Firebird Read online

  Firebird

  Michael Asher

  © Michael Asher 2000

  Michael Asher has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 2000 Harper Collins.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  PRELUDE

  PART I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  PART II

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  PART III

  54

  55

  56

  Extract from Shoot to Kill by Michael Asher

  PRELUDE

  ST SAMUEL’S MONASTERY, FAYOUM OASIS, EGYPT,

  WINTER 1995

  A storm was coming. The heat pulsated from a sapphire and ultramarine sky streaked with veins of blood coloured dust among the foaming eddies of altocumulus. Professor Milisch Andropov smelt fire ash on the air and frowned as he watched an Egyptian vulture plunge down like a stone, taking refuge in the branches of the tallest eucalyptus tree. He savoured the breeze, trying to calculate how long it would be before the storm struck, and reluctantly gave the gardeners the order to shut off the water cocks. He lit a cigarette and watched the last of the water draining out of the feeders that took it among the olives, almonds, figs, oleanders, bougainvilleas and jasmine that filled the monastery garden. Damn the storm, he thought. In the twenty years he’d been coming to St Samuel’s he’d seen the monastery transformed from a virtual ruin into a living, thriving religious community, and water had been the key to that change. He’d put in bores to tap the aquifers deep under the desert surface, harvested the occasional rains by turning every cloister and rooftop into a conduit, designed a reclamation system which meant that in a good year the place could exist in almost perfect homeostasis — the ecologist’s dream. Andropov glanced up again and saw that the sky had darkened, the clouds coalesced into a single dark configuration that hung over the monastery like the claw of a giant. He shivered. It was a ghibli — the fearful southern wind that had been known to blind men and scour the paint off cars. The plants in the cloister garden hadn’t evolved in the desert, and a severe ghibli could wreck the place and set back his irrigation work by weeks. He stared at the vulture high in the eucalyptus tree, a hunchback shape with a piercing eye that glared back at him like a malevolent old witch.

  It was a bad omen, he thought.

  His reflections were interrupted by a high pitched keening, and he looked down to see a procession entering the cloister through the main arch. The wind was whispering and sifting sills of dust across the quadrangle, and for a moment it seemed to him that the party had been blown in willy nilly by the storm. Even from this distance, though, he could make out that the figures were Bedouin, and that they were carrying something among them on a makeshift stretcher. The stiffness and formality of their movements suggested to him a funeral cortege. A moment later the monastery’s lay medical assistant, Da’ud — a grizzled Copt from Asyut with a permanent scowl — came shambling towards him. ‘Professor, come quickly please!’ he said breathlessly. ‘Someone has been hurt!’

  At the gate there were five or six sullen Bedouin in dirty gallabiyyas and turbans coiled tight around their heads against the wind. On the crude rope bed they held what looked like a bundle of bloody rags from which the head of a boy protruded — a boy with blood smeared hair, an ash white face and fixed, staring eyes. A woman in black behind them wailed and screeched, ‘Waladi! Ya Waladi!’ My son! My son!

  ‘For God’s sake, shut up, woman!’ Andropov snapped in Arabic. ‘To the infirmary! At once! At once!’

  Da’ud led them across the square to the infirmary building, and Andropov trotted along behind, fumbling in his pocket for the key to the operating room. There was no incumbent doctor at St Samuel’s and the Patriarch, Father Grigori, who normally supervised the sick, was absent. Andropov had been a medical student before he’d shifted to Earth Sciences, and though he’d never practised professionally he’d seen enough sickness and injury in his time to double as medic when he was staying here. He urged the cortege into the little operating room and the men laid the boy on the table. He washed his hands quickly, put on gloves and told Da’ud to set up the intravenous drip, then switched on the operating light. The Bedouin pressed around him muttering and the woman blubbered to herself. He gripped the oldest looking of the tribesmen tightly by the arm.

  ‘Get that woman out of here!’ he said. ‘You — tell me what happened. The rest — out!’

