Blood Rules (8 page)

He glanced at his watch: fifty minutes since touch-down. Refueling would be complete by now; they’d be boarding passengers shortly. He ought to take his seat; once back in business class Leila Hanif would be unable to see him. But instead Raful dealt with temptation in the time-honored way: by yielding to it. He lounged to the front of the plane and took up position beside a bulkhead, where he could get a clear view of the door without obstructing the aisle.

“You didn’t get off?”

Colin Raleigh had come to stand next to him, hands in pockets. Damn!

“No, just taking a look at my fellow passengers,” Raful answered good-humoredly. “Where are they going and why?—that kind of thing.”

He swung around to lean against the bulkhead, easing Colin into a new position with his back to the door.

“Where are
you
going and why, I wonder?” said Colin.

But Raful made no reply, because at the far end of the jetway, where it made a turn, a figure had appeared. Someone he was expecting but couldn’t be sure would come, however carefully he’d scattered bait in her path: a woman. For a moment he was so engrossed with this newcomer that he failed to notice Robbie coming through the aircraft door ahead of her.

Colin half turned when the boy touched his arm, and for a moment Raful tensed:
How could he fail to notice Leila?
“Your new traveling companion,” Colin told him. “This is my son, Robbie.”

Raful nodded, though his eyes remained fixed on the woman who was slowly advancing along the bridge. He withdrew slightly, not wanting her to see him. There was a chance, the merest chance, that Leila would recognize Raful Sharett, although she had only seen him once before, and then briefly.

He was aware of Colin explaining to his son that he had met him, Sharett, in New York, and wasn’t that an amazing coincidence.
Idiot! Take the boy away before he sees her.

He made small talk with Robbie, wanting to distract him from Leila, but when she was twenty feet or so short of the plane he sensed a fresh source of hot desert air entering the cabin and couldn’t stop from looking over Robbie’s shoulder. Yes! Someone had climbed up the exterior ladder from the apron and entered the jetway through a door beside the control panel: a workman, wearing the gray overalls and ID badge of a Bahrain Airport employee. He nodded at the soldier on guard, who evidently recognized him, for he smiled. Then this newcomer began to walk back along the jetway, toward the terminal. Toward Leila Hanif….

Raful forgot all about Robbie. His face set into a mask of concentration. Other boarding passengers partially obscured his view, but he knew what was going to happen. He saw the airport worker reach inside his overalls, saw Leila slip open her carry-on bag, already unzipped and ready to receive what the man dropped into it, noticed how skillfully she slid the zipper shut.

Earlier in the day, before coming to the airport, she would have handed her gun to someone with access to the airport apron, enabling herself to pass through all the security checks without hindrance. Now she had her weapon back again.

“How did you two meet?” he heard Robbie ask, and knew that the question was meant for him. “Where in New York…?”

“Oh.” Raful made an almighty effort, knowing how much depended on this. “Where was it, Colin?… Look, I think they want us to go back to our seats, it’s late.”

He should have taken her out
here.
A civilized place, Bahrain: full of English influences, not wholly indifferent to certain aspects of the Israeli position … he might have managed to spirit her away. He should have done it. Raful suddenly knew, with fearsome conviction, that he should. He was about to risk the lives of some two hundred innocent people on a revenge that was almost entirely personal. He might be a
goel,
an avenger of his daughter’s blood, but he was not an animal, not on a par with the woman he’d hunted for so long. He felt the skin tighten along his brow and was conscious of sweat seeping down from his hairline.

A quick glance showed that, to his immense relief, Colin and Robbie had gone back to their seats; Robbie was now in business class. He withdrew still farther into the shadowy toilet recess, far enough to guarantee that she would not see him as she daintily stepped aboard, presenting her boarding pass as if it were a royal invitation, with a smile that showed in a creasing of the scarcely visible eyes. Exquisitely dressed, dignified of bearing, she diminished everyone around her. But within the hour, this woman would be as dead as the cohorts of corpses she had left to lie in the wake of her regal progress. As dead as Sara his daughter was dead; dead as Esther his wife and Ehud his friend were dead. Raful wiped the sweat from his forehead, drawing savage comfort from the reminder.

