“For God’s sake don’t make a noise or you’ll get us both scragged!”

The voice had spoken English. Unaccented, idiomatic English.

Ramses forced his taut muscles to relax. After a few seconds the hand over his mouth lifted.

“Who-”

“Ssssh! Let’s get farther away. Someone may have heard you fall.”

It struck Ramses as excellent advice. He followed the crawling figure as it made its way rapidly but silently through the grove. When they were some fifty yards away from the camp the other man stood up. Ramses couldn’t make out his features, only the general outline of someone wearing a loose dark garment and headcloth. The large leaves of the fig tree against which his back was pressed provided deep shade.

“Well done,” said the unknown, in the same barely audible murmur. “We should be all right now. But keep your voice down.”

“Who the devil are you?”

After a moment of hesitation the other man said resignedly, “I’ll have to come clean, I suppose, although it’s against regulations. Name’s Macomber. We met at Oxford two years ago. Hogarth’s rooms at Magdalen.”

Macomber’s name meant nothing to Ramses, but Hogarth’s did. Distinguished scholar, experienced archaeologist, rabid imperialist, Hogarth despised “men in the lump” and believed in the God-given superiority of the white “races”-particularly the British. He gathered round him young men whom he inspired to share his vision, who asked nothing more than to serve their country in the great game of empire, without recognition or reward. Ramses had been invited to join the select circle because of his long years of experience in the Middle East, but he had only attended one of the meetings: he had found Hogarth’s beliefs and air of certitude thoroughly offensive. He remembered Macomber now-a pale young man with a shock of yellow hair and eyes that glowed with adolescent fervor as he listened to his mentor hold forth. Officially Hogarth had no connection with any of the intelligence organizations, but Ramses wasn’t the only one who suspected he recommended worthy acolytes for recruitment.

“Regulations,” he repeated. “Which lot are you working for?”

“Never mind that, just listen. I spotted you when you came here with her the first time, been trying to speak with you ever since, but you were always with someone, and I wasn’t allowed to leave camp except once or twice to go to the mosque, and-” A rustle of leaves nearby brought him up sharp. He wasn’t as cool as he had tried to appear. Ramses was getting uneasy too. If they were found together they would both be in trouble.

“Get to the point,” he said. “Why is MO2 interested in Mme von Eine?”

“She’s high up with the German government. They are trying to move into the Middle East, preparing for war eventually-”

“I know. Be specific. Why her, why here, why now?”

“She’s after something. Some talisman, some document, some…I don’t know what, but she and that fellow Mansur consider it vital in their plot to unify Islam against us. I overheard them talk about other places to look-Jericho, Jerusalem-” He glanced over his shoulder. “I’ve got to get back before I’m missed. I’m telling you this so you can pass the word on if something happens to me.”

“Why do you think it might? Has something gone wrong?”

Macomber swallowed noisily. “Mansur caught me listening outside her tent the other night. He’s been watching me ever since. Tell them they were right about von Eine, she’s a major player; tell them about the talisman and about Mansur-I don’t know who he is or what his particular game is, but they can-”

“Tell them yourself,” Ramses said. The sixth sense his mother often spoke of, the feeling of being watched, was raising the hairs on the back of his neck. He put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Come with me now. I can supply you with clothes, you’ll be a friend from university on a walking tour.”

“I have to finish the job.” The muscles under his hand stiffened.

Ramses bit back a blistering expletive. “You’ve done the job. The chance of your finding out anything more is negligible, especially since you are now under suspicion.”

“One more thing. I overheard them mention the Sons of Abraham. I don’t know what it means, but it sounded important.”

To Ramses’s heightened senses the night seemed to be alive with movement and sound. “Don’t go back there,” he said urgently.

“I’ll be all right.” Ramses’s face was so close to Macomber’s he saw his teeth flash in a smile. “I was getting a little…Well, you know. It’s helped, talking to you.”

He moved quickly, slipping out from under Ramses’s restraining hand, and was gone into the night before Ramses could stop him.

Ramses stood listening for several minutes before he dared hope Macomber had slipped back without being spotted. There had been no outcry, no gunfire. His skin was still prickling, though, and he concentrated on moving with exaggerated caution, slipping from shadow to shadow and tree to tree, making use of every bit of cover. It wasn’t until he had reached the outskirts of the village that he was able to relax a bit and consider the implications of that extraordinary encounter.

Macomber had not answered him when he asked who had sent him on his mission. Some section of MO2, probably; the Ottoman Empire was under its jurisdiction. Whoever they were, they had no business sending a novice like Macomber out into the field. He could get in deep trouble just for being what he was: a lone Englishman trying to pass as a native of the area, for purposes unknown and therefore threatening. It was a miracle he had pulled it off as long as he had. The knowledge necessary to pass as a member of a completely different culture couldn’t be drilled into someone, like cramming for an examination. It took years of living the life, learning the language fluently and idiomatically, and a thousand little things that could mean the difference between success and failure-or life and death.

He could only hope that Macomber had got carried away by the thrill of a secret mission and let his imagination run away with him. What had he actually learned, after all, that could put him in danger? Germany’s aspirations in the Middle East were a matter of public knowledge. Vague references to conspiracies and amulets, mysterious phrases…It sounded like the plot of a spy novel, and there hadn’t been a single hard fact in that rambling narrative. As for the Sons of Abraham, it was the sort of romantic name that might have been selected by a religious cult or one of those strange American fraternal organizations.

He had to put up with more teasing when he returned. “You’ve been gone quite a long time,” Fisher said, with a sidelong glance at Reisner. “Enjoy yourself?”

“I wasn’t admitted to the presence,” Ramses said. “They kept me waiting awhile. I’ll just go finish copying the ostraca now.”

“That’s right, you’re leaving tomorrow,” Reisner said.

Don’t you wish, Ramses thought. “Day after tomorrow,” he corrected. “If that’s all right with you.”

“If you think that gives you enough time. You wouldn’t want to be late meeting them.”

“Plenty of time.” Enough, not only to finish tracing the ostraca but to give Macomber a chance to reconsider his offer.

The others set off for the dig early next morning, leaving Ramses bent industriously over his work. As soon as they were out of sight, Ramses headed for the camp.

But when he reached the spot, the camp was gone. Only the blackened scars of campfires and a stretch of trampled earth littered with animal droppings and miscellaneous trash showed where it had been.

He walked slowly across the area where Frau von Eine’s tent had stood, on the unlikely chance that something of interest had been overlooked among the scraps of packing material and other debris. He picked up a crumpled paper and smoothed it out. It seemed to be a page torn from a diary or notebook, bearing only a few words in German-the beginning of a letter to Mein lieber Freund. A disfiguring blot on the last word showed why it had been discarded. The only other unusual item was a scrap of baked clay, so close in color to the earth on which it lay that he almost missed it. Roughly triangular, it bore a few marks that might have been the wedge-shaped cuneiform script that had been used in the Middle East for international correspondence and diplomatic documents during the second millennium B.C. Could this have been broken off one of the clay tablets employed for such letters? If so, it would explain why Madame had reacted to his casual statement about tablets missing from Boghazkoy, and why she had been so wary of admitting where else her travels had taken her.