Flicking out the cylinder of his Taurus, Avatar discarded the dead brass and speed-loaded another seven rounds. His borrowed rifle already had a full clip.
CHAPTER 54
29th October
“It’s paradise . . .” Hani’s excitement filled the upper tier of the library, echoing off the inside of the giant pyramid to get lost among the books that lined row after row of shelves.
“Hani!”
“It is,” she insisted. “Paradise. Jannah . . .”
Madame Syria stared up, towards the highest of the mezzanine floors where a small girl who shouldn’t have been in the library in the first place, leant dangerously over a rail, while simultaneously pointing behind herself towards a dark shape on the horizon.
The SS Jannah had the classic profile for a great liner, a stepped ziggurat of cabins and suites rising high above the main deck along both sides, with the captain’s bridge jutting from the ziggurat’s front, like steel-and-glass flukes on a hammerhead shark. At the rear, a glass casino was suspended podlike between tall towers. Everything aboard the ship was white, apart from the main deck, which was planted with a long promenade of palm trees and manicured lawn.
That the huge hull had originally belonged to a Soviet factory ship was a fact remembered only by nautical fanatics, shipping enthusiasts, Koenig Pasha and Hani.
“Look!” The girl practically screamed the word.
“Hani!” Madame Syria was torn between outrage and undisguised fear that the governor’s niece might tumble over the edge to the marble floor far below.
“Look,” insisted Hani.
The chief librarian did what she was told, impressed despite herself. She’d only seen the SS Jannah once before, as a girl, when the trimaran from Iskandryia to Syracuse had throttled back to let its passengers watch as the great liner cruised by.
“We’ve got to tell Uncle Ashraf,” Hani shouted, already halfway down the first flight of stairs. “Really, we must . . .”
“Uncle . . .” No matter how often Madame Syria heard the child refer to the new governor of El Iskandryia by that name, it still seemed disrespectful. But then the child was his niece and a mesdame so . . .
Lady Hana bint-Abdullah al-Mansur, better known as Hani, hit the bottom of the stairs and grabbed the middle-aged woman by the hand, practically dragging her across the pink marble floor towards the exit.
“Paradise,” yelled Hani. “It’s almost here.” She’d shouted her message so often from the back of a calèche that her voice was now raw.
“What?”
“Paradise. The SS Jannah, ” said Hani, her face split in a grin. “It’s true. Go on, tell her,” Hani insisted, turning to Madame Syria. The librarian stared at Zara, then glanced over Zara’s shoulder to a study door opening beyond.
“Excellency,” she said hastily.
Ashraf Bey scowled. In the study behind him were St. Cloud, the Graf and Senator Liz, representing Paris, Berlin and Washington. All three had an opinion on the final sentencing of Effendi, all firmly held, all different. None of them wanted to give way on a single point. Everything, it seemed, but absolutely everything was a matter of principle.
Execution would play badly to the world’s press. So they wanted Raf to agree to life imprisonment at Ras el-Tin. And this was before a man had even been found guilty . . .
Hani slipped her hand from Madame Syria’s grasp, stepped politely but firmly around Zara, who was blocking her from Raf’s sight and stopped directly in front of her uncle.
“Solved it,” she told him, her voice little more than an intense whisper.
“Solved what?” Raf demanded.
“The riddle, obviously!” Hani’s face exploded into a grin, then that was gone, leaving Raf looking at a quiet, satisfied smile. This too vanished as Hani noticed something on the study table behind Raf.
“Baklava!” said Hani in a tone something between outrage and admiration. “You’ve got fresh baklava!” Without waiting to be invited, actually without appearing to notice Raf’s other guests at all, she slipped through the door and into his seat.
“Hani.”
Politeness said not to answer with her mouth full, so Hani waited.
“My niece,” Raf explained and watched three faces shift their attention from him to the small girl and back again.
“There’s a ship coming into harbour,” said Hani when her mouth was empty, which took a while because Hani ostentatiously chewed the mouthful thirty-two times, as her late Aunt Nafisa had instructed. “It’s the SS Jannah. ”
Tewfik Pasha had decided in advance what he intended to say and had prepared himself to overrule any objections. The talking box that Zara’s brother found in the bilges had proved invaluable on both counts. An atelier on board the SS Jannah had spent the previous twelve hours hand-stitching a second jacket to specifications so strict that the Khedive had rejected the first attempt as inadequate.
The coat was modelled on a jacket his father had worn when he married the Khedive’s mother, as seen on endless reruns of Lives of the Rich and Infamous. Cut from black silk and featuring minimal embellishment, the jacket’s only decoration had been a thin piping of gold around its high collar. Unfortunately, the current Khedive’s replica was both narrower across the shoulders and less tailored at the hips, although the atelier had worked hard to hide that fact.
At the suggestion of Colonel Abad, the Khedive had shaved away most of his beard, removing everything except the ghost of a goatee and the faintest trace of moustache. And, helped only by Avatar, he’d showered, dried himself and climbed into the immaculately sewn costume; because that’s what his new clothes were, a costume, the accretion of society’s ideas on how a Khedive should look.
On Tewfik Pasha’s head was a tarboosh. Over his heart was pinned a simple enamel-and-gold star. The order of the Imperial Crescent, first class. Even his choice of decoration carried a message. It was there to remind the waiting cameras that his ultimate allegiance (such as it was) went to Stambul.
And there would be cameras, dozens of them. That much was obvious from the myriad feeds he’d scanned as the SS Jannah steamed east towards El Iskandryia. A major city without electricity, without working computers, landlines, even cookers and cars. Its very nakedness drew the media like wasps to a honey trap. As the Khedive suspected his new governor intended it to . . .
Standing on deck with the injured Avatar slightly behind him, as protocol demanded, Mohammed Tewfik Pasha watched men the size of ants grab a stern rope and carry its giant loop to a waiting bollard. It took eight men to lift one rope and still they staggered under its weight.
When the rope was in place, a winch on the stern tightened, pulling the liner forward as a rope at the bow was loosened, removed from its bollard by another group of ants and carried forward, to be fixed around a bollard waiting up ahead. At which point the forward winch began to tighten. It was a laborious way to coax a liner along the edge of the Silsileh and perhaps there were easier ways to dock on Iskandryia’s great seawall, but this was the SS Jannah.
Stars, starlets and actual icons, whole galaxies of famous names were aboard. At least they were according to the Hello International. A panoply was the term they used. The reality was rather different. Late October/early November was definitely out of season and the constellation was confined to three minor genome-proteone heiresses, the elderly founder of LearningCurve GmB, two balding Bollywood lotharios, the Van der Bilt girl and him . . .