by Wilbur Smith
‘Well, Sir Nicholas.’ Abou Sin held out his hand courteously, and Nicholas took it with an air of resignation. ‘I am sorry to have taken you out of your way like this. I know that you will be anxious to continue on your journey, so I will not detain you further. Is there anything I can do for you before you leave? Do you have sufficient fuel?’
Nicholas glanced at Jannie, and he shrugged. ‘We have plenty of juice. Thank you, sir.’
Abou Sin turned back to Nicholas, ‘We are planning to build a special annexe to the museum at Luxor to house these artefacts of Pharaoh Mamose that you have returned to Egypt. In due course you will be receiving a personal invitation from President Mubarak to attend, as an honoured guest, the opening of that museum. Dr Al Simma, whom I am sure you know has been appointed the new Director of the Department of Antiquities, will be in charge of the museum. I am sure she will be delighted to review the exhibits with you when you come back.’
He bowed to Sapper and the two pilots.
‘Go with God,’ he said, and went down the ramp. Royan began to follow him, but Nicholas called softly after her.
‘Royan!’ She froze, and then turned her head slowly and reluctantly to meet his eyes for the first time since they had landed.
‘I didn’t deserve that,’ he said, and then with a stab of emotion he realized that she was weeping softly. Her lips quivered and the tears ran slowly down her cheeks.
‘I am sorry, Nicky,’ she whispered, ‘but you must have known that I am not a thief. It belongs to Egypt, not to us.’
‘So everything that I thought there was between us was a lie?’ he demanded remorselessly.
‘No!’ she said. ‘I—’ and then she broke off without finishing what she was going to say. She ran down the ramp into the sunlight to where the chauffeur was holding the back door of the limousine open for her. She slipped on to the seat beside Abou Sin without looking back, and the Cadillac pulled away and drove through the gate.
‘Let’s get the hell out of here, before these Gyppos change their minds,’ said Jannie.
‘What a splendid idea,’ said Nicholas bitterly.
Once they were airborne again, Aswan Control cleared them for a direct flight northwards to the Mediterranean coast. The four of them, Jannie and Fred, Sapper and Nicholas, stayed together on the flight-deck and watched the long green snake of the Nile crawl along their right wingtip.
They spoke very little during this long leg of the flight. Once Jannie said quietly, ‘So I can kiss my fee goodbye, I suppose?’
‘I didn’t really come along for the money,’ said Sapper, ‘but it would have been nice to be paid. Baby needs new shoes.’
‘Does anybody want a cup of tea?’ Nicholas asked, as though he had not heard.
‘That would be nice,’ said Jannie. ‘Not as nice as the sixty grand that you owe me, but nice anyway.’
They flew over the battlefield of El Alamein, and even from twenty thousand feet they could pick out the twin monuments to the Allied and German dead. Then the blue of the sea stretched ahead of them.
Nicholas waited until the Egyptian coast receded behind them and then he let out a long, soft sigh.
‘O, ye of little faith,’ he accused them. ‘When did I ever let you down? Everybody gets paid in full.’
They all stared at him long and hard, and then Jannie voiced their doubts. ‘How?’ he asked.
‘Give me a hand, Sapper,’ Nicholas invited, and started down the staircase. Jannie could not control his curiosity and handed over the controls to Fred. He followed the two Englishmen down to the lavatory on the main deck.
Sapper and Jannie watched from the doorway as Nicholas took the Leatherman tool from his pocket and lifted the cover of the chemical toilet. Jannie grinned as Nicholas started to work on the screws, holding the hidden panel in place. Big Dolly was a smugglers’ aircraft, and these little modifications were evidence of the pains that Jannie and Fred had taken to adapt her to that role. There were a number of these hidey-holes cunningly built into the engine housings and other parts of the fuselage.
When they had flown back from Libya, the Hannibal bronzes had reposed in the secret compartment behind this panel. The location of the panel in the back of the toilet made it highly unlikely that any follower of Islam would want to investigate such an unclean area.
