Then the lights went out.
Anya recognized Fekkesh immediately and breathed a sigh of relief. He was standing within ten feet of her, looking
nervous and insecure as he always did. She wondered if he remembered where she had said she would be. Yes. His eyes were travelling to the right-hand corner of the audience and methodically counting back. One, two, three, four, five. His smile was more one of relief than welcome. He stepped forward and she moved her knees to let him pass. Then he stopped. His face registered transparent fear as if he had suddenly seen a ghost and he turned on his heel. Anya half rose to her feet as he hurried away into the shadows.
Then the lights went out.
Bond cursed and started to run towards the back of the audience. In the darkness, his feet caught against a cable and he tripped and nearly fell. He cursed again and there was an impatient ‘Ssh!!’ from the hypnotized onlookers. Why the hell had Fekkesh taken off like that? Who had he seen? Could he have recognized Bond? Hardly likely. One of the heavies? Possibly. Bond abandoned speculation and concentrated on running as fast as he dared. A sudden blaze of an illumination on the pyramid of Mycerinus showed him a figure and its grotesquely larger shadow running down the north side of Cheops. By some strange, optical illusion, the shadow seemed to be moving out of time with its owner, almost as if giving chase to iL Bond pulled out his Walther and sprinted, the distorted voices from the amplifiers bombarding his ears as he ran past Now it was dark again. God ! This was like the night barrage before the battle of El Alamein. The blinding flashes of the twenty-five pounders throwing into relief the advancing infantry.
As if to demonstrate the image, the Sphinx was once more illuminated, and as Bond’s eyes were automatically drawn towards the source of light he saw a sight which brought him abruptly to a halt. Silhouetted against the distant Sphinx was a giant figure which at first glance seemed like some statue, unrecorded since the dawn of history. Its head was huge and ungainly and its arms stood away from the body in the pose of a wrestler flexing to take hold of an opponent. Viewed behind it, the Sphinx seemed an appropriate mount to bear this Colossus away across the desert. And then the giant moved. The head swivelled towards Bond, the eyes blazed and the light shone from its mouth as from a lighthouse.
And then everything was plunged into darkness.
Fekkesh was desperate. Desperate as a man who has taken out a mortgage he cannot repay, or gambled in a game when the stakes are too high, or promised a woman he loves something he can never give her. But most of all he was desperate because he knew that his time was running out. That he was going to die. When he found the opening in the wall, he pressed into it like a bug into a crack. Anywhere to get away from the big man who killed for Stromberg. Why? Why had he listened to them? What had they been able to do to him to make him believe that he could ever turn against Stromberg and get away with it? Especially with this. It was too big. He had been insane. He should have stayed on the fringe. Taken the money, been grateful.
Something impeded the passage of air to his nostrils and Fekkesh froze. The man was standing in the opening. In the darkness, the sound of his heavy breathing sounded like the sawing of wood. At that moment, Fekkesh gave up the ghost. He hunched his shoulders and began to whimper. God, please make it quick, he prayed. Please spare me too much pain. He thought of his children and of Felicca, waiting at the flat, but most of all his mind was full of a blind inchoate terror that numbed him like an injection sinking deeper and deeper into his gums. He pressed his eyes tight shut and dug his nails into his palms. God, let it happen soon. He was tightening like a spring that had to break.
When the hand fell upon his knee it was almost a relief. He braced himself and opened his eyes. The outline of the face was visible against the stars. There seemed to be no malice in it. No hatred. No cruelty. If this was the face that animals wore before they ate each other then it was not too bad. And then the mouth opened and Fekkesh saw the two rows of jagged, stainless-steel teeth. And then he started screaming. And Jaws pulled him down like a rag doll upon the scaffold of his knee and bit through the back of his neck as easily as if it had been a stick of celery.
To Bond, the noise that ended the screams was like that of a stick breaking. He raced towards it and arrived as the huge man materialized from between two blocks of stone like a spirit escaping from some rifled sarcophagus. For a second the two men faced each other and then Jaws showed his gleaming teeth in a contemptuous smile and turned on his heel to be swallowed up by the night. Bond hesitated, torn between the knowledge that he must find Fekkesh and an impulse to pursue this terrifying giant with the gleaming teeth. There was no choice. Fekkesh came first. Bond held his gun low and edged his shoulder round one of the thirty-ton blocks of stone that formed the base of the pyramid. His heart sank as he saw a foot protruding from the shadows. He knelt down swifdy and felt for the man’s heart. Something glistened in the darkness; a pool of blood spreading from the neck and shoulders. Someone, there were no prizes for guessing who must have chopped half through the man’s neck. Bond forgot about the heart and pushed back the man’s head. The face with the wide staring eyes was recognizable. Fekkesh. .
Swiftly and skilfully Bond went through the pockets of Fekkesh’s shabby suit. The breast pocket yielded a small diary. Bond quickly felt inside his own jacket and produced a silver pencil with a number of modifications by Aspreys. Two presses of the clip turned it into a torch. Bond flicked through the diary with the aid of its thin beam. The address section was empty and there were no telephone numbers. The day-to-day entries seemed all connected with work. Bond’s sketchy Arabic unscrambled ‘Meeting of Khem-en-du Excavation Committee’ and a luncheon appointment with the directors of the Coptic Museum. There was even a note to remember Felicca’s birthday. Some tiny and nearly dried-up reservoir of sentiment in Bond was pleased to see that this date had passed. He hoped the lovers had enjoyed it.
There was an entry for the following Thursday: ‘Max Kalba, Mujaba Club. 7.30 pm.’ Neither the name nor the club meant anything to Bond but it was the only lead he had unless he searched Fekkesh’s flat and could get into his office at the Cairo Museum. That and find the big man. There could not be many countries in the world where he would find it easy to hide in a crowd. Bond shivered as he looked down at the broken body at his feet. How could the neck have been torn open like that? It was almost as if - no. He rejected the suggestion as being too horrible, too absurd. But, there again, he had once examined a rat after a terrier had killed it and - almost against his will, Bond’s gaze dropped once more to the bulging eyes, the thin sharp-nosed features, the blood beginning to coagulate around the jagged puncture marks. Fighting against nausea, he thrust the diary into his pocket and turned away from this place of terrible death.
Outside, it was dark and the only sound was the distant one of car doors slamming and tour operators calling the faithful to get into their Russian-built coaches. The son-et-lnmiere must be over. Bond brushed the sand from his knees and began to walk round the great black bulk of Cheops to where the car headlights were sawing at the darkness. What had Napoleon calculated? That there was enough stone in the three pyramids of Gizeh to build a wall ten feet high around France - Bond preferred to deal in feet even when the calculations were being made by Napoleon.
Bond heard the soft footfall in the sand too late and turned the wrong way. A flash of lightning struck him behind the right ear and a deep pit opened up at his feet. He tumbled slowly into it and looking back as he rolled over and over could see that the triangular face of Cheops was rising not four hundred and fifty-five feet into the sky, but for ever until it blotted out the heavens like a great black cliff.