In a little upper room at the back of the mosque, Yusup Beg was bending over a low table groaning with books. In the centre, its pages untouched by any of its companions, lay a large Koran from the mosque library, a waqf copy penned in elegant Arabic letters. Around it were dispersed tafsirs, concordances, dictionaries, manuals of holy law, and a complete set of the traditions of al-Bukhari. He checked the wording of the Throne Verse against its citation in the commentary of al-Baidawi. Wrinkling his nose, he frowned, made a note on the pad on his lap, and leaned back on his haunches, yawning.
That was when he felt it begin. It was extremely muted at first, no more than a shiver in his spine and a faint tingling in his feet. Then it grew in strength. He thought it was an earthquake, he was sure it was an earthquake. The books on the table in front of him started to quiver. Volume 30 of Tabari’s Jami’ al-Bayan slithered its way to the edge and toppled to the floor. It was followed by several more.
Yusup leaped to his feet, anxious to retrieve the Koran before it suffered either indignity or damage. As he stood, he looked through the window. He blinked his eyes, then rubbed them. For as far as he could see, snow was falling on the city. He crossed to the window and looked out. The sky overhead was as blue as ever, yet snow was falling over everything, white and cold and perfect.
Asiyeh watched as the snow fell into the courtyard, white and cold and ominous. She’d known something bad was coming, known it from the moment she woke that morning. There’d been the aubergines, for one thing. There she’d been in the kitchen, slicing them up for the noonday meal, when she’d noticed that several of them had dark streaks through the white flesh, streaks that looked suspiciously like writing to her untutored eye. She’d remarked on it to Narges, who’d nodded and said, "If we could read these, we’d know a thing or two about the Torment and when it’s going to end".
"The Torment" was what everybody called the blockade. And then there was the matter of the Koran. Asiyeh opened the Holy Book at random after waking every morning in order to see what it had to say about the day to come. The fact that she couldn’t read it any more than she could an aubergine had never deflected her. She made her own intuitive readings, and indeed enjoyed something of a reputation with her friends as a woman to whom God had granted insights denied others. This morning’s reading had been the darkest in a long time.
‘Asiyeh!’
She started and looked to where the call had come from. Osman had just come through the gate and was waving to her. She’d seen him age thirty years in the past week. He staggered a little as he came through, and she wondered if he’d been taken ill. Or perhaps he wasn’t getting enough to eat. In spite of his position in the city, and the near-absolute authority he exercised, he refused to take more than his proper share of everything, including food. His men were harsh on hoarders and looters, and Osman could not afford to have it even hinted that he himself was anything but scrupulously honest.
She stood watching him, thinking maybe it was best she went down to him. He could be an impatient man, and no wonder, given how busy he was. She waved back to him and started for the stairs. As she did so, she noticed with horror that the snow had started to change colour from white to grey to black. In a matter of moments, the courtyard, that had been so beautifully white and untarnished, looked as if it had been swept with a black brush.
She cried out in disgust, then noticed Osman stagger again. He looked up and caught sight of her on the balcony, and she saw that his face was creased with pain and some terrible inward agony. Before he could call out or gesture, he fell face forward into the pond. Asiyeh screamed and ran for the stairs, but he was dead long before she reached him.
He was not the first, nor was he the last.
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
London
The day before had been a very long day, and it hadn’t been improved or shortened for Elizabeth by Anthony’s decision to spend most of it in the office.
‘My child is missing!’ she’d screamed at him that morning as he was on his way out. ‘For God’s sake, Anthony, she could be in a gutter by now, she could be desperate. Or in a hospital. My God, Anthony, she could be in an NHS hospital, in a ward full of homeless people and loonies. Do you have any idea what some of those places are like?’
‘Well, yes, I do, as a matter of fact. Not very nice, as you say, and hopelessly overcrowded. Which is why I have comprehensive medical insurance, as do you. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I do have to get to the office. My driver’s waiting.’
‘Fuck your driver. What about Maddie? What about my child?’
‘Look, darling, Maddie will be perfectly all right. If she starts feeling unwell, as I’m sure she will, I’m quite sure she’ll find a nice policeman and ask to be brought here, or back to Rose’s establishment. You could always try ringing Rose later on. Now, I really do have to go. My country needs me.’
‘You know, you really are totally pathetic, Anthony.I mean to say, you virtually run an intelligence service, you spend your time with spooks and secret policemen, but you can’t come up with a single idea as to how to find a missing child.’
‘She’s not a child, Lizzie. You know that perfectly well. Maybe this outing will be good for her, maybe it’ll help her grow up properly. God knows what you did to her in the first place, to get her into this state.’
She’d spent the rest of that day looking for Maddie herself, in a rather desultory fashion. If Anthony had his office, she now had her own business commitments and, once they’d been attended to, there’d been a long-planned lunch at Le Caprice with Tiggy Althorpe, then her regular massage and workout at the Sanctuary. It had been late afternoon when she rang Rose, and he said he’d heard nothing at all from Maddie, but that he’d certainly ring Elizabeth the moment he did.
