Packer had not been able to see the sides of the pass, but could make out their shape by the absence of stars. Ryderbeit, however, seemed endowed with some especially sensitive night-sight. He had a pencil torch with which he occasionally consulted the charts on his lap; but most of the time he seemed to be flying by instinct.
Packer was no aviation expert, but he guessed that Charles Pol would have had to spread a very wide net indeed in order to find another pilot like this one-eyed Rhodesian pariah. He wondered, too, what extra inducements Pol had offered, beyond the £100,000 that Ryderbeit had already received, and whether it was in a joint account, subject to the same dual signature conditions as Packer’s.
He had fastened on this thought — on any thought — for as long as possible. Anything to keep his mind off the immediate fears of the flight, and the more ominous speculations of what lay ahead that night.
For more than an hour, after crossing from Iraq and leaving the mountains, Ryderbeit took them back up to 1000 feet, and they flew to the steady rattling roar of the engine, without seeing a single light below — not a town, not a village, not one pair of headlamps to mark a road. Packer felt like someone who has swum too far out over a deep lake and wonders if he can make it back to the shore.
At 10.35 local time — an hour ahead of Beirut — they reached another ridge of mountains; and again they came in so low that Packer felt that at any second the long rigid wheelstruts would be snapped off by a rock. But Ryderbeit’s natural antennae seemed to detect every contour, every hump and peak and crevice, until they were drifting down the long empty slopes towards the Gulf. Lights were now sprinkled across the blackness below — and ahead Packer could see the glow of a city.
Ryderbeit signalled with his thumb and passed him the torch. Packer unstrapped himself and crawled back over his seat into the cramped tapering fuselage whose vibrating sides made his teeth rattle.
His fingers found the screws, and with the torch in one hand he got out Ryderbeit’s pocketknife, opened the screwdriver blade and went to work. He slipped three of the spare ammunition clips, each containing thirty rounds, into the deep pockets of his anorak; climbed back over his seat and laid the two MI6s on the floor under his legs, before passing the other three clips to Ryderbeit, who tucked them into his belt.
They were again flying so low that Packer had the sensation of riding in a very fast car, skimming over the shadowy mounds of sand dunes, expecting at any moment to see a house speeding towards them.
Ryderbeit had switched on the radio, and moved the dial slowly round, picking up the occasional static crackle; then a blare of music — a woman wailing to the twang of some primeval instrument. Mamounia Radio. Ryderbeit adjusted the dial to a precise wavelength, with the volume turned up full. A couple of minutes passed; there was a loud swooping howl, and a voice with a thick accent shouted through the cockpit: ‘Please over to forty-three degrees…’ It went on repeating numbers, while Ryderbeit altered direction, again with the speed and ease of a racing driver.
A pair of lights appeared over the next hump of sand — two burning oilcans, with the flames flapping sideways in the crosswind. Ryderbeit flew between them, touched the wheels down with a gentle jolt, reversed the prop with a screaming, howling shudder, and pulled up within fifty feet.
He had his straps off and one of the MI6s in his hand before the engine died; opened the flimsy door and jumped down, crouching under cover of the wing, with the gun snapped on to fully automatic — capable of firing all thirty rounds in 1.5 seconds — sweeping the muzzle round in a swift arc. Packer followed, with the same movements.
Two men were already beating out the flaming beacons, and two more were approaching with hurricane lamps. There was a high container truck parked on the dunes about thirty yards away, above the salt-pan on which they had landed. One of the men came forward and shook them both by the hand. He did not smile. ‘We have little time. The aircraft will go to the truck.’ It sounded like the voice which had talked them down on the radio.
Packer and Ryderbeit slung the MI6s over their shoulders and joined the four men behind the wings of the Storch, and they began pushing it towards the truck.
The time was 10.54 p.m.
CHAPTER 38
Sarah had been able to eat little for dinner. At nine o’clock she went up to her room and tried to sleep. At ten o’clock she had a shower and began to prepare herself. Shiva Steiner sent her up a vodka martini which she found disappointingly weak. All evening Steiner had appeared unusually fussy and anxious and had twice given her the same warning. ‘Sarah, it is most important that you do not have too much to drink. The Ruler detests people who are drunk.’
Sarah would have liked very much to get drunk. Instead, she took twenty milligrams of Valium and tried to avoid thinking of what lay ahead. But tonight her imagination was unusually busy, playing — against her will — on the persistent and repulsive theme of what it was going to feel like to slip a poisoned suppository up the anus of a man she did not even know. Her upbringing had left her with a lingering revulsion against the mechanics of the human body.
She wondered, with a slight shiver, as she squeezed the tube of glue along the edge of her false eyelashes, whether he was hairy. She had once seen a man on the beach, in Turkey, who had tufts of hair on his shoulders and down his spine, and thick black hair sprouting out of the edges of his bathing trunks, and the sight had sickened her. The Ruler came from a tribe very close to the Turks.
She wondered, too, what he would want to do to her.
Her mind, with malicious curiosity, wondered how she would react if he insisted on subjecting her to some outlandish Oriental perversion; she realized with dismay how relatively inexperienced she was. The Ruler, Steiner had told her, was a worldly man who would want diversions — he would certainly not be satisfied, as poor Owen Packer was, with conventional coitus.
