The labyrinth of osiris, p.39
The Labyrinth of Osiris, page 39
‘I’m guessing business rather than social,’ he said as the two men climbed.
‘Extraordinary powers of deduction,’ quipped his friend, brandishing the briefcase and rolled-up map he was holding.
‘The water test results?’
‘The very same. Sorry to have kept you waiting.’
The apology was unnecessary. Since he’d started looking into the Samuel Pinsker story, the curious case of the Coptic well poisonings had receded to the very back of Khalifa’s mind. There’d been no reports of further incidents, all was quiet out at the Attia farm. So far as it was still on his radar, he’d all but settled into the view that the whole thing was a storm in a tea glass.
‘You’re going to tell me they went bad naturally, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘Nothing of the sort,’ replied Omar. ‘The wells were poisoned, no question. All seven of them.’
‘Three,’ corrected Khalifa.
‘Seven. I did some trawling around and on top of the ones you gave me, I turned up another four that had also been affected.’
Khalifa stopped. Suddenly it was the Labyrinth of Osiris that had receded.
‘You sure about this?’
‘Absolutely. And those are just the ones that have been reported. There could well be more. No pun intended. You know – well, well …’
Khalifa ignored the joke.
‘All Coptic?’
‘Four of them are.’
‘According to my maths that leaves another three.’
‘On the ball as ever, sahebi.’
‘And?’
‘Those are Muslim-owned. One’s a Bedouin watering hole over near Bir el-Gindi, one a smallholding down towards Barramiya, and the other one … I can’t remember precisely where that was – I’ve got the details in here.’
He lifted his briefcase. Khalifa’s mind was clicking, trying to adjust itself to a picture that appeared to be showing something very different from what he had initially imagined it to be showing.
‘It’s been interesting,’ said Omar. ‘Very interesting. Important, actually. I think we should talk. Shall we …’
He motioned up the stairs. Khalifa led the way up to the fourth floor and along the corridor to his office, only to find Ibrahim Fathi sitting in there with his feet on the desk, crunching torshi and chatting on the phone. The neighbouring room was free and they went in there instead.
‘I’ve done a brief summary of the situation,’ said Omar, once the door was closed, opening his case and handing over a stapled bunch of papers. ‘Preliminary Report on Regionalized Hydro-geological Anomalies in the Sahara al-Sharqiya’ read the title page. ‘But it’s probably easiest if I just talk you through the whole thing. If you wouldn’t mind clearing a space there.’
He started unrolling the map while Khalifa made room for it on a nearby desk, helping his friend to flatten it out and weighing the corners with, respectively, a mug, an ashtray, a hole puncher and The Complete Manual of Egyptian Policing – the first time in twenty years Khalifa had ever found a use for the last. Unlike the map on the wall in Khalifa’s office, which showed the whole of Egypt, this one covered just a small segment of the country: the rectangle of desert framed by the Nile to the west, the Red Sea to the east and Routes 29 and 212 north and south. Within the confused filigree of wadis, tracks, gebel and contour lines, seven small crosses had been marked in red ink. The poisoned wells, presumably. Khalifa lit a Cleopatra and the two men bowed over the desk.
‘I’ll try to keep this short and not bore you with a lecture –’ began Omar.
‘Hamdulillah.’
‘– but before I get on to the wells –’ he indicated the seven crosses – ‘it’s probably worth giving a bit of context so you at least understand what the hell I’m talking about.’
Khalifa dragged on his cigarette and motioned his friend to continue.
‘So: the central Eastern Desert.’ Omar slapped a palm on to the middle of the map. ‘Geologically this sits on the edge of what’s known as the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer – basically a vast subterranean sheet of water-permeated, semi-porous sandstone sandwiched between, and cut through by, layers of non-porous rock: basalt, granite, clay, that sort of thing. A “confined aquifer” as we refer to it in the business, meaning the water is locked underground.’
Khalifa took another drag. Whatever else he was getting out of helping Ben-Roi, it was certainly proving educational.
