Peter
Alai had given his orders, and now he was going to make sure he was out of Hyderabad when they were carried out. The Caliph could not be tainted with the arrest of his own wife.
But the Caliph could not be ruled by her, either. Alai knew that the wazirs of his council hated her; if he did not have her arrested by men loyal to him, then she would certainly be killed.
Later, after things had settled down, after she had regained her senses and stopped thinking she was unstoppable, he would take her out of prison. He could not release her in India—that was out of the question. Maybe Graff would take her. She wasn't one of Ender's Jeesh, but by the same reasoning Graff had used in his invitation, the world would certainly be a safer place with her gone from it, while a colony might be lucky to have someone of such ability and ambition at its head.
Meanwhile, without Virlomi there was no reason for him to govern from Hyderabad. He would continue to respect his treaty with India and withdraw his forces. Let them try to rebuild without Virlomi's madness trying to throw them prematurely into war. India would not be in shape to mount a meaningful military campaign against anything more substantial than a flock of starlings for many years to come.
Alai would spend the next few years putting Islam's house in order and trying to forge a real nation out of this mishmash that history had left for him to deal with. If Syrians and Iraqis and Egyptians couldn't get along with each other and despised each other the moment they heard the other's accent, how could anyone expect Moroccans and Persians and Uzbeks and Malays to see the world in the same way just because a muezzin called them to prayer?
Besides, he had to deal with the stateless peoples—the Kurds, the Berbers, half the nomad tribes of ancient Bactria. Alai knew perfectly well that these Muslims would not follow a Caliph who kept the status quo—not when Peter Wiggin was tempting revolutionaries everywhere with his promise of statehood and the examples of Runa and Nubia.
We brought Nubia on ourselves, thought Alai. The ancient Muslim contempt for blackest Africa still seethed under the surface; if Alai had not been a member of Ender's Jeesh, it would have been inconceivable for him, as a black African, to be named Caliph. It was in Sudan, where the races met face to face, that the ugliness had emerged with so much virulence. The rest of Islam should have disciplined Sudan long ago. And now they all paid the price, with the humiliation of Sudan at the hands of the FPE.
So we have to give the Kurds and Berbers their own governments. Real ones, not sham "autonomous regions." That would not be popular in Morocco and Iraq and Turkey, Alai knew. That's why it was stupid in the extreme to imagine embarking on wars of conquest when there was no peace or unity inside the world of Islam.
Alai would govern from Damascus. It was far more central. He would be surrounded by Muslim culture instead of Hindu. It would be a civilian-centred government, not an obvious military dictatorship. And the world would see that Islam was not interested in conquering the world. That Caliph Alai had already liberated more people from oppressive conquerors than Peter Wiggin ever could.
As Alai left his office, two of the guards fell in step beside him. Ever since Virlomi simply walked into his office the day they got married, Alamandar had insisted that it not be so easy to walk into highly sensitive areas of the compound. "We are in occupied enemy country, my Caliph," he had said, and he was right.
Still, there was something that made Alai uneasy about having to be accompanied by guards as he moved about the compound. It felt wrong. The Caliph should be able to move among his own people with perfect trust and openness.
As Alai stepped through the door into the parking garage, two more guards joined the two who had walked with him from upstairs. His limousine sat idling at the curb. The back door opened.
He saw someone jogging toward him from among the parked cars.
It was Ivan Lankowski. Alai had rewarded him for his loyal service by putting him in charge of the administration of the Turkish nations of central Asia. What was he doing here? Alai had not called him back from service, and Ivan had not written or called about coming.
Ivan reached into his jacket. Where a gun would be, if he was armed with a shoulder holster.
And he would be armed; he had carried a gun for too many years to be comfortable without one now.
Alamandar got out of the open back door of the limo. As he rose to his feet, he shouted at the guards. "Shoot him, you fools! He's going to kill the Caliph!"
