Effendi

CHAPTER 55 30th October

The corridor was painted a drab institutional beige. Along its edges the dirty plastic floor tiles curled up to allow the floor to be sluiced clean. A relic from the bad old days when this wing had housed the insane, the incontinent and the politically inconvenient.

Three states that often went together.

At least they did under the Khedive’s grandfather, after military doctors had finished their various forms of rehabilitation.

Raf moved quietly along its length, doing his best not to blink at the brightness bleeding in through windows opaque with grime. He wore no dark glasses and even five years’ worth of dust and spiderwebs was not enough to soften the light.

Hakim and Ahmed he’d left hanging in the Athinos café opposite the hospital’s front steps. Not very willingly Raf had to admit, but he’d overruled them with alarming casualness before making his way unannounced into the ugly concrete building. Along with the two guards, he’d left Eduardo, who was still in shock at discovering that “the man,” as he insisted on calling Raf, was governor of Iskandryia.

The façade of the Imperial Free had a preservation order on it, as did all the buildings that fronted the Western Harbour. The view from the sea was so famous that, years back, Koenig Pasha had decreed the skyline could not be changed.

When Raf had first arrived, the security guard inside the main door was watching Ferdie Abdullah, his eyes glued to a public screen, like somebody recently denied one of life’s basic necessities. If he noticed the scowling young man with the flowers and Dynamo cap, he thought no more about it.

Raf had returned the nod of a passing porter who was vaguely aware of having seen the visitor somewhere before, probably the last time the Dynamo fan came to see whoever he came to see. His fiancée from the size of that bouquet. No sane man would waste so much money on his wife.

Reaching the lifts, Raf had punched a button at random. He got out at obstetrics and took a different lift down two floors, got out again and used the emergency stairs to climb back past obstetrics to the deserted wards above. From there he walked the length of a corridor, until it ended at a large window.

Defenestration.

An ornate word for an ugly threat; but there were less messy ways to achieve what Raf wanted . . . Pulling a tiny voice recorder out of his pocket, he checked that it was fully charged and working, then slipped it back into the battered leather jacket he’d borrowed from Eduardo.

Raf didn’t really need to check the machine, since the Braun was brand-new and came from a boutique on the SS Jannah. He was just putting off what came next. And he already had the key code for the door in front of him. He’d got that from Hakim, who’d been guarding the impromptu prison cell when he got Raf’s order to meet him in the loading bay behind Athinos.

And since the consultant had already made his rounds for the day and, other than Professor Mahrouf, only Ahmed and Hakim had authority to enter the cell, it was Hakim or Ahmed that the Soviet girl expected.

“Hi,” said Raf.

Her cell was small. The walls padded with cotton waste under hard canvas. There was one slit window, high up and barred. At its edges the floor had those sluice-friendly tiles that curved up under the padding on the wall. It was, in every way, as bleak as Raf had expected.

“I said Hi. . .”

She made no reply, just sat there in the orthopaedic chair, her legs wrapped in lightweight casts, her right wrist handcuffed to the chair’s frame. An empty bedpan rested on the floor just out of reach and Raf caught the glance that said she wanted to ask him to hand it to her and leave.

She didn’t ask. Which was just as well. She’d been left like that for an hour because that was how Raf had told Hakim to play it.

“Just checking,” said Raf. He took a chart from the end of her bed and switched it on. Silk scaffolds shielded her broken, load-bearing bones. They were seeded with cells designed to deposit calcium and produce messenger RNA for pro/C, a precursor of the collagen found in bones. Also sourced from the SS Jannah, undoubtedly.

“Nothing but the best,” Raf said. “But even with all that scaffolding, it won’t be hard for me to smash them again, if that’s what it takes.” He sat himself down on a bed next to the girl’s chair, waiting for fear to happen.

It said a lot for her training that no panic reached her pale blue eyes. Instead her broad face fell into a mask of resignation, as if she’d expected no less—and she hadn’t. All Soviet Spetsnaz rangers were instilled with a belief so absolute that the only thing awaiting them after capture was torture and death that it was practically hardwired.

“I’ve been told you speak English and Arabic,” Raf said as he took a notebook from the inside of Eduardo’s scuffed jacket. He’d been told nothing of the sort. A full-face search of Iskandryia’s intelligence database came up with as little as his somewhat illegal DNA trawl through the records of the Red Cross. The girl in front of him had never before been captured or treated on a field of battle, come to that.

What interested Raf was that Commissar Zukov expressed so little interest in the prisoners. And the Khedive had given Zukov a chance to comment, both on and off the record. All Zukov said was, “Not ours.”

