The Hidden (37 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

The air was thick and sultry as Littoni strode purposefully towards Ezbekieh. The streets were filled with the usual throngs of soldiers and brightly painted girls gathered outside nightclubs and cafés.

Littoni didn’t dare catch anyone’s eye. He was entirely absorbed in his own thoughts, biting back the wave of nervous excitement pumping through his body. He patted his jacket and felt the halter against his shirt that held his revolver. His chest rose and fell painfully from walking quickly.

As he thought about his men moving into place behind their combat lines within their allocated grids, a powerful surge of adrenaline electrified his limbs. Those wealthy Cairene and foreign diplomats gathering to grease their way into the favour of the king and his entourage did not know what was coming.

He screwed up his eyes in the dark. Things were eerily quiet on the military front. There was no sign of any extra deployment of troops nor any visible increase in the number of soldiers scouring the streets. Inshallah, on this moonless night, the X would not be stopped.

He withdrew a cigarette as he arrived at his ground-force meeting in the basement of a sector member’s house in Ezbekieh. He slipped inside the building as nonchalantly as he could and made his way to the back. The others would already be there, waiting for
him. The tiny basement storeroom, its entrance shielded from view by a rickety old door, was perfect. He stepped in and saw three pairs of eager eyes upon him. A dim lamp lit the room.

“Greetings, fellow rebels,” he said. “All armed Sayyids?”

The men laughed as though they were off to a celebration. They were all in high spirits. Dressed in civilian clothes, they could blend easily into any crowd.

“Inshallah, if God wills it, we will succeed,” he said. “As the leaders, we will be sending our men in from their assigned streets abutting the palace. Keep well back until the bomb has been detonated. Then we will march in on the palace with all the other sectors. Use your weapons if anyone tries to stop you. Our first destination will be the king’s suites and offices. Kamal and Mustafa have been instructed to telephone the radio stations from the palace to let them know the government is no more and the king is dead. They will inform them that the new government will take effect immediately. British martial law will no longer apply. Our men on the ground will make sure of that. The X will disband, and the new alliance government will take over. I will rule as president of the newly independent Egypt.”

The men murmured their approval.

Littoni went on. “The sectors have agreed that Tashi, Hamid, and Hossein are to be chief advisors to the new president. The rest of the X will be given jobs within the new government.”

Littoni smiled victoriously. In all his years—first as an army officer who was ousted because of his disastrous military manoeuvre abilities, then later during his moderately successful attempts at running various cafés around Cairo—he had always harboured a burning desire to rule. As payback for the humiliation of being evicted from the army, as payback for the bankruptcy he had once
faced at the hands of various political hotshots, including Issawi. The only thorn in his side had been Farouk.

“Ready Sayyids?”

The men pushed towards the door.

“Then let’s go. Inshallah.”

The journal of Hezba Iqbal Sultan Hanim al-Shezira,

Cairo, late September 1919

From the window I see a fat, old, bespectacled man with greying hair arrive. He is wearing a suit and carries a cane. In one hand he is holding a brown leather holdall. He is shown into the house by one of the guards. I stand back and shroud myself. I do not want him to touch me or look me in the eye. The thought that this doctor has been sent by the courts to examine me makes me shiver with repulsion.

I am standing with my back to the wall on the far side of the sitting room when the door is flung open and one of the guards nods the doctor in. My whole body tenses and I feel sick. Then I have an idea. What if he proclaims me insane? My charge might be viewed differently. I decide it is worth a try. It might buy me some time, precious time to get word to Alexandre.

The door is shut, and the doctor stands alone opposite me. For a while he just looks at me. I feel like a poor abandoned animal that someone is trying to rescue. Yet I cannot be tamed.

The doctor smiles at me. “Come here, child,” he says, and he beckons me with his finger. “You know why I am here, don’t you.”

I shake my head but say nothing. I am not going to make this easy for him. I don’t want his filthy hands on my flesh. He sets down his holdall and walks towards me. I make a noise, the ugliest noise I can muster. It comes from deep within me. It is horrible, insane.

