'We shall make our way, then,' Muhammad Ibrahimi said.
He walked beside me, the guards behind. No one else was in the courtyard now, and as our feet rustled through the fallen eucalyptus leaves and we reached the archway I had the feeling that a curtain would come down behind us.
Exhaust gas was on the air as we reached the forecourt; the tail lights of a car showed among the trees where the driveway curved towards the road. Above the minarets of the palace the last of the daylight had gone from the sky, and with the coming down of the Sahara night a three-quarter moon was already silvering the chrome and cellulose of the 560 SEL Mercedes limousine that was waiting for us. An Arab driver and another European guard were standing beside it.
Ibrahim! gestured for me to get into the back of the car, then followed. Two of the guards got in and pulled down the jump seats facing us; the third sat next to the Arab driver. The last door was slammed and the hydraulic locks clicked home. I felt for the seat-belt and buckled it. Ibrahimi folded his hands, leaving providence to Allah.
'The funds,' I asked him, 'are in the boot?'
It was just to keep the polish on my cover. Two thousand five hundred bills would need a suitcase, and I didn't see one here.
'Yes,' he said.
He would have a knife, Ibrahimi, a knife rather than a gun. The European clothes he'd changed into hadn't altered his image very much: with his beard and his hawk-beaked nose and his silences he was intensely Arabian, and would have been brought up with an affinity for the blade in time of need. It would be the same for the driver. The others would have guns.
Be not sanguine, my good friend, upon this inauspicious night, 'tis hardly meet. We are not super-ferrets, we the ferrets in the field, we are but ferrets, and subject to the laws of nature, red in tooth and claw.
Chapter 19: LIMOUSINE
South along the rue Khelifa Boukhalfa and across the Plateau Sauliere district, with the scents of the evening coming through the ventilation system: the smell of broiling lamb mechoui from the Berbers' open-air kitchens, of jasmine arid donkeys and incense and bruised oranges and the acrid reek of the leather tanneries in the souks. Our driver knew his job, made detours around the congested areas where merchants lined the streets with their loaded carts and their rickety makeshift stalls.
'What is his name,' I asked Ibrahimi, the driver's?'
'I do not know.'
We spoke in French, Ibrahimi and I, when we spoke at all. I would have liked to know the name of the driver as a matter of routine tradecraft: if you call a man by his name you establish immediate intimacy by however small a degree – you are no longer a complete stranger. And in a scene of confusion when other sounds are pervasive, call a man's name and you'll get his immediate attention.
I didn't expect there to be any scenes of confusion on this cool Saharan night. Klaus had things running with the precision of a Swiss watch. But habit was ingrained in me and I let it work. It could save Solitaire at a pinch, given the advent of a miracle to help things along.
I didn't expect miracles either.
From where I sat I could see the digital clock on the softly-lit dashboard of the Mercedes, between the shoulders of the two hit men who sat facing me. The time was now 6:49: twenty-six minutes to the rendezvous, to the flashpoint. The airport at Dar-el-Beida is 20 kilometres from the city, and we were now nearing the motorway. Since I could see the clock I wouldn't have to look at my watch. I didn't want Ibrahimi to know I was interested in the time. The hit men sat watching my hands. I didn't know if they spoke or even understood French, but it was unlikely. Ibrahimi wouldn't need to give them any verbal instructions. If I made a wrong move they'd go for me: they were robots with guns, knee-jerk reflexive. I didn't move my hands; I left them folded on my lap. If I were going to move them with malice aforethought I'd need to do it very quickly.
The limousine accelerated onto the motorway, its headlights sweeping over the moonlit landscape. There were twenty-four minutes to go. One thought kept obtruding as I looked over the options that were left: that fix I'd overheard couldn't be the target for Midnight One. 26°03' north by 02°01' west must be somewhere in the Sahara desert, because London was the zero east-west meridian and almost due north of Algiers, and Baghdad was somewhere about 30 degrees latitude. Klaus hadn't mounted this operation to blow up a lot of sand. It would be nice to look at a map, one of the maps in the leather pocket at the back of the driver's seat, but I couldn't think of any excuse to ask for one.
Khatami, the Iranian pilot, had been quite insistent on the telephone at the poolside, making sure the caller got the fix correct and asking him to write it down and repeat it, even telling him to synchronise watches. But it couldn't be the target for Midnight One. Then was it the location of Midnight One? In the middle of the Sahara desert?
There was a telephone set into the walnut console between the jump seats. It would also be nice to use the telephone, as well as a map, but I didn't think Ibrahim! would let me.
The only viable option I had left was to pre-empt the flashpoint: move into some kind of action that could get me clear with a whole skin and leave Solitaire running. It would have to be calculated but it was going to be messy: that was unavoidable. One scenario seemed attractive.
There were five men with me in the limousine and they were armed, three with guns and two – I was going to assume – with knives. My immediate target would be Ibrahimi, and the technique would be an elbow-strike to the throat, and lethal. To do it effectively and with the certainty of a kill I'd need to work up the optimum degree of catapult tension in the arms to lend added momentum to the strike. At the moment my hands were lying loosely on my lap and I'd have to move them a little and quite naturally, settling them again with my left hand holding my right wrist. I must then change the hold into an actual grip, tightening it and pulling my arms against each other to the point where the maximum tension was reached before muscle fatigue set in. Then I would release my hands, and the time it would take for my right elbow to reach the throat of Muhammad Ibrahimi would be in the region of one-fifth of a second. This is the figure we've recorded in practice at Norfolk, where a lot of work has been done on this particular technique because it's quite often that an executive finds himself sitting captive in the back of a car.
Through the windscreen I could see a big jet sloping towards Dar-el-Beida with its strobes flashing against the deep indigo' sky. By the clock on the dashboard we were now nineteen minutes to the flashpoint.