by Glenn Meade
“But you recall it very well.”
Weaver hesitated, then slowly reached into his pocket, took out his wallet, and handed something to me. “That’s because I have this to remind me.”
It was a very old, faded black-and-white photograph, kept preciously in a protective plastic cover, the paper wrinkled and cracked. Three young people stood among the tombs near the Step pyramid, their faces healthy and tanned, their arms around one another’s waists as they smiled out at the camera. I recognized Harry Weaver at once, as a young man. Beside him stood a striking woman. She was very beautiful, her features finely chiseled, her blond hair bleached from the sun. Next to her was a handsome man, a smile etched on his face. Jack Halder and Rachel Stern.
I stared down at the photograph for a long time, the images suddenly real, faces to go with the story, then silently handed it back, stuck for something to say. There was really nothing I could think of.
Weaver returned the photograph to his wallet. “I’m glad we talked, Carney. If ever you’re back Stateside, I’m always happy to see visitors, so look me up some. There are so few old friends still around these days—they seem to pass away with monotonous regularity.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Well, goodnight, or should I say good morning.”
“Good morning, sir.”
He entered the elevator, the doors closed, and he was gone.
• • •
I walked back to my apartment but couldn’t sleep. For some reason, I kept going over Weaver’s story in my mind. I sat there restlessly, drinking coffee, watching the sun come up, thinking about everything Weaver had told me, until a little later I got dressed and went down to the street and walked towards the deserted Kasr-el-Nil bridge. When a solitary taxi drove past, I hailed it. The driver looked surprised to see a customer at such an early hour.
“Where to, sir?”
“Sakkara.”
He didn’t register astonishment that someone would want to visit the famous site at dawn but simply shrugged as I climbed in. We drove out along the Pyramids Road before turning south, out into the green Nile countryside and along the canal, the shabby villages along the way deserted, hardly a sinner in sight, and then we came to the ruins of the fabled city of Memphis, and at last Sakkara, that awesome monument to a long-dead king, loomed ahead.
It looked a very beautiful place just after dawn, truly glorious, sky and earth the color of fiery sandstone, a tangerine sunrise washing over the oldest pyramid in Egypt, where the most fertile land on earth, the lush Nile delta, ended abruptly with a thick forest of palms and the barren desert began. There was a hut where the tourist police checked the incoming traffic, but there was no one about so early in the morning, and I told the driver to carry on, up the steep winding road to the site. When we reached the gravel parking lot below the entrance, I got out.
“Wait here, please.”
I walked up the hill. It was still cool in the desert after the freezing cold of night, the place desolate—no hordes of tourists, or annoying camel drivers and guides offering their services. I walked among the ruins and stood in the pale shadows of the splendor of Zoser’s pyramid. A sign nearby said that an international archeological team was at work, another dig in progress, but I saw no one, so I went to sit on one of the stone blocks at the base.
There were faded initials carved into the stepped layers of ancient brown rock, hundreds and hundreds of them, scratched and chiseled by visitors and victors over countless centuries. Primitive marks left by Roman legionnaires, ciphers scraped into the weathered stone by Napoleon’s conquering armies, and endless forgotten memorials to lovers, long dead. I searched for a long time, brushing away sand, moving from stone to stone, the rock so badly eroded in places that it was impossible to read some of the inscriptions, until finally a chill went through me as I found what I was looking for, the letters so badly worn I had to trace their faded outline with the tip of my finger.
But there they were. RS, HW, JH. 1939.
I thought of that summer when Harry Weaver had first come to Sakkara. I thought of Jack Halder and Rachel Stern, and all the dead names from the past, their bodies long gone to dust, with their passions and pain, hates and intrigues, and I thought how none of it mattered anymore. Above all, I wondered if Jack Halder was still alive. He’d be a very old man now, but really it was no use wondering.
As Weaver had said, little by little we drift from the shores of the past until they become just a distant memory. All that remained of the truth was a worn old photograph and these neglected initials chiseled in stone. But for me, they were truth enough.
I stood, dusted my hands, and walked back down the hill.
• • •
I never discovered what happened to Franz Halder’s collection, and I never saw Harry Weaver again. He passed away four months later in a New York hospital, two days after suffering a stroke. The prominent newspapers all had obituaries. He was to be buried in a local church cemetery in his hometown, where he and Jack Halder had spent their childhood together.