‘The water itself is for the most part non-replenishable fossil water,’ his friend went on. ‘Which is to say, water that drained into the rock tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years ago and has been down there ever since. There’s a limited amount of hydraulic conductivity due to gravity changes and atmospheric pressure differences – I won’t go into the physics of it all –’
‘Hamdulillah,’ repeated Khalifa, who was already starting to get lost.
‘– but to all intents and purposes the water is static. It doesn’t move, it doesn’t go anywhere, it’s not recharged, it doesn’t dissipate. It just sits down there in the pores of the sandstone, boxed in by the afore-mentioned non-porous layers. Imagine a sponge encased in watertight concrete and you get a rough idea.’
Through the wall Khalifa could hear Ibrahim Fathi talking on the phone, although thankfully the torshi-crunching remained out of earshot. It was a sound Khalifa had always found irritating, and he was having enough trouble keeping up with things without extra distractions.
‘Virtually every well in the Eastern Desert,’ continued Omar, ‘and the Western Desert too, for that matter, is drilled down into this static water system. The depth of the wells obviously varies from place to place depending on the proximity of the aquifer to the surface – anything from twenty metres to two kilometres – but the basic principle is always the same. To reuse the sponge analogy, it’s like pushing a straw through the concrete into the sponge and sucking out the water.’
He paused a moment to allow Khalifa to absorb this, then:
‘There are, however, some rare and rather interesting exceptions.’
Something about his intonation made Khalifa prick up his ears at this.
‘How do you mean, exceptions?’
‘Well, in certain places the geology of the aquifer system is much more confused,’ explained Omar. ‘The non-porous bulkheads break down, the sandstone itself is fragmented, intercuts with seams of heavily fractured limestone – again, I won’t bore you with all the hydro-geological detail. All you really need to know is that deep underground there are fault-lines zigzagging through the aquifer. Cracks, basically. Most of the time they’re just a few hundred metres long, but occasionally they run for kilometres, or even tens of kilometres. Almost like subterranean pipes.’
There was a knock on the door and the constable from downstairs came into the room, bringing the tea Khalifa had requested. Omar waited for him to deposit his tray and leave, then picked up the thread.
‘The extra space in these cracks obviously allows for increased water movement,’ he said, spooning three sugars into his glass and stirring. ‘We’re not talking gushing underground rivers or anything, but the water does travel, in a way it doesn’t in most other parts of the aquifer. Slowly, usually, a few dozen metres a year at most. If the crack is on an acute gradient, however, or if anywhere along its length precipitative water from flash floods is able to penetrate, the movement can be considerably more pronounced. They did an experiment last year down at Gebel Hammata where they introduced dye into one of the cracks shortly before a flood and it was carried almost five kilometres in as many months.’
‘Fascinating,’ murmured Khalifa, wondering where on earth all this was leading. Omar saw what he was thinking and held up a finger, indicating that he should be patient, that the point was coming.
‘It’s only recently that people have started looking at these fault-lines in any sort of detail,’ he said. ‘Mainly because we haven’t had the necessary technology. But there’s now a team up at Helwan University who are using aerial remote sensing to try to map the cracks, or at least the major ones. And as luck would have it, one of the areas they’ve been surveying is the one we’re interested in.’ He gave the map another slap. ‘Just on a hunch, I got in touch and passed on the coordinates of the poisoned waterholes. And what do you think they found?’
‘All on fault-lines?’ hazarded Khalifa.
‘Exactly. All of the seven wells happen to have been dug down into hydro-conductive cracks. The water they’re drawing is moving water. Keep that thought in your head –’ he tapped Khalifa’s temple – ‘and now look at the distribution of the wells.’
He indicated the seven red crosses again.
‘At first glance it all seems totally random, doesn’t it? Just a scatter of wells without any obvious linking pattern. Factor in when they were poisoned, however, and a pattern does emerge. The earliest reported incident was here, at Deir el-Zeitun.’
