Florence of Arabia (29 page)

"Well, sum-bitch. Goddammit."

" Mukfeleen
?'

He handed Florence
the glasses. "See that heavyset
guy
in front with the mustache? His name is Anbar Tal. H
e's a captain in the Royal
Matar
Air force Security Serv
ice. I recruited him."

"He's
...
CIA?"

"Last I
checked."

"Why is he approaching our house with all those men and pistols?"

Bobby peered through his binoculars. "The body language somehow isn't convevin' to me
We're here
to
help"

H
e slipped the car into reverse and slowl
y began t
o back away.

Florence looked in the rearview mirror and saw the men in black and blue
thobes
approaching their car from behind. Bobby instinctively floored the accelerator.

There were two loud
thumps
from behind, and then the men in
thobes
were on the trunk of the car, and not happy about it. In the next instant, they were on the hood, and even less happy. Then they were
on the ground in front of the c
ar, limp and beyond caring one way or the other.

The car was now speeding backward at thirty miles per hour. Ahead, in the receding distance. Florence saw the five
mu
ks.
led by Anbar Tal,
running toward them, aiming their pistols. It took a second for Florence's overworked brain to process that this stance was preliminary to worse developments. She processed this critical insight a quarter second before the first bullet smashed through the windshield, leaving her
ab
aaya
coated in safety-glass crumbs. Crouching in her seat, she heard more vitreous explosions, accompanied by obscene mutterings from the driver's seat. Then there were even louder explosions, which after a moment she realized came from nearby. Bobby was driving backward and firing out the window with his left hand.

"Could use some help," he said.

Florence had fired a gun only once, many years ago. during her brief State Department training course. Though she had gripped a pistol many times in the previous weeks, it now felt strange and unwelcome in her hand as she flipped the safety off and aimed out the window. She shut her eyes and fired.

There was a loud metal
thu
nk.
followed by an explosive hissing and a vertical jet of steam. She had shot through the hood of their car and punctured the radiator.

Bobby swung the wheel hard over and yanked the hand brake, turning the car 180 degrees, then shifted into drive and floored it. The problem was that an internal combustion engine, however expertly engineered by the finest automotive minds in
Germany, is not designed to run,
either efficiently or for long, once penetrated by nine-millimeter rounds. Steam hissed from the hood like water spewing from the spout-hole of an angry whale.

"You all right? Flo? You
hurt?"

"I'm okay. Oh, shit, Bobby, I shot the car."

"Listen up. I'm gonna turn t
hat corner. I'm going to stop. I
want you to get out. Okay? Now, listen to me: There's a ma
n who works at the live-chicken souk
.
H
e's got a booth, the name on it is Zam
Zam Best Chickens. Got that? His name is Azool bin-H
alaam. He's worked for me. He's independent.
N
o
one knows about him, not CIA, not Uncle Sam, not the Frogs, no one. He can get you on the ferry to— Shit, come on, you, sum-bitchbastard!" Bobby was pounding the dashboard in the obscure hope that the engineers had installed a sensor there that, when pounded violently, would instruct the car's computer to ignore the fact that a nine-millimeter bullet had been fired through the engine's cooling system. Alas, the engineers had overlooked this feature. "I'm not going to leave you here," Florence said.

"Shut up and listen. You tell Az
ool you're a friend of Cyrus from Cyprus. Got that? Cyrus from Cyprus. He'll get you out of the country on the ferry to Pangibat. Got that? ZamZam. Azool. Cyrus from Cyprus. Have you got that?"

They'd turned the corner. Bobby pulled the cranking car over and stopped. The street was blessedly teeming with pedestrians, some of whom paused to stare at the strange sight, a hissing Mercedes.

"Go, Flo. Please
. Don't make me beg. girl, I'm t
oo old."

She opened the door to get out, then closed it. She took her pistol and turned around and aimed through the rear window. "Just drive."

"Goddammit, woman."

"Just drive."

Spewing cusswords, Bobby stepped on t
he accelerator. A violent, bron
chitic
hissss
issued from the
hole in the hood as the last of t
he coolant evaporated. The car moved forward without conviction.

Looking back, Florence saw a dark sedan round the corner fast. Pedestrians bolted out of the way.

She braced the gun in both hand
s and kept her eyes open. The fir
st shot shattered the glass of their own rear window, providing a clear field of fire. She aimed again and methodically emptied the magazine of eight rounds into the windshield of the pursuing vehicle. The car veered from side to side and then went off the road and onto the sidewalk and into the plate-glass window of a pastry shop.

"Better." Bobby muttered.

Florence ejected the spent clip and rummaged in her satchel for a fresh one.

Bobby turned off down a narrow street. The hissing had stopped. The temperature-gauge needle was hard over into the red, indicating meltdown. This and a loud knocking sound a
ugured the necessity, sooner rat
her than later, of alternative transportation.

Bobby
braked. They opened the doors and got out. A car similar to the one Florence had dispatched turned the corner. It accelerated toward them. Florence saw pistols aimed at them from the windows on both sides.

Bobby opened f
ire. A hole appeared in the windshield in front of the car's driver, another in front of the passenger. The car veered sharply lo the right, into a lamppost, in the process shea
ring off
an arm that had been aiming a pistol.

