The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (55 page)

Travel companies did a good line in offering the “real Iskandryia” from the safety of air-conditioned coaches. As if the
arrondissement
’s simmering resentment somehow made it more real than the old wealth of the Greek District or the comfortable red-bricked mansion blocks near the fish market.

“Enough already,” said Raf, adding his varied collection of keys and bulbs to the weapons discarded by Avatar’s guards. There was nothing he needed in the empty kitchen. It was time to find the cellar.

The Daimler-Benz parked below the
FOR SALE
sign had smoked windows and whitewall tyres, newish but dusty from trawling through too many back streets. The vehicle had
hire car
written all over it.

Seconds after its headlights died, the near-side rear door opened, briefly lighting the inside. What interested Raf was the woman who got out.

“You know her?” Raf asked, yanking Avatar to his feet and dragging him across to the cellar’s high window. Had he had more time, Raf might have been kinder, gentler… The story of his life really.

“You’re drunk!” Avatar said, belatedly realizing the obvious. He sounded surprisingly shocked.

“Not entirely,” said Raf. “Now…you know her?”

Avatar shook his head.

“Well, I do. Last time I saw her she was standing behind your sister, waiting to climb onto a restaurant car.” The boy didn’t ask what Raf was doing watching Maxim’s. Which was a fair trade-off, because Raf didn’t ask what made Avatar throw in his job as Raf’s driver.

Zara had that effect on both of them.

“So what happens now?” whispered Avatar, watching the woman walk towards the house, her silhouette looming large above the bars of the cellar’s only window. Behind her walked a driver.

“We dance,” said Raf. “Then I go find whoever dumped a dead girl in your dad’s garden.”

He saw surprise on Avatar’s face. “This is just the sideshow,” Raf explained apologetically, looking at the drugged and swaying boy. “Just a sideshow.” Quickly drawing the black blade from its sheath on his right ankle, Raf checked the point and tried out a couple of steps.

“Well,” he amended, “I dance.”

Raf hauled Avatar over to a soiled mattress opposite the door. “You lie down here and
pretend
to be ill.” Flipping round the blade so that it pointed upwards, Raf stood with his back to the doorframe. All it took to embed the blade lightly in the wood was to flip up his hand and step away, leaving the knife protruding from the frame behind him. There were probably better ways to guarantee having a blade ready for use while leaving both hands free; this just happened to be the one that I & I had taught him.

The next few minutes Raf reconstructed later from sounds alone, beginning with the scratch of a key. The Yale on the front door was oiled but even so the tumblers grated a little. There was the click of a light switch, followed immediately by a grunt of irritation. A snatch of Arabic fired into the darkness was repeated, louder this time, irritation becoming anger as the woman caught her hip on the corner of a table in the hallway, the table scraping across tiles.

Already her breathing was less steady.

Raf caught the exact point her anger turned to worry. It came just after her driver banged open the kitchen door and found the room deserted, silent and dark. What little light came through the front door obviously revealed nothing except the fact her guards were gone.

“Fetch a torch.”

Heavy treads crossed the floor above Raf’s head, then came the clash of metal heels on the front steps. The creak of a car door. A slam. Moments later the driver was back, his tone apologetic.

The woman swore, louder than was wise. And Raf heard the click of a gas lighter, then heavy footsteps descending towards the cellar door.

“Fucking ragheads,” said the woman. “You can’t get them to do anything…”

The driver muttered something that might have been agreement. He was still muttering as he stepped through the door and dropped his lighter. Screaming was out of the question given that Raf’s garrotte had already crushed the cartilage of his larynx, so the man gurgled instead.

“Come in,” Raf told the woman. “Unless you want me to finish off your driver…?”

Not a problem apparently.

Finding her wrist in the darkness, Raf pulled her hand, gun and all, from her side pocket. The weapon she held was tiny, impossibly elegant and looked very expensive. Twisting it from her rigid fingers, Raf tossed it into Avatar’s slop bucket, adding a splash and liquid clank to his collection of sounds.