Raf still needed to work out if that translated as “Never ours,” or “Not ours now you’ve got them . . .”

All the same, the girl understood some English. Enough for her brain to ignite verbal-recognition patterns during a CAT scan. The two orderlies who’d chatted indiscreetly were plainclothes. The white-coated radiologist was actually a police doctor. That, of course, had happened late last night and in a different ward.

“We could always do this the simple way,” suggested Raf.

The blonde girl just scowled, anger creating mental defences as she prepared herself to sever her mind from the pain awaiting her body. The separation never lasted, but everyone knew that occasionally people got lucky and died before their wandering mind got dragged back to hell.

“Maybe not.” Raf pulled out a snub-nosed Colt, also borrowed from Eduardo, and extracted an extra pair of old-fashioned metal cuffs from his coat pocket, flipping free one end. The Colt he put to the girl’s head and the cuffs Raf flicked round the girl’s free wrist, the left one, with a satisfyingly smooth flip. As manoeuvres went it was extremely professional, which was lucky. She was meant to think he did this all the time.

Snapping the cuff’s other end to the bed’s frame, Raf unlocked her right wrist, stood the girl up and dragged her round to the mattress, his gun still at her head.

“On you go.”

With her left hand newly secured, the only way she could do that was lie facedown. Securing her right wrist to the right side of the bed, Raf stood back. Then he yanked her ankles into position and fixed these with plastic strip cuffs.

Somehow, she still looked too comfortable.

So he took the pillows and when that didn’t seem enough, pulled the sheet from under her, stripping the bed down to its striped mattress. After that, taking her hospital gown seemed obvious, so he ripped it in two from the bottom up and left himself with remnants still attached to her arms.

It was only when Raf pulled a gravity special and let drop the blade that he saw the girl tense. She was, he realized, watching him in a mirror across the room. Pretending not to notice, Raf slashed away the arms of her gown, leaving her naked except for two lightweight leg casts that looked disconcertingly like ankle warmers.

“Want to do this the easy way?”

Not a flicker of response.

With a sigh, Raf dipped into his pocket and pulled out a metal bar the size of a small torch. It was slightly pointed at one end, while at the other, a sheath of slightly sticky clear plastic formed an easy-to-grip handle.

“You know what this is?”

She did. Every combat troop in the so-called civilized world could recognize a shock baton. They were the negotiators of choice for police forces across the world, not to mention for criminal elements from Seattle to Tokyo, combining all the advantages of maximum pain with minimal tissue damage. Batons didn’t leave the kind of scarring that ended up on Amnesty posters, which was one undoubted reason for their popularity.

“I’m sorry,” said Raf, folding his fingers into a half fist, “but there’s something I need you to tell me. And I need you to tell me it now.” His rabbit punch caught her in the kidney and urine darkened the bare mattress as her bladder emptied. “It’s kind of urgent.”

Walking to the head of the bed, Raf crouched down until he could see her face. Furious eyes challenged him, then he was wiping spittle from his cheek.

“Fuck it.” Raf stood up and wiped his face.

Instead of using the baton, Raf took his gravity knife and scratched a cross potent into her naked back, slicing just deep enough to draw blood. Then he stuffed a tissue into her mouth, gagged her with the cord from her gown and put the small recorder down on the windowsill. The time had come for Raf to go next door.

“Gregori,” said Raf.

Now, the small man stripped naked in the corner had been treated on a field of battle. At Fort Archambanlt to be precise, fifteen years before, on the Shari river in the southern wastelands of Tripoli. The name he’d given was Captain Gregori the Profligate, and a footnote still solemnly recorded a triage nurse’s expert opinion that this was false.

What was much more interesting for Raf was that Gregori’s DNA showed significant points of similarity to the blonde girl. Not enough points for him to be her father, but quite enough for him to be an uncle or cousin. Which fitted neatly with the Soviet habit of conscripting whole families, then keeping them together because the bonds that tied them were already imprinted.

The other interesting fact was that Gregori had surrendered voluntarily, not because he’d been wounded and unable to continue or brought to a halt by lack of ammunition. He’d taken one look at Avatar and put down his own gun seconds ahead of putting up both hands. Since Spetsnaz rangers didn’t surrender, there was a meaning here that Raf wanted unravelled.

“You,” said Raf, “on your feet.”

The naked man did what Raf expected him to do, which was stay slumped where he was.

“Up,” Raf insisted, producing Eduardo’s gun. When Gregori still didn’t move, Raf grabbed a handful of hair and yanked the man to his feet. A hood was needed and Raf had forgotten to bring one, so he stripped the case from a hospital pillow and used that instead, knotting its bottom tight round the man’s throat.

