Firebird (27 page)

I knew I wasn’t going to try anything. She was about the fastest operator I’d ever seen, and she had too many questions to answer, anyway. I slipped out my stiletto and dropped it into the sand. Her blue eyes were cold and hard.

‘Sanusi was right about you, Sammy,’ she said, ‘if that’s really your name. You aren’t a cop, I knew that from the beginning. You have a pierce mark on your upper right ear, just where the Hawazim wear their famous fidwa, and you wear the Hawazim dagger — the notorious
khanjar
.
’

She was going to find out soon enough, anyway, but I decided to play the innocent just to see how far she would go. ‘I told you,’ I said, keeping my hands raised, ‘it was a street gang.’

‘I don’t think so. Ever heard of a study called
Street
Life
of
Aswan
by Howard Johnson? There was a copy in the US embassy resources section. It lists all the street gangs of Aswan over the past twenty years with their little eccentricities, and guess what? An earring in the upper right ear fold, and a dagger on the wrist aren’t featured at all. Sanusi put me on to you and I’ve done my homework, Sammy. You heard of a book called
Ghosts
of
the
Desert
—
The
Hawazim
of
Egypt
, by a Doctor Calvin Ross? It’s all in there. You said yourself that the Nile Valley people are scared shitless of the desert, yet you seem to feel mighty comfortable here. You know your eyes were actually shining when you showed me that pile of rocks out there?’

‘Yeah, well that’s probably the beanies I dropped.’

‘Bullshit! You know all about the law of companionship, sandstorms and camel turds, don’t you? Of course, you’re a pretty smart guy — you might have learned it somehow, but you’ve got Hawazim whip scars all the way down your back, and that’s not the kind of thing you get on a crash course in desert anthropology.’

‘I had an accident,’ I said.

‘Yeah, you had an accident all right. When we were being chased down the alley on Roda, you used that phrase about the “Divine Spirit”. Only the Hawazim use that term, and you don’t pick that up from a weekend seminar either. You’re Hawazim, Sammy, and the Hawazim are regarded as a bunch of cupcakes by everyone, even the other Bedouin. They’re despised but feared as a tribe of wizards with hocus pocus powers. The question I’ve been asking myself is the same one Sanusi asked: how in the name of hell did a member of that tribe get into the SID? The Hawazim under Omar James Ross — the son of the guy who wrote the book, as I’m sure you know —virtually rose in rebellion against the government four years ago. Funny — that’s about the same time you’ve been a cop.’

I looked at her and grinned, and it seemed to infuriate her. ‘Start talking, Sammy,’ she said, ‘or God help me, I’ll put you down.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘But first what about you,
Special
Agent
? Sanusi was right about you, too, wasn’t he? You’re a faceless woman. Sure you’re fast. You’re faster than anyone I ever knew, and you can move more silently than a cat. You never miss a shot, never miss a trick, but last night I had a long and interesting talk with our Mr Van Helsing. He told me you ratted on me. Says you blew the whole thing to the cops, who conveniently happened to be there when we came out of the archives. Says you set me up deliberately because you couldn’t stand a “raghead” stealing your thunder, and when I think about it only you and Hammoudi knew about the archives job, and I’d bet my life Hammoudi didn’t snitch. Now, the question
I’m
asking myself is, are you really FBI, or a mole for someone else? Mossad? Even the Militants? Or maybe you’ve been in with Van Helsing since the beginning and those charming scenes at the Mena and in the car last night were an act. You do a very good act, miss...whatever your name is. It isn’t Daisy Brooke, that’s for sure.’ I eased the black and white photo Hammoudi had given me out of my inside pocket and held it up between my forefinger and thumb. ‘This is Daisy Brooke — a homely brunette…’

Daisy’s eyes flickered slightly as she tried to focus on the photograph, and in that moment I threw it into her face and made a grab for the SIG, knocking the muzzle away and falling heavily on her. She landed under me with an ‘Ooof!’ and dropped the weapon, her nails raking viciously at my eyes as we rolled over in the sand. Just then there was a gunshot crack that sounded deafening in the silence, and a bullet thumped off the stones and ricocheted with a vibrating whizz. Daisy hesitated and I broke her hold, monkey crawled away from her and turned to see a host of camel riders loping in through the gaps in the wall — men in ochre coloured
jibbas
with plumes of hair and gargoyle faces.

