Everybody did something well, that’s what the fox used to insist when Raf was small. It was just that some people took longer than others to discover their real talent. And this, it turned out was his . . . Not caring about the doing until the doing was over. Of course, given his guarantee, Raf probably shouldn’t have cared at all.
Blood had strung a necklace round the throat of the driver, although Raf was the only person in the cellar who could see the dark pearls. And the wire was too tight to be clearly visible even to him.
“Slip off your jacket,” Raf told the woman, “then step away from it.” He waited while she shrugged off her dark coat and put it carefully on the damp tiles, folding it first. Did that signify strength or weakness? The fox would have known.
She was thin; dressed in a white silk blouse, thick black belt and a knee-length skirt that matched the folded jacket. As upscale and anonymous as the guards had been obvious and down-market.
“Turn around.”
Tucked into a small holster on the back of her belt was a tiny Colt. The almost invisible bulge on her thigh was undoubtedly something predictable like a derringer or throwing knife.
“Disarm,” Raf said simply.
The Colt she placed carefully on the floor. The bump remained where it was, which was her choice. Stupid, of course, but still her choice.
“This is where you tell me who you are,” said Raf.
The shake of the woman’s head was so slight as to be almost subliminal.
“The alternative,” said Raf, yanking the garrotte, “is that I finish strangling your driver.”
“Poor driver,” was all she said. And as the big man lurched in panic at the tightening of the wire, the woman dipped one hand towards her thigh, sliding back raw silk to reveal a razor-edged blade.
Now.
Without thought, without prior intention, Raf dropped the borrowed garrotte and reached up and back, his fingers folding around the handle of his own blade, which tumbled rapidly through the darkness; the woman’s right eye emptying onto her cheek like broken egg as vitreous humour slid down tight skin.
Stepping into her scream, Raf slammed palm against hilt and drove the knife through the woman’s parietal lobe and into her cerebellum. Somewhere in that sequence the woman’s brain stem got sliced and she stopped being strictly human. Though the whimpering only stopped when Raf put thumb and first finger either side of her throat and squeezed.
He was in the process of lowering her to the ground when a mobile rang. Raf found it in the inside pocket of the woman’s discarded jacket. The little phone was clumsier than he’d expected from someone of her erstwhile elegance.
“Na’am?”
Raf listened for a few seconds and shook his head.
“No,” he said, slightly breathless. “Fraulein Lubeck can’t come to the phone. Yes, I’ll ask her to call you back . . .” He listened hard. “No,” he said finally, “I’m sure she’s never heard of someone called Ashraf Bey.”
CHAPTER 17
Sudan
Each Seraphim 4 × 4 had a blade at the front designed to dig into dunes and turn over sand, which is what they did. Within minutes the dead were ploughed under, enemy trucks torched and camera crews invited in.
Trucks burning weren’t exactly hot news but new shots still got added to stale ones. And trustworthy faces in pale suits stood under the blistering sun and reassured the doubtful that after a bitter firefight rebel militia had been defeated with almost no loss of life to PaxForce.
“Zero loss of life . . .” corrected a voice in Ka’s ear.
“Then why say almost?”
“What?” Sarah glanced round, then shrugged and turned her attention back to Saul. They were moored under an overhanging thorn that kept the afternoon at bay, while lapping water cooled their hiding place and tossed sunlight onto the underside of its spiky canopy.
Ka was ignoring all questions. He was getting good at that. Ignoring the others meant not facing questions he couldn’t answer.
“Well?” Ka asked the voice.
“No dead would mean an unfair fight. Strong against weak. A few dead equals luck, skill, better weapons . . . It’s about presentation.” The voice paused and, without having to ask, Ka suddenly found himself looking down on a thornbush rather than at a battlefield.
“Who are you?” the voice demanded.
Ka sighed. “You’ve asked me this already . . .”
“Humour me,” said the voice. It didn’t sound very humorous at all. “That’s a basic rule, okay?”
“Sergeant Ka,” said Ka. “We were part of the Army.”
“Were?”
Ka thought of the ploughs turning over sand and blinked as his p.o.v. changed. The 4¥4s were done now, even out at the edge of what had been Ka’s camp. Some trucks were even leaving, helmeted troops waving to a blonde woman who stood atop a dune, laden down with power pack and portable satellite dish.
Ka turned off the radio. “We can’t go back,” he told the others, as if that was an end to the argument.
“Oh yes we fucking can.” Saul’s voice was deeper than Ka’s own. His superior age showing in its gruffness and the ease with which he dropped swear words into his conversation. “We just turn this shitty boat around.”
“They’d flog us publicly,” Sarah reminded him. “Maybe shoot us.”
“Yeah.” Bec flicked her gaze from Sarah to Ka, then back again. “We’ll need an excuse.”
Lifting his shades, Ka stared at Bec. “We can’t go back,” he said slowly. “You know why we can’t go back? Because everyone’s dead.”
Mouths dropped open and Zac instantly flung his hands over his ears, as if to block out Ka’s lies. Both his sisters were in that camp, Ka realized; had been, rather . . .
“It was quick,” Ka insisted. “Instant,” he added hurriedly. “It was instant. A bomb made a small bang and everyone just fell over.”
“Yeah?” said Saul. “And how do you know . . . ?”
“I just do. Then the ’copters came and trucks full of soldiers.”
“Why did they send soldiers?” Bec asked. “If the bomb had already killed everyone?”
Ka didn’t have an answer to that.
“Because the bomb doesn’t exist,” said the voice in his ear. “That’s why . . . In a moment your radio is going to come on. Talk to it direct.”
My radio is switched off, Ka wanted to say, but the blue box was already noisily swooping hi-to-low at exactly sixty cycles a minute, like a miniature police siren.
“Sergeant Ka,” said the boy, holding the radio to his ear and feeling stupid.
“Lieutenant Ka,” corrected the voice. “As of now. Lieutenant Ka, Sergeant Sarah, Corporal Bec . . .”
“What about Saul and Zac?”
“Zac’s a baby. And Saul . . .”
Ka waited.
“He’s a spy, you understand?”