In fact, they looked just like him. Give or take the slightly longer hair and his beard.
'Can I help you?' Raf asked politely.
Neither answered. Neither moved. But it didn't matter, because the fox was awake. Disarm yourself, disarm your enemy, said a tired voice in his head. It sounded cracker-barrel, but Raf recognized it as a koan from the old rasta he'd trained with while on remand.
Raf put up his hands and watched both dancer and ballerina suddenly relax.
'Yeah,' said the man, coming closer. 'We were told you'd be sensible.' He sounded disappointed.
That's me,' said Raf, stepping forward to sweep aside the man's automatic with his left hand, while swinging in with his right elbow, catching him across the throat.
Sometimes you've just got to dance.
Raf uncoiled, right elbow returning to spread the man's nose sideways across his once-handsome face. Balance Raf took out with a simultaneous clap to both sides of the man's head, rupturing the eardrums. He was spared having to thumb the dancer's eyes because the man was already headed floorwards, Raf following hard behind.
As they landed, Raf put one elbow through the dancer's rib cage, driving a fat splinter of bone deep into a suddenly very shocked heart. The stink of open bowels filled the room but by then Raf had rolled sideways across the carpet, the dancer's automatic already in his hand, coming to rest beside a filing cabinet. Either it would give him cover or fill him with shrapnel, depending on what loads the ballerina carried in her gun. It gave him cover, though the only thing to be said for the sudden stench of cordite was that it swamped the smell that came from the body between them.
'Hey.' Raf's voice sounded better than he'd expected, given someone was using him for target practice. 'You want to tell me what this is about?'
He wasn't fussed about giving his position away. She already knew exactly where he was, she just couldn't reach him. 'Well?' Raf said.
Her answer was another slug, slammed into the filing cabinet. In at the front but not, thank God, out at the side. Her big problem was her slugs were small calibre, their load almost subsonic. She'd come carrying brass designed to fire at close range, then rattle round inside Raf's skull magimixing.
'You can put that gun down or I can kill you,' said Raf. It was, he realized, probably the wrong time to start enjoying himself; but knowing that didn't change a thing. His thoughts felt as clear as they'd ever been. And for the first time in years, he wasn't standing on the outside watching himself.
'Make your choice' said Raf, noisily jacking back the slide on his newly borrowed automatic. 'It means nothing to me.'
A slug fired into the filing cabinet gave Raf his answer.
Shaking dust from his short hair, Raf took a look around him. The ballerina had a door behind her to give an exit, if that was what she needed: this he already knew. He had a wall, a filing cabinet and a blind corner without door or window. Not good at all.
On the other hand ... Raf smiled. 'I hope they're paying you well,' he said, doing his best to sound genuinely concerned. 'And I hope you've got insurance. Because the hospitals round here are likely to slice you up for body parts if you look like you can't meet their bill ...'
He paused to let the silence build, thinking himself inside her head until he finally, briefly became her. 'You've still got a chance,' he said. 'Which was more than your friend ever had.'
The answering shot that Raf expected didn't come. And it didn't sound like the ballerina was changing position or anything, because he could hear silence, devoid of even the faintest tread of feet moving carefully over a carpet.
The woman was listening to him, which was her first mistake — probably the only mistake Raf needed. 'Look,' said Raf. 'You've been set up.' He paused again, as if hit by a sudden thought. 'You got a mobile there?'
The woman would have, undoubtedly. A Seiko wrist model or a Paul Smith wallet, the chrome flip-open kind. Something classy but anonymous to let her call in the cleaners when her job was done.
'Call home,' he told her. 'Have your handler access the precinct files, check out Ashraf al-Mansur.'
Nine, three ... three, nine, two ... two, two, five, four, zero, three. She was using something with a keypad and it was a local number, Raf decided, following the dial tones in his head. What was more, she got a connection first time which told him all he needed to know about his own situation.
The woman spoke rapidly, her intonation rising towards the end. Twice she stumbled over her words. Being scared made her unpredictable, which made her dangerous; and Raf seriously didn't want to be on the wrong end of a gun held by a frightened ballerina. Not when more triggers got yanked in panic than ever got squeezed with intent.
