'Cool bastard.'
'And damn quick with that knife.' Vandam touched his cheek: the dressing had been taken off, now, and several days' growth of beard hid the wound. But not Elene, not with the knife, please. 'I gather you haven't found him.'
'I haven't found anything. I've had Abdullah brought in, just on general principles, but there was nothing at his house. And I called in at the Villa les Oliviers on the way back same story.'
'And at Captain Sadat's house.' Suddenly Vandam felt utterly drained. It seemed that Wolff outwitted him at every turn. It occurred to him that he might simply not be smart enough to catch this sly, evasive spy. 'Perhaps we've lost,' he said. He rubbed his face. He had not slept in the last twenty four hours. He wondered what he was doing here, standing over the hideous corpse of Major Sandy Smith. There was no more to be learned from it. 'I think III go home and sleep for an hour,' he said. Jakes looked surprised. Vandam added: 'It might help me think more clearly. This afternoon we'll interrogate all the prisoners again.'
'Very good, sir.'
Vandam walked back to his vehicle. Driving across the bridge from Zamalek to the mainland, he recalled that Sonja had mentioned one other possibility: Wolff's nomad cousins. He looked at the boats on the wide, slow river. The current took them downstream and the wind blew them upstream-a coincidence of enormous importance to Egypt. The boatmen were still using the single triangular sail, a design which had been perfected . . . How long ago? Thousands of years, perhaps. So many things in this country were done the way they had been done for thousands of years.
Vandam closed his eyes and saw Wolff, in a felucca, sailing upriver, manipulating the triangular sail with one hand while with the other he tapped out messages to Rommel on the transmitter. The car stopped suddenly and Vandam opened his eyes, realizing he bad been daydreaming, or dozing. Why would Wolff go upriver? To find his nomad cousins. But who could tell where they would be? Wolff might be able to find them, if they followed some annual pattern in their wanderings. The jeep had stopped outside Vandam's house. He got out. 'I want you to wait for me,' be told the driver. 'You'd better come in.' He led the way into the house, then directed the driver to the kitchen. 'My servant, Gaafar, will give you something to eat, so long as you don't treat him like a wog.'
'Thank you very much, sir,' said the driver.
There was a small stack of mail on the hall table. The top envelope had no stamp, and was addressed to Vandam in a vaguely familiar hand. It had 'Urgent' scribbled in the top left-hand corner. Vandam picked it up. There was more he should do, be realized. Wolff could well he heading south now. Roadblocks should be set up at all major towns on the route. There should be someone at every stop on the railway line, looking for Wolff. And the river itself ... There had to be some way of checking the river, in case Wolff really had gone by boat, as in the daydream. Vandam was finding it hard to concentrate. We could set up river blocks on the same principle as road blocks, he thought; why not? None of it would be any good if Wolff had simply gone to ground in Cairo. Suppose he were hiding in the cemeteries? Many Muslims buried their dead in tiny houses, and there were acres of such empty buildings in the city: Vandam would have needed a thousand men to search them all. Perhaps I should do it anyway, he thought. But Wolff might have gone north, toward Alexandria; or east or west into the desert . . .
He went into the drawing room, looking for a letter opener. Somehow the search bad to be narrowed down. Vandam did not have thousands of men at his disposal-they were all in the desert, fighting. He had to decide what was the best bet. He remembered where all this had started: Assyut. Perhaps he should contact Captain Newman in Assyut. That seemed to be where Wolff had come in from the desert, so maybe he would go out that way. Maybe his cousins were in that vicinity. Vandam looked indecisively at the telephone.
Where was that damned letter opener? He went to the door and called:
'Gaafar!' He came back into the room, and saw Billy's school atlas on a chair. It looked mucky. The boy had dropped it in a puddle, or something. He picked it up. It was sticky. Vandam realized there was blood on it. He felt as if he were in a nightmare. What was going on? No letter opener, blood on the atlas, nomads at Assyut ...
Gaafar came in. Vandam said: 'What's this mess?'
Gaafar looked. 'I'm sorry, sir, I don't know. They were looking at it while Captain Alexander was here--' 'Who's they? Who's Captain Alexander?'
'The officer you sent to take Billy to school, sir. His name was-'
'Stop.' A terrible fear cleared Vandam's brain in an instant. 'A British
Army captain came here this morning and took Billy away?'
'Yes, sir, be took him to school. He said you sent him-'
'Gaafar, I sent nobody.'
The servant's brown face turned gray.
Vandam said: 'Didn't you check that he was genuine?''
'But, sir, Miss Fontana was with him, so it seemed all right.'
'Oh, my God.' Vandam looked at the envelope in his hand. Now he knew why the handwriting was familiar: it was the same as that on the note that Wolff had sent to Elene. He ripped open the envelope. Inside was a message in the same hand:
Dear Major Vandam,
Billy is with me. Elene is taking care of him. He will be quite all right as long as I am safe. I advise you to stay where you are and do nothing. We do not make war on children, and I have no wish to harm the boy. All the same, the life of one child is as nothing beside the future of my two nations, Egypt and Germany; so be assured that if it suits my purpose I will kill Billy.
Yours truly, Alex Wolff.
It was a letter from a madman: the polite salutations, the correct English, the semicolon, the attempt to justify the kidnapping of an innocent child ... Now Vandam knew that, somewhere deep down inside, Wolff was insane. And he had Billy.
Vandam handed the note to Gaafar, who put on his spectacles with a shaky hand. Wolff had taken Elene with him when he left the houseboat. It would not have been difficult to coerce her into helping him: all he had to do was threaten Billy, and she would have been helpless. But what was the point of the kidnap, really? And where had they
