The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (21 page)

There seemed no logic, at first, to which person on the list would suddenly vanish but slowly ZeeZee began to develop a sixth sense. So one autumn morning he reversed the order of two jobs and turned up early at an
art brut
concrete lodge outside Seattle.

ZeeZee left his red Suzuki and black crash helmet at the top of a rough earth track that fed off the crumbling backtop and walked down towards the house and Puget Sound’s pale waters beyond.

The man on the jetty wasn’t expecting to see him. That much was obvious from the way he froze, heavy suitcase still clutched in one hand.

“Sorry to disturb you…”ZeeZee held out his hand and when Micky O’Brian put down his suitcase, ZeeZee slipped the court order into the hand that reached out, watching the fingers close from instinct. ZeeZee relied on that reaction a lot in his line of work.

“Smile.”

By lunchtime the sudden breakdown of Micky O’Brian was leading the local news and had third slot on Sky. A feeding frenzy was about to begin. Ravaged by drugs, or maybe by pleurisy brought on by Aids, by alcohol and painkiller addiction, by paradise syndrome… Journalistic diagnoses were made from positions of absolute ignorance; conflicting, contradictory, as many irrefutable facts offered as there were commentators.

Shots of a private ambulance with blackened windows appeared first on
Celebrity Update.
As did footage of a grey-haired woman in a white coat who spoke sincerely and at great length to the camera without actually giving out any information at all.
Confidentiality
got a name check, so did
courage, hope
and
recovery.
The name of the clinic got mentioned three times, but that information was redundant. Everyone watching the CU channel already knew where celebs got their lives, health and shit back on track.

The fact was, Micky O’B would be in there forty-eight hours max, seventy-two hours at a push. The clinic operated a high-profile arrivals policy, while arranging the world’s quickest and most discreet departures.

The only thing on which every single commentator agreed was that Micky O’Brian’s agent had signed him into a clinic that morning and the head of the clinic was now refusing to let cameras past the gate. That Micky had recently been served with a summons regarding a major drugs bust went unmentioned.

Wild Boy slid to a halt outside ZeeZee’s apartment as dusk hit, rolling darkness and soft mist through the streets. Hanging his helmet from a handlebar, the Japanese boy took the stairs two at a time on his way up to the third floor. He didn’t knock, just kicked the door out of its frame with some fancy footwork and stood in the gap, glaring.

“Hey, fuckwit…”

Been here.
Fear filled ZeeZee’s throat like mercury rising in an old-fashioned thermometer.

“…Who the fuck do you think you are?”

It was the wrong question. But only because ZeeZee couldn’t answer it. So Tiriganaq answered it for him. Using the English boy like a puppet.

“I know who I am…” said ZeeZee’s voice, “and I don’t give a fuck who you think you are.” Then ZeeZee found himself scrambling off the bed to grab his holster and yank free the Taurus.

When ZeeZee woke up he was standing in an approximation of Wild Boy’s usual stance, shoulders relaxed and one hand hanging loose at his side. In the background, on a screen next to the damaged door, the newsfeed kept running unwatched; flickering like a sad ghost at the edge of his vision. It was old footage of Micky O’Brian, back when he could still act.

Wild Boy looked at the gun and smiled. “You don’t have the balls.”

The click of a hammer being thumbed back was ZeeZee’s answer. Some of Hu San’s people filed their hammers flat to stop the point snagging on clothes. Not ZeeZee. His revolver was factory-perfect. And when ZeeZee had first started working for Five Winds, Wild Boy had delivered a box of fifty bullets. Only seven of them were missing. They were the bullets in his gun.

“Try me,” said ZeeZee, and raised the gun. The Arctic fox’s growl behind his eyes was enough to make the world resonate like a struck glass. He could feel Tiriganaq’s grin leaching through onto his own face.

“I’ve got a message,” Wild Boy said. “Hu San is very disappointed in you. And she thinks you should be disappointed in yourself.” He hooked a long strand of dark hair out of his eyes, concentrated on delivering his message and tried not to worry too much about the weird smile on ZeeZee’s face.

Then he left.

