Clay disinfected and bandaged his ear, cleaned himself up as best he could then donned the Nubian headdress and thaub that Mahmoud had given him. When he left the room, G was sitting in the chair by the window counting out the cash Clay had given him, laying the bills out in fanned piles of ten, a thousand US dollars to a pile. He didn’t even look up as Clay left.
On the road outside the hotel Clay flagged down a taxi and showed the driver the address that Tall had written on the card. He was pretty sure now that it wasn’t a trap. Tall’s information about G had proved good. He had taken a big chance speaking to Clay as he had. What had been his motivation? He’d said he had kids. Was he one of the people Mahmoud and Atef had spoken about – one of the many Egyptians longing for change, secretly working to undermine the power structure that had run the country since 1954? Was this his own small act of rebellion?
Clay looked at his watch. Suez was more than a hundred kilometres away, but there was still plenty of time until the RV with Mahmoud. He knew it was a long shot, going to Luxor. But it was all they had. And Rania was going nowhere without finding out what happened to her son. Every day they delayed leaving Egypt put them in further peril. Not just him and Rania, but all of them – Atef, Mahmoud, their wives and children, Samira’s girls even. If the Consortium and the AB were working together, as now appeared certain, then the danger was multiplied. These were not people who compromised, or forgot. He had to make Rania see this. She was acting out of desperation, holding fast to the thinnest of probabilities, a blurry CCTV image of an infant, a picture she hadn’t even seen herself. A passport photo that could have been obtained anywhere. Her son was dead. He had to make her see this. Perhaps whatever this Al-Gambal knew would help her understand. Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, he had to try.
Outside, the work morning traffic lay stalled along the banks of the Nile, gasping under a blanket of ethylated lead and partially combusted hydrocarbons that thickened the air into vapour. Clay pushed the tail of his jelabia over his nose and mouth, shallowed his breathing. Finally leaving the corniche, the taxi driver turned east, towards New Cairo City and Suez. The Moqattam cliffs loomed above the haze-shrouded minarets of the citadel then faded in the distance. Forty minutes later the taxi was speeding east through a desert of construction waste, miles and miles of it, spread like a pox in millions of individual truckloads across the sand plains. Cairo’s buildings faded in the rear window, swallowed in an inversion of brown smog.
By the time they reached Suez it was just gone eleven in the morning. The driver, unfamiliar with the area, stopped several times to ask for directions, was sent this way and that. Finally they arrived at a low-rent apartment complex, a half-dozen identical five-storey buildings set around two opposing semi-circular roads. Crumbling pavements spilled sand onto the tarmac. A few dead palm trees, withered and bent, perhaps planted at the grand opening years ago, lay slumped and toppled in a field of smashed brick and rubble. The driver stopped the taxi and pointed at a building. Half the windows were boarded up with plywood. Arabic graffiti snaked across the walls of the entranceway.
‘Are you sure?’ said the driver.
Clay gave him half the fare. ‘Wait here,’ he said, stepping out of the car.
Clay climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. Apartment forty-seven was at the end of the hall, towards the back of the building. He stood outside the door, listened a moment but heard nothing. He knocked, waited. After a minute, he knocked again, louder this time. Nothing. He raised his hand to try one last time when the door opposite cracked open against its chain. An unshaven face peered out from the darkness.
‘Upstairs,’ came a voice. ‘On the roof.’
Clay mumbled his thanks and started back to the stairs.
Yusuf Al-Gambal was sitting in a canvas director’s chair facing the Gulf of Suez, smoking a cigarette. He was bare-chested and wore tinted Vuarnet sunglasses. A can of Coke swung hinged between the thumb and index finger of his other hand. He turned as Clay approached, ran his gaze over Clay’s face and frowned. ‘What took you so long?’ he said.
Clay stopped a few paces away but said nothing.
Al-Gambal took a puff of his cigarette, raised his chin and blew the smoke skywards in a slow, steady, exhalation. ‘If my father were alive, all you bastards would be behind bars.’
Still Clay didn’t reply.
‘Do what you have to do,’ said the young man. ‘I don’t care anymore.’ He flicked the smoking butt of his cigarette over the lip of the roof. ‘Burn in hell.’
