King's Crusade (Seventeen) Page 6

  ‘Check the shipping manifests from eight weeks ago,’ said Jackson. Alexa glanced at him. He pointed at the map. ‘There’s a port in Duba, in the Tabuk province, on the north west coast of Saudi Arabia. There’s also a port in Safaga, two hundred miles from here and across the Red Sea from Duba.’

  Alexa looked at the screen. He was right. She told the Crovir tech where to look. Ten minutes later, they had the cargo manifest for a ship that arrived at Safaga from Duba seven days before the cameras at the mine had captured images of the trucks. A Balcher crawler crane was listed among the transported goods.

  ‘Why Saudi Arabia? They could have gotten a crawler crane from any city in Egypt,’ she pondered with a thoughtful frown after ending the call.

  ‘Visibility.’ Jackson indicated the map again. ‘They would have had to travel on the main roads to get here. You don’t exactly want to be noticed if you’re looting treasure.’

  Alexa had to agree with him. She started the Jeep and continued driving north. Less than an hour later, they rolled onto an asphalt road and headed for a motorway that ran along the Egyptian coastline.

  Night was falling by the time they saw the cluster of lights that was Safaga. Alexa guided the vehicle through the old city and eventually turned in the direction of the port. She negotiated a couple of narrow side roads before finally parking the Jeep next to a derelict warehouse.

  One hundred feet away, lights were still on in the two-storey edifice that housed the offices of the company that owned the Ras Abu, the ship that had transported the crane from Duba. Several people left over the next hour. The parking lot in front of the building gradually emptied until a single car remained.

  Alexa opened the door of the Jeep and stepped out onto the warm asphalt. Jackson joined her.

  ‘I’m not sure this is a good idea,’ he said, following her across the road.

  ‘What isn’t a good idea?’ She scanned their surroundings briefly.

  ‘Breaking and entering,’ said Jackson.

  She glanced at him. ‘It’s more discreet than walking in and asking them for the information.’

  The front door of the building was locked. Alexa removed a lock pick from her jacket and inserted it in the keyhole. It clicked open a couple of seconds later.

  ‘You’re a woman of many worrying talents,’ said Jackson drily, as they entered a small lobby.

  Alexa shone a pen torch on a signboard on the wall to their right. El Bashir Shipping Ltd. was on the second floor of the building. She headed up the stairs and turned down a narrow corridor, Jackson on her heels.

  Light was coming from under a closed door at the end of the passage. Alexa ignored it and entered a large room on the right. It was the main office of the shipping firm. She switched a desk lamp on and looked around. A series of filing cabinets occupied the west wall. The drawers were labeled by month and year. Jackson opened the one for October, and they went through the files together.

  There was no mention of the Balcher crane in any of the paperwork.

  While Jackson continued to search the other cabinets, Alexa turned her attention to the old computer sitting on one of the desks. Ten minutes later, they still had not found any trace of the Ras Abu’s October shipping orders.

  ‘Now what?’ said Jackson.

  Alexa turned off the desk lamp and headed back into the corridor. She stared at the door at the end. A shadow moved across the light that shone through the gap at the bottom.

  Jackson raised his eyebrows. ‘Tell me you’re not thinking of going in there?’

  A grim smile crossed her lips. She strode down the passageway, turned the handle of the door, and pushed it open.

  A short, portly, dark-skinned man with a beard stared at them blankly from the other side of the room beyond. His stubby, multi-ringed fingers froze in the process of placing a document in the wall safe in front of him.

  ‘Perfect,’ murmured Alexa. She crossed the floor toward him.

  The stranger unfroze, reached inside the safe, and brought out a gun. Jackson shouted a warning behind her.

  She raised her right knee, pivoted on her left foot, and kicked the Beretta pistol out of the man’s grasp. There was a loud snap as his thumb broke.

  A strangled gurgle escaped the man’s lips when she closed her hand around his throat in a chokehold, lifted him bodily from the floor, and slammed him down on the desk next to the window. Her gaze shifted briefly to the papers beneath his head.

