Arabesk (9 page)

ZeeZee believed he was not guilty, except all the evidence said he was.
Ergo,
to use his lawyer’s phrase, he was innocent through insanity. Except that ZeeZee knew the lawyer realized that wasn’t how it went. ZeeZee might not be guilty but he wasn’t insane. Insanity would involve naming Hu San.

“Hey!” ZeeZee nodded at a black pick-up only inches from the front of Clem’s Lincoln. “What gives?”

“Asshole won’t pull over.”

“Look,” said ZeeZee, drawing his knees up into the brace position. “We’re in the slow lane, Chief. Where’s he going to move?”

“That’s not my problem,” Clem announced, but he edged back slightly. And just as ZeeZee was about to sigh with relief, Clem hit the gas again, lurching the Lincoln straight into the back of the pick-up. Metal shrieked and locked, and then the Lincoln twisted sideways, did half a revolution and came to a halt on the hard shoulder fifty yards later. Fifty yards in which ZeeZee sat in the passenger seat aware he was going down the interstate, backwards…

Very sensibly, the pick-up truck kept going, dragging the ripped-off remains of a Lincoln’s bumper behind it in a flashy display of sparks.

“Jesus,” said ZeeZee when he could say anything at all. “You trying to kill me?”

“No,” said Clem. “Nothing that simple.” He fished in the car’s glove compartment and came out with a matt black Para Ordnance .45—the 15-round, police-issue model.

ZeeZee didn’t register the make, finish or calibre. He was too busy looking at the void of its muzzle, which pointed straight at his head.

“This is where you escape,” announced Clem. “And over there’s where you run, towards that nice big sign saying Flight Departures.”

“And just about here’s where you shoot me in the back,” said ZeeZee, nodding to a spot ten paces from the car.

“No,” Clem shook his head as he leaned across and shoved open ZeeZee’s door. “I’m retiring and you’re my pension plan.” Reaching under his seat, Clem yanked out a briefcase. “The combination’s your DOB.” He grinned sourly. “I don’t want to know what’s in here. Just make sure you open it well away from my car…”

“Who’s paying you?”

Clem didn’t know, but he had no intention of admitting that to ZeeZee.

“Tell me,” ZeeZee insisted. What with remand, taking the plea and developing his designer mad-fuck persona, he’d put a lot of effort into staying alive.

Clem pulled back the slide on the Para Ordnance.

Stay
and get shot, run and ditto. It had been
a
day full of shit choices. But what really scared ZeeZee was that the whole wired-out scenario had Wild Boy stamped all over it and ZeeZee didn’t trust Hu San’s deputy. The Boss—now, she’d have done it differently, smoothly.

“I’m not going unless you tell me,” ZeeZee said, slamming shut his door. No one tried to escape from Huntsville because no one could afford to. A bond was posted prior to arrival. Any attempt to escape automatically forfeited the bond, which was a multiple of the number of years in the sentence times a sliding scale according to the severity of the crime and the perp’s previous… Killing a police informant—ZeeZee didn’t even want to
think
what his bond would have been set at.

Unless it really was Hu San organizing this, busting out of Huntsville was just a quick way to commit suicide. Marginally less dramatic than standing up in court to name the woman. But
only
marginally…

“Your choice,” said Clem, raising the automatic. He was smiling.

The briefcase was retro Alessi, with a numerical lock and little purple LCDs that glowed through black glass: Fooler loops were built into its sides and the handle housed a semi-AI whose sole job was to inform airport scanners that the contents were covered by diplomatic protocol.

Holding his breath, ZeeZee started counting to ten in his head and lifted the lid. He reached seventeen before he realized he could stop now. His initial haul from the case was a plane ticket, a white passport and a strip of photos from one of those Kodak booths found at stations. The smiling girl in the shots was young, dark-skinned, middle Eastern. Four different poses, but each frame showed the same wide-eyed teenager.

ZeeZee flicked open the ticket and scanned the details. All the real data was encoded in a strip running along the outer edge of the front cover: the printout inside was just a reminder. It was made out to
Ashraf al-Mansur,
OA-273 flight to Cairo, with a connecting flight to El Iskandryia, taking off—

In about fifteen minutes, according to ZeeZee’s watch. He checked the passport and blinked as his own face stared up at him, only shaved and without the dreadlocks, surrounded by a sea of unreadable foreign type. That the photograph had him wearing a suit and tie he’d never seen before was weird, but what really weirded him out was the simple English phrase across the top of each page.

