“How long?” Khalid gasped.
“It is now ten in the evening,” Ragaswami said in his high-pitched voice, studying the face of a cheap digital watch. “You have been here for more than five hours. It is most amazing that you are even awake right now. You are a very strong man, most assuredly. A lesser man would be unconscious until tomorrow at the earliest.”
Ragaswami would have continued, most assuredly, had Khalid not cut him off. “I need to make a call.”
“Oh, yes, I was just going to come to that. Your identification was lost before you were brought here. We have no way of contacting your family.”
The morphine was starting to kick in. Khalid felt the flames licking at his back subside, the fires slowly extinguishing.
“I have no family here,” Khalid muttered thickly, “but I have a friend, Trevor James-Price. He’s having dinner tonight at Les Ambassadeurs.”
It took a few minutes for Ragaswami to tell a duty nurse to track down James-Price, during which time he examined the superficial wounds that peppered Khalid’s back, mumbling to himself and once exclaiming proudly about the tightness of the stitches he’d laid.
“I’m sorry, but the restaurant didn’t have a reservation for a James-Price,” a haggard nurse said, poking her head into the doorway of Khalid’s room.
“Wait, it’s not his table.” Khalid played back his meeting with Trevor, remembering the woman with him. It didn’t seem as if they’d known each other long, and the dinner was her idea, not his. There was no way someone like Trevor could get a short-order reservation at Les A.
“The table is under Millicent—” He paused for nearly a minute, the morphine taking a stronger hold of his mind, blanking out not only the pain, but his entire consciousness as well. His world was turning… gray. “Millicent Gray, she got the reservation. Tell Trevor I need him.”
Five minutes later, Khalid was on the edge of blackness, a deep void that beckoned him in, one that he desperately wanted to enter but fought off like Saladin against the Crusaders at Ghalali. The nurse finally returned with a portable phone, holding it to the bed so Khalid could speak without moving and possibly tearing the stitches that ran in every direction across his back.
“I say, old fruit, this goes beyond the pale,” Trevor said somewhat sharply. “I thought we were meeting later tonight. It’s not often I get taken out by a bink like Millie.”
“Shut up, Trev,” Khalid moaned. “I’m in trouble.”
“What else is new? You bloody wogs are always in trouble. It’s the Koran, you know, all that jihad rot. It’s too violent by half and you’re all reared on it like it was a children’s story.”
“Trevor, will you shut up?” The drugs were making speech easier, but he was losing track of what he was saying. “I’m in a hospital with an Indian quack, most assuredly. I need you here. And I need your girlfriend too.”
“What are you talking about?” Concern cut through Trevor’s normal cavalier airs.
“I’ve been bloody shot, you ass. I need you to get me out of here. It hasn’t ended. It won’t ever end.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Khalid. Let me speak to the doctor.”
“No,” Khalid said. Ragaswami had left the room with the promise of returning in just a few moments. “Not tonight. I won’t be able to make it. Tomorrow morning you’ve got to come here and bring Millicent Gray. She’s tall enough.”
“What are you talking about, Khalid? Jesus, you’ve got me spooked. Are you all right?”
“They have me on drugs. I can’t talk for much longer.”
Khalid’s speech slurred as he drifted back into oblivion. “Tomorrow morning, I need you here with Mrs. Gray. Dress her in a chador, full veils. She must be covered from head to toe like a devout Muslim woman. Tell them she’s my wife. You understand?”
Trevor heard the desperation in Khalid’s voice. “Trust me, my friend, we’ll be there as soon as they let us. Christ, for you, I’ll wear the fucking veil.”
Khalid had slipped into a drug- and pain-induced unconsciousness. Had he been awake he would have heard those last few words and saved his friend’s life. As it was, he was out, the phone dropping to the floor so hard that the battery pack snapped out from its concealed cradle, cutting the connection as if Khalid had hung up the phone.
Back at Les Ambassadeurs, Trevor handed the phone back to the hovering waiter and turned to his libidinous hostess. “Do you remember my friend at the Savoy? Well, it seems he needs our help.”
“Don’t tell me he knows my husband is a member of Parliament?”
“My dear,” Trevor took one of her slim hands in his, pushing aside a plate of fine Scotch beef to get to what he really wanted. “Nothing so pedestrian. Tomorrow morning, you are going to be a harem master. And I shall be your harem.”
“I thought all members of a harem were virgins?”
“True, but after tonight I fear that you’ll have corrupted me.”
MV Hope
The heat coming from the central system had a dry, ozone tang that made the cabin smell like an electrical appliance that had just shorted. The antique system rattled every time it cycled water through the creaking pipes, popping so loudly that Aggie, already edgy, jumped when a pipe sounded off like a pistol shot. Outside the porthole, the late afternoon sun was hidden by layers of clouds and a wispy fog. Icy rain pelted the glass, driven by a stiff wind blasting down from the barren reaches of the Arctic Circle. According to the digital thermometer hanging near the cabin door, the outside temperature was twenty-eight degrees, but with the windchill it hovered in the midteens.
It was only the middle of October, and winter had already begun to grip the Land of the Midnight Sun.
The interior of the cabin was a comfortable seventy, but to Aggie it seemed much, much hotter. She’d just finished fifty sit-ups and was now lying on her back, her long legs held at a thirty-degree angle above the floor so that the rippled muscles of her stomach quivered. She’d been working out for two hours doing isometrics, aerobics, and step exercises, using a metal footlocker. She’d done two hundred advance lunges from her fencing lessons, each attack so focused she could almost feel an imaginary blade striking an opponent. Perspiration glossed her body and held her hair plastered to her head. Her sweat shorts and T-shirt clung like a second skin.
Getting up to begin her warm down, Aggie caught her reflection in a wall-mounted mirror. Used to seeing herself after exercising, she wasn’t much concerned with her hair or her clothes or the sweat that dripped from her chin. But her eyes… they still burned with a cold emerald fury. The hours of exercise hadn’t dimmed any of the anger that burned within her.
“Men,” she spat at her reflection.
She’d spent her entire life proving her independence, taking on challenges, facing them and more often than not vanquishing them with relative ease. Her master’s degree was her own, her sleek body, once gawky and angular, was the result of her own effort, her personality validated years of fighting the influences of her parents and their warped lives. She had earned the respect that was her due, paid for it with time and dedicated work. But in the past twenty-four hours she’d been treated as if she were just a piece of furniture, or maybe a pet.