'Schisen.' The word was soft, spoken with feeling.
'Ashraf al-Mansur,' said Raf, 'special forces, explosives expert, advanced weapons training ...' He paused, trying to remember what else the kid had put on her list, because it was Hani who'd faked his CV, Raf was certain of that. 'Crack shot, proficient in close combat.' And there was other stuff, real facts that Hani didn't know or couldn't imagine.
'Acute hearing,' said Raf, 'enhanced vision, eidetic memory ... How am I doing?'
He wasn't expecting an answer yet and didn't get one. All the same, the woman's breathing grew shallower, more ragged. Right about now should be when she'd start thinking about how to bring this deal to an exit.
'There's a door behind you,' said Raf. 'Feel free to use it.'
'And get killed on the way out? Spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder?' The blonde woman spat out her words, bitterness battling fear. 'You killed Marcus.'
'I'm sorry,' said Raf. What was more, he meant it. Killing the blond man hadn't been an accident but equally it hadn't been entirely from choice. 'You were set up, both of you. Because whoever sent you knew you wouldn't walk away from this alive ...
'Think about it,' he said as he stood up, staying pressed back against the wall. 'You're disposable. Not to me but to whoever hired you.'
'That goes with the territory.'
'Yeah,' said Raf, 'but what was the franchise? To kill me or get killed yourself? Think about it,' he repeated. Surrendering the protection of his filing cabinet, Raf stepped carefully over the dancer who lay face up, blindly staring at a cracked ceiling. And the bullet he'd been waiting for all his adult life never came.
She was smaller than Raf had thought. Older, too. Her eyes only half watching Raf's gun.
'Your husband?'
'My brother.' She tossed her own weapon onto a nearby chair and peeled off latex gloves. Glancing at Raf for permission to approach the body.
The woman didn't touch the corpse, just kneeled beside it and looked. Her eyes were as dry as her face was impassive. But when she spoke her voice was cracked with tension and raw with anger. And the anger was not directed at him.
'Bastards.'
Raf gave a long low, silent sigh of relief and put the dead dancer's automatic in his jacket pocket. What he'd just achieved was the cerebral equivalent of reversing a throw hold. 'You want to tell me who hired you?'
She didn't, which was exactly what he expected. He wouldn't have believed her anyway. That would have been too easy and these things never were.
'Fair enough,' said Raf. 'But I'd like you to be very clear on one point. I'm already dead. And I'd like you to pass that on ...'
The ballerina glanced up at that and saw Raf's smile. A smile so wintry she wanted to shiver. Very briefly, she wondered what his face would look like without those shades and decided she didn't want to know. Never would be too soon to see him again.
From the bullet-riddled filing cabinet Raf took the files for Nafisa and Jalila, ripped the page that contained Lady Nafisa's last appointment from the clinic diary and grabbed a manila envelope as an afterthought. When he shut the door behind him, the ballerina was carefully picking up her spent brass. One less collection of calling cards for forensics to consider.
Time to change camouflage, Raf decided
. The building's elevator only ran as far as the fifth floor, after that it was stairs all the way up to the eighth. On the sixth floor was a communal bathroom for men and a separate one for women, which probably meant no hot water at all on the floors above where the hall carpet grew stained, the paint peeled and the doors became narrow. More importantly still, the locks became old and cheap ...
Raf posted the files and appointments page to Zara, c/o Villa Hamzah. Then, wearing his new washed and untorn jellaba, he ordered a coffee at a café next door to the apartment block and waited. When the dregs of the first coffee got cold, he ordered another and took the offer of an ornate sheesha and the evening paper. For once he wasn't on the front page or on pages two and three. Page four had a small paragraph, no picture. Someone somewhere had taken a decision to turn down the heat.
Raf smiled.
An hour after he'd left the clinic, a black van turned up outside. Largish, oldish, anonymous ... The man in the driving seat clambered out, brushing cake crumbs from dirty blue overalls. Licking the suction strip on an on-call sign, he slicked it to the inside of his windscreen and wandered up to the main door, large toolbox in hand.
