Palace Circle (42 page)

He punched the motor into life. He had decided to tell Delia as well. He knew she would believe that his ongoing feelings for Petra had played a major part in the breakup and that she would be deeply perturbed, but it couldn't be helped. Enough secrets had been kept from her in the past, without him adding another.

It was five o'clock by the time he got back to Grey Pillars, and with the heat of the afternoon over, the place was a hive of activity again.

“I've left another sheaf of files on your desk,” Doris said efficiently as he entered his office. “Captain Reynolds's replacement hasn't arrived yet. Corporal Slade has found you a comfy billet with two other officers in a flat on Sharia el-Walda. He says it's pretty shabby, but the location is hard to beat. It's so near to the embassy, you can see into its garden.”

“Thank you, Doris—and now a mug of tea if you can rustle one up.” He flopped into a battered swivel chair, putting his feet up on the desk and reaching for the files. “Two sugars, please.”

And then, with the paddles of a ceiling fan rotating creakily
above his head, he settled down to do his reading. Two hours later he knew the names of all the informers on the British payroll—and the names of many anti-British informers.

“Though who the anti-British informers pass their information on to, we're not sure,” said Slade, a young Cockney, when he handed Jack a key to the Sharia el-Walda flat. “The Romanians are always suspect. One of their number has already been expelled. Peter, the barman in the Long Bar at Shepheard's, is also a favorite bet but, to be honest, sir, there's not much to back up the suspicion. The only thing anyone's sure of is that the enemy is getting military information and that it's coming from an A-one source. Which has to mean from someone within GHQ or the embassy.”

Having already come to that conclusion, Jack merely nodded and went on with his reading. Rommel had apparently earned himself the nickname of “Desert Fox” and Jack wryly noted that the nickname was even used in official communiques.

On the military front the Australians, with some British help, were still holding out at Tobruk. Rommel had the port city encircled and major British offensives were being undertaken to relieve it.

None, so far, had been successful. Despite the huge number of tanks and troops, Rommel's use of 88-mm antiaircraft guns ensured that every British offensive ended in a murderous defeat. The enormous guns were dug deep into the sand with their snouts disguised by sand-colored tents. Even with field glasses it was impossible to distinguish them from the dunes.

Rommel's trick was to send light tanks on a fake attack. When the British tanks engaged in battle, the panzers would withdraw and the enormous flaks would open fire. The result was carnage of epic proportions.

It made for grim reading and Jack was glad when Doris
waltzed in on him again. “Captain Reynolds's replacement has arrived, sir. Shall I send him in?”

“Pronto, Doris, please.”

He swung his legs off the desk and as he did, Archie walked into the room.

Jack's eyes widened and as the realization dawned that it was Archie who would be his second-in-command, all the misery, anger, and tension of the afternoon vanished.

He rounded the desk in a flash. “Archie, you old sonofagun!” he said, giving him a great bear hug. “I thought you were with special ops.”

“Ah, well. You know what thought did, old mate,” Archie said, a wide grin splitting his homely face. “It thought wrong.”

“Let's go for a beer.” Jack snatched his peaked cap from the corner of his desk. “You and I have a spy to catch.”

Three days later Jack was in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar. A reliable informer, a barber, had told him of a conversation he had overheard. “The father is a grocer and the son is in the Egyptian army,” he had said. “The son wants money to pay his mess bills and his father won't give him any unless he lands a British army contract for vegetables. His exact words were, ‘You'd do better to get that contract instead of involving yourself with crazy army plots that are bound to fail.’”

The term “crazy army plots” was one that couldn't possibly be ignored and Jack thought he could see a way of getting hard inside information about them.

The Khan el-Khalili was a mammoth maze of twisting alleys so crowded with narrow stalls that it was only possible for two people to pass each other by coming into jostling, physical contact. The bazaar sold far more than fruit and vegetables. Egyptians hawked perfumes, rugs, spices, silver, alabaster—
and jewelry so fine that it was the one place in Old Cairo where Europeans could always be found.

Jack pushed his way through the noisy crowds. A few yards in front of him Petra suddenly stepped out of a dark shop doorway, her arms full of silks.

He came to such a sharp, abrupt halt that the Arab walking immediately behind him tripped hard over his heels.

