The Seventh Scroll by Wilbur Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

bed.
    the end the solution to her problem was simplicity itself. She merely phoned the administration office and arranged for them to collect the box of slides from her office and send it out to the airport in a taxi with one of the secretaries.
    When the secretary handed them over to her at the British Airways check'in desk, he told her, "The police were at the Museum when we opened this morning. They wanted to speak to you, Doctor." Obviously they had traced the registration of the wrecked Renault. She was pleased that she had her British Passport. If she had tried to leave the country with her Egyptian papers she might have run into delays: the police would probably have placed a restriction order on all passport control points. As it was, she passed through the checkpoint with no difficulty and, once she was in.the final departure lounge, she went to the news-stand and studied the array of newspapers.
    All the local newspapers carried the story of the bombing of her car, and most of them had resurrected the story of Duraid's murder and linked the two events. One of them hinted at fundamentalist religious involvement. El Arab had a front-page photograph of herself and Duraid, which had been taken the previous month at a reception for a group of visiting French tour operators.
    It gave her a pang to see the photograph of her husband looking so handsome and distinguished, with herself on his arm smiling up at him. She purchased copies of all the papers and took them on board the British Airways flight.
    During the flight she passed the time by writing down in her notebook everything she could remember from what Duraid had told her of the man that she was going to find..
    She headed the page: "Sir Nicholas Quenton-Harper (Bart)." Duraid had told her that Nicholas's great-grand, father had been awarded the title of baronet for his work as a career officer in the British colonial service. For three generations the family had maintained the strongest of ties with Africa, and especially with the British colonies and spheres of influence in North Africa: Egypt and the Sudan, Uganda and Kenya.
    According to Duraid, Sir Nicholas himself had served in Africa and the Gulf States with the British army. He was a fluent Arabic and Swahili speaker and a noted amateur archaeologist and zoologist. Like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, he had made numerous expeditions to North Africa to collect specimens and to explore the more remote regions. He had written a number of articles for various scientific journals and had even lectured at the Royal Geographical Society. When his elder brother died childless, Sir Nicholas had inherited the title and the family estate at Quenton Park. He had resigned from the army to run the estate, but more especially to supervise the family museum that had been started in 1885 by his great-grandfather, the first baronet. It housed one of the largest collections of African fauna in private hands, and its ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern collection of artefacts was equally famous.
    However, from Duraid's accounts she concluded that there must be a wild, and even lawless, streak in Sir Nicholas's nature. It was obvious that he was not afraid to take some extraordinary risks to add to the collection at Quenton Park.
    Duraid had first met him a number of years previously, when Sir Nicholas had recruited him to act as an intelligence officer for an illicit expedition to
    "liberate' a number of Punic bronze castings from Gadaffi's Libya. Sir Nicholas had sold some of these to defray the expenses of the expedition, but had kept the best of them for his private collection.
    More recently there had been another expedition, this time involving an illegal crossing of the Iraqi border to bring out a pair of stone has-relief friezes from under Saddam Hussein's nose. Duraid had told her that Sir Nicholas had sold one of the pair for a huge amount of money; he had mentioned the sum of five million US