Cable repairs ... air-conditioning experts ... 24-hour electrics ... From city to city, the cover rarely changed. The only thing unusual was that it had taken the van an hour to arrive. Since it was unlikely that the firm for which the dead dancer worked was that inefficient, it meant the woman had needed time to say goodbye to her brother. Which was a good sign. At least, Raf thought so.
The coffee was bitter and what little Raf had of the hashish was home-grown and too sweet. But when the man in overalls reappeared Raf knew it had been worth his wait. So he tossed a couple of notes onto his café table and pushed back his seat.
What was left of the dead dancer was being carried out, cut up and jointed in those black bags. And from the frozen stare on the blonde ballerina's face as she trailed after the clean-up man down to his van, it was equally clear she'd been present when the butchering had been done.
That was love of a kind.
Cleaner and woman held a fleeting discussion on the sidewalk. More a quick question and an emphatic answer, really. The man wearing overalls shrugging and pulling himself up into the driver's seat. The ballerina didn't acknowledge his nod or even glance at the vehicle as it slid into the traffic, positioning itself behind a rattling green-painted tram.
She was good at blending, Raf had to give her that. From the flash of a packet, it was obvious her cigarettes were local. Except that no local woman would have smoked untipped Cleopatras; but then, no local woman would have smoked in public. Only she was a tourist, wasn't she? And tourists did stuff like that out of ignorance. Showed their bare arms on the streets, didn't cover their hair, smoked in public. What she didn't do nearly so well was validate her surroundings.
Her gaze slid over Raf. A man, a striped jellaba, spent sheesha in front of him, settling up with the waiter of an Arab café. It wasn't what she was looking for and so she didn't see it. In non-eidetic people, the cortex was wired weird like that.
Cigarette in hand, she flipped open her wallet and made a call, lighting and discarding a second Cleopatra before her handler called her back with whatever information she'd asked for. An address, most probably, given the way she promptly yanked the map from her bag.
Raf and the ballerina moved off together, joined by their invisible thread of anger and need. Raf following twenty paces behind, his head half buried in an evening paper. Moscow Dynamos had destroyed Belgrade Eagles, Danzig had drawn with Naples. Montenegro had been thrashed by Tunis. Thai particular game was being replayed on café screens everywhere, the fact the score was known in no way diminishing the cascade of outrage when a player from Tunis got fouled inside the penalty area.
The Ottoman provinces kept their dislike of Berlin under control but their contempt for Austria-Hungary was legendary.
The significant difference being that the Kaiser had few, if any, Islamic subjects while whole areas of the Austrian Balkans were Muslim ...
The woman went in through one revolving door and came straight out of another, barely bothering to pause in the foyer of the Suq el Meghreb. She was checking for a tail, but Raf was so far back that he'd barely turned towards the first door when she reappeared from the other muttering angrily.
She was coming unravelled in front of him, the slow burn of her shock overriding common sense to such an extent that she patted a bulging pocket and tossed her map into a bin, doubling back barely fifty paces before hanging a left into a blind alley so narrow it was more of a gap between the Suq el Meghreb and a neighbouring warehouse.
There was no way Raf could follow her into the gap without being seen, so he strolled past its narrow entrance, counted sixty and doubled back, glancing in as he walked by. The ballerina had vanished, the cul de sac was now empty.
Raf really didn't like what that said at all, because what it said was that she'd gone upwards and he was going to have to climb .
Chapter Forty-six
1st August
Only tourists ever bothered using the black carriages that plied their trade along the final sweep of the Corniche. Which meant that no one paid much attention to an ancient caleche being pulled past the fish market by an elderly mare: one of a dozen carriages working the Golden Crescent, that strip stretching up from the new Bibliotheka towards the headland and the heavy grandeur of Fort Quaitbey.
'What are we going to do?' Hani demanded, as the leaf springs of their carriage squeeked ratlike over the cobbles. 'Well?'
Zara said nothing. She just watched fishing boats depart, with their square nets raised and the lamps that would lure catch to their net unlit, but Hani wasn't fooled for a minute.
