The Cairo Code (29 page)

“Darn.”

Two pistol shots cracked in quick succession from somewhere below in the hotel, then came another two, which seemed to echo out in the alley. He raced back along the hall and down the stairs.

•  •  •

“He's dead, sir. He tried to escape—made a move towards the front door. I fired a couple of warning shots to scare him and he just keeled over, clutching his chest. Looks like the shock must have given him a heart attack. I tried to revive him but it was useless. The clerk's called an ambulance, not that it's going to do much good.”

As Reeves spoke, Weaver looked down at Tarik Nasser's overweight body sprawled on the lobby carpet. The blubbery face had turned blue.

Sanson knelt, felt his pulse to be certain.
“
That's all we needed. We still had to question the sod. Did you see anything, Weaver?”

“There's a window open on the third floor. I think someone might have got down the fire escape, but there's no sign of anyone.” He looked at Reeves. “I heard two more shots. Where's Briggs?”

“He should be still covering the rear, sir.”

Sanson paled, got to his feet. “Let's get out the back—”

As they made to move, Briggs rushed in the front door, panting, his revolver still in his hand, and Sanson said urgently, “Did you get the Arab?”

“He got away, sir.”

“Terrific.”

Deacon reversed the Packard into the deserted alleyway near the Rameses station.

He was fuming. There were important things he had planned to do that afternoon before he sent his signal to Berlin that night, but this unexpected disaster had ruined his schedule. It could even ruin
everything.

He halted the car, jerked on the hand brake, rolled down the window. The alleyway was a filthy, stinking place, not a sinner in sight. He lit a cigar to ward off the stench before he stepped out of the car and said aloud, “You can come out. It's safe.”

A second later, Hassan appeared from a recessed doorway, the Walther in his hand. He slipped it into his waistband. “What kept you? I phoned half an hour ago.”

“I got here as fast as I could.” Deacon looked enraged. “Never mind that. What happened? Out with it.”

Hassan told him, his face puzzled. “I don't understand. I was careful entering and leaving the hotel. How did the army know I was there? Tarik told me the police were searching all the hotels in the city. They called on him a few days ago, but he said they didn't seem suspicious. Perhaps they were, but pretended not to be. They could have been watching the hotel all along.”

Deacon said sourly, “There's got to be more to it than that, or they would have nabbed you days ago. You're sure Tarik didn't inform on you?”

Hassan looked insulted.
“Never.
He is my cousin. He saved my life.”

Right now, Deacon couldn't think clearly enough to reason things out. He knew only that he had a terrible gut feeling there was trouble brewing.

“Did anyone get a good look at you as you left the hotel?”

Hassan shook his head. “I escaped the back way, over the rooftops.”

“That doesn't mean they won't get a secondhand description. Some of Tarik's guests are bound to have seen you in the hotel. You said there was shooting?”

“They had a man waiting in the back alley. I think he saw me climb onto the roof and fired two shots. I heard another two shots inside the hotel. And I saw the American officer, Weaver.”

“What?”

“I saw him look out onto the fire escape as I waited on the roof until it was safe to move.” Malice flashed in Hassan's eyes. “If Tarik is harmed, I will kill the American.”

Deacon gritted his teeth in exasperation, unlocked the trunk. He had neglected to tell Hassan that he'd been delayed because he'd driven past the hotel on his way and spotted an ambulance outside, two attendants carrying out a body covered with a blanket. He'd tell him later, once he had found out what had happened. “You'll kill no one. Get in the trunk. I can't have you traveling up front in the car, it's too risky. Don't worry, you'll be able to breathe.”

Hassan reluctantly made to climb into the trunk. “Where are you taking me?”

“To the villa. It's about the only place left. You stay there from now on, until I say it's safe to go out on the streets again. Understand? And start praying no one searches the bloody car if I'm stopped at a checkpoint.”

Weaver sat in the Jeep's passenger seat as Helen Kane drove him towards Giza. “Did Sanson say what it was about?”

