by Nick Louth
What she had removed now lay between her legs like a hideous abortion, but there was nothing human about it. It looked like a revolting putrid pastry, with only some patterned grid in the gore to show there was a plastic object within. She kept having to remind herself that this was a functioning bomb which, for all she knew, could detonate at any time. She carefully wrapped it in a hand towel, and placed it at the foot of the bed, unsure how to dispose of it, but desperate to be somewhere else, anywhere else, away from it. But disposal would have to wait until she could move.
More shooting, even closer. Screams in the room directly beneath hers, silenced by a deafening blast which made the window downstairs explode in a shower of fragments. They were working the way up to her floor. They must know exactly where she was.
She took the previously-threaded needle, dipped it in the eau to toilette and made three quick broad stitches to close the incision. The pain was terrible, almost as bad as the first cut, but the thread held the wound closed. The cut was weeping, but there was no further blood.
Another burst of gunfire, another broken window. Shouting directly below. She clicked the TV off. It was Omar’s voice bellowing. ‘That wasn’t her, you idiot. Try the next room.’
Cantara picked up the bundle, and looked at her own window. Giant, unopenable, another air-conditioned hotel. She took the bundle into the bathroom, unwrapped it, and looked at the toilet bowl. Would it flush? She had to try. Even if it didn’t the water might stop the location signal. With luck. She eased it gently into the bowl and flushed. The water swirled and at first it sank, then bobbed back up again. Shrugging, she realised that she had to leave it. Cantara dressed hurriedly, being careful not to stretch the wound, which was throbbing horribly. If she was not recognised, there was at least a chance of survival. She put on the abaya and headscarf and reading glasses, stuffed the cushion up the front, and slung the colourful bag over her shoulder. She waddled to the door, knowing she could move no faster. She kept the Stanley knife concealed in her hand.
The corridor was deserted. Many rooms had been abandoned, doors open. Luggage was strewn along the corridor. The lift was thirty metres to her left, in a small lobby. The corridor continued parallel to the street another ten metres before turning sharply right away and towards the back of the hotel. Looking to her right, the staircase was just ten metres away, a wooden door doing little to muffle the horrible sounds echoing up it. Someone was begging for their life in English. Then a shot.
There was no way she could tackle stairs. It had to be the lift. If Omar was killing on the staircase, she might be able to get past and down in the lift. She shuffled to the lift as fast as she could, old lady steps and painful still. A floor below, she could hear the rhythmic smashing of doors, one after another, and the occasional shot. At the lift lobby she pressed the call button, which lit up and then went off. The ‘out of service’ button flashed on. Behind her was a window. On the street below she saw dozens of vehicles, with armed police taking cover behind them. Dozens of guns were pointing at her. She waved frantically at them, pointing left down the corridor towards the staircase. She made three precise gestures. She held up two fingers, to indicate the number of assailants, pointed towards the staircase where she had heard them, and mimed a throat-cutting gesture for what was happening to the guests. An officer on the ground, frantically gestured for her to move further along the building to her right, and then upwards, towards the roof. Perhaps he was indicating an emergency exit?
A squad of a dozen armed police raced towards the building, disappearing from view beneath her. There was more shooting, different gun sounds. Not Omar’s AK47. She edged along to the end of the corridor, which turned sharply right, away from the street. There was an emergency exit, but when she got to it, it wouldn’t open. She rattled the bar frantically, but it was locked. No way out. She heard clearly the ascent of feet on the staircase at the other end of the corridor, which ran for maybe forty metres until it reached the dog leg, then ten metres in which she was hiding. Between the firing, another sound was clear. Clip, clap, clip, clap. Omar’s artificial shoe. He was going to find her. None of the bedroom doors down here were open. Cantara now knew a twisted version of the old saying.
You can’t run, and you can’t hide.
Chapter Forty-One
Rifat was furious. Omar and Jabr had disobeyed his orders. They were hunting down the girl, and had turned off their phone. It could ruin everything. He would wash his hands of the two Yemeni morons, weapons too crude for the twenty-first century. Monsters of the Caliphate, unchanged since the dawn of Islam. They had never understood the subtle modern battle that needed to be fought. Within an hour, he guessed, they would be dead anyway. With luck, the crudity of their assault would convince the authorities that nothing more sophisticated was planned against the peace conference. Yes, perhaps that was it. Their deaths in some squalid shoot-out would help to relax the security operation, even a fraction. That could only help him.
