In the Palace of the Khans (7 page)

“This is serious, Lou. I've promised the President that none of us will breathe a word about our visit until we're safely back in Dara. By the best intelligence we've got there've been two foiled assassination attempts in the last eighteen months.”

“Wow!” said Nigel. “Who by?”

“Could be any of a number of people. The odds are it's something to do with the dam. According to rumours it was the Moscow mafia, hoping to muscle in on the project if the President isn't in the way. But it's just as likely to be home-grown Dirzhaki, some of them pretty high up in the administration, who've got the same idea. And then there'll be some of the military who'd like to be able to order absurd numbers of tanks and aircraft in the arms market because of the kick-backs that go with them. And there's even an old clan feud still active. You know what the great Dirzhani epic is called, Niggles?
The Vengeance of the Khan
. They still think like that.”

“Have you got it?”

“There's an English translation in the library. I found it pretty unreadable. I hope you're both happy about this.”

“Anything to get out of Dara for a couple of days,” said Nigel's mother. “I was in the market before ten, and it was stifling already. Rick says according to the local radio it's going to get worse.”

“That's all right, then. Now I've got to gobble and go. Tell me what you're up to this afternoon.”

“I thought we'd go and look at the caves. At least it will be cooler in there.”

CHAPTER 4

Day 4 was yesterday

Mr G's again in the morning, but then I got a crummy great headache and Mum made me go to bed. Sorry about that
…

(He didn't like lying, but it was the best he could do.)

It seemed even hotter next morning by the time the driver dropped Nigel off at the back entrance to the Palace. The same guard was there, half-lounging in the strip of shade below the wall while he chatted to a young woman, presumably one of the palace servants. He had a piggy, pleased-with-himself face. When Nigel offered him his pass he just glanced sidelong at him and waved it aside and opened the door, making no attempt to search him, and gestured to him to go on in. He grunted something that probably meant “Wait” and returned to the girl.

Nigel went in and waited. He'd forgotten to have a pee before he left the embassy and was beginning to notice the fact. Several minutes passed. He was already late. The need to pee was becoming urgent. The hell with it, he thought, and keyed in the code. The lift doors opened, and closed behind him as soon as he pressed the 2 button.

The lift went down, not up, and stopped with a jolt. The lights went out. Close by outside an alarm bell clanged alive. His heart hammered. It's all right, he himself kept telling himself. Just a lift malfunction. They'll come and get me out.

After a while he settled down into a corner, stuffed his thumbs against he his ears to damp down the headachy clamour of the bell and played through his game against the President in his head to fight the urge to pee.

The bell stopped as suddenly as it had begun. He took his thumbs out of his ears and rose. He could hear a man's voice, close outside, giving orders by the sound of it. The doors sighed open and he was bathed in glaring light.

He staggered back, blinded. Rough hands grabbed him, hustled him out and flung him on the floor. A man shouted an order, urgent.

“I'm English!” he croaked, just managing not to wet himself. “I can't speak Dirzhani. No Dirzhani.”

Silence. Hesitation. The glare vanished, replaced by ordinary electric light. Blinking, he made out soldiers standing above him, staring down. Two guns were pointing at him. He began to reach for the pass in his pocket, but was instantly grabbed again, and hoicked to his feet. One of the men felt in the pocket, found the pass, looked at it and handed it to the man who seemed to be in command.

He too looked at it, unclipped a handset from his belt and tapped in a number. When it was answered he spoke for a while, answered a question, waited, spoke again, and passed the handset to Nigel.

“Mr. Rizhouell?”

“Mr. Dikhtar? Yes, me. I'm terribly sorry. I didn't realise …”

“Please tell me what happened. Your driver reports that he left you at the door and passed you over to the guard on duty there.”

“That's right …”

Nigel started to explain in detail.

“You knew the code for the lift door.”

“The guard let me see him tapping it in yesterday. 9876. It was so simple I couldn't help noticing.”

