Arabesk (57 page)

Her answer was a glare.

“I want to,” said Ka. “They were my friends too.” Which wasn’t quite true. Saul was a bully and he’d never got to know Bec, but Ka knew the three of them had been together since Kordofan. And Zac… Zac had been Ka’s responsibility. “But what if the troops come back to make another search…?”

Sarah said nothing.

“They’ll know some of us are still alive and come looking with planes. What…?” said Ka, seeing Sarah’s face suddenly harden.

“You’re afraid.”

“Afraid? I’m scared shitless. You, me…it’s just a matter of time.”

“The will of God,” Sarah said.

“You believe that?”

She thought about it. “I used to, kind of still do. Maybe I just want…”

“Yeah.” Ka put his arm round her shoulders and this time she didn’t push him away…

In the back of the truck was a thermoflage net, fitted with a pocket at each corner that could be filled with stones or loaded with sand, for when the terrain was impossible to peg. As well as blanking out thermal signatures, the huge net stealthed radar. Or so the Colonel said and whatever that meant, it sounded good.

The smashed boat was far behind them and night had come in. Heat still radiated from the sand but the temperature of the air was in free fall, latent heat losing out to the sprinkling of cold stars overhead.

“We’d be better sleeping inside…” Ka made it almost a question.

“Front seat?”

“That’s still sticky. It should be the back.”

Sarah’s grunt was doubtful.

“It’s going to get colder,” warned Ka. Something experience had told Sarah already. Being out in the emptiness without a bag or fire was no joke and her survival blanket was back with the…

“Hey,” he reached out, “it’s okay.”

She cried when they lay side by side on folded matting in the back of the yellow Seraphim, hot tears for what she’d lost. Though crying made no real sense, because everything she’d ever had to lose, Sarah had long since thought gone. Except her life maybe, and she was finding that increasingly hard to care about.

And so Ka held her tight and muttered his desolate promises into her ear. That he would look after her and any soldiers who came after them were dead, that the war would stop once the river dried up…

And she let his words wash over her and by the time Ka stopped promising and climbed clumsily on top, she’d stopped crying. It was his tears that fell into her face and breasts as he moved slowly above her, his quiet sobs the last thing she heard before they both fell into sleep.

10th October

“Present,” said Raf, tossing the scrawny animal at Hani
so that it landed claws out and stuck to her bare shoulder. “This one doesn’t need batteries.”

“Ouch.”
Grabbing the cat by the scruff of its neck, Hani yanked back its head and glared. The animal glared right back and five seconds into their staring contest it began to purr.

“The sound of nine lives,” said Raf.

Hani raised her dark eyebrows.

“Purring is a healing mechanism. 27–44Hz. That frequency helps bones mend and heals cuts. It works on humans too…”

Sunday morning, at a stone table in the madersa’s walled courtyard, the splash of the marble fountain Raf had paid to be mended cutting through the clatter of Donna working nearby in her huge kitchen. Breakfast was spread out in front of them, almost untouched.

Coffee for Raf, orange juice for Hani.

Having drunk her juice, Hani had swallowed a token mouthful of balila and been on the point of getting down when Raf beat her to it and went to get his apology. Which was what the almost-cat was. For asking Hani how she found Avatar… Right question, wrong way.

“For me?”

Raf nodded.

“What does it eat?”

“Well…” He considered her question. “Bats are its favourite… That’s a joke,” Raf added hastily, when Hani started to look worried. “Tell Donna to get it some meat.”

“What’s it called?”

Raf shrugged.

“Uncle Ashraf,” Hani’s voice was mock sweet. “If it’s a boy can he live in the haremlek?” Hani still had problems getting her head round the idea of anything male being allowed near the second floor of the madersa. Centuries of tradition were a hard mind-set to break.

“It’s a girl,” said Raf, “and she can’t
live
there…but she can visit, all right? She lives in the courtyard…”

“…or the kitchens.”

Raf pretended to think about that, knowing already that he would let Hani have her way. “Maybe,” he said. “Provided you clean up any mess and Donna agrees.”