Turning back to the laptop, he was still getting a faint trace from Cantara’s tracking device. It had barely moved in the last half hour. Maybe Omar and Jabr would get to her before she moved, maybe not. Either way, there was nothing to lose now from detonating it. He smiled to himself, picked up his phone and scrolled down to the pre-set text.
‘Goodbye Cantara,’ he said. He pressed the ‘send’ button.
* * *
Cantara decided the best she could do was play dead. She lay on the corridor floor by an abandoned suitcase, felt underneath her abaya for her midriff, and sure enough there was wetness. There were shouts and gunfire from downstairs and the ringing of feet on the stairs, but she still heard, much nearer, the clip-clap of Omar’s wooden foot, as he moved along the corridor, searching from room to room. A burst of gunfire and a kick indicating each one of those locked doors broken in.
The blast took her by surprise, duller and less loud than the shooting. The hotel briefly shuddered, and a gust of wooden fragments blew down the corridor. A deep growl of pain and an oath in Arabic showed Omar was still alive. She took her bloody fingers, and smeared them across her face, and all over the blue hijab. If she could pass for injured or dead, she might yet survive.
The clip-clap sound was gone. She crawled carefully towards the corner, and peered around. Thirty metres away, Omar was sitting down in the corridor, looking away from her, watching the staircase with his AK47 to his shoulder. Part of a toilet bowl lay on the soaked carpet next to him, the wall of the room opposite – her room – completely demolished. Only then did she realise the splintered object standing between them was Omar’s wooden foot, snapped at the shin. It looked as if it too was leaving him, having finally rejected his murderous ways.
The fire door to the staircase briefly opened. An exchange of fire. Bullets whined over Cantara’s head. Glass shattered, a scream rang out, and someone fell clanging, down the metalled stairs.
‘Another infidel on the way to Hell,’ Omar muttered, as he changed the clip on the AK47. For a minute there was quiet, and Omar stood, leaning on the wall, facing the staircase. Wheezes of effort or pain escaping him as he hobbled backwards towards Cantara, leaning on the wall, pulling himself along with his left hand. She could see he had been hit, high on the left shoulder. Blood was soaking his djelabah. Omar was just a few metres from her corner, so she wriggled back, and played dead, lying on her side. Omar finally slid around the corner, and sat, just in front of her. There he could take cover, his weapon pointing towards the staircase. She could smell the animal sweat and the blood on him. Silently, she clicked out the blade of the Stanley knife, still concealed in her hand. To save her life, she might yet again have to use it on living flesh.
There was another exchange of gunfire, and the sound of heavy boots. Through half-closed eyes she watched Omar knocked back and a ragged growl escape him. A bloody spray had graffiteed itself on the corridor wall opposite, at its centre a neat bullet hole. Someone else was moaning softly around the corner, where they had
fallen in the corridor. Omar didn’t even glance in her direction, but reached into his belt for a new clip. He was about to end another life. Cantara couldn’t bear it. She raised herself gingerly to a kneeling position, and just as she was readying herself to lunge with the knife, he turned and saw her, his mouth jagged in recognition and anger. ‘You! Are you not dead?’
Before he could turn the gun, a single shot rang out, and Omar slumped, dead, underneath her readied knife.
* * *
Cantara awoke as she was being lifted on a stretcher into a helicopter on the roof of the hotel. An Egyptian army medic standing over her was yelling to a helmeted airman ‘One more. Another gunshot wound. Stomach wound, looks serious. Are you full now?’
The crewman gave him a thumbs up as they hauled her inside. There was someone else on a stretcher next to her. Cantara put her hand on the crewman’s wrist, and tried to speak, to let them know how urgent it was to find Chris. But the roar of the rotors drowned out every syllable. The man just gave her hand a reassuring squeeze.
Her next moment of consciousness was hours later. A hospital bed, a light being shone in her eyes. She was aware of a huge amount of activity in the background, the squeal of trolley wheels, urgent voices, footsteps and occasional cries of pain or alarm.
‘You are safe now,’ said a doctor whose face appeared from behind the light. ‘And I’m delighted to tell you that, despite appearances, you have not been shot.’