Again she tried not to think about it, but the thought was imperative: how was she going to manoeuvre him into a position where she could insert one of those odious little waxy grey, bullet-shaped objects which Steiner had given her earlier in the evening, disguised in two Estée Lauder lipsticks. She could already imagine several mishaps, any of which would cause immediate disaster.
She would have to secrete at least one of the lipsticks under the pillow, and bring it out while he was already mounting her, her hands all the time caressing him against her will, her fingertips having to explore and locate the exact point of entry, and then carry out the act of murder with a deft precision which must allow for no margin of error. The least hesitation, the smallest degree of clumsiness, would alert him at once — he would grab the lipstick out of her fingers and summon the guards.
What would happen then was something she wanted to think about even less than the idea of probing with her index finger to find the rubbery ring of the Serene Imperial sphincter.
It was essential, Steiner had emphasized, that the poison be inserted as deep as she could reach, so that it was drawn up into the rectum. From that moment the convulsions would start and he would be totally incapacitated. It was the few seconds beforehand that would be critical.
She felt slightly sick as she removed the varnish from her fingernails, and cut each of them almost to the quick; then checked herself again in the mirror, and put a spare pair of pants in her bag, along with her wallet and passport and cosmetic purse, her silver pill box from Asprey’s containing her Valium, and the two lipsticks.
At 10.30 precisely Steiner appeared, alone, and escorted her down a side staircase, on to the sandy forecourt in front of the garage. He hardly spoke, except to ask her if she had everything she needed — her passport, in particular. She knew she would not be returning here, and Steiner had assured her that her luggage would reach Beirut safely. It was not a detail that greatly concerned her now.
As she stepped out into the muggy darkness, her mind seized on small irrelevant details. She noticed that Steiner was oddly dressed: instead of one of his impeccable suit
s, he looked as though he were going out on some hunting party — olive-green smock shirt and baggy matching trousers tucked into green rubber-soled boots.
The Fleetwood sedan was waiting on the forecourt. Steiner showed her in and said nothing as he closed the door on her. The engine was already running and the driver pulled away a second later, between the marble gateposts, on to the empty coast road into the capital. After a couple of miles she noticed that the familiar Ford Falcon had not joined them.
They reached the suburbs and there was still no car behind. The streets were almost empty of traffic, except for light military vehicles — jeeps, trucks, occasionally an armoured car or weapon carrier.
Beyond the sealed smoked windows she was aware of a ghostly stillness. The city seemed far darker than last night when she had ridden back from the Embassy; yet it was not deserted. There were men in every doorway — shadowy figures with invisible faces; static groups of men round the squares, on the steps of official buildings, near the entrances of the big international hotels.
Here, at the very centre of the city, it became so dark that she lost her bearings. Theirs was still the only car in sight, driving now on dipped headlamps, very slowly. Several times soldiers in leopard-spotted battle-dress and steel helmets stepped out and peered at them closely, the muzzles of their machine pistols trained on the front window.
They came to a street lined with camouflaged buses, and she could just make out rows of more helmets behind the windows. There were also buses up all the side streets; and the roadblock at the entrance to the square leading to the Royal Palace was now manned by at least fifty troops and two armoured cars.
The Fleetwood slid to a halt. An officer strolled up to the driver’s side. He had a thin savage face with a black moustache and sunken black eyes under the shadow of his helmet. He stepped forward and opened the door for her. As he did so, their eyes met and he looked at her with an expression of contemptuous indifference.
She got out and steadied herself against the car door. Her knees were trembling. The officer gestured towards a jeep with two men in it. She walked over. One of the men jumped down and pulled the front passenger seat forward to let her into the back. The officer said something behind her and the man grinned, but did not reply. She sat down and clutched her shawl round her, although it was a warm night.
The jeep drove off, slowly, with a single spotlight cutting through the blackness of the square. Two points of light marked the entrance to the Royal Palace ahead. The rest of the square was in total darkness.
They passed the statue of Hamid the Martyr, his head and shoulders splashed with bird droppings, his cape and boots mouldering with verdigris. The gates to the Palace were open and unguarded. They drove up to the steps leading to the pair of massive bronze doors.
The jeep stopped and the man in the passenger seat leapt down. Sarah followed, moving carefully as though she might trip and fall. She felt giddy with a sensation of being suddenly very drunk; and feared that if she did fall she would not be able to get up again.
The next few minutes passed in a silent trance in which her mind and body did not seem to be properly related. It was as though she were being wheeled through a hospital, only half conscious, aware of people round her without really seeing or hearing them.
The corridors were long and brightly lit, and there were men stationed at intervals at the high ormolu doors. Two men walked with her, but did not support her: her main concern was the highly polished floor, which seemed at every step to be sliding away beneath her feet.
They came to the end of another corridor and stopped at a smaller brass-studded mahogany door, with no handle. One of the soldiers rapped on it twice: it was instantly opened, just enough to allow Sarah to pass through. It slammed shut behind her.
