Once, just once, Avatar thought he might have seen his mother. Standing at the gates of St. Luke’s and staring intently through the ancient wrought-iron bars at neatly uniformed children who kicked a plastic football across melting tarmac or tried to dunk basketballs through a single hoop screwed to a classroom wall.
She looked old to him, but was probably not. A thin face peering from the folds of her heavy hijab. Her eyes had scanned the playground’s movement, seeking a point of silence. And the gaze she met was his. He was the one she watched, with a hunger so open it sent one of the sisters across the playground to find out who she was and what she wanted . . .
Avatar put a bullet through the head of a soldier standing guard outside the old bank vault. A single shot fired through the slightly open door. The Spetsnaz should have relocked the safe after sending the others through. Except she couldn’t, obviously enough, not with all the ship’s systems down.
In reply, Avatar took a slug through his left arm that ripped up muscle and exited at the back. Only Avatar was so cold he hardly felt the blow and was too busy killing the first guard’s partner to notice the blood that stained the canvas of his makeshift jacket.
Two left, maybe one. Up on deck, where Avatar needed to be.
His mother was gone by the time Avatar brought his thoughts back to the long-forgotten and dusty playground. Gone from his memory and from the tall gates before Sister Carlotta even made it across the sticky tarmac.
Up ahead were more stairs and sunlight.
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.