She was crying.
“How?” Zaq asked, and then he knew because the Librarian knew, and Zaq watched himself being carried back from the gardens and tucked into bed where he slept.
“Clothes,” Zaq demanded, but no one came.
“The servitors have gone,” said the girl. “The chief eunuch sent them home.”
“They have homes?”
The girl nodded.
“I thought you just turned off,” said Zaq. “Came back to life again when you were needed.”
She looked at him through huge eyes. “I’m not sure I understand,” she said.
Zaq dressed himself in his pale blue chao pao, the one decorated around the neck, across the shoulders and above the hem with embroidered five-clawed dragons.
The original ruling was simple. Five claws for an emperor, four for a prince and three for generals, chamberlains and dukes.
Sometime between the first Chuang Tzu and Zaq, who was the fifty-third emperor to have taken that title, imperial dragons had suffered severe inflation and so had the materials from which they were made. The dragon embroidered across the cloak that Zaq now wore had so many claws they were almost impossible to count.
“Go,” Zaq told the girl.
“Where should I go?”
“Home?”
So she went, still naked. And Zaq watched her walk away until she turned a corner at the end of a corridor and he was alone again.
I may eat this, I may not eat that. I will walk this distance and stay silent for that many hours. Hold my hands out to my sides for this many minutes. Stay awake for that many hours.
The rules Zaq made for himself were no more arbitrary than those written for him by tradition. And if others failed to understand them that was not his fault.
Was it?
Wrapping the dragon cloak around him, Zaq allowed himself a red bean mini moon cake from a gold plate and headed back to the garden, stopping only to smash all the mirrors as he came to them.
CHAPTER 56
Marrakech, Summer 1977
Fifteen minutes after the girl in the oversized haik left Café Impérial and retraced her steps along the edge of Jardin de Hartai to where a boy waited, five sticks of industrial explosive detonated beneath a bench at the rear of the café. The wooden bench was against the left-hand wall and only one person was sitting there because the café was almost empty, which was all that could be said for what happened.
The primers had been manufactured for quarrying. Of low grade to begin with, age and careless storage had taken them to the edge of their useful life. In fact, the forensic expert borrowed from Paris regarded it as a wonder that they hadn’t detonated of their own accord while being carried through the streets of Marrakech.
Sécurité regarded this as a poor miracle.
It mattered little that the bomb was of such low quality because someone had taped rusty nails around each stick. A report written a couple of weeks after the atrocity by a policeman called Major Abbas and circulated by the Ministry of the Interior to Paris and Washington noted the similarity between this attack and similar Algerian-inspired atrocities, concluding that the organizers were probably already across the border and thus could not be found.
His report contradicted a suggestion in Le Matin that the nails were chosen because they were rusty, pointing out that these were probably all that had been to hand.
Either way, the rust added complications to wounds that were already, if one were honest, beyond anything other than the most palliative treatment. Shrapnel from a bomb can spin up to and through the point of impact. Where and when it stops spinning depends on the rate of spin and the density of the tissue with which it comes into contact; bone is usually enough.
Of the few patrons in Café Impérial scarcely any survived. And of the three who did, all died from side effects or medical complications within a period of fifteen weeks. The last to die was Ishmael Bonaventure, who still controlled a number of brothels, clubs and cafés at the time of his death, including Samantha’s, a discothèque on the edge of the Palmeraie visited by Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix.
Among those who died instantly were the manager, his son, the man on the bench and a second cousin of Hassan’s uncle, who’d come to meet Ishmael Bonaventure.
Monsieur Bonaventure had been as surprised to receive a telephone call from the cousin as that cousin was to be contacted by Caid Hammou. Having fallen out six months before over profits from a bar in Agadir, the bad blood between Hassan’s uncle and the cousin was known to many.
Caid Hammou offered his cousin a simple choice: renewed friendship or a lifetime of enmity. That this life was likely to be short went unspoken.
