by Holly Watt
‘This is magnificent.’ Ed spun out the syllables. ‘How the hell did you find it?’
‘Come in,’ said Josh. ‘It’s worth seeing.’
They followed him up the marble stairs, to the huge golden doors. Confused by the dark of the entrance hall, Casey looked up at the roof of the portico. Underneath, its roof was painted with scarlet and vermilion swirls. She had the sudden sense of walking into the underworld, the last moment before crossing the Styx.
‘Come on, Carrie.’ Ed nudged her on.
The entrance hall was the size of a ballroom, the floor a mosaic of silver and emerald and indigo, stretching away like a dream. In the centre, a vast fountain was silenced. The white marble – a wedding cake of Carrara – shimmered in tiers.
A balcony ran the whole way round the hall, held up by gleaming columns. Down one length of the wall below it, an unknown soldier had unleashed a full magazine, a long line of bullet holes scarring the marble.
‘This is fucking incredible.’ Oliver dropped his bags and held up his arms. ‘Look at this place.’
Casey twirled forward, laughing at the beauty of the room with him. For a second, Oliver caught her eye, and then he shrugged and smiled at her.
Josh was pleased at their enthusiasm.
‘I’ll show you to your rooms,’ he said. ‘The other guys are somewhere about.’
Casey’s skin prickled at the mention of more people, unknown people. Every new person was an electrical surge of fear.
An elderly woman bustled out with a tray, carrying long, icy glasses filled with mint.
‘Delicious.’ Casey tried to smile, but the woman looked away.
Clutching their glasses, they followed Josh to their room, up some stairs, down a long corridor. Oliver was in a room a few doors away.
‘Here,’ Josh gestured. ‘I’ll leave you to it. We’ll be out on the terrace, at the back.’
‘It’s so huge that we should scatter breadcrumbs,’ said Casey. ‘Like Hansel and Gretel and the gingerbread.’
The bed was frilled with pale pink lace, piled high with cushions, under a circus tent of mosquito nets. An awkward golden sofa sat beneath the window. It was shaped like a mermaid, petulant head at one end, the seat a swirling tail. A huge statue of an eagle was balanced in the corner, next to a dark oak sideboard. The eagle was snatching at its prey, beak screaming wide.
‘An odd sort of paradise,’ said Casey, wondering which of the fallen Gaddafi princesses had chosen the clouds of lace. Maybe Aisha, who had given birth to a baby girl in Djanet just hours after crossing the frontier at Tinkarine, the baby a bargaining chip before she was even born, a card played to get over the border.
Humanitarian grounds, they said.
Or maybe it had been one of Gaddafi’s buxom bodyguards who slept here, lolling on the satin coverlet and smiling in the huge gilt mirror.
Casey photographed the bed, snapping away like any other tourist. She fiddled with the mini-speakers she had brought, filling the air randomly with Aida.
On a coffee table lay a pile of magazines. An old Vogue, a battered Tatler. There were a few leaflets, in English and Arabic, that looked like they had been printed several decades ago, flaunting the region’s sights.
‘I don’t mind sleeping on the floor,’ said Ed quietly. ‘I can sleep anywhere.’
‘Don’t worry,’ whispered Casey. ‘It would be miserable on the marble. The bed is absolutely enormous, and we don’t want them walking in with you banished to the floor.’
They had agreed to say as little as possible in the bedroom because recorders were so tiny, so sensitive, so easy to use. The opera, pouring from the speakers, would blot out most of their conversation.
The windows were fifteen feet high. White linen curtains blew in the breeze, the desert plain spreading away to a horizon that shimmered like a mirage. They stepped out on to the balcony.
‘It is magical.’ Casey wondered, just for a second, what it would be like to be in this place with Ed alone. ‘Just spectacular.’
She turned to him, and knew he was working out how they might escape. Could they climb out of this window? Yes, probably. How would they get to the car?
‘Do we know where we are, relative to Salama?’ she asked, trying to remember the satellite images.
‘They didn’t say. Oliver may have been getting a better guided tour.’
Casey had a shower in the huge bathroom, which had his and her jacuzzis. The towels were as white and fluffy as any at the Savoy.
