Shah-Mak

by Alan Williams

  They both looked up. Sarah had come in without knocking.

  CHAPTER 5

  At dinner Sarah was at her most sparkling. The restaurant had an entry in Michelin, and Pol had ordered generously and with imagination. He had chosen, for Sarah and himself, the best wines; and Packer found himself eating almost in silence while the two of them laughed and talked and drank together as freely as though this obscene old Frenchman had known her since she was a child.

  She seemed to enjoy him enormously. Her eyes followed his with every word, flashing with mock flirtation; responding to all his jokes, not with her usual contrived gaiety but with genuine high spirits, her head thrown back, her shoulder rubbing up against him, like a cat caressing a vast silken sofa. Packer was all the more disconcerted for, whenever he was alone with her, he usually found her a rather humourless, even sullen character. Above all, he noticed that she appeared entirely to overlook Pol’s habit of talking with his mouth full — a sin which Packer committed only at the risk of arousing her fury and revulsion — while their host continued to eat and talk his way through the meal with impunity, his goatee clotted thick and cherry lips smeared bright with grease.

  For beneath his gross exterior, Charles Pol had charm. It was a comic but insidious charm; an alliance of the sybarite and the buffoon, overlaid with the seductive comfort of the magnanimous host; and towards the end of the evening Packer began to consider the outrageous possibility that the day’s events might all be some obscure and elaborate ruse by which Pol intended to ensnare Sarah.

  Such things had happened before. What could not be explained, however, was the vast compendium of information that Pol possessed about his and Sarah’s backgrounds. This had been no ordinary pick-up. Its final execution in the tulip field might have been ludicrous, but its planning had been meticulous. The research itself must have taken weeks, even months, depending on Pol’s sources of information — and this brought Packer back to perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the whole affair. Why had the Frenchman waited until the trip to Amsterdam to make contact? Pol had hinted that he was somehow persona non grata with the British authorities. Assuming that the man was genuinely trying to set up a major assassination, Packer was inclined to accept this explanation at its face value. But then how — without intimate access to certain of Packer’s former colleagues in the army, and perhaps a few indiscreet friends — could he know so much?

  Sarah’s case was relatively straightforward; half a day’s research in the library of any of the big European newspaper offices would have revealed most of her background. Miss Sarah Pugh Laval-Smith was public property; Captain Owen Packer was not. For Pol to have obtained such information about him — both classified and obscure — would have demanded the resources of at least one major Intelligence organization, friendly or otherwise.

  Packer decided that the Frenchman might, after all, be serious.

  He sipped his Vichy water and watched the waiter put down the two balloon glasses of Armagnac in front of Pol and Sarah; and again detected, behind those epicene features across the table, a gleam in the Frenchman’s little eyes which Sarah seemed to find entrancing, but which Packer had begun to mistrust.

  They were now the last diners in the restaurant. Without consulting Sarah, Pol ordered two more Armagnacs. She often boasted to Packer about how she came from a hard-drinking family; and he had known her to get drunk many times, but always in an impeccably controlled way. Only her bad temper and those ritual ‘bull shots’ at lunch in the Ritz betrayed her. Her delicate features, painstakingly repaired with cosmetics, remained unblemished.

  Pol drank a toast: ‘To my two new, dear young friends!’ — and Sarah lifted her glass to his and drank, without looking at Packer. It was one of her most tantalizing techniques — the way she assiduously ignored him in public, while bestowing on friends and strangers alike that brittle gaiety that was so alluring, and so venomous.

  It was after midnight when they left the restaurant. Pol, his rosy face smeared and streaked with sweat, held them both tightly by the arm and wobbled between them on his slippered feet. He mounted the stairs with some difficulty, pausing every few steps, and once swayed perilously backwards as they neared the top. Packer felt gloomily sober.

  They reached Pol’s door first. He stopped and beamed. ‘My children, I must offer you a last drink!’ He winked at Packer. ‘A glass of Vichy perhaps, Monsieur Packer?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Packer, ‘we’re going to bed.’ He released himself from Pol’s grip and took Sarah’s arm, which she instantly removed.