The first rider was mounted on a magnificent off white she camel. He wore a ragged
shamagh
across his face and carried a bolt—action sniper’s rifle with telescopic sights — a rifle I recognized immediately. He made a
kkhyaakhyaaaa
sound and yanked his headrope, so that the camel raised her head disdainfully and settled into the sand with perfect grace. The rider slid out of the saddle and walked up to Daisy, slipping away his
shamagh
to reveal a lean, bearded, bespectacled face. He whipped off his glasses, wiped them ceremoniously on the sleeve of his
jibba
, then replaced them carefully.

‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ he said in English. ‘My name is Omar James Ross.’

36

Daisy came up with her hard blue eyes flaming, and her full lips drawn back from bared teeth. Her headscarf had fallen off in the tussle and her blonde hair streaked out wildly in the desert breeze. To me she looked like a big, beautiful, dangerous pantheress about to spring. She was going for the SIG but Ross was quicker. He moved with the speed of a cobra, clawing it out of the sand and stuffing into his belt. Daisy panted and wiped dust off her lips with her cuff.

‘Hey!’ she said. ‘That’s mine!’

Ross peered at her over the top of his glasses. ‘That depends on whether you’re with us or against us,’ he said. ‘If you’re against us, then by Hawazim custom this weapon is rightly mine. If you’re with us, you can have it back. Now which is it?’

Daisy rocked back on the balls of her feet, still breathing heavily, and her full lips pouted first at Ross, then at me. There was a commotion as the rest of the tribesmen — twelve or thirteen of them — couched their camels amid a cacophony of snorts, bellows, grunts and shouts. They looked as if they had sprung out of the bowels of the earth, I thought, with their flint coloured eyes and almond shaped faces covered in thick beards, their bodies small, lean and robust. They wore their shocks of hair uncut and greased with fat or in plaits bleached with camel urine.
Their
jibbas
were stained russet red from the dye of the desert plant
abal
, though several of them were barechested, wearing only a loose pair of pantaloons and a coarse shawl passing round the back with the ends thrown over both shoulders. They wore cartridge belts at their waists and carried their rifles as if they were extensions of their arms: each of them wore a tiny silver earring — the
fidwa
— in the upper fold of the right ear, and a stiletto blade strapped just above the left wrist. They were mostly barefooted, their feet wide splayed and calloused from walking on sand and grit, and they moved with the precision and economy of trained acrobats. They gathered silently shoulder to shoulder, holding their rifles and swinging their slender camel sticks, sensing the tension, watching keenly for their leader’s next move.

Ross turned to me and slung the sniper’s rifle. He clapped both hands on my shoulders, then clasped my right hand in both of his and looked me in the eyes, unblinking. ‘Thank the Divine Spirit for your safe return, Nawayr,’ he said. ‘By God, you have left us in the wilderness. By the will of the Divine Spirit, no evil?’

‘No evil, thank the Divine Spirit.’

‘May the Divine Spirit grant you long life!’

‘Praise be to God! The Divine Spirit grant long life to you and yours.’

‘Welcome back.’ He gave me the triple nose kiss of the Hawazim, then suddenly threw his arms round me and embraced me hard. When he pulled away I saw there were tears in his eyes. ‘We owe you, Sammy,’ he said. ‘No other Hazmi could have put in four years in the city.’

I knew this was literally true — to anyone brought up in the desert, four years in Cairo would have been a living death. Most Hawazim couldn’t stand a single night under a solid roof. But then I had a natural advantage: unlike them I’d spent my first ten years in a town. I studied Ross and noted how his body had grown leaner and harder since I’d last seen him. He was a half breed like me, but he looked more Arab than I did, with coffee coloured skin, jet black hair and the flint coloured eyes of his mother’s people. I was a Hazmi by adoption, but Ross had been reared in the desert and knew its ways from birth. It was only after his mother had died that his father had taken him away from the tribe and sent him to school in Britain, and as the Old Man used to say, ‘a thing learned when young is a thing carven in rock’. Ross had returned to the tribe four years ago, bringing with him a beautiful half Greek, half Egyptian girl called Elena, who was now his wife and the mother of his son. They’d gone looking for the legendary lost oasis of Zerzura in the most desolate reaches of the Western Desert, and Ross had returned changed. I never knew what he’d found out there — I suspected Hammoudi did, but he’d kept his mouth shut. All I knew was that it had to have been something pretty important, because afterwards he and Elena had been picked up by the police.