‘So that’s what you were doing in here for so long,’ Jannie laughed as Nicholas lifted out the panel. His grin faded as Nicholas reached into the space beyond and carefully drew out an extraordinary object. ‘My God, what is that?’
‘The blue war crown of ancient Egypt,’ said Nicholas. He handed it to Sapper. ‘Lay it on the bunk, but treat it carefully.’
He reached into the compartment again, ‘And this is the Nemes crown.’ He handed it to Jannie.
‘And this is the red and white crown of the two kingdoms. And this is the death-mask of Pharaoh Mamose. Last but not least, this is the ushabti of the scribe Taita.’
The relics lay on the fold-down bunk, and they stood and stared at them reverently.
‘I have helped you bring out stone friezes and little bronze statues,’ said Jannie softly. ‘But nothing like this before.’
‘But,’ Sapper shook his head, ‘the ammunition crates the Gyppos offloaded at Aswan? What was in them?’
‘Five one-gallon bottles of chemical for the toilet,’ said Nicholas, ‘plus half a dozen spare oxygen cylinders, just to make up weight.’
‘You switched them.’ Sapper beamed at him. ‘But how the hell did you know that Royan was going to scupper us?’
‘She was right when she said I must have known she was no thief. The whole lark was out of character for her. She is,’ he searched for the correct description, ‘much too upright and honest. Not at all like the present company.’
‘Thanks for the compliment,’ said Jannie drily, ‘but she must have given you more reason than that to make you suspicious.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Nicholas turned to him. ‘The first real inkling I had was when we came back from Ethiopia the first time, and she immediately pushed off to Cairo. I guessed she was up to something. But I was absolutely certain only when I learned that she had passed a message, through Tessay, to the Egyptian Embassy in Addis. It was clear then that she had alerted them to our return flight.’
‘The perfidious little bitch,’ Jannie guffawed.
‘Careful there!’ said Nicholas stiffly. ‘She is a decent, honest and patriotic young woman, warm-hearted and—’
‘Well, well!’ Jannie winked at Sapper. ‘Please excuse my slip.’
Only two of the great crowns of ancient Egypt were set out on the polished walnut conference table. Nicholas had placed them on the heads of two genuine Roman marble busts that he had borrowed from a dealer with whom he did regular business here in Zurich. He had drawn the blinds over the tenth-storey windows, and arranged the lighting to show the crowns to the best effect. The private conference room that he had hired for the occasion was in the Bank Leu building on Bahnhofstrasse.
While he waited alone for the arrival of his invited guest, he reviewed his preparations and could find no fault with them. He went to the full-length mirror on one wall and tightened the knot of his old Sandhurst tie. The stitches had been removed from his chin. Mek Nimmur had done a first-rate job, and the scar was neat and clean. His suit had been made by his tailor in Savile Row, so it was in a muted chalk stripe and had been worn enough to have acquired just the right degree of casual bagginess. The only shiny items of his dress were the hand-made shoes from Lobb of St James’s Street.
The intercom buzzed softly and Nicholas lifted the handset.
‘There is a Mr Walsh to see you, Sir Nicholas,’ said the receptionist at the desk in the bank lobby downstairs.
‘Please ask him to come up.’
Nicholas opened the door at the first ring and Walsh glowered at him from the threshold.
‘I hope you are not wasting my time, Harper. I have flown all the way from Fort Worth
.’ It was only thirty hours since Nicholas had telephoned him at his ranch in Texas. Walsh must have jumped into his executive jet almost immediately to have got here so soon.
‘Not Harper. Quenton-Harper,’ said Nicholas.
‘Okay then, Quenton-Harper. But cut the crap,’ Walsh said angrily. ‘What have you got for me?’
‘I am also delighted to see you again, Mr Walsh.’ Nicholas stood aside. ‘Do come in.’
Walsh strode into the room. He was tall and round-shouldered, his jowls drooping and wrinkled and his nose beaky. With his hands clasped behind his back he looked like a buzzard on a fence pole. Forbes magazine listed his net worth at 1.7 billion dollars.
Two men followed him into the room, and Nicholas recognized both of them. The antiquarian world was very small and incestuous. One of them was the professor of ancient history at Dallas University. Walsh had endowed the chair. The other was one of the most respected and knowledgeable antiques dealers in the United States.
