Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West
Page 21
She screamed. “Kamal!” The ground reeled past. She spluttered, trying to say more, but her mouth wouldn’t work. She felt the blood drain from her face. The angle of the sun slid around, adding to her sense of dizziness and placing Kamal’s face into shadow. His eyes were full of surprise.
He reached out and shook her knee. “Abigail! I thought you were okay with flying.”
“It’s not… Oh…” She shook her head. “Not that!” It was a while before her heart slowed and she was able to explain. By now the airport was far behind. The engine noise lessened, though Kamal was still climbing.
“If he’d wanted to shoot, he would have,” stated Kamal calmly. “I’d guess he was just using the telescopic sight to get a look at us.”
“But who was he? Surely the Mercedes couldn’t have caught us up? And why did he have a rifle anyway?”
“It’s Iran; anyone who thinks they’re important has an automatic rifle, unless they have a machine gun. I have to assume he was some accomplice of the others, but I must admit I’ve no idea who they are. Certainly not government, or they’d have liaised with the airport staff to stop us. So the good news is we’re unlikely to be intercepted by fighter jets.”
And then she caught sight of the compass bearing and crashing upon her came the direction that Kamal was heading.
"Kamal, we can´t be-! Where are we going? Stop trying to scare me more!”
"We´re going into my own back yard, where you´ll be perfectly safe. Syria, Abi, Syria, where the answer to your mystery may be-"
"Syria! We can´t! My papa would have kittens!"
"My dear, what a picturesque phrase... Ismaili colleagues at the University of Damascus might help with your fragment, but I never make promises I cannot keep. I needed, shall we say, some pieces to be in place, as well as absolute reassurances about stability wherever we go. Besides," and he grinned, "I guessed you´d love to see a crusader castle such as Krak des Chevaliers, just for instance?"
Abigail’s shock was passing. Now she felt giggly and high. Syria! Paul would give his eye-teeth as a reporter to be heading into the country! What a man Kamal was. She was in his hands, and what hands those were. Kamal stroked her thigh, with inevitable consequences.
“There there, my love.”
She flushed but tried to remain serious. “You must have logged our flight path to Syria, but we never showed our passports.”
“I’m known at Rasht. It makes the officialdom more… more streamlined.”
Kamal smiled his rakish smile and moved his hand up between her legs. Suddenly feeling wholly adventurous and deliciously naughty, Abigail didn’t object.
“I detected, soon after we met, that you desired a life with more excitement.”
True, very true. She’d yearned for excitement. Now here she was, headily alive and in love, with her so, so accomplished man thwarting pursuers and winging her over an exotic land. The Caspian shimmered, blue and turquoise like the tiles of some vast mosque conceived in the unknowable mind of Allah. To the south, a wall of mountains reached up to the altitude of the plane, gold and ochre and black in the sharp sun of late morning, seemingly above the cares of the world; like the Nizaris who’d lived there, reaching for God. Patchwork green rolled by beneath. Kamal’s eyes twinkled somewhat wickedly, no doubt promising much more adventure to come.
Abigail laughed, and maybe sounded a little manic, but she didn’t care. Syria! This life was rich, she had to grasp it! She relaxed her legs a little more as Kamal’s gentle massage started to work its magic.
“Is this thing fitted with an auto-pilot?”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ian Watson made a bit of a splash in 1973 with his debut novel of psycholinguistics, The Embedding, which won amongst other awards the Prix Apollo in France. After a first degree and a research degree in English Literature from Balliol College, Oxford, he lectured at universities in Dar es Salaam, then in Tokyo, then in the History of Art school in Birmingham, UK, before becoming a full-time writer in 1976. Numerous novels of science fiction, fantasy, and horror and a dozen story collections followed, all of them now available as ebooks through Gollancz´s www.sfgateway.com -- apart from Ian´s 4 delirious gothic space operas set in Games Workshop´s Warhammer 40K universe, but including the first full-length genre fiction book by 2 transgressive European authors with different mother tongues, The Beloved of My Beloved, co-authored with Italian Roberto Quaglia, one story from which won the British SF Association Award for Best Short Fiction of 2009. 9 months´ spent eyeball to eyeball with Stanley Kubrick resulted in screen credit for the Screen Story of A.I. Artificial Intelligence made by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick´s lamented death. These days Ian lives in Asturias in Spain, where goblins swig cider while playing bagpipes in the green rainy hills.
Ian Watson's Official Site
Andy West has a degree in Physics and 30 years experience working in the embedded computer industry, specialising in sales of computers to be used in extreme conditions of temperatures and pressures high and low, such as in outer space. His debut novel, The Outcast and the Little One, was published by NewCon Press, UK, in 2012. Set on a largely tamed Venus, it tells of the struggle by an impoverished society of intelligent robots against their cruel suppressers, an exotic race of posthumans. Into the midst of the robots comes a posthuman child, who grows by physical and mental augmentations to become their kinsperson, with dramatic consequences for both races. And this is but an offshoot of Andy´s epic novel, The Clonir Flower, which awaits publication, and in which Andy deploys to the full his fascination with the dynamics of evolution, cultural development, and historical patterns. A keen folk music devotee, he plays Irish whistles. He lives in England in North Bucks near Milton Keynes, on the southern border of which Alan Turing conceived the fundamentals of modern computing at Bletchley Park.
Andy West Amazon US Author page
Andy West Goodreads page