I’d been among the team of Hawazim who’d disguised themselves as Camel Corps troopers to spring Ross and Elena, and I’d seen Ross put a bullet through a guy’s head from a hundred metres with a snapshot, while the guy had his handgun in Elena’s ear. It was in the same battle that the Old Man had been snuffed, and Ross had taken his place as leader of the tribe. The Hawazim weren’t led by a sheikh, but by a sort of shaman whom they called
amnir
, or ‘One Who Lights The Way’, and who had the intuitive sense they called ‘the Shining power’. A lot of people had a touch of the power, just as I did, but Ross had it more strongly than any Hawazim
amnir
for several generations — stronger even than the Old Man himself.

Ross stooped and picked up my stiletto — the Hawazim
khanjar
. He passed it to me handle first. ‘You’ve earned this forty times over,’ he said, ‘and this.’ He brought a silver earring out of his pocket — my
fidwa
— engraved with my own personal brand. ‘I kept it for you, like I promised,’ he said. I hadn’t worn it since I’d left the desert four years ago, and I took it and fitted it into the hole in my upper right ear. It was as if this was the signal the tribesmen had been waiting for. Suddenly they crowded round me, nose kissing, clasping my hand, slapping me on the shoulders, shouting, ‘Nawayr!’ and ‘Thank the Divine Spirit for your safe return!’ I was moved by the warmth of their greeting. No matter where you went, I thought, you would never find any people so welcoming as the Hawazim. A small, squat man with a great shaggy beard and a chest as broad as a bull camel’s suddenly shot out of the crowd and charged at me with the force of a bullet.

‘Nawayr!’ he bawled, wrenching my hand as if he wanted to crush it. ‘Good thing we came when we did! You’re letting women down you now!’ It was my blood brother, Ahmad, who was nicknamed
Buraym
or ‘Little Pot’ — a miniature Samson, one of the strongest and bravest men in the tribe. ‘By God!’ he said, ‘you’ve no more muscle on you than a camel stick! You need a good dose of lizards’ eggs and milk. And what do you look like in those rags! I hardly knew you, by God! Get some real clothes on and then we’ll see the old Nawayr!’

A tall slender man heaved him out of the way and took my hand. He was thin and wiry, even for a Hazmi, his face long and narrow as a slice of melon, with a sharp goatee beard. It was my blood brother, ‘Ali-Ahmad’s half-brother. ‘Don’t listen to the Little Pot,’ he said, laughing, ‘you haven’t changed at all, brother. It’s a miracle, thank the Divine Spirit. I don’t know how you stood it in the city. All those fat and dishonest folk so stupid they don’t even know their own ancestors — all that rottenness and perversion.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘you know what Mukhtar used to say:
La
yadhurr
as
-
sihaab
nabh
al
-
kilaab
: The clouds are not harmed by the barking of dogs!’ The tribesmen laughed and applauded. ‘You knew I was coming?’ I asked Ross.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I saw it in the Shining — you, the girl, the exact place and time. I didn’t see Hammoudi, though. Where is the old Night Butcher?’

‘Last I saw he was drawing fire from a bunch of thugs who were trying to kill us. He’s probably feeding the Nile perch now.’

Ross smirked. ‘I doubt it. Hammoudi has a habit of getting himself resurrected. I killed him once myself, and it turned out he was wearing body armour!’ He adjusted his glasses and handed the sniper’s rifle back to ‘Ali, its rightful owner. For years it had been his pride and joy.

‘I knew that shot could only have come from the Hawk’s Eye,’ I said.

‘True,’ Ali said, caressing the weapon as if it was a child, ‘but if it had been me I wouldn’t have shot wide!’ He glanced playfully at Daisy, who was cowering by the Daihatsu with the wild look still on her face. ‘We’ll have to take her with us,’ he said.

Ross raised a quizzical eyebrow at me. Daisy stared at him. I picked up my Beretta and blew the sand off the working parts. ‘She’s put her ass on the line for me,’ I told Ross. ‘On the other hand she might have set me up, and I don’t even know her real name.’

‘She has a right to keep her name. But treachery against a
rafiq
is serious. Did she set you up?’

I put my pistol away and thought about it. The guards at the archives; the machine gun tracer splintering the
Princess
Maria
; the way she’d shot the guy who’d blasted open my front door, and another of the thugs in the street, the way she’d wrecked the two MP motorcyclists with brilliant shooting at their front tyres. I still didn’t know who Daisy was, but like I’d told Monod, it was time for a leap of faith. OK, she might have a secret agenda of her own, but whatever Van Helsing had said she’d come too near to getting slotted too many times for it to have been an act.

