Gavril and the others were in the little room where they held conferences. They looked up with surprise when Ethan and Sarah came in, but no one said anything.
Gavril looked up as they entered.
‘Ethan. Sarah. Come in and sit down. I have some news for you.’
They took their places in silence. It could only be bad news, Ethan thought. What other sort had there been recently?
‘We’ve just been talking about this,’ Gavril said. ‘The news was waiting for us when we got back from weapons training. Aehrenthal has someone in England. They went to Woodmancote Hall and found your grandfather’s journal. They have the coordinates too. Aehrenthal is in Libya even as we speak.’
25
Oea
Getting into Libya was one thing. Getting a permit to go exploring in the deep desert was something else. Sarah carried the fake passport that had been organised for her by Lindita. The three of them travelled with a group of six monks. No one wore clerical garb. They brought with them a sheaf of false documentation in the name of the Centrul de Istorie Comparata a Societatilor Antice, the Centre for Comparative History and Ancient Society, based in the history faculty of Bucharest University. The telephone number, fax number, and email address all led to an office in Piatra Neamt, where they would be answered by operators well-versed in the background and likely plans of the expedition members.
If getting to Ain Suleiman was hard, harder still was it to get hold of weapons. Gavril knew Aehrenthal’s capabilities and knew he would not travel without guns. It was highly likely the two teams would meet at some point, quite probably at Ain Suleiman, should they get there. If fighting broke out, they had to be prepared.
One day Gavril asked Ethan to step outside the hotel they were staying in. They were staying in the capital, Tripoli, the ancient Oea.
As he stepped out, Ethan looked back and saw Sarah sitting by a downstairs window, gazing out at the street. A sand devil, come from God knows where after days without rain, danced teasingly in front of her, then went off spinning for a while among the traffic. She did not seem to notice it. If there were dervishes, they were in her brain, whirling like atoms in fancy dress. From a loudspeaker in the hotel came a burst of Arab music, bewildering and passionate, its plangent melody caught and given strength by the tap-tapping of a small drum.
‘We need to slip away,’ said Gavril. ‘This is still a dictatorship. There are eyes everywhere, and they like to follow foreigners. Come this way. And try not to look as though you’re doing anything suspicious.’
They walked away from the harbour, across to the entrance to the Old City, the Medina. Father Gavril — who wore jeans and a black leather jacket — had already visited this surviving district of the pre-Italian period, filled with winding suqs, artisan workshops, mosques and Qur’an schools. Ethan thought of his grandfather. Had he wandered down these same alleyways, bought bread at these bakers, passed these brightly painted doorways? It all seemed timeless, but for the plates in souvenir shops bearing portraits of Mu’ammar al-Qadhdhafi, or the tubes of Crest toothpaste.
Gavril guided them to an old cafe opposite the Ottoman Clock Tower. A boy offered to shine their shoes for one dinar each. No sooner had they sat down than the boy got to work, applying liquid polish and spit before stropping and buffing as though his life depended on the brightness of the shine he could raise.
At other tables, old men played backgammon, their fingers fluid as they moved the counters with bewildering speed back and forwards over antiquated boards. From time to time they would pause to smoke their shisha pipes, inhaling fragrant smoke.
Gavril ordered mint tea, a concoction of green tea in a silver pot stuffed to the brim with mint leaves and sugar. It was sweet beyond measure, but deeply refreshing. With the tea came a plate of baklava.
‘Not a great place for diabetics,’ declared Ethan.
Gavril nodded and took a sip of the hot tea.
‘Ethan,’ he said, ‘I need your help. I don’t mean you haven’t been the greatest help already. But this is…different.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I’ve told you before that we need weapons. All my people are well trained in firearms, and knowing what we do of Aehrenthal, and knowing we could well bump into him, I don’t want us to be unarmed.’
‘But you can’t just walk up to the nearest gun shop in Tripoli and come away with a little arsenal. Don’t worry, I had to leave my gun behind at the airport as well, and I feel as naked as you do. How can I help?’
The shoeshine boy finished Ethan’s feet. Ethan looked down and, to his surprise, he found himself gazing into a mirror. He parted with his dinar and thanked the boy, using one of his newly acquired Arabic phrases. The boy pocketed the money and moved on to Gavril’s shoes.
‘There’s something only you can do, Ethan. I don’t know how it will work, or whether you can pull it off, but I don’t think we have any choice.
‘There’s a small office here in the Suq al-Mushir. It’s manned by three of your compatriots, two kids of about nineteen and one older man, maybe your age. The organisation they work for is a charity registered in the UK. It’s called We Are Palestine, and its stated aim is the collection and distribution of money for various building projects in Gaza and the West Bank. In fact, very little of the money they collect reaches either place, at least, not in the form of building materials.
‘We Are Palestine is a Hamas-backed front organisation whose real purpose is to buy and smuggle arms across the Egyptian border into the Gaza Strip and, by a more circuitous route, the West Bank. The border police couldn’t give a damn what goes through, and Gaza is controlled by Hamas, so it isn’t hard getting material through.’
The shoeshine boy halted and held out his hand. Gavril smiled and handed him twice the agreed amount. The boy grinned and went off in search of more customers.
‘I’m a man of God,’ Gavril said, ‘or, at least, I’m supposed to be. Yet here I sit, talking about weapons while this poor child scrapes a living polishing my shoes.’
‘How do you know all this?’ Ethan asked. The tea was warming him inside. Though this was the Mediterranean, the weather was chilly.
‘I’ve been preparing for this for a long time,’ he said. ‘We’ve long known that tackling Aehrenthal would involve weaponry, so we’ve made provisional arrangements for several parts of the Middle East and North Africa. I want you to go to WAP’s office and offer them a lot of money. We’ll give you a cover story. Say there will be a lot more in future, but explain that you need some guns immediately, that you want to hit an Israeli target in southern Egypt.’
‘And you think they’ll give me the guns just like that?’
Gavril poured more tea into his glass and drank it all in one gulp. Opposite, people had started to head for a little mosque.
‘We’ll give you money. Some things endure in this world, and greed is one of them. Whether they really love the Palestinians or are just getting off on being out here on the cutting edge of left-wing activism, the money will get them moving. There are so many weapons passing from hand to hand round here, they won’t mind handing a few on to you.’
WAP’s office consisted of two dingy rooms at the rear of a flyblown Ottoman-era building that clung on like a ghost at the end of a long alleyway studded with firmly closed doors. Its wrought-iron window grilles and intricately carved doorway had seen better days. It had served as the city’s largest Qur’an school under the Karamanlis, then as a brothel for European women brought to these shores by Barbary pirates under the Ottomans, then as a halfway house for Sicilian peasants newly arrived in the quarta sponda during the Italian occupation, and finally as a trade union reserve office under Qadhdhafi’s Jamahariya.