The cousin had not been looking forward to visiting Café Impérial, centre of Bonaventure’s operations in the New Town. As prices went, however, acting as go-between for Caid Hammou and Ishmael Bonaventure was far less than the cousin had been expecting to have to pay for what, in retrospect, was a very unfortunate error in accounting.
So he agreed, fixed the meeting and went with a list of suggestions from Caid Hammou on how operations in Marrakech might be more fairly divided.
Eminently reasonable suggestions, all things considered. And sitting across a table from the elderly freedom-fighter turned gangster, the cousin could see that Bonaventure felt this too.
“I will need to meet Caid Hammou.” The old man’s tone might have been peremptory but his acceptance of Hammou’s right to the title “caid” said all that was needed about how content he was with the compromise on offer.
“Of course,” Caid Hammou’s cousin said. “Shall we arrange that now?”
The old man looked surprised, also gratified. He had assumed that Caid Hammou would make difficulties about the exact time and place of the meeting in an attempt to keep face. “He’s happy with this?”
The man on the other side of the table nodded. “Let me make the call,” he suggested, pointing one finger at a telephone on the wall. “May I use that?”
“Be my guest.” Ishmael Bonaventure sat back to enjoy the moment. He was still savouring his success when a young Arab girl walked in, swathed in a black haik. Someone’s servant, he imagined.
She drank mint tea, the cheapest thing on the board, and ate half a pastry, leaving her payment in a handful of small coins. Ishmael Bonaventure was willing to bet a few would be empire cheffian, old currency from the days before the French gave up their claim to his country.
Bonaventure watched her eat, drink her mint tea and pay in an old mirror which his father had imported from Paris. He didn’t notice that she’d forgotten to take her shopping bag.
The old gangster and Caid Hammou’s cousin were both still waiting, somewhat impatiently, for Caid Hammou to arrive when the bomb exploded at the table behind them and their impatience ceased to matter.
The café was destroyed, its back wall ripped open, its ceiling crumbling in like eggshell. It was mere bad luck that Café Impérial backed onto a notario’s office sometimes used by French intelligence. And it was this, that an office on Boulevard Abdussallam had been destroyed and two European lawyers killed in the blast, which made the news.
CHAPTER 57
Lampedusa, Thursday 12 July
More fucking flash guns than at the Oscars. Colonel Borgenicht kept his assessment to himself, while still regarding it as pretty accurate.
Originally he’d demanded that the event take place during the day and that numbers be limited. He’d been overruled on both counts. His attempts to go over the head of General Mayer, as he found himself referring through gritted teeth to the Professor, foundered when the five-star general he approached was overruled by Gene Newman in his capacity as Commander in Chief.
So Colonel Borgenicht found himself providing security for a Sicilian village emptied of most of its inhabitants and filled with the cream of the world’s press, which wasn’t exactly how the Colonel thought of the growling and surging mob roped off on one side of a picturesque nineteenth-ce
ntury square.
After a quick once-over, he’d dismissed the female journalists. Mostly they were scrawny, dressed in black and utterly interchangeable, being short-haired, immaculately made up despite the heat, and thin as teenaged boys. His own tastes were more lush. The men came in two models, ponytailed and those, infinitely greater in number, who sported heads as cropped as any of his own marines.
These ones worried him.
Colonel Borgenicht existed to protect his President, his country, his men and himself in that order. The thought that the President might be killed while he was on duty had given the Colonel a sleepless forty-eight hours and reduced his social skills to zero. All that concerned him was getting through the next two hours.
The time had been chosen because Prisoner Zero needed to show the President the Milky Way. That was what General Mayer had told him. The lunatic wanted to show President Newman some stars. So the entire meeting was timed to coincide with the heavens breaking through the evening sky.
It helped, apparently, that the meeting was taking place on Lampedusa, where light pollution was still in its infancy; although, to make sure, most lights in the village were to be turned off at a preset time.
