In the Palace of the Khans (3 page)

At last the President looked down at his victim, knelt beside it on one knee and gently eased something out from under the coarse mane. He rose and held it up. The camera closed right in. It was some kind of small dart.

(Oh, of course! Nigel kicked himself now for not having got it.)

Cut to a night scene. The same wintry hillside, but with a dozen good fires blazing. Villagers feasting around them. The President and four other men eating more formally, with chairs and a folding table. In the foreground, the drugged ibex. As the camera watched it raised its head, stared, started awkwardly to its feet and staggered away into the dark.

The villagers were all on their feet too, shouting and cheering. One of the men at the table clapped his hands for silence. An older man, clearly one of the villagers, made a short speech and raised his goblet to the President. With silent shouts of applause the feasters drank to their Khan, who answered with a rather longer speech, waited for the applause and held up his hand.

Solemnly he picked up a small object from the table, presented it to the man who had just spoken and kissed him on both cheeks. They were standing there face to face, with the firelight dancing across them, when the video ended.

Nigel returned to the start and watched it again, looking for clues. The gun had a sort of bulge at the end of its barrel, presumably for the dart. It couldn't be very accurate. Lucky shot to hit the ibex in the neck, so that it didn't show as it bounded on. No, of course not. It had really been shot by somebody hidden much nearer on the far side, and the fake dart planted after the ibex had fallen. He started again at the beginning. Yes, the shadows were wrong—too long. That scene must have been shot at least an hour later than the one showing the hunt. He was watching the closing moments again when his mother came back.

“I suppose that's the village headman,” he said. “Do you know what he's giving him?”

“Actually he's a professional actor. But the headman really did get a purse of gold, worth as much as a pair of ram's horns, Nick says.”

CHAPTER 2

Day 2
.

Hi there. Well, I've now been in an ordinary Dirzhani house
—
not that ordinary, actually, really posh, right on the river, belongs to this guy
—
I'll call him Mr G
—
who's something big in Dara Dahn. He got together with my dad at some sort of a meeting and when Dad said I was coming on a visit he asked if I could hang out with his daughter a bit, help polish up her English. I'll call her Luana
…

Nigel's father and the two Secretaries were British. Otherwise all the tiny embassy staff were “local”. Tim's and Roger's wives were really British too but counted as local; they were embassy secretary on alternate days while the other one had their kids. Nigel's mother's secretary, Ivahni, was a Dirzhak who spoke good English. Most of the guards and servants spoke a bit of English. And then there was Rick, who really was local, and really was British.

He was the embassy driver. Before that he'd been general odd-job man at the FO's Kyrgyzstan outpost in Dara Dahn. His parents had come to England from Antigua, and he'd been born in Leeds. He'd gone into the army when he'd left school, but had got sick of the racial harassment and dropped out. Then he'd met and married a Dirzhani girl who was working as a cleaner at the hospital. He'd come back to Dirzhan with her as soon as it split off from the USSR and got himself made driver and odd-job man and pretty well everything else in the new FO outpost in Dara Dahn. He'd lived there for fifteen years now, and had two daughters. He wore a smart navy blue uniform and cap and held himself like a soldier. He liked to talk, and still did it in what Nigel guessed was a Leeds accent.

Now he spoke in Dirzhani to the bodyguard, who opened the rear door of the plush old embassy Rover and climbed in.

“You come up in front with me, sir,” said Rick, holding the passenger door for Nigel. “Khan dun't like to be kept waiting, but we've a bit of time over so I'll take you down through the old town, and tell you what's what.”

“You can call me Nigel if you like,” said Nigel as Rick settled into the driver's seat. The car wasn't air-conditioned, so they kept the windows open.

“Suits me,” said Rick. “Not in front of your dad, mind. Dun't give a flip for himself, but in Dirzhan he's H.E. the British Ambassador, and we got to keep standards up, even when there's nobody looking.”

“You must like living here.”

“Not half. I'm quids in here. I mean that, literal. Pound here will buy you two, three times what it would in England, less you've a taste for fancy foreign shoes and such. They cost all right. Besides, I'm somebody here. I get a bit of respect. Nothing like that for me back home.”