  ‘Good night, Charles. Thank you for a marvellous evening!’ She gave Pol her most devastating smile, and Pol smiled back, bright and benign, but without excitement.

  ‘Bonne nuit!’ he whispered loudly, and stumbled against his door as he opened it.

  In their room Sarah began to undress at once, quickly and dispassionately, wearing only a pair of tight blue pants as she bent over the mirror, her back fully displayed to Packer. She began peeling off her eyelashes.

  He tried to avoid looking at her, lay down on the bed and stared moodily at the ceiling. He knew the routine too well by now; it was less of an instinct than an animal scent, like a dog sniffing fear. Only with her it was resistance, truculence — worst of all, indifference. He caught a glimpse of her pale-nippled breasts in the mirror and saw them quiver slightly as she pulled two jade necklaces over her head, and heard her voice, limp and sulky, talking to her reflection: ‘God, I’m tired.’

  Packer looked away and fought the familiar temptation to coax her with soft lulling endearments, imagining it as it had been in the early months, with him standing behind her with one hand cupping her breast, slowly pinching the nipple, while the fingertips of his other gently prodded her pubic mound, feeling her thighs parting as he leaned down and began kissing the fluffy black hair at the nape of her neck. Now, with the passing of that year, the task of seduction had become inversely more difficult, more challenging, while his own approach had become clumsier and more artless, to the point when it was no more than a coarse and ineffectual grope.

  He heard her rings clatter on to the table top, then felt the bed heave as she sank down on to it, curling up with her back towards him, pulling the sheet and blanket close up round her neck and shoulders. ‘I’m so tired,’ she said again; then, with a little sigh: ‘Goodnight.’

  He got up and began to undress, leaving on his boxer shorts, and wondered, in a flash of desperation, whether this might be the moment to offer her a share of half a million pounds. Every girl has her price, he thought. There had been times, increasingly during recent months, when he’d caught himself imagining luscious, fearful, unspeakable things he could do to her — or watch have done to her — wondering how much she would accept before submitting, each subtle and ghastly perversion calculated to within a few pounds.

  He could feel her steady breathing, feigning sleep, as he climbed carefully in beside her, rigidly restraining himself from touching her, even with his knees or toes, until he felt that cold dead lump in his gut and a tiny pulse beating fast in his left temple. He reached up and turned out the light.

  CHAPTER 6

  The peacock-blue diplomatic passport was cleared through a special gate, and the man walked out of Zürich’s Kloten Airport eight minutes after his Boeing 727 had landed. It was 10.20 p.m. and snowing lightly. Outside, a black Peugeot stood with its engine idling. A plain-clothes chauffeur waited on the kerb, and whipped the rear door open as soon as the man emerged.

  Even inside the car the man kept on his dark glasses and ankle-length vicuna coat, removing only his black astrakhan hat. An attaché case with four gold-plated locks was secured by a chain to his thin wrist, just below his Patek Philippe watch. The chauffeur drove fast but carefully, accelerating only when they joined the autoroute to Chur, where the Peugeot reached the ‘advised’ speed limit of 120 kmh. An hour later the chauffeur turned off at the intersection to Landquart.

  At exactly two minutes t
o midnight they passed the sign marked Klosters, six miles below Davos. The Peugeot drove between the scattered chalets on the outskirts of the resort. The car then took a sharp left turn, passed a red and white No Entry sign, and began to climb a steep single track between pine trees, its surface freshly cleared of snow. A hundred yards further on, a couple of men stood on either side of the track, half hidden by the pines. As the Peugeot’s headlights swept up between them, one of them flashed a pocket torch twice, and the chauffeur slowed down long enough for the man to read the Peugeot’s number plate. After another quarter of a mile they came in sight of the dark heavy-roofed shape of the chalet.

  The Ruler received his visitor ten minutes later in the sauna lined with oozing pine logs. He was sitting on the centre step, naked except for a white towelling sarong. Despite the fierce heat, he sweated little. His body was well preserved, betraying its age only by a slightly hollow chest and small paunch.