Ivan's gun was out. He fired, and the guard to Alai's left dropped like a rock. The sound was strange—the barrel had a silencer, but Alai was close to being directly in front of it, so it wasn't so much silenced as shaped.
I should drop to the ground, thought Alai. To save my life, I should get out of the line of fire. But he couldn't take the danger seriously. He didn't feel as though he were in danger at all.
The other guards had their guns out now. Ivan shot another one, but then the bullets—not silenced—flew in the other direction, and Ivan fell to the ground. His gun did not slip from his hand; he maintained his grip on it to the end of his life.
Or maybe he wasn't dead. Maybe he could spend his last moments explaining to Alai how he could betray him like this.
Alai walked to Ivan's body and felt for a pulse. Ivan's eyes were open. He was already dead.
"Come away, my Caliph!" shouted Alamandar. "There may be other conspirators!"
Conspirators. There was no possibility of other conspirators. Ivan didn't trust anybody enough to conspire with them. The only person Ivan absolutely trusted was...
Was me.
Ivan was a perfect shot. Even at a run, he could not have aimed at me and then clumsily hit two guards.
"My guards," said Alai, looking up at Alamandar. "The ones he shot—will they be all right?"
One of the other guards jogged back to look. "Both dead," he said.
But Alai already knew that. Ivan had not been aiming at Alai. He had come here with one purpose in mind, the purpose that had guided him for years. Ivan was here to protect his Caliph.
It flashed into Alai's mind with immediate clarity. Ivan had learned of a conspiracy against the Caliph, and it involved people so close to Alai that there was no way for Ivan to warn him from a distance without running the risk of alerting one of the conspirators.
Alai reached with one hand to close Ivan's eyes, while with the other he pulled Ivan's pistol from his slackened fingers. Still not taking his eyes off of Ivan's face, Alai fired the pistol upward into the guard who was standing over him. Then he calmly aimed at the guard who had gone back to the bodies and fired. Alai had never been as good a shot as Ivan. He could not have done this while running. But kneeling, he was all right.
The guard he had shot without looking was lying on the pavement, twitching. Alai shot him again, then turned to Alamandar, who was getting back into the limo.
Alai shot him. He fell into the car and it screeched away from the curb. But the door was not closed yet, and Alamandar was in no shape to close it. So as it passed Alai, there would be a brief moment when the driver would be unprotected by the heavy armouring and bulletproof glass. Alai laid down three quick shots in order to have a better chance of catching that moment.
It worked. The car did not turn. It ran into a wall.
Alai jogged over to the still-open back door of the car, where Alamandar was panting and holding his chest. His eyes were on fire with rage and fear as Alai levelled Ivan's pistol to fire.
"You are no Caliph!" gasped Alamandar. "The Hindu woman is more of a Caliph than you are, you black dog."
Alai shot him in the head and he fell silent.
The driver was unconscious, but Alai shot him, too.
Then he went back to the bodies of the guards, who were dressed in western business suits. Ivan had shot one of them in the head. He was larger than Alai but his clothing would do. Alai had his white robe off in a moment. Underneath he wore jeans as he always did. After wrestling with the corpse for
a few moments, he got the shirt and jacket off the man, and without popping any of the buttons off.
Alai took the pistols from the two guards who had never gotten off a shot and dropped them into the pockets of the jacket he now wore. Ivan's silenced pistol had to be nearly out of bullets, so Alai slid it across the pavement back toward Ivan's body.
Where do I imagine an African man can hide in Hyderabad? No one's face was more recognisable than the Caliph's, and those who didn't know his face knew his race. They would also know that he spoke no Hindi. He would not make it a hundred meters outside in Hyderabad.
Then again, there was no chance he could get out of the compound alive.
Wait. Think.
Don't wait. Get away from this murder scene.
Ivan jogged through the parked cars. The garage would have been cleared of any observers by Alamandar's men; that meant Ivan must have been hidden inside a car. Where was that car?
