Blood Rules (26 page)

“Some of your best friends,” Hakkim was saying in a voice heavy with irony, “are Israelis.”

“Yes,” Celestine acknowledged, after a pause. “I know one or two.”

In the silence that followed she tried to work out the best thing to do. Azizza was warning her that the coffee contained a drug; goodness knows how she’d found out, perhaps she’d seen him do this before, with a girl. A boy, more likely. So the whole thing was a setup.

Why?

If he was truly Feisal’s man, all he had to do was trail Azizza at a distance and report back as soon as he saw her enter the house. But if he’d already reported to Feisal before bringing the wine and drugged coffee, why hadn’t Feisal come to pick her up yet?

One thing she
did
believe: if he’d been telling the truth about this man Sharett, then once the Israelis knew it they would move heaven, hell, and earth as well to get their agent out. They would storm the plane. They would kill the terrorists. Kill her own granddaughter, perhaps kill Robbie too. But unless somebody did something she would never see Robbie again, because his mother would steal him away.

A terrible thought struck her. “Chafiq,” she gasped, “does Leila realize who this man Sharett is?”

“I don’t know.”

What would she do if she knew?
What would she do?

“I’ll need to take the photo,” Celestine said with the brisk manner of one who decides. “And the copy of Sharett’s passport.”

“Impossible. They have to be back in Feisal’s office by this evening.”

Hakkim was terrified. He might, just, be telling some small part of the truth. If his story was true and she could convince the Israelis of that, she could get him off the hook, because the vital information would have come from him.

If. Might. Could. Perhaps. Maybe.

She would have to take the photo and the passport copy. Without them, no chance. But he would never relinquish them voluntarily.

“Chafiq,” she said wearily, “my head is going round and round. Can I have some of that coffee, please?”

D
R. DELAHAYE
sat back on his haunches and shook his head. “Getting worse,” he murmured. “Do you know when he last injected insulin?”

“Sorry, no.” Colin was sitting in the window seat; Robbie had the aisle. Tim Campbell lay between them, breathing in rapid pants, his eyes shut. Colin cradled Tim’s head against his chest. “Will he die?” he added quietly.

The doctor nodded. “Unless we can get him to the hospital soon and fix him up with a potassium drip. Normally I wouldn’t worry too much about a young chap like this, but thirst’s even more of a problem for him than the rest of us, and he seems like a high-anxiety type. He’s already severely acidotic, I’d guess … look at that rapid breathing.”

There was nothing more Dr. Delahaye could do for Tim, so he went back to his own seat, several rows behind. Colin gently propped Tim’s head against the seat and stood upright. Selim saw. He motioned with his hand for Colin to sit down again.

“I want to talk to you,” Colin said clearly.

Selim stiffened, but he came down the aisle. Colin stared into his eyes. “Do you wish to be responsible for the death of an innocent kid?” he said, more quietly.

When Selim made no reply, Colin continued, in the same even, almost monotonous voice, “Is this what the Koran teaches? Please tell me, I would like to be advised. Is there glory in heaven for acts such as these? I wish carefully to understand your religion, so that I may respect it and learn from it.”

Selim bent down low, leaning across Robbie and Tim Campbell. “Do not defile what you can never understand,” he breathed. “What is it you want?”

Colin reached out to place a hand on Tim Campbell’s inert wrist.

“This boy is diabetic.” He did not raise his voice, or cringe, or soften, or change his manner in the slightest respect. “This boy ran out of insulin some time ago. He is in a coma, from which he will not recover unless he receives medical care promptly. He will die. The world will know that he died, and why. They may not understand the Koran, they may be deaf to the word of Allah, but this at least the world will understand.”

Robbie was continually wiping the sweat from Tim’s pale face. Now he looked up at Selim and said, “I want to see my mother. Please.”

“Be quiet.”

“I know you do what she wants, sometimes. I know she can help. She promised she would help. Speak to her, or let me.”

While Selim’s gaze floated between the three of them, Colin went through the calculations again, testing each link, fighting down the dread. He could save Tim Campbell’s life. The strategy was simple, also very dangerous.

He’d go to Leila and say that unless she allowed the sick boy to go out on the helicopter, he would tell Robbie of his mother’s true role. Somehow he had to find a way of communicating this threat to Leila and then prevent her from having him quietly killed before he could carry it out. Colin believed that she would not kill him because the risk of Robbie’s discovering who had given the order was too great. But she would undoubtedly separate them. Up to now she had left them together, calculating that this way there was at least a chance that Colin might persuade Robbie to leave quietly with his mother. Once he threatened to tell Robbie the truth, however, she would realize that her tactic had failed and move the boy. Then Colin wouldn’t be able to talk to his son. He might never see him again.

