by Ed Kovacs
Wilder stood decked in Armani, the de rigueur uniform for Muslim playboys once again running wild in Cairo, now that the turmoil and violence of the so-called Arab Spring had faded. He scanned the darkened club and saw that magnetism appeared to be in play at a number of booths even though it was only 1:30 A.M. and the night was young.
At the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, Cairo, sort of Mecca meets Macau, once again flooded with wealthy and upper-class Arabs escaping the stifling rigidity of their various homelands. The city provided an anything goes free-for-all of shopping, drinking, and partying, Arab-style. Only Dubai and Cairo, since the demise of Beirut, delivered that package. Upper-crust Arabs certainly didn’t come for the Pyramids. The place crawled with bad boy sheiks, quasi-exiled princesses, ex-wives of king’s brothers, international gun runners, and shrewd businessmen.
The cultural center of Islam and the largest, most historic city in Africa, Cairo also drowns in poverty. Donkey carts vied for advantage with Mercedes and Toyotas, and within a couple of kilometers of Zinc, families still lived a lifestyle almost identical to their ancestors of a thousand years ago.
With tourism being Egypt’s number one industry, there was something poetic in the way ancient monuments from prehistory provided the bread and butter that drove the economy and fed so many of the hoi polloi.
The Great Egyptian Unwashed, however, did not frequent Zinc, where a Jack and Seven cost twenty U.S. greenbacks. This currently being the most ultra chic club in town, Sky felt certain Hassan Ferghani would be here. He could only smile as he found Hassan pressed in so close to a twenty-two year-old Arab beauty dripping in diamonds that it looked like it would take the jaws-of-life to separate them.
“Sky!” Hassan sprang to his feet smiling and grabbed Wilder’s hand.
Hassan was the kind of walking cliche women love: tall, dark and handsome. Not to mention intelligent, rich, and decent. His generous natural smile showcased perfect white teeth, his deep black thick hair slicked back, and he wore Hugo Boss tonight, not Giorgio Armani. “Man, what are you doing here?!”
“Call me Pete,” said Sky, smiling. “I’ve got a bit of a problem.”
Hassan’s smile faded. “How big?”
“Hassan, you know me well enough that I would never pull you away from a girl who looked as good as that one does.”
“No, you would ask her to call a girlfriend for you. Preferably a girl even better looking.”
“Will she keep until another time?”
Hassan blanched. “You're serious.” He pursed his lips. “See me at the bar in three minutes. We’ll get out of here and go someplace quiet.”
“And private,” added Sky, pointedly.
###
Wilder wanted to make sure they weren’t followed, so Hassan drove them over the bridge into the center of the city, then headed south. Following Egyptian custom, he drove at night with his headlights off, turning them on only when approaching another vehicle. How one determined the presence of oncoming traffic at night was another question entirely, and may partly explain the plethora of gods and demigods Cairenes, the people of Cairo, fervently worship. The conventional wisdom that the “no lights unless necessary” technique extended the life of the car battery flew in the face of the other prevalent Cairo motoring tradition: honking the horn whenever approaching vehicles, donkey carts, camels, pedestrians, trash cans, light poles, or blowing leaves. If absolutely no reason existed to beep the horn, the rule was, honk anyway. Hence, Cairo ruled as the noisiest city on the planet.
They cruised in this fashion all the way down to Old Cairo, just opposite the southern tip of the Nile’s Roda Island, an area known as Masr al-Qadima, a place some Egyptologists, including Sky, thought was settled as far back as the 6th century BC.
Later, the Romans built a fortress here called Babylon, after that other place, and some of the old fort walls still stood. Babylon became a Christian stronghold for several centuries, and churches sprang up like weeds, but Christianity merely signaled a transition for Egyptians from pharonoic times to the Islamic age.
