“How long we got left?”
“About thirty minutes,” said Hani.
“There wasn’t another battery?”
“Dead.” The kid’s voice was resigned. So resigned that Avatar had trouble working out if Hani was seriously chilled or just having trouble getting her head round how bad things actually were.
When Hani had first called Avatar, she asked if he wanted her to fix a voice connection to Zara, so he could check what Hani said. He’d thought about it for all of a second and rejected the idea. He believed what she’d told him about how bad things were looking for his old man.
“There should be a door at the end of this corridor . . .”
“Locked,” said Avatar.
“How do you know?”
“I’m guessing.”
“Try it anyway.”
Sighing, Avatar crab-walked swiftly towards the heavy door, his back to the wall and the revolver he’d stolen from the Khedive’s cabin held upright, combat style.
Avatar was doing his very best not to rush things but there was an ache behind his eyes and a hollow in his gut where his stomach should be. Since he regularly went a week on two kebabs and three lines of sulphate, the hollowness had to be fear rather than hunger. Not a good feeling.
The door wasn’t just locked. Someone had welded it shut with a splatter gun. Cold drops of solder beading the edge of its frame like metal tears.
“They’re coming back!” Hani’s warning came seconds ahead of footsteps echoing along a corridor.
“Come on,” Hani said. “Hide . . .”
Avatar shook his head, then realized the kid wouldn’t pick up his gesture on her monitor. She’d be too busy watching the guards. “Which way are they headed?”
“Towards the lifts,” said Hani, her voice tight.
“Good.” Avatar meant the comment for himself, but the kid picked it up anyway from one of the wall mics or something equally scary. Avatar’s relationship with machines was confined to his mixing decks, and he liked those dumb and pliable.
“Avatar . . .”
“Yeah, okay, I can see them now.”
They were jiving between themselves, some joke about a v’ Actor on the third deck. Their laughter was not cruel, just barbed, the armour that those who lack wear against those who have. Except that in this case lack was relative. The crew aboard the SS Jannah earned more in a month than Avatar scratched together in a year.
Pulling back the hammer on his borrowed Taurus, Avatar muffled the click it made by folding his fingers over the top. Then he pressed himself back flat against the corridor wall, putting a fat downpipe between himself and the approaching pair.
They did what Avatar expected them to do, which was head straight past, still deep in conversation.
Very gently, Avatar touched his revolver to the side of the guard’s hair and watched irritation turn to fear, as the hand that flicked up to brush away whatever it was met the cold ceramic of Avatar’s weapon.
“Make a noise,” growled Avatar, “and say good-bye to your head.” The threat came out exactly as he’d imagined and Avatar felt unreasonably proud. It was, he hoped, exactly the kind of thing Raf might say.
“You . . .” The suit not suffering a gun to his head spun round and found himself face-to-face with a dreadlocked stowaway wearing a God Speeds T-shirt. It made the suit even more unhappy. “You won’t get . . .”
“I just did.” Avatar gestured towards the lift. “That way,” he said, herding them towards a waiting Orvis. “Now,” said Avatar when they were both safely inside, “how do I reach the floors below this?”
At this level the lifts didn’t thank you for travelling or hope you enjoyed the rest of your day, they were blind and dumb, with buttons that needed pushing. And the lowest level on the small array of buttons in front of him was Dminus4, this one.
“There isn’t a floor below this,” the suit said through gritted teeth. “This is as low as it gets . . . And how did you get aboard anyway?” His eyes took in Avatar’s black combats, the T-shirt and the strands of black glitter threaded into his dreads. Nike sneakers completed the outfit.
The SS Jannah had no second- or third-class cabins. Come to that, it didn’t even have first-class accommodation. Everything was executive or above, running all the way up to the Imperial Suite, where Mohammed Tewfik Pasha, Khedive of what remained of El Iskandryia, currently occupied the whole seventh floor. No more than two hundred guests were ever on board at any one time. And it was the ship’s proud boast that guests were outnumbered three to one by hotel staff. That was before one even considered whatever crew were actually needed to run the ship.
“The floor below this,” Avatar said crossly. “How do I get to it?”
The two crew members looked at each other, and the suit raised his eyes to heaven. “Look, kid,” he said, “there isn’t . . .”
Avatar shot him through the leg, just above the knee. By the time the slug exited the man’s quadriceps and flattened itself against the steel wall of the lift, the suit’s lungs were dragging in mountains of air.
“Don’t even think about screaming,” Avatar advised him. “Now, let’s try again, how do I . . . ?”
“Okay, okay . . .” The unharmed guard had one hand out, as if to ward off bullets from the gun Avatar began to raise. “So far as I know,” he said slowly, “this is the ship’s lowest level. Everything else below this is buoyancy tanks, turbines or ballast.”
“What about servicing the engines?”
“It’s a self-functioning sealed unit. Right . . . ?” He glanced to the man on the floor for confirmation. “It’s sealed.”
“There must be hatches.”
“Yes and no,” said the guard nervously. “They’re welded shut.”
“Too bad.” Avatar looked at the puddle of red spreading itself across the lift’s grey floor and pointed his gun at the injured suit’s other leg.
“It’s true, I promise you . . .” The man nodded like a frantic puppet, as if his frenzy alone could convince Avatar. “There is no way down . . .”
“Find me one,” Avatar demanded, but he was talking to Hani.
CHAPTER 47
28th October
“I shouldn’t . . .”
“Yeah, so you keep saying,” said Raf. “You shouldn’t be here, you shouldn’t have done that . . .” He was grinning like an idiot, he couldn’t help it. Beside him, Zara lay curled tight, with one of her arms thrown across his stomach and tiny beads of sweat tangled in her short dark hair, at the point where it brushed back from her forehead. Quick breaths flexed the cage of her ribs.
“You okay?”
“What do you think?” Zara untangled her legs from his and rolled away. This time round she didn’t bother to pull up a sheet, merely sprawled on Raf’s bed with one arm up over her grey eyes, revealing dark-tipped breasts that were high and perfect and honey-sweet in the early daylight that crept through the windows from the garden outside.
“Do you think they heard?”
Raf listened to the crunch of heels on gravel below, the unmistakable squeal of boots as a soldier executed a perfect about-turn at the end of the path, swivelling on the spot.
“I would imagine so,” he said, straight-faced, only to shake his head when Zara sat up and stared across, eyes wide.
He’d done only what she allowed. Which was more than Zara intended and less than he wanted. She was working to rules, though even Zara wasn’t quite sure whose rules those were.