Colonel Borgenicht had wanted this meeting in broad daylight on American soil. Some place where he had complete control of who was let in. Better still, some place where he was not the most senior officer present. There were, it seemed, a number of good reasons why this was a bad idea. And he could tell, just by looking, how distasteful Petra Mayer found it having to put those reasons into words.
They’d been at breakfast in the officers’ mess. (This is what a hand-scrawled note on its door called the place. A vending machine inside selling six kinds of flavoured water, and a row of rubber mats revealed its other identity as the hotel’s T’ai Chi room.)
“It should be in the US.”
Ripping apart her smoked salmon bagel, Petra Mayer ate the wedge of salmon, having first scraped off all traces of cream cheese. “Ma’am,” she said. “You’re meant to call me ‘ma’am’.”
The Colonel was sure she did this only to irritate.
“It has to be in the US, ma’am.”
The officers’ mess was meant to be self-service, something to do with recent advances in democratic equality, but the Professor had discovered that spilling a few glasses of orange juice as she carried them to her table was enough to make waiter service suddenly materialize. Besides, she was a general. A very short, rather ill and temporary general, but still a general.
The Professor raised her cup. “Another coffee,” she demanded.
Nothing else was said until this arrived and then she sat forward, indicating that Colonel Borgenicht should do the same. “Why,” she said quietly, “do you think we’re keeping the prisoner here?”
“Because it shows faith in our NATO allies.” That was the first among many reasons trotted out by the Pentagon Press Office and the Colonel didn’t believe it any more than the Professor.
“No,” said Petra Mayer. “I mean really?”
The Colonel blew out his breath. He was having trouble seeing this small woman as a general. In fact, he had trouble seeing her as anything other than trouble. Her brief stint as the President’s tutor he knew about. Her intelligence assessments of Beirut and all places similar was on a need-to-know basis, and he didn’t.
“Questioning,” he said.
Petra Mayer nodded. “Obviously,” she said. “Take this man to the US and a whole different set of rules apply. You want that?”
Something was troubling Colonel Borgenicht. “I’d have thought—” The Colonel stopped, considered and wondered how to finish.
“That this is exactly what I would have wanted? Of course it is,” said the Professor. “It’s also exactly what the US can’t risk. At least, according to the Attorney General.” Petra Mayer stared at the Colonel, who now leant right forward to ensure their conversation remained private. “What do you think the verdict would have been if this had been tried in an open court?”
“I can guess,” he said, after a moment’s thought.
“Quite,” said Petra Mayer. “You’ve seen the files.”
“He made a confession.”
“Indeed,” said the Professor. “We’re getting really good at letting others do our dirty work. That would be the first thing to go. Throw out his confession and what do we have? A lunatic who should never have been allowed out in public. Unfortunately he also happens to be a genius.”
“So we retry,” said the Colonel, his words almost a whisper. “Keep the court military.”
“And reach what verdict?” Petra Mayer stared at the crop-haired black officer. The man was built like the proverbial shithouse and had biceps that still, fifteen years after he was commissioned, betrayed the fact he’d started in the ranks. Petra Mayer had seen the Colonel’s file. She knew about his divorce, last year’s less than discreet battle against OxyC, a prescription analgesic better known to most of Dr. Petrov’s clients as “hillbilly heroin.”
The man had a high IQ fighting to escape the limitations of its uniform.
“It gets worse,” Petra Mayer said.
The Colonel looked at her. “How can it get worse?” he demanded.
“The meeting’s to be televised in real time,” said Petra Mayer. “They’re going to walk out there in front of the cameras, look at the stars and shake hands.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s part of the deal.”
“Whose deal?”
“Prisoner Zero’s.”
“Jesus fuck.” From the look on his face, it seemed Colonel Borgenicht finally understood that his certainties were coming unravelled over a cup of cold coffee in a hastily emptied hotel room on an island in the middle of nowhere.
