Salah followed Brigitte, and Kamal stopped by Karim’s mother, who’d collapsed against her home. Her daughter and grandchildren clustered around her, weeping, as Kamal phoned for an ambulance. Recovering from their shock, the crowd, mostly made up of young men, started muttering angrily and began to close menacingly. Life was hard enough for these impoverished people without wealthy outsiders coming here to murder them. Pearce had known Middle Eastern crowds to inflict rough and instant justice and he sensed the mood turning all around them.
‘What are you doing?’ Yousef asked. ‘I had to shoot him. I aimed to injure him. I did not want to kill the man.’ His voice was high and uneven, the tone of liars throughout the ages. ‘Let me go.’
Pearce ignored him and pushed him up the slope towards the large mausoleum. Brigitte was crouched beside Karim and looked up as they neared.
‘He’s dead,’ she said.
Pearce gripped Yousef tighter and forced him on.
‘Hey! Let me go!’
Pearce replied with a hard smack. ‘You’ll talk when I tell you to.’
Yousef whimpered and his eyes welled with tears.
‘We don’t have long,’ Brigitte said, glancing round nervously as she fell in beside Pearce.
The crowd was gathering a sense of purpose and had started following them up the gentle incline. Salah said a quick prayer over Karim’s body and hurried towards the tomb.
Pearce kicked open the rusty gate that stood across a narrow corridor which ran through the middle of the squat building. He dragged a protesting Yousef along the passageway and down a run of stone steps.
‘Stop!’ Yousef pleaded. ‘Please. I didn’t mean to kill him.’
The tomb was dark and the warm air ripe with the smell of decay. Pearce pushed Yousef roughly, bouncing him from one coarse stone wall to the other. There was another corridor at the bottom of the steps, and two crumbling wooden doors stood opposite each other. Pearce forced Yousef through the one on the right.
‘No!’ the deputy governor shouted. ‘You can’t do this.’ He tried to force his way out, but Pearce clocked him with the pistol and he fell back, moaning.
Brigitte followed them in, but when Pearce saw Salah in the doorway, he blocked the captain’s path.
‘I want him to suffer,’ Salah said as he tried to push past.
‘It’s better if you don’t see this,’ Pearce replied. ‘Stop anyone coming in. They want his blood.’
Yousef whined, and Salah looked at the pathetic man who was hunched over, sobbing as he cradled his head.
‘Give him something from me,’ Salah said before heading out of the shadows towards the sunlight at the top of the steps.
‘You can’t do this,’ Yousef whimpered. ‘You’re FBI. You have rules.’
Pearce stalked up to the man, who shuffled back towards the wall of shelves that held the shrouded corpses of the family who owned this crypt. Judging by the size of the bodies, this was the chamber for men, and the one across the corridor would have been for women.
‘We don’t have any rules.’
Pearce punctuated his statement by driving the pistol into Yousef’s clavicle, breaking the bone. Yousef’s shrill scream echoed around the crypt, and he collapsed, clawing at his shoulder and crying freely.
‘You didn’t want us coming here,’ Pearce said. ‘You knew there was a risk Karim would tell us the truth. You recruited him. You hired him to smuggle the canister into the prison, didn’t you?’ He crouched and forced Yousef to look at him. ‘Didn’t you?’ he yelled.
Brigitte smacked the back of Yousef’s head. ‘Talk to him!’
‘Please,’ Yousef cried.
‘Who hired you?’ Pearce asked.
‘I don’t know his name,’ Yousef sobbed. ‘I think he was Czech or Polish. Maybe Russian. I don’t know. He came to my house a few weeks ago. He offered me a hundred thousand dollars. I didn’t know. He said if I didn’t help, he would tell the governor about the bad things I was doing in the prison. Tell him about the drugs. I swear I didn’t know what they would do.’
‘Who was he? What did he look like?’ Pearce drove the muzzle of the pistol into Yousef’s collarbone and the man screamed.
‘Please!’ he said when Pearce removed the gun. ‘I don’t know. He wore a mask. He had a beard. A long one. He was as tall as her,’ he indicated Brigitte. ‘I don’t know anything else.’
Pearce heard raised voices cascade along the corridor. Then Salah spoke rapidly in Arabic, telling people to stay back. There was the sound of a commotion. They didn’t have long. ‘Where did they go?’
‘The prisoner, the one we knew as Ibrahim Mahmood, the man who was broken out – when he’d first come to prison, he spoke of working at a big port in America,’ Yousef said. ‘I think he said Seattle. Please. That’s all I know.’
Pearce looked at Brigitte, who nodded. The angry cries coming from outside were growing louder and more hostile, and calls for justice bounced around the tomb.
‘Help me,’ Yousef pleaded, his face a dirty mess of blood, tears, dust and snot. ‘Don’t let them in.’ He understood the severity of his situation.
Pearce stared at him coldly. ‘You’re on your own.’
Yousef cried out as Brigitte and Pearce left the crypt. His pained lament filled their ears as they hurried into the sunlight. They found Salah at the top of the steps, struggling to hold back the growing crowd. A young man in shorts and T-shirt was out cold in the nearby dirt.
‘He wouldn’t listen,’ Salah explained.
‘We’re finished here,’ Brigitte responded.
Salah nodded and turned to the crowd. ‘Imshi,’ he said, clearing a path that kept the gathered souls at a safe distance. The last thing they needed was to run the risk of infection and lose fourteen days in isolation.
As the angry crowd surged forward, Salah yelled commands to ensure people kept their distance, and he, Brigitte and Pearce walked away from the sounds of violence that soon sprang from within the dark crypt.