“Maalesh,”
he said as the Arab struggled to regain his balance. “Sorry.”

Petra, too, had come to a halt. With the shopkeeper standing beside her, she was examining the silks in sunlight coming from a gap in the long tin roof above their heads.

It was the first time he had seen her since his arrival in the city. Her glorious mahogany-red hair fell in a turbulent riot of deep waves to her shoulders, pushed away from her face on one side with a tortoiseshell comb. Tall and slender, she was wearing a white linen suit with scarlet sandals. Her legs were suntanned and bare of stockings.

He felt as if his heart had ceased to beat.

She was completely occupied with what she was doing, frowning in concentration as she fingered first one roll of silk and then another.

He saw, as if for the first time, the long thick sweep of her eyelashes, the faint hollows under her beautifully sculpted cheekbones, the rich, generous curve of her mouth.

In that moment he knew that his love for her, and his need of her, would never fade.

And she no longer loved him. For years he'd been trying to hammer that information into his head and still there was a part of him that refused to believe it. He'd tried to move on; he'd tried to find happiness with Fawzia. But his marriage had ended with the hideous scene at Mena House.

In bitter despair he stood and drank in the sight of the
woman he'd loved for as long as he could remember. Suddenly she raised her head from the rolls of silk and their eyes met.

One of the rolls of silk slipped from her hands and the shopkeeper darted forward to catch hold of it.

Jack forced himself into movement. Striving to look relaxed and at ease he strolled up to her.

“Hello,” he said as she clutched a roll of crimson cloth to her chest. “I wondered when we'd run into each other. Did your mother tell you I was back in the city?”

“Yes.” The word came out clipped as if someone had just punched her. “It was bound to happen, wasn't it?” she said, her voice now as falsely bright as if she was talking to a casual acquaintance. “You know Cairo so well and you speak Arabic. Not many intelligence officers in Cairo do. Ivor says it's a wonder you weren't sent here a year ago.”

“I wish I had been. Can I take that roll of silk from you before it follows the other one?”

Without waiting for her response he lifted the silk from her arms. As his hands touched hers, she trembled.

“Could we go for a drink together, Petra?” A pulse was throbbing at the corner of his jaw in exactly the same way a pulse always throbbed at the corner of his father's jaw when he was under intense stress. “The terrace at Shepheard's, or perhaps coffee at Groppi's?”

“I… no.” She looked around wildly for a way of escape. “It isn't possible, Jack. I have an appointment—”

“Sholto,” he said, determined to keep her talking for at least a few moments longer. “How is he? He's someone else I haven't run into yet.”

“Sholto?” Her face took on an expression not so different from Fawzia's when he had asked her to name her lover. “Sholto's fine, thank you. And now I'm sorry, Jack, but I really do have to go.”

Shattering all the stallholder's hopes of a hefty sale, she turned and plunged into the sea of humanity streaming down the narrow alleyway.

Jack didn't follow because he knew she didn't want him to.

Within seconds, as the crowds pressed around her, all he could see between a bobbing mass of white turbans and black veils was her Rita Hayworth mane of hair. He wasn't sure, but as she disappeared from view he thought that her shoulders were shaking—almost as if she was crying.

“I wasn't sure the powers that be were going to agree to the grocery contract,” Archie said a few days later as they reviewed the successful outcome of what they referred to as their “grocer and son” operation.

“They had to.” There was wry amusement in Jack's voice. “It was the only way of getting the son to give any information. Once the British army contract for vegetables was in place I had him exactly where I wanted him. It was a case of talk or lose the contract—and by bluffing that I knew more than I did about his ‘crazy army plots,’ I scared the living daylights out of him. The poor devil thought he was going to be charged with treason if he didn't cooperate.”

Archie lit a cigarette. “So we now know there's a group of Egyptian army officers itching to rise in revolt and we have the name of one of the ringleaders. Captain Anwar Sadat,” he said with great satisfaction. “I'm not surprised the brigadier is pleased.”

It was late evening and they were in Jack's office. Doris had long gone, as had the great majority of people who worked at GHQ. Jack was in his favorite position—slouched comfortably in his swivel chair, his feet on the table.

