“No,” the Khedive said. “They came armed and they were killed.” His gaze took in the Commissar, von Bismarck, the American Senator and that old man from Paris whose title kept changing. “Except for two of them,” he added as an afterthought.
On cue, two burly crew members dragged the crippled Soviet girl down the walkway. Behind her staggered a small man, a revolver held to his cropped skull by a third crew member. Cameras fired, as the Khedive meant them to.
“Ashraf Bey.”
Raf stopped his whispered conversation with Zara and stepped forward. The bow he gave was slight, little more than a nod.
The Khedive raised his eyebrows. “I’m putting these two in your charge.”
“Highness,” said Raf, and raised a finger. One of his uniforms instantly broke away from holding back the crowd. “I’m transferring the prisoners to you,” Raf said. “Take them both to the Imperial Free . . . And you.” Raf looked round for Hakim. “Make sure they get full protection. And a doctor,” he added as an afterthought.
Protection from what Raf didn’t say.
“Excellency . . .”
Raf turned back to the excited huddle of journalists.
“What is going to happen with Monday’s trial?”
“In what way?”
“Will you continue as magister. . . Now that His Highness has returned?”
“No, he will not.” The Khedive’s answer was clear enough to reach the back of the waiting group. And even if it hadn’t been, there were enough floating cameras and mics aimed in his direction to carry his reply to the waiting world.
“From now on,” said the Khedive, “Ashraf Bey will be acting as city prosecutor . . .”
The gaze Raf met was unbending. A decision had been made publicly and was not to be broken. “After all,” Tewfik Pasha continued, “combating crime is a major part of any governor’s remit.”
“In that case, will you still be allowing Miss Quitrimala to represent her father?”
“What case?”
The English journalist didn’t seem able to answer.
The Khedive stroked his small beard, looking for the briefest moment exactly like his grandfather as a young man. “As magister I will accept anyone the defendant chooses to appoint,” he said carefully. “Although, in the circumstances, I would strongly recommend a trained lawyer.”
“But Quitrimala refuses to appoint his own defence . . . What’s more”—the Englishwoman’s voice was taut with the human drama of it all—“he categorically refuses to accept anyone appointed by the court.”
“Well,” said the Khedive, “that is his right.” For the first time since Tewfik Pasha appeared on the jetty, he looked straight at Zara.
Hani sighed.
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.”