“You mean to kill me?”
Avatar took a deep breath. Every hour since Hani first called him up he’d spent riffing this moment. He’d done what a lifetime of street smarts suggested he do, which was introduce himself. Only now Avatar couldn’t remember in which order he was supposed to make his points.
“My father’s on trial . . .”
No, Avatar shook his head, that wasn’t where he was meant to start.
“My name is Kamil. My father’s name is Hamzah Quitrimala. I’ve come to . . .”
“How old are you?” demanded the voice.
“Old enough,” said Avatar.
“I had tank commanders younger than that.” The voice sounded almost regretful, as if the man speaking wished Avatar was less than his fourteen years. “Hell, by your age most of my tank commanders . . .”
“Were dead.” Relief cascaded over the boy as he realized that he’d done it right and found the Colonel; but all he said was, “Yeah, I heard.”
If silence could have shrugged, it did.
“Everybody dies,” said the Colonel. “Well, almost everybody.”
“You’re alive . . .”
“And so, it seems, is little Ka.”
“Ka?”
“Kamil. The boy who hated war so much he gunned down everyone who wanted to take part, including the whole of his own platoon, if you believe the reports. And officially I always make a point of believing official reports . . .”
“He actually killed all those people?”
Avatar lowered his revolver and shook off his rucksack. He felt sick, sick and empty, like someone had ripped open his stomach and taken his guts when he wasn’t looking. “I thought you were meant to be Dad’s alibi . . .”
“I think,” said Colonel Abad carefully, “you’ll find I’m meant to tell the truth.”
“You’ll do it?” Avatar sounded shocked. “You’ll stand up in court?”
The way Hani explained it, the SS Jannah functioned as an autonomous micronation. That was, so long as the liner stayed within international waters it ran to its own laws. So why would someone like Colonel Abad put himself in danger by offering to come ashore?
“You thought you’d have to kidnap me?” The Colonel’s voice was sour. “No chance. This is my Elba. You remember Napoleon needing to be forced off that island at gunpoint?”
Avatar didn’t remember anything about Napoleon at all. Zara was the one with the expensive education.
“You’ll find me on Dminus9, right at the bottom of the pit. You do know that the last and deepest circle of hell is ice-cold, don’t you? In the fourth round, Judecca. And the ninth circle, Cocytus. That’s the problem with being captured by someone with a classical education. They want to get all clever on your arse.”
As there wasn’t an answer to that, Avatar turned his attention to reaching the far end of the hangar, though now the Taurus was heavy in his combats pocket and most of his attention went on not tripping over the trip-wire pipes.
“How do I get through this?” Avatar asked, when he hit a steel wall thrown across the point of the liner. In it was a door, also steel, with three heavy, old-fashioned locks. Since this was the first door he’d seen on the entire level, apart from the one he’d used to get in, Avatar figured it had to be right.
“Try opening it . . .”
Avatar did, and the heavy door swung open in a cascade of metal dandruff as its hinges creaked and popped fat flakes of rust. A twist of riveted steps fed down to the coldness below and then kept on going to the level below that, bypassing the turbine rooms.
Old-fashioned switches waited for Avatar at every landing but the bulkhead lights were empty of bulbs, so he felt his way through the darkness, until the fingers following the icy rail ceased to be his and vanished into a dull ache.
The deeper Avatar went, the colder it became until every inward breath froze in his throat or plated the inside of his nostrils and every outward breath condensed at his lips. The cold had a physicality that was new to him. And with the cold came a tiredness and the need for sleep.
Heat he’d lived with all his life. It arrived with late spring, sometimes earlier if a khamsin hit, with its fifty days of hot dry wind, and trickled away into the end of autumn. With it came catlike lassitude and pointless quarrels. But this was more than heat’s opposite. Every twist of stair Avatar descended took him further inside himself, folding him into lethargy.
“What’s the temperature?” Avatar demanded.
“Cold,” said the voice. “Cold enough to shut down your core.”
“And you live in this?”
“It makes no difference to me,” the voice said. “And Saeed Koenig wanted to discourage sightseers.”
His teeth chattered uncontrollably and his feet were a memory beyond feeling. The black T-shirt and combats he’d put on that morning now seemed less of a fashion statement and more of an absentmindedly written suicide note.
“Where now?” Avatar asked, knowing he’d been followed on camera every step of his descent.
“Straight ahead. Use the door . . .”
Still cursing the lack of a flashlight, Avatar inched through the darkness until his outstretched hand found a handle, low down and on the right. He gripped it tight with shaking fingers and everything started to go wrong. Disbelief giving way to panic as he tried to yank free his hand and heard skin rip. What panicked Avatar wasn’t pain but its complete absence.
He was frozen fast to a subzero metal door handle.
“Piss on it,” said the Colonel.
Avatar ignored the comment and tugged again.
“Piss on it,” Colonel Abad ordered crossly, his voice echoing from two places at once. “Go on. Do it now.”
The man meant it, Avatar realized. Using his good hand, Avatar fumbled at the nylon zip of his combats.
“Now piss on the other hand. Get some warmth into those bones.”
Avatar did as Colonel Abad ordered, fastened his fly and stepped through to the Colonel’s quarters, fingers still dripping. He didn’t imagine the Colonel would want to shake hands.
The room was in darkness.
“Lights,” said the Colonel, and a strip lit overhead. What it revealed was an empty space like all the others Avatar had passed through; just smaller, narrower and less high. The walls, which curved on both sides, were blasted back to bare steel and riveted plate. Obviously enough, there were no portholes. Also no furniture, apart from a low metal table, and no cooking equipment. No sign of human habitation and no Colonel.
As jokes went, it was a bad one.
“How are your fingers?” asked a voice behind him. “I’ve just checked my libraries and you may need a skin graft, when we get ashore . . . If we get ashore, ” the voice amended, as if suddenly concerned not to push the bounds of accuracy.
Avatar looked round until he spotted a speaker, attached to the ceiling over in the corner of the room. It was so out-of-date that its grille was cloth, set into a case that looked like it might actually be wood. Soviet-made, from the look of things. “Where are you?”
“I’m the housekeeping routine on the table.”
“You’re what?” Avatar looked across to see a small radio wired into a feed socket on the wall. At first glance the radio looked to be covered with grey suede, but that was just dust fallen from the ceiling or carried in through a ventilation duct on the Arctic wind. Beside it, by themselves, stood an ugly-looking pair of spectacles.
“Yeah,” said the Colonel, “that’s me.” A CCTV camera on the wall swung slowly between Avatar and the table. It looked like nothing so much as a duck shaking its head. “Not what you expected, huh?”
Avatar shook his head in turn. “No, it’s not.” All the same, he felt he needed to clarify the position. “You’re my dad’s boss? Colonel Abad?”
“‘But in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon. That is, destroyer. Angel of the abyss, he that brings God’s woes upon his enemies . . .’