‘I probably will,’ said Clay, his Arabic so much better now than it had been just three weeks earlier. ‘But I’m not who you think I am.’
Al-Gambal set down his Coke, pushed himself out of the chair and stood staring at Clay through his reflective lenses. Clay looked back at a dual image of himself, the sky warped dark blue and vanadium behind him.
‘You’re bleeding,’ said Al-Gambal, in English.
Clay reached up to his neck. His fingers came away stained bright red.
‘Who are you?’ said Al-Gambal
‘A friend.’
‘I don’t have many of those left.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Clay, stepping closer. ‘I’m a friend of Madame Al-Farouk, Hamid’s wife.’
Al-Gambal took off his sunglasses, narrowing his eyes against the sun.
‘She’s here in Egypt,’ Clay continued, ‘and she’s trying to find out what happened to her husband.’
Al-Gambal nodded slowly. ‘I met a woman a few days ago. She said she was Hamid’s private secretary. She said her name was Veronique Deschamps. I didn’t believe her.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Clay.
‘Hamid was murdered,’ said Al-Gambal.
‘Why?’
‘Because he challenged the system. Because of how close we came to exposing them.’ Al-Gambal replaced his glasses. ‘I always knew they would come after us.’
‘Was it the court case?’
Al-Gambal turned away, walked to the edge of the roof and looked out across the water. A freighter appeared from behind the breakwater that marked the entrance to the canal.
‘Yusuf,’ said Clay. ‘Please. I don’t have a lot of time.’
‘I am not able to discuss any matters associated with the case,’ he said, still staring out to sea.
‘I can protect you. Get you out.’
Al-Gambal laughed. ‘You don’t understand, do you?’ he said, his voice wavering. ‘I’m already dead.’
‘Your choice, broer. Then it won’t matter. So tell me.’
Al-Gambal glanced at Clay, looked back out across the Gulf. The freighter had moved away from the breakwater now and was plying south towards the Red Sea, trailing a long plume of black smoke against a flawless sky. ‘I suppose I could…’ he began, but let it go.
Clay reached into his pocket, pulled out the dead Kemetic’s camera and showed Al-Gambal the photo of the three men and the woman in front of the court buildings.
‘Where did you get this?’ said Al-Gambal.
‘That doesn’t matter now,’ said Clay. ‘What were you being tried for?’
‘High treason,’ replied Al-Gambal. ‘The prosecution was asking for the death penalty. A little ironic, don’t you think?’
‘But you won.’
‘We didn’t win. But we made it difficult enough for them that the attorney general offered us a deal: our silence, and in return they drop the charges, and we go free.’
‘And you took it.’
‘I didn’t want to. I wanted to fight. So did Ali.’
‘Ali?’
‘My colleague from the project. The official story is that he hanged himself in prison. It happened the day after we were offered the deal.’
‘Jesus.’
‘He was twenty-four.’ Al-Gambal flicked the end of another smoke off the roof. ‘It was his first job.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Clay, meant it. He’d seen far too many young guys die before they’d had a chance to learn how to live.
Al-Gambal inclined his head. ‘We thought Hamid wanted to fight, too. He was very, very good at what he did. Very passionate, very skilful. But then Ali died, and something else happened…’ Again he stopped short, let his sentence trail off.
‘So you made the deal.’
‘Yes. But then, when I heard on the news that Hamid and his son had been killed in Paris, I knew. They killed Mehmet a few days ago. I’m next.’
‘Mehmet?’
Al-Gambal pointed to the third man in the photo, the one Clay had found dead in his flat. ‘My oldest friend.’
‘Jesus,’ said Clay. ‘What happened to change Hamid’s mind?’
Al-Gambal placed his hand on his bare chest, covering the place where his heart was. ‘Me. It was my fault.’
‘Tell me.’
Over the next fifteen minutes, Yusuf Al-Gambal told his story. Whether he wanted someone to hear his version of events before he died, or just needed to get it straight in his own head, he let it all come out.
