by K J Griffin
‘Ever done any work for the Ramlis?’
‘The who, sir?’
‘Ramlis. You know, like Saudis—the bloody ragheads you see buying up Harrods?’
‘Oh them, sir. No. Can’t say as I have, like.’
The answer wasn’t what Easterby wanted to hear.
‘And this company of yours—Ultimate—what sort of contracts do you get?’
“Well…we do all sorts, really. Mostly small jobs south of the river, like.
But business is getting tight these days with the big boys trying to squeeze us out of the market.’
‘Number of staff? How many chaps have you got working for you, Phil?’
‘Oh, that depends, sir. Depends what’s on. Most of the lads aren’t permanent, like. I get them in when there’s a job on.’
Goss lent conspiratorially over the table towards his ex-colonel, gulping at his pint.
‘So what’s this all about then, sir, if you don’t mind my asking? Have you got something for us, Colonel?’ he asked, the lager flecking the bristles above the corner of his mouth.
Easterby looked contemptuously at Goss’s cutthroat, keen features. What the hell were the Ramlis up to? Why had they picked Goss and his third-raters out of all the major league competition around?
Easterby swilled his glass and lent forwards across the table till he was only a whisky-breath from Goss’s face.
‘Yes, I have, actually,’ he hissed. ‘A rather special job. It will require a bit of tact and, as I told you on the phone, a spell abroad.’
‘You know you can rely on me for tact, sir. I didn’t let you down before, did I? We looked after each other back then, didn’t we sir?’
Easterby took an irascible swig of his whisky and crisped, cheeks reddening with a mixture of anger and embarrassment.
‘That was a long time ago, Phil. A very long time. And you can forget the old days. Believe me, they’re gone, and gone forever. Just be grateful I looked you up for this show, picked you out from hundreds of better outfits, gave you a shot at the big time.’
But brutes like Goss could hold their nerve under fire.
‘Grateful?’ he sneered. ‘Oh, I’m grateful all right, Colonel. Like you were grateful back in them old days when I got the men all whipped into shape, all shit-scared and ready to testify just the way you wanted.’
For a few seconds Easterby felt his anger would get the better of him His fist was clenching the whisky tumbler in his fingers so tightly he could see the dregs of his drink shaking with ripples of rage. But the blind fury lasted no longer than the last mouthful and with a well-drilled effort of self-restraint, he let the tide subside. He had gone on to better things since he had last met trash like Goss; there were other ways. So, with a heavy sigh, he scooped the empties from the table and went to the bar for another round, and by the time he had returned to the table, the trip to the bar had firmed him for action.
‘OK, Phil, here’s the deal,’ he announced, passing Goss another pint. ‘I’ve got an undercover job for you out in Ramliyya. When can you fly?’
Goss looked livelier.
‘Anytime, sir. You know me, Colonel—always ready for action!’
‘Good,’ Easterby nodded, and he began to brief Goss as he had been directed by the deputy ambassador of Ramliyya.
Chapter 9: Oxford: October 13
Sophie arrived in the Warden’s undercroft at 7:15, fifteen minutes earlier than the invitation had stated. It was a one-off soirée to which all undergraduates were invited once in their college careers, though few regarded it as a landmark of any note. In the emotional turmoil she had been plunged into since she had met Al-Ajnabi, Sophie had first thought of turning down the invitation, but time spent with Marcus had restored her self-confidence. Besides, her finances were so fragile she couldn’t be sure how much longer she would be able to stay on. All the more reason to indulge herself in such silly old Oxford pageantry.
Dress was formal. Sophie entered the ancient undercroft in black dinner gown with matching stockings, relieved to see Isabelle, Simon, and a couple of other less familiar friends with whom she could sip a nervous sherry.
There were four or five other groups in the room, mostly tutors and outsiders. Another quartet of students was struggling with a verbose don at the far end of the room next to the fireplace.
The Warden, hovering somewhere just behind Sophie, was an infamously randy old devil. Rumour had it that his only consolation in hosting the dull student dinners was the sight of some nubile flesh or the occasional eccentricity of one of the non-academic guests he invited.
Sophie cringed when she saw the Warden homing in on her group, then flushed with embarrassment as he ignored the others and took hold of her elbow, chuckling inanely with semi-inebriate bonhomie.
‘Delighted to meet you…umm…Sophie,’ he gurgled, peering at the nametag and simultaneously taking in as much of Sophie’s cleavage as his eyes could swallow. ‘Allow me to introduce you to the other guests, my dear.’
And without waiting for her assent, he detached Sophie from her group and started to display her around the room like a trophy.
Only the two English tutors, Richard Chase, and the ultra-feminist Emily Ockenden, were familiar faces to Sophie. Most of these older guests had been hitting the sherry hard, except, of course, for the teetotaller Ockenden. Among the non-academics were a barrister, a QC, a leading economist, a famous journalist, a senior policeman and a female MP—all old alumni, she soon found out, and personal friends of the Warden or Dean.
Diverse conversations drifted towards Sophie’s ears from around the room. A couple of earnest young men to her right were jousting energetically about gay marriage. A group straight ahead with strong views on changes to the benefit system discussed welfare reform over champagne. Elsewhere Europhiles jostled with Europhobes.