CHAPTER 30

8th July

Hamzah kept his promise. The builders arrived at five
the next morning in a Mack diesel with
HZ Industrial
logoed down the side. They parked up in the Rue Sherif and a Taureg foreman in a striped jellaba walked round to the back where he hammered on the door until Raf appeared, bleary-eyed and squinting.

Khartoum should have gone but he sat unmoving in one corner of the courtyard, not far from where Hani slept. From what little he’d said, Raf gathered he was terrified the killers might come back.

The young Taureg glanced doubtfully at Raf’s tattered dressing gown, which came from an old wardrobe on the second floor and was a testament to the late Lady Nafisa’s private frugality. Anyone else would have thrown it in the bin. “Your Excellency?”

Raf smiled. “Ashraf al-Mansur,” he agreed. “Hamzah Effendi sent you?”

“Yes, Your Excellency…” Shrewd eyes glanced over Raf’s shoulder at the madersa’s narrow entrance with its porter’s bench and traditional blind ending. Getting building supplies in that way would be next to impossible. As for removing the walls of an upstairs office once it had been taken down…

“Does Your Excellency…”

“On Rue Sherif,” said Raf. “Bricked up.”

Five minutes later, the foreman came back with two workmen who looked even younger. Each carried nothing more sophisticated than a crowbar.

Next to arrive were the police. Two officers came at dawn. Stepping over rubble to pass through the freshly opened front door. No one had reported noise or called in with suspicions about a truck parked on Rue Sherif. And they didn’t come to check that builders were meant to be ripping out a wall to make space to remove bits of a crime scene. They came for Raf. And it was a measure of Felix’s fury that he didn’t come himself.

Five minutes after the two officers appeared, Madame Mila arrived in a long blue Mercedes, with tinted windows. The kind of car that screamed
important government official.
Raf could put the sequence together in his head. Hamzah had turned up at the precinct with his lawyer, quoting Raf as his reason for being there. Hamzah had left the precinct. In a fury, Felix had woken the Minister to get permission to bring in Raf.

The only thing Raf didn’t understand was why the Minister had immediately called Madame Mila or what Madame Mila could want from him. It turned out to be his signature.

“Sign here.” The woman thrust out a notepad and a stylus.

Raf glanced at the screen and shook his head. “Not without knowing what it says…”

“You can’t read?” The woman’s voice was incredulous.

“Not Arabic,” said Raf, “though I can speak it… How well do you speak English?”

The woman said nothing.

“Well, then…” He reached for the pad and passed it to Hani. “You tell me,” he said. “What does it say?”

The girl skimmed the swirls of Arabic, then read them again slowly, her lips twisting as she mouthed the words to herself. “I don’t want this,” she said to Raf, her eyes suddenly enormous with fear.

“Why not?” he demanded. “What does it say?”

It was Madame Mila who answered. “An order is being issued for Hani to be made a ward of my office and given into protective custody.”

“An orphanage?”

The coroner-magistrate looked at him as if he was mad. “Lady Jalila has offered to stand guardian to this child.” She glanced at Hani. “You are a very lucky young lady.”

“If that’s a court order,” Raf said slowly, “why do you need my signature?”

“A formality,” said the woman.

“And without my signature…?”

“The girl will still be taken.”

“Just not yet,” said Raf, nodding to himself. He handed her back the pad. “I’m afraid I can’t sign this… The child will stay here with her nanny.” He pointed to where Donna hovered in a courtyard doorway, scowling at the noise. The old woman was cook, housekeeper and mopper-up after Ali-Din. Being the child’s official nanny should add no extra burden.

“So,” said Raf. “Am I under arrest?” He fired off his question at the elder of the two police officers. “Well?”

“Of course not, Your Excellency, but we have been told to bring you in for questioning.”

“In that case,” Raf said. “I’ll be with you as soon as we’ve all had breakfast.” He paused, to look at their doubtful faces. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You can get on the blower and tell Felix I’m not going anywhere.”

The meal Donna provided was simple:
’aish shamsi
bread warmed on an oil-fired range in the kitchen, which was where they ate. It was served with a thin dribble of sweet butter and a large mug of chocolate dusted with cinnamon. Donna also made chocolate and warm bread for the builders, then carried another tray out to the waiting police car.