He broke off to shout a greeting to a man leading a donkey-cart loaded with sawn timber up the steep, crowded, cobbled street. Most of the older men had thick, bushy beards and were wearing a kind of floppy turban, a long loose jacket and baggy trousers. All the women had shawls over their head or some kind of veil or even one of those long all-over cloaks that that covered them from head to toe except for the bit around their eyes.

“Those are burkas or something, aren't they?” said Nigel.

“Dahli, we call 'em,” said Rick. “Dahl's a bit different anyway, seein' we're Dirzhaki. We're like that.”

There were teenagers of both sexes in T-shirts and jeans, but all the girls, even kids not much older than toddlers, had shawls over their heads and the boys wore caps. And they kept apart, boys together, girls together.

“What would happen if I said hello to a girl I didn't know?” he asked. “Would they lynch me?”

“Know her or not, no difference,” said Rick. “Don't try it, 'less you want your face spat in.”

There didn't seem to be any shops, but every open space, however small, seemed to have a sort of mini-market in it, with a few stalls. And there weren't any advertisements, apart from enormous posters of the President on every blank wall. The man with the donkey-cart shouted cheerfully back as the two ancient vehicles edged past with millimetres to spare.

“Third cousin of Janey's—that's the wife,” explained Rick. “'Nother thing about being here—you get real families. Like it was back in Antigua, 'cording to my mum. England, you get folks dun't know how many kids their brothers an' sisters got, pretty well.”

“What do they think about the President? Do they all call him the Khan, like you did?”

Rick took his right hand off the steering-wheel, lowered it as if he was fiddling with his seat belt, and pointed urgently with his thumb towards the back seat. Nigel had forgotten about the bodyguard.

“Yeah, he's the Khan all right,” said Rick. “Never had a President did 'em any good. Doubt the old khans were much better, but they've forgot about that. They respect this one. He's done all right by them, anyone can see. Hospitals, schools, steady jobs, food in the markets. Step out of line, mind you, deal drugs, anything like that, and you'll get it in the neck.

“Getting there soon, lad. That's it across the river—fancy bit of building, dun't you think?”

Without warning they had emerged into openness. It was as if the narrow, twisting street down which they had been driving, with its higgledy-piggledy houses, had been chopped short to create a modern tree-lined boulevard running beside the river. The trees were saplings, and the glass-walled offices and government buildings looked only a few years old.

The water-front opposite was utterly different. The river was about the size of the Thames in London, and along its further shore the buildings were any old age and crowded right to the water: wharves with derricks; the backsides of a couple of mosques, built as if they hadn't expected to be looked at from this direction; warehouses; one or two cafes actually fronting the water; a few ordinary little houses like those in the old city; and in the middle of it all, looking across at this handsome new boulevard, the Palace of the Khans.

Nigel thought it was the most beautiful building he'd ever seen, more beautiful the Empire State in New York or the Parthenon in Athens or Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. It was three tall storeys high, built mainly of a pale, fawn-coloured stone, exactly right to support the astonishing blue of the domes—lapis something, he vaguely remembered—a big one at the centre and two smaller ones either side. They were bordered with gold round their lower rims, ribbed with gold and topped with little golden spires. The entrance doors were set back under an archway reaching almost to the rim of the central dome and supported by two pairs of blue lapis-something pillars. Four narrower arches ran up the façade on either side, filled in with a delicate carved-stone lattice, a pattern like frozen flames.

“Wow!” said Nigel. “What's it like inside?”

“Never been, meself,” said Rick. “You're one of the lucky ones. S'posing you come out again, o' course.”

It was a joke. Didn't mean anything.

Two turbaned sentries stood at the top of the steps, with their guns slung behind their backs and purple sashes running slantwise from shoulder to hip over their khaki uniforms.

“You wait there, lad,” said Rick. “We're on parade again.”

He got out, walked round in front of the Rover, climbed the three steps and spoke to one of the sentries, then came back, opened the passenger door, saluted as Nigel got out and handed him his shoulder-bag.

