Little Sister (A James Palatine Novel)

by Giles O'Bryen

  ‘You will be driven to Tindouf early tomorrow. From there, I will arrange a flight to Algiers. It will be an Algerian military transport. No movies, no air hostesses!’ He laughed and shook James’s wrist. ‘You will be uncomfortable, and bored!’ he declared gleefully.

  They spent the day in the sanctuary of the Polisario HQ, its plain, square rooms like boxes into which you could climb when the world asked too much. The nurse came and tended his injuries with good-humoured mercilessness – he was sure she kept a scrubbing brush somewhere about her person and was using it to clean the grit from his back. When food was served, he ate urgently; otherwise, he slept. The longer he slept, the more he wanted to sleep. He dreamed of Younes’s ballooning lung, of Sarah’s drug-enfeebled limbs. He got up, and the sheet on which he’d lain was imprinted with a map of his wounds. He lay down again and dreamed that Nat was watching him with her beautiful eyes. He wanted to wake up and talk to her but could not.

  Before they left for their flight to Algiers, Manni Hasnaoui arrived again and asked to speak to James in private.

  ‘The device you brought here with you, the IPD400. What is it – a computer, they say?’

  James explained, then said: ‘MI6 want it back – I believe that’s why they tipped you off about the Moroccan raid.’

  ‘Did they?’ The eye of Hasnaoui peered up at him. ‘I think I’ll keep it. What do you say to that, Dr Palatine?’

  ‘Will you keep me, too?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I saw Mansour Anzarane at the compound. Now that the man himself is dead and you have Commander Djouhroub and the rest of Zender’s guards safely locked away, I’m the only credible witness that the suspected Agadir Bomber was based in the Free Zone.’

  ‘No one in fact suspects him of Agadir,’ said Hasnaoui sharply. ‘He is a pawn in a smear tactic devised by a pit of snakes in Rabat.’

  ‘I’m just the man they need to make the tactic work.’

  ‘You have become a hero of our young nation, Dr Palatine. Now you talk of betraying us. Will you?’

  ‘I’m not your enemy, Mr Hasnaoui. Let me take the IPD400 away, and I’ll deny seeing Anzarane at the compound.’

  ‘Excellent. Nejib Sulamani trusted you and so shall I. He was a perceptive man as well as a fine soldier. When we spoke to him, to warn him about the Moroccan attack, we gave orders that you should be arrested and brought here. Sulamani said you had escaped and no one knew where you were. Do you understand why he did that? He meant to protect you.’

  ‘What would you have done with me?’

  ‘I prefer not to speculate,’ said Hasnaoui briskly. ‘Nejib ignored his orders and took the matter out of our hands. Well, we Sahrawis have never been an obedient people. Since then, you have helped save us from calamity, so I am pleased that we have reached this understanding. Please tell me why you killed Anzarane?’

  ‘He was in the way. Who told you about the Moroccan raid?’

  Manni Hasnaoui remained silent for a minute, and when he spoke again, the brisk tone had gone from his voice.

  ‘We were amazed to receive this intelligence about what the Moroccans were planning – from a new source which had never before shown an interest in our struggle. What was the motive? The return of the IPD400, they said.’

  ‘Why should they prefer the IPD400 to fall into your hands rather than the Moroccans’?’

  ‘This is what we asked ourselves.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It is said that when a sick man goes to see a doctor, it is not the first problem he describes that troubles him, but the second, the one he mentions as he leaves. The IPD400 was the first problem. You, Dr Palatine, were the afterthought. It seems we are not the only people with a powerful interest in keeping you silent.’

  Hasnaoui’s head swivelled up and he examined James with an expression such as he might usually reserve for an errant son.

  ‘In Europe they like to say we Arabs hold life cheap. But still, in that regard I think we have much to learn from our new source.’

  Shock spread through him, a cold, paralysing poison. ‘MI6 want me dead?’ He stared at Hasnaoui. ‘Why do they care that Anzarane was at your compound?’

  Hasnaoui shrugged.

  ‘They’re hiding something,’ James said. ‘Something dirty. Something black. They think I discovered it while I was at the compound. Now they’re terrified I’ll come home and tell the world what they’ve been up to.’

