Thank you.' She dropped her head.
He lightened. 'Now, I understand… You have heard, Miss Bethany, the rumours – what they would gossip about in a camel market – of terrorists in the Sands. No, no. Those people are in Riyadh, Jedda and Ad Dammam, not in the desert. They would die there. Excuse me, please.'
She was left in the emptied room.
She wiped out the last lines on her blackboard. Min wayn intal and shu-ismak? She smeared out the chalked words.
Where are you from? Who are you?
In the boxes are the Stinger missiles. Do you know about the Stinger missiles?' Hosni was laid across the neck of his camel and his voice was a reedy, frail whisper.
Caleb crouched in his saddle to hear him. 'Once I saw one, but not close.'
'They are old. We do not know whether they are affected by the age. But they are important.'
They moved in a tightened knot, man close to man, camel brushing against camel, and he smelt the sweat on the guide and the boy, on the Egyptian and himself, the foul breath panted by the camels.
His knee bumped against a box's edge on the flank of a pack bull.
'I saw one when we tried to hold a line beyond Kabul, but the bombers were too high,' Caleb said. 'It was not fired.'
'The Stinger turned the war for us against the Soviets. The Soviets had a great fear of them.' Hosni coughed, tried to spit, as if the old memory of an enemy required it.
'I was never taught to fire one.'
'We bring them across the desert, deliver them, then they will be moved on, taken to where there is a target… but we do not know whether they will operate. Tommy opened the boxes, and there were manuals inside. They were written for Americans and Tommy could not read American.'
'Should we leave them behind?' Caleb had changed the order of the march. He expected to be listened to. 'Will the weight of them kill the camels?'
'You are the Outsider to us. I am told to escort you. I am told to bring you to the heart of the family. I do not know where you have come from, who you were. I do not ask. Two are already lost, but four remain. If I ask whether you can read the American manual of the Stinger, then you tell me something of yourself. My ignorance is your protection.'
'I am asking you, is their weight worth the life of the camels, do they slow us? What is more important? You and me or the Stingers?'
He knew the answer, expected to be told what he knew. 'Tell me.'
He did not know what the pale, watering eyes saw, but they speared at him and the voice grew in its pitch. 'I think you show ignorance. Perhaps it is only the Stingers, if they work, that will get us, you and me, through to those who wait for us.'
'The next time we stop, I will open a box, take the manual…'
'And read it?'
'… and read it. I will, because of my importance,' Caleb said.
For a moment, Hosni struggled to rise in his saddle, but the pinions held him. Caleb saw the man who had fought the Soviets, who had given his life to the struggle of the Emir General, saw the controlled anger.
'I warn you, ignorance you will learn from – vanity will destroy you. With vanity comes arrogance, with arrogance comes failure…
Imagine. Caravans move, columns of men move, mule trains move.
Men struggle not only through this desert but through mountains, through passes, through streets and through the alleyways of souks, they come from the doorways of mosques and from the entrances to caves. You are only one man. Do you believe the organization of the Emir General depends on one man, whose past gives him importance? We are many. A hundred men move – some will be slopped, some captured, some will be killed – and they will be replaced by another thousand. In an engine, you are one tooth in one cog. I ask of you, never again show me your vanity,'
Caleb flinched. The boy close behind him would have heard the attack, and the guide in front. It was as if he had been struck. He felt small, a pygmy dwarfed by this needle-thin old man whose hand he had kissed in love.
'The next time we stop I will read the manual.'
A dozen men and women sat in two lines, divided by computers.
Two lines of six, facing each other, separated by the screens and keyboards.
The raindrops, from their run between the car park and the Libtary entrance, were on the shoulders of Lovejoy's coat and the waxed waterproof loaned to the American. The skies outside were ashen and the forecast was for rain all day, then an unsettled week no clear blue skies on the horizon.
He spoke quietly to the chief librarian. He'd telephoned her in the morning and been told at what time the Internet class was scheduled to finish. He didn't do tourist trips. They'd stayed in a hotel just outside the centre of Wolverhampton, gone early to bed because the American seemed exhausted from his overnight flight. Over breakfast Lovejoy had made his calls, which had culminated in a less than frank conversation with the chief librarian. This was the first step. He had not taken the American for a drive round the sights of Wolverhampton, but had killed time in the hotel lobby. The first step always made Michael Lovejoy nervous, and his justification for going to the Library had been brief and terse.
The Library was three miles south-west of Wolverhampton, nine miles north-east of the Birmingham city plazas. After eight phone calls, Lovejoy had spoken to the chief librarian and had heard what he wanted. She was a middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Aggie, who was careful in her appearance and had the brightness of enthusiasm. To her, Lovejoy was a lecturer from the University of Birmingham. The American, a complication to the cover story, was not introduced, had been told not to speak, just smile.
'Right, well done, everybody, the hour's up… ' Aggie's voice boomed in the Library's quiet.
It reflected her endeavour. The interior was bright, cheerful and clean. It had a section at the far end for magazine reading, and the newspapers. There was an annexe for children, surrounded by shelved picture books and boxes of toys. Away, against the end wall, was the double bank of computers. She might have been speaking to juveniles, but those she addressed were in their twilight years: 'If you could, please, switch off, close down. You're making great progress, I'm very pleased.'
Lovejoy held the audio-cassette player, and the American had the tape in his pocket.
'I'm going to ask you to meet Michael – he's from Birmingham University and he's needing some guinea-pigs for a social-awareness project.' She spoke slowly as if she might not be understood, and loudly because the majority of them wore hearing-aids. She'd explained on the phone earlier that her Internet Familiarization class for Senior Citizens, starting at eleven, offered him a chance to meet older community members in a group. That day, and he'd checked it out, there was no specified gathering of the elderly at either the working-men's club or at the British Legion. It was, in his opinion, the best chance of meeting men and women whose lives were embedded in the area, born and reared there, worked and retired there. They looked up at him, tired eyes magnified by spectacles, and he thought he saw an expectation of interest after the struggle to master the computers' intricacies, and the Internet that was now forced on them. 'I ask you to listen very thoroughly to what Michael says, and then help him. He's relying on you.'
She waved for them to leave their blank screens and follow her to the chairs in the magazine reading section. They straggled after her, live men and seven women, all ethnic white, all with pale, aged faces; two used wooden walking-sticks and one had a metal hospital slick. She arranged the chairs so they made a half-circle behind a table, and they sat. Lovejoy put the cassette player on the table and reached out for the American to pass him the tape; he slotted it into the player. He sensed the scepticism of the American behind him.