In the Palace of the Khans (14 page)

“Don't know. I'm going to be sick,” he said, and was, leaning against a tree so that the mess fell further down the slope. He turned, shuddering and chilly, and sat down beside her. The terror seemed to have gone with the vomit, but the anger and the shame were still there, churning. She put her arm round him and drew him close.

“That was awful,” she said again.

Mercifully Taeela hadn't seen any of this, as she had stopped as soon as she was in among the trees to wait for her father. They sat in silence, waiting for the others. Now it dawned on him what his mother had been doing.

“You've hurt your leg!”

“Caught it on the corner of one of those chests while we were getting out from behind them. We got in a bit of a tangle, remember?”

He did now. He remembered how he'd fought clear of her, how she'd muttered with pain, limped to her place at the door of the hide, run so awkwardly along the walkway … He'd felt and heard and seen these things, but not once thought about them, or what had caused them, or anything except his own terror-driven urge to run …

“Ah, here they are at last.”

He scrambled to his feet and, rather than face Taeela, watched her guard help the two men lower the wounded woman to the ground. She seemed to have fainted.

The President rose and turned.

“Mrs Ridgwell, we must … You are hurt?”

“Nothing serious, just a nasty cut,” she said, rising and limping over. “I just need a plaster bigger than what I've got in my bag. It can wait. How is she?”

“Still losing blood, I fear.”

“I'll look, shall I? But I don't think there's much I can do here. It'd be much easier back at the offices, with proper lights and water and everything. What we really need is a stretcher. With her wound where it is it isn't doing her any good, carrying her like that.”

“We will construct one,” he said after a pause, and started giving orders to the guards. One of the women took a hand torch out of a bulging pocket and ran off up the path, the other handed her torch to the President and returned to the start of the walkway, where she waited under the trees, gun held ready, silhouetted against the star-glimmer.

“If you and Nigel would help us look for suitable branches, Ambassador,” said the President.

“Of course. Come on, Niggles. You can drag them back down.”

Nigel jumped at the chance, not just to do something—anything—except drown in shame and terror, but also to get away from Taeela. He fetched out his own torch, and started to follow the three men up through the trees. To his dismay Taeela came scrambling up beside him.

“Oh, Nigel!” she gasped. “I was so scared!”

He halted, turned, and stared at her. Her eyes seemed huge as an owl's in the dim light. Her chest was heaving with the effort of the climb.

“Me too,” he muttered.

“But … But … Oh, Nigel!”

Then, astonishingly, she started to laugh, took a pace towards him, caught her foot on something and lurched forward so that he had to grab her to stop her falling. She flung her arms round him and hugged him, her laughter now on a rising note, almost out of control.

He was fighting the urge to join her in her hysteria when he heard the crackle and squeal of wrenched timber from further up the slope. That steadied him enough to be able to push her away and grab her wrist.

“Come on. We're supposed to be helping. We'll talk later,” he said, and started to drag her up the slope. The effort of the climb loosed the laughter-demon's hold, and by the time they reached the others she was merely panting.

There were two branches ready for them to take, which was easy enough with the slope in their favour. On the way down they met Herr Fettler and Nigel's guard climbing up to help, and at the bottom they found that the guard who had run off towards the Humvees had just returned with one of the drivers, bringing a first-aid kit, plus some tools and cord and stuff.

“I'm sure they've got plenty of people up there now,” said Nigel's mother. “Why don't you stay and help me, Taeela? I could do with someone to hold the torch.”

So Nigel, still bewildered by Taeela's reaction, climbed the slope with the guard and driver and then held a torch for one of the men while he hacked and trimmed. It didn't take long with several workers and the right tools, nor did the job of assembling what they'd collected into a usable stretcher back down by the path.

“What happens now, sir?” said Nigel's father as they watched the process.

“We return to the offices,” said the President. “I must make some immediate telephone calls and Mrs Ridgwell will do what she can for the casualty. The rest of you will eat while you are waiting. Do you have any calls to make, Ambassador? Your mobile won't work from here but I have satellite communication with the palace. If you will give me Mr O'Hara's number I can instruct someone to warn him he may have to accompany the security squadron to Vamar tomorrow. Then you can brief him more fully from the lodge. Is there anyone else?”

“Not immediately, sir. It can wait till we're back at the lodge.”

“Very well. I must apologise to you for our expedition having been so unfortunately interrupted.”

“At least we did see the owls,” said Nigel's mother. “That was wonderful!”

CHAPTER 8

They climbed out of their Humvee in front of the Owl Project office, and watched the guard unload the stretcher from the other one. Nigel's mother and Taeela headed off for the toilet.

“Me too,” said Nigel's father. “Come on, Niggles.”

“I'm all right.”

“Might as well while you can. Come along.”

There was something urgent in his voice. Anxiously Nigel tagged along. The toilets were separate from the other buildings, on the far side of the parking lot. His father slowed to let him catch up.

“Keep your eyes open, Niggles,” he muttered. “We're not out of this yet.”

“Uh?”

“The President's got a problem. He knows there's no way I can't put in a report on what's happened, however much I tone it down.”

Nigel halted in his stride, his mouth opening and closing.

“But … but it was only one guy taking a pot shot at him because he didn't want the dam built, Dad. It wasn't a big deal. I mean … I mean it was an effing big deal for us, worst thing that's ever happened to me, but … but it wasn't like the guy was trying to overthrow the government.”

“As far as we know, Niggles. Even that is bad enough from his point of view. Green issues were big back home at the last election, and the Greens don't want the dam built. They'll make a lot of this—evidence of how strongly the locals think about it, and so on and so forth.