He’d been working as a scientist on a new project funded by the Canadian foreign aid agency, looking at air pollution in Cairo and how to improve air quality. He and Ali spent over a year installing monitoring stations across the city, collecting and compiling data. And what they found was far more disturbing than anyone had expected. Of course, you could see the smog. Everyone knew that air quality was poor, especially in the summer months when big inversions would lock the city in a gas chamber of its own making. But as they analysed the data and started to model toxicity, it became apparent that the air was far more poisonous, in considerably more ways and far more often, than anyone had imagined when the project had been set up.
Yusuf lit another cigarette. ‘Lead,’ he said, smoke pouring from his nostrils. ‘That was the big one.’
Yusuf and Ali ran some preliminary calculations on human toxicity, focusing on lead. Then they got permission from the project manager to do some blood testing on selected children, working with a few local schools in the worst-affected areas. It wasn’t in the original project budget, but the project manager told them that if they could find savings in their other monitoring work, he would allow them to apply it to the blood testing. They collected samples from thirty-two children in the end.
Over the coming months, they put it all together: the air quality data, the blood lead levels, the toxicity and dispersion modelling. Their work showed that children growing up in the worst areas, breathing this air for the first five to ten years of their lives, were not only far more likely to contract respiratory illnesses, but would suffer significant declines in cognitive skills, learning and language ability, and IQ. And the effects would be permanent.
‘It blew us away,’ Yusuf said, taking a long draw on his cigarette.
A preliminary report was prepared, and the Canadian project manager presented it to the EEAA – the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency – and the Ministry of Health. Al-Gambal was in attendance. Two days after the presentation, the project manager was removed from his position and sent back to Canada. The report and the slides used in the presentation were removed from the office and a new manager was installed. Over the coming weeks, the terms of reference of the project were rewritten, radically scaled back. Staff were ordered to hand in any and all copies of data they had on their hard drives, or backed up on disc, and any hard copies of information they may have had. Shocked by the speed and ferociousness of the coverup, Al-Gambal and Ali decided to save as much of the original data as they could.
‘We didn’t keep much,’ he said, speaking rapidly now. ‘But it was enough.’
Al-Gambal’s father had been a famous high-court judge, and Yusuf knew enough about the law to realise that he had a case. He went to one of his father’s old associates, and presented him with the information. The next day, the police came to his flat and arrested him. After two weeks of detention, he was charged with high treason. It was Mehmet who sought out Hamid Al-Farouk and asked him to take on Yusuf’s defence. Al-Farouk had successfully defended a number of other high-profile cases in Egypt over the previous few years and had a reputation for brilliance. They met, and he agreed to take on the case.
Al-Gambal paused long enough to light another cigarette using the burning end of his last, and continued. ‘Hamid was fantastic. It was beautiful to see him work.’
‘But something went wrong,’ said Clay.
Al-Gambal nodded, inhaled, let the smoke drift from his mouth as he spoke. ‘I offended him.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Over the course of the case, we watched him change.’
‘How?’
‘He became increasingly zealous and intolerant. His behaviour was more and more erratic. He started invoking God and fate, and quoting the Koran out of context.’ Al-Gambal stared up at the sky. ‘And yet I loved him.’
Clay waited for him continue.
‘I finally worked up the courage to tell him how I felt. Despite everything that was happening, it was all I could think about. I knew he was married, had a son. But I didn’t care. It was madness. I was completely and madly in love with him. I have never felt like this about anyone before.’ Al-Gambal grabbed the lip of the wall, leaned out so that his head and shoulders extended into the void. ‘I know I will never feel that way again, about anyone.’
‘But he rejected you.’
‘And I was jealous. That woman. She followed him around like a dark shadow.’
‘The woman in the photograph?’
Al-Gambal stared at the screen a moment and nodded. ‘Ali’s cousin, Fatimah. Her father died when she was young, and she was sent to live with her uncle, in Lebanon. She and Ali grew up together. Fatimah helped organise the children for the blood testing in Hadayek el-Koba.’
‘The lead smelter.’ The one Rania had told him she’d broken into that night.