Walsh stopped so suddenly that they both ran into him from behind, but he did not seem to notice.
‘Son of a gun!’ he said softly, and his eyes lit with the flames of fanaticism. ‘Are those fakes?’
‘As fake as the Hannibal bronzes and the Hammurabi bas-relief you bought from me,’ said Nicholas.
Walsh approached the exhibits as though they were the cathedral communion plate and he the archbishop.
‘These must be fresh,’ he whispered. ‘Otherwise I would have known about them.’
‘Fresh out of the ground,’ Nicholas confirmed. ‘You are the first one to have seen them.’
‘Mamose!’ Walsh read the cartouche on the uraeus of the Nemes crown. ‘Then the rumours are true. You have opened a new tomb.’
‘If you can call nearly four thousand years old new.’
Walsh and his advisers gathered around the table, pale and speechless with shock.
‘Leave us, Harper,’ said Walsh. ‘I will call you when I am ready to talk to you again.’
‘Sir Nicholas,’ he prompted the American. Nicholas knew that he had the upper hand now.
‘Please leave us, Sir Nicholas,’ Walsh pleaded.
An hour later Nicholas sauntered back into the conference room. The three men were seated around the table as though they could not bear to be parted from the two great crowns. Walsh nodded at his minions and they stood up and obediently but reluctantly filed from the room.
As soon as the door closed, Walsh asked brusquely, ‘How much?’
‘Fifteen million US dollars,’ Nicholas replied.
‘That’s seven and a half mill each.’
‘No, that’s fifteen mill each. Thirty million the two.’
Walsh reeled in his chair. ‘Are you crazy, or something?’
‘There are those who think so,’ Nicholas smiled.
‘Split the difference,’ said Walsh. ‘Twenty-two and a half.’
Nicholas shook his head. ‘Not negotiable.’
‘Be reasonable, Harper!’
‘Reasonability has never been one of my vices. Sorry.’
Walsh stood up. ‘I am sorry too. Perhaps next time, Harper.’
He clasped his hands behind his back and stalked to the door. As he opened it, Nicholas called after him.
‘Mr Walsh!’
He turned back eagerly. ‘Yes?’
‘Next time you may call me Nicholas, and I shall call you Peter, as old friends.’
‘Is that all you have to say?’
‘Of course. What else is there?’ Nicholas looked puzzled.
‘Damn you,’ said Walsh, and came back to the table. He dropped into his chair. ‘Damn you to hell and back!’
He sighed and pursed his lips, and then asked, ‘Okay. How do you want it?’
‘Two irrevocable bank drafts. Each for fifteen million.’
Walsh picked up the intercom, and spoke into it. ‘Please ask Monsieur Montfleuri, your chief accountant, to come up here,’ he ordered dolefully.
Nicholas sat at his desk in his study at Quenton Park. He stared at the panelling that covered the wall facing him. Although the panelling had originally come from one of the Catholic abbeys dissolved by Henry VIII in 1536 and had been bought by his grandfather almost a hundred years ago, it was newly installed in this setting.
He reached under the top of his desk and pressed the hidden button of the electronic control. A section of the panelling slid smoothly and silently aside to reveal the armoured plate glass of the display cabinet built into the wall behind it. At the same time the spotlights in the ceiling lit automatically, and their beams fell on the contents of the cabinet. The spots had been placed so that there was no reflection from the glass window to distract the eye, and the beams brought out the full glory of the double crown and the golden death-mask of Mamose.
He poured whisky into a crystal glass, and while he sipped it he savoured the thrill of ownership. But after a while he knew there was something missing. He picked up the Taita ushabti from the desk in front of him, and spoke to it as though he were addressing the subject himself.
‘You knew the real meaning of loneliness, didn’t you?’ he asked softly. ‘You knew what it was like to love someone you could never have.’
He set down the statuette and picked up the telephone. He dialled an international number and it rang three times before a man answered in Arabic.
‘This is the office of the Director of Antiquities. How may I help you?’
