Arabesk (81 page)

Once, just once, Avatar thought he might have seen his mother. Standing at the gates of St. Luke’s and staring intently through the ancient wrought-iron bars at neatly uniformed children who kicked a plastic football across melting tarmac or tried to dunk basketballs through a single hoop screwed to a classroom wall.

She looked old to him, but was probably not. A thin face peering from the folds of her heavy
hijab.
Her eyes had scanned the playground’s movement, seeking a point of silence. And the gaze she met was his. He was the one she watched, with a hunger so open it sent one of the sisters across the playground to find out who she was and what she wanted…

Avatar put a bullet through the head of a soldier standing guard outside the old bank vault. A single shot fired through the slightly open door. The
Spetsnaz
should have relocked the safe after sending the others through. Except she couldn’t, obviously enough, not with all the ship’s systems down.

In reply, Avatar took a slug through his left arm that ripped up muscle and exited at the back. Only Avatar was so cold he hardly felt the blow and was too busy killing the first guard’s partner to notice the blood that stained the canvas of his makeshift jacket.

Two left, maybe one. Up on deck, where Avatar needed to be.

His mother was gone by the time Avatar brought his thoughts back to the long-forgotten and dusty playground. Gone from his memory and from the tall gates before Sister Carlotta even made it across the sticky tarmac.

Up ahead were more stairs and sunlight.

Flicking out the cylinder of his Taurus, Avatar discarded the dead brass and speed-loaded another seven rounds. His borrowed rifle already had a full clip.

29th October

“It’s paradise…” Hani’s excitement filled the upper tier
of the library, echoing off the inside of the giant pyramid to get lost among the books that lined row after row of shelves.

“Hani!”

“It is,” she insisted. “Paradise. Jannah…”

Madame Syria stared up, towards the highest of the mezzanine floors where a small girl who shouldn’t have been in the library in the first place, leant dangerously over a rail, while simultaneously pointing behind herself towards a dark shape on the horizon.

The SS
Jannah
had the classic profile for a great liner, a stepped ziggurat of cabins and suites rising high above the main deck along both sides, with the captain’s bridge jutting from the ziggurat’s front, like steel-and-glass flukes on a hammerhead shark. At the rear, a glass casino was suspended podlike between tall towers. Everything aboard the ship was white, apart from the main deck, which was planted with a long promenade of palm trees and manicured lawn.

That the huge hull had originally belonged to a Soviet factory ship was a fact remembered only by nautical fanatics, shipping enthusiasts, Koenig Pasha and Hani.

“Look!”
The girl practically screamed the word.

“Hani!” Madame Syria was torn between outrage and undisguised fear that the governor’s niece might tumble over the edge to the marble floor far below.

“Look,” insisted Hani.

The chief librarian did what she was told, impressed despite herself. She’d only seen the SS
Jannah
once before, as a girl, when the trimaran from Iskandryia to Syracuse had throttled back to let its passengers watch as the great liner cruised by.

“We’ve got to tell Uncle Ashraf,” Hani shouted, already halfway down the first flight of stairs. “Really, we must…”

“Uncle…” No matter how often Madame Syria heard the child refer to the new governor of El Iskandryia by that name, it still seemed disrespectful. But then the child
was
his niece and a
mesdame
so…

Lady Hana bint-Abdullah al-Mansur, better known as Hani, hit the bottom of the stairs and grabbed the middle-aged woman by the hand, practically dragging her across the pink marble floor towards the exit.

“Paradise,” yelled Hani. “It’s almost here.” She’d shouted her message so often from the back of a calèche that her voice was now raw.

“What?”

“Paradise. The SS
Jannah,
” said Hani, her face split in a grin. “It’s true. Go on, tell her,” Hani insisted, turning to Madame Syria. The librarian stared at Zara, then glanced over Zara’s shoulder to a study door opening beyond.

“Excellency,” she said hastily.

Ashraf Bey scowled. In the study behind him were St. Cloud, the Graf and Senator Liz, representing Paris, Berlin and Washington. All three had an opinion on the final sentencing of Effendi, all firmly held, all different. None of them wanted to give way on a single point. Everything, it seemed, but absolutely everything was a matter of principle.