Everyone had heard of
diplomatic immunity.

In a small pocket in the lining of the lid was a platinum HKS, with a holo of his face on the reverse, stamped over with a mesh of laser thread. Finding the card was enough to make ZeeZee ransack every slot, pocket and zipped compartment in the case but he discovered nothing else, except a crumpled Mexican quality-control slip and a torn sachet of silica gel.

The check-in desk for the flight had already closed but ZeeZee stared round in such obvious distress that a girl two desks down trotted off to get an Ottoman Airways official.

“I’m on flight OA-273.”

“I’m sorry, sir, your gate’s closed.”

“But I have…”

“It shut twenty minutes ago.”

Mutely, ZeeZee thrust his ticket at the American woman who took it with a frown, as if actually touching the thing might commit her to something. She flicked back the cover to glance at the counterfoil, then looked at ZeeZee: taking in the blond biker beard and beeswaxed dreadlocks, the pale blue Huntsville jumpsuit and tatty trainers.

“Something wrong?” ZeeZee had trouble keeping anxiety out of his voice.

Yes, there was, but not in the way he meant. Counterfoils were discreetly colour-coded for priority, to avoid bouncing the wrong people off over-booked flights. The scale ran green up though red. ZeeZee’s ticket was coded gold.

“Can I see your passport, please, sir?” Her face was white with hostility.

She didn’t even bother to take the small booklet ZeeZee tried to hand over. Instead, she made sure her fingers didn’t touch his as she handed ZeeZee back his ticket.

“I’ll see what we can do about stopping the plane.”

He was waved through Security, which was probably just as well. And then a black kid with three gold nose rings hurled ZeeZee through the crowds filling Departures, horn beeping as ZeeZee gripped tight to a rail that ran around the back seat of the little electric buggy.

“Man, I love that,” announced the kid as he slammed to a halt.

“Some ride,” agreed ZeeZee, clambering off.

“Yeah.” The driver did as near to a skid turn as he could manage with an electric cart on the carpeted floor of an embarkation tunnel. “A rock god in a hurry. It’s the only thing makes my life worth living.”

Once aboard the Alle Volante, ZeeZee was shown to his cabin. A tiny cubicle with a shower stall, chair and the kind of double bed that might just fit two people if both were fashionably thin and intended to spend most of the flight on top of each other. For one person it was ideal.

The catalogue of duty-free goods was the same as it ever was—full of overpriced and ugly items that probably seemed a good idea at the time. ZeeZee skimmed through a dozen screens, adding to his basket a shirt, combats, new shoes, a silver Omega, a black G-Shock and hair clippers, along with a choice of complimentary medical kit that came free because he’d racked up more than $2500. He chose number three, which claimed it was for essential in tropical emergencies and came with malaria patches, surgical glue, unbreakable condoms and a generalized snake-venom antidote.

When the screen asked for payment ZeeZee fed it the number on his new card and in reply got a smiling cartoon valet who assured him all the goods would be delivered within five minutes.

Halfway across the Atlantic, ZeeZee turned up the screen again and found a local Seattle newsfeed. Any reference to his own escape had been relegated to non-news by the murder in Kabul of the mujahadeen general Sheikh el-Halana.

ZeeZee knew all about Sheikh el-Halana: the whole world knew. Two weeks back, fundamentalists had bombed the Ottoman consulate in Seattle, killing thirty-five and destroying the consulate, its computers, its listening centre and most of its records. The FBI had spent twelve days saying nothing, then announced there was little likelihood of getting enough evidence to convict. And now, two days after that announcement, the man widely suspected of being behind the bombing was dead.

Somewhere on the outer edges of ZeeZee’s tired brain a plan began to gel. Reaching for the complimentary in-flight notebook, he scrawled seven words on the first page, crossed one word out, added another two and circled them all individually before joining them together with a rapid flurry of lines. His next identity now had a little flesh on its bones.

3rd July

When Ali-Din was bored he peed on the tiles. Hani
didn’t have that option. She wasn’t even allowed to visit the lavatory when Aunt Nafisa had company. She wasn’t allowed books and she certainly wasn’t allowed her Nintendo gamepad.