“It doesn't bring us any nearer to finding our spy, though,” he said, frowning. “The information the German military is
getting isn't the kind a captain in the Egyptian army would be privy to. We need to be looking closer to home. I'm interested in every high-ranking officer at GHQ who has an Egyptian girlfriend. That's the way I see the information being obtained, Archie. Via pillow talk.”

“And Sadat?” Archie asked. He was perched on the corner of the desk, one leg swinging. “What is our next move where he's concerned?”

“Our informant will continue to give us information—he's too deeply compromised not to. And Sadat will be followed. I've assigned that task to Slade. If Sadat is in contact in any way with the chap we're after, we'll get him.” He glanced down at his watch. “It's past midnight, Archie. What say we trawl the nightclubs and check every officer we see with an Egyptian girlfriend? Where shall we start? The Kit-Kat or the Sphinx?”

“There's a small club off Kasr el-Nil Street, near the Turf Club, that would be better. The belly dancer there is great.”

“Let's give it a try, then.” Jack lifted his feet from the desk and reached for his Sam Browne belt and holster. He was quite sure that his theory about a British officer with an Egyptian girlfriend was the right one. He couldn't imagine a British officer knowingly passing secrets to a German spy, but Cairo was a city where, given the number of troops that were in it, women were in chronically short supply. If a man found an Egyptian girlfriend she could be passing secrets either for the money or as a true Egyptian patriot. The way he saw it, when her boyfriend was asleep the girl would copy information from the papers in his briefcase and then pass that information to a German informant, who would then transmit the information to the German military.

Before Jack had left Jerusalem he'd assumed that tracking down such an officer would be relatively straightforward. There couldn't, he had thought, be that many officers at GHQ with access not only to top secret documents but to top secret
documents they had the clearance to take out of the building in a briefcase. Such an officer had to be extremely high-ranking, which would automatically cut down the list of suspects.

But then he had seen the number of high-ranking officers crammed into Grey Pillars and had known that even if his theory was right, tracking down the officer responsible was not going to be easy.

The club off Kasr el-Nil Street was exceedingly small and the minute he stepped through its beaded curtains he doubted many officers would be found there.

“Welcome to club King Cheops, Major,” a waiter said, swiftly taking in the crowns on Jack's shoulder straps. “Would you like champagne? Company? We have very nice girls at King Cheops. Very good dancers.”

“We'd like a table and two Stellas,” Jack said pleasantly. “No girls. Not tonight.”

As they were led across to a table in front of the stage Archie said, “Not tonight? I thought you were a happily married man and that Fawzia was in Cairo?”

“Fawzia is in Cairo,” Jack said as he sat down, “but our marriage is over. And I don't want any sympathy, because I don't need it. Now, how long d'you think we're going to have to wait until your belly dancer comes onstage?”

They sat through a dreadful acrobatic act and an even more dreadful snake-charming act and then, with a roll of drums, the tension in the little club mounted and the noisy clientele at the other tables became even noisier.

“Zahra's good. Really good,” Archie said in happy anticipation, raising his voice so as to be heard. “I reckon her father must own the club, because I can't see any other reason for her not being in demand at the Sphinx or the Kit-Kat.”

When Zahra glided barefoot onto the tiny podium dressed in a gold-sequined halter top and a chiffon hip skirt, bracelets on her arms and ankles, and tiny cymbals on her fingers, Jack
could see that she was exceptionally beautiful in exactly the same way as Fawzia. Her kohl-rimmed eyes were doe-shaped and slanted, her eyebrows perfectly symmetrical arches, her waist-length hair a gleaming blue-black curtain.

Over the years he had seen many belly dancers, but as the familiar sinuous music began and Zahra's hips swiveled slowly and sensuously, Jack thought that perhaps Archie was right. Zahra was far too good a dancer for such a tiny club.

Beside him, Archie had hunched forward, mesmerized. Under other circumstances Jack was pretty sure he would have been similarly mesmerized, but he had too much on his mind. Earlier that afternoon, when Brigadier Haigh had congratulated him on infiltrating the subversive officers within the Egyptian army, he had also given him a grim warning: “Now that Claude Auchinleck has replaced General Wavell as C in C, it's going to be all systems go to relieve Tobruk. With a big push like this in the offing it's vital no information is passed on to the Germans. Their spy in Cairo has to be found, Jack.”