Star of Egypt (7 page)

Willis was not lying. Slayton was certain there was nothing to fear from the Professor. He might have been duped into making
the call—but by whom? Tooling slowly, Slayton fixed on a family-style coffee shop he knew to have individual little phone
carrels in the back, near the restrooms.

The facilities within were all faceless and gleaming Formica; the waitresses a crew of ebullient, underpaid sixteen-year-olds.
If you hit them with anything besides a direct order, they would shake their head as though they were hearing a foreign language.
Slayton stopped at the counter to order a black coffee, which he proceeded to take with him toward the telephones.

Slayton slipped into one of the booths and dialed the preliminary clearing number from memory:

Federal Treasury 1-202-566-2000
.

“Good morning, U.S. Treasury Department.”

“Extension 788, please,” said Slayton. Now the maze began.

“Thank you.” An extension began to buzz with that blatting, low-frequency ring. Five times.

A click, then tape hiss: “You have reached 788; please insert identification code and clearance number.” Click. It was a pleasant,
neutral woman’s voice.

Slayton dialed 221-121-2212-111, punching the * button between the gaps. They’d have to switch over again when Ma Bell finally
found a consumer use for that button.

There was a series of important clicks and relays falling into place, followed by another dial tone, this one high-pitched.
Slayton punched in 4-4656. Two buzzes and another woman’s voice, this one a live human being, and the final hurdle for Slayton
prior to reaching Hamilton Winship on the priority scramble line. “Yes?” was all the voice said.

“Tell Ham we’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

“Mr. Slayton?” The inflection of the voice squeaked upward on the final syllable. That would be Marilyn.

“Marilyn, darling, I have a priority 71 on this. Can you punch me through?”

In response, another line rang, once.

“Slayton?”

“Right.”

“Slayton,” said Winship gruffly, “I wish to hell you would stop calling me that name, especially to the bloody secretaries.”

“What name, sir?”

“I’ve assembled a briefing for you; I trust you and the tour will be arriving on time.”

“Yes, sir. Trucks are being loaded now. We should be late, but we’ll be there.”

“Any incidents?”

“No sir. Nothing conclusive.”

“I’ll leave it in your hands, then, and see you tonight.”

“Late tonight,” said Slayton. It would be good to see if the briefing filled any holes. To Slayton, the attempts on his life
equalled a kind of progress, but to inform Winship at this point would be meaningless.
Let’s see the briefing
.

“Alright, then.” Winship hung up, and there was a fast run of noise that was the priority scramble line disconnecting itself.
Winship was unaccustomed to time-wasters like
hello
, or
good-bye
, or
have a nice whatever
. Slayton appreciated that.

He didn’t have any scribbles to pocket—to write the numbers down on paper would be professional suicide—and so he left, hitting
the counter for two refills on the way back. Perhaps the caffeine would open up some new possibilities in his brain, provide
inroads or approaches he had not yet considered that would make everything clearer, or at least, more obvious.

The truck convoy to Washington, D.C., was designed to be slow. It was a stretch of eighteen-wheelers, lead cars, red flags,
and blinking lights that frequently backed the traffic up for miles in the no-passing zones. From the sky it would manifest
itself as a convoluted mechanical snake, slowly twisting through its wind-up routine.

Ahead of the convoy, Ben Slayton piloted an unmarked government car at a healthy clip nearer the posted limits. There was
nothing to be gained by poking along with the trucks—if there was sabotage, for example, he could do little except watch the
trucks fall over like groaning dinosaurs—so he had opted to escort the stars of the tour into the nation’s capital. Beside
him sat Shauna Ramsey, immaculately dressed as usual; behind him, the Professor and Maggie Leiber. Somewhere behind the convoy,
Slayton guessed, was Wilma Christian, poking along in her Corvette, doing her best in the name of comprehensive coverage.

“A
mast
ă
ba
contains several chambers, Mr. Rademacher, principal of which is a room or chapel in which the actual burial service is conducted,”
said Willis. “There is a separate compartment in which the body of the deceased is walled off, but it does not contain the
corpse—or, if the deceased was better known or wealthier, the sarcophagus. A man’s wealth was frequently counted in the number
of multiple coffins he could afford, or in the way he was mummified.”

