It took ninety minutes to reach the airstrip Shaikh Yassin had directed them to, but they picked up his security escort—two late-model, American-built sedans with impenetrable mirrored windows—within a kilometer of the border crossing. When they turned off the pavement and through the barb-wire-topped gate of the airstrip, they were stopped, searched, and bundled onto an unmarked helicopter. Osnat submitted to the whole process with an indifference that verged on boredom.
They were in the air for almost forty minutes. And with every moment that they flew through Palestinian airspace unchallenged, Arkady became incrementally more frightened of the man to whom Moshe had just entrusted him for a span of time and under conditions of treatment that had no limitations Arkady knew about.
The helicopter finally touched down on a makeshift landing pad in the middle of a weed-choked parking lot that looked big enough to accommodate every automobile still left on the planet.
“What is this place?” Arkady asked.
Osnat just pointed. Arkady followed her pointing finger and saw a rusted, dust-caked sign looming over the horizon like an artillery emplacement:
Arkady’s first thought when he saw the hotel itself was that it was a building that had been built in a more peaceful time. The near-transparent pavilion of glass and stucco had been replaced piecemeal by armored shutters and mirrored plexi-flex that reflected the world outside with that smeared, underwater quality that was a sure sign of bulletproofing.
Two vast beasts flanked the hotel’s main entrance. Winged hippocanths whose broad chests swept upward into enigmatic smiling faces framed by heavy stone ringlets that made them look, to Arkady, like the avenging angels of the Hasidim. One of the two statues was pitted with bullet and shrapnel scars. The other was in such pristine condition that Arkady wondered momentarily if it was a fake.
There was a sensor attached to the door. As Arkady stepped up to it the mirrored panel whispered sideways on hidden tracks and Arkady found himself face-to-face with Shaikh Yassin.
“You admire my sentries?” Yassin asked. “They come from Baghdad. Before people invented you, that’s what we used to think monsters looked like.”
The lobby was dominated by an immense fountain whose centerpiece was a massive limestone ziggurat rising from the middle of an eye-stingingly chlorinated reflecting pool. Water coursed from hidden spouts at the ziggurat’s summit. When the fountain was new the water must have run smoothly down the ziggurat’s steps, creating the illusion of a structure made entirely of water. But time had sloughed off the ziggurat’s limestone facing, exposing the rebar-reinforced concrete behind the luxurious veneer, and now the water rilled down the ruined, rust-streaked surface in a complex series of broken fractals.
Arkady looked at Osnat. She was transfixed by the water, staring at it with a slight curl to her lip that might have been disgust or incredulity or both.
Water is power,he remembered Korchow saying. On this planet water is the only power that matters.
Korchow had told Arkady that Yassin’s great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandfather had both attended Oxford University on Saudi oil revenues, at least according to Yassin’s version of the family history. But the myth of oil and Oxford was only kept alive to emphasize the family’s royal pedigree. The real Middle Eastern oil aristocracy had gone down in the general wreck of Earth’s industrial economy. The shaikh’s grandfather had made—or if the shaikh was to be believed, remade—the family fortune in a form of liquid gold more priceless and more fraught with political controversy than oil had ever been.
Arkady looked at the shaikh’s face, at the lines of cruelty carved into it beneath his smiling manner, at the subtle tics he was already learning to recognize as the signs of human privilege. He’d admired the man’s soft-spoken courtesy at the first bidding session, and had wondered several times since then if he ought to throw himself and Arkasha on Yassin’s mercy. But now he realized, with a certainty that went beyond reason or logic, that he could never entrust Arkasha’s safety to such a man.
“What are the limitations of this exercise?” Yassin asked Osnat, entirely innocent of the fact that he’d auditioned for, and failed to win, the role of Arkasha’s savior. “May I speak to Arkady alone, or are you required to provide some form of supervision?”
“Show him your wrist,” Osnat said.
Arkady lifted his left hand to display the biomonitor Osnat had strapped on before they left.
“You leave that on,” Osnat told him. “Other than that, you set the rules. And you have your privacy. I just go away and come back when you’re done with him.”
“That’s trusting of you.”
“Only if you mean that we trust you not to do something suicidally stupid.”
Yassin raised his carefully groomed eyebrows. “Yusuf,” he said, “would you mind showing the good captain to the kitchen? I’m sure we can find some sandwiches for her.”
He was speaking to a slim green-eyed boy dressed in civilian clothes. Arkady vaguely remembered the boy from the meeting at Abulafia Street, but he looked as unimpressive now as he had then. The young man hesitated as if he were about to argue with the order, but then slipped out of the room with Osnat behind him.
As soon as the pair was gone, Yassin gestured to one of the remaining guards, who stepped forward, seized Arkady’s sleeve, rolled it up above his elbow, jabbed a needle into him, and extracted a nauseatingly large quantity of blood into the same color-coded vials that littered half the Syndicate biotech labs Arkady had visited.
“Excuse our bad manners,” Yassin said, “but we wanted to get that over with. You understand, I’m sure. It won’t be necessary to mention it to anyone.”
“I feel dizzy. Can I sit down?”
“Oh, certainly.”
A chair was provided.
Arkady sat in it.
“Well,” Yassin said, “shall we begin?”
What followed was the strangest series of unconnected and apparently pointless questions Arkady had ever been asked in his life. No question was linked to any other in any logical way that Arkady could understand. And even when he grasped a question well enough to answer it sensibly, Yassin was as likely as not to cut him off in midanswer. If he hadn’t known better, he would have suspected that Yassin was deliberately trying to prevent him from relaying any useful or coherent information.
Yassin seemed to find the interrogation just as frustrating as Arkady did. The shaikh’s annoyance was reflected not in his own body, however, but in the increasingly threatening demeanor of his bodyguards. It was the first time Arkady had encountered this kind of complicated power by proxy. It was less impressive than Moshe’s personal ability to intimidate…but it was just as terrifying.
“My dear fellow,” Yassin said at last, interrupting Arkady’s fifth or sixth attempt to explain basic terraforming techniques, “do they have such things as schools where you come from?”
Arkady nodded.
“And do you happen to know where Iwent to school?”
Arkady shook his head. Yusuf, who had slipped back into the room, coughed.
“Al Ansar,” Yassin said. The name didn’t seem to have the anticipated effect on Arkady. “You’ve heard of it?” Yassin prompted. “Yes?”
“Uh…sorry.”
“It’s a prison camp. Run by the Zionists. I spent eight years there.” Yassin pinned Arkady under a stare intense enough to make him wonder what ants felt like when they were plucked up by entomologist’s pincers. “They tortured me. Can you tell?”