The evening had been spent indoors, watching TV and waiting for the doorbell to ring. Anthony had been out at one of his watering holes. The phone hadn’t gone all night.
Now, as the second day was up and yelling "Rise and shine" through her curtains, she was beginning to think that Maddie might have been serious about getting out and staying out. Lizzie woke with a hangover on all fronts, downed half a bottle of very old whisky, and made up her mind to tell her errant excuse for a daughter what she could do with herself if she dared to ring up for help or turned up at the front door pleading to be taken in again.
She picked up the house telephone and rang the long-suffering Filipina maid.
‘Imelda? Listen - if my … If Miss Madeleine turns up, can you please tell her to fuck off?’
‘Sorry? No understand.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. Look, you know who Madeleine is. Maddie. Remember? The little slut who took up residence here and then did a midnight flit?’
‘Yes, Maddie, yes. Understand.’
‘If she should turn up at the front door asking for asylum, can you tell her this house is out of bounds? Can you do that?’
‘Bounds?’
‘She’s not allowed in. If there’s trouble, ask for me.’
‘Yes. Not allowed.’ There was a sigh at the other end, then, before Elizabeth could put down the receiver, a chilly voice. ‘You want breakfast now, Mrs Laing?’
‘Breakfast? No, I bloody well don’t want breakfast. Why don’t you j ust go and burn some toast? You sound like you could do with a diversion.’
She slammed down the phone and spent another hour rebuilding her face. When she felt able to face the world again, she slipped downstairs to the hall and picked up the mail from the table. It was always so ridiculously late these days, she thought, sifting through it as she wandered back to the kitchen.
‘Bills as usual,’ she murmured, echoing voices up and down the country. Always the same bills too: American Express, her Harvey Nichols account bill, her monthly bill from the Ritz. She paused, pulling out a plain white envelope addressed to her in rather clumsy handwriting. It carried a London postmark.
She sat down at the breakfast bar and slit the envelope wit
h her forefinger. Who the hell did she know in Paddington? she wondered.
‘Nobody lives in Paddington, absolutely nobody,’ she murmured, taking a folded paper out of the envelope and straightening it. She read it, slowly at first, then rapidly as she grasped what it was about. It was quite short, in fact, but entirely to the point.
I have your dotter, Maddie. If you want proof, tip out what’s in the envellope.
She lifted the envelope and shook it. A ring fell out, a small ring set with a large sapphire. Elizabeth’s mouth went dry. She recognized the ring at once. She’d bought it for Maddie as a birthday present five or six years earlier.
You and your husband look fucking loaded, so Im going the whole way on this. I want a million, in cash. Ill be in touch to give you instruchions. You’d better believe Im capable of doing damage to her. If you dont obay my orders, you’ll find bits of Maddie coming through your letterbox. She has nice little tits. Id hate to see them come off.
You can tell the police if you like. But if I were you Id keep the fuckers out of it. Ta-ta for now. I'll see you in my dreams.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
There was no way of telling one day from the next. The weather did not change, the sky remained the same, the landscape they passed through looked identical to the landscape of two or three days ago. Had it not been for the compass, they might have been going round in circles. Sometimes Nabila thought they were, sometimes she thought the compass just pointed at random. If there was radioactivity out there, wouldn’t that be possible?
‘You’re forgetting about the GPS,’ David said. ‘According to it, we’re making steady progress in the right direction. And if it fails, there’s always the stars.’
In reality, navigating through the dunes was not as easy as David made it sound. There was simply no way of keeping to a straight line, and in the heat that clamped down on them throughout the hours of daylight, it was all too easy to forget to take bearings when they should.
Every day, the temperature rose to well over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Two days in a row, it reached one hundred and sixteen. Shade was hard to come by, and if any appeared it could only be enjoyed for a brief spell while they rested. The strain of walking and climbing would have been enervating even in a cool climate, but here the constant heat sapped what little energy they had. They could afford to take only the shortest of rests: once you stopped walking and sat down on the warm sand, every cell in your body would cry out to fall asleep; but if you did, you’d wake an hour or two later with the vilest of headaches, parched, giddy, sick, and rubber-legged.
They ploughed on in a silence that was broken only by the gentle clanging of the camels’ bells. At times, David would look up, and for an instant he’d be exhilarated by what lay ahead: the knife-edge of a dune, slanted against the sky; the ripples on a dune’s side, perfectly laid, like the sand ripples on a seashore at home; the line of camels behind him like a funeral cortege, or etched at sunset against the horizon, black and unexpectedly graceful.
Moments later, his exhilaration would evaporate in the heat. The sun beat down pitilessly, arching its back over them, whipping, scourging, flogging anything that drew breath. At times it felt as if there was no way to breathe, that there was too little air, and that they too had fallen into a vast quicksand from which every last trace of moisture had been removed.
They were in darkness among light. With their heads bowed and their faces swathed in bright cloths to keep out the sand and the sun’s harsh rays, they moved like miners along tunnels of their own making. David found two pairs of dark glasses in one of the packs, and they wore them when they could.