The square was carefully selected. Although it was only chosen after several alternative locations had been considered and rejected; Camp Freedom was the first to go.
As this was Colonel Borgenicht’s first choice he expected no less.
The camp was secure, wrapped tightly with razor wire and had high-powered searchlights set up at all four corners on scaffolding towers. Machine-gun encampments guarded the roads in and out. The very qualities that made it Colonel Borgenicht’s first choice led to its rejection by Gene Newman.
Razor wire and searchlights said the wrong thing for his administration. They said fear of the world outside. Gene Newman wanted something warmer, more media-friendly. He wanted historic, elegant, statesmanlike…
The town hall in Lampedusa had to be dropped when the ruling Northern Alliance wanted to be part of the handshake. A seventeenth-century palazzo, now functioning as a five-star hotel on Punta Muro Vecchio, reluctantly went the same way, even though it had its own heliport, the terraced gardens were entirely walled and the Milanese manager loved the idea.
Astronomical insurance costs, claimed the owners. The real reason was more pragmatic. Palazzo Muro Vecchio had a wide and loyal Italian clientele who were none too happy with the way the Marrakech incident had been handled and the Swiss group owning the hotel took an entirely sensible decision to protect their investment.
This left Valera, an old white-walled villaggio near Punta Parise, at the western end of the island, beneath the shadow of Monte Alberto Sole. A press release from the White House revealed that the village variously had been Byzantine, Arab, Norman and Spanish. For much of the Renaissance, while condottieri set themselves up as princes in the north and southern Italy continued its war of attrition against the Barbary pirates, Villaggio Valera lay derelict, a home to goats and the occasional fugitive.
All of this changed in 1881 when what remained of the derelict village was bought by Baron del Smith, a cotton trader from Liverpool who’d fought alongside Garibaldi at the battles of Volturno and Aspromonte, been created baron by Victor Emmanuel II and then, five years later, been sent into exile by the same King for trying to introduce communal farming to Sicily.
The village was rebuilt t
o a plan drawn up by Baron del Smith’s wife and the slopes around it divided into workable farms. Olive trees and lemon groves were planted, as were almonds and oranges. The experiment was a brave one but lack of adequate irrigation, the heat of a few bad summers and the mistrust of other landowners saw the village fall back into near ruin. By 1910 the almonds were being picked, sorted and husked by old women who spoke sadly and often of their sons making new lives for themselves in America.
President Gene Newman’s great-grandmother was born in Villaggio Valera. In retrospect, it was an obvious choice.
“There’ll be a gun on you at all times. You understand that?” Colonel Borgenicht’s voice was tight. “We’ve got snipers in the bell tower and on the roof of the town hall.”
Prisoner Zero smiled.
Part of Colonel Borgenicht wanted to beat the man’s head against the nearest wall, the other bit wanted to get on his knees and beg the bastard not to fuck this thing up. Instead, he just nodded, as if Prisoner Zero had given him the answer he wanted.
“Yeah,” said Petra Mayer. “You’ve told him that already.”
They were standing beside the church. And at the opposite end of the square, behind waist-high metal barriers, waited the press, plus selected members of the public and Katie Petrov, Miles Alsdorf and all those who didn’t rate being included in the Presidential entourage.
Colonel Borgenicht would have preferred the barriers to be higher, but then he’d have preferred the bit parts and media not to be there at all, which was obviously impossible since the entire meeting had been turned into one big press call.
He had snipers stationed at both ends of the square, a precaution helped by the fact that the town hall’s roof was flat and the bell tower of the church was easily reachable by stairs from the inside.
A sniper in the ornate bell tower was responsible for the laser dot on the back of Prisoner Zero’s head. It would have been simple to give laser sights to the man on the roof of the town hall opposite, but then Prisoner Zero would have had a rag dot visible in the middle of his forehead. And that would send out all the wrong signals, apparently.
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