Outside in the corridor, Raf spun Gregori in a circle, bounced him off a peeling wall, then spun him in the opposite direction. The man was still staggering when Raf pushed him through the door of the blonde girl’s cell and untied the hood.

His partner lay naked and gagged on the bed, facedown on a urine-blackened mattress, with blood running from a cross potent cut into her back. On the floor lay a discarded shock baton. If Raf had been Gregori, he’d have tried to attack Raf too.

A kick to the knee took Gregori to the floor, his fall unbroken because his arms were cuffed. Raf kicked him again for good measure, but Raf’s snarl was not matched by the severity of the kick. He wanted Gregori scared, not injured.

“Who paid you?”

The man didn’t even turn his head. Just lay on the floor, curled into a tight ball, not the action of a Spetsnaz officer with Gregori’s experience.

“Look,” said Raf, kicking him slightly, “we already know you weren’t acting on orders. So what we need is information on who instigated this attack.” He bent down and dragged the man to his knees. “And it’s information we intend to get.”

Raf walked over to the discarded baton and picked it up; Gregori’s anxiety only really kicked in when Raf kept going towards the bed.

“Who,” said Raf, “was behind the attack?”

He switched on the baton.

Gregori said nothing so Raf turned to the girl and put the live baton to her spine. The gag blocked her scream, but she still bucked in agony as muscles in her back locked solid. In the quivering aftershock, she pissed herself again. The baton had touched her spine for less than a second.

Raf breathed out, opened his eyes and turned back to the man.

“That’s just a taste,” he told Gregori. “Now we bring in the expert.” Toggling his watch to visual, Raf put a call through to Eduardo. “Dr. Lee? We’re ready for you . . .”

The white coat came from a medical supply shop, as did the stethoscope Raf had given him earlier. And Eduardo extracted the coat from its carrier bag and hung the stethoscope round his neck only when he’d reached the corridor and was certain no one else could see him. He’d been assured by Raf that all CCTV cameras were still faulty, courtesy of Hakim’s earlier word with the Imperial Free’s security manager. Eduardo just hoped this was true. In case it wasn’t, and because it looked cool, he was wearing shades. Copies of the pair usually worn by Raf.

“Excell . . .” He saw the frown on Raf’s face and swallowed the rest of his word. “I’m here,” he added, redundantly.

“Everything she knows,” said Raf. “I want the lot.” He made to pass the shock baton to Eduardo, who shook his head.

“I always use my own.” Eduardo pulled a battered rod from his pocket, wrapped around with duct tape. “It gives greater control.” Both Raf’s and Eduardo’s batons came out of stores at Champollion Precinct and Raf had made Eduardo practice this little exchange until he was word perfect, but Eduardo was still pleased with himself. Raf had explained twice that getting it right was very important.

What they had to do was trick the man.

“It won’t take long,” said Eduardo, pulling a tube of lubricant from his coat pocket.

Dragging Gregori to his feet, Raf reached for his makeshift hood and began to pull it over the man’s head. The last thing Gregori saw before a pillowcase closed off his world was Eduardo leaning over the facedown girl, rubbing KY between her buttocks.

The screams began before Raf even had time to spin Gregori round or bounce him off a wall. He did the spinning anyway.

Raf kicked Gregori’s door shut with one heel, half–closing off an animal howl that began low and ran the whole register before ending in juddering sobs. Even through the tightness of a gag, it was possible to hear the utter anguish of the person being tortured.

“You can stop this,” said Raf, pulling off Gregori’s hood, “anytime you want to . . .

“Okay, your choice.”

Raf muttered into his watch and the next scream was longer, shuddering to a close in a muffled plea, spoken in no language understood by either of them, in all probability, no language that was human.

“She won’t die,” said Raf, “just wish she could.”

He pulled a sheet of paper from his borrowed jacket and skimmed it. At the top, a blue-and-yellow globe nestled within two curving sheaves of corn. Between the tips of the corn hung a red star. And beneath the globe rose a yellow sun, rising from the base of the two sheaves, which was bound round with red ribbon.

“Commissar Zukov states categorically that you were not involved in work for the Soviet Union, but you knew that didn’t you . . .” Raf shrugged and skimmed the sheet. “The Soviet Union disowns your actions.”

Gregori looked at him.

“You want to talk to me about that?”

The man didn’t.

With a sigh, Raf muttered more words and the howls began again, animal-like and anguished, each one running into another until the very magnitude of the pain became unimaginable.

“Your choice,” Raf repeated. “Your choice . . .”

