‘You still have nine fingers left,’ Ben said. ‘It can’t have been that bad.’

‘And I plan on keeping it that way.’

Ben smiled. ‘Nothing so hot this time, Abdou. I promise. I just want to know where I can buy a watch.’

‘That’s it? A watch?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Looks to me like you already have a watch,’ said the old man pointedly, looking at Ben’s Omega.

‘But say I wanted something a little more special and I wasn’t inclined to pay the full price. Where could I go?’

Abdou shrugged. ‘Anywhere in Cairo. Any one of a thousand guys. Take your pick. How should I know?’

‘Come on, Abdou. You can do better than that.’ Ben took out a wad of money and held it there under the old man’s hungry gaze. ‘The watch I’m looking for would have hit the market in the last couple of months. A gold Rolex Oyster. Very distinctive. I’m prepared to offer top dollar for it. No messing around.’

Abdou’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘Why?’

‘Let’s just say it’s of personal interest to me. I’d like it back.’

‘Nobody gets hurt?’

‘Nobody who didn’t bring it on themselves,’ Ben said.

The old guy thought about it for a moment. Then his old face crinkled. Ben knew what he was thinking. What the hell. I still have nine fingers left.

‘I can give you a list of names,’ Abdou said. ‘If your watch is still in Cairo, someone will know.’

Ten minutes later Ben was back out in the street with the CZ75 pistol in his waistband. In his pocket was a notepad page with five names, five addresses. He walked to the waiting taxi.

It was going to be a long night.

Chapter Sixteen

Within an hour, five names had dropped to three. Abdou’s list wasn’t turning out as productive as Ben had hoped. The first address he went to, west of the river, was just a sea of rubble with Portacabins and cranes throwing long shadows in the moonlight. A billboard told him the area had been demolished to make way for some new retail development.

When the second place turned out to be deserted, derelict, Ben was beginning to suspect the old man had tricked him, and began to think about paying him a return visit.

But then the third address raised his hopes again. Ben got the taxi to drop him off a few hundred yards away and walked the rest. The pawnshop was just as Abdou had described it, tucked away from the street. There were enough furtive-looking guys hanging around in the neighbourhood to make Ben think it was exactly the kind of place a certain type of opportunist thief would go to dispose of an especially hot item. Abdou had said the proprietor, Moussa, was one of the best fences in Cairo. The hanging Fender guitars and digital camcorders in the barred window were just a front. The choice stuff was locked away upstairs in Moussa’s private quarters.

The place was easy to break into through a side entrance. Ben entered silently, followed the sound of the beeping alarm keypad to the control box and ripped it off the wall. He took a mini Maglite from his bag and flashed it discreetly around him. The shop was an Aladdin’s cave of bric-a-brac, most of it useless junk. Raking through the place, Ben found a glass cabinet stuffed with watches: Sekonda, Timex, Casio, Citizen. Nothing too prestigious on open display-but he hadn’t expected there to be.

Through a bead curtain, up a flight of steps, moving silently in the darkness. He drew Abdou’s pistol from his belt. A yellow streak of light under a door, the sound of a TV-canned laughter, some imported comedy show. The volume was turned up high enough to have drowned the beeps of the alarm. Ben smiled in the darkness. Careless.

The door was flimsy and gave way on the first kick.

Moussa was alone. The room around him was strewn with fast-food packaging and bachelor debris. He was sitting on a sofa in his underwear facing the TV, a big spoon in one hand and a tub of ice cream in the other. He spun around in panic as the door crashed in, long black hair whipping around and his thick beard parting in a gape of horror. The spoon and the ice cream dropped out of his hands as Ben strode up to him, grabbed his beard and dragged him down off the sofa onto the floor. The pawnbroker sprawled on his back, blinking, too shocked to make a sound.

Ben was a big believer in simplicity, and the approach he used to get the truth out of people was as simple as he could make it. It was a system that had worked for him many times, in a lot of situations, and when it was the appropriate course of action it never failed. It was the ultimate test of sincerity.

He planted a foot on Moussa’s chest, pointed the CZ75 in his face and watched his eyes. ‘I have a couple of questions,’ he said softly.

Five minutes later, Ben’s heart was sinking again. The man knew nothing. He was slumped against the wall, his hair slicked with sweat and tears, mouth hanging open in shock. He’d passed the test. All Ben could do was move on to the next name on the list.

He laid a couple of banknotes on a table as he walked back to the shattered door. ‘Thanks for your time,’ he said, and left.

It was after midnight by the time he made it to the fourth place on his list. As the taxi rolled up, Ben did a double-check that the address was right. It was.

He opened the car door and stepped out into the sultry night air. Not the kind of environment he would have expected to find one of Abdou’s contacts. It was a nice, respectable, middle-class street of neat white houses and trim little gardens. The pavement was lined with trees, and the cars parked along the kerb were relatively new, clean and well cared for. The kind of place a schoolteacher would live. Not rich, not poor, not particularly exciting and completely safe. It might have been the perfect cover for someone in Abdou’s line of work. Or then, Ben thought, it might be a complete wild card.

He looked up at the house. There was a light on upstairs, shining through a gap in closed drapes. A movement from inside. Someone getting ready for bed, maybe. He hesitated for a moment, creaked open the small wrought-iron gate and walked up a path to the front door. He rang the bell. A minute went by, and then he heard sounds from inside. A woman’s voice speaking Arabic. Footsteps coming down the stairs. A little scrape of metal from the other side of the door told him that someone was sliding aside the cover of the peephole to see who was there. The door opened a crack, pulling the security chain taut.

A woman’s face appeared in the gap. She was perhaps in her late thirties, but she looked tired and careworn. There were lines on her brow and flecks of grey in her black hair and her eyes narrowed with suspicion as she peered out at him.

Through the three-inch aperture Ben could see a pair of teenage boys behind their mother in the hallway. Both were dressed in T-shirts and shorts, hair tousled as if they’d climbed out of bed in a hurry to see who the mystery visitor was. One was about thirteen, the other maybe a couple of years older. The elder one was trying hard to look strong and protective. Ben guessed that meant there was no father in the household. Behind the two kids, the hallway was littered with crates and cardboard boxes. It looked as though the family were either in the middle of moving out, or moving in. This wasn’t looking promising. He glanced again at the name on his list.

‘Mrs Hassan?’ he said to the woman in Arabic.

‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘It’s late. What do you want?’

‘I need to talk to your husband, Mrs Hassan. Can I come inside?’

She hesitated, shook her head. ‘My husband’s not here any more.’

‘Where can I find him? It’s important.’

‘Whatever business you had with him, you’re too late.’

‘Where did he go?’ Ben asked. But the look of intense sadness on the woman’s face was already telling him the answer.