  Outside, the storm was swelling, pressing against the window with probing fingers. When the rest of the tribesmen had gone, Andropov peeled back the sheet and what he saw almost made him retch. Half the skin of the boy’s torso had been flayed off and his genitals had been mutilated beyond recognition. There were lacerations on his legs, arms and shoulders so deep that in places he could see the arteries pulsing and glimpse the ends of shattered bones. The boy’s breathing was laboured, and he was quivering in shock. Andropov drew a deep breath and explored the thigh wound gently. His first impression was that the boy had been slashed with a machete or cut with an axe, but on second look he realized the wounds were too ragged — they looked more like they’d been gouged with a rake, he thought.

  ‘Well?’ he asked the Bedouin who’d remained.

  The man was old, with skin like tanned goat hide, his face long and curved at both ends like a crescent moon, with outsized ears and an expression of such dolt like blankness that Andropov knew it had to be false. He was a village headman, he guessed, probably from one of the settled tribes who claimed Bedouin ancestry but were actually peasant farmers. Andropov knew the monks despised them, because their religion was a hodge podge of Islam, superstition and witchcraft. They had their own medicine men, he knew, and would never have come to the monastery if the boy hadn’t been at death’s door. The Bedouin’s eyes were as cold and hostile as a fish’s.

  ‘I never saw it,’ he said. ‘Nobody here did. When we got there he was already bleeding.’ He stared at the floor. ‘Probably a bull camel,’ he said, ‘It’s the rutting season. You stand in the way of a rutting bull camel on heat and he’ll rip you apart.’

  ‘I’ve seen camel bites,’ Andropov said, ‘and this isn’t one of them. Camel bites show signs of crushing, and this doesn’t. It’s almost...almost as if he was mauled by a leopard.’

  ‘No leopards round here,’ the old man said, lifting his eyes to Andropov. ‘Used to be, maybe in my grandfather’s time, but now there’s only caracals and they beat it as soon as they get a whiff of Bani Adam.’

  Andropov sized the man up again and noticed that he was carrying a big, greasy service revolver stuck in his belt. ‘Why do you bring firearms into a monastery?’ he demanded. ‘Don’t you know this
is God’s place?’

  A cold smile spread across the Bedouin’s wrinkled features. ‘There’s only one way of dealing with a murderous bull camel,’ he said. ‘Besides, you never know when you might come across a blood enemy.’

  Andropov stared at him for a moment. The tribes here were riddled with feuds that lasted for generations, and he wondered if that was what lay behind the boy’s injury. Without knowing quite why he suddenly snatched the pistol from the man’s belt and opened the chamber. It was filled with silver bullets. ‘What’s this?’ he said, picking out a round and holding it up in the light to the medical assistant. ‘Silver bullets? Da’ud, what in God’s name is this about?’

  Da’ud looked at the silver slug then stared at the boy’s shattered body. An expression of terror slowly crept into his eyes. ‘God protect us from the devil!’ he gasped, stepping back from the operating table. ‘Don’t touch him, Professor! This is the work of a ghoul.’

  Andropov glared at him. ‘Ghouls? Witchcraft?’ He turned to the old man with fury in his eyes. ‘You tell me what’s going on here,’ he snapped, ‘or I’ll send for the police.’

  The old man blanched, then nodded slowly and watched Andropov with bulging, sand shot eyes. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘It was a ghoul. God preserve us from Satan! Only silver bullets can kill a ghoul.’

  ‘Pagan superstition!’ Andropov said.

  The old man’s mouth curled into a crooked smile, showing a mess of yellow teeth. His eyes remained cold as needles. ‘I know a ghoul’s work when I see it,’ he said.

  ‘You said it wasn’t the work of a camel — true, but it wasn’t a leopard or a caracal or a hyena neither. There were tracks near the body — strange tracks. The man who found the boy said he saw a creature running into the desert — a hairy thing that walked upright on bandy legs. We tracked it out into the khala, and we’d have got it too if it hadn’t been for the ghibli.’

