Free Four Ways to Pharaoh Khufu by Alexander Marmer

pressed a speed dial button. Almost immediately the paramedic started speaking rapidly in Arabic with the person on the other end of the call. A couple of moments later, the paramedic barked at the driver to pull over at the intersection of El-Malek and Faisal Bridge, next to Giza Square. The driver complied. After a brief stop the ambulance slowly merged back into traffic with a new passenger on board: Asim. Asim looked hard at Schulze’s body on the gurney. As the driver navigated the ambulance through the hectic and notorious mid-morning Cairo traffic, Asim spoke briefly to the paramedic while handing him an envelope. Slowly and purposefully, Asim made his way to Schulze’s gurney, his bushy Afro waving with the ambulance’s jerking and swaying. Keeping his icy eyes fixed on his victim the entire time; he quickly disconnected each of the tubes from Schulze’s body.
    You will die! That’s what you deserve! The thoughts that ran through his mind did little to calm him, as he still did not have the stele. Schulze took his last breath and his eyes rolled over. Asim sat next to Schulze and began a slow and meticulous search of his lifeless body.
    But all he found was a wallet. Opening it, he found a German driver’s license, several family pictures, 120 euros and 100 L.E. It can’t be! There’s gotta be something … some kind of clue! Asim slowly inspected Schulze’s clothes. He first inspected the dead man’s vest, sticking his hand in the pockets. After a close inspection of the dead man’s shirt and undershirt he found nothing unusual. The dead man’s trousers were then inspected with the same effort. In the end, Asim’s search of Schulze’s dead body had produced the same fruitless result as the search of Schulze’s hotel room the previous day. Hanging onto a strap, Asim stood up in the rocking ambulance and took an overhead view of his prey. He let out a deep, anguished sigh.
    What am I going to say to the chief ? In a fury, he kicked the gurney, but Schulze’s spirit was already too far away to feel it. However, it did prompt Schulze’s left foot to fall off the gurney. Startled, Asim looked at the dead man’s exposed black sock. He braced himself against the swaying ambulance and bent over to pick up the man’s foot. He yanked off the shoe, tossing it aside. Then he grabbed the top of the sock and began pulling it off. And as he pulled, a white piece of paper was revealed. Curious at the unexpected discovery, Asim carefully pulled out the thin white piece of paper with a familiar logo, three capital red letters on a yellow background: DHL , a division of the German logistics company, Deutsche Post.
    Asim felt triumphant! The white piece of paper he was holding was a postal receipt dated September 12 th . The Medjay glared down at Schulze’s body. That was six days ago , Asim thought. He must have mailed our sacred stele six days ago. The thought of their stele being shipped to a foreign country gave him a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Oh Horus, living and great, please no!” He sobbed in a whispered wail. The crackling sounds of the ambulance radio muffled his desperate cry of prayer.
    As the ambulance made a sharp turn onto El-Tahrir Street in front of the Jordanian embassy, it suddenly came to a complete stop. The ambulance was stuck in the city’s infamous traffic, despite being only a dozen street blocks away from Cairo’s public hospital, Anglo-American Hospital Zohoreya . The ambulance’s wailing siren had no effect on the traffic clogging the El-Galaa Bridge as it crossed the Nile. Nobody moved and nobody even attempted to pull aside to let the emergency vehicle through, which is typical for Cairo traffic.
    Asim quickly examined the postal receipt. Mailed from 38 Abd El-Khalek Tharwat Street in Downtown, Cairo , he read silently. Below the heading, he observed that the item shipped weighed one kilogram and that 200 Egyptian pounds was paid for DHL Express Worldwide