An attendant was closing the door, sealing it, ready for flight. As Raful went back to business class he could not resist a last, long look at the woman sitting in first class, row 2.

She had taken a copy of
Gulf News,
the English-language newspaper, from her carry-on bag and appeared to be deep in its back pages. What did you think about, he wondered, as you counted down to a hijack? Did you put the finishing touches to your design, behind that placid mask of a face? Or were you so calm, so detached from the horror of it all, that you could study the small ads for real?

Leila kept her expression under control, but deep inside herself she was aware of disquiet. As she had taken the gun from her driver, transformed for the necessary few minutes into an airport baggage handler, she’d raised her eyes, expecting to see Robbie, and instead found herself looking straight at Colin Raleigh’s back. He plainly hadn’t noticed her, which was all that mattered, but she was angered by the way that one brief sight of him unsettled her. Leila stared at the advertisements for Filipina maids with no sense of what she was reading.

She must concentrate! She’d sworn to Halib she would complete the business of the hijack before giving any thought to the rescue of her son. As far as she was concerned she’d embarked upon a kidnapping pure and simple; but to Halib, who had made all things possible, it could only be a politically motivated hijack. First she must deliver the Iranian prisoners, and only then would she be free to continue with the real purpose of the exercise. So—the hijack….

Her ex-husband looked less tortured than she remembered him.

Think about the hijack!

Colin had shed a few years, to the point where he again reminded her of the man she’d met at Oxford, long ago. Slowly the newspaper descended into her lap. Colin had utterly ceased to exist for her. Utterly!

H
ALIB
waited until Colin Raleigh had reached the lift before closing the door of his suite and rounding on Leila.

“You are crass,” he said. “To involve him, bring him here … how could you be so stupid?”

“I was supposed to die quietly?” She flounced to the nearest sofa and threw herself down on it, gazing at her brother through sulky eyes. “How could
you
be so stupid as to send the boys after me? Eh?”

“Father sent them. And have a little respect—the boys are family too.”

“Is that why they slapped me around? My own cousins! Great God, are you and Father both mad? In daylight, in a car park? Respect!”

“Father felt that when someone you love stops listening to the voice of reason, you take steps.”

“Not in England, you don’t. And anyway, is this how we deal with each other now—through intermediaries?”

“I wasn’t consulted. Father needed me in Paris. I hadn’t the least idea he’d asked Rafic to move in on you. Of course, if I’d known, I’d have stopped him.” He came to sit down on the sofa next to Leila, putting an arm around her shoulders. “Seriously, angel, if you don’t answer Father’s letters …”

“Is he angry?” Leila, so defiant a moment ago, sounded more like a cowed schoolgirl.

Halib nodded, gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Don’t worry, he loves you; we all love you. Look, I’ll have to make peace back home. Rafic was blaspheming his way to hell on the phone, he’s terrified of Feisal. You and your friends screwed everything up. Tell me what’s troubling you.”

“Well.” Leila shrugged in a deliberately theatrical way, bringing a smile to Halib’s lips. He had this very special, lovely smile, which cracked his face into concentric circles; she’d only seen that particular pattern of lines on a few young faces, always Arab, and she found it irresistible. If Halib had not been her brother, he would have made such a perfect husband….

“Father’s started to nag,” she went on, not meeting his eyes. “In his letters he keeps on about how he wants me to promise to come home and stay there.”

“So? You’ve finished your finals now; what’s keeping you?”

“I could stay on. Perhaps do a doctorate.”

“And what would Yusif have to say about that? Your fiancé is keen to become your husband. Anyway, how can you do a doctorate when you only got a second-class degree?”

“Not here. Bristol. Or maybe Edinburgh.

” He stared at her blankly. “What’s wrong with St. Joseph? Or the American University in Beirut?”

“They’re
in
Beirut; gracious, isn’t that enough?”

