THE MODERN TRAVELER’S FIRST view of Egypt is appropriate: Cairo airport, set out in the flat, brown sand of the desert stretching away in silent heat for miles. It is a landscape that communicates, quite distinctly, a sense of agelessness, unchanging, interminable.
Pierce flew in from Athens on a Polish airlines turboprop—a dirty, grumbling airplane that bounced down onto the Cairo airstrip in a disgruntled way and discharged its passengers into the late summer heat. The airline had only recently begun service to Cairo, and then only for a particular reason: to bring Russian technicians into the country to work on the dam.
The airport was handsome, almost splendid, with that faintly overblown quality that distinguishes many modern Egyptian buildings, dwarfing the people, contrasting with their poverty. The marble floors were polished and the friezes were monumental, but the baggage delivery was inefficient and the customs officials lazy and carping. He was glad he had already obtained a visa for his first visit. Travelers who had planned to buy them at the airport were obviously in for a long wait.
He stopped at the bank on the way out and changed some traveler’s checks for Egyptian pounds. The bank was short on small change—a characteristic of all banks in the country—and he was paid his last few piasters in stamps and advised curtly to send some postcards home.
He looked at the money. The bills were not bad, but the coins had digits written in Arabic. He had not understood the denominations before, and he did not understand them now. They all looked the same to him. He walked outside and caught a taxi into town.
It was a half-hour ride along a straight highway. The sun was setting, turning the sky pink, then red, then suddenly black. There were no clouds, and the sunset had a rather cold quality. The driver told him in excellent English how the desert in this region had been a huge British bivouac during the war. Pierce did not listen.
The land was flat, desolate, windy; there was no vegetation, no sign of life.
They entered the outskirts of town, passing down broad avenues lined with elegant mansions built in the Victorian style. Date-palm trees swayed gently in the evening breeze. Traffic thickened into a weaving swarm of black-and-white Fiat taxis, most of them battered. There were few private cars.
At length, they were deep in downtown Cairo, a brawling, noisy, dusty city. The sidewalks were jammed with pedestrians—businessmen in suits, traders and shopkeepers in the native galaba, a striped garment like a nightgown. Everyone was talking, gesturing, active. It was a masculine crowd; Pierce saw only an occasional woman, mostly foreign.
They drove down Suleiman Pasha Boulevard, past the statue of that man, a Frenchman named Ferrier, who modernized the army of Mohammed Ali. They came into the central plaza of Liberation Square, renamed after the revolution in July, 1952. Here, fountains played in the evening air; streetcars clattered, and buses grunted in a cloud of gray exhaust. Above the buildings facing the square were bright neon signs, in Arabic and English, advertising TWA, Rolex, LOT (the Polish airline), and Aswan Beer.
The taxi drove up the ramp of the Cairo Hilton.
He was back.
“Robert Pierce,” he said at the registration desk.
A short, pudgy man smiled pleasantly. “Passport, please.”
Pierce handed it over.
“Sign here, please.” The man pushed across a form and called a bellboy, who came up. The man handed the passport to the boy, who left.
Pierce did not blink. He knew what was going on: The boy was taking the passport to register it with the police. On his first visit, he had gotten excited.
“Hey,” he had said, “where’s he going with that?”
“To the police. You must be registered. He will bring it back.”
“He’d better,” Pierce had said.
Then, the man had said, “That will be one Egyptian pound, please.”
“Why?”
“Cost of registration. The hotel does this as a service to our guests. If you do not wish to pay, you can register yourself. But the lines are long, and—”
“Never mind,” Pierce had said, handing the man a pound note.
Now, he dug into his wallet and passed the pound note across the counter without being asked.
“Ah,” the clerk smiled. “You have been in Egypt before?”
“Yes,” Pierce said. “I have.”
His room was impressive. There was a good view of the riverfront and the Nile; looking south, he could see the other two large hotels of Cairo, the Semiramis and Sheperd’s. They were both faintly gaudy, reminiscent of Miami Beach.