Execution would play badly to the world’s press. So they wanted Raf to agree to life imprisonment at Ras el-Tin. And this was before a man had even been found guilty…

Hani slipped her hand from Madame Syria’s grasp, stepped politely but firmly around Zara, who was blocking her from Raf’s sight and stopped directly in front of her uncle.

“Solved it,” she told him, her voice little more than an intense whisper.

“Solved what?” Raf demanded.

“The riddle, obviously!” Hani’s face exploded into a grin, then that was gone, leaving Raf looking at a quiet, satisfied smile. This too vanished as Hani noticed something on the study table behind Raf.

“Baklava!” said Hani in a tone something between outrage and admiration. “You’ve got fresh baklava!” Without waiting to be invited, actually without appearing to notice Raf’s other guests at all, she slipped through the door and into his seat.

“Hani.”

Politeness said not to answer with her mouth full, so Hani waited.

“My niece,” Raf explained and watched three faces shift their attention from him to the small girl and back again.

“There’s a ship coming into harbour,” said Hani when her mouth was empty, which took a while because Hani ostentatiously chewed the mouthful thirty-two times, as her late Aunt Nafisa had instructed. “It’s the SS
Jannah.
”

Tewfik Pasha had decided in advance what he intended to say and had prepared himself to overrule any objections. The talking box that Zara’s brother found in the bilges had proved invaluable on both counts. An atelier on board the SS
Jannah
had spent the previous twelve hours hand-stitching a second jacket to specifications so strict that the Khedive had rejected the first attempt as inadequate.

The coat was modelled on a jacket his father had worn when he married the Khedive’s mother, as seen on endless reruns of
Lives of the Rich and Infamous.
Cut from black silk and featuring minimal embellishment, the jacket’s only decoration had been a thin piping of gold around its high collar. Unfortunately, the current Khedive’s replica was both narrower across the shoulders and less tailored at the hips, although the atelier had worked hard to hide that fact.

At the suggestion of Colonel Abad, the Khedive had shaved away most of his beard, removing everything except the ghost of a goatee and the faintest trace of moustache. And, helped only by Avatar, he’d showered, dried himself and climbed into the immaculately sewn costume; because that’s what his new clothes were, a costume, the accretion of society’s ideas on how a Khedive should look.

On Tewfik Pasha’s head was a tarboosh. Over his heart was pinned a simple enamel-and-gold star. The order of the Imperial Crescent, first class. Even his choice of decoration carried a message. It was there to remind the waiting cameras that his ultimate allegiance (such as it was) went to Stambul.

And there would be cameras, dozens of them. That much was obvious from the myriad feeds he’d scanned as the SS
Jannah
steamed east towards El Iskandryia. A major city without electricity, without working computers, landlines, even cookers and cars. Its very nakedness drew the media like wasps to a honey trap. As the Khedive suspected his new governor intended it to…

Standing on deck with the injured Avatar slightly behind him, as protocol demanded, Mohammed Tewfik Pasha watched men the size of ants grab a stern rope and carry its giant loop to a waiting bollard. It took eight men to lift one rope and still they staggered under its weight.

When the rope was in place, a winch on the stern tightened, pulling the liner forward as a rope at the bow was loosened, removed from its bollard by another group of ants and carried forward, to be fixed around a bollard waiting up ahead. At which point the forward winch began to tighten. It was a laborious way to coax a liner along the edge of the Silsileh and perhaps there were easier ways to dock on Iskandryia’s great seawall, but this was the SS
Jannah
.

Stars, starlets and actual icons, whole galaxies of famous names were aboard. At least they were according to the
Hello International
… A
panoply
was the term they used. The reality was rather different. Late October/early November was definitely out of season and the constellation was confined to three minor genome-proteone heiresses, the elderly founder of LearningCurve GmB, two balding Bollywood lotharios, the Van der Bilt girl and him…

Ruler of a stricken city besieged on all sides by more-powerful nations who claimed to have only Isk’s best interests at heart. Nations who, according to all the newsfeeds, still demanded that he give up Iskandryia’s leading industrialist. And for what? To prove Isk was fit to join their nest of vipers.