Everybody did something well, that’s what the fox used to insist when Raf was small. It was just that some people took longer than others to discover their real talent. And this, it turned out was his… Not caring about the doing until the doing was over. Of course, given his guarantee, Raf probably shouldn’t have cared at all.

Blood had strung a necklace round the throat of the driver, although Raf was the only person in the cellar who could see the dark pearls. And the wire was too tight to be clearly visible even to him.

“Slip off your jacket,” Raf told the woman, “then step away from it.” He waited while she shrugged off her dark coat and put it carefully on the damp tiles, folding it first. Did that signify strength or weakness? The fox would have known.

She was thin; dressed in a white silk blouse, thick black belt and a knee-length skirt that matched the folded jacket. As upscale and anonymous as the guards had been obvious and down-market.

“Turn around.”

Tucked into a small holster on the back of her belt was a tiny Colt. The almost invisible bulge on her thigh was undoubtedly something predictable like a derringer or throwing knife.

“Disarm,” Raf said simply.

The Colt she placed carefully on the floor. The bump remained where it was, which was her choice. Stupid, of course, but still her choice.

“This is where you tell me who you are,” said Raf.

The shake of the woman’s head was so slight as to be almost subliminal.

“The alternative,” said Raf, yanking the garrotte, “is that I finish strangling your driver.”

“Poor driver,” was all she said. And as the big man lurched in panic at the tightening of the wire, the woman dipped one hand towards her thigh, sliding back raw silk to reveal a razor-edged blade.

Now.

Without thought, without prior intention, Raf dropped the borrowed garrotte and reached up and back, his fingers folding around the handle of his own blade, which tumbled rapidly through the darkness; the woman’s right eye emptying onto her cheek like broken egg as vitreous humour slid down tight skin.

Stepping into her scream, Raf slammed palm against hilt and drove the knife through the woman’s parietal lobe and into her cerebellum. Somewhere in that sequence the woman’s brain stem got sliced and she stopped being strictly human. Though the whimpering only stopped when Raf put thumb and first finger either side of her throat and squeezed.

He was in the process of lowering her to the ground when a mobile rang. Raf found it in the inside pocket of the woman’s discarded jacket. The little phone was clumsier than he’d expected from someone of her erstwhile elegance.

“Na’am?”

Raf listened for a few seconds and shook his head.

“No,” he said, slightly breathless. “Fraulein Lubeck can’t come to the phone. Yes, I’ll ask her to call you back…” He listened hard. “No,” he said finally, “I’m sure she’s never heard of someone called Ashraf Bey.”

CHAPTER 17

Sudan

Each Seraphim 4×4 had a blade at the front designed to
dig into dunes and turn over sand, which is what they did. Within minutes the dead were ploughed under, enemy trucks torched and camera crews invited in.

Trucks burning weren’t exactly hot news but new shots still got added to stale ones. And trustworthy faces in pale suits stood under the blistering sun and reassured the doubtful that after a bitter firefight rebel militia had been defeated with almost no loss of life to PaxForce.

“Zero loss of life…” corrected a voice in Ka’s ear.

“Then why say almost?”

“What?” Sarah glanced round, then shrugged and turned her attention back to Saul. They were moored under an overhanging thorn that kept the afternoon at bay, while lapping water cooled their hiding place and tossed sunlight onto the underside of its spiky canopy.

Ka was ignoring all questions. He was getting good at that. Ignoring the others meant not facing questions he couldn’t answer.

“Well?” Ka asked the voice.

“No dead would mean an unfair fight. Strong against weak. A few dead equals luck, skill, better weapons… It’s about presentation.” The voice paused and, without having to ask, Ka suddenly found himself looking down on a thornbush rather than at a battlefield.

“Who are you?” the voice demanded.

Ka sighed. “You’ve asked me this already…”

“Humour me,” said the voice. It didn’t sound very humorous at all. “That’s a basic rule, okay?”

“Sergeant Ka,” said Ka. “We were part of the Army.”

“Were?”