I looked at Ross. ‘I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt,’ I said, ‘she saved my life.’

‘Rolling in the sand is a funny way of saying thanks,’ Ross said, grinning.

‘It was a minor disagreement. Daisy wanted to know who I really was, and now she’s got her answer.’ I looked at her and the hard blue eyes met mine. ‘You were right,’ I told her, ‘I’m not really a cop. Oh, I trained in the Police Academy all right, but they didn’t know I’m really Nawayr, an adopted tribesman of the Hawazim — the Ghosts of the Desert. Sammy Rashid is my real name, and what I told you about my background was true. My father was a Yank and I did grow up on the streets of Aswan.

One day I tried to rob an old man of the Hawazim, Mukhtar wald Salim — Ross’s uncle. It turned out that he was the
amnir
of the tribe, and he recognized I had a touch of the Shining power. He adopted me, and after that I grew up in the desert. Ross is my cousin by adoption, and these two — ‘Ali and Ahmad — are Mukhtar’s sons, my blood brothers.’

Daisy opened her mouth to ask a question, but ‘Ali interrupted her. ‘We have to get moving,
amnir
,’ he told Ross, ‘they’ll be coming before long.’

Ross turned his attention back to Daisy. Will you ride with us as our companion?’ he asked. Daisy nodded and he whipped out his stiletto so fast that its blade flashed in the lowering sun. ‘Who’s got salt?’ he demanded. One of the tribesmen hurried forward with a decorated leather bag of salt crystals and Ross took a few and scattered them on the blade. He offered it to Daisy. ‘Eat!’ he said. ‘This is the food covenant of the tribe.’

Daisy blinked at me, then took a piece of salt from the blade with her teeth. Ross did the same, then shook hands with her and gave her back the SIG and its magazine. ‘I don’t know your real name,’ he said, ‘and you can keep it. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, whatever you’ve done in the past, doesn’t matter. All that matters is what you do from now on. You’ve already put your life on the line for Sammy. We’ll defend you with our lives and we expect no less from you.’

Daisy nodded solemnly. ‘I won’t let you down,’ she said, ‘but what’s really going on here?’

Ross laughed. ‘I’ll tell you the whole thing in good time,’ he said, ‘but not now. Now we have to move. Come on. Let’s ride!’

***

By the time we got the car under cover in one of the large buildings, Ahmad had brought up two spare camels, ready saddled and bridled. I saw to my delight that one of them was my own Umm ar-Rusasa — ‘The Mother of the Bullet’, a ten-year-old off white racer belonging to
al
-
Bil
— the thoroughbred herd of the tribe. As a foal she’d been shot in a raid by the Fuciara and still carried the bullet in her body — hence her name. Actually the Old Man had given her to me as a three year old: she was bad tempered and highly strung, and he’d said that he’d chosen her specially so I would be obliged to learn about camels the hard way. He said he wouldn’t give me another till I’d mastered her, anyway, so if I lost or foundered her I’d have to walk. At first she’d tried to bite and kick me — twice she’d run away, and I’d had to track her down alone. But the Old Man had been right: I’d learned, and once we’d come to an uneasy truce, she’d turned out to be one of the fastest, most enduring camels in the herd.

‘She’s foaled twice since you were here,’ Ahmad said, ‘she’s an old lady now. Still got fire in her belly, though. Are you sure you’re still up to it, brother? You wouldn’t like a docile old dowager instead?’

I sidled up to Umm ar-Rusasa and pulled at her flexible lower lip: she crooned and snuffled at me, but didn’t snap. ‘See!’ Ali said. ‘She knows you in your city clothes, even if the Little Pot doesn’t!’

‘Can you ride a camel?’ Ahmad asked Daisy, pointing at the elderly she-camel he’d brought for her.

‘It wasn’t on my curriculum at Berkeley,’ she said, ‘but I’ll give it a go.’

I helped her into the saddle and took the headrope. The she-camel stood up, groaning, letting her old joints unlimber. ‘You don’t have to do anything but sit,’ I told Daisy, ‘I’m hitching you behind me.’

‘No!’ she said. ‘Give me the bridle. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it properly!’

I gave her the headrope and a camel stick Ahmad had brought for her. ‘This one’s easy to manage,’ Ahmad told Daisy. ‘She’s very even tempered. Just yank the rope right or left depending on which way you want to turn, but only pull back when you want to stop. If you want to go faster, tap her on the flank lightly with the stick and wiggle your toes on her withers.’