Arabesk (82 page)

“Nothing is unbreakable,” he said carefully.

“Particularly not to a safecracker with a thermal lance.” Avatar grinned, his voice street smart enough to suggest he knew all about things like that.

Flashguns fired.

No thermic lance had existed, but she wasn’t to know that and nor was anybody else. The helicopter had been kept. The bodies Tewfik Pasha had ordered tipped over the side. As far as the Khedive was concerned, the press could report that as burial at sea.

“Was there a battle?”

The Khedive thought about that one.

“There was a short skirmish,” he said finally, with an apologetic glance towards Avatar and his bandaged shoulder. “As you’d expect, security aboard the SS
Jannah
is excellent.” The Khedive’s lips twisted into a sour smile. Now he was beginning to sound like an advertisement for Utopia Lines.

“So the thieves were arrested?”

“No,” the Khedive said. “They came armed and they were killed.” His gaze took in the Commissar, von Bismarck, the American Senator and that old man from Paris whose title kept changing. “Except for two of them,” he added as an afterthought.

On cue, two burly crew members dragged the crippled Soviet girl down the walkway. Behind her staggered a small man, a revolver held to his cropped skull by a third crew member. Cameras fired, as the Khedive meant them to.

“Ashraf Bey.”

Raf stopped his whispered conversation with Zara and stepped forward. The bow he gave was slight, little more than a nod.

The Khedive raised his eyebrows. “I’m putting these two in your charge.”

“Highness,” said Raf, and raised a finger. One of his uniforms instantly broke away from holding back the crowd. “I’m transferring the prisoners to you,” Raf said. “Take them both to the Imperial Free… And you.” Raf looked round for Hakim. “Make sure they get full protection. And a doctor,” he added as an afterthought.

Protection from what Raf didn’t say.

“Excellency…”

Raf turned back to the excited huddle of journalists.

“What is going to happen with Monday’s trial?”

“In what way?”

“Will you continue as
magister
… Now that His Highness has returned?”

“No, he will not.” The Khedive’s answer was clear enough to reach the back of the waiting group. And even if it hadn’t been, there were enough floating cameras and mics aimed in his direction to carry his reply to the waiting world.

“From now on,” said the Khedive, “Ashraf Bey will be acting as city prosecutor…”

The gaze Raf met was unbending. A decision had been made publicly and was not to be broken. “After all,” Tewfik Pasha continued, “combating crime is a major part of any governor’s remit.”

“In that case, will you still be allowing Miss Quitrimala to represent her father?”

“What case?”

The English journalist didn’t seem able to answer.

The Khedive stroked his small beard, looking for the briefest moment exactly like his grandfather as a young man. “As
magister
I will accept anyone the defendant chooses to appoint,” he said carefully. “Although, in the circumstances, I would strongly recommend a trained lawyer.”

“But Quitrimala refuses to appoint his own defence… What’s more”—the Englishwoman’s voice was taut with the human drama of it all—“he categorically refuses to accept anyone appointed by the court.”

“Well,” said the Khedive, “that is his right.” For the first time since Tewfik Pasha appeared on the jetty, he looked straight at Zara.

Hani sighed.

30th October

The corridor was painted a drab institutional beige.
Along its edges the dirty plastic floor tiles curled up to allow the floor to be sluiced clean. A relic from the bad old days when this wing had housed the insane, the incontinent and the politically inconvenient.

Three states that often went together.

At least they did under the Khedive’s grandfather, after military doctors had finished their various forms of rehabilitation.

Raf moved quietly along its length, doing his best not to blink at the brightness bleeding in through windows opaque with grime. He wore no dark glasses and even five years’ worth of dust and spiderwebs was not enough to soften the light.

Hakim and Ahmed he’d left hanging in the Athinos café opposite the hospital’s front steps. Not very willingly Raf had to admit, but he’d overruled them with alarming casualness before making his way unannounced into the ugly concrete building. Along with the two guards, he’d left Eduardo, who was still in shock at discovering that “the man,” as he insisted on calling Raf, was governor of Iskandryia.

