“So let me guess.” The big man smiled and let cigar smoke trickle towards the ceiling, though the smile didn’t reach his eyes and a breeze through the open window dissipated the smoke before it reached the height of a picture rail.
“Organized crime the Ottoman way?”
Avatar shook his head.
“Well it can’t be the refinery because then they’d just go through my press office . . .” His refinery was situated to the west of Isk, at the point where slums met desert. In an industry working hard to improve its image, Midas Oil was an entire lap ahead. Bursaries, research grants, third-world scholarships, a whole marine-biology, antipollution programme at Rutgers.
Accidents got apologized for the moment they happened, critics were greeted with open arms, research papers were put to peer review and released, copyright free, straight onto the Web. It was a long-term game and, as Hamzah had hoped, it was driving even the softest ecological pressure groups insane.
“What then?”
“Your childhood . . .”
To the man’s credit, Hamzah did little more than blink.
“Think you can deal with this?” Hamzah asked Avatar.
“Sure,” said Avatar. “You want him killed?”
Hamzah raised his eyebrows, amusement driving out the last echoes of anger.
“No,” he said with a smile. “I don’t want him killed. Whatever you’ve heard, whatever the police whisper, that’s not how I do things.”
Avatar looked for a brief second like he wanted to disagree. Then he shrugged. “It’s your party,” he said. And left without glancing back, exiting through a window larger than the front door of most of the places in which he’d lived.
CHAPTER 4
Sudan
“Safety off,” said the gun.
Standing beside Sergeant Ka, Zac said nothing. He’d spoken little enough when he was alive and now he was dead he talked even less . . .
Ka thought that strange, because Zac’s sister Ruth had also said little from the time she’d been captured to the moment she died. But now she talked so much that Ka couldn’t concentrate on watching the growling trucks that rolled across the scrub towards him.
“Distance?”
“Half a klick and closing . . .”
Status and range. That was all the plastic H&K/cw could manage. It was an incredibly stupid weapon and the boy with the bone cross, feather amulet and boots several sizes too big didn’t know why the manufacturer had bothered.
There was meant to be some way to turn off the voice but to do that you needed to be able to read. So instead Ka had ripped the tail from his shirt and tied it to the stock, right over the little plastic grille behind which the speaker hid.
Before Ka began this mission, Colonel Abad had ordered him to be sure to check his weapons each morning. Then, when that was done, to inspect the weapons of the rest of his troop. Only there was no rest any longer. At least, Ka didn’t think so.
He was it.
So Ka inspected his own weapons, trying to remember what he was meant to be looking for . . . Dirt, maybe, and rust. Except rust wasn’t a problem because it hadn’t rained in a year in this part of wherever he was, somewhere between Bahr el-Azrek and the Atbarah. At least, that’s where he thought he was.
Untying the lanyard that fastened a revolver around his neck, Ka checked it. It was as clean as any weapon could be in a country where most of the earth had turned to red dust and half of that had been stripped away from the rock beneath. The revolver was his favourite. He’d have liked it even more if any of the bullets he carried in his truck had been the right calibre.
H&K21e clean and freshly oiled. Tripod fixed and belt ready. H&K/cw . . . spotless. His knife wasn’t clean but that was because Ezekiel’s blood had ruined the leather of its handle. Everyone had warned Ezekiel not to pick up bomblets, but the boy was six and the cluster bombs came in red, green and yellow.
Ezekiel had always loved bright colours.
Their most junior soldier had been left under a blanket of stones where he died, on the side of a hill just below the cracked eggshell memorial to where a functioning mosque once stood. Ka had refused to kill the boy until the others stopped talking to him. He was the sergeant, they said. Stuff like that was his job. In the end, Ka had given in, gone back to where he’d rested Ezekiel in the shade of a broken wall and found the small boy already dead.
But he buried the blade deep and carried it back to camp to show them the deed was done. Things had been different after that. They all wanted to be with Ka but he no longer wanted to be with them.
Now he was alone, with his back to the empty village. Well, it was two villages really. One built from grey brick that looked heavy but turned out to be solid froth, like ossified spit. That version had been constructed ten years before by the government and destroyed by them as well, a few years later.
The older village was behind the new one, jammed into a space between the start of a hill and a scar of rock. But most of its mud-walled huts had fallen in, from age this time. According to the Colonel, there was no water for miles, what with the wadis drying up and the nearest bore hole being both barren and filled with corpses from an earlier battle.
Ka lifted his H&K/cw and snapped free the lower clip. It was loaded with 5.56mm, each kinetic round dipped in holy water and polished with snakeskin. His old AK49 had been altogether better, less flashy. But an older boy had wanted Ka’s AK49 and given him the plastic gun in return. That boy was dead now. Ka didn’t feel too bad about it.
CHAPTER 5
7th July
“You need to be here . . .”
Avatar’s call came through as Hamzah was getting ready for bed. His wife was upstairs sleeping, and his daughter . . . Wherever Zara had gone after her swim, she’d taken her little F-type Jaguar and left a wet towel on the hall floor by way of good-bye.
“Where’s here?”
“Sarahz . . . Corner of Place Gumhuriya.”
Hamzah knew exactly where the club was. There might be a dozen bars and restaurants he owned without knowing exactly where they were, but Sarahz had been one of his early acquisitions, maybe the first.
“I’m about to turn in.”
“Not now, you’re not . . . Believe me, I’ve got something you’ll want to see.”
Avatar put down the club’s pay phone and went back to his decks. Building on a breakbeat sambassimba anthem that cut the heavy overdub/techno fusion that was ol’sko drum’n’bass with lighter Sao Paolo rhythms, weirdshit polka, vicious Fender licks and syncopated snare.
“SpecialBeatService,” the near original PatifePorto mix.
He was working a late-Wednesday crowd, upstairs at Sarahz. Mostly poor little rich boys from St. Mark’s plus a handful of overdressed, hard-eyed kazuals from Moharrem Bey. The girls were tourists, mostly. A smattering of au pairs, exchange students, teenagers glad to get away from their distant families.
Avatar got the gig on merit. The manager didn’t know his new DJ was the bastard of Hamzah Effendi. Until ten minutes ago, Amici hadn’t known that his club was owned by Avatar’s father—and he was still getting over that shock.