“She will,” said Hani, with the absolute certainty of a child who knows she has the winning hand in a particular relationship. With that, Hani slid from her seat, not to go ask Donna but to find Khartoum. She needed to have a serious discussion about a sensible name.

Having taken the dirty breakfast plates back to the kitchen, Raf stopped to check an update on the ISK rolling news channel, which was all Donna ever watched. Bodies had been found in a derelict house near Mahmoudiya following a tip-off, and a nightclub called Sarahz, on the corner of Gumhuriya, had been firebombed, although the damage was less than it could have been.

According to Ferdie Abdullah, the channel’s elegant if elderly anchorman, these events were not related.

13th October

Changing down a gear, General Koenig Pasha slung his
favourite car around a corner and glanced at his passenger. “We got the murderer,” he said casually and smiled to see disbelief freeze the Senator’s face.

“When?” Senator Liz was so shocked she forgot to be polite.

“A couple of days ago. My Chief of Detectives…” The call from Raf had come the previous evening. It seemed the killer had been killed. According to a cross-crime/evidence-sifting algorithm run that afternoon, seminal fluid taken from the girl butchered on Hamzah’s beach gave an exact DNA match to a man found murdered in a deserted house in Mahmoudiya. Ashraf Bey proclaimed himself as surprised as the General.

“This man,” said the American. “When will he stand trial?”

“Never,” the General announced airily.

“But surely…”

“I’m afraid not.”

If the boxlike black Bentley lacked the élan of the General’s two-tone 1936 Rolls-Royce Phantom III or the racing lines of his green 1937 Hispano-Suiza, it made up for that in raw power, being a two-handed broadsword to the others’ rapier.

The General liked cars much more than he liked people, most of whom lacked a quarter of the Bentley’s character. And he decided that if Senator Liz Elsing had been a car, she’d have been a Ford, reliable, bland and irritating. He, however, would have been this Bentley.

“It seems the murderer died,” added the General. For propriety’s sake, this was the point at which he should have said
under questioning,
because the woman would expect no less. However, as her traditional Western prejudices could be relied upon to fill in that gap for herself, the General changed gear instead and heard the motor slow to a throaty, law-breaking roar. A roar that impressed him more than anything the Senator might say.

Originally made in 1931 and totally rebuilt in 1993 at the orders of a Sudanese drummer whose fingers could coax rhythms from goatskin that defied simple mathematical definition, the eight-litre vehicle had been presented to the General by Hamzah Quitrimala. A small token of the industrialist’s appreciation for being given permission to build the Midas Refinery.

The red leather driver’s seat on which Koenig Pasha sat was as battered and shiny as a club chair. The walnut trim on the dash was solid, not veneer, and years of careful hand-polishing had produced a patina that would enhance the most elegant antique.

Which it was, the General reminded himself. Though it was hard to remember that fact when the car’s 7,983cc of in-line power could still accelerate its bricklike body to 110 mph. Only one hundred had been built and most of those with the 144-inch wheelbase. The General’s featured the 156.

And in fourth gear, the car could range from walking speed to the ton, vibrations kept to a minimum by rubber mountings to the engine and gearbox.

“What do you think?”

“Very colourful, Your Excellency,” said his passenger, watching as a small Citroën three-wheeler laden with peppers pulled over to let the General pass. He knew her researchers had told the Senator that, unfortunately, the current vegetable crop would be bumper. Which gave her one less way to get leverage.

“I meant the car…”

“The car, Your Excellency?”

By now protocol demanded that Koenig Pasha ask the Senator to call him
General
or maybe even
Saeed;
at the very least it should have been
sir
… General Saeed Koenig Pasha, however, had no intention of obliging. Senator Liz, as she insisted he call her, was known to the General as an international busybody so afraid of her own vices that she’d turned the magnifying glass of her insecurity on the virtues of everyone else.

He also doubted, strongly, that her fact-finding mission to El Iskandryia involved the finding out of any facts. In his long experience, special envoys from the White House or Berlin were only interested in trade, polishing their spheres of influence and issuing threats, usually disguised as a once-in-a-lifetime, one-off opportunity.

