“It is so fine,” Salai said. “It is exactly as it was designed. You have done so very well. This is a wonder to me.
The Arab smiled with relief, his beautiful, even white teeth gleaming in the soft light.
“And the Prophet will be here soon?”
“Within the hour, Tariq. He has only stopped to attend to one or two pressing matters along the way.”
“This is such a great day for us,” the man said with real fervor. “We had never thought to see such a day.”
“And he will bring such great riches, and the greatest artists and scholars in his wake,” Salai said cheerfully.
“We have been downtrodden long enough,” the man said with some feeling.
“Indeed you have, and no longer. The Great Work will be done here and you will be exalted among men,” the youth said soothingly. “You have already been rewarded for your faithfulness-”
He was cut short as Tariq sought to prevent any suggestion of ingratitude or impatience.
“We could not have built this without the money you gave us,” he said at once, and we have a fine hospital and school for the children. We know the Prophet’s generosity to his people. it is simply that to have him among us-” His face was literally one of rapture.
“And here is the center,” Salai said as he turned the final corner. “Ah, Tariq, this is a fine rendition.”
The mosaic must have taken the men of the place many years of painstaking work. Untold thousands of tiny fragments of gleaming, polished stone and crystal shone in the gentle light from the alcoves. The strange, haunting androgyny of Leonardo’s John the Baptist was perfectly reproduced in the round shrine a the heart of the labyrinth.
“Wonderful. And then there is the deeper mystery, Tariq, but we shall not speak of this now.”
“We await,” the man said simply.
27
“So we breeze into a bandit heartland with a photo-ID and say, Excuse me, gun-wielding bandit-type fellow, but have you seen these men?’ when we know one of ‘em doesn’t look like this anyway,” Geraint pondered over a junk-food brekfast. The airport didn’t seem to offer anything better, but at nearly noon-by the time they’d managed to wake, bathe, dress, and pack everything again-they didn’t fancy the lunchtime menu and the junk was all they could face.
We’ve got Blondie and he’s impossible to miss with that pony tail,” Michael replied.
“He could tuck it inside his jacket.”
“Ever seen him do that?”
“He still might.’’
“Yeah, right, and that’s why when his master fragged the photo ID, he left him so clear-as-day to make it hard for us,” Michael replied with some venom. “Sorry. I’m still tired. I really do think he actually wants us to find him.”
“That’s bizarre.”
“Is it really? Look, the guy has to have some ego. He’s a genius-look at what he’s done. He must have some desire for recognition. He must want someone to say ‘look how clever I am’. He’s just picked us, that’s all.”
“Fair enough, I suppose, but why us? I mean, there have to be a dozen teams out after him.”
“There are. Matter of fact I caught a glimpse of Denison from MCT Frankfurt in Venice, unless I’m much mistaken. But I think we’re closer to him than anyone else. After all, Renraku was the only corp that got the Shroud icon,” Michael finished, pensively. Still not sure why he did that.”
“Well, we have nowhere else to go” Geraint said. “And if the Matrix crashes I lose a bundle, so let’s get the fragger.”
“We’re actually going to have a day to spare,” Michael said. “if this was the movies, we’d only get to him five seconds before he pressed the button. and you’d see the time display counting down the time before-bang!”
“Hmmm,” Serrin said for no reason in particular. He’d been lost in his own thoughts for most of the morning, gazing at pictures of paintings and reading notes. It was obvious he wanted to be left alone until he’d worked out whatever he was wrestling with. Kristen was more than familiar with these moods by now, and had learned just to be around when the elf came back to the real world.
“I got permission to cross the relevant air space, so far as that goes” Streak told them. “Mind you, it’s bound to be pretty dicey passing over Iraq, so frag that. We’ll take the southern route over Saudi. I don’t fancy the Turkish route, not with heading down the Caspian past Azerbaijan. They let off SAMs for recreation down there. Saudi’s okay.”
“Have we got everything we need?” Geraint asked him for the tenth time that morning.
“Your Lordship, you’re already dosed with quinine and KZT and half a dozen other drugs, which is why you’re so happy stuffing your face with the kind of drek you wouldn’t dream of eating back home. Kind of frags your body that way” Streak grinned. “You’ll sleep ten, twelve hours a night for a week or two as well. Trust me. Oh, and it’ll turn your piss green, but that’s always a good party trick if you can do it. If I was a bug, I’d avoid you like the plague.”
He leant back and laughed loudly. “Whoops, mixed metaphor. You know what I mean.”
“Fine,” Geraint said, having indeed swallowed a disturbingly large number of oddly shaped tablets at Streak’s behest before breakfast and then wondered whether he should show such naive trust. The hypo, at least, he knew had come from a hermetically sealed pack; it was the same pack he’d used a few times previously, prior to business jaunts to the Far East.
“Then let’s go. No point in wasting any more time.”
They paid their bill, headed through the small concourse to the VIP and private-passenger lounge, and made their way slowly to their small plane. The last week of their lives had seemed to hold so many plane journeys. taxi rides, and car trips that they were beginning to get homesick in their various ways-not that any of them was actually aware of it. What they all felt more than anything was relief that, at last, they were going to meet the man who’d caused them, one way or another, so much trouble.
They’d already been followed by more than one group of people, and been attacked by at least two of them. They’d also eluded at least two other groups of runners set on their tails by other corps who knew that Michael and his friends had some kind of head start. They’d missed only one tail, which was not entirely surprising for he did, after all, get immediate updates on all information Michael sent back to Renraku. Since Michael had already extracted a six figure sum in expenses and fees from Renraku, he thought he had to give them some justification for that, and some account of his work. So it hadn’t been too difficult to trace him.
The spy made his report and asked for instructions. He was told to wait for reinforcements and told which plane to wait for.
“Frag, that’s military issue. I don’t know if we can land in that thing,” he balked.
The voice on the other end of the line was calm but steely. “Not to worry. We have records of the construction and very recent satellite confirmation of structural integrity,” his boss said in the strangled vocabulary of the corporate executive. “Three craft will be despatched.”
“Three?” The spy was incredulous. That meant the best part of two hundred paratroops and auxiliary military being flown into the place. Since they were supposed to be hunting a lone individual, this seemed to be overkill, to put it mildly.
“The locals may be hostile.”
“Oh, come on, they’re just primitives with bloody hunting rifles!”
“Don’t be so patronizing. You know, your last profile suggested you might have latent racist tendencies.”
“Don’t sell me that crap,” the man said with some feeling. “Twenty of these guys could take out a bunch of hijackers on a Boeing and you’re sending in two hundred? What the frag is going down here? What are you sending me into?”