on the table with a flourish. He turned it up to face me. The symbol on it was a black horse with a pale green rider. Above the rider was the word Plague in an old Germanic looking font. Below the horse was a sequence of Egyptian symbols, a pyramid, a beetle, Isis, with the sun above her head. The last symbol was a square with an arrow inside it.

  I moved my hand to touch the card. My hand was trembling. The tremble passed up my arm and through my body. Had he picked this card because he knew what happened in Germany in the last month, how thousands of refugees had died from a rapidly spreading illness, which the medical authorities were still struggling to contain?

  Or had the card been picked for some other reason? My hand touched the edge of the card.

  He slapped his down on top of mine. It felt hot, clammy, as if something was burning on his skin. I jerked my hand away.

  I felt infected.

  “Leave at once. Do not return. You have seen your card,” he shouted. He smashed his other hand down on the table as if he was determined to frighten me. The black tarot cards and his faded business card all jumped inches into the air. I stayed still. He stood, shook his fist at me.

  “You and your husband are cursed. Get out! Out!”

  I headed for the door, one eye on Candio. He was bobbing up and down, a finger pointing in my direction. I wanted out. I’d seen enough.

  “Evil clings to you!” screamed Candio, jabbing his finger at me, as if I’d admitted to killing babies.

  “You’re one sick hustler,” I said.

  I slammed his door hard, headed down the stairs. “Weirdo,” I shouted to the building as I went down. When I reached the first landing a navy baby pushchair smashed into the floor in front of me.

  I stopped, looked up in time to see a black foot-tall wooden sculpture of a snake flying in my direction. I stepped back. It smashed into the spot where I’d been standing. A violent shiver passed through me. He could have killed me.

  “Go! Your fate is sealed. You are dust.”

  His parting shouts echoed in my ears as I closed the front door. As I walked away fast I was shaking. Not just a little, but inside, as if my brain had been scrambled.

  My hand felt hot, too, where he’d touched me.

  There was a pub on the corner near the Tube station. I went inside, found the ladies, scrubbed my hands, again and again.

  They were still trembling, but with anger now.

  I felt enraged, but stupid too, for bothering to go to see him just because of that stupid symbol. Was I going crazy with grief? I’d seen Sean in my dreams. I am sure that’s normal. But there were symbols around him. And there was a fire in front of him, which I touched. The flames felt like ice. And I’d heard his voice. All around me. Calling my name. Sometimes even when I was awake.

  ***

  His voice came back to me when I went into the bathroom to wash my salty tears away. Light played at the edges of our bathroom mirror, noises echoed from the street.

  And now I felt roasting, as if I was ill. I went back into the bedroom, turned on the light, opened up Sean’s laptop again.

  I’d looked through every file, every program on it over the past month. There’d been a saved blog post article in his browser about Egypt. I found it, opened it.

  It was about a recent discovery in the new chamber they’d found in the Great Pyramid outside Cairo. A picture of one wall of the chamber filled the top of the article.

  I spent the next two hours, until the dawn lit our room, researching Cairo and its ancient monuments. I started with Wikipedia and moved to YouTube. The Great Pyramid, the largest of the three main pyramids near Cairo, was, depending on who you believed; hiding the game reset button for our virtual reality world, an alien construction project by the beings who brought human DNA to Earth, which humans still hadn’t found a way inside, or a storage center for seeds and knowledge from before the flood. Or possibly all three.

  The Sphinx, in front of the Great Pyramid was either built in 2,500 B.C. or 10,500 B.C. if you wanted all the related stars to line up at the Spring equinox. I ended up on an English language Egyptian news site called The Daily News Egypt. I scrolled through articles looking for anything connected with the new passages they’d discovered in the Great Pyramid using thermal imaging.

  That was when I saw it.

  An article about a new Saudi built hospital in Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo, called Dar al'amal, showed a picture of a white private jet with the Arabic letters of the hospital’s name on its side. The article spoke about how the best medicine in the world was now being practiced in Cairo. Proof of this was that patients were now being flown in from all around the world to be treated there. The first example of this were flights from Germany, which had started a month before, to help the German medical authorities with their ongoing emergency.

  It wasn’t just Egyptians who were being flown to Cairo either, the article stated. I read the whole article three times. Then I searched for other instances of medical flights taking people out of Germany. There were none. Other countries had offered staff and equipment, but no one else had taken patients out of Germany.

  I was clutching at wickedly thin straws, but I hadn’t even found a straw to clutch at in the last month.

  I looked up flights to Egypt.

  As I booked a hotel near Tahrir Square in the center of Cairo, the tremble in my hand returned. This had to be crazy. I pressed the BOOK NOW button.

  3

  Now

  The driver had his hands up. His smile was gone. The gunman was motioning for the car window to be opened on my side. I pressed the electric window button, my hand shaking, expecting the glass to shatter at any moment.

  The gunman was dressed in paramilitary garb, loose black trousers, a thin black armored vest and a black cap with a gold emblem, a stylized bird. He bent down, the muzzle of his g
un lowering.

  “Which hotel?” he said. His accent was cultured, his skin paler than the crowd still surging around us.

  “The Excelsior,” I said.

  His eyes were cold, piercing blue. “You are coming to Cairo at the wrong time. What is your name.”

  “Isabel Sharp.”

  “Why are you here? Are you a journalist?”

  “I’m looking for my husband.”

  He nodded. He swung his arm. Two other men, dressed as he was, moved to the front of our car and pointed our driver to a laneway to our right. A yellow plastic barrier blocked it. It was being removed as I watched. My driver grunted, shrugged and headed down the lane. The buildings on each side rose high above us. The first windows were two stories up, but the lane was empty. We picked up speed as we made our way down it.

  I turned to look out the back window.

  The man who’d stopped us was staring after us. As I watched he took what looked like a phone from his shirt pocket and began tapping at it.

  It took us less than two minutes to reach The Excelsior. The driver took my bag from beside me and handed it to a doorman in a baggy brown suit. The driver smiled at me as I paid him in Egyptian pounds. I gave him an extra fifty pound note at the end and he bowed.

  “May Allah keep you safe,” he said, as he backed away from me. “Pretty lady.”

  I coughed. The air was dusty and heat was pricking at my skin even though the sun was lowering over the buildings around us. The doorman was holding the double height glass doors open for me. I followed him in. The pale green marble of the giant foyer glistened as if it had recently been washed. Wicker chairs lined the walls. Behind the reception desk two young men in brown uniforms waited, smiling.

  The foyer felt empty, though there were groups of two or three people talking together to my left and right. It seemed as if the hotel had been built for an influx of tourists which had never arrived. On the wall above the reception desk hung a giant painting, gilt framed, of the pyramids. A golden light shone from behind the Great Pyramid.