Guy Fawkes Day
Page 42
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Madinat Al-Aasima: October 24: 11:00 a.m.
Thank God it was only a quick in-and-out job, Douglas Easterby consoled himself when the chauffeur from the Ramli Ministry of the Interior collected him at the airport. He had an evening booking for the British Airways night flight that would get him back to Heathrow by tomorrow morning. Never a pleasant destination at the best of times, on this occasion Ramliyya seemed ever closer to a life-like recreation of Hell.
The driver took him to a private mansion near the Red Sea, towards the northern fringe of the city. The owner, the driver informed him, was Prince Fahd, the minister of the interior.
Inside, the prince subjected his guest to the usual interminable ritual of cardamom coffee and dates. The hook-nosed host’s English was limited; Easterby began to fidget, bored of the present and apprehensive about what was to follow.
Shortly before noon, the pudgy Ramli prince scooped himself from the French antique sofa and urged his guest to follow him outside. In the comfort of the host’s chauffeur-driven Bentley, the two men headed downtown along broad, palm-fringed roads. It was Friday; holy day; noon; the most important of the week’s thirty-five prayers.
The first mosques were already seething at the minarets. Robed and bearded figures strode sombrely along empty pavements to fulfil their pious duty. Easterby recognized the lagoon and huge jet fountain at the heart of the city’s commercial centre. On the other side of the lagoon stood the largest and most ornate of Madinat Al Aasima’s many mosques, its gold-plated minarets shimmering in the noon heat.
The chauffeur approached a cordon of policemen guarding the only entrance to the mosque’s spacious car park. The police ranks broke respectfully before the Prince’s plates, and the Bentley pulled up in the far corner, next to the mosque. In no hurry to proceed with an unwelcome duty, Easterby waited for the chauffeur to finish with Prince Fahd before his own door was pulled open to reveal what would become an amphitheatre with no lions and no gladiators, just two men and one sword.
In no time the colonel’s collar started to stick uncomfortably to the base of his neck. But it wasn’t just the thirty-eight degree heat that induced the heavy sweating. In the intense glare of the Ramli midday, Easterby was rapidly losing appetite for an event he would have paid handsomely to watch only twenty-four hours before.
Other VIP cars joined their position in the inner sanctum. A mixture of robed and uniformed Ramlis greeted the colonel coolly, each maintaining a reserve worthy of the occasion.
From the mosque’s loudspeakers, the muezzin was working his sermon to its frenzied conclusion. Easterby listened to the censorious ranting that seemed to search out unseen faults hiding undiagnosed inside the hearts of the early onlookers.
The colonel had seen death often enough during his army days, but always only the placid aftermath of death. Twisted bodies, however gruesomely mutilated, had the decency to lie calm and still before the onlooker’s eyes. This was something quite different, an invitation to witness the agony of death, the split-second of transition from animated life to component parts. And even after all the headaches Goss had so recently thrust upon him, the colonel would have preferred to read of his former sergeant’s public beheading over Times and toast in the comfort of his Oxshott mansion. This was all too premeditated, and Easterby’s disciplined stomach was starting to mutiny.
The colonel stood waiting beside the growing line of Ramli officials, feeling hotter and guiltier as the noonday prayer chanted away Goss’s last minutes. The sodden collar and tie constricted his throat with a will of their own. Pull yourself together man! he admonished himself. Once the prison van gets here, it will all be over in minutes. All the barbaric horror will seem worth enduring once you’re safely back in London and the ink dries on the new contracts. And why sweat for Goss? After all, it’s no more than the ugly brute deserves. And convenient too, for there will be other secrets buried along with Goss’s mutilated carcass in the dust of Ramliyya.
Judging by the succession of Allah Akbars, the midday prayer was nearing conclusion. Streams of excited, bearded spectators began to pour from the raised steps of the mosque and flood to the barriers around the car park. Easterby remembered someone telling him that Ramli prisoners were always blindfolded for execution. At least Goss wouldn’t catch sight of his former commanding officer standing callously to attention in front of the hostile crowd.
The babble of voices around the car park rose in crescendo. The crowd had spotted the prison van entering the car park, flanked by an escort of police cars.
At first the rear door of the prison van remained closed. Four policemen broke from the security cordon, hurried to the front of the van and hauled out a large green mat, which they carried into the centre of the parking lot. They unfurled the rug clumsily, with a good deal of puffing and gesticulation. A fifth man crowned their efforts with a transparent length of plastic sheeting.
Looking to the left of the van, Easterby set eyes for the first time on the executioner, a tall, dark man dressed in white robes. Hanging limp in his right hand was a long, thin sword, its blade looking implausibly narrow for the chunky neck it was soon to bite.
Finally, the rear door of the prison van swung open, and to his horror, Easterby found himself looking straight into Goss’s face, red, uncovered and bulldog angry.
Goss jumped out as he might have bailed out of a plane, thrashing his manacled hands into the air in a whirlwind of testosterone energy. His eyes furiously scanned the ranks of his tormentors. Then he saw his target. His chest puffed out, his face reddened, and the roar came all the louder for the abrupt silence of the minaret.
‘Cuuurrrnnell! Cuurrrnell Eeesterbeee, you bastard! I know what you did. I know you set me up, you scum! You’ll rot in hell for this, Colonel! You’ll rot in bloody hell!’
It took five of the puny Ramli policemen to restrain the fearsome sergeant as Goss summoned up every last reserve of raw strength to fight against his fate. The Ramli crowd had evidently never seen anything like it before. Some murmured in outrage, others with unreasoned fear.
Two more policemen rushed up to help. Now and then Goss jumped up to shoulder height, kicking anywhere he could, lashing into the policemen’s heads and chests. The group staggered to and fro across the car park, propelled by Goss’s blasts of blind fury. Easterby felt his leg muscles start to twitch as more policemen arrived.
The struggle intensified, but as the protagonists edged step by step closer to the green mat, Goss’s prodigious strength began to fade and his breath came in convulsions. Finally, he sank defeated to his knees, a spent and gasping force in the outrageous noonday heat. The policemen saw their chance and rushed to scoop the prisoner up, frenziedly bundling him the final few yards onto the green mat before desperation could summon up final, untapped reserves of strength.
Goss must have known at that moment that he was beaten, but with one final spit into the eye of the storm he let out a pitiful howl, raging against the injustice of his fate, raging against the whole world, the next world, and, above all, against the man who was sending him there.