  Andropov shivered and turned his back on the old man. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘wait outside.’

  There was a waft of fine dust as the door opened, and the momentary drone of the wind. The boy was moaning softly, his eyelids fluttering. As the door closed, Da’ud stared at the patient again and backed away. He made the two fingered sign against the evil eye. ‘Leave him, Professor. The ghoul is within him. If it knows he’s dying it will cross over.’

  Andropov gave him a withering look. ‘Shut up! Give me some morphine — quickly!’

  The Copt fumbled in a glass cabinet and came out with a sterile syringe, a needle and a phial of clear liquid. The Professor grabbed them from his shaking hands, fitted the needle, then snapped off the top of the phial with calloused fingers. When he’d filled the syringe he held it up to the light for a moment and flicked it with his index finger. He was about to insert the needle into the side of the boy’s buttock, when his eyes snapped open, his body convulsing wildly, his head writhing from side to side. The back of his hand caught the syringe and flipped it skittering across the floor. The Professor made a grab for him, and as he did so the boy grasped his wrist and gripped it with the strength of a drowning man. The look of horror in his eyes was so shocking that the Professor recoiled. ‘What happened?’ he asked. ‘What was it?’

  The boy stared sightlessly at the ceiling, his eyes bright with death. His purple lips moved haltingly. ‘Ghoul!’ he whispered. ‘Ghoul!’

  PART I

  CAIRO, EGYPT,

  DECEMBER, 1999

  1

  I don’t care what they say, I thought, the head’s too small for the body. I glanced up at the monster’s inscrutable face, shading my eyes against the blazing light of the midmorning sun, and felt a quaint thrill of fear — a thrill that had never quite left me no matter how many times I’d visited the Great Sphinx enclosure here at Giza. To me, this sculpture had always seemed the product of an alien mentality, and I knew why the Arabs called it Abul-Hol: ‘The Father of Terror’. Its face was a frame without features, the face of a creature lurking at the cusp of reality and illusion — a shapeshifter’s face. Or maybe it was just that I saw my own face there. The Egyptologists claimed that its features were those of Khafre, the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh who was also supposed to have built the second pyramid nearby. They said that the whole Giza complex — three large pyramids, six small ones, mastaba tombs, boat pits and the Sphinx — was constructed by a single dynasty of pharaohs around 2500 BC, and that each piece of the jigsaw was an integral part of a coherent whole. Something — call it intuition — told me that the Sphinx was much older, and even if it did have Khafre’s face, that didn’t prove he’d constructed it. Maybe it once had a lion’s head, and Khafre simply had it recarved in his image. The experts disagreed vehemently, of course, but then I’ve never had much time for experts. They always seem to have a secret agenda of their own.

  I adjusted my baseball cap so that the peak covered the nape of my neck, and wiped the moisture off my forehead with my cuff. It was unusually hot for December, and the met boys were tracking a massive sandstorm that they reckoned would hit the city in a couple of days. There were a few people about — European and Japanese tourists in shorts and sunhats, and the odd curious clump of locals — but the place was by no means crowded. On my way into the Sphinx enclosure I’d passed a film crew shooting a troop of men in ill-fitting leotards performing sweaty aerobics for a TV programme. Anywhere else it would have been beautiful young nymphets in costumes so tight they had to be poured on, but this was Egypt and we had to be content with pot-bellied bruisers. I knew they were still going at it despite the heat, because I could hear the half-hearted shouts of their instructor over the thick granite walls.