“Just like today,” said Slayton, and the women laughed politely.

“The compartment features a deep shaft that winds down to another passage that connects to the actual chamber of the dead—the
vault. These were often brick-lined, or hewn out of rock, and decorated with paintings depicting scenes from the life of the
dead person.”

“Except for the poor. I believe they merely tossed them into caves or dug pits for them. Am I correct, Professor?”

“Correct. Their lives did not merit such documentation. Seth-Olet was a soldier, and the vault paintings we have reproduced
are quite spectacular. It’s hard to scoff, even though I realize there were probably scientists or philosophers, unknown to
this day, who were probably dumped in holes with no ceremony, but whose work formed the basis for our present-day science.
Money
can
buy you immortality.”

“
Reproductions
of the paintings?” said Slayton, momentarily confused.

“Yes,” said Shauna. “We couldn’t very well ship the entire
mast
ă
ba
over to America like the London Bridge. The presentation was Maggie’s idea.”

Maggie picked up her cue. “We plan to present the artifacts as they would be arranged inside the actual
mast
ă
ba
, slightly redesigned to fit onto a horizontal plane, of course. The idea is to present an experience as close to the actual
penetration of the tomb as possible. None of your stuffy rows of glass cases here; that’s why all the security. Naturally,
everything is as tamper-proof as we can make it, as well. But we have huge reproductions of the vault chamber paintings and
so on—we want to shut out the outside world as much as possible.”

“Except for the TV cameras on behalf of your President,” said Shauna, and Willis groaned.

“Oh yes, oh god, the importance of media. The President is to appear live on tape from the tomb of Seth-Olet, to open the
tour. Ye gods.”

Slayton was inwardly happy. With a minimum of steering, they had worked themselves around to the things he was anxious to
quiz them about.

“That means that besides the cameras, your tomb is going to be full of men in natty gray business suits,” he said. “I wonder
if they’ll wear their sunglasses in a tomb?”

Maggie looked confused now. “What?”

Shauna shrugged wearily. “Secret
Service
, love. They’re as ostentatious here as Her Majesty’s.”

“Really,” said Slayton, amused.

Shauna stumbled. “Well, that is… I’ve seen a few television shows and they
seem
to be…” She actually began to blush.

“What happened to your little car, Mr. Rademacher?” said Maggie abruptly, from the back seat.

“Left it,” said Slayton. “No problem. I have several, and couldn’t very well fit you three into it for the drive, so my people
supplied another. I’ll pick it up in a few days.”

“Oh,” she said, distantly.

Slayton decided not to pursue that topic any further. It was a good excuse to switch to a brief and entirely gratuitous ramble
on his car collection. Housed in a special garage on his “farm” in Virginia, the autos ranged from those left to Slayton by
his father—Hudson Terraplanes, mostly—to Slayton’s own acquisitions, which included his Nash-Healy, Packards from the 1930s,
and vintage Cadillacs from even earlier, mainly 1912 through 1920. All were lubricated, rebuilt, as close to mint as Slayton
could tinker them, and a good deal of his time on the farm was spent in that garage.

The rap was mainly called up to impress the women in the car, and impress them it did.

“It would be simply marvelous to see all those old cars,” said Shauna. “They all work?”

“If they don’t work I get extremely perturbed,” commented Slayton, “… so I spend a lot of time making sure they work. Yes.”

“Good for the soul,” grumbled Professor Willis, speaking in a low voice like a grizzly bear just grumped up from hibernation.
His participation in this conversation had been unexpected to Slayton, though Willis, as usual, seemed to be talking exclusively
to himself—the most intelligent audience he could find. “Do the soul good, to see a Packard in good running condition after
all these years. Haven’t ridden in one since… ye gods, since 1938. Only comfortable automobile ever built.”

Slayton was taken by surprise, but grinned. It was the first thing he had heard Willis say that was not related to Egyptology,
or the tour. He had a fleeting glimpse of a kindred soul; it was not too much of a fantasy to visualize Willis in that garage,
clucking over his automobiles.