  Along with the precious tip-off to the Polisario HQ, the Playpen had offered a sly hint that the price of this information was the death of James Palatine. . . Even with everything he knew about the Playpen – the chronic disingenuousness, the cocoon of self-importance that absolved them from all considerations of honour or principle – even so, he was stunned that Strang and co would stoop to this.

  ‘I don’t even know what they’ve been up to,’ he said.

  ‘You should make it your business to find out. As for the Polisario, we deny all knowledge of you,’ said Hasnaoui, the brisk tone returning to his voice. ‘Dr Palatine? We have never heard of this man. The IPD400? What is that? As far as the SADR government is concerned, these things do not exist.’

  He slapped his hand down on the table and shouted for a boy.

  ‘The sooner your computer leaves the Free Zone, the better. It is cursed. There is. . . How would you say it, there is blood on its keyboard. That is good – my English is still quite colloquial. Blood on its keyboard,’ he repeated, emitting a raucous chuckle as the boy arrived to help him to his feet. ‘My new friend Clive would be pleased with me.’

  Clive Silk. The Playpen’s messenger boy. James watched the old man crabbing his way to the door. The masters of the Playpen would not have contented themselves with merely requesting that he be killed – there’d have been threats, too, veiled and unveiled. What a risk Hasnaoui had taken by telling him this.

  They gathered in the hallway, where Hasnaoui made a speech. ‘I hope you will return one day and find us enjoying the freedom we have fought for side by side. You will always have an honoured place in our hearts and in the story of our nation.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Hasnaoui,’ said Nat. ‘I hope it goes well for you.’

  ‘If you want my advice,’ said Anton to Benoit, who was standing respectfully to one side, ‘I’d go to Marrakech. I haven’t seen many women since we got here—’

  Seeing Manni Hasnaoui start to bristle and swivel his head towards the blasphemer at his side, James quickly took the old man by the hand and shook it. ‘Please get in touch, if you ever visit London.’

  ‘What is there in London for us, the people of the Western Sahara?’ Hasnaoui snapped. ‘Turned backs and empty pockets, that’s what!’

  They were driven across the border into Algeria, then on for thirty miles until they arrived at an airstrip laid out between two hangars. An hour later, a military transport rumbled down out of the sky, refuelled, and carried them north. It seemed to James miraculous that a plane could go so slowly and yet remain airborne. He slept, and Hasnaoui’s words wandered through his dreams. We are not prepared to go to the lengths they demand of us. . . He woke, and could not believe that only an hour had passed and they were still slogging on to Algiers. He slept again. There is blood on its keyboard. . . They landed. Papers were inspected, taken away, re-inspected, passed along, inspected again, stamped, queried and handed back.

  ‘Hotel el-Djazaïr,’ said Nat to the taxi driver at the head of the queue outside the terminal. ‘How much, including tips, parking, petrol, tolls and your daughter’s wedding fund?’

  Half an hour later, a bellhop was pulling open the doors of the taxi and gazing in astonishment at what emerged.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Anton. ‘My kind of place.’

  ‘It’s not a whorehouse,’ said Nat, ‘it’s a hotel.’

  ‘All one to me,’ Anton retorted, straightening his miraculously well-preserved cream jacket. ‘Which way to the bar?’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

&n
bsp; Next day, Nat and James met Nikolai, Anton and Mikhail in the lobby before they set off to catch the three o’clock flight to Paris. The three Ukrainian men had been drinking all night, with the zeal of men for whom alcohol deprivation is a form of spiritual exile. Nikolai’s face, still sporting the bruises he had suffered at the hands of the casino guards, looked like a bowl of rotten fruit, and in the rubbery pallor of Mikhail’s features it was possible to see what he would look like in twenty years’ time. Only Anton seemed to have survived the festivities unscathed.

  ‘Let’s do this again – soon, right Ms Kocharian?’ he said.

  ‘I’m going to say no, Anton. I’d never be able to face the women of Kiev if I got you killed.’

  They smiled at each other – a recognition that, if nothing else, they were now capable of bantering on roughly the same wavelength.