When the Muslims invaded and conquered Egypt, they built their capital, Cairo, a few kilometers away from Babylon. Today, Cairo has grown to an urban sprawl of over fifteen million souls. It had been years since he'd visited this area of Old Cairo, an area replete with Coptic Christian churches, an ancient synagogue, mosques and narrow cobblestone streets.
Hassan illegally parked his silver Range Rover just off the Corniche el-Nile on the northern edge of Old Cairo in front of a small, somewhat ratty 24-hour tea house that looked like hundreds of others in town.
“Let me guess... they’ve got great baklava.”
“Not really. My cousin owns this place, so we don’t have to worry about prying eyes.”
The two men had become friends years ago when they'd worked together on some minor tomb excavations, before Hassan got promoted to Assistant Deputy Director for the Giza Monuments, and before Sky was declared persona non grata on the plateau for calling Dr. Yuseff Fakhry, who at that time was the head honcho at Giza, a lying a**hole.
Hassan had never liked Fakhry, either, and suspected he had something to hide, especially after Fakhry got promoted to the plum post of Director of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, a job the man was not qualified to hold. Luckily for Hassan, he was teflon-coated due to his family's powerful relationships. He didn’t have to fear for his job, so Hassan maintained his close friendship with the pariah, Dr. Wilder. They had broken more than a few hearts together in the hotel discos of Cairo. Besides, secretly, Hassan supported many of the fringe theories Sky floated in his books.
###
Hassan ordered them shaleb, a drink made from nuts, rice flour, coconut and grapes. Under a crinkled cigarette poster and fluorescent lights, Sky lit up a H. Upmann torpedo. During the drive over, he'd made it clear that, for safety’s sake, he couldn’t tell Hassan everything.
“You want to stay at my place, wouldn’t that be safer?”
“Maybe safer for me, but not for you. I’m in a little tourist hotel on Pyramids Road. I’ll be all right.”
“You need money?”
“No, I’m flush. What I need is a new brain, I’m missing something. I’ve spent the last day and half in the Egyptian Museum trying to figure out what I overlooked.” He exhaled bluish smoke. “Do you know Simon Forte?”
“I’ve heard of him. A rich businessman, he’s in the news every once in a while because of his donations to charities here. I think he has a house over on Gezira. Either there or Garden City.”
“Can you find out where?”
“Sure, that’s easy.”
Earlier in the day Wilder had been able to ambush Michelle Stark, whom he'd once dated here in Cairo, as she left the American Embassy for lunch. Michelle worked for Diplomatic Security Service, the unit that, among other things, enforces laws regarding illegal use of American passports and visas, their issuance and manufacture. It took all of his charm for Michelle to reluctantly obtain, through back-channels, the information that Forte and his entourage had arrived in Egypt two days ago. No one matching Diana Hunt’s description accompanied him.
He tried not to let this information get him down. He feared the worst for Diana, and would do whatever he could to find her, but for now, the ticking clock forced him to focus exclusively on stopping Forte. “Make your inquiries discreetly, Hassan.”
Hassan smiled and lit a cigarette. “You still won’t tell me? Come on, you know we Egyptians are crazy for conspiracies. For instance, almost every Egyptian thinks Princess Di and her fiancee Dodi Fayed were murdered.”
“I think so, too.”
“See! That’s why you’re an honorary Egyptian,” said Hassan, his smile gleaming even in the sketchy fluorescent lighting. “New World Order?”
Sky took a sip of the drink but it didn’t go well with the cigar. “Well, if some group wasn’t trying to take over the world, I’d be surprised, wouldn’t you?”
; “Of course. And we can see that because we have a sense of history. Most Americans don’t seem to understand history at all.”
“We’re kind of getting off track, we need to focus.”
“Focus? On what? How can I focus on something you won’t tell me anything about?”
“Good people have been killed over this.” Sky said the words slowly, deliberately, with a laser stare into Hassan’s dark eyes, “Right in front of me.”
Hassan sobered a bit. “You have a new book coming out?”
Sky nodded. “It was recently released in the States.”