The façade of the Imperial Free had a preservation order on it, as did all the buildings that fronted the Western Harbour. The view from the sea was so famous that, years back, Koenig Pasha had decreed the skyline could not be changed.

When Raf had first arrived, the security guard inside the main door was watching Ferdie Abdullah, his eyes glued to a public screen, like somebody recently denied one of life’s basic necessities. If he noticed the scowling young man with the flowers and Dynamo cap, he thought no more about it.

Raf had returned the nod of a passing porter who was vaguely aware of having seen the visitor somewhere before, probably the last time the Dynamo fan came to see whoever he came to see. His fiancée from the size of that bouquet. No sane man would waste so much money on his wife.

Reaching the lifts, Raf had punched a button at random. He got out at obstetrics and took a different lift down two floors, got out again and used the emergency stairs to climb back past obstetrics to the deserted wards above. From there he walked the length of a corridor, until it ended at a large window.

Defenestration.

An ornate word for an ugly threat; but there were less messy ways to achieve what Raf wanted… Pulling a tiny voice recorder out of his pocket, he checked that it was fully charged and working, then slipped it back into the battered leather jacket he’d borrowed from Eduardo.

Raf didn’t really need to check the machine, since the Braun was brand-new and came from a boutique on the SS
Jannah
… He was just putting off what came next. And he already had the key code for the door in front of him. He’d got that from Hakim, who’d been guarding the impromptu prison cell when he got Raf’s order to meet him in the loading bay behind Athinos.

And since the consultant had already made his rounds for the day and, other than Professor Mahrouf, only Ahmed and Hakim had authority to enter the cell, it was Hakim or Ahmed that the Soviet girl expected.

“Hi,” said Raf.

Her cell was small. The walls padded with cotton waste under hard canvas. There was one slit window, high up and barred. At its edges the floor had those sluice-friendly tiles that curved up under the padding on the wall. It was, in every way, as bleak as Raf had expected.

“I said
Hi
…”

She made no reply, just sat there in the orthopaedic chair, her legs wrapped in lightweight casts, her right wrist handcuffed to the chair’s frame. An empty bedpan rested on the floor just out of reach and Raf caught the glance that said she wanted to ask him to hand it to her and leave.

She didn’t ask. Which was just as well. She’d been left like that for an hour because that was how Raf had told Hakim to play it.

“Just checking,” said Raf. He took a chart from the end of her bed and switched it on. Silk scaffolds shielded her broken, load-bearing bones. They were seeded with cells designed to deposit calcium and produce messenger RNA for pro/C, a precursor of the collagen found in bones. Also sourced from the SS
Jannah,
undoubtedly.

“Nothing but the best,” Raf said. “But even with all that scaffolding, it won’t be hard for me to smash them again, if that’s what it takes.” He sat himself down on a bed next to the girl’s chair, waiting for fear to happen.

It said a lot for her training that no panic reached her pale blue eyes. Instead her broad face fell into a mask of resignation, as if she’d expected no less—and she hadn’t. All Soviet
Spetsnaz
rangers were instilled with a belief so absolute that the only thing awaiting them after capture was torture and death that it was practically hardwired.

“I’ve been told you speak English and Arabic,” Raf said as he took a notebook from the inside of Eduardo’s scuffed jacket. He’d been told nothing of the sort. A full-face search of Iskandryia’s intelligence database came up with as little as his somewhat illegal DNA trawl through the records of the Red Cross. The girl in front of him had never before been captured or treated on a field of battle, come to that.

What interested Raf was that Commissar Zukov expressed so little interest in the prisoners. And the Khedive had given Zukov a chance to comment, both on and off the record. All Zukov said was, “Not ours.”

Raf still needed to work out if that translated as
“Never ours,”
or
“Not ours now you’ve got them…”

All the same, the girl understood some English. Enough for her brain to ignite verbal-recognition patterns during a CAT scan. The two orderlies who’d chatted indiscreetly were plainclothes. The white-coated radiologist was actually a police doctor. That, of course, had happened late last night and in a different ward.

“We could always do this the simple way,” suggested Raf.

The blonde girl just scowled, anger creating mental defences as she prepared herself to sever her mind from the pain awaiting her body. The separation never lasted, but everyone knew that occasionally people got lucky and died before their wandering mind got dragged back to hell.