“But there's another possibility. Doesn't it strike you as a bit too opportune that a man should be out there with a rifle and night sights good as that on an evening when, for the first time ever, the President arrived without enough guards to secure the area? What serious hunter tries to shoot game at that sort of range in the dark? What's more, sights that good really cost. And you don't find them in every corner gun-shop. You'd need a couple of days at least to lay it on.”

He sounded much less jumpy now, talking about the danger they'd been in calmly, reasonably, as if it were something in a film they'd seen. It was his way of dealing with it, but it wasn't much help to Nigel.

“B … but that would mean …”

“Exactly. Somebody would have had to have passed the word on almost the moment the accident had happened—effectively as soon as the President had called the palace to tell them. I doubt if they could have done it even then, from scratch.”

“You mean …”

“Either a big criminal organisation, or the military, most likely … Wait. They're coming out. I haven't said anything to Lucy about this yet. Don't want to worry her.”

Nigel waited in the dark, shaking his head. It couldn't be true. It mustn't be true. Somebody in the palace … He barely noticed his mother and Taeela heading back across the parking lot.

His father didn't say anything more about it until they'd started to follow them. Then he broke into a rapid mutter.

“Look, there isn't time to tell you the whole thing. The point is, all this is going to be pretty obvious to anyone back home, no matter how much I tone my report down. If he's going to do anything to stop me it's got to be before I call home. The obvious thing would be for all three of us to have an accident on the way back to the lodge. I don't think it's at all likely—he'd be crazy to try it, but maybe he is a bit crazy deep down inside. Tyrants get like that, in the end.”

“No, Dad! He isn't like that!”

“He is, Niggles. I've read the reports. I've only told you a bit of them.”

“But Taeela would be devastated! She really hit it off with Mum.”

“There's no reason she should know it wasn't an accident if she travels in a different car. I'd say he'd do it if he thought he could get away with it. I really don't think it's at all likely, but to be on the safe side, do your best to travel in the same car as Taeela if you get the chance. OK?”

“I suppose.”

The guards had fetched cool-bags and a hamper from the Humvees and were spreading food and cutlery out on a folding table, and Herr Fettler was fussing around finding stuff for them. The President had disappeared to make his telephone calls. The wounded guard was lying on a mattress on the floor with Nigel's mother kneeling beside her, easing her out of her blood-soaked trousers, and Taeela watching her, helping when she could. Nigel's father was sitting at one of the office desks making notes on a pad, with Nigel alone on the other side of the room, hunched into himself, shuddering and sighing.

Everybody else had found something to do. His eye was caught by a movement in the pool of light round the desk, his father's long-fingered hand combing the blond forelock out of his eyes and then picking up a pencil and writing two or three words and repeating the movement.

Something about the gesture …

Yes that's what it was, a gesture, a signal, to tell everyone, himself included, how deeply he was thinking, how urgent and important his notes were. Nigel knew he wasn't being fair, but he felt resentful. OK, his father had a lot on his mind, specially if he was right about what he'd told Nigel in the car park, but before starting on that couldn't he at least have asked Nigel how he was bearing up, said something to show he understood how utterly shattered he must be? Instead he'd plunged straight in, loading Nigel with a fresh lot of horrors, a whole new nightmare still to come.

The horrors withdrew into the darkness outside as Nigel thought about his father.

You don't think about your parents when you're small. They're just there, filling your life, too big to get your mind round. Slowly you begin to learn what they're like, compared to other people, but you don't judge them. They are what they are.

Until a few weeks ago Nigel would have said that his father had been a pretty good dad when he'd not been busy working or fishing or whatever. He'd taught Nigel how to do things, played games with him, read to him at bed-time if he was free, and so on. Nigel had just taken all that for granted till one weekend last term when he'd been staying with his sister Libby.

He'd been in the kitchen, drying up while she washed, relishing the feel of ordinary family life going on. He'd been missing that since Santiago.

On the spur of the moment he'd said, “Any chance we can all get together for a bit—you and Toby and Tim and Cath and Mum and Dad and me—next time they're home? Seven's a lucky number, you know.”

Libby had sighed and shaken her head.

“Dad and I don't get on,” she'd said. “I thought you knew.”

“I didn't know it was still … I mean, now you're married and you've got a family of your own.”

“Not unless he's changed, and he isn't going to. I'll still be just an add-on to his life, along with Toby and Tim now, not us with lives of our own. And now that he's got this precious ambassadorship … Nothing in the world is going to matter beside that … I'd better stop before I break something … I'm sorry, Bro. Raw spot. Anyway, Mum's lovely. I miss her.”

“So do I. Thanks for telling me. I suppose.”

He hadn't taken it all that seriously, then. Libby was just like that. But now he found himself seeing his father through her eyes.

Looking back, it struck him that his father had always chosen the games they'd played and read him the books that he himself had liked as a kid. He'd taught Nigel chess in Santiago, but really he just knew the rules and a few very simple things. Then he'd made the mistake of giving Nigel a book about the game, and Nigel had started beating him. He hadn't wanted to play after that. He didn't have time to read the book.

And of course Nigel had his father's own stupid name. It was difficult for him to be fair about that because he hated it so much, hated it almost as much as the baby name his father still insisted on calling him by. The same with the family likeness. If you looked in old albums at pictures of the two of them at the same age you couldn't tell them apart. The real difference was in what they thought about it. Nigel's father liked the way he looked. It had never before struck Nigel as odd that there should have been a mirror just inside the living room door of any house they'd lived in. Now he realised why.

So was it a good sign that Nigel hated the way he looked as much as he hated his name? Did it mean that in his heart of hearts he didn't want to be like his father, inside as well as outside? Like in the way they both hated rows, tried not to get involved, to keep their cool, to deal with anything like that just in their heads? He could dye his hair, of course, and dress like a slob, and change his name when he was old enough. That wasn't important, any of it. The real question was could he change the way he thought? And felt?