Ka thought of the ploughs turning over sand and blinked as his p.o.v. changed. The 4×4s were done now, even out at the edge of what had been Ka’s camp. Some trucks were even leaving, helmeted troops waving to a blonde woman who stood atop a dune, laden down with power pack and portable satellite dish.

Ka turned off the radio. “We can’t go back,” he told the others, as if that was an end to the argument.

“Oh yes we fucking can.” Saul’s voice was deeper than Ka’s own. His superior age showing in its gruffness and the ease with which he dropped swear words into his conversation. “We just turn this shitty boat around.”

“They’d flog us publicly,” Sarah reminded him. “Maybe shoot us.”

“Yeah.” Bec flicked her gaze from Sarah to Ka, then back again. “We’ll need an excuse.”

Lifting his shades, Ka stared at Bec. “We can’t go back,” he said slowly. “You know why we can’t go back? Because everyone’s dead.”

Mouths dropped open and Zac instantly flung his hands over his ears, as if to block out Ka’s lies. Both his sisters were in that camp, Ka realized; had been, rather…

“It was quick,” Ka insisted. “Instant,” he added hurriedly. “It was instant. A bomb made a small bang and everyone just fell over.”

“Yeah?” said Saul. “And how do you know…?”

“I just do. Then the ’copters came and trucks full of soldiers.”

“Why did they send soldiers?” Bec asked. “If the bomb had already killed everyone?”

Ka didn’t have an answer to that.

“Because the bomb doesn’t exist,” said the voice in his ear. “That’s why… In a moment your radio is going to come on. Talk to it direct.”

My radio is switched off, Ka wanted to say, but the blue box was already noisily swooping hi-to-low at exactly sixty cycles a minute, like a miniature police siren.

“Sergeant Ka,” said the boy, holding the radio to his ear and feeling stupid.

“Lieutenant Ka,” corrected the voice. “As of now. Lieutenant Ka, Sergeant Sarah, Corporal Bec…”

“What about Saul and Zac?”

“Zac’s a baby. And Saul…”

Ka waited.

“He’s a spy, you understand?”

“I understand,” said Ka, sitting up so straight his hair almost caught in down-hanging thorns.

“I understand, sir.”

“Sir.”

“And you know who I am?”

Ka shook his head. Somehow that was enough.

“Colonel Abad,” said the Colonel, introducing himself. “You’ve heard of me?”

Oh yes. Ka grinned stupidly at the badge on his shirt. Those shades, the cigar, that black beard. The Colonel.

“Where are you exactly?”

The boy looked round him. Cliffs tight on both sides of the river and white-headed vultures overhead. But then there were always vultures circling thermals over this stretch of the Nile. Above the vultures, made smaller both by reality and distance, hovered raptors. Black-winged kites, most probably.

Sarah’s felucca was tied at the river’s bend, on the side where floodwater flowed less fast and silt almost buried rocks that were pale and strangely square. Three thousand years earlier, during the flood season, a cargo boat had run aground there. Staying with his freshly hewn sandstone, the captain had sent slaves downriver to get help. He died in the night waiting for their return, killed by an adder as he sat by a small fire lit to keep jackals at bay.

Colonel Abad knew these things. The hieroglyphs of the pharaohs cartouched below their statues, the genera of birds and animals, even the molecular structure of each rock that made up the crumbling cliffs and temples, statues and ruins.

Ka could identify concrete, sandstone and polycrete, the frothy stuff that set hard and could be coated with sand or gravel, provided any covering was whacked on before the crete had time to dry. Both sides used it to make HQs that blended into any background.

“We’re upriver from the camp,” Ka said, “on a bend near low cliffs… And we haven’t eaten all day,” he added as an afterthought.

“You got grenades?”

“Yes,” said Ka. At least Saul had. Zac, Sarah and Bec had two rifles, a knife and a pistol between them. He had the plastic gun. What his dead lieutenant called a doublePup. He didn’t like it very much.

“Swap it,” said Colonel Abad. “First chance you get. Right…” The radio crackled for a second. “Listen up. Food first. That means losing a grenade to the river. Get Saul to throw and Bec and Zac to collect the fish… All of them.”