“Oh, come, poppet.” He laughed, gave her another hug. “You make it sound like hell.”

“Well, it is,” she flared. “Father wants me in the business. And don’t call me poppet!”

“Banking’s an excellent business to be in.”

“Oh, come
on,
Halib! You know as well as I do what our business is. Rafic spelled it out: we’re Shia Muslims, we’re one of thirty families controlling the entire hash crop, in Beirut we’re fighting for our very survival, and we’re in up to here with the PLO. We’re
zaim
—leaders! Mafia!”

He released her and shifted away, partly to look at her better and partly, she felt, to distance himself from the possibility of contamination. But Leila, carried away by a message she had waited too long to deliver, could not be stopped.

“I love Europe, England. Here I don’t need a bodyguard, or an armored car. I want to live a normal life, Halib! An ordinary person, with a nice husband and a baby or two.”

“Raleigh, for instance?”

“Of course not! He just happened—” Something clogged her throat, and she blushed; the flow of blood was not so much hot as painful. “Will you shut up about Colin and listen to what I’m saying?”

“But it’s a dream, Leila.”

“It is
not!”

“An unattainable dream. What you’re saying is that you want to go through life in neutral. And where we come from, there are no neutrals. There are Maronites; there are Muslims, F’listins, and Israelis.”

He did something vile to that last word, giving it unwonted, sinister sibilance: “Ish-r’eye-lees.”

“You can’t make me fight against my will.”

He stood up and went across to the dresser, where he picked up a pack of Black Russians and lit one, deliberately exhaling a lungful of smoke in her direction as if it were a curse.

“I can make you do anything, Leila. All I have to do is remind you of a certain day, when you admitted to our house a certain Ish-r’eye-lee agent.”

She stared at him, unable to credit that he could use so foul a weapon against her. Then, seeing him about to continue, she raised both hands to cover her ears, violently shaking her head from side to side.

“An agent of the Mossad. Now a general. He came in with a gun and he shot dear old Grandfather Ibrahim, shot him dead, bang-bang, all because a little girl with no more brain than a centipede—”

“Stop it!”

“—thought it would be fun to open the door to anyone who knocked.”

“You’re so unfair! I was just a child. No one had told me; if you wanted me to be more careful, you should—” But she was shouting through tears now, the words came out distorted, and Halib wasn’t listening anyway.

“‘Who let him in?’ That’s what Feisal wanted to know. But I took you away and I fought for you, Leila, fought for a day and a night, until Father no longer wanted to hang you up by your pretty… little … thumbs.”

He shook the black cigarette at his sister as if aiming to dislodge the ash onto her lap.

“You … let him in. The Ish-r’eye-lee. The killer. You.”

Leila keeled over on the sofa and lay there sobbing. They were dry sobs. Her whole body shook, but no sound came out.

“So we swore a holy oath, to be revenged. And every year, on the anniversary of sheikh Ibrahim’s death, we have renewed it.”

“Not Celestine.” Leila sat up, straightening her hair with rough sweeps of the hand. Guilt was giving way to anger. “Grandmother never swore. She said it was an oath against the spirit of the Holy Koran.”

“She was weak. But
you
swore.”

“I was
nine.
A child is only a child.”

“And an oath is only an oath? No, Leila.” He paused, looking around the room as if in search of inspiration. “See here…. ”

He went across to the hide briefcase that Colin Raleigh had so admired, half an hour before, and carried it over to where she was sitting.

“This stuff isn’t real, of course.” He opened the lid. “But it’s how it will look on the day.”

She gazed down at the arrangement of wires, the gray puttylike substance, at the slide switch, at all the mundane apparatus of indiscriminate death, and suddenly she felt exhausted. She wanted to go away and find a hole in the ground, crawl into it, and never come out.

“You can’t be serious.” The words were wrung out of her in such a flat, toneless way that she felt them inadequate and tried again. “You can’t be serious.”

“If Father wants you to go home,” Halib said, “you’d better go. That’s all.”

“I won’t.”