He touched the cross nearest to the centre of the map, marking the monastery Demiana Barakat had told Khalifa about.
‘And the most recent one here.’ He touched the cross marking the position of the Attia farm. ‘And from here –’ Deir el-Zeitun – ‘to here –’ Attia farm – ‘the poisonings form a clear dating sequence. Basically, the further they move from the central highlands, the later they get.’
A finger of ash was starting to build up on the end of Khalifa’s Cleopatra. He didn’t notice it. Out of nowhere the tingle in his spine had returned.
‘Now there are various ways of rationalizing that pattern,’ continued Omar. ‘Conceivably it’s just a coincidence. Or possibly, for reasons best known to themselves, someone’s planned a campaign of well poisonings starting with the remotest ones first. For me, though, the obvious explanation – the only real explanation – is that the wells aren’t being poisoned from above ground, but from below. And whatever is causing the poisoning is somehow getting into the aquifer here –’ he rapped a knuckle bang in the middle of the map, on the contour ripples of the Gebel el-Shalul – ‘and percolating outwards and downwards along the hydro-conductive fault-lines.’
The ash on the end of Khalifa’s cigarette snapped, raining down on to the map. He brushed it away. The tingle was getting stronger. Much stronger.
‘All of which brings us neatly round to the water analysis,’ said Omar, reaching over and picking up his report, which Khalifa had left on the neighbouring desk. ‘It took a bit of time, and I had to call in a few favours, but I managed to get samples from all seven wells. The results came in yesterday. As I was expecting, all the wells were poisoned by the same thing, give or take some slight variations in specific concentrations. What they were poisoned by, however, came as a bit of a surprise.’
He opened the report, flicked through, started to read:
‘Trace levels of mercury. Elevated levels of selenium, fluoride and chloride. Off-the-scale levels of –’ He glanced across at Khalifa. ‘– arsenic.’
Khalifa gawped. ‘Someone’s dumping arsenic in the water?’
‘It certainly looks that way. Although the interesting thing isn’t so much the arsenic itself as finding it in combination with those other elements. This is getting way out of my field, but I’ve spoken to some people I know, and the consensus seems to be that we’re dealing with the residue of an off-gas precipitate from a sulphur roaster.’
The gawp rearranged itself into a bewildered glaze. ‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘I had to ask the same thing,’ said Omar, laughing. ‘Apparently it’s a stage in the process of separating ore from rock. It’s used in various forms of metal extraction – copper, zinc, lead. Although in this case the high levels of arsenic point more towards the leftovers from—’
‘Gold-mining.’
Khalifa finished the sentence. The tingle was gone. In its place a hard, throbbing drum-beat deep in the pit of his stomach. He stared at the map, at the highlands of the central desert, then squashed his Cleopatra into the ashtray holding down the map’s south-east corner.
‘Would you excuse me a moment, Omar?’ he said. ‘I’ve got a couple of urgent calls to make.’
JERUSALEM
MIDWAY THROUGH THE morning Archbishop Petrossian was returned to house arrest in the Armenian compound. The crowds in Omar Ibn al-Khattab dispersed, the journalists packed up, Baum got a roasting from Chief Gal for his handling of the whole thing. Ben-Roi and Zisky went back to their office and had just sat down to talk through their next move when their phones went off. Simultaneously. Zisky crossed the office and picked up his landline; Ben-Roi swivelled in his chair and answered his mobile. Khalifa. None of the usual pleasantries.
‘I think I might be on to something.’
He filled Ben-Roi in – Pinsker, the Labyrinth, the possibility the mine might still be viable, the poisoned wells. Ben-Roi scribbled the odd note to himself, but for the most part just sat listening, his expression registering first interest, then amazement, then, with the news about the wells, disbelief.