  ‘Mr. El Bashir?’ she said. The man struggled frantically beneath her, his heels banging against the side of the table while his fists tugged ineffectively at her arm. His eyes were like golf balls in his reddening face. Alexa increased her grip on his Adam’s apple. ‘A nod would suffice.’

  ‘You’re killing him,’ said Jackson darkly. He had picked up the Beretta and stood holding it as if it were a bag full of snakes.

  Alexa ignored him. The stranger was nodding frantically. She let go, took a step back, and waited.

  El Bashir sucked in air and tried to stand up. His knees buckled and he sagged against the desk with a groan. ‘Who—who the devil are you?’ he croaked after several seconds, rubbing the skin of his neck gingerly. His right thumb was red and swelling up visibly.

  ‘That’s irrelevant,’ said Alexa. ‘We’re looking for the October shipping orders for the Ras Abu. Where are they?’

  The man’s eyes betrayed him. For a fraction of a second, his gaze shifted to the wall safe.

  ‘Search it,’ she told Jackson brusquely.

  The Harvard professor frowned as he walked to the opening in the wall. He ignored the piles of foreign currency stacked neatly at the back of the metal box and inspected a pile of document holders. ‘Found it,’ he said after a minute. He pulled out a pair of sheets from a file and scanned the pages quickly. ‘It doesn’t say who ordered the Balcher crane.’

  Alexa turned her attention to the fat man. Sweat stained the collar of his shirt, and beads of perspiration dotted his forehead and upper lip. She glanced at her watch. Almost fifteen minutes had elapsed since they had entered the building. They were wasting precious time.

  She reached behind her back and brought one of her Sigs out of her body holster. El Bashir blanched when she placed the tip of the suppressor against his forehead.

  ‘You have ten seconds to tell me who hired you to bring the crawler crane from Duba,’ said Alexa.

  The fat man’s lips opened and closed soundlessly. ‘These people—these people are dangerous!’ he finally stammered. ‘They said they would kill me if I mentioned a—’

  She moved her hand and fired a shot into the desk. The fat man jumped, emitting a short cry. Across the room, Jackson audibly sucked in a breath.

  ‘Five seconds,’ Alexa said in a conversational tone. ‘Three, two, one. Goodbye, Mr. El Bash—’

  ‘All right, all right!’ the fat man shouted shrilly as she started to squeeze the trigger. She stopped. ‘The order was placed over the phone, with strict instructions not to record any of the details. The man who collected the crane called himself Dragov. Boyko Dragov. That’s the only thing I know, I swear!’

  ‘He didn’t give you a contact number or address?’

  ‘No! He always called me,’ said El Bashir shakily.

  ‘What does he look like?’ asked Alexa.

  El Bashir’s eyes grew large with panic. ‘I really don’t want to—’

  She fired another shot into the desk. Jackson took a step toward her.

  ‘He was—he was tall!’ The words rushed out of El Bashir’s mouth in a breathless stutter. ‘And big! Like that—that green monster from that American TV series!’

  Jackson’s eyebrows rose. ‘You mean, “The Hulk”?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the one!’ said El Bashir, nodding wildly.

 
; Alexa frowned. The man was holding something back. ‘What are you not telling us?’

  El Bashir gulped and looked pleadingly at Jackson.

  ‘It’d be better if you talked,’ said Jackson, glancing at her.

  El Bashir hesitated. ‘This Dragov—he—he wanted me to tell him if I knew of any fishing vessels that would travel to Port Said.’

  ‘You mean up through the Suez Canal?’ said Jackson sharply.

  El Bashir nodded.

  ‘What did you tell him?’ said Alexa. El Bashir’s panicked gaze shifted to the desk. She lowered the gun. Wincing at his swollen thumb, the fat man grabbed a piece of paper and hastily wrote down three lines. He handed her the sheet.

  She studied the names on the list. ‘Do you know whether he hired any of these ships?’