Gregori held out for another ten minutes, during which he chewed the edge of his lip to ribbons. And then he caved, eyes blind with tears as he pushed himself to his feet and lurched towards where Raf sat on a dusty wooden chair.

“Whatever you need,” Gregori said desperately. “Just stop your doctor.”

“Enough,” said Raf into his watch. The screams stopped dead. “You want to go see her?”

Gregori shook his head. “Later,” he said. “When the shock goes. She won’t be able to talk properly until then.” He looked, at that moment, as if he spoke from experience. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” said Raf, except that he already did. The man and girl were there to confirm something. All the same, Raf let Gregori describe how Spetsnaz were hired out to the highest bidder for any currency harder than roubles. There were rules to guarantee no military action was counterrevolutionary but, in practice, any job could be made to fit.

Gregori’s bitterness was unmistakable.

“You recognize her?” Raf pulled a photograph from his jacket. It showed the suit he’d left on the floor of the deserted house in Moharrem Bey. The technicians had done a good job with lighting, makeup and postproduction. The woman looked only slightly dead.

“Yes . . . She died.”

“I know,” Raf said. “I killed her . . . Thiergarten, right?”

Gregori nodded.

“Who both hired you and had tourists butchered to order . . . No,” Raf held up his hand when Gregori opened his mouth, “that wasn’t a question.”

The Soviet shrugged.

“So,” said Raf, “who involved the Thiergarten? That was a question,” he added.

“I don’t know.”

Raf had already figured this out for himself.

“What happens now?” the Spetsnaz asked. “To me and Nadia.”

“Your cousin?”

“My niece. My brother’s child.”

“Sanctuary,” said Raf. “Asylum. New identities if that’s what it takes. Help us and we will help her.”

Gregori smiled grimly. “It takes time to recover from something like that.” He jerked his head towards the silent wall. “And sometimes people never do, but you already know this, don’t you?”

“Maybe,” said Raf, “it will take much less time than you think. Now . . .” He pulled a final photograph from his jacket. “Tell me if you’ve ever seen this man.”

Eduardo looked at Raf’s outstretched hand, clicked the relevant bit of his brain into gear and shook it. And kept shaking until Raf patiently prised free his own fingers.

“Excellency.” Eduardo’s smile was shaky. His eyes still tearful. All he’d had to do was click on a voice recorder when Raf said turn it on and click it off when Raf said do that; but the ancient recording of a Moslem girl being tortured kept repeating in his head.

“One of the best,” Raf said to Hakim, as Eduardo turned away. “One of the best.”

Hakim looked doubtful.

“I mean it,” said Raf, and watched Eduardo shuffle away from Café Athinos, dodging traffic until he finally reached his ancient Vespa, which was parked up next to the Corniche wall. It took Eduardo five goes to kick-start the machine.

The man cost Champollion less than the precinct paid out each week for fresh coffee and still counted himself lucky.

“Guard the hospital,” said Raf to the two men remaining, well aware that Hakim and Ahmed were really meant to guard him. By giving them other duties he freed himself up; they both knew that and were powerless to do anything about it. And besides, governors of Iskandryia were supposed to be impossible to work for, it went with the job description. “Find the prisoners proper clothes,” he added as an afterthought, “and get a doctor in to see to the girl’s back.”

Raf caught the look in Hakim’s eye. No matter what had really happened, an enhanced version would be round the precinct within minutes. His officers could be relied on to guarantee that his reputation lived up to its reputation.

“She’ll live,” said Raf as he slipped on his shades and collected his own jacket from the back of Ahmed’s café chair.

There were at least fifteen other cars on the road, now that the curfew had been lifted. They were old, battered and driven by grinning men who waved to friends and sometimes complete strangers. It was an irony of the EMP blasts that those whose vehicles were oldest were those least affected.

Garages were still shut but the electricity was back in a third of the city and standpipes were already being removed from at least one arrondissement, which now had water. Shops were reopening. All of the newsfeeds had miraculously been restored. Foreign reporters were busy doing talking heads about how El Iskandryia was slowly getting back on its feet.

On his way out of the city, Raf halted the Bentley beside an overflowing irrigation ditch and tossed in the tiny recorder. The woman on it had died long before he was born; and although the recording, smuggled at great risk from a cellar in Kosovo, had not been allowed as evidence at a later trial, a copy of the recording had found its way to Amnesty. Their “democracy in action” radio advertisement was judged political and banned in twenty-four of the twenty-six countries in which it was due to run.

“What now?”

“His Excellency Ashraf al-Mansur . . .” St. Cloud’s majordomo was careful not to look at his master. Not seeing things he shouldn’t see formed a substantial part of his duties. “He demands admittance.” The small Scot spoke the word with such relish that the Marquis looked up and almost blew his carefully constructed, syncopated rhythm.