  ‘Thanks for helping us out,’ said James. ‘We’d never have got Little Sister back without you.’

  ‘Which little sister do you mean?’ said Anton. ‘The one which sits quiet in its box, or—’

  ‘Yes, that one,’ Nat interrupted. ‘Because the other one rescued you, remember?’ She turned to her brother. ‘Get that knee seen to by a proper doctor, Niko, not just some drunk who owes you a favour.’

  ‘Taxi is here,’ said Mikhail.

  Left alone with Nat in the lobby, James felt awkward.

  ‘We should talk,’ he said.

  ‘Tomorrow. Today, I refuse to talk about anything that’s happened or anything that might happen next. Let’s go and explore. You have any money?’

  He went to the office of the hotel cashier and organised a transfer of funds from his London account, then they stepped out into the gentle hubbub of an October afternoon in Algiers. Nat had got the hotel to launder her jeans and T-shirt, but James had only the white shirt and ill-fitting black cotton trousers he’d been given by the women at the Polisario HQ. She took him to a menswear store and made him buy a dark grey suit with an indigo shirt, and black leather woven-topped slip-ons that she said made him look like a software salesman.

  ‘I’ve worked with software salesmen,’ he said. ‘None of them wore shoes like this.’

  ‘Don’t be difficult. All the men in Algiers wear them – you want to blend in, don’t you?’

  They wandered into the old kasbah, a maze of whitewashed squares and steep, narrow lanes with steps of bowed cobbles. Rooms supported on fissured timber buttresses jutted from the upper storeys of the houses they passed. There were carved stone doorways and patches of plaster splashed with graffiti, walls strung with electric cables and alleys decked with zigzags of bunting that, on close inspection, turned out to be hundreds of children’s T-shirts drying in the placid air.

  After lunch by the harbour, James bought two pre-paid mobiles from a kiosk. He loaded their numbers in the speed-dial settings and handed one to Nat. He didn’t want to tell her that the Playpen wanted him dead, not yet.

  ‘Do you think we’re safe here?’ Nat asked uneasily. She was thinking of the gunman in the souk in Marrakech, of Grey Tony Schliemann. Soon she would have to tell James what she had done.

  ‘There was a man watching us in the hotel lobby,’ James said. ‘Thick black hair and steel-rimmed glasses. DRS, Algerian intelligence, I guess.’

  ‘Surely they’ve worked out that you’re on their side, after what you’ve done to the Moroccan army over the last week.’

  ‘His sort trust people on their side even less than they trust the enemy.’

  ‘You’re one of them, really, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Well, I always wanted to be a Bond girl.’

  They walked through an area of ragged tenements where they collected a gaggle of children who looked up into their faces with comically winsome eyes and asked for money. A knot of young men stared lasciviously at Nat and passed remarks among themselves. James stared back, and something they saw in his face made them turn away. Soon they came across a cable-car station. They climbed into the dented cabin and swayed up over the city, serenaded by the grinding and screeching of the truck above their heads. Three old women nodded approvingly at them from the opposite corner.

  ‘I’m more scared now than I was when you blew a hole in the roof over my head,’ she said, taking James’s arm and smiling at the crones. ‘At least then I thought I had some chance of surviving.’

  A series of tremendous clanks signalled their arrival at the upper station, high above the centre of Algiers. They emerged opposite the basilica Notre Dame d’Afrique, sat on a bench and looked out over the city arranged beneath them, the mosaic of boats in the harbour, the rumpled sea beyond.

  ‘Hard to believe it’s the Med. We’re half way home,’ she said.

  ‘Just two hundred and fifty miles north there are people drinking buckets of Sangria and throwing up their lunchtime cheeseburger.’

  ‘You’re very puritanical.’

  ‘People are always telling me I don’t know how to enjoy myself,’ said James, wondering what it was about Nat that made him want to reveal such things.

  ‘I’ll teach you. We’ll start with dinner at the best restaurant in Algiers.’

  They got no further than a café on the next corner. A woman sat in the window, slapping dough into shape and baking flatbreads inside a blackened clay oven. Her husband presided over a charcoal barbecue. A collection of CRB Belcourt football club memorabilia, thickly furred with dust, hung on the fat-stained wall behind his head.