So how could he put pressure on Leila without cutting his own throat?

What if she called his bluff and he was forced to tell Robbie that his mother was a terrorist? Suppose Robbie said he didn’t care, that she was his mother and he loved her? Why in Christ’s name hadn’t he told the boy the truth earlier, when there wasn’t all this pressure?

Colin clenched his fists. Selim still stood there, seemingly undecided. Such lack of resolution was unusual in him. A break in the pattern. Good.

“Listen to my son,” he choked out. “There is a lady in first class. Consult her.”

Selim stood upright. He turned to the back of the cabin, where another of the five gunmen stood guard, and uttered a few words of Arabic. The second man nodded.

“Wait there,” Selim muttered. “I’ve given orders that the two of you are to be specially watched. You could bring down a lot of death here. Think about that.” Now he was talking to Colin. “You personally are safe, for the moment. You know why: you have a job to do.” His gaze skated sideways to Robbie. “A lesson to teach. And you detest the thought of
innocent
lives being lost.”

He stalked away. Colin noticed that his shoulders seemed hunched. Was it an illusion, brought on by fatigue? No. Selim was tiring.

Colin turned to look out the window. It was nearly dark. The desert floor stretched away to the black foothills, sterile and empty. Nothing moved. He felt himself familiar with every stone, every grain of sand, every spike in the distant, dark horizon. Mars must look like this. The sun was setting, thank God! During the day-time, its fierce light was mitigated by the Perspex windows, specially designed for high-altitude flying in thin atmosphere where ultraviolet light would otherwise scorch and destroy living tissue, but it was nowhere near strong enough to protect the passengers from the furnace that roared silently outside. Even nightfall brought little relief from that. Colin tried to sit perfectly still and control his breathing, tried to forget the thirst that constricted his throat.

When Tim’s head lurched against his shoulder, Colin at first thought it another symptom of his deepening illness, so he concentrated all his attention on the boy. Then, seeing his pallid face unmoving, he looked up to realize, in panic, that Robbie had risen. Colin’s brain worked slowly. Of course, his son wanted to stand up so he’d pushed Tim onto his father…. Why was Robbie in the aisle when Selim had expressly ordered them to stay put?

“Sit down!” he cried, but Robbie was running.

The guard at the back of the cabin shouted. People started to scream. Robbie yelled something, his words lost in the hubbub. When the gunman fired a single round through the ceiling, the noise echoed like thunder presaging the Last Days and the screams rose to hysterical pitch; other passengers were standing up now, convinced that this was the start of the massacre, each man for himself. A woman catapulted from her seat into Robbie’s path, but the boy thrust her aside, racing on toward the curtain at the front of the cabin, behind which, he knew, was his mother.

Colin stood up. He cared nothing for the melée developing ahead of him. Alone among the terrified passengers, he turned to the back of the plane. The gunman was down on one knee, aiming along the aisle. By now there were so many people between him and Robbie that his chances of hitting the boy were nonexistent. It didn’t matter. Colin knew he was going to fire.

He gripped the seat backs on either side of him and vaulted over Tim’s motionless body. “Sit down!” he shouted. “For God’s sake—
sit down!”

Nobody paid him any attention. Colin found himself looking down the aisle into the muzzle of the M3A1 twenty feet away, less. He took a step forward. The barrel jerked up. Now he was the target.

The world came to a stop. His last seconds upon this earth. Would it hurt? he wondered. And then: Please let his aim be accurate, I don’t want to lie here wounded, don’t let him shoot me in the stomach, it takes an age to die and the agony is beyond description….

He spoke his last words.

“Shoot me.”

The gunman could not hear him. His mouth extended into what might have been a smile or an expression of concentration, and Colin braced himself. And at that moment, silence overwhelmed the plane, a silence so unexpected, so complete, it was an almost audible thing.

Colin heard himself say again, “Shoot
me.”

People were staring at him as if he’d gone mad. Slowly, one by one, they sat down. Colin’s head pounded with a deadening kind of ache, as if somebody were knotting and twisting whatever vessels and muscles and veins lay behind his eyes. He could still see the gunman, nobody else, just the hijacker at the end of the cabin, but he could not feel his legs or his arms or any part of himself except his heart, which was threatening an all-out strike. His eyes floated in the cabin, disembodied but functional. He was alive, when he knew he couldn’t be.