“We are at war, Leila.” “Our clients are at war!”

“It comes to the same thing. Their cause is our cause, for the moment.”

She stared up at her brother, aware of something new in him. “You enjoy this,” she said slowly, “don’t you?”

He nodded. “To have important, interesting work; yes, it’s good. I don’t have to preach to you about the F’listin catastrophe.”

“Palestine. The English word is not F’listin, it’s Palestine.”

“So? You’re losing your roots, know that? Our enemies stole a country from a gentle, decent, farming people and made it into a fortress against all Arabia, against all the world. And they killed our grandfather in cold blood, because he bankrolled F’listin resistance.”

“They
said
he did. That was a lie.”

Halib laughed. “Of course it wasn’t a lie.”

She caught her breath. “How dare you say such a thing?”

“Because it is
true!
Ibrahim believed, passionately, that Palestine was Islamic ‘from the river to the sea.’ So he lent the PLO millions of
liraat.”

Leila’s face had turned white, except for two unhealthy blotches in her cheeks. She was breathing heavily. Halib, seeing the state she was in, relented.

“Poppet, angel: listen, I love you, eh? ‘My brother and I are against my cousin; cousin, brother, and I are against the stranger.’ That’s how it is.”

“Not the whole of it.” She stood up. “If you’re going to quote, quote the first bit, too: ‘I am against my brother.’ That’s how it starts. ‘I am against my brother; my brother and I are against—"’

“I see.” Halib’s voice was tight. “You say that to your
own
brother.”

“If you accuse Grandfather of collaborating with those … those Palestinian butchers, then you are not my brother. I don’t know what you’ve become, but you’re not my brother.”

“He only supported them because he was naïve!
Y’Allah!
Can’t you see the tip of your own nose?
He
didn’t realize that every cent went on Mercedes-Benzes and Katyusha rockets!”

“He never did that. Never, never,
never!”

Halib’s fists clenched, matching her own; related and riven by blood and a legacy of hatred, they teetered on the brink of saying unforgivable things. In the silence, Leila’s brain caught up with words she’d uttered unthinkingly: “You’re not my brother.” They’d spewed out because she would have said anything to fight him. But now she realized that truly this man, whom she’d loved to distraction all her life, was a false deity.

If Leila thought about it for a second longer she would come face-to-face with the reality. So she did the only thing possible in the circumstances. She ran away.

Later she had no recollection of how she got down to Beaumont Street. She came to herself on the corner of the High and Cornmarket, hearing bells chime five o’clock. She looked around her, saw the comfortingly strong-looking wall of a bank, and went to lean against it. After a while her legs failed her; she had to slide down the wall and sit on the pavement, where people cast glances varying from sympathetic to censorious before hurrying on.

Time passed. More bells. Leila raised her head. She could not stay here on the pavement outside Nat West forever. She stood up, aware now, painfully aware, of the stares of others. She began to drift down the High. There was no one she could turn to, nowhere she could go. This, then, was desolation. The outer darkness. Hell.

Numbers jostled for attention inside her head. After she had walked a long way, they coalesced into recent memory: sixty-two. And there was a one also, to be fitted in. Number 62 on the High, first floor. Colin’s place.

Perhaps she could talk to Colin about the way her life had just ended.

For a long time she stood on the pavement by the junction with Longwall Street, gazing up at the frontages opposite. The house, one of a pinched terrace, did not look like much. Its windows obviously hadn’t been cleaned for ages. Did she really want to go in there?

At home the old women used to shake their heads in token wisdom and mutter, “Do not trust a man and a woman alone together for any longer than it takes for water to run out of a jar…. ”

Well. She was climbing the stairs. She was knocking on someone’s door. Nobody in. But when she tried another one it opened to reveal Colin standing there, so tall and straight. His face looked honest. It concealed nothing.

She was going in. Accepting tea. Listening to music that brought a kind of solace.

She was lying across his knees on a sofa while he stroked her hair, and the soft mauve light of an Oxford evening leached away to silence and peace.