A second camel died two days out from the quicksand. It had been weakening even before the storm, and afterwards it went into a severe decline. It started to have trouble keeping up with the others, and Nabila had forced it along using a combination of coaxing and pushing. Each night she examined it carefully and gave it what she could, which was little. Then, quite suddenly, its knees buckled and it collapsed to the ground. By the time they got to it, it was dead.
The death of the first camel had not caused much difficulty. It had been easy enough to redistribute most of her load between the other animals. But this time it was out of the question: there simply wasn’t anywhere for most of the food and equipment to go. If the other camels had been fresh, they might have taken some extra weight without complaining, but as things stood, every extra pound represented an additional risk.
A few essential items were swapped for others of less importance. They transferred as much water as they could, but more than half had to be jettisoned. It was given to the other camels, the first fresh water they’d tasted in a long time. Nabila poured it out, helping by helping, into a huge red plastic bowl from which the camels sucked great panting mouthfuls.
They moved on, leaving the dead camel buried beneath a shallow layer of sand, and its load scattered like litter around it. The next dune was the highest they had come to yet, but the camels, refreshed by their drink, climbed the slope with what almost seemed to be eagerness.
It was as they reached the razor-sharp ridge that David first noticed something out of the ordinary. It was, a thin sound that he realized must have been building in his ears for the past minute or so. He shook his head, thinking it might be a blood vessel in his ear, or mere imagination; but, no, there was something there, and it was growing louder. It seemed familiar and somehow threatening, and he strained to make out what it was.
Slowly, the sound built itself in his head, taking on a discernible shape. Perhaps he would have recognized it earlier, had it not been so incongruous out here, all these miserable miles from nowhere.
He scurried back to where Nabila was manoeuvring the rear camels on to the blade of the dune.
‘Take them back down,’ he shouted.
‘What?’
‘The camels! We’ve got to get them right off the ridge, on to this side of the dune. Come on, help me turn the leaders round.’
Before she could ask, he was haring off to the front and tugging at the head of the lead camel. Puzzled by his odd behaviour, the beast bucked against his efforts; then Nabila arrived and whispered her blandishments in its ear. It halted and turned to go back on to the dune’s western flank.
‘What’s wrong, David? What have you seen?’
‘Nothing yet. It’s what I can hear. Listen.’
She paused, listening intently.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there is something. A sort of buzzing. Like a giant bee. Would a plane be flying this low?’
‘It’s a helicopter,’ he replied, urging the camels on. ‘Coming in from the east. He’s flying slowly, which means he’s on a surveillance run.’
‘Can you see him yet?’
‘I haven’t tried. We’ve got to chivvy these camels down before he sees us. We’re standing out here like robins on a Christmas cake.’
‘Like ...?’
‘I’ll tell you later.’
They scrambled to hurry the camels as far down as possible. Once the last animal had been hunkered, David raced back up to the ridge and threw himself down just below the top. He pulled out his binoculars, then crept to the very edge.
The chopping noise was much louder now, amplified by the silence through which the helicopter was moving.
David scanned the sky in what he thought was roughly the right direction. He thought there was only one chopper, but it was always possible that there were others out there. The sun was behind him, putting him at an advantage. Nevertheless, finding a chopper at a distance in an empty sky wasn’t as easy as it seemed.
And then he saw it, its whirling blades caught in a ray of sunshine long enough to catch his eye. He lifted the glasses to get a fix on the aircraft. It was flying at an angle to him, allowing him to get a reading of its flank. His first thought was that it was Russian, an Mi-8 Hip or an Mi-24 Hind C: an attack helicopter, anyway. China had bought a huge number of them after the collapse of the Soviet system. Tha
t hadn’t made them any friendlier.
The copter was about half a mile away, approaching in a straight line. He watched it come, holding his breath. As he did so, he became aware of a second engine, some distance to his right. He swivelled and spotted a second helicopter some distance off, but flying parallel with the first. How many more were there, he wondered, spread over the vast expanse of the Taklamakan?
He knew that, if the nearest copter swept right overhead, there was nothing they could do to stop him spotting the camels or, more likely, the long line of hoofprints that punctuated their trail mile after mile into the distance.
To his relief, the pilot made his pass about half a mile to the north, and kept moving in a steady course away from them. He watched it until it passed wholly out of sight, then went back down to Nabila.
‘He didn’t see us,’ he said.
‘How can you be sure? Maybe he’s flown on to his base to report what he saw.’
David shook his head.
‘First of all, he must be based to the east. He won’t have enough fuel to go right to the western end of the desert. That applies whether he started in the west or the east. I think he’ll veer off to the north soon for refuelling.’
‘What’s he doing? Do you think he was looking for us?’
‘It’s hard to say. I don’t really think so. I saw a second aircraft a few miles further south. There could be half a dozen or more, there’s no way to tell. Just because we’re the only living things in the desert doesn’t necessarily mean we’re being hunted. We’re in range of whatever tests they’ve been carrying out: maybe the copters are monitoring fallout or something else specific to this weapon. I think that’s a lot more likely than sending helicopters into a place like this just to find two people who escaped from Kashgar.’
‘What if they come back? What if they catch us in an exposed position?’
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