The Alexander Cipher Page 0,98
agreed Nicolas.
Elena turned to Dragoumis. “I thought you were a man of peace,” she said.
“And so I am,” he agreed. “But every nation has the right to defend itself. And we are no different.”
THE PLACE WHERE GAILLE’S FATHER had fallen to his death was at the eastern edge of the Siwa Depression, some three hours’ drive from Siwa Town. When Gaille asked Mustafa and Zayn to take her out there, they looked deeply uncomfortable. But she pointed out to them that she was his daughter, that she had never had a proper chance to say good-bye to him, and finally they agreed.
They drove east along the Bahariyya track for the best part of a hundred kilometers, then turned north. It was a beautiful though slightly eerie setting. High cliffs jutted from the great Sea of Sand. There was no greenery out here. A white snake slithered down a steep dune. Apart from that, Gaille saw no life at all, not even a bird.
It was a five-minute scramble from where they parked to the foot of a high, sheer cliff. A cairn of stones marked the exact spot. His full name, Richard Josiah Mitchell, had been scratched crudely into the top one. He had always hated being called Josiah. His closest friends, knowing this, had teased him mercilessly with it. She picked it up and asked her guides if either of them was responsible. They shook their heads, then suggested it must have been Knox. She set it back as she had found it, uncertain what to think.
As she stood there, Mustafa explained how they and Knox had hurried down here to find her father already cold, his blood everywhere, how they had offered to help Knox take his body back to the truck, how he had snarled at them.
She looked around at where they had parked. “You mean that truck?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She felt a little weak. “My father’s body was in your truck?”
Mustafa looked a little sheepish. He told her how much he and Zayn had respected her father, what a tragedy it had been, how unnecessary. Gaille stared upward while he talked. The rock face rose sheer and high above them. It made her toes tingle. She felt light-headed, a little nauseated. She had never been good with heights. She took a step back, stumbled, and might have fallen had Zayn not grabbed her by the arm and restored her to balance.
Her sense of vertigo stayed with her as she and Mustafa climbed the rock face. Zayn elected to stay behind with the truck, in case of robbers. Gaille had snorted softly when she heard that. Robbers! There was no one for fifty miles. But she couldn’t blame him. The growing heat and the gradient made the climb far more difficult than she had anticipated. There was no path, just a series of steep shelves of rock too sandy to provide secure footing. Mustafa led the way, dancing up in his ragged flip-flops, careless of his thick white robes and heavy pack, five times bulkier than her own. Each time he got far enough ahead, he would squat like a frog on an outcrop to smoke one of his foul cigarettes and watch amiably as she labored to catch up. She grew increasingly indignant. Didn’t he know that men his age shouldn’t be able to ingest tar so relentlessly and still be fit? Didn’t he realize he should be a physical wreck? She scowled up at him. He waved cheerily back. Her feet ached despite her leather boots; her calves and thighs were trembling with exertion; her mouth was tacky with thirst. She reached him at last, slumped down, fetched out her water bottle, swilled and swallowed a mouthful, and asked plaintively, “Are we nearly there yet?”
“Ten minute.”
She squinted suspiciously at him. He had said that every time.
THE SANDSTORM HIT LIGHTLY AT FIRST. Rick sat back in his seat with a relieved smile. “This isn’t so bad,” he said.
“If it doesn’t get any worse.”
It was still light enough outside that he could see the track, despite the sand being blasted against his door and window. Sandstorms tended to fall into two broad categories. One was effectively a dust storm, hundreds of feet high, that blocked out the sun and was disorienting without being particularly brutal. The other—like this one—was a true sandstorm: a fierce wind picking up sand from the dunes and firing them like shotgun pellets.
It wasn’t long before Rick was regretting his complacency. The wind buffeted them