  As soon as the door closed, his visitor suppressed a gasp, bowed low three times, and began to breathe carefully. He was wearing a blue worsted suit and a neutral tie. Within seconds he felt the prickles of sweat on his sallow brow and along his upper lip, but he made no move to take off his jacket or loosen his collar. He remained standing, still holding the attaché case, which was no longer chained to his wrist.

  The Ruler gave him a long stare, then reached out for a wooden ladle beside him, dipped it into the bucket on the step below, and poured the contents on to a pile of steaming stones against the wall. The water exploded with a sharp hiss, filling the room with a fog of steam. The visitor found himself gasping again, and blinking at the Ruler through tears of sweat.

  The steam slowly subsided. The Ruler looked down at the little man in front of him. ‘Welcome, Letif.’

  Marmut bem Letif, newly appointed Minister of the Interior to the Imperial Court of the Emerald Throne in Mamounia, bowed again and produced a bunch of gilt keys with which he began to unlock, with his slippery fingers, each of the four locks on the case. He opened it, still standing, and balancing it awkwardly on his forearm, picked out three stapled sheets of pink paper closely covered with Arabic script. He began to hand them to the Ruler, but was waved back.

  ‘The paperwork can wait until later. I have summoned you here, Letif, for a confidential audience. First, how do you find your new appointment?’

  Letif licked the salt off his lips. ‘It is indeed an honoured privilege, Your Imperial Highness. It carries with it great responsibilities.’

  ‘Come, come, Letif. You talk like a diplomat. I have not summoned you more than 3000 miles to listen to bureaucratic platitudes. Here you are free to talk privately, in absolute confidence. I do not want the babblings of some fawning acolyte. I want the truth.’

  Letif raised his head and looked at the Ruler with moist, yielding eyes. He felt the sweat running down his back. The Ruler seemed for a moment amused. ‘You are shy, Letif. The experience of your new office has not yet taught you the harshness of authority. Let me help you. You have already made the acquaintance of your subordinate, Colonel Sham Tamat?’

  Letif inclined his head in a nod, but said nothing.

  ‘He is a hard man. A brutal man. But NAZAK is a hard and brutal organization. It guards the internal security of our nation, Letif. We cannot afford — even for the benefit of our Western friends — to leave it in the hands of weak, sentimental liberals.’

  Letif stood with his head resting on one of his narrow shoulders. There was a long pause.

  ‘Something troubles you, Letif. I am your master, and you are directly responsible to me. You must tell me everything, however trivial it may seem.’ The Ruler’s tone was quiet and soothing.

  A nerve began to twitch and tug at the damp skin around Letif’s right eye. He spoke carefully, without looking at the Ruler. ‘I am conscious of Your Imperial Highness’s views about certain aspects concerning the work of Colonel Tamat and his organization. Last week, on the day after I received Your Imperial Highness’s Seals of Office, the colonel invited me privately to the headquarters of NAZAK. I witnessed one of his formal interrogations.’

  He paused, and his dewy eyes seemed to be searching for something in the steamy gloom of the sauna. Again he smelled the brackish odour of the windowless cell, with its single strip of neon that fizzed and blinked from the ceiling; saw Colonel Tamat’s large friendly figure beside him, in its well-tailored uniform the colour of dried dung, as the awful instrument was wheeled in, looking like a portable barbecue; then the girl being stripped from the waist down and strapped on to the grille, and then the screams and stench of scorched skin and urine, the flash as the lights fused, and Tamat’s laugh bellowing through the darkness: ‘The little bitch — pissed on to my beautiful barbecue a cheval — toasted her fat arse and she never told us a thing!’

  ‘I am waiting,’ said the Ruler; but before Letif could answer, his master had ladled more water on to the stones. When the noise had subsided, Letif replied.

  ‘There was an accident. One of the prisoners — a girl, a student — was electrocuted on Colonel Tamat’s machine.’

