Arabesk (79 page)

“Somewhere in the small print,” said the Khedive, “it mentions that you carry ship-to-air defences. However, my own intelligence digests confirm that you have functioning PCB.”

“We’ve got what?” The captain’s voice was hollow.

“Lightning throwers, three of them, LockMart-made, second-generation.” The boy wriggled the fingers of one hand. “I’ve got some too. They look like black metal spiders.”

“Like…” Captain Bruford halted.

“If they attack you,” said the Khedive, “attack back. If they don’t, then let them land on the ’copter deck. If there’s a problem, I and my bodyguards will deal with it.”

“Bodyguards?”

“Well, bodyguard,” the Khedive admitted. “Sort of…”

“And where is this bodyguard?” asked the captain, still cross at being blackmailed over the particle beam weapons. It was blackmail, because PCBs were illegal under an antiproliferation treaty signed eighteen months earlier. Added to which, bodyguards were strictly forbidden aboard the SS
Jannah
… That was condition one of being accepted aboard.

“Where’s Avatar?” The Khedive glanced round his suite and then at the sunlit balcony beyond. “Now there’s a question.” Dropping his silk dressing gown to the floor, Tewfik Pasha hunted for some trousers. “To be honest, I haven’t a clue…”

He was still looking for something to wear when Captain Bruford let herself out. In total, she’d been in his suite for less than ten minutes. And he was, she told herself, irritating, difficult and overprivileged even by the standards of guests on the SS
Jannah
… He was also undeniably beautiful, with a charisma that made Hollywood replicas look shallow and contrived.

She considered briefly the possibility that he really was the General’s lover. And then her watch chimed and she took the first available Orvis, overriding its programming so that it took her straight down to the ops room. She might be the captain, but this was a civilized ship and she didn’t want to keep her chief of security waiting any longer than was necessary.

28th October

Café Le Trianon was closed. That meant the private lift
that went straight up to the floor above and the offices of the Third Circle was out of action. And that meant Hani had to use the stairs from Boulevard Saad Zaghloul. She didn’t mind; in fact, things were much quieter in the HQ of Iskandryia’s civil service now that the lift and the telephones had stopped working.

Unfortunately, people still kept interrupting her.

Hani hit a hot key and her list of satellites vanished. Although the subroutine that was supposed to be making contact with Avatar kept running in the background, without success.

“Hani. What are you doing here?”

Ingrid Nordstrom saw the young girl’s face freeze and stepped back, forcing a smile.

Life at the Third Circle had been difficult these last few days. There was no real work for her to give the staff when they came in, but equally no one had given Ingrid permission to let them stay away.

She sighed.

None of this was the child’s fault and actually Ingrid liked Hani. Much more than she usually liked children, or most other adults, come to that. The bey’s young niece was the politest child Ingrid had ever met and the quietest. And if not for the child’s obsession with computers, no one would have noticed she was here at all: but with just two machines working in the whole office, it was inconvenient if Lady Hani decided to monopolize one of them.

“I’m halfway through a story,” said Hani. “I’m good at stories.”

She was too.

Raf thought she was with Khartoum, who thought she was at the madersa with Donna. And Donna thought she was shopping with Zara. Whereas, in fact, she’d walked from Shallalat Gardens to Le Trianon by herself. Later she’d say sorry, if she got found out, but at the moment things were much too critical to explain.

“It’s a fairy story,” said Hani, “sort of…”

“What’s it about?”

Hani’s face creased in concentration, one finger hammering at the
Pg Up
key until she found the passage she wanted.

“And lo as dusk fell over the stony desert, a son of Lilith came out of the night wrapped in a mantle of darkness. Across his chest he wore a necklace of human teeth and in his hand he carried a staff carved from the wing-bone of a djinn…”

Out of the corner of her eye Hani could see the woman frown so she skipped down a few paragraphs.

“…and when the sun rose over the rose-hued walls of Al Qahirah, the son of Lilith hid in the shadow of a house and wrapped darkness tight around his thin body. And this day passed as days always pass, slowly for those who labour and more swiftly for those to whom life is joy.