“This trouble has to do with your new book, doesn’t it?” Hassan casually lit a Turkish cigarette. He was dumb like a fox.
“Yes.” Sky paused and looked long and hard at Hassan, trying to decide how much to tell him. “Remember the magician Hui?”
“Sure. The conspiracy to overthrow Ramses the Third.”
“I need to get into his secret room under Giza. Fast.”
“What secret room?”
“Exactly.”
“But no such room has been discovered. If so, surely I would know. This would involve a cover-up from the highest levels, a con—” He stopped himself from saying the word.
“A conspiracy, Hassan?”
Hassan stared at Wilder for almost ten seconds, then signaled for two ahwa turki. “I suspect this will be a long night.”
CHAPTER 26
Dawn broke upon the Sphinx and the great pyramids of Cheops, Chephren, and Mycerinus like it had untold mornings over the millennia. And no matter how often he witnessed it, the sight always magically transported Sky back in time, as if seeing the magnificent structures anew in some distant epoch. The behemoths were perfect yet crumbling, complex yet simple, graceful yet hulking, dumb yet eloquent symbols of a glorious past which still struggled to be completely revealed, perhaps to bring a greater truth to the weary peoples of the planet. The mystery of it all seduced one, as the pyramids glowed etherically in the soft whisper of the newborn day.
A handful of hardy tourists rode camels and posed for once-in-a-lifetime photo-ops using cheap cell phone cameras. The scent of fresh clover wafted along the dry breeze from the camel yards as herders cajoled the beasts as herders had done for thousands of years. Cocks crowed from the nearby village, summoning early risers to stir.
Hassan’s Range Rover rolled stop on the road near Cheops’ Pavilion and they dismounted for an overlook of the plateau.
“Do you ever get to the point where you take them for granted? ‘Oh, the Pyramids, oh yeah, so what?’”
“I work out here almost every day. So it’s not the same feeling as you. But how can I not stand in awe of all this, especially when there is still so much we do not understand?”
“Like how did they lift a stone that weighs three hundred tons when there isn’t a crane in the world today that can lift that much.”
“My colleagues don’t even think for themselves. They just parrot the party line. If they expressed an original thought, not that they’re capable of having one, they’d risk losing their jobs. So they maintain the charade that our wise ancestors used manpower to haul those stones up ramps. The ramps themselves would have to be built of stone, of a mass three times larger than the pyramid!”
“Exactly,” said Sky, smiling inwardly at how he'd managed to open Hassan's eyes years earlier to such obvious truths.
“And show me the rope, please, in use thousands of years ago, that would not snap if nine hundred men or even nine thousand tried to pull a six hundred-thousand pound rock. And why are there no marks on the stones, evidence of being handled or dragged across the desert?”
“The thing I keep going back to, the thing that makes the most sense is the use of pumps and hydraulics... water power,” said Wilder.
“I tested your theory that the passageways and chambers of Cheops could have been used as a pump and chemical engine. A series of locks raising and lowering the water level. Enormous structures could be built that way. I think that’s possible, but no one here will even consider it, it’s blasphemy.”
“Do your colleagues ever admit, privately, that the Great Pyramids were not used as tombs?”
“No, they would never say that, even though I’m sure some of them don’t believe it anymore. The rest, like Doctor Fakhry, they don’t even want to understand the truth.”
“Maybe there’s a lot more understood than we’ve been led to believe.” They scanned the plateau and walked aimlessly onto the sandy soil. “The records say that somewhere under this sand Hui had his secret chamber where he performed his magic.”
“Right.”
“There was obviously a main entrance, but also a secret entrance.”
“How do you know that?” quizzed Hassan.
“Partly from common sense and partly from a document I came across at the British Museum. The document in London refers to the eyes of the sun inside the chamber for the secret way out. I don’t think Forte has seen that document, since it was misfiled.”
“Okay.”