  ‘This is in fact the best restaurant in Algiers, but it hasn’t been discovered yet,’ said Nat. ‘Next year it’ll be wall-to-wall celebrity chefs and travel writers.’

  ‘All the ingredients are locally sourced,’ said James. ‘For example, the chicken we are eating used to live under the bed.’

  Nat laughed and had to put her hand in front of her mouth to stop the food flying out.

  They made their way back to the hotel. Nat went to her room to find out if her friend Magda Podolski had recovered, while James took the lift up to the roof terrace. He sat and looked south over the town. The houses scattered across the hills looked like thousands of multicoloured tealights set out in meandering tiers behind a tissue-paper screen.

  Nat joined him. ‘She’s OK. I spoke to her. Said she had a terrible headache and an even more terrible thirst for revenge.’

  ‘Good,’ said James. ‘What actually happened?’

  ‘I’ll tell you tomorrow. . . Maybe.’

  James shifted heavily in his chair, making the wickerwork creak. ‘Every time I sit down for more than a minute, I seize up.’ He kicked off his new shoes. ‘And these things are ridiculously uncomfortable.’

  ‘I thought you were indestructible. Man up.’

  James smiled and massaged his toes. ‘So where do you reckon Zender is now?’

  ‘God knows. Somewhere not far from a skilled pastry chef.’

  ‘You think he might have gone back to Switzerland?’

  ‘He’s not wanted almost everywhere. But he’s rich. . . and well connected.’

  Nat yawned, touching her upper lip with the tips of her fingers. The snorting of traffic in the street below rose up and dwindled into silence under the canopy of stars. James watched her lips form round the O of her yawn and thought of the kiss she’d given him before leaving for Bir Lehlou in the Mercedes. She leaned back and gazed up at the tawny sky, but seemed to grow instantly bored of that celestial vista and fell to examining him instead. Their eyes met. An unchaste image appeared in his mind, causing him to cross his legs. A boy padded over, bowed and took their order.

  ‘I guess we have to get Little Sister back to Grosvenor,’ James said.

  ‘I’d rather give it to al Qaeda. You English are so correct. You have a word for it, something like punctual.’

  ‘Punctilious,’ said James. ‘My form tutor used to say I was too correct. He said I was a computer which had taken the form of an adolescent boy.’

  ‘He was wrong. Your mind wanders all over the place.’

  �
��Oh?’

  ‘Yes, I can tell. For instance, a minute ago, you asked me about Zender and I yawned, and you thought something wicked.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Don’t say you didn’t.’

  He looked into her forthright green eyes.

  ‘All right, I won’t.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I don’t have to tell you that.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me, no. But please do – I promise not to be shocked.’

  ‘It’s private.’

  ‘It must be very bad. Whisper it in my ear.’

  ‘You’ll have to come over here, I’m too stiff—’

  She giggled, a sound so pleasurable it made the boy waiting at his station in the shadows of the terrace crane his neck round the fronds of a potted tree fern to see what was going on. The beautiful woman with the red-gold hair moved over and sat on the arm of the tall Englishman’s chair, the Englishman who looked like he’d been in a terrible fight. She rested her hand on his shoulder and leaned in towards him until her cheek touched his. He moved his lips close to her ear and whispered something. She shut her eyes and leaned in closer. The boy saw that she was smiling.

  She woke before dawn and found she was clinging to him, forehead bowed against the warm knuckles of his neck. Vile dreams were skulking in the corners of the room, waiting for her to go back to sleep. The thermostat clicked and cold air rushed from the air conditioning vent above the bed. She watched the louvred flaps play slowly back and forth and imagined gas spilling into the room, her enemies counting down the seconds until the toxins took hold.

  When the sun came up she turned the air conditioning off and went to open the window, hoping to feel a little heat from the new day. But it was still cool outside and the influx of air made her shiver. She ran back to bed and he woke and folded her in his arms. Then she rolled away, because the nest of pleasure and forgetfulness they had woven for themselves the previous day had come apart and she couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t.