Wiping up Ali-Din’s puddle with her shawl, Hani screwed the sodden cloth into a bundle and stuffed it under her chair for Khartoum to find. Hani was bored, too, and lunch hadn’t even started. To make things worse, it looked as if lunch might not start for ages. Ashraf was late and everyone was pretending they didn’t mind.

Well, she
did
mind, she minded a lot… Aunt Nafisa had forced her into a dress and kept at the knots in her hair until Hani’s scalp hurt.

The woman Ashraf was going to marry didn’t look that happy, either. She was prettier than Hani had expected—dark, though, with black hair cut so short it probably didn’t need to be brushed at all. She wasn’t wearing a proper dress, either…just a long scarlet coat with baggy trousers underneath. There were three holes in one of her ears but no earrings in any of the holes.

Zara caught Hani staring and forced a smile. Instantly the child snatched away her glance, then looked back. When Hani married it was going to be to a pasha, rich and handsome, Aunt Nafisa had promised. Ashraf was a bey, which was almost as good, but he looked weird. Aunt Nafisa said that was because he’d been doing secret work for the government. And no, Hani wasn’t allowed to ask him about it.

Everyone in the
qaa
was sitting on silver chairs, except for the big man leaning against a pillar. Probably he was worried he might break his if he sat on it. The chairs were classically French, made a hundred and fifty years earlier when Third Empire was what families like theirs had wanted, so Aunt Nafisa had told her.

But instead of the cabinet maker covering each chair-back with walnut veneer, he’d finished the entire frame—legs, back and sides—with a tissue-like sheet of beaten silver. And the matching chest of drawers, divan and semi-circular occasional tables had their own share of similar ornamentation. All of the madersa furniture on display in the public rooms was
haute
Third Empire, refracted through Ottoman eyes. It looked ugly to Hani but she’d learnt to keep that opinion to herself; although she suspected her aunt agreed.

“Sorry…” Steps rang on the marble stairs leading up to the
qaa
and Hani forgot furniture at the same moment as she stopped being bored.

“Ashraf!” Lady Nafisa’s voice hovered between fury and thinly disguised relief that he’d shown at all. Smoke had been twisting up from the kitchens for at least an hour. And while Nafisa’s cook Donna might have been spit-roasting a goat over an open fire of juniper twigs, Hani’s money was on something in an oven beginning to burn.

“I’m sorry,” said Raf, looking round the
qaa.
“I was at my office,”

“On a
Saturday!”
Hani snorted, not bothering to disguise the disbelief in her voice. Even she could lie better than that.

“He went to his office.”
She hooked Ali-Din up onto her lap and rubbed her nose in his fur, ignoring her aunt’s scowl. It said something about how determined Aunt Nafisa was that things should go smoothly that she didn’t immediately order Hani to take the puppy outside.

“Yes,” said Raf. “And then I walked home.”

“Doesn’t look far on a map,” growled a voice he knew. “Rather different against the crowds.” Hamzah Effendi left his place at the balustrade, wrung Raf’s hand heartily and retreated back to his pillar.

“Lady N doesn’t like it,” he said, waving a fat cigar. “Nor does my wife. Don’t blame you going to the office. Probably the only place you can get some peace. Still,” he said, “you’re here now and that’s what counts.” Dropping his cigar to the floor, Hamzah ground the butt under heel.

Lady Nafisa tried not to wince.

“My nephew, Pashazade al-Mansur, Ashraf Bey,” she said to a short thickset woman loaded down with more gold than the federal reserve. “His father is the Emir of Tunis.” Lady Nafisa sounded as if she was selling a horse at auction.

“Ashraf, this is Madame Rahina…” It was obvious from the shock on the fat woman’s face that her husband hadn’t warned her about Raf’s beard or dreadlocks.

“…And you know Dr Hamzah Quitrimala Effendi, who owns HZ Oil…”

“Bloody hard work,” said Hamzah, tapping a fresh cigar from a leather case that looked like it should contain shotgun shells. “Pity you took that job at the Third Circle. Could have done with a good man on board. God knows, Kamil’s never going to be up to—”

Both Lady Nafisa and Hamzah’s wife suddenly found something else to talk about, so Raf never heard who Kamil was or what he wasn’t up to. But from the frown on the face of Federal Reserve and the quarrelsome expression of Hamzah Effendi himself, Raf guessed that, whoever he was, they argued about him a lot.