I was back in New York on leave at the time and I decided to hire a car and make the long drive upstate to pay my final respects. There was a bad storm, I was delayed, and by the time I arrived the funeral had ended. There were dozens of mourners, and more than a few familiar White House faces. Rain drifted in across the cemetery in sheets, and it didn’t take long for the crowd to disperse back to their cars as the sound of thunder rolled above us, and then I was alone.
Beyond the white-painted wooden church, on a distant rise, I could see what had once been the site of the residence belonging to Jack Halder’s family. It was long gone now, a shopping mall and a parking lot in its place. For some reason I thought about two small boys who had once played there and become friends until passion and circumstance had made them enemies, and their love for a woman had almost destroyed them both.
As I stood there, drenched by the rain, I let my eyes wander over the grave. It was covered with wreaths and bouquets of every description. More than a few were from the Pentagon and the veterans’ associations, and there were even two from former American presidents.
But among the wreaths and flowers I noticed a solitary snow-white lily, lying at the base of the black marble slab. A cold shiver ran through me. I picked up the envelope, read the plain white card inside, the handwriting frail and scratched, but the words unmistakable.
They said: “A promise kept. Jack.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
As ever, no book is written without help, and of the many people who assisted my research I would especially like to mention James H. Griffith, former Secret Service agent to President Roosevelt, who experienced the Cairo Conference in 1943 at first hand; Secret Service archivist Mike Sampson and H. Terrence Samway (Assistant Director, Office of Government Liaison and Public Affairs, Washington) for their kind help in providing archival material; Ted Allbeury, author, and Stephen Franke (Lieutenant Colonel, U.S. Army, Retired) of the Middle East Services Group, for their much-valued advice on intelligence matters; John Hackett, a true English gentleman, with more stories to tell than any writer could hope to hear in a lifetime; and Samir Raafat, author and historian, for his expert knowledge of wartime Cairo, and for the courtesy and kindness he extended to me during my research in Egypt.
The Cairo Code is a work of fiction tempered with a measure of truth, and any errors—historical, intended, or otherwise—are solely mine. That the Nazis intended to assassinate President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill during the series of important Allied conferences that took place in the Middle East in late 1943 is historical fact.
The Sphinx mission is based in part on Operation Long Jump, a daring top-secret plan conceived by Heinrich Himmler and Walter Schellenberg, after the infamous Nazi spy in Turkey, Cicero, provided the information—stolen from the safe of the British ambassador—that the American president and British prime minister were to visit Cairo, and then Teheran, for secre
t talks.
An initial plan was devised jointly by the SD and the Abwehr, using a special team of agents to pinpoint the exact whereabouts of the Allied leaders. When the final stage of the operation was imminent, Berlin dispatched two planeloads of crack SS paratroops, the intention being to storm the conference location and kill Roosevelt and Churchill—the principal target being the American president. Though it came perilously close to succeeding, the plan failed virtually at the last minute, when a captured German agent revealed the conspiracy. The vital radio set that was to have guided down the aircraft, and which had been hidden in an ancient tomb, was destroyed, resulting in one of the Luftwaffe transports of SS troops being shot down, and the second forced to turn back. Until the remaining infiltrators had been killed or captured, President Roosevelt was hastily moved to a secret location by his Secret Service team.
So much of what happened during those dark, intriguing, and exciting days of the Second World War is veiled by the clouds of time and distance. Old intelligence hands fade away and take untold secrets with them to the grave. Whether Sphinx ever really came close to changing the course of world history will forever remain a mystery.
© FRED CANNON
GLENN MEADE was born in Finglas, Dublin, in 1957. His novels have been international bestsellers, translated into more than twenty languages and have enjoyed both critical and commercial success. He worked in the field of pilot training for Aer Lingus for many years and as a journalist for the Irish Times. He now writes full-time.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1999 by Glenn Meade
A slightly different version of this work was previously published in 1999 by St. Martin’s Press as The Sands of Sakkara.
Cover design by Bruce Gore
Cover Image by Getty Images
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First Howard Books trade paperback edition April 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Meade, Glenn, 1957–
[Sands of Sakkara]
The Cairo Code : a thriller / Glenn Meade.—First Howard Books trade paperback edition
pages cm
1. World War, 1939–1945—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Egypt—Fiction. 3. Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano), 1882–1945—Assassination attempts—Fiction. 4. Churchill, Winston, 1874–1965—Assassination attempts—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.E16845S26 2016
813'.54—dc23
2015026476
ISBN 978-1-4516-8827-6
ISBN 978-1-4516-8828-3 (ebook)