“Maybe not.” Raf pulled out a snub-nosed Colt, also borrowed from Eduardo, and extracted an extra pair of old-fashioned metal cuffs from his coat pocket, flipping free one end. The Colt he put to the girl’s head and the cuffs Raf flicked round the girl’s free wrist, the left one, with a satisfyingly smooth flip. As manoeuvres went it was extremely professional, which was lucky. She was meant to think he did this all the time.

Snapping the cuff’s other end to the bed’s frame, Raf unlocked her right wrist, stood the girl up and dragged her round to the mattress, his gun still at her head.

“On you go.”

With her left hand newly secured, the only way she could do that was lie facedown. Securing her right wrist to the right side of the bed, Raf stood back. Then he yanked her ankles into position and fixed these with plastic strip cuffs.

Somehow, she still looked too comfortable.

So he took the pillows and when that didn’t seem enough, pulled the sheet from under her, stripping the bed down to its striped mattress. After that, taking her hospital gown seemed obvious, so he ripped it in two from the bottom up and left himself with remnants still attached to her arms.

It was only when Raf pulled a gravity special and let drop the blade that he saw the girl tense. She was, he realized, watching him in a mirror across the room. Pretending not to notice, Raf slashed away the arms of her gown, leaving her naked except for two lightweight leg casts that looked disconcertingly like ankle warmers.

“Want to do this the easy way?”

Not a flicker of response.

With a sigh, Raf dipped into his pocket and pulled out a metal bar the size of a small torch. It was slightly pointed at one end, while at the other, a sheath of slightly sticky clear plastic formed an easy-to-grip handle.

“You know what this is?”

She did. Every combat troop in the so-called civilized world could recognize a shock baton. They were the negotiators of choice for police forces across the world, not to mention for criminal elements from Seattle to Tokyo, combining all the advantages of maximum pain with minimal tissue damage. Batons didn’t leave the kind of scarring that ended up on Amnesty posters, which was one undoubted reason for their popularity.

“I’m sorry,” said Raf, folding his fingers into a half fist, “but there’s something I need you to tell me. And I need you to tell me it now.” His rabbit punch caught her in the kidney and urine darkened the bare mattress as her bladder emptied. “It’s kind of urgent.”

Walking to the head of the bed, Raf crouched down until he could see her face. Furious eyes challenged him, then he was wiping spittle from his cheek.

“Fuck it.” Raf stood up and wiped his face.

Instead of using the baton, Raf took his gravity knife and scratched a cross potent into her naked back, slicing just deep enough to draw blood. Then he stuffed a tissue into her mouth, gagged her with the cord from her gown and put the small recorder down on the windowsill. The time had come for Raf to go next door.

“Gregori,” said Raf.

Now, the small man stripped naked in the corner
had
been treated on a field of battle. At Fort Archambanlt to be precise, fifteen years before, on the Shari river in the southern wastelands of Tripoli. The name he’d given was Captain Gregori the Profligate, and a footnote still solemnly recorded a triage nurse’s expert opinion that this was false.

What was much more interesting for Raf was that Gregori’s DNA showed significant points of similarity to the blonde girl. Not enough points for him to be her father, but quite enough for him to be an uncle or cousin. Which fitted neatly with the Soviet habit of conscripting whole families, then keeping them together because the bonds that tied them were already imprinted.

The other interesting fact was that Gregori had surrendered voluntarily, not because he’d been wounded and unable to continue or brought to a halt by lack of ammunition. He’d taken one look at Avatar and put down his own gun seconds ahead of putting up both hands. Since
Spetsnaz
rangers didn’t surrender, there was a meaning here that Raf wanted unravelled.

“You,” said Raf, “on your feet.”

The naked man did what Raf expected him to do, which was stay slumped where he was.

“Up,” Raf insisted, producing Eduardo’s gun. When Gregori still didn’t move, Raf grabbed a handful of hair and yanked the man to his feet. A hood was needed and Raf had forgotten to bring one, so he stripped the case from a hospital pillow and used that instead, knotting its bottom tight round the man’s throat.