“Shoot me.” He understood.
Lord God of hosts, let me stand in for Isaac. Shoot me, not my son. Shoot me.

His head began to clear itself of congealed blood. He wheeled around toward the front of the plane. The aisle was empty. Nothing, no one, now separated him from Robbie, who stood facing him at the point where economy gave way to business class. Beyond the bulkhead, Colin could just see Selim. But that was not what held his attention. Behind Robbie, with one hand resting on his shoulder, stood Leila.

Mother and son stared down the aisle at Colin. The expression in their eyes was the same: curiosity and wonder. His son and ex-wife both understood this moment. They had explored it with him, as hypothesis, times without number. What would you do? they had always wanted to know: How would you react, if it was your turn to make the choice of him-or-you?

Now they knew. Robbie was smiling, grinning, crying, all at once. Leila, too, was smiling, though hers was the bitter smile that acknowledges error to the inner self. A loser’s smile.

The plane stayed absolutely silent. Row upon row of passengers gazed at the woman with her hand on the boy’s shoulder, not understanding what it was they witnessed. But they seemed to know that if they waited, the truth would out. Seconds ticked by, weaving themselves into one minute … two.

“She’s my mother,” Robbie suddenly exclaimed; and the hand tightened on his shoulder until its knuckles were white. “This is my mother.” He swallowed hard, choking back tears. “She’s going to ask them if my friend Tim can go home. Because … because, you see, he’s very sick.”

He spoke the last word in a dying fall, as if conscious that he’d said either too much or not enough. He tried to twist around to look at Leila, but her grip on his shoulder stiffened, making him stare at her hand instead. His smile faded. Colin watched his son’s confidence drain away with the abruptness of the last grains of sand disappearing down the neck of a timer.

When Leila addressed herself in Arabic to the hijacker at the rear of the cabin Colin knew she was admonishing the man for having panicked and aimed at Robbie. He wheeled around. Her henchman stood there without any discernible expression on his face. Not by the merest flicker of a muscle did he betray his true relationship with this woman. Colin knew that she had chosen her words with the utmost care, so that even if any of these passengers understood Arabic they would still not divine the truth.

Now Leila turned to Selim and her face broke into a delightful smile. She spoke to him in a low voice, wheedling, promising, understanding. After a while he nodded, a trifle impatiently, perhaps: he would agree to almost anything as long as it meant the end of this prattle; that was the message his face conveyed. When he spoke a few clipped sentences, Leila translated.

“He says the sick boy may leave next time the helicopter comes. But no one else may leave.”

For a moment the deadly silence continued. Then, with complete suddenness, the passengers began to clap. Colin had never heard anything like it: you could not single out the pair of hands that began it, for all of them came together at once. They were cheering. Some lifted their hands above their heads to applaud, as if a great diva had come among them. And throughout it all Leila continued to stand there with one hand on Robbie’s shoulder, blushing a little, a tight, embarrassed smile on her face, while Robbie let the tears course down his cheeks, tears of gratitude, tears of pride that his mother should be the one who set Tim free.

She gave him a little push. Robbie ran down the aisle to fling himself into his father’s arms. Colin buried his face in the boy’s neck, unable to speak. When he raised his head again, the curtain at the far end of the aisle once again sealed off the cabin.

“Oh, Dad…. ”

While Robbie was still trying to find words, a new sound added itself to the commotion around them: helicopter rotors.

“Come on, son. Better get Tim up front.”

Selim materialized beside them. He got everyone back into their seats—everyone, that is, except Colin and Robbie, who were ordered to carry Tim to the forward door. Father and son gently brought the unconscious boy to the inflatable safety ramp and prepared to slide him down it.

“Get well!” Robbie said. Suddenly he bent forward to squeeze Tim’s hand. “Ultimate experience, man!” he cried, as the boy’s inert body went slowly down to the ground.

Robbie continued to watch while men from the chopper carried Tim away, but to Colin, eyeing his son’s profile, the humid, hot evening was redolent of other memories, other times. Before, in Beirut, that terrible summer, he had learned only that he was prepared to sacrifice others in order to save Robbie. He knew now that he could even sacrifice himself if he had to.

The helicopter rose into the air, hovered there a moment, and turned east for the sea. Robbie threw up his arms in a dramatic wave of farewell.

“Thirty-sixth level of experience!” he cried. “You’re a Dungeon Master now, man. You are.” His voice sank to a whisper, his arms fell to his sides. “You are…. ”

To Colin, watching his son’s face crumple, that summer of 1974 suddenly seemed like yesterday.