Free Star of Egypt by Buck Sanders Page A

to maintain his nonprofile, to hide, to set up and execute gimmicks. Often, officials
     had to be bribed on an international basis, and that required lots of money. Thus, it was entirely likely that Haman’s choice
     of America had a twofold motivation. Not only was somebody paying him to set up the President and embarrass the government
     in front of the Egyptians, but somebody else was forking over for his services as a teacher of home-grown guerillas. Plus,
     Slayton’s subconscious nagged, there are probably four or five other reasons you haven’t thought of yet.
    The Seth-Olet tour was setting up in Washington, D.C., and the head count among the crew and supervisors remained constant.
     If Haman was there, he had not disappeared on the docks.
    Of course, he would know the government could identify the work of Rashid Haman, and that would make it necessary to leave
     the country as soon as possible. To Haman, the best way to vanish from a country was to stay inside its borders. You either
     escaped within seconds, or stayed around to watch the guys with the diaries get grilled on national television. Either way,
     you did not get caught, and that was the basis of the bigger game.
    Slayton did not make a habit of smoking, but he wanted a cigarette now. He needed some philosophical smoke drifting around
     him.
    Terrorists had no ideals; they played both sides of political shortcomings against the middle, usually killing the innocent
     in the interest of point-making for people or systems they would just as easily turn on, killing for whoever would pay the
     asking price. Politicians fought wars, killing the innocent to perpetuate the international shell game. Revolutionaries and
     anarchists killed the innocent for causes. Deaths were totalled in different coinage, but the result was still death. Haman
     specialized in death, in spreading the madness, and it was Haman and people like him who had brought the United States to
     the brink of the same type of urban terrorism that now determined railway schedules in Ireland, or curfews in Jordan.
    He pushed back from the desk. The records room was too well-lit, like a classroom, conducive to reading but not to thinking.
    He glanced at his watch, a Seiko which he had retained, sweep hands and all, throughout the craze for electronic digitals.
     It was midnight, and it was time to contact Wilma, to see if she had come up with anything on the histories of the tour people.
    Slayton stepped out of the building.
    “I’ve got an absolute ream of notes,” Wilma told him over the phone. “I’d rather pass ’em to you under a table than read the
     entire novel over the telephone.”
    “Done and done,” said Slayton, and they arranged to meet at Wilma’s apartment.
    Driving, Slayton felt a residual twinge of anxiety. He was certain he was not being followed, yet, if Rashid Haman was on
     his tail—as his paranoia did not insist, but
suggested
, with its sly, used-car dealer’s grin—it would be idiotic to endanger anyone else, let alone anyone close.
    Somehow Slayton felt he would live through the night. He also knew, as did Wilma from the moment she picked up the phone,
     that it would be impossible to merely scoop up the folder-full of her painstaking amateur detective work and breeze out of
     the apartment. The idea that he might get murdered had nothing to do with terrorists.
    She met him with a glass of wine, and his fears were confirmed. But first, she insisted, “I have to tell you about the Egyptological
     swap meet that’s coming to our fair town.” Slayton smiled pleasantly, and braced himself for a dunning repetition of facts
     he had known for some two days.
    “It seems that the barge that brought these priceless artifacts to our shores—it’s called the
Star of Egypt
, fittingly enough—may also have unloaded a second cargo of god-knows-what.”
    “What?”
    “Take a look,” she said, trotting to the sofa with a manila folder of 8×10 glossies. She