  Amid the murmur of foreign voices I picked out footsteps behind me, and I knew at once they were out of place. The tread was too heavy and deliberate for a tourist — sightseers here trod at a leisurely pace. Instinct told me the steps were heading towards me, and I felt discreetly under my old leather jacket for the handle of my .380 Beretta in its quick-draw shoulder-rig. It was just a precaution. The last thing I needed was a shoot-out under the eyes of the Sphinx, but in my few years as a Special Investigations detective I’d made some enemies, and I couldn’t afford to be casual. I still had the scar on my rib-cage from the time we’d staked out the Shadowmen’s stronghold in New Cairo and they’d been waiting for us with rocket-launchers and God knew what hi-tech shit. There was still flotsam of the Shadowmen about, and any one of them had a good excuse to stiff me if he had half a chance. Even before I’d turned, though, I’d recognized the tread of Colonel Hammoudi — the measured pace I’d grown used to over the years. He eased his bulk up beside me and squinted sideways at Abul-Hol.

  ‘Can’t leave this junkyard alone can you, Sammy?’ he said in a low voice. ‘Not even in your spare time.’

  I snickered, relaxing my grip on the Beretta. It was kind of pathetic that an eligible young police lieutenant like me had nothing better to do on his day off than stare at the Sphinx alone. But I had no wife, no children, no girl, no social life outside the police and no friends apart from Hammoudi. Home was a spartan apartment at the top of a block on Roda. Some people said I was a hermit, socially awkward, or even a closet gay, but I wasn’t. It was just that until I’d completed my job here, that was the way it had to be.

  I smiled at the Colonel. ‘Half the police budget goes on guarding our glorious heritage,’ I said, ‘so I reckon there ought to be at least one cop who knows what it is we’re protecting.’

  Hammoudi grunted. ‘Our glorious heritage,’ he repeated, rolling the words around his mouth as if trying to suck some kind of meaning out of them. He was a good nine inches taller than me — six-three at least — and he wore a faded dark suit that must have felt like chain mail in this heat. His white shirt was frayed at the collar, and he wore a dark tie and black shoes that had been polished so much the uppers had begun to wear through. His shoulders looked almost impossibly broad, and I knew it wasn’t padding. His head was a dome, his hair receding, streaked with sil
ver at the sides, and his face, hacked out of granite, was as aggressive as a bulldog’s, its cradle of intersecting lines emphasized by a neatly clipped moustache.

  ‘How’d you know I was here?’ I asked.

  ‘Call it empathy,’ Hammoudi said, a wolfish crease spreading between the corner of his mouth and left eye.

  I stifled a rude snort. OK, Boutros Hammoudi had many gifts, but I wouldn’t have numbered empathy in the first ten. He still ran the Special Investigations Department with the same rod of iron he’d earned a name for years ago as a parachute sergeant in the Yemen. Then, he’d led a unit called the Night Butchers who’d operated at night behind enemy lines, bringing back the penises of their victims as trophies. Now he was sixty and nearing retirement age, but he still worked out with weights four nights a week, and could pack a wallop. I once saw him hit two slimeballs with a volley of snap punches that dropped them as clean as steel bolts through the skull. The sound of his knuckles on their flesh was like gunshots. Empathy? Bukra flu mishmish, I thought.

  Hammoudi grimaced impatiently as if following my cerebral processes. ‘You told me days ago you were overdue for a trip to Giza,’ he said. ‘This is your first day off in weeks, so I guessed you’d be here.’

  That was nearer the mark, I thought. ‘Well I hope it’s strictly social,’ I said, ‘because like you say, this is my day off, and every time I’ve had a day off in the past three months something has come up!’

  The Colonel gave a feral grin and drew a flattened pack of Cleopatra cigarettes from his side pocket. He flicked one out, stuck it in his mouth and lit it with a disposable lighter. He breathed out smoke and stared with apparent interest at the front paws of the Great Sphinx. ‘Isn’t there supposed to be a stela or something in there?’ he asked.

  I screwed up my eyes against the sun and turned my baseball cap the right way round. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘you can just see the top of it from here, but it’s crumbled and unreadable now. They call it the dream-stela of Thutmose IV, the Eighteenth Dynasty pharaoh who ruled before the heretic Akhnaton.’