The doctor stops, his eyes narrowing. Then he goes back to get his holdall, and he places it by the bed. I start to shake and moan. If these sounds make him think I am not of right mind, then all the better. He tiptoes forward and reaches for me. I slide back farther along the wall. He tiptoes closer.

“My dear, I am here simply to examine you, to confirm your state, and to write a report about you for the qadi. Please don’t make things worse than they already are.”

My thoughts run riot. If I can swallow my revulsion and let him examine me, I might be better able to convince him of my demented state. I try to relax my body. The doctor reaches out for me again, and I let him steer me towards the bed. He is still smiling. I sit down.

“Now then, that’s better. I just want you to lie down and lift up your robes. Relax,” he says. “Relax.”

I lie down and watch him through my veil. He puts on some rubber gloves and feels my belly, pushing down here and there to check the position of the baby. Then he gingerly picks up the corners of my robes and my undergarments and rolls them back so that my legs are exposed. I flinch and freeze. My body is like a rock. I have no feeling left in me. Those large, ugly hands encased in gloves are about to force their way into the core of my body. He moves himself around so that he is standing between my legs, peering down at me through his spectacles. I can’t do this. I can’t let him touch me.

Suddenly I rear up and push my heel into his groin as hard as I can, sending him flying. He falls back on the floor, groaning in pain. I jump up and grab a syringe from his holdall, the first thing I see, and wave it in the air at him. I am so scared. A million thoughts are running through my mind, galloping like my horse riding into the desert wind. I want this doctor to proclaim me insane. I don’t want my life taken away from me.

I don’t want to be locked up. I did what I did because of Rachid, because my heart was breaking for him. Am I to be imprisoned for loving so much? At least if I were deemed insane, I would be granted some reprieve from the horrors of prison long enough to plan my escape. The doctor gets up, still groaning, and stares at me in disbelief.

“All right, Sayyida,” he says. “Put down the syringe. I have finished with you.” He is rubbing his arm and his head where he fell, and then he tentatively reaches for his holdall and heads for the door as fast as he can.

I hear murmuring outside my door. The next thing I know, the guards are inside the room with their guns pointing at me, demanding the syringe. I give it to them. They edge their way out of the room this time, never once turning their faces from me, pointing their weapons all the while. The door shuts and the bolt slides back into place.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

That night, at dusk, two hundred members of the Buluk el Nizam—the Egyptian auxiliary police force—gathered at Intelligence HQ, the top-secret military training camp in the el-Gamaliya district. Each of them carried a machine gun over his shoulder. They stood erect, side by side, silently awaiting orders. The atmosphere was heavy. Each man knew of the seriousness of the task that lay ahead of him.

And then they were joined by eight hundred similarly equipped British soldiers. The men waited before a stage. At last five men walked onto it. One man picked up a loudspeaker and started to speak through it. It was Hilali, head of Security Operations.

“Men, you’ve been briefed on Operation X. Network Intelligence has unravelled this group’s intention to strike tonight. And this has been backed up by one of our top secret agents. We have mobilised our largest security operation ever. Now, it is of vital importance that we take the X by surprise. Although it has been widely advertised that security has been increased, the celebrations at the Abdin Palace must appear to go on as normal. The X would expect this. The X sectors will likely plan to surround the palace to wait out the start of the coup. If you are in part of the raid operative, your leader will have informed you to move in on the palace in concentric circles from Garden City, Zaynab, Ezbekieh, the Old
City, and the Sultan Hassan Mosque and to arrive at the palace with enough time to nail the ringleaders who will be watching and waiting close by. We believe the two most senior leaders of the X plan will lead the coup.

“Our top code-cracker has dismantled a radio message that leads us to believe that a meeting will take place tonight. We have the address where the meeting is scheduled to be held. This is a matter for our top security men. What we propose to do is this:

“We are going to deploy a hundred men to secretly fringe the boulevard closest to the main entrance to the palace. The rest of you will be involved in the raid operative. You know who you are and you know what to do.