She stood blinking into the room. Her imagination had anticipated a chamber of sumptuous elegance, discreetly lit, with perhaps a whiff of incense. The Ruler would be there, alone, casually attired, and would offer her champagne and golden caviar. He would take up their conversation about English country houses, and she would describe her family’s ancestral home in detail, particularly the famous garden with its lake and grottos and Palladian bridges. She had not even needed to rehearse this part, for she knew the speech off by heart. She would continue until the Ruler stopped her; he would expect her to be nervous, and with his experience she knew that he would take up the conversation without effort.
She was shocked to find that it was not going to be like this.
All the lights were on, so bright that the room seemed to be floodlit. It was not a large room, but some kind of antechamber, lined with high-backed wing chairs and Louis XV sofas. It was crowded with men, all of them standing, many of them armed with pistols or sub-machine guns.
They were silent as she came in, and watched her this time with a lewd curiosity. A man in plain clothes came forward and seized her bag. Two uniformed men stood on either side of her, very close, without touching her. The plain-clothes man riffled expertly through the contents, glanced at her passport, then passed the bag to a second plain-clothes man who nodded and disappeared with it through a pair of folding doors at the end of the room.
The first plain-clothes man turned and looked at her; then, with a dispassionate expression, slapped her across the mouth. Her head spun round and the room went red, then black, full of dancing lights, as she felt hands close round her arms and her feet seemed to leave the ground. Doors opened, then shut. She heard a man laughing and peered across a much larger room containing a four-poster bed with peacock-blue hangings.
The man was large, with a broad fleshy face. Her handbag was slung over his left arm, while in his right hand he was holding something between his thumb and forefinger. She dimly recognized one of her lipsticks. He carried no gun, and he was smiling. Beside him, spread out on the bed, was the smooth naked body of a man. His hands had been folded gracefully across his groin, and his face was turned away, hidden by the shadow of the hangings. At first all she recognized were his wings of dark silver hair; and with a dreadful clarity which contrasted with the numbness of her brain, she remembered thinking that the rest of his body seemed quite hairless — an ageless, alabastine figure which even in this moment her distracted senses found almost beautiful.
She drew closer to the bed, aware of the man still watching her, still smiling. Then she swung round: ‘What is this? What are you doing here? Are you staying to watch?’
The man smirked, without sound. She turned again, her fear becoming confused by anger. ‘I did not agree to a ménage à trois!’
‘You did not agree to anything,’ the man beside her replied, pleasantly.
She took a closer look at the bed. The eyes were tiny slits and a small pool of yellow liquid had oozed out on the peacock-blue pillow under his ear. She felt the floor sway, and the outlines of the room became dim and fuzzy. She wanted to be sick, but her throat contracted. The man said, ‘You are too late, Mademoiselle Laval-Smith —’ and bowed — ‘but fortunately you come in excellent time for me!’ He spoke English in a deep sensual voice with a musical accent.
‘Who are you?’ she gasped.
‘My name is Colonel Tamat. You may have heard of me — I have a very bad reputation —’ he chuckled — ‘I am Chief of the Security Police, NAZAK. And what you see over there is the last vestige of the Tyrant of the Emerald Throne.’
His words faded with a singing in her ears; she grabbed the back of a chair and tried not to look at what lay on the bed. ‘What has happened? Oh God! Oh God, what’s happened?’
‘You are under arrest,’ Colonel Tamat replied in his friendly voice, and held up the lipstick. She saw now that it was one of the grey suppositories. ‘You are a very wicked girl, Mademoiselle Laval-Smith.’
She looked at him, her mouth hanging open, her face feeling swollen and lopsided. ‘What have I done?’ she moaned.
Colonel Tamat laughed heartily. ‘Young lady, you have just killed His Serene Imperial Highness. And w
hat I have in my hand is the evidence.’
‘But I didn’t.’ Her mouth was dry and she forced her knuckles between her lips.
Colonel Tamat shook his head, his face suddenly grave. ‘It is foolish to protest, Mademoiselle.’ He lifted the lipstick to his nostrils. ‘This unpleasant little device contains cyanide, as you are no doubt aware. And you do not suppose that one of His Highness’s most loyal subjects would dare to commit such an outrage?’
She gave a choking gasp. ‘But that — that!’ She gestured towards the bed without looking at it — ‘I didn’t do that!’
‘What has been done to the body is immaterial. The fact is that you, and your Imperialist foreign masters, have murdered the Supreme Ruler of our country. As such, you will be subjected to the full rigours of the law.’
The room became blurred, then went black.
CHAPTER 39
The Fieseler Storch had been folded up and put in the back of the truck, which had then driven off with Ryderbeit and the rest of their reception party, leaving Packer alone with the man who had first come forward and spoken English. The rest of them had seemed in a hurry, and Packer and Ryderbeit scarcely had time to cross-check their plans and schedules for the rest of the night.
The plane was to be refuelled, brought back to the salt-pan and reassembled within one and a half hours: midnight plus thirty minutes. Ryderbeit had snarled something about waiting no more than ten minutes; and if Packer and his rich little dolly bird didn’t show up in that time, he’d take off. That was his contract, and he was sticking to it.
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