She came out in a big dressing gown, to make Ed laugh, and slumped on the bed.
‘I’m shattered,’ she yawned.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘We’ll just go down for a while.’
Her nerves came flooding back as they left the safety of the bedroom. She pulled her hand away from Ed, not wanting him to feel her fear. Everything could be a trap. Everything. Every creak, every tap, every step.
A shadow fluttering in the corner of her eye had her spinning, but she forced herself to breathe, and swallow the sudden terrors. She stretched her face into a smile, because that was the easiest way to hide her thoughts, every time.
And so they made their way downstairs.
*
To give herself a precious few seconds, Casey poked her nose into some of the rooms. They were abandoned. Miss Havisham dust covered everything.
Just before they got to the terrace, she pressed record on her phone and put it in her pocket. Everything would be taped now, and sent back, as fast as possible. She didn’t dare wire herself up, not here.
They found Josh and Oliver out on the terrace, under a blue and white parasol. Two men sat with them. As soon as she saw them, she felt her heart slow, and knew she would be all right, the actress on the stage managing that first line.
The men greeted Casey and Ed heartily, with the easy enthusiasm of all expats at cocktail hour. Evidently, Josh had made it clear that they were to be welcomed. Oliver treated Casey with pompous amiability, as if their conversation in Djanet had never happened.
All four men were drinking beers.
‘Beer? Or gin and tonic for you, Carrie?’ Josh gestured to a Tuareg man, standing in the corner.
The man disappeared, returning, a few minutes later, with a tray, ice clinking.
‘Leo.’ Josh nodded to one man, then the other. ‘Rory.’
The four men half-stood as Casey sat down, oddly chivalrous. Ed sat down next to her, hand resting briefly on her knee.
The sun was drifting down, into orange sands and blue shadows. A huge swimming pool glistened like a sapphire, the gardens round it dried to dust. A rosemary hedge lined the terrace, wafting scent. It could have been any holiday. She could almost imagine the knock of a tennis ball, and a ripple of laughter in the distance.
Leo’s voice could travel around the world in a sentence. Undertones of American, a hint of Australian and a faint touch of Cape Town that she caught on ‘like’ and ‘yes’. But then Josh’s South African accent was contagious. She wondered if that was where it came from, the slight twang in Leo’s voice.
Leo was almost as tall as Josh, rugby-player solid. His nose had been broken, not just once, and a scar ran down his face, from temple to chin. There was a sparkle of dark humour in his eyes, and black hair that looked like he had cut it himself.
Rory was shorter, wiry, his hair clipped tight to his head. He said nothing as they arrived at the table. Hard eyes flicked over Casey and moved on restlessly. He was watchful, thought Casey. Behind the welcome, he was dangerous.
She wondered if they were Marakata Green, these two, sitting there in the gentle warmth of the evening, thousands of miles from their letterbox in that Caribbean haven.
Rory was staring at her, and she dropped her eyes, in a way that could have been shyness or fear, flirtation or submission.
‘This view is incredible.’ She hid her face by staring out across the plain. ‘How on earth did you end up here?’
But Rory turned the questions back t
o her, again and again, keeping the conversation moving. She managed to speak easily, somehow, building a past, sentence by sentence. Then Rory asked Ed about the cave paintings. Ed – so fluent she almost applauded – told him the histories.
‘Saw a leaflet in our room, too. We’ll have to check that out.’
Ed had read book after book as a cover for the trip, he’d admitted almost shyly, as they drove across the desert. She’d laughed. I was good at exams, she’d said. Then forgot it all in a week. Even now she read her notes as she rushed to a meeting. But there on the terrace she listened to his conscientious words, so grateful.
Rory had his head on one side. He had a habit of staring for a little too long. He asked careful questions, and listened to every answer. She wondered, throat tightening, when she would run out of answers, and what would happen then.
But at least Ed was listening in, learning their story as she told it. Both of them laughed about the scruffy hotel in Djanet, and meandered on their imaginary journey across Africa. Casey bounded into anecdotes she’d told a million times. Because they were safely familiar, and filled up the air.
Storyteller, she thought. Liar. Every word could be the end.