‘Is Dr Al Simma available?’ he asked in the same language.
‘Please hold the line. I am putting you through!’
‘Dr Al Simma.’ Her voice sent an electric thrill down his spine.
‘Royan,’ he said, and he could sense her shock in the long silence that followed.
‘You!’ she whispered. ‘I did not think I would ever hear from you again.’
‘I just rang to congratulate you on your appointment.’
‘You cheated me,’ she said. ‘You switched the contents of three of the crates.’
‘As a wise man once said, friends are the easiest to cheat – they don’t expect it. You, of all people, should know the truth of that, Royan.’
‘You have sold them, of course. I have heard a rumour that Peter Walsh paid twenty million.’
‘Thirty million,’ Nicholas corrected her. ‘But only for the blue and the Nemes. Even as I speak to you, the red and white crown and the death-mask repose before me.’
‘So now you can pay off your Lloyd’s insurance losses. You must be very relieved.’
‘You won’t believe this, but the Lloyd’s syndicate on which I am a Name has come up with much better results than were forecast. I wasn’t really broke after all.’
‘As my mother would say, “Bully for you.”’
‘Half of it has already gone to Mek Nimmur and Tessay.’
‘At least that is a good cause.’ Her tone tingled with hostility. ‘Is that all you called to tell me?’
‘No. There’s something else that might amuse you. Your favourite author, Wilbur Smith, has agreed to write the story of our discovery of the tomb. He is calling the book The Seventh Scroll. It should be published early next year. I will send you a signed copy.’
‘I hope he gets his facts straight this time,’ she said drily.
They were both silent for a while, before Royan broke it. ‘I have a mountain of work in front of me. If there is nothing else on your mind—’
‘As a matter of fact there is.’
‘Yes?’
‘I would like you to marry me.’
He heard her draw breath sharply, and then after a long pause she asked softly, ‘Why would you want anything so unlikely?’
‘Because I have come to realize how much I love you.’
She was silent again, and then she said in a small voice, ‘All right.’
‘What do you mean, “All right”?’
‘I mean, all right, I will marry you.’
‘Why would you agree to anyt
hing so unlikely?’ he asked.
‘Because I have come to realize, despite everything, how much I love you back.’
‘There is an Air Egypt flight from Heathrow at 5.30 this afternoon. If I drive like fury, I may just make it. But it gets me into Cairo rather late.’
‘I will be waiting at the airport, no matter how late.’
‘I am on my way!’ Nicholas hung up, and went to the door, but suddenly he turned back and picked up the the Taita ushabti from the desk.
‘Come on, you old rogue.’ He laughed triumphantly. ‘You are going home, as a wedding gift.’
EPILOGUE
They strolled along the corniche in the mauve evening. Below them the Nile ran on eternally green and slow and inscrutable, disposing of the secrets of the ages. At the point on the river bank, below the ruins of the temple of Ramesses at Luxor, where once the great barge of Pharaoh Mamose had docked with Taita and his beloved mistress upon her prow, they paused for a while and leaned upon the coping of the stone retaining wall. They gazed out to the darkening hills across the river.
Time had long since obliterated the funerary temple and the great causeway of Mamose, and other kings had built their own monuments over the foundations. No man had ever discovered the tomb that he had never occupied, but it must have been situated close to the secret opening in the rock through which Duraid Al Simma had entered the tomb of Lostris and discovered there the scrolls of Taita in their alabaster jars.
All four of them were silent in the gathering dusk, the shared silence of firm friendship. They watched a cruise boat pass, coming upriver with the tourists clustered upon her decks, still agog after ten days of voyaging from Cairo on these enigmatic waters, pointing out to each other the great pylons and engraved walls of Ramesses’ temple, their excited voices small and inconsequential in the hush of the desert evening.
Then Royan slipped her arm through Tessay’s and the two women walked on ahead. They made a lovely pair, slim and young and honey-skinned, their laughter gay and sweet, their dark heads ruffling in the sultry puffs of Saharan air off the desert. Nicholas and Mek Nimmur followed them, each watching his own woman fondly as they bantered.