‘I meant what I said. That I love you. I do. I want us to be together. I’ll find a way, some way that won’t hurt Harry.’
‘Don’t talk like that. I can’t listen to this. It’s not right.’
‘You know it’s right,’ she said. ‘We both do.’ She held him tight. He stroked her hair as she moved her face up to his. The struggle was killing him. He gave in to the kiss. They embraced for a few seconds, and then he pushed her away reluctantly, his throat tight. ‘I’ve got to go. I’m going to miss this flight. I’ve got business to take care of
‘Stay with me. Take the next flight.’
‘You know I can’t do that.’
She reached up and gently caressed his cheek. ‘Take care.’
‘You too,’ he said.
‘When will I see you again?’
‘I don’t know.’ He turned to go, tearing himself away.
‘Call me,’ she said as he walked off. ‘Promise you’ll call me.’
He wanted to turn back and hold her again, be with her, take her somewhere where they could be alone. But he kept walking. Just before he pushed through the doors into the terminal building, he glanced back. She was standing there by her car, a small, forlorn figure in the distance. She waved. He sighed and entered the building.
Across the car park, two men had been sitting in a car watching the whole thing. The driver had been about to get out to follow their target inside the airport to find out what flight he was getting on.
Then the BMW had screeched up and the Paxton woman had jumped out. The man had ducked back inside the car, not wanting to be spotted.
He turned to his companion in the passenger seat, who was wearing a white foam neck brace. ‘What’s going on here? What the hell is she doing?’
The passenger looked grim as he watched Zara Paxton with her arms around the target. ‘Christ,’ he groaned. ‘She wasn’t supposed to get emotionally involved with him.’ He glanced at his colleague, wincing at the pain that the movement cost him. ‘You think she’s told him anything?’
The other one sighed. ‘I don’t know. We’d just better pray she isn’t going to fuck this whole thing up for us.’
Chapter Fourteen
Pierre Claudel was a master at what he did. In the shadowy circles in which he moved, his name was a whispered legend. The truth about his life was a closed book, and he preferred to keep it that way.
At the age of forty-two, he was a confirmed member of the Cairo rich list. He was tall and suave, always well- dressed, impeccably mannered and extremely eligible. He played tennis and polo, enjoyed fine art and fine wine, had a private box at the opera, could recommend the best restaurants and hotels in any city in the world, and was seldom seen in public without the latest addition to the procession of expensive, but always eminently replaceable, women who passed through his life and bed. He drove a bright red Ferrari and lived in a mock Tuscan villa set in 1.6 acres of clipped and manicured country parkland in Hyde Park, one of Cairo’s most exclusive gated communities.
As to where all this had come from, Claudel was highly secretive about the nature of his business. When asked what he did, he would just smile his charming smile, give a modest little wave of his hand and reply that he specialised in cultural exports. That answer was good enough for the small-talking country-club elite and the women he seduced at the city’s fashionable high-society parties. They didn’t need to know the truth. Nobody did.
A long time ago, back in his native France, Pierre Claudel had been a passionate archaeology scholar. As a young student he’d worked himself mercilessly, graduated top of all the classes he’d ever taken and formed the makings of a glittering career in academia. He’d taken a lecturer’s post at the Sorbonne, where some of the students were older than he was. He’d done well, settled into a comfortable if not terribly luxurious lifestyle. Found himself a nice girlfriend, Nadine, and moved into a flat together. A little car, a little dog, a cosy little Parisian routine. Talk of marriage, starting a family one day.
It would have satisfied a lot of men, but that wasn’t the way Pierre Claudel’s mind worked. He wanted more. And within a year or two, he was becoming restless.
Then, at the age of twenty-seven, his passion for Egyptology had brought him to his first excavation in the Western Desert and he’d felt the first kiss of adventure. He’d been hooked. It suddenly hit him what he should be doing with his life. Fortune and glory were the promises that lurked under the sands, and he was going to find them.
On his return to France he instantly started winding up his old life there. He quit his job, left Nadine weeping over a brief note on the kitchen table. With his whole world in a suitcase he boarded a flight, stepped down on the hot Egyptian soil and never looked back.
The new, reinvented Claudel installed himself in the cheapest rented rooms he could find in Cairo, and immediately got down with fierce enthusiasm to setting up his new business. He became, in effect, a professional tomb robber. And within a year of starting up his operation, he was already on the fast track to becoming a very wealthy man. He could still remember the day he’d made his first million. This is fucking easy, he’d thought.
And years later, that was still exactly how he felt about it. It was easy. Ridiculously easy. He was damn good at it, and it had been very, very kind to him.
He liked to think that his profession was older than prostitution. Ever since the earliest civilisations had started honouring their dead by burying them with precious objects, there had been opportunities for men like him. He wasn’t the kind of idiot that the Egyptian Antiquities Police would catch, shovel in hand, digging at the foot of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. Claudel’s operation was slick and sophisticated. And safe. He made sure that the guys doing the actual thieving never knew who they were working for, while he himself never even went near the desert. The wine bars and top class restaurants and golf courses were the places he carried out his business, and that suited him fine. Hot sand was bad for his handmade Italian shoes.
Claudel had travelled everywhere in the course of his trade-Rome, Athens, Ankara, Beirut, Damascus, Delhi were all potential sources of prime merchandise for him. But Egypt was the real deal. Egypt was where it was truly at, and he wasn’t the only greedy piglet suckling on her fat teat. Everyone with half a connection was muscling in for a piece of the action. Even government officials trusted with the job of protecting Egypt’s heritage had been caught amassing huge fortunes by squirrelling artefacts to private buyers in Europe and the USA. Pharaonic slate palettes, pottery, glazed figurines, bronze statuettes, amulets, gold trinkets, carved stone heads, tapestries, even furniture-not to mention the wealth of items left over from the Graeco-Roman period. There was a veritable avalanche of stuff pouring out of the country.
Claudel was careful never to let the artefacts too close to him. There was no Egyptian art in his home, not a scrap of anything that the Ministry of Culture or the Antiquities Police could ever catch him with. They’d never come close to suspecting him, but if they ever did come knocking on his door he’d be only too happy to show them around the place. Everything he personally owned was legit. Nobody could ever know that he’d paid for his collection of Ming vases by tunnelling through the wall into a storeroom used to house artefacts at a temple in Karnak and making off with a truckload of statues. He’d never even seen them. Even before they were his, they were sold.
It had been the same with the priceless Louis XIV desk in his study, a trade for a Ptolemaic-era gold mask lifted from a mummy at the necropolis of Deir-el-Banat. One of his first really big sales. He could still remember it well. The tombs had been nice and shallow, sometimes just a metre under the surface. Grab and go. By the time the authorities had rolled up, all the good stuff was gone. They could keep the bones and bandages. Claudel had little use for dusty old corpses.
And that was the way it had continued. Fifteen years on, business had never been more brisk. The appetite for Egyptian antiquities was as hot now as it had been in ancient times. Occasionally, an eagle-eyed Egyptologist would spot the stolen goods that cropped up in the auction rooms of Christie’s and Sotheby’s and the alert was sounded. The trail would sometimes lead back to the source and heads rolled, especially when the Ministry of Culture boys
