Scorpia Rising

that great!” Julius exclaimed. “Wasn’t that cool!”
    “Go to bed, Julius,” Razim replied. He picked up a printout and held it up to examine the figures. “I have work to do.”
    Two guards had arrived. They untied Alex and dragged him away. Julius followed them out of the room. Razim sat where he was, deep in thought.
    Out in the desert, the flames flickered in the darkness, throwing jagged red shadows across the sand.

20

    HALF AN INCH

    THE CONVOY WAS MOVING SWIFTLY through the streets of Cairo. There were nine vehicles in all, starting with two police cars and four outriders on motorbikes. The three cars at the center of the procession were identical: oversized black limousines with tinted windows and a miniature Stars and Stripes fluttering at the corner. The cars had begun their journey a mile away, at the American embassy in Garden City, and from the moment they had swung out of the gates and onto the main road, a whole army of Egyptian policemen had been deployed to keep them moving, with officers holding back the traffic at every corner and at every light. From the air, the convoy might have looked like a living animal, a snake perhaps, burrowing its way through a hundred thousand ants.
    The secretary of state was in the first limousine. It might have been safer for her to ride in the middle one with CIA agents in front and behind . . . but this was also the more obvious target. Even though the cars were armor plated, an armor-piercing missile launched from a rooftop was always a possibility. All the roofs had been checked. Armed policemen had taken up strategic positions all the way along the route and would remain there until the night was over. The man known as the Engineer had been seen in Cairo. He might have been killed, but not before he had provided an assassin with a weapon. Nothing could be left to chance.
    Sitting in the backseat, next to the window, the secretary of state watched the drab buildings and the stationary traffic as they flashed by. She was a small woman with steely eyes and tied-back silver hair, wearing an off-white silk jacket and skirt, a white shirt, and a jade necklace that had been given to her by the Chinese premier on a recent visit. There was a short, bald-headed man in a dark suit next to her. He looked nervous, but she knew it had nothing to do with the security arrangements. He was her foreign policy adviser and was already thinking about what she was going to say. It was always a dangerous business, making new enemies, and her speech tonight would do just that. Her driver and bodyguard—both CIA men—were in the front. They knew nothing. To them, it was just another business trip.
    It seemed to have gotten dark very early. It was only half past six, but the sky was already black. It was going to rain. The temperature had risen too high even for this sweltering city and it was obvious that something was going to break soon. The clouds were so heavy that they looked as if they were about to fall out of the sky, and the air was sticking to everything it touched. Even the air-conditioning inside the car seemed to be fighting a losing battle.
    “It’s a pretty nasty night, Jeff,” she said. Her foreign policy adviser’s name was Jeff Townsend.
    “Could be a downpour,” Jeff agreed.
    “I thought it didn’t rain in Cairo.”
    “It doesn’t rain often, ma’am. But when it rains . . . it rains.”
    The secretary of state had a headache. It had been nagging at her ever since she had touched down in the presidential plane. She leaned forward. “Do you have an aspirin, Harry?”
    “Sure thing, ma’am.” Her bodyguard was also a trained medic. He handed her two pills, which she swallowed with a sip of mineral water from a bottle.
    The convoy crossed the Nile on University Bridge and swept around El-Gamaa Square—actually a circular area and one that would normally have been jammed with traffic. It continued up a wide avenue with palm trees on each side and lawns and fountains running up the center. The university itself lay straight ahead. Even on a normal day, security at the campus was high, with students passing through a single gateway and showing ID before they were allowed to continue. But this week, security levels had soared with triple checks, full body searches, metal detectors, the works. The main Assembly Hall had been in lockdown for the past twenty-four hours. Egyptian police with sniffer dogs had finished searching the place for the fifth