Keys in the ignition. Thank you, Ivan. You planned for everything. No time would be wasted fumbling with keys, as you dragged me to your car to get me out of here.
Where were you going to take me, Ivan? Whom do you trust?
Alamandar's last words rang in his ears. The Hindu woman is more of a Caliph than you are.
He thought they all hated her. But now he realised that she was the one advocating war. Expansion. The restoration of a great empire.
That's what they wanted. And all his talk of peace, of consolidation, of reforming Islam from the inside before reaching out to the rest of the world, of competing with Peter Wiggin using the same methods, inviting other nations to join the Caliphate without requiring them to become Muslim or live under Shari'a—they had listened, they had agreed, but they hated it.
They hated him.
So when they saw the break between him and Virlomi, they exploited it.
Or ... was Virlomi behind this?
Was Virlomi pregnant with his child?
The Caliph is dead. But here is his baby, born after he died but infused with the gifts of God from his birth. In the name of the baby Caliph, the council of wazirs will rule. And since the mother of the new Caliph is ruler of India, he will join the two great nations in one. With Virlomi as regent, of course.
No. Virlomi could not have wanted him murdered.
Ivan would have an air plane waiting. The air plane that brought him. With his own trusted crew.
Alai drove at a normal pace. But he did not drive to the checkpoint where he normally entered the airport grounds. In all likelihood, that place would be manned by the conspirators. Instead, he went to a service gate.
The guard sauntered over and started to tell him only authorised service vehicles could use this gate.
"I'm the Caliph, and I want to go through this gate."
"Oh," said the guard, looking confused. "I see. I—"
He pulled out a cellphone and started to punch at it.
Alai didn't want to kill this man. He was an idiot, not a conspirator. So he swung the door open, bumping into the man. Not hard. Just enough to get his attention. Then he closed the door and reached through the window. "Give me that cellphone."
The soldier gave it to him. Alai switched it off.
"I'm the Caliph. When I say to let me through, you don't have to ask anyone else's permission."
The soldier nodded and ran to the controls and the gate slid open.
As soon as Alai was through the gate, he saw a small corporate jet with Cyrillic lettering under the Common letters naming the corporation. The kind of plane Ivan would have used.
The engines started up as Alai approached. No, as Ivan's car approached.
Alai stopped the car and got out. The door of the jet was open, forming steps to the ground. Holding one hand on the pistol in his pocket— for he was taking this plane whether it was Ivan's or not—Alai walked up the steps.
A businessman—or so he seemed—waited for him inside. "Where's Ivan?" he asked.
"We're not waiting for him," said Alai. "He died saving me."
The man nodded once, then went to the door and pushed the button to raise it. Meanwhile he shouted, "Let's go!" and then said to Alai, "Please sit down and fasten your seat belt, my Caliph."
The plane began taxiing before the door was closed.
"Do nothing out of the ordinary," said Alai. "Nothing to alert them. There are weapons here that could easily shoot down this plane."
"Our plan exactly, sir," said the man.
What would the conspirators do, when they found out that Alai had escaped?
They would do nothing. They would say nothing. As long as Alai might turn up alive somewhere, they dared not be on record as saying anything.
In fact, they would continue to act in his name. If they followed Virlomi's plans, if her insane invasion went forward, then Alai would know they were with her.
When they were in the air—having waited for ordinary permission from the controllers—Ivan's man came back and stood diffidently two meters away.
"My Caliph, if I may ask?"
Alai nodded.
"How did he die?"
"He was busy shooting the guards surrounding me. He got two of them before they cut him down. I used his weapon to kill the others. Including Alamandar. Do you know how far the conspiracy went?"
"No sir," said the man. "We only knew that you would be killed on the air plane to Damascus."
"And this air plane? Where is it taking me?"
"It has a very long range, sir," said the man. "Where will you feel safe?"
