Ahmad was a traitor in Sir Denis’s camp; that Sir Denis was losing his grip and didn’t recognize friend from enemy.
This telegram shattered these delusions, lifting a dreadful load from his mind.
Perhaps he would never see Zoe again, but she had given him many hours of happiness and, after all, he wasn’t in Cairo to enjoy himself!
During the remainder of the evening he wrote a long letter to her, addressed c/o J. Jansen, but never wandered far from the hotel, expecting Nayland Smith to walk in at any moment.
But up to the time that he went in to dinner Sir Denis hadn’t appeared.
He was about to stand up and go out on to the terrace for coffee when he saw him hurrying in his direction and accompanied by another man quite unmistakably English. Both wore evening dress.
“Ah, there you are, Merrick!” Sir Denis snapped. “Want you to meet Sir Nigel Richardson from the Embassy!”
“How do you do, Mr. Merrick!” Sir Nigel shook hands cordially. “Devil of a game you fellows have taken on! Smith’s been telling me all about it.”
Brian felt quite confused. “Will you join me for coffee?”
“Came to fetch you,” Sir Nigel explained. “You’re coming back to the Embassy for your coffee and so forth. Business to be done! Lots of work. Very little time.”
Brian found an Embassy car waiting outside, and a few minutes later found himself in Sir Nigel Richardson’s study. Coffee was passed around and an assortment of liqueurs offered by a butler who would have delighted P.G. Wodehouse;
also excellent cigars. A young attache, Captain Arkwright, joined the party and made notes from time to time. He was earnest, efficient, and highly excited.
“Please give my regards to your father, Mr. Merrick.” Sir Nigel raised his glass to Brian. “He was with the American Legation in Madrid some years ago when I also was posted to Spain. We were much younger!” He smiled, glanced at Nayland Smith, “You were a policeman in Burma in those days, Smith!”
“Where I first crossed the path of Dr. Fu Manchu!” Sir Denis stood up, and began to move about restlessly, filling his pipe, which he rarely forgot to bring along, as Brian recalled. “And he’s a bigger menace today than he was then.”
Sir Nigel Richardson frowned thoughtfully, drawing together his heavy eyebrows, black in contrast with his silvered hair.
“Your sudden appearance, Smith, has set me thinking. Rumours of this man’s doings, nothing further, have come my way in spots as far apart as Teheran and Paris. What should you guess his age to have been the first time you saw him?”
“I should have taken him for seventy—well preserved, but seventy.”
Sir Nigel stared, watching Nayland Smith light his pipe.
“Then, for heaven’s sake, if he’s really still alive——”
“I know!” Smith snapped. “He’s over a hundred! I have believed for a long time that he has mastered the secret of prolonged life. He’s a scientific genius. But unless he’s also a Chinese edition of the Wandering Jew I’ll finish him one day!”
“He has certainly proved hard to finish,” Sir Nigel commented dryly.
And as Nayland Smith grinned in rather a grim way, Brian noted a faint mark like a wrinkle appear on the bridge of his nose and realized for the first time that the plaster had been removed.
“If I fail to get him this time, Richardson, it’ll be because he’s finished me! And now, to the job ... As you know, my passport, as well as everything else I had with me, is lost——”
“A new diplomatic passport is ready, Smith.” He glanced at the attache. “You have it there, Arkwright?”
“Here, sir.” The passport was laid on a coffee-table.
“Transport?” Sir Denis snapped.
“A plane manned by Royal Air Force personnel will be at your disposal.”
“And Mr. Merrick?”
“I have made an appointment for him to meet Mr. Lyman Bostock, my United States opposite-number, at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Take your own passport along, Mr. Merrick. It will be exchanged for one giving you diplomatic privilege.”
Brian’s head began to swim. He didn’t know if this was due to Sir Nigel’s old Napoleon brandy or to the miraculous speed with which Nayland Smith got things done.
“And the third passenger?”
Sir Nigel lighted another cigar. “That matter, Smith, I had to pass to Bostock. He has promised me that a passport with a suitable visa will be issued by the United States Consulate and ready for Mr. Merrick to pick up in the morning when he calls for his own. . . .”
When the Embassy car took them back, Nayland Smith got out at the hotel entrance and dismissed the chauffeur.
“To take that official chariot through the Muski tonight, Merrick, would be calculated to start a riot! The bar’s still open. I’m thirsty. So let’s have a drink and then I’ll get a cab.”
Brian thought, as they sat down at a corner table, that Sir Denis looked oddly drawn and very tired. “I’d say you’d had one hell of a time,” he told him, sympathetically.
“Why?” came with almost a fierce snap. “Do I look chewed up?”
“Not at all, Sir Denis! In fact, though I don’t know the details, I consider you have made an amazing come- back.”
Nayland Smith smiled. But even now it wasn’t the happy smile which Brian seemed to remember. Undoubtedly, he had suffered more than he cared to admit.
“I suppose I look as well as I can expect to look.” He took a long drink. “By the way, Merrick, have you had any news from Luxor?”
Brian told him about the message from Mr. Jansen.
“That’s good.” Nayland Smith glanced at his watch. “Time I was moving. Don’t waste regrets on Zoe, Merrick. She’s a charming girl, but her mother was an Arab. These people are unpredictable, you know. Like snow upon the desert and so forth . . . Don’t be late in the morning.” He jumped up. “We must be ready to leave at any hour tomorrow.”
Brian stood up, too. “But where are we going?”
“New York . . . Good night, Merrick!”
* * *
Mr. Lyman Bostock turned out to be another friend of Senator Merrick, as Brian discovered when he presented himself in that gentleman’s office at ten o’clock.
“You might be your father as I remember him at Harvard!” Mr. Bostock declared. “I suppose he got you this appointment as aide to Sir Denis Nayland Smith?”
“Not at all, sir. I got it myself—-just by accident!”
“Is that so?” Mr. Bostock, with his smooth white hair and fresh complexion, his soft, Southern voice, had a gentle manner which made Brian wonder what he was doing in such a smouldering volcano as Cairo. “I naturally supposed, as Sir Denis is acting for Washington, by arrangement with London, that your father had proposed you. You will find your duties exciting.”
“I have found them exciting already!” Brian laid his passport on the desk.
“This is your new passport.” Mr. Bostock passed it across. “When your present employment ends you may be asked to return it: when you will receive your old one—which I am sending to Washington. And now”—he opened an envelope— “here are Dr. Hessian’s papers.” He looked up. His mild, blue eyes twinkled. “Rather irregularly, I confess, he is being admitted to the United States under the quota system! And here is Dr. Hessian’s passport. . . .”
When Brian, back in his room, had put the neat little diplomatic passport in an inside pocket and locked the other documents in a suit-case, he went downstairs and out into the garden.
And he was still lingering over it, wondering how soon they were to start for New York, when a boy came up with a radiogram. Brian tore it open—and felt his heart give a queer little jump.