“Woman’s gone,” Hani told Raf, translating from Donna’s Portuguese without missing a bite. The child looked less frightened now that daylight had arrived and she had a plate of warm food in front of her, but she was still obviously worried. “Do you really have to go?”

Raf nodded.

“But you’ll come back?”

“Of course,” Raf said firmly. “They probably just want to talk about the stuff I did in America.”

“When you were an assassin…?”

“I wasn’t an assassin.”

Hani actually smiled. A faint flicker as if she was the only one to get the punchline to a particularly obscure joke. “Of course not,” she said. Grabbing a whole slab of
’aish shamsi,
Hani started peeling off strips. “I’m off to feed Ali-Din,” she announced and slipped from the table. Seconds later, Raf heard Hani’s feet clattering on the stairs up to the
qaa
. It was the first time she’d stepped inside the house since her aunt was murdered.

Raf was distraught, apparently… Having missed out on Tuesday’s murder
and
Wednesday’s autopsy plus funeral, Thursday’s tabloids had decided to make up for missing time by running the killing, autopsy and funeral as one breathless story, with endless sidebars of comment and very few facts. Actually, it was mostly comment or conjecture, with little blind URLs at the end of each paragraph to remind readers that they could always download more of the same.

He was also desolate, missing and strangely unmoved, Raf discovered. A little-known figure in Iskandryian society, rumour now had him as one of the most-influential fixers in North Africa. His work in America was so secret that every justified request to the Minister of Police for official information had been met with an impenetrable wall of silence.

There was a long-lens grab of him sitting on the gravel next to Hani outside the al-Mansur mausoleum and a standing shot taken at such an extreme angle it had to have been lifted from a spysat.

“Lies,” snarled Felix, sweeping the papers from a table. “Like most of the crap you’ve told me.” Felix jerked his head at the officer standing beside Raf and the man stepped backwards, looking doubtful. So Felix jerked his head again and the officer scuttled from the room.

That left Felix and Raf together in a cell no more than ten paces by ten paces. All the light was artificial, glaring down from a single strip crudely screwed to a filthy ceiling. Blood—or what looked like blood—was splattered up one wall and around the chair in which Raf sat. A relic of earlier encounters.

The fat man’s bunched fists were shaking with anger.

Raf stood up and stepped away from the table.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Felix said bitterly, “No one would dare get heavy on
your
ass. We’re not that stupid.” He slammed a file on the table and nodded to Raf to open it. Inside was a single sheet of A4 paper. At the top was a pixelated mugshot of Raf, still wearing dreadlocks and beard.

“We received this while you were on your way in,” said Felix. “Only it was crypted so we couldn’t immediately get it open. But that was okay, because five minutes after you arrived we got sent a neat little 4096-bit key. Nothing too complicated, right? Because we’re police and we’re stupid…”

Felix pulled a packet of Cleopatra from his pocket and tapped loose a cigarette. Ignoring the “No Smoking” sign glued to the door, he lit up with an old 7th Cavalry Zippo and dragged carcinogenics deep into his lungs. “You know, it’s hard to believe anyone of twenty-five could have built up this kind of record.”

Raf ran his eyes down the sheet with rising disbelief. It was hard to imagine how anyone could have that record, full stop… Personal envoy from the Sultan in Istanbul. Weapons training at Sandhurst. A spell in Paris, counter-intelligence at Les Halles. A level of security clearance so high its name was blanked out because no one at the precinct had authority to know it existed. Throw in genius-level IQ, eidetic memory, weapons-grade negative capability and it read like a biofile straight out of…

“Yeah,” said Raf, “I find it hard to believe myself.” Every year of his life was covered, from leaving school to arriving in Iskandryia: he just didn’t recognize any of it.

“Mind telling me why you warned Hamzah?” Felix ground his cigarette butt out on the table top and promptly lit another one, inhaling hard. His jacket stank of cigarettes, whisky and disappointment. “Unless, of course, it’s a secret.”

“No secret,” said Raf. “He just didn’t do it.”

“And you know who did?”

“No.” Raf shook his head. But he did know it wasn’t Hamzah.