‘I know,’ she whispered
‘Can you tell me your name?’
‘I am Cantara al-Mansoor. I have an urgent message…’
A nurse was looking at a clipboard, her pen running down the names. She shook her head. ‘No one of that name listed at the hotel…’
‘Is that really your name, Miss?’ the doctor asked.
‘Yes, it is really me…’
The doctor turned away, whispering to a colleague. Cantara could only snatch a few phrases: ‘…thinks she’s that Lebanese terrorist who blew up the plane…delirious.’ A woman’s voice: ‘She might believe she’s pregnant….a pillow under her abaya.’ The man’s voice: ‘Maybe she was trying to abort this phantom pregnancy.’
A nurse came over and hurriedly gave her an injection. ‘This will make you sleep. Tomorrow morning we’ll tidy up that nasty-looking wound, once the antibiotics have had chance to work. We’ve got lots of badly hurt people to look after, but you’ll be fine.’
When she next awoke it was dark outside. She was in bed, in a screened-off section of a busy ward, wearing a paper nightdress. She could hear movement and moaning from nearby beds. Suddenly she felt fully awake, and very hungry. With tentative fingers she felt her stomach. There was a fresh dressing but, flexing her tummy muscles, the stitches still pulled. She carefully sat up. Her stolen clothes were in the bedside cabinet, next to the shoulder bag. She abandoned attempts to don underwear, fearful of pulling her stitches, but found a slip, a blouse and the abaya. The blood had dried to resemble a whole bar of chocolate melted across the black midriff. She eased her feet into the sandals. By the ward door out to the lifts sat a huge uniformed policeman, underneath a clock which said 4.53am. He was snoring, his head tucked down to his chest. She tiptoed past, then noticed a wallet protruding from his tunic pocket.
Cantara licked her lips. She needed money. For food, for transport. To reach Chris. She lifted her hand, fingers shaking. This was a step further into theft than borrowing clothes, but then she was so hungry. She thought of her own mother. Her proud mother who had always lambasted the thieves who plagued Ain al-Hilweh, and made her own children promise on the Holy Book never to take that which does not belong to them. Pride in honesty had been their staff, to lean on all the unforgiving years.
With a silent plea for forgiveness, Cantara eased out the wallet, and slipped it into her shoulder bag. She eased open the ward door, summoned the lift, and a minute later stood outside in the bustling night-time streets of Sharm el-Sheikh. Amid the bustle of taxis and anxious relatives by the hospital entrance, she sought out the all-night food and provision stalls. She bought bread, water and painkillers, masking the stain with the bag. As she leaned against a wall to eat, an Egyptian TV crew interviewed relatives waiting for the injured. The female reporter practised her bulletin, announcing that the attack on the Ramada Royal Pharaoh had left nine dead and twenty-two injured. Both attackers were killed. Between takes, Cantara asked the crew if they had seen anyone from Arab Satellite Broadcasting.
‘No. Maybe they’ll be here later,’ said the producer, a middle aged man.
‘I urgently need to get in contact with a British journalist at ASB called Chris Wyrecliffe,’ Cantara said.
‘Don’t know him,’ the reporter said, looking into a hand mirror to check her make-up. She then looked up at the producer: ‘Aren’t ASB based at the Majestic?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Most of the internationals are there.’
‘Where’s the Majestic?’ Cantara asked.
‘It’s the huge unfashionable place, just opposite the Tutankhamun. But it’s got a great roof terrace for filming, with a view right across,’ she said.
‘Hold on.’ The reporter got out her phone and rang the hotel. She asked for Chris Wyrecliffe, but a minute later relayed that there was no reply from his room. ‘If you need to find him, take a taxi. It’s only five minutes. If he’s international press, he’s bound to be in bed. They never get up this early.’
* * *
Chris Wyrecliffe rolled over and onto his back, breathless but blissfully happy. He was in Taseena’s room. In Taseena’s bed. Her naked body lay next to him, her breasts and belly glistening with a fine moisture amid the rumpled sheets in the half-light of the dawn.