“Women came with water jugs to the standpipe as did a slave leading a thirsty donkey. For though Needle Alley was too narrow for a camel to pass, the donkey was thin and the carpets it carried were loaded on its back rather than in panniers as we do now…”

Hani stopped. “There’s more,” she said politely. “If you’d like me to read it.”

Ingrid Nordstrom shook her head. “I need to go.” She seemed about to say something else but hesitated on the edge of speaking.

It would be about the son of Lilith, Hani imagined. Most of the people Hani had talked to about this, which admittedly was very few, were unsettled by the idea of djinn and vampyres. “This vampyre’s good,” explained Hani, her voice firm. “You do get good ones…”

The woman looked surprised.

“It’s true,” Hani insisted. “I’ve checked it in a book. If a son of Lilith survives seven years undetected, he can travel to a land where a different language is spoken and become human. He can even marry and have children. Although,” Hani paused and her face grew serious, “the children will still be sons and daughters of Lilith.”

“How fascinating.”

“And I won’t be much longer,” Hani promised. “As soon as I’ve finished here I’m going to the library.”

“Take your time,” said Madame Ingrid, and was surprised to discover that she meant it. Hani had become such a regular at the Third Circle it was hard to remember she was there on sufferance… That was what the bey had said the first time he brought her in, on sufferance. Ingrid wasn’t to let Hani become a problem.

He’d been staring at Hani when he said it.

Ingrid decided to leave the child to her story. These were difficult times for everyone. And getting more difficult. She just hoped the bey wasn’t being too strict with the girl.

28th October

A window opened in the air in front of Avatar: a sleek
black ’copter, blades chopping to a deep bass beat, smoked-glass windscreen and not a decal in sight to say where it came from or who might be inside.

“Floating focus,” said the Colonel. He was talking about the spectacles.

“And the ’copter…?”

“Mi-24x Hind gunship, adapted for three 20mm cannon with Hellmouth, Rattlesnake and Quickdraw rockets—$189.3 million, plus $1.6m per missile. Old model.”

“No,” Avatar said crossly. “I mean, who does it belong to?”

“No idea,” said Colonel Abad. “It won’t tell me. Didn’t want to tell me its model number or price range until I told it you were in the market to buy one. Then the imprinted sales coding took over, always does…”

Avatar looked at the tiny machine that floated in front of his eyes. Watching as toy-sized doors blew back and even smaller figures tumbled out, guns ready. Somewhere just above his hearing, sirens wailed and a gun spat, distant as the echo of yesterday’s firecrackers. The black-suited figures were firing over the heads of an unseen crowd.

“I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”

The Colonel thought about this for a split second. “As much as you want and more.” His voice was apologetic. “It was the hidden door,” he explained. “Not an original idea but effective. One of the Medicis did something similar at the Pitti Palace. Of course, the difference is, this one had a silent alarm.”

Even Hani had been impressed. Solder shut every normal door on level Dminus4, then leave an exit through the back wall of a strong room. The safe’s entrance had featured antique defences: tear gas between inner and outer layers, tasers positioned down both sides of the frame, all the stuff that putting a gun to the wounded suit’s head had miraculously disabled. But the trapdoor at the back, that had tripped an alarm satellite in low-earth orbit. And half the intelligence agencies in Europe were busy going ape-shit…

It looked like one of them had arrived.

Climbing the first twist of stairs was easy. More so since Colonel Abad showed Avatar how to adjust the spectacles to infrared. The cold the Colonel could do nothing about, except get Avatar back to the warmth of an upper deck as soon as possible. Although, at Colonel Abad’s suggestion, Avatar did empty his rucksack of its handcuffs, pepper gas and rope, and slice a hole in the bottom and another on either side, then invert the bag to wear as a tunic.

“Protect your core temperature,” the Colonel advised him, “if you want to stop your brain from shutting down.” Avatar was slightly surprised to learn his brain could shut down, but he did what Colonel Abad suggested, mainly because he’d been doing pretty much everything the Colonel said since it first suggested he turn on those lights.

“You’re manipulating me,” Avatar said, stopping dead at the thought.

“That’s my job.” The familiar bearded figure smiled sadly, having first popped into floating focus. “Only in the specifications it’s called functional motivation.” With an apologetic shrug, Colonel Abad vanished and Avatar was left staring at riveted steps lit by a dull red gloom.

