Paul Christopher - The Templar Cross

"If Rauff collected all that gold from North African Jews, you would have thought he'd have sent it back to Germany. So what was it doing out in the desert?"

They reached the bottom of the hill and flagged a silver Mercedes taxi cruising the harbor front, trolling for business from the restaurants overlooking the water. Twenty minutes later they'd booked themselves into a garish pink suite overlooking the crescent of beach in front of the Royal Casino Hotel in Mandelieu-la-Napoule.

"I guess the next stop is Tunisia," said Holliday, crouching in front of the minibar and getting out the fixings for a stiff drink. Both the sight of Felix Valador's grisly corpse in the cupboard and the nasty feel of the Holocaust gold in his hands had shaken him badly.

"Not necessarily," said Rafi, sitting on the edge of one of the beds and flicking through the channels on the big flat-screen TV. He dug into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He tossed it to Holliday. "Check out the shots I took."

Holliday put the phone in picture mode and scrolled through the photos. There were two or three general views of the antique store interior, one of Valador, dead in the armoire, the phony ruby in his ear, three pictures of the gold bar and two more of the old Bakelite wall phone between the Grecian columns. The first of the two was a wide shot of the phone's relative position between the columns and the last shot was a close-up of the phone itself.

"What do you see?" Rafi asked.

"A bad picture of an old dial telephone."

"What's on the wall above the phone?"

Holliday squinted, then zoomed in.

"A number." He read it off. "0112032087582."

"Zero-one-one is the international dialing prefix. The next two digits are a country code and the single digit after that is the city code."

"What country? What city?"

"Let's find out," said Rafi. He went to the phone on the night table between the beds and dialed the concierge in the lobby. Holliday mixed his Jack and soda. "Parlez-vous anglais?" Rafi asked. There was a pause. "Great. I wonder if you could tell me what telephone country code is twenty… two-zero, yes. And the city code three. Trois, oui, yes. Merci bien." He hung up the telephone.

"Well?" Holliday asked, sipping the drink.

"Alexandria," said Rafi.

"Virginia?" Holliday asked, not entirely surprised. Alexandria, Virginia, wasn't too far from MacLean and Langley, home of the CIA. It figured that they'd be involved.

"No," said Rafi. "Egypt."

They flew out of the Nice- Cote d'Azur Airport the following morning on a rattletrap Boeing 737 in faded blue Royal Air Maroc livery. The aircraft was ancient, some of the ceiling panels held up with duct tape. Rafi's seat table kept collapsing, almost spilling a suspicious-smelling breakfast of something yellow in his lap, and throughout the trip small children ran up and down the aisle screaming at the top of their tiny lungs. There was no drink service and the toilets were overflowing after the first hour. Holliday was sure he smelled cigarette smoke coming from behind the ill-fitting cockpit door.

Their journey was a convoluted one, going first to Paris-Orly and then to Casablanca, where they waited to be refueled for three hours. From Casablanca they hopped north again to Tangier, then east to Oran in Algeria for a brief stop before flying on to Algiers.

In Algiers there was another unexplained lay-over on the tarmac, where they were served a lunch of flatbread and something called tagine, which was generally brown and looked like it might have begun life as a stew. It tasted of mutton and cardamom and had a large dollop of runny yogurt on top. By this point in the journey Holliday began to understand that he was no longer in Kansas anymore, or anywhere else in the regular world. It was beginning to feel like an episode of The Twilight Zone. Beside him Rafi didn't seem to mind at all. Holliday presumed it took a Mediterranean mind to appreciate the nuances of travel in North Africa.

After an eternity staring out the grimy window of the plane at the barren expanse of Houari Boumedienne Airport and the burnt-out, skeletal and overgrown remains of an Air Afrique 737 from a crash decades old, they took off once again, landing in Tunis for what the pilot referred to as a "Mechanicals techniques problem." With the mechanicals techniques apparently fixed the plane took off two and a half hours later, ceiling panels drooping, toilets reeking and overflowing and the central aisle awash in garbage and small children.

Three hours after that the old plane dropped through the dense brown fog of fumes over Cairo. A long frustrating hour and a folded fifty-dollar bill got them through customs and immigration into the cat-litter atmosphere of the ancient city. Another forty minutes in a taxi got them to the ornate palace of the nineteenth-century Ramses Railway Station.

Half an hour after that, utterly exhausted, they squeezed on board the early-morning train to Alexandria. They rolled out of the dreary broken suburbs of a Soviet-era Cairo into the ghostly mists of the Nile Delta marshes and finally arrived at the great arc of the city by the sea, which the English expatriate novelist Lawrence Durrell had once described as the White Metropolis-Alexandria.

By the time they reached the Regency Hotel on Corniche Street, facing the beach and the ocean less than a hundred feet away, they had been traveling for almost exactly twenty-four hours on a trip that should have been barely half that long. Within five minutes of arriving both men were asleep.

The following morning after a room service breakfast of two eggs over easy, Holliday phoned the telephone number Rafi had photographed in Felix Valador's store and discovered that it belonged to a gift shop on Masjed el Attarine Street.

"What do we do?" Rafi asked. "Just walk into the place and say: Hi, we're pals with Felix Valador so tell us everything you know?" He pushed back from the breakfast table.

"All I know is we're going to stand out like a pair of sore thumbs on any back street in Alexandria," said Holliday.

"So we need some protective cover," responded Rafi.

"Phone the concierge and see what he can rustle up for us."

What the concierge rustled up was his taxi driver cousin, a young man in his early twenties named Faraj. Ten minutes after the concierge called, Faraj was at the front door in a black and yellow Lada taxi that looked as though it had been used in a war. Faraj himself was a beanpole in a spotless white galabia and a matching skullcap. He wore Coke-bottle glasses, smiled a lot and was trying to grow a desperate little beard. According to the concierge, young Faraj was a university student who only drove a taxi part-time and spoke excellent English.

"You speak English, Faraj?" Rafi asked.

"Certainly. Very excellent. Lindsay Lohan."

"Lindsay Lohan?" Holliday asked, a little startled.

"Certainly," Faraj said and nodded. "Black hole. Certainly excellent." He began to sing. His voice was surprisingly good, low and mellow; an Egyptian Barry Manilow.

"Enough," said Holliday, holding up one hand in surrender. "How much for the day?"

"Please?"

The concierge aimed a burst of angry Egyptian toward his cousin and they held a brief, intense conversation. The concierge finally turned to Holliday and showed a mouthful of gold teeth.

"Four hundred pounds," said the concierge.

Holliday gave Rafi a quick inquiring look.

"About a hundred U.S. dollars, perhaps a little less," said the Israeli.

"Deal," said Holliday.

Everybody shook hands. The concierge kept his hand extended.

"He wants his money in advance," said Rafi.

"His money?"

"He's Faraj's agent. He'll take his cut and pay him at the end of the day if everything goes all right."