“The raid operative has been divided into groups of twenty. Each group has been allocated its own area with a list of souks, cafés, mosques, nightclubs, and shops that must be raided. It is important that this happen while the X is mobilising its men into position. They will leave key members behind at certain strategic locations to radio information in. We will leave no stone unturned, and you have been commanded to use as much force as necessary to bring about the desired outcome. We want these men and we want them tonight. There are one hundred men on the wanted list, but we suspect that they are only the tip of the iceberg. We are sending in armoured cars and military trucks, backup forces with cannons and armaments. We will not fail to rid this city of this foul force. The arrested men will be taken to the el-Gamaliya detention centre. While you are working on your assigned mission, our top men will tackle the meeting, which is supposed to take place prior to the coup. Good luck, men. Security Operations’s top men will be on the ground with you. My colleague Mustafa Gamal and I will be bringing in the Abdin contingent. Tomorrow, the men and women of Cairo will walk taller and without fear, Inshallah.”

The soldiers filed out. The military trucks were waiting. Hilali and Gamal jumped off the stage and walked outside, found their truck, and climbed in. Twenty youths peered gloomily at them from the bed of the truck. They know nothing of war, Gamal thought sadly as he glanced at them. These raids would not sharpen their prowess or harden them to the months of war to come. As he realised that the capture of the X was dependent upon these mere babes’ innocence and inexperience, he felt he was staring failure in the face. Hilali’s words had had a false ring to them. Tomorrow, the men and women of Cairo would not walk taller and without fear. The X would never die. It would live forever, maybe in a different form, with a new name and new leaders, but it would never be obliterated. They might squash a few of them, might push them underground for a while, but they would be back.

The trucks moved off and began snaking their way through the streets in all directions. Hilali and Gamal’s truck was bound for Ezbekieh. It stopped at the fringes of the gardens, and the men leapt out. Hilali and Gamal skirted the houses and shops as invisibly as possible. The rest of the force came in from behind, heading towards a long line of shops, tailors, perfumeries, bakeries, and cafés.

Operation X had begun. If he and Gamal mucked this up, if anything happened to the king or Issawi, both he and Gamal would be finished. A woman in one of the shops they were raiding came towards them and flung her arms at them, pounding their chests. Operations grabbed her and held her against a wall. “Lock her up,” Hilali yelled.

The woman burst into tears. From her mouth came an impenetrable tongue-tied mass of expletives. She struggled and bit and kicked as two men held her down to the ground, then held her firm.

“Please,” she sobbed. “I am just trying to earn my living. You can’t do this.”

“Shut up, woman,” Hilali shouted.

He motioned to his soldiers to take her to the truck.

“You,” he shouted at one of the men who stood near the door of one of the cafés with his arms raised. “Give me your papers.”

The man produced them.

Gamal looked at them for a moment and then lunged at him, ramming the angular end of his machine gun into his stomach. The man keeled over and collapsed.

“Take him to the truck,” Gamal said.

One of the soldiers dragged the unconscious body along the pavement and hauled him into the back of the truck. Something caught Hilali’s eye. A boy of about nineteen, in a café, his face twisted with hatred, was reaching for a lantern. The youth grabbed the lantern off the café bar and threw it across the tiny souk haret to the tailor’s shop opposite.

The silk seller leapt up and ran out screaming “Allah, Allah, Allah” as racks of brightly coloured silks exploded into flames. Suffocating smoke billowed out, clouding everyone’s visibility. The soldiers ducked, and Hilali and Gamal were thrown back by the force of the flames.

Hilali yelled, “Quickly, the basement!” Gamal led the way. He pushed through an archway to a maze of corridors, through a wooden door, down some steps to a basement. He tiptoed forward, his men right behind him. He saw a light under the door, threw his body against it, and fired a round of machine-gun shots behind him in the air to get their attention.

“Freeze!” he shouted. Before him were four men dressed in civilian clothes, suits, and tarboushes, their mouths gaping open, their eyes all-knowing, their hatred palpable. One of the men stood
up and reached for a gun. Hilali pumped the opposite wall with more rounds from his machine gun.