Scorpia Rising

beating. Nobody came in. Whoever had been there must have gone.
    Moving more quickly now, afraid that he might be discovered at any minute, Alex tried the third drawer. It was empty apart from a couple of brochures, advertising the college. He swung it shut again, then opened it a second time. Was it his imagination, or had something metallic moved somewhere inside the drawer? He had heard it, a distinct rolling sound followed by the clunk as it had hit the wooden edge. He took the brochures out. There was nothing underneath them. Unless . . .
    Alex placed his hand flat on the bottom of the drawer and pushed. It tilted and he saw that he had discovered a false bottom, that there was a secret compartment underneath. Gunter had dropped a Biro into the hidden space and it had rolled from one end to the other with the movement of the drawer.
    What else was there? Alex put his hand in and pulled out a gun, made in Russia with a star engraved in the handle. Was that something Gunter kept for his job at the school? And if so, why was it concealed here? It had been resting on top of a map . . . the edge of the Sahara and an oasis town called Siwa. It seemed an unlikely vacation destination, although Cairo College did sometimes organize trips into the desert. Next out was a newspaper, a copy of the Washington Post , about a week old. The front page was given over to a big article about the president’s plummeting approval ratings and, underneath it, a smaller one about pollution in the Gulf of Mexico. There might be something relevant inside, but Alex didn’t have time to read it. MI6 could buy the same edition and do that for themselves. Alex memorized the date and set the paper aside.
    There was nothing else in the drawer except for a bundle of photographs. Alex spread them out over the surface of the desk and examined them. Most of them showed a large domed building that reminded him of the Albert Hall in London but that, from the palm trees that surrounded it, was more likely to be somewhere in Cairo. The pictures had been taken from every angle. There were cars parked outside and people—many of them young and carrying books—crossing the lawns that surrounded it. Some sort of school or university? This was a modern, liberated place. Some of the women were in jeans and hardly any of them were wearing head scarves or veils.
    And then there was a picture of a room, perhaps inside the domed building. It wasn’t so much a room as a wide storage closet or a cellar. Alex saw red tiles, old paint cans, and a mop in a bucket, leaning against a corner. What on earth could Gunter want with a photograph of this? The next picture was even stranger. It was a close shot of a coat hook, presumably in the same room. The hook was in the middle of a brick wall, shaped like a swan’s neck. The edge of the metal had caught the flash, which was blurring much of the image. It certainly wasn’t going to win any prizes in a “Views of Cairo” competition.
    There was one picture left. Alex turned it over and frowned. He was looking at a photograph of himself. It must have been taken sometime in the past two weeks. It showed him in full school uniform, walking through the gates at the end of the day. The photographer must have been inside Gunter’s office. Alex was in the far distance, barely more than an inch high. But it was definitely him. The definition was good enough for him to see his own face. Even so, there was something about it that puzzled him. He examined it carefully. There was definitely something wrong.
    Alex took out his own iPhone—a real one with a three-megapixel camera—and took snaps of all the photographs he had looked at. Then he carefully returned them to the secret drawer, making sure they were in the same order he had found them, and laid the gun on top. He wondered if MI6 would be able to make anything out of them. Well, it was up to them now. He had finally achieved something. Maybe he had even bought his ticket back home.
    Alex made sure he had left nothing behind, then tiptoed over to the door and listened. There was nobody outside.
    He slipped out into the corridor and quickly walked away.
    It was almost four o’clock. He was very late leaving. If anybody asked him what he was doing, he would say he had forgotten his homework and gone back for it. He passed the school secretary’s office—there was nobody there—and went through the main doors, back into the searing heat of the yard. The gates were