The Cairo Code (76 page)

I thought of that summer when Harry Weaver had first come to Sakkara. I thought of Jack Halder and Rachel Stern, and all the dead names from the past, their bodies long gone to dust, with their passions and pain, hates and intrigues, and I thought how none of it mattered anymore. Above all, I wondered if Jack Halder was still alive. He'd be a very old man now, but really it was no use wondering.

As Weaver had said, little by little we drift from the shores of the past until they become just a distant memory. All that remained of the truth was a worn old photograph and these neglected initials chiseled in stone. But for me, they were truth enough.

I stood, dusted my hands, and walked back down the hill.

•  •  •

I never discovered what happened to Franz Halder's collection, and I never saw Harry Weaver again. He passed away four months later in a New York hospital, two days after suffering a stroke. The prominent newspapers all had obituaries. He was to be buried in a local church cemetery in his hometown, where he and Jack Halder had spent their childhood together.

I was back in New York on leave at the time and I decided to hire a car and make the long drive upstate to pay my final respects. There was a bad storm, I was delayed, and by the time I arrived the funeral had ended. There were dozens of mourners, and more than a few familiar White House faces. Rain drifted in across the cemetery in sheets, and it didn't take long for the crowd to disperse back to their cars as the sound of thunder rolled above us, and then I was alone.

Beyond the white-painted wooden church, on a distant rise, I could see what had once been the site of the residence belonging to Jack Halder's family. It was long gone now, a shopping mall and a parking lot in its place. For some reason I thought about two small boys who had once played there and become friends until passion and circumstance had made them enemies, and their love for a woman had almost destroyed them both.

As I stood there, drenched by the rain, I let my eyes wander over the grave. It was covered with wreaths and bouquets of every description. More than a few were from the Pentagon and the veterans' associations, and there were even two from former American presidents.

But among the wreaths and flowers I noticed a solitary snow-white lily, lying at the base of the black marble slab. A cold shiver ran through me. I picked up the envelope, read the plain white card inside, the handwriting frail and scratched, but the words unmistakable.

They said: “A
promise kept. Jack.”

As ever, no book is written without help, and of the many people who assisted my research I would especially like to mention James H. Griffith, former Secret Service agent to President Roosevelt, who experienced the Cairo Conference in 1943 at first hand; Secret Service archivist Mike Sampson and H. Terrence Samway (Assistant Director, Office of Government Liaison and Public Affairs, Washington) for their kind help in providing archival material; Ted Allbeury, author, and Stephen Franke (Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army, Retired) of the Middle East Services Group, for their much-valued advice on intelligence matters; John Hackett, a true English gentleman, with more stories to tell than any writer could hope to hear in a lifetime; and Samir Raafat, author and historian, for his expert knowledge of wartime Cairo, and for the courtesy and kindness he extended to me during my research in Egypt.

The Cairo Code
is a work of fiction tempered with a measure of truth, and any errors—historical, intended, or otherwise—are solely mine. That the Nazis intended to assassinate President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill during the series of important Allied conferences that took place in the Middle East in late 1943 is historical fact.

The Sphinx mission is based in part on Operation Long Jump, a daring top-secret plan conceived by Heinrich Himmler and Walter Schellenberg, after the infamous Nazi spy in Turkey, Cicero, provided the information—stolen from the safe of the British ambassador—that the American president and British prime minister were to visit Cairo, and then Teheran, for secret talks.

An initial plan was devised jointly by the SD and the Abwehr, using a special team of agents to pinpoint the exact whereabouts of the Allied leaders. When the final stage of the operation was imminent, Berlin dispatched two planeloads of crack SS paratroops, the intention being to storm the conference location and kill Roosevelt and Churchill—the principal target being the American president. Though it came perilously close to succeeding, the plan failed virtually at the last minute, when a captured German agent revealed the conspiracy. The vital radio set that was to have guided down the aircraft, and which had been hidden in an ancient tomb, was destroyed, resulting in one of the Luftwaffe transports of SS troops being shot down, and the second forced to turn back. Until the remaining infiltrators had been killed or captured, President Roosevelt was hastily moved to a secret location by his Secret Service team.

So much of what happened during those dark, intriguing, and exciting days of the Second World War is veiled by the clouds of time and distance. Old intelligence hands fade away and take untold secrets with them to the grave. Whether Sphinx ever really came close to changing the course of world history will forever remain a mystery.

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1999 by Glenn Meade

A slightly different version of this work was previously published in 1999 by St. Martin's Press as
The Sands of Sakkara.

Cover design by Bruce Gore

Cover Image by Getty Images

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First Howard Books trade paperback edition April 2016

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meade, Glenn, 1957–

[Sands of Sakkara]

The Cairo Code : a thriller / Glenn Meade.—First Howard Books trade paperback edition

 pages cm

1. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Egypt—Fiction. 3. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882–1945—Assassination attempts—Fiction. 4. Churchill, Winston, 1874–1965—Assassination attempts—Fiction. I. Title.