Behind them, Place Orabi burned its eternal flame in the tomb of the unknown warrior, up ahead was Shorbagi mosque, famous for lacking a minaret. Its muezzin called from arcades that looked out over a market square. Just another useless fact her aunt had insisted she know. Hani shrugged. None of it mattered now.
'Well?' she demanded.
'I don't know,' Zara said crossly, but she did. They would go to the address they'd been given. Maybe she should have taken Hani to Lady Jalila's house when the first message came. That way, maybe Raf would still be ... Surreptitiously Zara checked the text she'd copied across from Ali-Din fifteen minutes before, even though she already knew it by heart. Raf murdered. Hani in terrible danger. Meet me at ... No key accompanied the words and at the top the from field was blank. But the text itself was signed LJ, which Zara took to be Lady Jalila. The only relative Hani had, now that Raf was ...
'You're crying again.' Hani said.
Zara shrugged. So what if she was? Stranger things had happened.
'Thought so ...' Hani swapped seats so she could sit next to Zara and put one arm round the elder girl's sore shoulders. 'I'm sorry.'
I don't know how to handle this, thought Zara. She desperately wanted to tell Hani it was all right to cry. Only then there would be two of them turned inside out, exposing their bare flesh to the world. It was unbelievably selfish, but Zara didn't think she could cope with that.
Beyond the mosque was the fish market, shutting up for the night. The cobbled square already hosed down and the kiosks locked shut. What vans were there waited for morning and the new catch. The hum of their refrigeration units a reminder that come dawn the bustle would begin again. Then the catch would be gutted, packed in ice and trucked out along the desert road to Cairo, where it would go on sale in the kind of fishmongers that required those serving to wear striped aprons and use French names for everything. The kind of place her mother talked about without ever having been to one.
'Faster,' Zara told the coachman, who scowled but still cracked his whip at the grey. He'd spent a good hour taking his caleche slowly up and down the Golden Crescent at Zara's request and now she wanted speed. Reluctantly, the grey rose to a trot.
Turn here,' Zara ordered but the coachman shook his head, reinin
g in.
'Can't leave the Corniche,' he protested. 'Regulations. I can take you further up or I can take you back, but I can't leave the esplanade.'
'Great,' Zara muttered, but she was talking to herself.
'It's all right,' said Hani, stuffing Ali-Din into a new rucksack, bought that morning. 'We can easily walk from here.' The child wore new jeans that matched her rucksack, and a white Hello Kitty tee-shirt still creased from its packet. Her usual buckle shoes had been replaced with stack-heel orange flip-flops and her long hair had been cut until it was as short as Zara's own.
Zara wasn't sure about that last touch. But Hani had demanded it, sitting on a stool in the VSV until Zara hurriedly used scissors to send long dark strands tumbling to the floor. And, in a way, Zara was flattered: they looked more like sisters now — and that had made shopping for clothes less risky.
Normality was difficult for both of them, Zara discovered. Almost everything Hani knew about life she'd learned through a screen. The crowds worried her, the noise worried her, the street smells she found so fierce that she took to holding her nose until Zara told her to stop. Too many people were watching. She didn't understand that money had to change hands before something could be taken from a shop. Somehow, it was as if many of the most basic rules weren't in her book. On the other hand, she could date buildings just by looking at the brickwork. She knew exactly who or what every street had been named after. And passing a Radio Shack with a flickering screen in the window, Hani dashed in to reset it almost without breaking stride.
As for her, Zara knew she belonged to Isk, but the Isk she belonged to didn't yet exist. Hers would be a city where men of her own race didn't expect her to step into the road so they could pass. Where robed clerics didn't glare to see a woman and child out on the streets alone. And where shopkeepers didn't look over her shoulder to see who was paying.
But they tried hard to be normal and blend in. Together they ate crepes from a market stall like tourists, drank warm mineral water that fizzed from its bottle and glued their fingers together with sticky almonds. Standing with their backs to Place Zaghloul, they'd watched grown men crash stunt kites into the waves and then jerk the kites skywards, swirling tails scattering silver drops of water.
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