  The Ruler’s eyes showed no expression. ‘Sham Tamat is a good family man, but he has the instincts and appetites of a wild beast. He is also cunning, and will react quickly and cleverly when attacked. Minister Letif, I am going to entrust you with a delicate and difficult task. You must be wary of Colonel Tamat. I have many potential enemies in my kingdom — some of whom I know, some I do not — but Colonel Sham Tamat is a man who must be watched constantly. After myself, he is probably the only person in the country who understands how to use real power. While he was still content to use that power in the interests of my nation, I was prepared to give him a free hand — even if it did mean allowing him to play with his revolting toys.

  ‘However, I have taken a decision. I no longer trust Tamat, and I intend to take that power away from him. But it must be done without bloodshed. That is most important, Letif. I have no intention of advertising our country as just another snake pit of power feuds, like our cheap Arab neighbours. Over the next decade, Letif, my nation is destined to become one of the greatest powers in the world.’

  A dull light shone in his black eyes as he sat forward, hands on his naked knees. ‘But I intend that we should also become a civilized power. We will use civilized methods in everything from agriculture and industry to the treatment of our political enemies. Sham Tamat and his kind are not civilized. They will soon cease to have any place in our nation’s destiny. Tamat will be destroyed, Letif, and you will be one of the instruments of his destruction.’ He sat back and gave a short nod. ‘Now to more general matters, Minister. What have you to report?’

  Letif inclined his head again and rubbed his hands together as if he were washing them — the tell-tale gesture of the bazaar and the street pedlar. ‘As always, Your Highness’s divine guidance has been correct. On Tuesday evening Colonel Tamat paid a visit to the house of Doctor Zak, across the Gorge of Darak. After three hours they were joined by two junior members of the Pan-Islamic Socialist Brotherhood. They stayed until after two o’clock in the morning, when Tamat returned to Mamounia, while Doctor Zak and the two officers drove away to Saba where they boarded a light aircraft.’ He glanced down at the papers in his hand, where his thumb had left a wet mark in the corner. ‘I have the registration number here, but unfortunately we were unable to determine the plane’s exact destination. However,’ he added, his meek voice gathering confidence, ‘the radar station at Bikar reported an unidentified plane flying into Iraq in the early morning.’

  ‘There were no flights back into my country?’ said the Ruler quietly.

  ‘No, Your Highness.’ Letif gave a limp smile. ‘I am fully confident that if there had been, your Imperial Air Defences would have intercepted them at once.’

  ‘Not if they were small aircraft flying low. Our radar defences, Letif, are among the best in the world, but they are directed at high-flying bombers and missiles. But no matter. I do not want
Doctor Zak and his friends apprehended — at least, not for the time being.’

  Letif bowed. ‘I understand, Your Imperial Highness.’

  The Ruler picked up the wooden ladle and dipped it again in the bucket, but this time just stirred it around, as though testing a soup; then, to Letif’s relief, he replaced it on the bench beside him.

  ‘Minister, let us now turn to that difficult and delicate task I mentioned to you. In the last few days information has reached me, from secret sources outside our country, which indicates that an attempt is being planned against my life. I know that such attempts have become almost commonplace, but they have usually been the work of amateur fanatics and disaffected army officers. My recent information, however, obliges me to treat this latest plot more seriously.

  ‘The indications are that it is being planned abroad, and that the potential assassins are unknown to our Security services. I want you, Minister Letif, to identify these men — to isolate them, and eliminate them. In accomplishing this, you will have to manoeuvre most delicately — particularly where NAZAK and Colonel Tamat are concerned. Tamat has great enthusiasm and energy when it comes to torturing a few students with left-wing sympathies. But I fear that he lacks the subtlety to deal with a full-scale international plot against my person. What you confide in Colonel Tamat, I leave to your discretion. As Head of Internal Security, he will have to be told of the plot. But I advise that as your inquiries proceed, you keep him informed of only the most basic details.’ He paused. ‘You are blessed with my confidence, Letif. You will not fail me.’

  Letif bowed again, his clothes clinging warm and wet to his skin, and his feet felt as though he were standing in mud. ‘I understand, Your Imperial Highness.’

  The Ruler smiled. ‘What news do you bring of Her Majesty?’