Mumbling some excuse about a stomach bug, she raced off to the latrines, which were little more than holes in the ground with individual booths around each drop. She closed and bolted the door behind her and whipped out her slender mobile phone from the pocket of her combat trousers. She was supposed to have handed it in to the security people at the entrance to the camp, but she had been forewarned of this in advance, so she had made sure she had two mobiles. The large flashy one she had handed over meekly with a look of disappointment. But this small thin one with its limited features, she had retained. She knew that the male soldiers wouldn’t frisk a woman, and they had no female soldiers at hand to do the job. So her secret was safe.
Safely ensconced in the latrine, she frantically keyed in a message and hit the ‘Send’ button. A minute later her message appeared on another phone six thousand miles away. It said: They found the stones.
Chapter 2
‘I got the message at two in the morning,’ said Arthur Morris.
They were seated round an oval cherrywood table in a small meeting room; two men in their fifties and a woman in her early forties. Morris was practically bald, except for two small, neatly combed patches on either side of the crown that were silver, but with some slight remnant of the brown that it had once been. His eyes were also brown and held just a hint of menace, warning friend and foe alike that he was a man not to be denied his wishes.
Behind him, a 555-foot obelisk glinted in the morning sun, forming a backdrop to their tense gathering.
‘Would they have had time to figure it out yet?’ asked the second man.
He was slightly older than Morris, with a short, neatly-trimmed beard. He was also taller and thinner. But the main contrast between them was the informality of his attire. A pair of light summer trousers and a beige sweater with the word ‘Georgetown’ written across it. Arthur Morris, on the other hand, was impeccably clad in a dark-blue suit. He favoured blue over grey and solid over pinstripe because he had read somewhere that they were signs of political conservatism.