Yusuf lit another smoke, closed his eyes. ‘It was the neighbourhood she grew up in, before she was sent away.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Exactly,’ said Yusuf. ‘These kids were her relatives, the children of her friends.’
‘And they were being poisoned. No wonder Hamid took the case.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Al-Gambal. ‘But by then, it didn’t matter.’
Not only did Hamid reject his advances, he viciously attacked him, accusing him of blasphemy and impiety, questioning his faith in Islam, deriding him and his kind as abominations, freaks, servants of Satan. After that, Hamid rapidly lost interest in the case. They knew that without Hamid, they were lost. They decided to take the deal.
But before they could inform the prosecutor of their decision, Ali was found dead in detention. ‘It was a warning,’ Yusuf said. ‘We all knew it.’
All information about the case was sequestered, and Yusuf was sworn to secrecy. It was made very clear that if he broke the agreement, he would be in prison for the rest of his life. ‘That was when I knew,’ he said. ‘We could never win. The project was closed down, the information buried. And nothing was going to change. Those smelters would go on polluting and children would continue growing up stunted and stupid. It was Hamid who convinced me, finally. He said to me: “The law isn’t enough. Not when it’s their law. You can’t fight this from the inside.” That’s what he said. I knew then it was over.’
‘He was wrong,’ said Clay. ‘Hamid kept some of the data. I’ve seen it. He must have been planning something, some kind of fightback. And Mehmet’s journal. A lot of it is in some kind of code. It’s your blood toxicity analysis, isn’t it?’
Al-Gambal nodded. ‘Mehmet was a very brave man, and a great friend. He cared very deeply about this country and what is happening to it. We all did.’
‘I know someone who can get this to the press in Europe.’
Al-Gambal pushed back from the wall, faced Clay.
‘Come with me,’ said Clay. ‘We can be out of Egypt in forty-eight hours.’ What he’d just heard would surely be enough for Rania. Hamid had simply gotten involved in the wrong case. Someone must have found out that he’d managed to keep some of the incriminating evidence. That would explain the encryption of his hard drive. All Clay had to do now was convince Rania that Eugène, too, was dead. The woman who’d last been seen with Rania’s husband and son was undoubtedly the assassin, sent by the Consortium. Framing Rania for the murders was the perfect coda.
Al-Gambal stared at him through his polarised lenses. Then he slumped his shoulders and lowered himself back into his chair. ‘Against people like these, you can never win,’ he said. ‘We don’t even know who they are. All we ever see are the functionaries – the crooked policemen, the paid-off judges, the cowed bureaucrats, the captured politicians. They make the laws, and they pass the sentences. But the people who really run the country – them we never see.’
Clay stood and looked out across the Gulf, the shifting currents of aquamarine and slate grey, the buff, heat-traced headlands on the far side of the canal. He thought about Crowbar, there in his desert tomb with the Galil across his chest. Where, he wondered, can people of conscience exist? How, in a world governed by the raw calculus of money and power, can individuals find justice? How can you fight something you cannot see? There were no targets, nothing physical to attack. Just an amorphous juggernaut of companies and ever-shifting capital. These were not enemies that he was trained to fight. If someone like Hamid, an expert in the law, in human rights, could be so easily undone, what hope was there for people like Yusuf Al-Gambal, like Rania, like him?
‘And this idiot, The Lion,’ Al-Gambal spat, ‘with his warped view of Islam, blowing things up, killing innocent people while claiming to fight for them. Doesn’t he realise that every time he commits an act of terrorism, the government can justify more repression? Brainless fool.’
‘Fuck’em,’ said Clay, finally. ‘You don’t have to live by their rules. Get out. Live on your own terms. Don’t participate. It’s the ultimate rebellion. If you don’t comply, they can’t own you.’ He meant it. Every word. ‘Come with me.’
But he could see the resignation in Al-Gambal’s slouch, in the calm way he lit yet another cigarette and filled his lungs. He was waiting for the end. He’d prepared himself, made his peace. Clay had seen it so many times before, in so many places, that easy departure.
Clay put out his hand. Al-Gambal took it. They shook.
‘Peace be upon you,’ said Clay. Then he turned towards the stairs and the waiting taxi and Cairo.