A knock on the door. A boy entered and gave him his passport. Pierce thumbed through it and found a small stamp on page 13, beneath his U.A.R. visa. There was Arabic writing, then in English, REGISTRATION WITHIN THREE DAYS, followed by more Arabic. He shrugged; it was no different from the stamp he had received on his first visit.
The telephone rang.
“Hello?”
“Robert? Grover here, in 452. Come on up, will you?”
Grover opened the door. “Robert, how good to see you.”
Pierce frowned. There was something funny going on; instinctively, he looked past Grover’s shoulder, wondering if someone else were in the room. It was empty.
“Do come in, my boy, come in.” The voice was falsely, jovial. “Drink, of course.”
“Of course,” Pierce said, still frowning.
“I made quite an odd discovery,” Grover said, “which I thought might interest you.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” He mixed the drink. “You see, this archaeological thing is quite newsworthy—oh damn, I’m fresh out of ice.”
Pierce looked at the bucket; it was still half full. He was about to say something, when Grover put his finger to his lips and shook his head.
“Before I tell you about my discovery, let me ring down for more.”
He went to the telephone, lifted it, and turned it bottom upward. Pierce saw a small black object attached to the undersurface.
“Room service? More ice for 452, please. Thanks awfully.” He hung up. “It’s on the way. Now, about that discovery. I wondered—”
“I can’t talk business without a drink,” Pierce said. “Let’s hold off for a minute.” He took out a pad and wrote, HOW LONG HAVE YOU KNOWN?
“Whatever you say, Robert. Have you admired the view? My room is higher up than yours, I believe.”
Grover took the pad. YESTERDAY MORNING. NOTHING SPILLED, BUT ALMOST.
Pierce got up, the pad in his hand. “It is a beautiful view. This is my second visit to Cairo. I think it’s a marvelous city.” SURE IT’S LIVE?
“Oh quite, quite.”
“I’m eager to explore it further.”
“My dear boy, we must. It is an absolute necessity.” HOW’S YOUR ROOM?
HAVEN’T CHECKED.
“Perhaps we should wait until November for a thorough exploration of the city. It will be cooler then.”
“You may be right.” LET’S JUST CHAT.
“I think so,” Pierce said. “How are preparations coming?”
“Wonderfully. We will be ready to leave in about a week’s time, I think. It’s very exciting.”
“Yes, it is.”
There was a knock on the door. That would be room service with the ice. Pierce gathered up the notes and stuffed them into his pocket while Grover answered the door.
“I have no damned idea what’s going on,” Grover said. They were walking toward Barnaby’s hotel. “I simply cannot imagine.”
“It’s strange,” Pierce agreed. “They didn’t bug my room. Do you think the government suspects you?”
“I don’t see why. In any event, if they’ve been snooping, all they’ll hear are a lot of suggestive noises. I’ve been preoccupied with my girls,” Grover said.
“Well, don’t touch that mike, whatever you do,” Pierce said. “Just play it straight until we get out of here.”
“My feelings, exactly.”
“Welcome,” Barnaby said. “Nice to see you’ve arrived, Robert. Pleasant trip?”
“Very.” Pierce took out his pad and wrote, GROVER’S ROOM IS BUGGED. IS YOURS?
Barnaby read it and shrugged. “Come in and make yourself comfortable. Not the Hilton, I’m afraid, but it will have to do.”
“What have you got to drink?” Grover asked. He was walking around the room, looking behind the pictures, beneath the window sill, over the door, under the washbasin. There was a faint smile on his face.
He likes this, Pierce thought. It’s all a part of the game to him.
“Just a little bourbon.”
“Bourbon?”
“An American drink.”
“How ghastly. I thought they stopped drinking bourbon when they killed Wild Bill Hickok. Isn’t that the one that tastes like scotch and molasses?”
“Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it, of course. The room is all right, by the way. So perhaps our cover isn’t blown.”
The spy-talk irritated Pierce, but he said nothing.
“Why do you suppose they picked on me?”
“I don’t know,” Pierce said. “Maybe you don’t have an honest face.”
“Do you think so?” He gave a pleased little smile.
Nikos came in, followed a few minutes later by Conway. Greetings were brief. Pierce took out a map of Luxor and spread it on the bed.
