Pandemic

"He's not the only one missing," Gamal whispered, as if spies surrounded his phone booth.

"Who else?" Eleish asked impatiently.

"A number of other regulars, men and women, have been gone for the same time," Gamal said.

"And you've heard nothing about their whereabouts?"

"No," Gamal said. "I've been going to prayers regularly. I did overhear two men discussing a 'desert base,' but I couldn't make out the rest of their conversation. And it's not safe for me to be asking too many questions."

"Okay," Eleish said, reaching for his cigarette. "Good work, Bishr. I will pay you triple for this. But I want you to stick close by the mosque. Report back to me if you hear anything new."

"I will, Sergeant Eleish, I will," Gamal said in a solemn, hushed voice.

Eleish hung up the phone. Distractedly, he reached into his desk drawer looking for the snack that his wife always packed for him. Then he realized that it was the middle of Ramadan. Like every day during the Muslim holy month, he had to fast until sunset, when he would say the evening prayers, or Taraweeh, with his family at their mosque. He was supposed to have forsaken smoking during Ramadan's daylight hours, as well, but he had long decided he couldn't manage both and opted for what he considered the lesser sin.

His stomach rumbling, he reached for the file that he kept separate from the open cases. On the flap, "Hazzir Al Kabaal" was written in pencil. He flipped it open and scanned his own scrawled handwriting from the past eight years.

Gamal's information fit with what Eleish discovered earlier in the morning. When he checked with Kabaal's newspapers (under the pretense of buying substantial advertising space) no one had seen or heard from the publishing magnate in over a week. "On vacation," he was told. Eleish realized that it still wasn't a crime in Egypt to take a vacation, but he didn't believe for a moment that Kabaal was lounging on a beach. Though he'd only met the man twice, after years of studying him Eleish knew Kabaal inside and out. He was a creature of habit. And vacations — at least ones where he left his mosque during Ramadan and dropped out of contact with the newspapers that he oversaw with a mother's devotion — were not Kabaal's style.

Achmed Eleish stamped out the butt in the ashtray and reached for another cigarette through the smoke wafting in front of him. He had no proof of any wrongdoing. When it came to Kabaal, proof was something he always lacked. And Eleish believed this recurring issue damaged his coronary arteries as much as the cigarettes.

Compounding his frustration, Eleish had so little time to dedicate to his pursuit of Kabaal, Rarely had Eleish ever fallen so far behind in his caseload of unsolved murders and other crimes. And like the rest of the police force, he was under constant pressure from above to intensify the crackdown on Egypt's homosexuals. He found it an insulting and laughable waste of time to harass Cairo's underground, but thriving gay community.

Eleish closed the file on Kabaal. He tapped his nicotine-stained fingertips on the back of the manila folder as he weighed his options. True, he had more pressing official matters than locating a missing mogul who was not known to have broken any laws, but Eleish felt a sense of criticalness that he could not readily explain. A voracious reader of detective novels, Eleish had long believed in the "hunch". His hunches had solved many cases over his twenty-five-year career. One of those same hunches told him that finding Kabaal, and soon, was an issue of great urgency.

Whatever Kabaal was up to, Eleish suspected it would only serve to further shame his beloved Islamic faith. And he intended to prevent that from happening at any cost.

PARK TOWER PLAZA HOTEL, LONDON, ENGLAND

Malcolm Ezra Fletcher III-Fletch to any of the boys back in Arkansas — couldn't shake his nagging cough. The hulking, fifty-five-year-old oil company executive was damned if a little head cold was going to ruin his first trip to London. Just my luck, Fletch thought, my first day clear of interminable meetings and I wake up with a fever and cough.

The cough reminded him of the young woman he'd seen getting out of his taxi in front of the hotel. He remembered that the pretty little thing had been hacking up a lung, too. Maybe that was where he picked up his cold? Wherever it came from, it was a doozy!

Still, lying around feeling sorry for himself was never Fletch's style. He hadn't missed a day of work in thirty-two years due to illness, and he wasn't about to miss his only chance to sightsee because of it either. He pushed himself out of bed and headed for the landmarks.