  El Bashir shook his head vigorously. ‘No. Look, all I did was bring the crane across! I’m not involved in anything else that might be going on here!’

  Alexa gazed at him for several seconds. ‘We’re leaving,’ she said finally.

  El Bashir’s shoulders sagged, relief evident in his eyes.

  ‘But,’ she continued, ‘if you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you. You’ll be under surveillance from now on.’ She turned and walked out of the room, leaving the fat man sweating profusely by the desk.

  ‘You were kidding about killing him, weren’t you?’ asked Jackson as he followed her out of the building. ‘And that surveillance thing was just to scare him, right? Hey, I asked you a couple questions!’

  Alexa halted in the parking lot and looked at him over her shoulder. ‘If he were to pose a threat to our mission, I would not hesitate to dispose of him.’

  ‘I don’t believe that!’ exclaimed Jackson.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ she retorted, striding to the Jeep and climbing in the vehicle.

  ‘No, I don’t, do I?’ He got in and slammed the door forcefully behind him.

  Alexa took the satellite phone out of the hardback case and called up the Crovir techs. ‘I need intel on three fishing boats,’ she said and quickly ran through the names on the piece of paper El Bashir had handed her. ‘I want to know if any of them docked in Port Said in the last six weeks.’ She stared blindly at the road ahead while she waited, aware of Jackson brooding at her side. ‘The Juzur Tawilah?’ she said finally, frowning at the windscreen. ‘Any chance of finding out where it unloaded?’

  The Crovir immortal on the other end of the line went silent for a moment. ‘That information is not held in the Port Authority database,’ he replied. ‘They’re probably still using paper records. The only way to find out is to go there.’

  It was Alexa’s turn to be quiet. ‘Can you find me a boat? A fast one?’ she said eventually. ‘No, further up the coast would be better. I want to be in Port Said by lunchtime tomorrow. Also, see what you’ve got on a Boyko Dragov. He’s probably of Bulgarian origin. I’ll wait for your call back.’

  ‘We could drive to Port Said,’ Jackson suggested in a distinctly reluctant tone as she disconnected.

  She shook her head. ‘A boat will be quicker.’

  The phone rang a while later. Alexa listened closely while the Crovir tech spoke. ‘The Abu Tig marina? Good. And Dragov?’ She scowled at the tech’s response. ‘Nothing? All right. I’ll be in touch if I need anything else.’ She ended the call.

  ‘The Abu Tig marina is fifty miles north of here,’ said Jackson.

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Have you been there before?’

  ‘No.’ He shrugged. ‘I read about it once.’

  Alexa recalled Reznak’s words as she started the engine. It seemed her godfather had also been correct about Jackson’s eidetic memory.

  Seconds after she pulled away from the curb, El Bashir exited the building that housed his shipping company. The fat man froze in his tracks when he saw the Jeep go by.

  ‘That guy is gonna have a heart attack before the week’s out,’ Jackson muttered pityingly.

  It was after ten when they reached the resort town of El Gouna and the Abu Tig marina. Lights were still on in the restaurants and bars that lined the harbor, and tourists and locals strolled along the busy promenades.

  Alexa drove to a hotel close to the waterfront and checked them into a room. Jackson’s eyes widened when he saw the pair of fake passports she showed to the receptionist.

  ‘Mr. and Mrs. Thompson? I hope you enjoy your stay with us,’ the man behind the main desk said with a bright smile.

  ‘We’ll need an early checkout in the morning,’ said Alexa.

  ‘Not a problem,’ the receptionist replied with a gracious nod. His smile grew stilted when his gaze fell on their bare ring fingers.

  ‘She’s allergic to jewelry,’ said Jackson, flashing a grin at the man.

  The receptionist’s eyebrows rose slightly. He glanced at their bags. ‘Do you have any other luggage?’

  ‘No,’ said Alexa. She took the passkey and headed in the direction of the room.