“You’re all familiar with the first part of the operation. Now you want to know what we do with the stuff once we find it.” He glanced at Lord Grover. “You guessed it, the other night—we float the treasure down the Nile in a boat. We can load in darkness and send it off; in the morning, if the government inspectors come around, we’ll be lily-pure and empty-handed.”
“Where do we get the boat?” Nikos asked.
“Upstream. We’ll steal a fisherman’s felucca in Aswan and sail it down. Nobody would ever connect us with a boat stolen 200 miles away. The Egyptians are always stealing things, I understand, and wood is scarce.”
Barnaby was listening, shaking his head.
“What’s the matter?”
“Do you know how large those boats are? Not very large, I can assure you. And when Tutankhamen’s tomb was discovered, the treasure from the anteroom alone filled five railroad flatcars. You’ll need a whole fleet of little boats.”
“No,” Pierce said. “We have to think of our second problem: how we convert our treasure into hard cash.” He looked around the group. “Barnaby suggested selling it to private collectors. That’s too difficult, and besides, word would be bound to leak out. Nikos undoubtedly could find fences, but we’d lose too large a percentage of the total value. So what do we do?”
He paused dramatically.
“All right, for Christ’s sake,” Grover said, puffing a cigar. “What do we do?”
“We sell it to the party that wants it most.”
“Egypt?”
“Of course. We send them a note, a few photographs of the tomb, and a trinket or two—worth 20,000 dollars, perhaps. We announce to them our discovery and give them forty-eight hours to pay fifty million dollars into a numbered Geneva account, which I have opened. We might mention in passing that after forty-eight hours, the treasure will either be melted down or offered for sale in toto to the museums of the world. First choice, I think, going to the museum in Tel Aviv.”
Dead silence in the room. Then Conway began to laugh, “Beautiful,” he said, “just beautiful.”
“In forty-eight hours,” Pierce continued, “the government will have no time to search out the treasure themselves. They will have no time to hunt the tomb robbers. They will have no time to do anything except scrape up the dough and get it off to Geneva. We can arrange transfer of the money from there by letter. We cannot be traced. It will be done as cleanly and anonymously as you could wish.”
“All right,” Nikos said. “But you still haven’t explained how we get the stuff out of the country.”
“But that’s the point—we don’t. The treasure will never leave Egypt.”
There was another long silence, and then Barnaby said, “But won’t they know? Won’t they know—as we do—that it is almost impossible to get it out of the country? When they get the letter, won’t they assume that it must still be in Egypt?”
“Would you, in their place?” Pierce shook his head. “I don’t think you’d take that chance. Not faced with the prospect of having it melted down on the one hand or displayed in Israel on the other. So long as they are perfectly assured that a treasure exists—and we will take great pains to assure them—then they must act as we wish. They have no choice. The stakes are enormous.”
Barnaby stood and walked up and down the room. He finished his cigarette in silence, turning the plan over in his mind. It was clever, as clever as the original hieroglyph. Somehow, the continuity of cunning appealed to him.
“Okay. What do we do?”
“We load part of the treasure—not all—onto a boat and sail it down to Cairo. We take only the most valuable and choice pieces. This will be our insurance against backfire of the plan. Should the Egyptians decide not to pay, we will have something to show for our efforts. The likelihood of their acting that way is minute, so minute that I considered not removing anything from the tomb. But I think it is best to be prudent, even if it is troublesome to us.
“Once in Cairo, we hide the treasure either in the city or in the desert outside. It should not be difficult to find a place. When it is secure, we will send off our letter. By that time, we will have returned to Luxor, where we will continue to dig innocently for another few months. The Cairo government will recover the treasure, and there will be immense publicity. We will feel foolish working diligently on a narrow-minded project when such grandeur was practically under our noses the whole time. But we will shrug and talk vaguely of the advancement of science by unspectacular steps. Six months later, we will all be rich men.”
Pierce smiled. The others smiled back.
“Do you have final clearance from the antiquities people?” he asked Barnaby.
“Yes. All set to go. The Land Rover has been loaded with everything we need. Nikos is driving it to Luxor in the morning. We can fly down the day after tomorrow.”