Florence gasped. Bobby
came around and pulled her lo her feet. They ran down alleys until Bobby, breathing hard, finally announced, "Okay, walk, just walk."

They walked, another Matari couple taking a leisurely stroll after shooting dead a half-dozen men.

The streets around them screamed with sirens. From above, they could hear the urgent whoosh and roar of rotor blades.

Bobby whispered to her. "Y'ever fainted?"

"No."

"Start."

"What?"

"Just
faint,
would you?"

Florence collapsed to the pavement as best she could without breaking a kneecap. Why. she had no idea. She closed her
eyes.

She heard a male voice speaking Arabic, asking what was wrong.

"She is pregnant," Bobby said with perfect lack of sympathy or tenderne
ss and exactly the right tone of annoy
ance.

"She shouldn't be outside in that condition." the man said.

"Don't I k
now it? Twelve times I told her,
and a thirteenth, but she insists. She thinks exercise will give her a male child."

"God
will
that
it
be. Is she all right?"

"I
think her time has come. We must have an ambulance."

Florence thought.
Clever b
oy.

"I will call you one."

"Allah favors the compassionate. Thank vou. brother."

While the man spoke into his cell phone, Bobby leaned down and whispered, "Now, why didn't 1 think of that?"

Matar
had good infrastructure and civil services. The ambulance arrived within minutes. Florence had maneuvered her satchel underneath her
abaaya
so that her outline was appropriately gravid. The two attendants loaded her o
nto a gurney and into the ambulance. Bobby
jumped in after her.

"Which hospital?" he asked an attendant.

'Churchill—I mean king Bisma. Thev changed the name."

"You better hurry unless you want to deliver the child right here." As the attendant went about rolling up the folds of Florence's
abaaya
in order to fasten the blood-pressure cuff, Bobby brought the pistol butt down on the back of his head. Then he reached through the doorway and pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the driver's neck and pulled back the hammer for that extra note of emphasis and said, "If you want to live, drive to the airport. If you'd rather die. I will drive."

The man emitted a squeak and began to beg for his life. "Relax. Do as I say, and everything will be well."

The man
continued to babble and wail, h
e had seven childr
en. He was the sole support. H
e had missed prayers that morning. If he died now, he would not see paradise.

Florence stripped the unco
nscious ambulance attendant of h
is uniform vest, then bound his hands and mouth with adhesive tape, which ambulances have in copious supply.

Bobby told the driver. "Slow down and turn off the siren."

The driver obeyed, still blubbering. Bobby handed him the radio handset.

"Tell the dispatcher to put you through to
Matar
Air Medical Service at the airport. Tell him only that." He pressed the muzzle into the man's neck. "I speak Arabic."

The driver did as asked. A voice came on. Bobby took the handset from the driver.

"This is Dr. Mansour bin-H
alibib, personal physician to
Fetish
al-Zir, assistant to the imam Maliq, blessings be upon his name. To whom do I speak?"

The voice came back
crisp and subordinate. "Saif al-Utabi, Excellency, at y
our service."

"Very well. We require an immediate medical evacuation. One of the imam's wives has sustained a brain injury. We are en route to you. Weil need your fastest aircraft, with fuel for Cairo."

"But I've received no authorization. Excellency—"

"I
am authorizing it"

"But Excellency—"

"If the imam'
s wife dies in this ambulance, I
will tell him that it was because I was distracted by
unnecessary
questions!
"

One advantage of totalitarianism: The lower down the food chain, the higher they jump.

"We will
make reach' for you." Saif al-Ut
abi said.

"We will be there in fifteen minutes. Inform the security personnel at the gate to admit us
without delay." "Yes, Excellency
."

The ambulance driver looked at Bobbv, goggle-eyed with fear.

The road to the
airport went through mostly empty desert. Bobby
put on the unconscious attendant's uniform vest. He instructed the driver to pull off on the far side of a billboard advertising the pleasures of Infidel Land:
M
ukfellecn
censors had painted over the offending text. Florence held the gun on the driver while Bobby dragged the oth
er man out of the ambulance and
laid him behind the base of the billboard.

Back inside, he gave the driver instructions, com eying, as gently as possible under the circumstances, that if he did not follow them precisely, he would be meeting Allah sooner than expected, prepared or not.

Flo
rence listened and said to Bobby
in French, a language she guessed the driver did not comprehend, "They do have an air force. They'll shoot us down."

"I'm wide open to suggestions."

"What about the embassy? They have to take us in there."

Bobby snorted. "Oh yeah, they'd be just tickled to have us. Even if the marines didn't shoot us down, even if we did make it through the gates, then what? Spend t
he rest of our lives living in the basement being frowned at by
embassy pukes? No. thanks. Right now a jet with medical markings sounds pretty good to me." Florence had to agree.

They were approaching the airport. Florence rigged herself up with every medical device in the ambulance—respirator tube, blood-pressure cuff, IV tubes. CoolPak pressure bandages—and lay back on the gurney in a passing imitation of an imam's wife with a serious head injury. Bobby took his seat in the front, reminding the whimpering driver that he had a pistol in his vest pocket. Bobby reached forward and flicked on the siren and lights, lighting u
p the desert around them in red,
white and blue strobes.