“Thank you, Rick.”

“Very good, sir.”

Self-consciously Nigel climbed the five steps alone. Both sentries saluted as he reached the top. He knew the form from having seen his father go through this sort of thing, so he raised his hand in acknowledgment and was about to show them his pass when a man in a dark suit and purple tie came out of the doorway and walked up with his hand outstretched. Nigel tried to put his pass in it but the man took it with his other hand and then shook Nigel's.

“The President is expecting you, Mr. Rizhouell,” he said in a high, anxious voice. “Avron Dikhtar. I am under-secretary to the President-Khan. I hope you have recovered from your journey.”

He was a small man, pale faced, dark haired, already going a bit bald, though he can't have been that old. Apart from the actual name his English was pretty good. He'd probably been practicing. So had Nigel.

“I am honoured to be invited,” he said. “The flight was fine, thank you.”

“Will you please to come this way.”

There was no lobby. The doors led directly into an enormous hall, just as stunning as the outside. There the day had been bright and clear, but this was a different sort of brightness, a rich dazzle and glitter sparkling from ten thousand polished surfaces, softened here and there by huge, deep-coloured hangings, all lit by hidden lights. The middle section rose to the full height of the central dome, with lower sections on either side. The only daylight came from a row of windows ringing the base of the dome.

Nigel would have liked to stop and look but Mr. Dikhtar led him briskly across the hall, up a few steps to a broad, stage-like dais and on up a magnificent staircase to a pillared gallery running round three sides of the central section of the hall. They turned left at the top and followed the gallery round to a door guarded by another two sentries.

“I regret the necessity, Mr. Rizhouell,” said Mr. Dikhtar, “but it is a routine for all visitors to the private apartments. Please give me your bag and raise your arms above your head.”

Nigel did as he was told, and the sentry leaned his gun against the doorpost and systematically ran his hands all over Nigel's body. When he got to his belt he grunted and spoke.

“You are wearing a money belt, Mr. Rizhouell?” said Mr. Dikhtar.

“Er … my proper one's bust,” said Nigel.

It was half true. The buckle had started to come unstitched, but it didn't show. He'd bought the money belt in the airport because he thought it was a cool gadget, like his Swiss Army knife and his compass and his monocular for bird-watching and his travelling chess set. He was a sucker for that sort of thing.

Mr. Dikhtar spoke to the guard, who grunted again and went on with the search, finishing by checking the soles of Nigel's sneakers. He straightened, grinning, and rumpled Nigel's hair in a fatherly fashion. Nigel's face must have shown what he thought about it, because Mr Dikhtar spoke sharply to the guard before he handed him the bag.

“Er … I'm afraid that's got my Swiss Army knife in it,” said Nigel.

Mr Dikhtar just nodded and waited. The guard checked the license on the back of the mobile and put it back. When he found the knife and the monocular and showed them to him he took the knife and put it in his pocket.

“I will return it to you when you leave, Mr. Rizhouell,” he said. “You may keep the eye-glass.”

The guard handed Nigel's bag back and picked up his gun. The other guard opened the door.

The hallway beyond it felt and smelt and looked like the lobby of the suite in the expensive modern hotel in Santiago where Nigel had once waited for his father to come out of a meeting. Even the wild-life pictures on the walls and the faint reek of cigar-smoke were spot on. Still, this was different. He was about to meet the monster. His heart started to hammer.

Mr. Dikhtar tapped on one of the half-dozen doors.

“A pleasure to have met you, Mr. Rizhouell,” he said, handing Nigel his pass. “I will see you later and give you back your knife”

“Thank you,” said Nigel, and turned to the opening door.

Just inside the room, waiting to close it behind him, smelling of some kind of strong, musky scent, stood …

What?

Man or woman? The bald, mottled head emerged from a loose long-sleeved ivory surcoat. The skin of the face was almost the same colour, creased with tiny wrinkles and shrunken to the shape of the bone beneath. Out of that deadness one living eye gazed at Nigel. The other was filmed with grey goo.