“Bentley, eight-litre, 1931… Superb machine.”

The small woman looked embarrassed. Too clumsy to make small talk like the diplomat she was supposed to be and too worried about getting it wrong to pretend she knew about vintage cars, Senator Liz retreated into silence, which was something of a first.

Smiling grimly, Koening Pasha put his foot to the floor and swung the heavy Bentley out into the middle of the road to overtake two Army jeeps and a tractor, which were the cause of their slowness. Let the soldiers catch up with him if they could.

Of course the Senator didn’t like his car. Americans expected cruise control, air-conditioning and a basic AI, all of which the General regarded as utterly redundant. If the General got hot, he opened a window, and if that failed to work, he just went faster…

As for directions, if he got lost he stopped and asked the
felaheen
… It was worth it for the shocked look when they realized to whom they were speaking.

“Finally,” said the General, “we’re here.” Stamping on the brakes, he swung his wooden steering wheel and aimed for a farm track, accelerating into the skid so that the car’s rear barely missed shunting one side of a crumbling set of gateposts.

After that, the heavy car ate up the dirt road, bouncing in and out of potholes and past row after row of walled terraces cut into the sides of the hill, until the jeeps were just distant plumes of dust behind it.

His own trail would be visible for miles, an almost biblical column of smoke ascending to heaven. All the same, Hakim and Ahmed would be worried, but then being his bodyguards that was their job, and his new
aide de camp
would be sweating blood and cursing under his breath. It had better be under his breath, because the General would hear about it if it wasn’t.

“Here we go,” Koenig Pasha announced, skidding to a halt in a slick of gravel that popped like small-arms fire.

Here
was a farmhouse cracked open like an egg. Red pantiles lay scattered across the earth, mostly in shards but with the occasional half tile. All the really good ones had been taken, then the not-so-good. What was left were discards, tiles too damaged to make stealing them worthwhile.

A single doorway stood doorless, while wooden shutters hung loose from shattered windows that had never known glass. And from inside came a scuttling like rats picking their way across broken crockery.

“Outside,” demanded the General. “Out of there now.”

“Yes, Excellency…” The anxious voice probably called everyone
excellency,
just to be sure. But the General had to call again before its owner appeared.

“I’m coming, Excellency.” With his eyes blinking at the sudden glare, a moon-faced boy materialized in the dark doorway. His gaze slid to the old man’s face and for a split second the young
fellah
didn’t recognize who was standing there.

Then he did.

“Stand over there,” ordered Koenig Pasha, nodding towards an outhouse wall. The boy was almost drowning in fear and yet he did what he was told, moving dreamlike towards a point indicated, like a swimmer fighting the current. His feet were bare, just visible beneath an oversized jellaba, which sagged from narrow shoulders and scraped the ground.

“Your brother’s clothes?”

The boy looked blank.

“The jellaba.”

“My father’s old one, Excellency. I…” He stopped. “I don’t have a brother.”

The General nodded thoughtfully.

“And who else is in there?”

“In where, Excellency?” The voice was tight.

Koenig Pasha looked round at a row of ancient olive trees that time and war had reduced to splintered stumps. Once there’d been a retaining wall holding up their terracing, until its collapse had let red earth spill onto the level below. There’d been a well too, only that had been filled with rubble and capped off with polycrete. He’d given the order himself, years back.

“Where do you think I mean?” he asked.

“There’s no…” The boy’s voice slid an octave and halted.

“Come on,” said the General, directing his order to the empty door. “It’s not safe in there.”

A ratlike scuttle inside turned into a second face, dark-skinned and broad-cheeked. The girl was maybe thirteen, roughly the same age as the boy. Her black hair was pulled back under a
hijab
tied hastily round her head, so that only her face could be seen.

“We were looking for Hussein’s goat.” Her words were a whisper she didn’t really expect him to believe. Resignation and fear expanded eyes already darkened with charcoal. Red was smeared crudely across her lips. Pomegranate juice, probably. That was what girls used when he was young.