“Only that he and General Clayton wanted to see you urgently at Mena House.”

They crossed the English Bridge, and the city gave way to mud-brick villages and sugar-cane fields, until they reached the edge of the desert. Soon they were eight miles west of Cairo, the dusty road busy with American and British military traffic, motorcycle dispatch riders speeding past in both directions.

Weaver felt bad about hardly having seen her in three days and had the nagging feeling he'd overstepped the mark by sleeping with her. “Look, I'm sorry about what happened the other night, Helen.”

“But I'm not.”

“You mean that?”

“Of course. I just wish you didn't look so troubled about it.” She glanced at his face. “My poor Harry. Have I disturbed the ordered pattern of your existence?”

“Something like that.”

She smiled, playfully. “You ought to know by now that women are the Devil.”

“You don't think it might complicate things?”

“Only if you let it. We're human, there's a war on, and it happens all the time, no matter what the military rule books say. I think we can still do our duty and keep a face on things, don't you?”

He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “You're a terrific girl, you know that?”

She smiled back. “Careful. Otherwise I might be tempted to take it further. If you can spare the time, we could always have dinner tonight.”

“It's the best offer I've had in days, but we'd better wait and see what General Clayton has in store. After what happened at the Imperial, somehow I don't think he's going to be in the best of moods.”

The mud-brick dwellings of the poor gave way to the luxury country villas of wealthy Cairenes, until eventually they came to the untidy little village of Nazlat as-Saman, at the foot of the Sphinx and the three Giza pyramids. Farther up the road from the village, at the end of a broad, palm-lined avenue, was a magnificent white-painted building surrounded by individual guest lodges and set in its own private grounds.

Originally an Ottoman hunting lodge in the last century, the Mena House had been bought by an English couple and transformed into a world-famous luxury hotel, a favorite haunt of royalty and the rich, complete with viewing balconies overlooking the pyramids, swimming pools, and lush gardens, all done in lavish colonial style.

“What does a girl have to do to earn a weekend here?”

“I'm sure I could think of something.”

She laughed. “I'm sure we both could.”

“OK, let's see how good the security really is. Better get your special pass ready.”

She swung the Jeep towards the hotel. The long avenue leading up to it had two heavily manned security checkpoints at each end of the track, a hundred yards apart. The road itself was blocked off by red-and-white pole barriers, and there were barbed-wire runs and several machine-gun emplacements either side of the track. A sign warned OFF LIMITS TO ALL PERSONNEL! STRICTLY NO ENTRY!

At the first checkpoint a burly American army captain stepped forward and told them to switch off the engine. He examined their papers thoroughly, including the special passes for the compound which the general had arranged for them to be issued with at GHQ, then went to use the telephone in the sentry hut, while half a dozen armed soldiers thoroughly checked the Jeep, using a mirror on a long pole to study the underside of the vehicle.

The officer finally came back, handed them their papers, and saluted. “Everything's in order, sir. You're expected. I'll have one of my men accompany you to the hotel.”

“That won't be necessary, Captain.”

The officer smiled knowingly. “Procedure, sir. Without an escort, the men at the next checkpoint are liable to blow your heads off without asking questions.”

•  •  •

They drove forward to the second checkpoint, a sergeant with an M3 machine pistol riding in the backseat. The same security drill was repeated with the same thoroughness before they pulled up at the hotel entrance and parked in the special visitors' parking lot opposite the main entrance.

A half-dozen Sherman tanks and armored cars were parked near the front, and sandbagged machine-gun emplacements and antiaircraft batteries had been set up on the roof and around the grounds. The place was a hive of activity, dispatch riders coming and going. There was another security checkpoint in operation in the hotel reception area. It bristled with American and British military police, and near the front of the hotel a detail of army engineers and carpenters was busily testing a mobile ramp, a wood-and-metal contraption on wheels which Weaver guessed was to help get Roosevelt's wheelchair speedily up and down the steps.