  ‘And men. She’s allergic to men,’ Jackson added under his breath as he strode after her. ‘Hey, can I have a look at that passport?’

  She handed him the document.

  ‘When did you do this? And isn’t this picture from my Harvard ID badge?’ he said as he scanned the passport.

  ‘I had it made while you were packing yesterday. Fawkes had it ready at the airport.’ She stopped in front of the door to their room and swiped the passkey across the lock. The lights came on automatically when they crossed the threshold.

  Jackson stared at the layout of the twin room with a deadpan expression. ‘For a second there, I thought we were gonna share a bed.’

  Alexa gave him a flinty look.

  ‘A man can but hope,’ he added with an unapologetic shrug.

  ‘Get some rest.’ She dropped her bag on the bed closest to the door. ‘We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.’

  Chapter Five

  They checked out of the hotel shortly after seven the next morning and made the short journey to the marina on foot. Alexa headed past several luxury yachts until she reached a berth where a sleek, black and chocolate-brown Hunton powerboat was docked.

  A man stood on the polished teak deck; a good six feet tall, with wavy dark hair and gray eyes, he looked like a model who had just stepped off a runway in Milan. ‘Miss Adams?’ he said in a faint Florentine accent, his gaze running appreciatively over her form.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied impassively.

  ‘You’re dead on time,’ said the Italian. His lips curved in a dazzling smile.

  ‘Adams? What’d you do, get a divorce overnight?’ Jackson murmured darkly behind her. She ignored him and stepped onto the boat. He hesitated before following her cautiously.

  The Italian man’s gaze shifted curiously between them. ‘And this would be?’

  ‘An associate,’ said Alexa. She caught Jackson’s scowl out of the corner of her eye and felt an odd sense of satisfaction.

  She was irascible again after last night. While the Harvard professor had fallen asleep seconds after she turned off the lights, she had lain awake for a good few hours, conscious of his every breath and the movements of his body on the bed next to hers. She had never been so aware of another being’s presence, be they immortal or human, in her entire life. It maddened her.

  The Italian man nodded lazily, unfazed by her demeanor. ‘The money has been wired to my account?’

  ‘It’s being done as we speak,’ said Alexa.

  ‘Great. I’ll pick up the boat in two days.’ He handed her a set of keys, stepped onto the pier, and untied the vessel.

  She caught the dock lines he threw at her and stored them on the deck.

  Jackson stuck his head through the open hatch to the cabin. ‘Hey, there’s a galley kitchen
and all sorts of stuff down here.’

  Alexa turned on the engines and guided the powerboat out of the marina. The Italian waved from the pier before walking off. Jackson eventually returned from his explorations and took the bolster seat next to her.

  ‘By the way, did I happen to mention that I get sea sick?’ he said with a grimace.

  She glanced at him. ‘You were fine on the plane.’

  ‘Yeah, well, planes and trains are okay. Boats are a problem.’

  She waited until they were out at sea before pushing the twin throttles. The boat leapt forward and gathered speed.

  ‘How fast does this thing go, anyway?’ Jackson watched the choppy waters at the side with a queasy expression as the powerboat bounced over the wash of a fishing vessel.

  ‘It can do seventy knots.’

  ‘That’s almost eighty miles an hour,’ he said after a second. She looked at him impassively. ‘Oh boy,’ he murmured.

  They passed several islands on their way up the Red Sea and entered the mouth of the Gulf of Suez at the Strait of Jubal less than an hour later. The mountains of the Eastern Desert appeared on their left and tapered off toward the Nile Delta to the north. In the east, bridging the African and Asian continents, rose the Sinai Peninsula; its highest peak, Mount Sinai, was soon visible through a haze of yellow desert dust.

  The wind picked up and the waves doubled in size. Jackson grew pale and threw up over the side twice. Alexa ignored him and held the wheel firmly in her grip. Fishing vessels, oil platforms, and reefs dotted the waters around them as they headed toward the southern end of the Suez Canal and Port Tawfik.