‘It has to be a coincidence,’ he said when Khalifa had finished. ‘My case, your case, same case – no, no, no, I don’t buy it. It’s too neat. Way too neat.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Khalifa. ‘I mean, it’s not like Pinsker’s mine is the only one in the Eastern Desert. But when I followed it up with the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, they told me there are no other gold mines operating anywhere near that area. The nearest ones are at Sukari Hill and Hamash, which are down past Marsa Alam. Over two hundred kilometres away.’
On the other side of the room Ben-Roi could hear Zisky’s voice – something about a bus, an unscheduled stop. He was way too engrossed in what Khalifa was saying to pay it any mind.
‘I still don’t buy it,’ he said. ‘There has to be another explanation.’
‘What do you make of this, then?’ said Khalifa. ‘While I had her on the phone I asked the woman at the ministry to check if there had ever been any mining in that region. There hasn’t. Or at least not in modern times. The only thing she could find was a lapsed exploration concession from fifteen years ago for a company called Prospecto Egypt. They spent eighteen months surveying in precisely that part of the desert.’
‘So?’
‘So, Prospecto are a subsidiary of Barren Corporation.’
Ben-Roi chewed his lip. In front of him Dov Zisky had stood and gone over to the map of Israel on the wall.
‘So what are you suggesting?’ he asked. ‘That Barren found this mine, have been working it on the quiet?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just giving you the facts. Although that does seem to be where the facts are leading. Concession licences aren’t cheap, after all. Barren would save themselves a lot of money working the mine illegally. And then if your journalist woman somehow found out about it, threatened to blow the whistle …’
Zisky called over, but Ben-Roi held up a hand to show he was busy. Funny, he thought – a week ago he’d asked Khalifa to do a bit of digging out on the margin of his case, now the Egyptian seemed to be solving it for him. He ran the scenario through his head, trying to match it with all the other clues they’d turned up. He had no idea whether it was feasible for someone to operate a gold mine in secret, although from what Khalifa had said the location was extremely remote, so maybe it was possible. Leave that aside for the moment. A lot of other pieces fitted. The newspaper articles, Pinsker, Barren, Egypt. The Nemesis Agenda too, if Kleinberg had been approaching them in the hope they’d picked up something about the mine in one of their hacking attacks. Or maybe she’d been going to tip them off. Either way it worked, just about. The problem element now was Vosgi and the sex-trafficking thing. How on earth did that relate to an illegal gold mine in the middle of the Egyptian desert? It didn’t – or at least not in any way that he could immediately fathom. As before, he felt like he’d shunted the carpet to fit one side of the room only to leave an unsightly gap at the other. Try as he did, he could never seem to cover the whole floor.
‘Ben-Roi?’ Khalifa’s voice echoed down the line.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was just going through it all. Listen, I owe you big time for this, my friend. Really big time. We’ll follow it up and I’ll let you know how—’
Before he could say ‘it all turns out’, Khalifa jumped in.
‘I’ll see what else I can turn up,’ he said. ‘It might be remote, but even so I can’t believe they could be running a mine out there without someone knowing about it. Someone must have seen or heard something.’
Ben-Roi told the Egyptian he’d already done more than enough, but Khalifa insisted, and in the end Ben-Roi thought, What the hell, if he wants to help out, who am I to dissuade him? Maybe in a way it’s helping him too. Like the Hannah Schlegel case helped me. Which was, after all, the reason he’d got Khalifa involved in the first place.
They agreed to keep in touch and Khalifa rang off. Ben-Roi sat a moment, drumming and swivelling on his chair, mulling it all over. Then, standing, he crossed to Zisky’s desk.
‘Sorry about that, Dov. Some interesting developments in Egypt. What have you got?’
‘The driver came back to me,’ said Zisky.
Ben-Roi’s brain was still half in the conversation with Khalifa, and it took him a couple of seconds to get what the kid meant. Of course. The Egged ticket. From the bin in Kleinberg’s flat. Return to Mitzpe Ramon. The bus driver had been away on holiday.
‘And?’
‘And I think we might be on to something.’
The second time someone had used the phrase in the space of fifteen minutes. Things were looking up.