But Ed rambled on, and two drinks in, it was Oliver who asked the question that Casey wanted to know: ‘So how did you end up here?’
‘We were down in Mali,’ Leo began. ‘A few years ago.’
‘There was a bit of trouble down there.’ Rory picked up the story. He was a Londoner, Casey thought, once long ago. ‘So we were brought in to sort it out.’
Mercenaries, Casey translated. Working for the highest bidder, not unlike the Tuareg who had escorted them over the border. Men like these work all over the world, scattered along the spectrum between legitimate and assassin.
‘After Mali was done, we were waiting around to see what would come up next,’ Leo went on. ‘So the three of us decided to drive up here, right across the Sahara.’
‘We were just bombing down the roads, having a laugh,’ Josh cut in. ‘Mali’d got a bit messy, so we just wanted to chill out.’
Mali had got indeed got messy, Casey remembered. A sudden little coup, a few hundred dead.
She wondered what they had really been doing in Libya, these three. There had been so many rumours when the Gaddafis fled kingless, down the long road to Algeria. That the gold, all those pirate’s ingots, had been shifted to Ubari, the desert town right down in the south. That the weapons abandoned in caches across the country were valuable, to the right buyer.
There were other stories, too, of course. That it hadn’t been just the Libyans, at the end. That other shadows crowded in, at the last. Shadows there in order to be certain – completely and absolutely sure – that Gaddafi was gone, once and for all, and to send a message to all the despots: you won’t get away, not without our help. You may need us, one day, no matter who you are.
‘Anyway, we were on the way out to Ghat, when we saw this place, right up and away from the road.’ Leo grinned at the memory. ‘It looked pretty wild, so we headed up here.’
‘It was booby-trapped,’ said Josh. ‘Careful which rooms you go into here, even now. Rory knows how to defuse them, but we haven’t done them all.’
‘I do them now and again.’ Rory pulled a face. ‘When I get a bit bored on a Sunday. Keeping my hand in. I think I’ve got most of them now, but maybe I haven’t.’
‘Gives us something to do,’ said Josh. ‘You’ve got to keep moving.’
‘But don’t go into a room if we haven’t said it’s OK,’ said Rory, somewhere between a warning and a threat.
The sun was dropping fast now, the sudden Sahara night.
‘So we found that this place was basically empty. Abayghur and his missus’ – Leo nodded to the Tuareg who was sitting in the corner – ‘were the only people here. They live in one of the outhouses round the back.’
‘So we decided to hang out,’ said Rory. ‘Just for a bit, at first. We wanted a bit of downtime, after Mali.’
‘The locals think it’s cursed,’ said Josh. ‘They’re very into witchcraft and that sort of shit out here. People die because they think they’ve had some spell put on them. It literally seems to kill them, believing it. Stupid.’
‘They think Euzma had a spell put on it, so almost none of them will come up here,’ said Rory. ‘Some of the local talent came up, once, not long after we arrived, with some fancy ideas. They liked waving their AKs around. But we soon put a stop to that little plan.’
‘We can’ – Josh enjoyed saying it – ‘look after ourselves.’
They spoke across each other in the way that old friends do. Oliver fitted easily into their little group. There was a plaster on his neck, Casey saw.
‘We got used to living here.’ Rory’s diesel voice. ‘Having a laugh. It’ll be a bit hot for the next few months, but compared to winter in Europe, it’s fucking nice.’
Casey felt Rory’s eyes on her again, and didn’t look up.
‘Tell me about it,’ Oliver interrupted. ‘I can’t stand London in January.’
‘When you can’t even remember how sunshine feels,’ said Casey. ‘It’s just the worst.’
‘Then the next job came in,’ Leo carried on, and Casey wondered how it worked exactly, that network. ‘Down in Nigeria, out on the Delta. One of the oil companies needed some of the locals kept an eye on. We knew it would be a couple of months, but we decided we wanted to come back here afterwards, when it was done.’
‘So we pulled in some of those Tuareg guys you met earlier,’ said Josh. ‘They’re from a settlement not too far away. They’ve got the whole area under their thumb, really, but, even so, they didn’t want Euzma. We asked them to keep things going.’
