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.
“How about you,” she asked. “You okay?”
“Sure.” Raf shrugged. “I’m fine.”
“Right.” Her smile was lopsided. “Of course you are.” Zara yanked back his covers. “Anyone can see that.”
Somewhere in the hinterland between midnight and early morning, as the stubborn darkness finally diluted, Raf had first struggled out of his shirt and then his pants, stripping himself bare. Neither of them had suggested Zara might want to do the same. But his hands had caressed her beneath her nightdress and finally found answering movement from her body. Movement that built slowly until she took his hand and almost pushed it into her pants.
“Stand over there,” said Zara, and pointed to a patch of sun that lit the room’s white floor. So Raf did what she asked, aware that she watched as he climbed naked out of the bed and walked across the tiles. When he stood where she wanted, he turned to face her and saw her blush.
“Now what . . . ?”
She knelt with marble tiles cold and hard against her bare knees. There were a dozen good reasons why she shouldn’t be kneeling there. Some personal, some cultural, a few of them even political.
“What?” Raf asked, seeing her shoulders shrug.
“Nothing,” said Zara and then could say no more. She felt his hips tense under her grip and heard him begin to swear softly as his back arched and every muscle in his legs seemed to lock.
She was a republican and Marxist, he was an Ottoman bey. She was new money and he was wealth inherited. No, she scrubbed that, Raf had little money, either way. He was police and her father was a criminal. Iskandryia’s establishment had adopted him and that too made him her enemy. Her father was on trial and he controlled the court. If it was in her power, she would overthrow everything he represented and the order to which he belonged.
And here she was on her knees before a man, something she’d promised herself would never happen. It didn’t matter if it was sex, money, violence or necessity that put a woman there; once there the weight of history made it hard to get back up again.
Zara could feel Raf’s fingers hard on the side of her head, so she took her right hand and wrapped it round him and moved her mouth in time to his need.
And later, with his taste still in her mouth, she led Raf back to the bed and sat beside him while he curled into a foetal ball and slept like the child she guessed he’d never been.
It was impossible that he knew how much she loved him, how much his vulnerability made her afraid.
CHAPTER 48
28th October
Avatar wasn’t sure what he’d expected. Maybe a whole deck given over to the Colonel’s quarters. PaxForce guards doubling as prison officers. Certainly daylight-perfect lighting tied to a season-specific twenty-four/seven clock, some trees, birdsong and an artificial stream; even the most basic clubs had those these days. At least they did in the circadian/chill-out zones.
And if not warders, then exile in splendid isolation. Imposing staterooms run to seed and ruin. Once fabulous tapestries grimed with dust. Avatar imagined it like something from a newsfeed novella. Golden Youth, In Place of Trust, Forbidden Fortune. . . Somewhere suited to murderous fathers, flirtatious mothers, drug-addled uncles and teenage schemers who usually wanted either their parents or siblings dead, if not both.
He didn’t think of Hamzah like this. Hamzah was a villain, not pure but pretty simple, and his money wasn’t knotted up in trusts and he had only one heir, Zara.
Avatar had no illusions about that. No real problems with it either.
All the same, he’d been expecting more from the Colonel’s lair. Actually, even that wasn’t accurate, he hadn’t so much been expecting more as been expecting something. Something other than a vast hangarlike emptiness, filled with acrid dust and lit by distant portholes that lined the gloom on either side of him, like tiny holes punched out into the real world.
His feet left tracks on the carpet in dust that was undisturbed by any other sign of human passage. Just because something made no sense didn’t make it untrue, however; Avatar knew that. Knew too that he needed to find a way down to the deck below, where there would be no portholes at all, unless the liner had a level designed to look out underwater. Which was possible.
“Lights . . .”
The futile command echoed back from steel walls, making him feel more alone than ever. Avatar’s problem was that silence irritated him and always had done. It scared him, if he was being honest. From the grinding of gears in the narrow street outside his children’s home and the jewels of music heard through other people’s windows to the hammering of water pipes each night in the dorm, noise had been his comfort from the start.