This was the perfect way to start his big day. Things had become quite hectic since last night’s jihadi attack on the Ramada Royal Pharaoh. He’d been working until 2am. The hourly bulletins had been repetitive enough, but the two-way interviews from the ASB news anchor in Dubai had been poorly directed. He’d no advance warning of the questions, not a hint that they were going to be obsessed with the rumour that the jihadis may have had a female accomplice, as Al Jazeera was reporting. Wyrecliffe had seen Al Jazeera’s coverage, interviewing bus passengers who had supposedly seen her. There were no pictures, and given the inevitable confusion over the casualties among the seventeen different nationalities staying at the hotel, an injured woman who apparently checked herself out of the Sharm medical facility may quite simply have been someone else. Other media took different lines. The doctor Wyrecliffe had seen interviewed on Al Arabiya TV seemed convinced his patient had tried to give herself an abortion, which didn’t quite match the image put out by Al Jazeera. Taseena had reckoned this female jihadi angle wasn’t worth spending his precious time on, and he agreed, though no one had apparently told Dubai.
One sensible precaution was Taseena’s move to reserve ASB’s Gulf correspondent Finn Finlay, a fluent Arabic speaker, with a second crew to cover the overnight shift in case of more attacks. Real action had added piquancy to yet more talks about peace. Viewing figures, she predicted, would be way up, though it was hard to compete with the turmoil across the Arab world from Jordan to Libya. One ratings asset was Omar bin-Ghalifani, the notorious one-legged Yemeni militant who led the raid and died in it. A classic baddy, with many killings to his name in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, he illustrated the sad truth that war is always more interesting than peace.
Wyrecliffe knew he’d have to go back to his room soon, to prepare for the early morning bulletins for the Gulf Breakfast Show. Two more brief reports on the hour, a two-minute slot at noon, then the big press conference with world leaders at 1pm. With a deep, satisfied sigh, he eased himself up and started to put on a shirt, Taseena watched him through half-closed feline eyes.
‘Come here,’ she said, reaching out and caressing his thigh. ‘Let’s take a proper look at where they put this pacemaker. I was in too much of a hurry last night.’ She clicked on the bedside lamp, an
d sat on the edge of the bed facing his midriff. She ran her finger along the scar, and through the crop of bristly hair that was regrowing. ‘Does that tickle?’
‘Like crazy, yes.’
‘My father had his pacemaker up here,’ she caressed Wyrecliffe’s collarbone. ‘Just a tiny scar. This is so different,’ she said, measuring the full length of her hand against the incision.
‘Like I said, I’m going to get it checked over once I get some time. My consultant in London reckons that I shouldn’t need some big old Soviet coal boiler to keep my heart working.’
‘Well. It seems to work well enough,’ she smiled. ‘Three times.’
‘Twice,’ corrected Wyrecliffe.
‘No, three,’ Taseena said. She grasped his soft, heavy penis and caressed it, looking up into his face to watch the pleasure she was creating. ‘I’ve arranged for Finn’s crew to do the early bulletin. Now take that shirt off.’
He laughed. ‘Carry on like this and you’ll make that Russian pacemaker explode.’
* * *
It was six am when Cantara got to Wyrecliffe’s hotel. The receptionist rang his room, but with no reply, Cantara wrote a note.
‘Please make sure you give this to him,’ she said. ‘It’s very, very important.’
‘I think he’s still in the hotel, he hasn’t returned his key. Perhaps he is at breakfast?’ the receptionist said.
Cantara nodded. It was a good point. Chris would never willingly miss a cooked breakfast. She took the lift to the basement and was drawn, irresistibly, by the smell of freshly cooked food, into a huge low-ceilinged refectory. There were already many dozens of people queuing for the buffet, sitting and eating. Clusters of journalists with bags and laptops, dotted among the plastic palms and columns, but despite walking two slow circuits of the many tables, she couldn’t see Wyrecliffe or anyone from ASB. Everyone was glued to the TV news. Police wanted to question a possible female accomplice who had been seen with the Ramada Royal terrorists. Eye-witnesses on a bus had described a woman who had been hiding in their pick-up truck, had taken a lift in a courtesy bus, and who had been seen later at the hotel. She had been assumed to be a victim when taken to hospital, but had since disappeared. Cantara’s heart rose into her mouth. She picked up a tray, joined the buffet queue, and helped herself to food. She sat down near the entrance. When a waitress asked her room number, she quoted Wyrecliffe’s.