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where the body of a king of Egypt once lay. Bright flashes of light pulse. For every camera confiscated, a cellphone is retrieved from a pocket, a small camera from another. Trying to stop tourists from raiding the tomb with light is futile. There is no guard here—a person would go mad standing inside this room. And the only reason we’re here at all is because thieves found the way in first.
    My visit to the pyramids coincided with the gathering of some of the world’s experts on international cultural crimes at the Marriott Hotel in Cairo. I was part of a Canadian group that included Czegledi, as well as two detectives from the Montreal art theft unit. The conference was supposed to be a chance for lawyers, law enforcers, and cultural specialists from around the world to trade information. And it was. We spent two afternoons in a dark, cavernous conference room in the Marriott. Each speaker presented a lecture and a Power-Point presentation.
    The first speaker, from a museum in Greece dedicated to knives and guns, filled us in on how bad conditions were for the preservation of knives. By mid-afternoon, the man sitting beside me, who’d flown in from Britain to present on copyright law, was experiencing intense jetlag and, perhaps, was bored. He lay down on the floor, curled up under his chair, and fell asleep.
    One of the conference organizers was a handsome Egyptian man in his mid-thirties. My first contact with him was shortly after I arrived at the Marriott. I’d made reservations for $100 U.S. a night through a travel agent. When I checked in, the manager on duty that morning said that as part of the conference, I should be paying $140 U.S. a night. We haggled for half an hour until he agreed to let me pay the $100 for the room. Then, on the first afternoon of the conference, I was approached by the Organizer. He was wearing a suit and was flanked by a couple of serious but subservient-looking men. The Organizer informed me that I had to pay the conference rate for the hotel, but instead of making up the difference by Visa, I could simply give him the difference in U.S. cash. I told him I’d already settled the issue with the manager. The Organizer waved his hand imperiously. He said that he would be speaking to the manager about the matter. His tone was threatening. You should pay, he said.
    Later that evening, I ran into Detective Alain Lacoursière from Canada. He had had a similar interaction. The detective had been thinking it over when he returned to his room and found a note on his pillow asking again for the money and wishing him a nice stay in Cairo. “I decided to pay,” the detective told me. “To be honest, it scared me. I’m out of my world here, and I don’t want to risk getting into trouble with anyone. So I paid.”
    Unlike Lacoursière, I hadn’t been sent to the conference by a company or a police force; I’d had to pay for my own plane ticket and room. It was already a stretch for me, and I couldn’t afford the overhead.
    Over the next few days, the Organizer hovered: at the conference, on the party boat on the Nile, on the Marriott’s epic back patio. He was figuring out how to handle me, I could tell, but he wasn’t ready to make a move. I wondered when he would. In the meantime, I’d met and was spending a lot of time with Rick St. Hilaire, at the time a county prosecutor in New Hampshire, who lectured on the impact of art theft in the United States and knew a lot about the impact of art theft on Egypt.
    â€œEgypt,” he said, “is a great place to start with the history of art theft.” St. Hilaire has a boyish face and says he gets teased all the time about how young he looks. He got hooked on art theft in university, when he took an elective about Egyptian art and architecture. Several years later, when he was a prosecutor, he reconnected with his professor, Dr. John Russell, who told him to look into the