Luckily the object of his interest kept moving, eyes fixed into the far distance. Drugs, familiarity or fear had emptied the adolescent’s smooth face of anything except boredom and an instinct for absolute obedience.

“Show him in.”

“Sir?”

“Show in al-Mansur.”

The majordomo bowed and withdrew, walking backward from the chamber.

“The Marquis will see you now.” He gestured politely towards a large door and the unacceptability of what lay beyond. “You may find him . . .” The majordomo hesitated. “A little distracted.”

Raf entered without knocking. Unlike the tiled, fountained and pillared Moorish fantasy that was Dar St. Cloud, the Marquis’ villa overlooking Cap Bon in Tunisia, the drawing room of his house at Aboukir could have been transported wholesale from Paris.

Gérard’s Cupid and Psyche hung in pride of place on the far wall. An adolescent Cupid chastely kissing the brow of a blonde girl who stared wide-eyed straight at the door where Raf stood, her hands folded neatly below naked breasts. A Vulcan Surprising Venus and Mars hung beside it, a huge canvas edged in heavy gilt, with the frame so massive that it almost touched both ceiling and floor. And on other walls, endless young nymphs gazed innocent-eyed at lean shepherd boys, oblivious to their own seminakedness.

A Napoleon III sideboard was positioned directly beneath the Gérard, its top a single slab of horsehair marble cut from a quarry outside Milan. Along the top were ranged naked glass figures, mostly Lalique, and two decanters.

“Pour yourself a small drink.” The Marquis spoke without looking up or releasing the figure still sitting on his lap (what with the shaved skull and baggy shirt, it was impossible to tell if St. Cloud’s companion was male or female). “This won’t take long.”

“It might,” said Raf, “if we’re going to cover who had Kamil Quitrimala kidnapped, why three tourists were butchered to order, a casino burned and the pipeline to a refinery cut. And that’s before we . . .”

“Out,” said St. Cloud crossly. And the adolescent to whom he spoke disappeared in a flurry of coltlike legs and a flash of thin buttocks. The oversized shirt was St. Cloud’s own, Raf realized; its use a badge of ownership or fondness received, perhaps both.

“Gang warfare for the casino and kidnapping . . . Psychopaths for the murders, variously dead, I believe. And I assume the Sword of God was behind the refinery, just as it was behind those outrageous EMP bombs.” The Marquis gave a smile.

“You assume wrong.”

St. Cloud looked at him.

“What,” said Raf, “do you know about the Osmanli Accord?”

“Less than nothing.” St. Cloud’s voice was firm. “I never bother myself with politics.”

“So it would shock you to discover that, behind the scenes, Berlin needs French agreement to retain its spheres of influence . . . As does Moscow?”

The Marquis snorted. “The idea that Berlin would ask anything of Paris is as unbelievable as . . .”

“The idea that someone French might demand a price of Berlin,” Raf said smoothly. “Well, while you’re at it, imagine that breaking Hamzah was the only result to matter in our little local crisis.”

“Hamzah Effendi?” St. Cloud shook his head. “Surely not . . .”

Raf nodded. “Imagine everything else was just so much means to an end. So the question I have to ask is, Who would want to damage Hamzah?”

“Who indeed . . .” said St. Cloud. “I suspect we’ll never know. Always assuming there was somebody.” He stood up from his elegant Louis XVIII chair, casually slipped himself back inside his trousers and made for the sideboard.

“Are you sure . . . ?” His hand hovered above a brandy balloon.

“Absolutely,” said Raf. “Beyond doubt.”

“Your choice . . .”

St. Cloud poured himself a generous measure of Courvoisier and swilled it round the balloon, bending close to inhale the heavy fumes. “Of course,” he added as an apparent afterthought, “even if this were all true . . . It doesn’t change the fact that Hamzah is guilty as hell. And there’s always the future ownership of that refinery to consider . . .”

“Plus the Midas oil fields in central Sudan and certain Mediterranean offshore sites.”

“Quite,” said St. Cloud. “Now, should a senior official find himself in a position to facilitate the transfer of Hamzah’s part of those holdings . . . After they’ve been legally forfeited by Hamzah, obviously. Then any country intent on consolidating its interests would undoubtedly be very generous.”

“Generous?”

“A commission is usual in these cases.”

“Five percent?”

St. Cloud looked shocked. “One or two. Three at the absolute maximum.”

“And what would three percent come to?”

The Marquis told him.

Raf decided to take that drink after all.