“All very impressive,” he said to the sergeant as he climbed out. “And definitely not the kind of place where you try to sneak past the concierge at 4:00 a.m.”

“You ain't seen the half of it, sir. We've put a ring of steel around the area. Watertight ain't the word.”

A grim-looking General Clayton came briskly down the hotel steps, Sanson behind him, accompanied by a tired-looking British major with a mustache. Weaver saluted.

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

“Get back in the Jeep, Harry. We need to talk,” Clayton said gruffly, and climbed into the rear, Sanson and the major crowding in beside him. The general made the introduction. “Meet Major Blake. He's with SIS.”

Blake offered Weaver his hand. “Pleasure to meet you, sir.”

Sanson said brusquely, “Perhaps it's time you got the guided tour, Weaver. We can talk on the way.” He nodded to Helen Kane. “Take her away, Helen. And be careful where you drive. Some of the areas around here are mined.”

•  •  •

It took twenty minutes to drive around the security compound. Weaver saw that the entire hotel and almost a quarter square mile of the surrounding desert had been ringed with a barbed-wire perimeter fence, dotted with machine-gun emplacements, and was patrolled by armed guards. Army engineers were still erecting tents on the Mena House grounds to accommodate the large numbers of troops. Just beyond the protection of the camp, the Sphinx and the pyramids stood as a majestic backdrop.

“We've got in excess of a thousand men guarding the area,” Clayton explained. “By the time the president arrives this place is going to be sealed up as tight as Fort Knox. Each of the delegates will have his own private quarters and additional personal security, depending on rank and status. Added to that, the president will have twenty Secret Service men protecting him, working round-the-clock shifts. And nobody, but nobody, gets inside the area without the proper papers. From this morning, there's a ten-square-mile air exclusion zone patrolled by the RAF and our own boys from the U.S. airbase here in Cairo, and enough antiaircraft batteries to take out half the Luftwaffe. If anyone dares enter the zone they get blasted out of the sky, no questions asked.”

“May I ask where the president will be quartered, sir?”

“In one of the hotel suites. If we have to move him for security reasons, it'll be to the ambassador's private villa, a mile from here. Like the compound, it'll be heavily guarded, but by our own boys. As for the hotel, all employees have been replaced temporarily with military personnel, with the exception of the manager. The Arab staff have all been given a paid holiday. We even had to move several local Bedouin families off their land for the duration. Which brings us to our Arab friend.”

The general looked stern, his displeasure evident. “What happened was a disaster. You'll have to do a lot better, Harry.”

They had come full circle, and Helen Kane pulled up back in the hotel parking lot. Weaver saw that the army engineers had just finished working on the special wheelchair ramp, and two of them wheeled it off to one side.

Clayton sighed as he climbed out of the Jeep. “There's also been a very worrying development. Major Blake, I guess you'd better explain.”

The major addressed Weaver. “Late last night, one of our intelligence people in Stockholm received an important message, passed through a Swedish intermediary from a high-ranking German source. The information said clearly that the Germans intend to kill the U.S. president and British prime minister.”

Weaver frowned grimly. “How?”

“The details are pretty sparse, but it seems their intelligence knows for certain that both men will arrive in Cairo sometime before the twenty-second, and they've devised a plan to kill them. A specialist German team to set up the operation was to be sent to Egypt within forty-eight hours. Our Swedish contact received the information yesterday evening. So that means it could be any time from then until tomorrow tonight.” Blake paused. “That's all we know, sir.”

Weaver turned pale. “I see.”

“I guess this puts a serious new perspective on things,” said Clayton. “It seems your fears about this Arab were correct all along. We've put extra coastal patrols in the air from this morning, as well as the air exclusion zone. There's some pretty lousy weather due to hit the northern Med over the next couple of nights, a deterrent in itself, but we can't be too careful. The Krauts are desperate enough to try anything.”

“And not to be treated with kid gloves,” Sanson remarked. “Or wouldn't you agree, Weaver?”