‘It’s too far from the road for them, they say.’ Rory raised an eyebrow. ‘But I think even they believe in the curse. Mad, the lot of them.’
‘They were cool with us being up here though,’ said Leo. ‘They’ve got their own operations, anyway. Moving stuff across the desert. It’s amazing how much action there is round here, for such an empty dustbowl.’
‘So now we come and go,’ said Rory. ‘A few months here, a few months there. Then we come back to Euzma, hang out a bit. The Tuareg keep an eye on it when we’re away, and so does Abayghur.’
‘We pay the Tuareg enough to make it worth us coming back,’ said Leo. ‘Alive.’
‘There’s a huge diesel generator in one of the outhouses, and we can tap a spur from the Great Manmade River for water,’ Rory went on.
The Great Manmade River was one of Gaddafi’s wilder dreams that came real. At a cost, of course. A huge series of pipes and a vast aquifer, plumbing the whole of Libya. They had passed the huge irrigation circles as they drove up, the enormous waterwheels dripping endlessly into the big green whorls. An ecological nightmare that would last until the aquifer ran dry.
Rory tugged the conversation on to Gaddafi, and his wilder plans. Casey sat and wondered how long it would be until she could circle the conversation. But then Oliver asked, and she didn’t have to use up one of her cards: ‘How much time do you spend out here?’
‘It varies.’ Rory ducked the question. ‘We keep busy though.’
‘And then the London operation got started.’ Josh nodded at them. ‘And that seems to be working well.’
It was so casual that Casey could hardly bear it. Ed stroked her hair, just for a moment.
‘I think Tripoli has more or less forgotten this place exists,’ said Josh. ‘Gaddafi barely spent any time out here, once it was built. He was always having these mad plans, and then going on to the next thing.’
Casey had seen that despot’s madness before, wandering around his palaces in Tripoli. She had spent long afternoons lost in the lunatic warrens beneath the palaces, and seen the endless nuclear bunkers hollowed out on the orders of a psychopath. There was a hospital down there, under the Tripoli pavements, and enough food and water to keep the Gaddafis going for years. Euzma was just a part o
f the madness.
‘This part has always only ever been loosely controlled from Tripoli,’ Rory went on. ‘Gaddafi managed to dominate the tribes, more or less, but it was never completely under his rule.’
‘They’ve got enough problems to keep them going up in Tripoli anyway, surely,’ Oliver remarked. ‘They’ve been trying to put together a government for the last few months, I think. Although they’ve been trying that for years now.’
Casey thought about the former defence minister, toiling to stick together a deal for Cormium, for all the Libyan oil.
‘Exactly,’ Leo nodded. ‘It won’t last for ever, us in this place. But it’s here for now.’
‘And we keep our cash safely out of this country, of course,’ Rory added. ‘No one would bring anything into Libya at the moment.’
‘It must have been weird for the Gaddafis, driving past this place,’ Casey thought out loud. ‘Knowing all this was up here, just out of reach.’
‘They could have defended this place for a while. There are some fortifications,’ said Josh. ‘But not for ever.’
‘You can’t defend anywhere for ever,’ said Ed.
Casey thought about the Gaddafis, and their convoy racing past, not even pausing at their dream palace, the folly never used. Abayghur snapped her back into the room, bringing delicious food; lamb tagine, flatbreads, spice. He was deaf, Casey realised quite soon. At least partially. Helpful.
They ate for a while, before Casey and Ed yawned their excuses.
Josh walked with them as they headed back to their room. Just before they reached the huge entrance hall, he stepped into a large room off to one side. It was a vast suite, with two bedrooms leading off it.
‘Our study,’ he mocked. ‘That’s my bedroom there, and Rory’s in there. If you need anything at night or whatever.’
The double doors to Rory’s room were closed. Josh’s room was huge. Casey could see a vast unmade bed on a dais under a lead crystal chandelier. Clothes were scattered, careless, on Chippendale chairs. A foxglove-purple chaise longue sat under the window, and a vast onyx lion crouched in a corner.
Josh tapped a laptop and then walked back to them, grimacing.
