Four weeks later, Seamus and Gordon Tripp sat on the fourth floor veranda of the Hotel Oriental in the New Quarter of Qairo having a light breakfast. Seamus took a moment to admire the long view the height afforded him, long down the Nile delta. He imagined the Mediterranean far off beyond that. Those prayer-callers on the minarets might have an unenviable job - calling the Muslims to prayer five times a day - but nothing could beat that view. What were those prayer callers called? Moozies?

Gordon probably knew. The boy had a way with those words. Always knew them right off the top of his head. Foreign words, food, places. Great trick, his memory, for impressing clients. A parlor game to pass time, to say some foreign place name and have Gordon guess where from. The boy had an ear for language, to be cer...

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