“Understood. Please pass me back to the guard sergeant.”

The guard sergeant listened to the handset briefly, switched it off and clipped it back on his belt. He gestured to Nigel to go into the lift, then started giving orders to the other men.

Nigel waited shuddering with released tension and desperate by now for a pee. His headache got worse. To distract himself he tried to work out what must have happened. The simple security code was a trap. There must have been something the guard did yesterday after the door had closed. Yes, that buzzer, signalling that everything was in order. Without that the lift would have gone down, like today, trapping whoever was inside it safely in the basement.

So it looked as if the guard was going to be in serious trouble, and the poor servant-girl too, probably. It really didn't seem fair, especially on her. But if there'd been two assassination attempts in the last eighteen months …

At last the guard sergeant came in, closed the door, took the lift up a floor, opened the door, pressed the 2 button, and nipped out before the door closed. The buzzer sounded overhead and the lift rose, stopping at the second floor. Mr. Dikhtar was waiting in the lobby, not looking at all smiley. The air-conditioning was on, but his upper lip was shiny with sweat.

“You have behaved somewhat unwisely, Mr. Rizhouell.”

“I didn't know what to do. Taeela doesn't like to be kept waiting.”

“The guard denies that he kept you waiting more than a few seconds, while he finished some official business with the young woman.”

“That's nonsense! It was more than five minutes. I looked at my watch. And they were chatting and laughing.”

“One moment,” said Mr. Dikhtar, reaching for a wall telephone.

“I've got to go to the bathroom,” said Nigel. “It's really urgent.”

Mr. Dikhtar pointed at a door as he picked up the handset, and Nigel darted off. By the time he came back Mr. Dikhtar was trying to be smiley again, but not convincingly.

“Fortunately we have corroboration for your account,” he said. “The car was logged in at the entrance eight minutes before the alarm sounded. That being the case I have to apologise on behalf of the President for the insolence of the guard's behaviour. But at the same time I must ask you not to speak to anyone about what has happened. If the precautions we take to protect the President became known, they would cease to be effective. I am afraid this applies even to your father. It is not that the President does not trust him personally, but …”

“It's all right, Mr. Dikhtar. I'm just here to help Taeela with her English. My father doesn't want me to get involved in anything else. If I happen to pick up interesting stuff here, he doesn't want to know.”

Mr Dikhtar stared at him unbelievingly and shrugged.

“That is a wise arrangement,” he said. “I will tell the President.”

“What about Taeela? She must have heard the alarm. I've got to tell her something.”

“She is aware of the precautions that involve her safety and will have taken the appropriate action.”

He moved along the corridor, hesitated, and tapped on the door.

“I will see you later, Mr. Rizhouell,” he muttered, and stood aside as it opened.

Inside the room almost nothing had changed, but the atmosphere was completely different. The television was on,
Charmed
this time; Fohdrahko was closing the door, Taeela sitting on the sofa. But he wasn't smiling and she was hunched and scared and the room prickled with tension.

“What happens? What happens?” she whispered, rising to her feet.

He forced himself into movement, crossed the room and settled onto the arm of the sofa, trying to look a bit more relaxed than he felt.

“It was mainly my fault, I suppose,” he said, “but I didn't want to keep you waiting and I was desperate for a pee …”

“What is pee?”

“Go to the loo … er, toilet, bathroom, whatever you call it.”

Her eyes widened.

“You talk about this? To me? A woman?”

“Er, yes. I suppose so. Shouldn't I have?”

She laughed suddenly, and the tension eased.

“I am learning so much from you,” she said. “Go on.”

It was a relief to tell someone who he felt was on his side. He went through the story in detail, only toning down his rough handling a bit, but making no bones about how scared he had been. It took a while as she stopped him every couple of sentences so that she could translate to Fohdrahko. Nigel had been ready for her to find it comic, which it had been in a way, the whole elaborate machinery of the palace gathering itself to suppress a harmless kid.