For now, it would be just fine to get these people rebilleted in a new hotel and see what Winship’s briefing had to offer
on Rashid Haman—whoever he was. Willis had dozed off in his seat, his pronouncement on Packards the final one, for the moment.
Shauna had become mesmerized by the road. She sat distractedly twisting a strand of hair, twining it around her index finger.

At the moment, Slayton was thinking how touchy it might be to search the artifacts comprising the Seth-Olet tour—thousands
of pieces—and he decided to cover that, too.

“I hate to bring this up, Shauna, Maggie… but those guys in the grey J.C. Penney’s suits will want to stick flashlights in
rather rude places once all that stuff is uncrated, if the President is going to come anywhere near it. Looking for bombs,
revolutionaries, radicals… mice… anything. Everything makes them nervous.”

“Some of the artifacts are extremely delicate,” said Maggie immediately.

“Yes. I assume there’s some kind of objection to poking into everything, so I thought it would be better to iron this out
now. They
will
want to look, and they can be ungracious about it if you have conditions.”

“Governmental bully-boys. Why they’re called the SS, I suppose,” Maggie said to her reflection in the window.

“So,” Slayton continued, “I’d like to act as liaison, to supervise the poking, to be the interface, so I can turn one way,
shouting at them, then the other, speaking civilly to you. Okay?”

“No objections whatsoever. It would be much more pleasant that way. We’ve had to deal with insistent spy-types before. Though
we’ve never shot one.”

“Though we’d have
liked
to, on occasion,” Shauna chimed in.

“No, Mr. Rademacher, you’re not like them at all,” said Maggie. “Which seems odd.”

Uh-oh
, Slayton thought. He did not wish to go down
that
road, or provoke quizzes that might undermine his position with the higher-ups of the tour. Instead, he saw another opportunity
to shift gears, and seized it: “Washington ahead, ladies.”

“Then your preliminary investigation has yielded nothing,” Winship said, with that downward curl in the sentence that hinted
at dissatisfaction with his top man. Slayton naturally had not mentioned the searches, bombs, or assassination attempts he
had been subjected to over the past couple of days.

“On the contrary, sir,” he said, standing before Winship’s desk with his hands clasped behind his back. “I’m in especially
tight with the three principal members of the contingent. My contact for the Arab workers turns out to be their leader, and
he’s most anxious to please. If there is any indication that there will be an incident,” he was careful to add, “… of
any
type, not only do I now have full cooperation of the people who matter, but several prime suspects among the crew.”

Winship sat and absorbed the information. The pipe came out and he began fiddling with it, waiting for more.

“Frankly, sir,” Slayton cleared his throat, “if Haman was to make any move involving the tour, it would be stupid to do it
in Baltimore. If we’re going to see any actions on his part, it will more likely be in Washington.”

“Why, if he is so thorough?” asked Winship.

“Because he’s also a prima donna, sir. He involves himself with theatrical plans and grand-slam staging for his gimmicks.
He has the stealth for the unobtrusive setup, sure, but he’ll get gradually more obvious as deadline time approaches.”

“An unfortunate choice of phraseology.”

“What I mean is that
now
is the time to look for Haman’s presence, not when he’s in Baltimore.”

“In that case,” said Winship, “I have several things here that ought to provide you with a very good reason to stay alert
nights when everyone else is sleeping.”

Slayton decided to keep the comment that came to mind exclusively to himself.

“First, Shafter in Egypt reports that Haman definitely left with the Seth-Olet tour. If he’s not with the tour, then he came
over with it, and we might have had him at the docks—”

“No sir. You’re underestimating Haman, again.”

Winship harrumphed, looking dourly up from the scattered papers on his desk. Slayton shut up, and he continued: “Second, we
have reason to believe that although you have not yet identified Haman, he has identified you. So much for infiltration.”

“Is that concrete, sir?” said Slayton, hoping Winship did not know about the incidents and was just stringing him along.

“Not ironclad, but the third thing is,” shot back Winship. “Records reveal that three years ago you inadvertently got mixed
up in one of Haman’s spoiling raids and killed three of his men. If the man is Haman, and if he has the make on you as we
suspect, and
if
he makes this connection, then you might be in greater danger than the President.” Winship let that hang while Slayton provided
the missing part.