He Shall Thunder in the Sky - Elizabeth Peters [161]
“And here,” I said, holding out a grubby, much folded bit of paper, “is an enclosure for you from Sennia.”
Emerson’s eyes were shining suspiciously. After he had read the few printed words that staggered down the page, he folded it again and tucked it carefully into his breast pocket.
There was no message for Ramses that day or the day after, or the day after that. Days stretched into weeks. Ramses went almost every day to Cairo. I never had to ask whether he had found the message he was waiting for. Govern his countenance as he might, his stretched nerves showed in the almost imperceptible marks round his eyes and mouth, and in his increasingly acerbic responses to perfectly civil questions. Some of his visits were to Wardani’s lieutenants; like the rest of us, they were becoming restive, and Ramses admitted he was having some difficulty keeping them reined in.
Rumors about the military situation added another dimension of discomfort. In my opinion it would have been wiser for the authorities to publish the facts; they might have been less alarming than the stories that were put about. There were one hundred thousand Turkish troops massed near Beersheba. There were two hundred thousand Turkish troops heading for the border. Turkish forces had already crossed the border and were marching toward the Canal, gathering recruits from among the Bedouin. Jemal Pasha, in command of the Turks, had boasted, “I will not return until I have entered Cairo”; his chief of staff, von Kressenstein, had an entire brigade of German troops with him. Turkish agents had infiltrated the ranks of the Egyptian artillery; when the attack occurred they would turn their weapons on the British.
Some of the stories were true, some were not. The result was to throw Cairo into a state of panic. A great number of people booked passage on departing steamers. The louder patriots discussed strategy in their comfortable clubs, and entered into a perfect orgy of spy hunting. The only useful result of that was the disappearance of Mrs. Fortescue. It was assumed by her acquaintances that she had got cold feet and sailed for home; we were among the few who knew that she had been taken into custody. That gave me another moment of hope, but like all our other leads, this one faded out. She insisted even under interrogation that she did not know the name or identity of the man to whom she had reported.
“She is probably telling the truth,” said Emerson, from whom I heard this bit of classified information. “There are a number of ways of passing on and receiving instructions. I understand that chap we saw at the Savoy—one of Clayton’s lot—what’s his name?—is claiming the credit for unmasking her.”
“Herbert,” Ramses supplied, with a very slight curl of his lip. “He’s also unearthing conspiracies. According to him, he doesn’t even have to go looking for them; the malcontents come to him, burning to betray one another for money.”
“One of them hasn’t,” said Emerson. “Damnation! The insufferable complacency of men like Herbert will cost us dearly one day.”
I also learned from Emerson that Russell agreed with his and Ramses’s deductions about the route the gunrunners had followed. The Camel Corps section of the Coastguards had been alerted, and since their pitiful pay was augmented by rewards for each arrest, one might suppose they were