His skull ached as if someone had nail-gunned a metal band around his head and the only proof Avatar had that his hands were still attached to his wrists was that he could see one of them in the half gloom, wrapped dead and pale round the handle and trigger of his Taurus.

Another endless twist of stairs, then another, and still Avatar was waiting to recognize the door that led through to the ripped-out deck with the frozen pipes. So he kept climbing, breath ragged in his throat and his jaw too numb to do more than mangle his words.

“Sweet fuck…”

He was swearing for the sake of it, for the company. Because every time he said something the Colonel flicked into focus at the edge of his vision. Avatar’s serious, sympathetic new friend, iconic with history.

“Sweet, sweet…”

“Door’s ahead,” said the Colonel. “But first stop and listen to me.”

“No,” said Avatar, shivering. “Won’t be able to start again.”

“The enemy eat children.”

Avatar nodded. Quite probably. There were some weird fuckers around. One of them had left a dead body on his dad’s beach.

“You need to listen. I mean it.”

Avatar tried.

“Better,” said the voice. “Look, I don’t have time to make you me… Tempting though it is.”

“You?” Avatar muttered. “Why the fuck would I want to be you?”

“Then who do you want to be?”

“Me,” said Avatar. “DJ Avatar.”

Colonel Abad sighed. “Failing that,” he said, “and it will fail, who else?”

It seemed an odd question. No, Avatar decided, fighting the cold for long enough to reach a conclusion, it
was
an odd question. “Raf,” he said, not having to overthink his answer. In the past he’d always dreamed of being Hamzah, but not since that night with the kidnappers, when Raf appeared. Raf was different. Raf was… Everyone else thought the bey was a trained killer, one of the Sultan’s best, but Avatar knew different…

Raf was weirder than that. Way weirder.

“You know about Lilith?”

Adam’s first wife had been bounced from Eden for refusing Adam. Well, for refusing his suggestion that she spread them. When Adam got bounced in turn, Lilith fucked him against Eden’s outer wall and got pregnant, while Eve was still sulking (this was before Adam repented). After Adam got Eden back, Lilith fucked the snake and gave birth to the djinn.

Like her, not having eaten of the fruit, her children never died.

Avatar had seen the vid nasty several times.

“He really is…” Avatar felt the need to stress that, just in case Colonel Abad thought he meant Raf was one of those kindergoths and candyravers who haunted the clubs behind Place Orabi, where the dress options were sun-sucking black or ghetto ghastly.

“Really?”

“Too right,” said Avatar. “Raf can see in the dark and hear things better than a bat. Kills like an animal when necessary, without conscience…”

“You like this man?”

“Oh yeah.” Avatar nodded his head, heavy though it was. “He was meant to marry my half sister… They’d have been perfect.” Realizing what he’d just said, the boy laughed but didn’t quite recognize the croak that forced its painful way between his teeth.

“So what would this…
son of Lilith
do?”

“With the enemy? Take no prisoners.” Avatar could see it in his head, the way Raf would slide up to the door ahead, all set to kill the lot of them, never putting a foot wrong. Except, of course, Raf was some place unhelpful, trapped in El Iskandryia. A city without…

“Turn off the ship’s lights,” Avatar demanded.

“There’s a problem with that suggestion,” said the Colonel. “I can only override components of the electrical infrastructure in an emergency…”

“This is an emergency,”
Avatar said, putting a space between each word. “Anyway, I thought you ran this ship?”

“Routine tasks only. Engine maintenance and supply systems. Onboard security and oceangoing navigation. The behavioural locks are solid and the parameters tight.” The Colonel’s voice was dry, almost matter-of-fact. “Believe me,” he said, “I looked…”

“The lights,” Avatar said as firmly as his shaking teeth would allow.

“To cut those,” said Colonel Abad, “I’d have to kill the ship’s entire electrical system.”

“Then do it.”

“The entire system…”

“Sure,” Avatar nodded. “I understand.”

The first thing Avatar saw was a tiny dance of light in the far distance, descending from the ceiling in a ragged two-step; slide and stop, slide and stop. A second firefly joined the first, followed by a third, their dance taking them towards the deck.