My arms were swollen and sore from too many shots too close together, but that wasn’t what bothered me. The sun was beating down on my head and shoulders, but I didn’t mind that. My stomach felt slightly queasy, but it wasn’t from anything I had eaten.

Some distance away a small group of people had gathered round an individual who appeared to be lecturing to them. They were distinguished from the other groups that covered the plateau like hordes of locusts by the bags they had slung over their shoulders. Many of the tour groups presented their clients with such bags, so that the bright distinctive colours could help identify lost or wandering members of the group, but there were no colours quite as distinctive as these: broad stripes of gold, turquoise-blue and bright red-orange, the shades so often found in Egyptian jewellery. One of the same bags, trimmed in gold braid and bearing my name, lay on the sand at my feet.

My eyes went back to the paper on my lap. It was the passenger list. My name wasn’t on it. I would appear, and be introduced, after the boat had sailed. This was in keeping with my cover story – that I had replaced a friend at the last moment. It was also a safety precaution, to keep my presence from being known in advance. Some safety precaution, I thought sourly. Well, it couldn’t hurt.

Some of the passengers had boarded the boat the day before. I had gone to a hotel instead and spent the afternoon . . . guess where?

A few hours in the Cairo Museum for someone in my profession is like a nibble of fudge to a chocoholic. The place is stuffed, bulging, overflowing with wonders. I was familiar with many of them from photographs and films, but there is no substitute for seeing the real thing. And the ‘minor’ artifacts, the ones that weren’t so often featured, were just as beautiful. I stood for ten minutes studying the inlay on a small box.

Shadowing my enjoyment, however, was my real reason for being there. The more I saw, the more I wondered why people like John hadn’t already stripped the museum.

I don’t mean to criticize. The whole damned country is a museum, and no one knew better than I how much it cost in money and manpower just to maintain the antiquities, much less support additional excavation. Egypt is a poor country, with a soaring birthrate; there aren’t enough schools, clinics, or jobs, or even food; half of it has to be imported. The Egyptians were in a particularly ironic situation, since the hordes of tourists on which the economy depended were slowly and inexorably destroying the treasures they came to see. According to one article I had read, visitors to the tomb of Tutankhamon put out as much as twenty-five pints of perspiration per day, raising the humidity in the small room to a point that damaged the paint and the underlying plaster. The very stones of the Sphinx had been eaten away by pollution and misguided attempts at repair.