Warren Murphy - Last Rites

On the way out the passenger exit, Remo shook hands with every flight attendant, whispering, "I'm a eunuch. Honest. I'm a eunuch."

On his way out, the Master of Sinanju shut the cabin door behind him, giving it a smack that made the entire fuselage shake like a gaffed fish and incidentally fusing the door shut.

The sound of fists beating against unyielding metal followed them up the jetway ramp and into the busy terminal.

A smiling Egyptian man bowed Remo and Chiun into his cab outside the terminal, and Chiun slipped in first. When Remo dropped into the seat beside him, he found the driver had already been given his instructions. The cab took off, screeching through the clangor and congestion of downtown Cairo.

"Care to enlighten a tourist as to his destination?" Remo asked Chiun, rolling up his window to keep out the sulphurous smog.

"You are going to confront the dreaded Sun Lion."

"I'm not afraid of lions."

"This is a very large lion."

"How large can a lion be?" asked Remo.

The Master of Sinanju only smiled with a tight satisfaction.

UNDER THE BORED GAM of the Cairo police Theron Moenig, UCLA professor of inexplicable phenomena, had set the four surveyor's lasers, one for each point on the compass, around the crumbling treasure of ancient Egypt men called the Great Sphinx.

The lasers were calibrated to nanometer tolerances. Set equidistant, they would detect the most minute vibrations in the great limestone idol. The great moment approached.

Theron Mcenig had toiled for six years for this great moment. Six years of seeking grants, funding and specialized equipment normally used to test the structural integrity and plumb of high-rise skyscrapers. And now it was here.

He must not fail. Science looked to him for the answer to one of the great riddles surrounding the Great Sphinx of Giza.

There were many questions surrounding the Sphinx. They had been asked repeatedly down through the dusty centuries. The empty echoes of answers that were never forthcoming resounded down the decades.

Who had built the Sphinx? Why was it built?

And who or what was represented by the giant, multiton figure of a recumbent lion with the head of a pharaoh?

Some said it wore the face of Pharaoh Khufu, who was known as Cheops to the Greeks. Others claimed the Sphinx wore the visage of his son, Khafre, at the foot of whose pyramid it reposed. Most scholars believed the Sphinx dated back to the end of the Old Kingdom. A few believed it was older than the earliest pharaoh.

Questions immemorial. The centuries rolled on, but the theories still hung in the sandy air of the desert, unanswered. If not unanswerable.

Professor Moenig had come to the land of the pharaohs not to investigate the old, unprovable theories but to pose one that had never been asked in all of history. Has the Sphinx been moving?

It was a preposterous question, which was why it had taken six and not the usual three years to wrest a halfmillion-dollar grant from UCLA's archaeology department. No one ever considered that the Sphinx had moved from its original spot. It had been buried by the encroaching deserts the ancient Egyptians called the Red Land countless times. In fact, had it not been buried four and a half centuries after it was carved, and thereby sheltered from the biting erosion of the windblown sands of the desert, the Sphinx might conceivably have become even more disgracefully eroded than it was.

It was the orientation of the Great Sphinx to the Pyramid of Khufu that first posed the theory in Theron Moenig's mind. Ancient records had shown conclusively that the Sphinx lay at a precise right angle from the Khafre pyramid's eastern face. Yet a modern satellite picture showed a clear three-degree tilt away from the perpendicular.

That the Sphinx had moved over the centuries as it sat patient and brooding seemed as inescapable as it was impossible.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa tilted. Everyone knew that. Big Ben had even started leaning one way. This was known. The seas receded. Glaciers melted and tides lifted. These were facts.

But what could have caused the Sphinx to move slowly, inexorably and-prior to sensitive surveying lasers-imperceptibly from its original east-facing orientation?

Professor Moenig was determined to find out. Armed with six million dollars of UCLA money-one million of it needed to bribe Egyptian authorities-he would discover the truth.

Even if he had to live in the three-hundred-dollar-a-day Pharaoh Suite of the Nile Hilton from now until the turn of the century to do it.

Opening his sun parasol, Moenig sat down before the computer terminal that displayed the Sphinx transfixed by the lasers' equidistant beams and pulled a paperback book from his backpack, settling down for the long haul. The longer the better.

THE CAB CARRIED Remo and Chiun over a bridge and out of the city. They were soon on Pyramids Road, and the imposing cluster of three great pyramids bulked up through the stinking smog. Desert sands lay on either side. Camels plodded majestically along, carrying tourists and pilgrims alike.

"Now, Khufu had many sons," Chiun said suddenly, as if picking up a story left unfinished. "But only one could be pharaoh. This was in the days of Master Saja. Khufu chose Djedefre as his successor. But one of his wives schemed to install her son by Khufu, one Rama-Tut. Ignorant of Khufu's unspoken choice, she conspired with a wicked vizier to rid the world of the rival sons of Khufu. Many accidents befell the sons of Khufu, who was in those days overseeing the building of the greatest of the pyramids before you. For pharaohs believed themselves to be gods who walked the earth and who, upon death, would ascend to the stars and rule the afterlife."

"That why they built the pyramids?" asked Remo.

Chiun nodded. "'The pyramids that you see are both tombs and staircases to the stars. In each structure that you see lies a shaft, facing north and slanting upward toward what was then called the Imperishable Stars-those that never set."

"Like Polaris?"

"In those days the pole star was a yellow star known to the Egyptians as Thuban, which lies at the tail of the constellation known since Roman times as Draco. Polaris has now taken its place in the sky. After we are dust, it will be the star Koreans call Chik-nyo. For not even the fixed stars in the sky are forever, Remo. But rest assured, when Chik nyo enjoys ascendancy the House of Sinanju will yet be strong."

The hot air grew dustier with every mile. Remo said nothing. The pyramids seemed to grow before them without giving the appearance of coming closer. They were immense, their dun outlines crumbling.

Chiun spoke on. "Now, Khufu had many burdens. He fretted over his pyramid, whose construction and sanctity would ensure a happy afterlife, and he worried about the misfortunes that were felling his lesser sons. So he summoned his chief vizier and asked him if the stars blessed the ascendancy of his son Djedefre to pharaoh. And this treacherous vizier, who was in league with the wicked mother of Rama-Tut, told Khufu that Djedefre would never be pharaoh. The stars looked with favor upon Rama-Tut instead.

"These tidings troubled Khufu deeply, for he recognized the darkness of Rama-Tut's heart and trusted only Djedefre to see that after his passing his tomb would endure the centuries undefiled. So Khufu sent to Sinanju for Master Saja and presented him with his dilemma.

"'If the stars bless Rama-Tut and not my good son Djedefre, what am I to do?' he asked Saja.

"And Saja answered, 'We will foil the stars.'

"Khufu demanded of Saja what was meant, but Saja said only, 'If Sinanju can foil the stars, will you build a monument to the House that will endure through the ages?'

"'Done,' said Pharaoh Khufu. And the deal was struck.