Colonel Abad was right. It was an imposition too far.

Tewfik Pasha was scowling ferociously as he let an automated gangplank carry him down to the waiting dock, a fact that registered with everyone but him. He was too busy staring out over his silent city, looking beyond the crowded Corniche and the odd-angled pyramid of the
bibliotheka
to the green of Shallalat Gardens and a distant baroque palace that had, a century back, been the winning entry to the competition to design Iskandryia’s railway terminus.

His scowl had everything to do with coming home and the state of his city. Nothing at all to do with the sight of Zara bint-Hamzah standing near the bottom of the gangplank or the fact she gripped the hand of Ashraf Bey as if her life depended on it.

Or was that her father’s life?

“Your Highness,” she said, dropping Raf’s hand.

Tewfik Pasha nodded to the girl and let go his scowl. But even as he fumbled for something appropriate to say, Zara’s attention shifted away from him to her half brother and something passed between the two as silent as thought and swift as electricity. Only then did she notice Avatar’s injuries.

“I have a statement to make,” announced the Khedive loudly.

Camera crews surged. At least that was the appearance. What really happened was that the police cordon relaxed enough to let journalists flow through strategic gaps. They were getting good at that.

Cameras whirred, flashguns fired and questions were shouted.

And all the while the Khedive just stood there, counting down in his head from ten, elegant but slight in a simple black uniform. His face utterly impassive as the chaos broke around him. This was his version of courage. A refusal to engage immediately, to do from instinct what would please everyone else.

“You,” he said finally, reaching zero.

“Your Highness…” Having been chosen, the Englishwoman with the lacquered blonde hair appeared uncertain which question to ask first. Too many needed answering, half of them involving the huge vessel moored behind him.

“How did you…?”

“I own the SS
Jannah
.”

She looked at him, the rest of her question already dead on her lips.

“It belonged to my father,” the Khedive said with a shrug. “Utopia Lines merely lease the vessel.” He could tell them how absurd he found this idea, that such an object should be owned by one person, but now didn’t seem to be the time. If possessing a ship was absurd, then how much more so to possess a city, even a broken one…

The journalist looked from the Khedive to the liner, then back again. A tiny camera hummed in the air a few feet above her head; one lens focused on her face, the other fixed on whatever she had in her sights. “Electricity,” she said as understanding suddenly lifted the frown from her face.

“You’re going to use the ship to power El Iskandryia.” Enough capacity to power a small city, she was pretty sure that was in the liner’s specifications somewhere.

“Power the city?”

It was a good idea, the Khedive was happy to admit that. But that wasn’t why the liner had made her first landfall in forty years.

“No,” he said. “Nothing so altruistic. After yesterday’s unprovoked attack on the liner, SS
Jannah
needs a refit.”

Instant anarchy. Just add…

Ignoring the explosion of questions, Tewfik Pasha examined the crowd, his eyes skipping bland and blind over Zara and Raf, until they finally fixed on the man for whom he’d been searching. The Soviet ambassador, Commissar Zukov.

“The attack was yesterday, at noon,” said the Khedive. “Eight men in a Mi-24x Hind gunship… A Soviet-made attack helicopter,” he added. Though for most of those gathered on the Silsileh, including Commissar Zukov, no clarification was necessary.

The Commissar was an elderly diplomat, waiting out his last years in a relatively unimportant post. And the Khedive had few illusions about the fact that Iskandryia was Zukov’s reward for a lifetime of doing exactly what he was told. In the man’s face, the Khedive could see panic and fear, but no guilt. Which was what the Khedive had expected.

“It’s possible the helicopter was stolen,” Tewfik Pasha admitted. But then pretty much anything was possible.

“They were terrorists?” The voice came from his right, a Frenchman.

“No,” said the Khedive, “they were jewel thieves…” He paused to let the crowd of journalists assimilate that fact. “At least, I assume that’s what they were. They certainly broke into the safe.”

“I thought the vault aboard SS
Jannah
was unbreakable?” The Englishwoman with the lacquered hair had refound her voice. And the hunger in her blue eyes told the Khedive exactly how this story was going to play.