“But here’s the common sense part: the coup against Ramses the Third failed and Hui was linked to it. He was a wanted man. All of his talismans, the Book of Spells, his magical accoutrement were kept in his chamber. And the location of his chamber back then wasn’t a secret. It functioned as his office. So when he fled the Royal Palace they must have posted soldiers outside his chamber to catch him.”
“But they didn’t catch him, meaning there must be a second way out.”
“That’s my guess.”
“I don’t have to tell you how common secret entrances are in Egypt, and how common they have been throughout our history,” said Hassan. “I’ve been through a few into some ladies' bedrooms recently.”
Sky offered him a cigar and they looked out over the plateau as they lit up.
“Have there been any unusual excavations? Maybe a site got worked, then closed up without anything coming out of it?”
“You know the situation. There’s so much to explore, but not enough money, time, or qualified people. I’ve been closely involved in the work here for the last several years. I’m suspicious of Fakhry, but not because I think he’s hiding secret chambers. He has sharp elbows and he’s trying to protect his turf.”
“Could Hui’s chamber have been discovered without your knowledge?”
“I don’t see how.”
“Nothing unusual has happened, no rumors of—”
“There are always rumors.”
“Of what?”
“Curses, deaths, doom and gloom predictions. Things like that.”
Wilder looked out across the desert about two hundred meters toward a one-story nondescript structure connected to the main road by a narrow strip of asphalt. “I don’t remember that building, what is that?”
“Fakhry’s new offices.”
“You think Fakhry knows Simon Forte?”
“I don’t know. But Fakhry is hosting a big United Nations party at the Mena House tonight. Some kind of charity function.”
“Can you get me a list of the attendees? Do you have those kinds of connections?”
“I can get you an invitation if you like.”
“Maybe.” Sky looked out to the lonely building.
“Fakhry is a bigwig establishment guy now. Why would he need a new office way out here?”
“He wouldn't, so it must be his ego, I suppose. He insisted on that site, far enough away from the monuments so as not to distract, but close enough to be convenient. It took some time to build, it was—” Hassan stopped in his tracks and looked at Sky. “It was an unusual situation. I can’t believe I didn’t remember.”
“How so?”
“They finished the building six months ago, but a few months later I heard talk that a busload of workers from Luxor crashed on the way home and all fifty had been killed. It wasn't on the news, so I thought—”
“Whoa, you’re confusing me. What do the Luxor workers have to do with that bu
ilding?”
“They built it. Local men were unhappy they didn’t get any work, but Fakhry insisted the office be built by the men from Luxor. I thought it was a political decision, someone being repaid a favor by having work given to his company or to men from his family, something like that. The workers were bused in every day from a nearby hotel. They never mingled with the people here. Kind of odd, now that I think of it.”
“And when the project finished, on the way back to Luxor, their bus crashed and they were all killed?”
“According to rumor. A friend of mine spent a long weekend in Luxor and bedded a pretty girl down there. The girl said her brother had been killed and she was angry the news didn’t report it. The bus line is owned by the government, of course. As is the major media.”
“You said it took some time to build. What do you mean?”
“Don’t forget, I don’t have anything to do with the construction of Fakhry’s office. So I didn’t pay much attention, but it took longer than it should have. I thought because they were doing something fancy, but there’s nothing fancy inside. I remember a lot of truck activity. At the time it didn’t seem significant.”
“I know that Egyptian work crews are labor heavy, but fifty workers to build that little building?”
“For a patronage job, the crew would be padded, sure, but you’re right. No way they needed fifty workmen.”
“Unless, say, half of them worked on something else. Out of sight. Underground.” He pondered the possibilities. “You been inside?”
“Yeah, it's just a couple of rooms and Fakhry's office.”
“How can I get in?”
“That I can’t help you with. There is an elaborate alarm system and around-the-clock security.”
Wilder took a long look at the building, confident they were on to something, and not a moment too soon. “Time for breakfast and a trip back to the museum.”
“I think it’s time for bed.”