Scorpia Rising

always covering his head with the traditional ghutra, or Arab scarf. When he was in Western dress, he had worn sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled down low. He decided that surgery would not be needed. He lived quietly, making sure he didn’t attract any attention. And he waited for the next opportunity to reveal itself, as he was sure it would.
    He still owned a penthouse apartment in the center of Cairo and a summerhouse in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. But his favorite home was where he was now, this long-forgotten fort lost in 1.2 million square miles of sand. This was where he came to get away from the crowds. It was where he felt more secure. And it was a perfect setting, too, for the series of experiments in which he was now engaged.
    There was a rope bridge that crossed from one side of the complex to the other. Razim had ordered it to be installed to save him walking all the way around. He crossed it now, putting out two hands to steady himself as it swayed beneath his feet. The salt pile was right beneath him now, and he watched as one of the guards emptied a wheelbarrow, adding to the heap. Razim had insisted that the new building be done in the traditional Berber style, mixing salt with sand. It was slow—but it felt right.
    Everything was quiet. The desert had settled for the night. He reached the other end of the bridge and walked along the opposite parapet until he came to a stone staircase that led back down to ground level. He took it. A second guard stood respectfully to attention as he walked past.
    Razim still didn’t know how Scorpia had managed to track him down. At first it had worried him. If they could find him, then any one of the world’s intelligence agencies might follow. But he had soon realized that Scorpia was an organization like no other. After all, by and large the police and security services do not threaten murder or violence to get the information they want. And in the end, he was glad that they had decided to seek him out. They were offering exactly the sort of work that interested him along with the promise of enormous sums of money. The two of them really were made for each other.
    Take this new assignment, the first he would handle as project leader. It was already a fascinating challenge: how to return the Elgin marbles to Greece. Like Zeljan Kurst, Razim had already dismissed the idea of stealing them, although that would surely have been easy enough. When was the last time anyone had checked security at the British Museum? Many of the roofs were made of glass and the security staff, low paid and lazy, could be either bribed or replaced. But that wouldn’t work. If the marbles were ever to be seen in public again, then they would have to be returned legally, with the full cooperation of the British government. So what it came down to was a question of leverage. How could Scorpia persuade them to do something that they had always refused to do?
    He took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. He smoked Black Devil cigarettes, manufactured in China and sold by the long-established firm of Heupink and Bloemen in the Netherlands. He had the packs specially modified so that they no longer warned him that he would quite probably die of cancer. Razim didn’t really care when he died—or how. But he didn’t like being bossed around by governments. He sucked in, letting the sweet, slightly vanilla taste of the tobacco roll around his tongue.
    Small clouds of dust rose around his feet as he crossed the courtyard. The beam of the spotlight swept the ground just ahead. Still smoking, he went into a circular building with a domed roof and a tower. This had once been a chapel. Razim had found faded pictures of various saints on some of the walls and there was even a stained-glass window—the only glass in the entire place. Perhaps French soldiers had come here once to pray that they would soon be sent home. Razim had smashed the window and painted over the frescoes. They were of no interest to him. He had, of course, never believed in God.
    The interior was brightly lit and kept at a pleasant temperature by a sophisticated air-conditioning system. The walls were now all white and purposefully thick, to keep out the heat. There were machines everywhere: computers, television monitors, different-sized boxes with dials and gauges. In the middle of all this, trapped in a pool of brilliant light, a man sat in a leather dentist’s chair, tied to it by soft cords around his