Petra's mother was tending the babies while Petra and Bean oversaw the last preparations for the opening of hostilities. Peter's message had been terse: How busy can you keep the Turks, while watching out for Russians in the rear?
Turks and Russians allies, or potentially so. What game was Alai playing? Was Vlad in it? Trust Peter not to share any more information than he thought he had to—which was invariably less than other people actually needed.
Still, she and Bean had been spending every spare moment working out ways, using limited, under-trained, and under-equipped Armenian forces to cause maximum disruption.
A raid on the most highly visible Turkish target, Istanbul, would enrage them without accomplishing anything.
Blocking the Dardanelles would be a harsh blow against all the Turks, but there was no way to project that much force from Armenia to the western shore of the Black Sea, and maintain it.
Oh, for the days when oil was strategically important! Back then, the Russian, Azerbaijani, and Persian wells in the Caspian would have been a prime target for disruption.
But now the wells had all been dismantled, and the Caspian was mostly used as a source of water, which was desalinated and pumped over to irrigate fields around the Aral Sea, with the run-off being used to replenish that once-dying lake. And to strike at the water pipeline would impoverish poor farmers without affecting the enemy's ability to wage war.
The plan they finally came up with was simple enough, once you bought the concept. "There's no way to strike the Turks directly," said Bean. "Nothing is centralised. So we'll strike Iran. It's highly urbanised, the big cities are all in the northwest, and there'll be an immediate demand for Iranian troops to come home from India to fight us. The Turks will be under pressure to help, and when they launch a very badly planned attack against Armenia, we'll be waiting."
"What makes you think it will be badly planned?" Petra asked.
"Because Alai isn't running the show on the Muslim side."
"When did this happen?"
"If Alai were in control," said Bean, "he wouldn't let Virlomi do what she's doing in India. It's too stupid and it will kill too many men. So ... somehow he's lost control. And if that's the case, the Muslim enemy we're facing is incompetent and fanatic. They're acting out of anger and panic, with poor planning."
"What if this is Alai's doing, and you don't know him as well as you think?"
"Petra," said Bean. "We know Alai."
"Yes, and he knows us."
"Alai is a builder, like Ender. He always has been. An empire won through audacious and bloody conquest isn't worth having. He wants to build his Muslim empire the way Peter is building the FPE, by transforming Islam into a system that other nations will want, voluntarily, to join. Only somebody's decided not to follow his path. Either Virlomi or the hotheads within his own government."
"Or both?" asked Petra.
"Anything's possible."
"Except Alai controlling the Muslim armies."
"Well, it's simple enough," said Bean. "If we're wrong, and the Turkish counter-attack is brilliantly planned, then we'll lose. As slowly as possible. And hope Peter has something else up his sleeve. But our assignment is to draw Turkish forces and attention away from China."
"And meanwhile, we'll be putting pressure on the Muslim alliance," said Petra. "No matter what the Turks do, the Persians won't believe they're doing enough."
"Sunni against Shi'ite," said Bean. "It's the best I could think up."
So for the past two days they had been drawing up plans for the quick, audacious airborne attack on Tabriz, and then, when the Iranians started to react to that, an immediate evacuation and airborne attack on Tehran. Meanwhile, Petra, in command of the defence of Armenia, would be prepared to make the Turkish counter-attack pay for every meter of progress through the mountains.
Now everything was ready, awaiting only the word from Peter. Petra and Bean weren't really necessary while the troops began their deployment and the supplies were moved to depots in the areas where they'd be needed. Everything was in the hands of the Armenian military.
"What scares me," Petra told Bean, "is how they have absolute confidence that we know what we're doing."
"Why does that scare you?"
"Doesn't it scare you?"
"Petra, we do know what we're doing. We just don't know why."
It was in that lull, between planning and getting the order to go ahead, that Petra got a call on her cellphone. From her mother.
"Petra, they say they're friends of yours, but they're taking the babies."
Orson Scott Card - Ender 08 - Shadow of the Giant Page 26