But Taeela didn't see it that way at all. She said something to Fohdrahko, and took Nigel's hand in between hers.

“But this is horrible for you, Nigel,” she said earnestly. “Did they hurt you?”

“I'll get over it. But it was pretty scary while it was happening … Look, Taeela, there's one thing you could do. I don't feel too bad about the guard. He wasn't doing his job properly, and then he tried to make it look as if it was all my fault. But the woman he was talking to—could you try and see that they aren't too tough with her?”

“Was she pretty?”

“I didn't notice.”

She shook her head pityingly and rose from the sofa.

“Nigel, you are too much … much too … nice,” she said. “OK. I telephone Avron Dikhtar.”

While she was talking to Mr Dikhtar Nigel looked round the room, puzzled. She would have taken the appropriate action, Mr Dikhtar had said. What? There was only the one door, nowhere obvious to hide, and the windows were barred by the stone lattice close outside. All he could think of was that there might be some kind of James-Bondish device which would shoot out of the floor at the touch of a button and bar the door with inch-thick bulletproof steel, but he couldn't see any sign of it.

Taeela put the phone down and laughed.

“Poor Avron,” she said. “He is so afraid of my Father, what he will say. I tell him … told him I will make it OK. Do I say ‘OK' to my father, Nigel?”

He blinked at the change of subject.

“Er … I think he'd prefer ‘All right,'” he said. “What about the woman?”

“She will be only warned,” she said. “And she will be told that it is at your asking that she isn't more punished.”

“Great. So what would you like to do now? I've brought a tape of another film my mother thought we might enjoy …”

Unsurprisingly the rest of the morning was rather flat. Nigel's headache came and went. His mother would have something for it. What was he going to tell her? Blame it on jet-lag? They watched
The Four Feathers
for a while, played three games of chess, chatted. He told her about school and the other kids, and his teachers and the gossipy rumours about them. It was an effort to keep it going. As he'd guessed, she didn't have any real friends her own age, but she talked about her visits to Moscow, and her mother and her brothers.

“Don't you miss them?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“They do not belong here. They are Russians. My brothers like the hunting lodge, but when they come they are visitors. Tourists. When I go to Moscow, it is the same. In Moscow I am the tourist. My mother didn't want another child. Always she is kind to me, but she cannot love me.”

“I've been lucky. I was a mistake too, but my parents seem to love me OK.”

“Oh, I am not a mistake. My father looked at my brothers. He saw that they were Russians. He said to my mother, give me another child, a Dirzhak, and then you can go to Moscow. I am the price of her freedom. She told me this herself.”

He stared at her, appalled but fascinated. She had been speaking apparently lightly, but she wasn't joking, as if the fact that her mother couldn't love her wasn't any more than that, a simple fact, like the direction in which a river runs or the height of a mountain.

“You don't mind?”

She shrugged.

“My father loves me, and that is enough. He is Dirzhak, and I am Dirzhak. When I am older, we will choose a man for me to marry, but when my father dies I will be Khan.”

“Is that possible?”

“We will make it possible. There were two Princess Khans in old times. My father has promised me.”

She waited for a response, but he couldn't think of anything to say. Taeela frowned at him, puzzled, concerned.

“Are you well, Nigel?”

“Sorry. It's just a bit of a headache.”

“Those stupid guards!”

“They were just doing their job.”

“Here, you must lie down, and Fofo will make you his medicine. Then I send for the car to take you home.”

The medicine was bright yellow and pungent as garlic. It got up Nigel's nose and made him sneeze till his head rang, but it must have had something effective in it, because he was almost asleep by the time he staggered up the embassy steps. His mother wasn't happy about it but decided not to risk giving him paracetamol on top of it, so let him go straight to bed, where he slept through a series of vividly crazy dreams and woke, clear-headed and hungry, just in time for supper.

Day 5
,

Two visits this time, one to Mr. G's and one to Rick's. He works at the embassy. Couldn't have been differenter
…