As the Warden led her to a group containing Ockenden, Sophie seized the opportunity to ask her tutor if today’s generation of female graduates could expect to receive fair and equal treatment in the workplace, and so succeeded in removing the Warden’s overfamiliar hand from the back of her elbow.
A bell was rung for dinner. The guests filed in dribs and drabs into the oak-panelled dining room, where waiters in white tunics stood long-faced behind the scrolled silverware.
Ockenden kept up her discussion all the way to the dinner table, and Sophie was relieved to find that she had been placed opposite her tutor, near the Warden’s huge wooden throne at the end closest to the undercroft entrance. To Sophie’s left a stout, young barrister with severely cropped hair, a pudgy face and an intention to impress introduced himself as Max Stein.
The Warden was last to enter the dining room, talking heartily to a guest he seemed anxious to please. Sophie froze, gripping the back of her chair. Too late, she looked down at the name of the missing guest on her right and read the name that threw her into delirious confusion: His Excellency Prince Omar Adil Al-Ajnabi Al-Janoubi, special envoy of the Royal Embassy of Ramliyya.
Al-Ajnabi looked impressive and regal in his flowing desert finery, the gold embroidery of his headdress catching the dim light of the chandeliers.
‘Ah, here we are, Your Excellency,’ said the Warden, motioning his guest to the seat beside Sophie. ‘Allow me to introduce you to Superintendent Whitaker of the Thames Valley Police.’
The grey man between Ockenden and the Warden lent across the table to shake the Arab’s hand.
‘Next to the Superintendent is Miss Ockenden, senior lecturer in English.’ There was only a half-smile and a formal greeting from the lecturer. ‘And opposite Miss Ockenden is one of our charming undergraduates, Miss…er,’
‘Palmer?’ suggested the stranger.
‘You know each other?’ The Warden was incredulous.
Al-Ajnabi looked matter of fact. ‘We met somewhere by the river. A most charming young lady.’
Al-Ajnabi caught Sophie’s eyes, giving her the briefest of those vampire smiles. Taken off guard, Sophi
e could only stammer the blandest of acknowledgements. Her see-through embarrassment aroused the table’s curiosity, from which she was saved only just in time by the bell ringing for grace. The Warden delivered something appropriately ecumenical and the guests took their seats.
As they pulled the heavy oak chairs to the table, Superintendent Whitaker charged into the small talk.
‘There’s been a lot about you and your country in the papers lately, Prince Omar.’
Al-Ajnabi nodded graciously and began to digress lengthily on the vast Ramli business projects soon to be inaugurated—a big boost for British business and jobs. The Warden, Whitaker, Ockenden and the barrister, Stein, all listened intently. Sophie was glad to find the pressure off. She fished distractedly at the consommé quatre legumes, sloshing down most of her first glass of red, while Al-Ajnabi fielded questions on the magnitude of the sum he held at his disposal.
The Warden interrupted his guest, smiling with commendable obsequiousness.
‘And we are very fortunate to be among the first beneficiaries of Ramli largesse,’ he announced to the table. ‘Yesterday Prince Omar pledged a gift of £180,000 towards the cost of our renovation work.’
Whitaker and Stein murmured appreciatively.
‘And why did you single out Magdalen College in particular for this generous gift?’ Ockenden asked, just in time to stall another waiter intent on filling her glass with wine.
‘Simple,’ Al-Ajnabi replied with a dramatic sweep of the hand. ‘Yesterday my assistant, a Mr Hasan, informed me of an unexpected saving of the same figure from my relocation expenses. As I had already met Miss Palmer, and she had been kind enough to tell me which college she attended, I decided to make an instant donation to her college as a token of my appreciation. So really, you have Miss Palmer to thank for my donation.’
Sophie was glad that she had just swallowed her last mouthful of consommé or she would have been sure to spit the soup straight out onto the Prince’s plate. She looked up. By now, prying faces starting from the Warden, to several way past the barrister were staring at her, some smirking, some with more honest smiles on startled faces. But Sophie hadn’t been listening to Al-Ajnabi’s words, so much as his delivery. Something in his accent struck her as false. His voice had lost the clipped ring she had heard on their first meeting; he was now making a conscious effort to sound Middle Eastern and not quite succeeding. Recovering her nerve in front of the spotlight, Sophie decided to riposte.
‘I hope you don’t mind my asking, Prince Omar, but there is one question I wanted to ask you the other day.’
He cocked an eyebrow, encouraging her to continue.
‘Are you a real Ramli, Prince? It’s just that you don’t look or seem like an Arab despite your dress; nor even, at times, sound like one.’
The rest of the table fidgeted uneasily. Only Ockenden, and curiously, Al-Ajnabi himself, smiled for unfathomable reasons of their own.
‘You are quite right, Miss Palmer,’ he replied, ‘Neither of my parents were Arabs. It is not uncommon in the Jazeera—the Arabian peninsula—for non-Arab Muslims to settle in the area after making the Hajj, or pilgrimage, to Makkah.’
‘Hence the name Al-Ajnabi, or ‘The Foreigner’.’ It was Ockenden’s turn to smirk.
Al-Ajnabi raised his eyebrows. ‘Exactly!’
‘I have some familiarity with Arabic literature,’ the tutor explained before she was disturbed by the arrival of a waiter. And she seemed intent on further comment, but the main course had arrived just in time to thwart a more expansive discourse. A choice of beef Wellington or truite à la meunière, steamed on silver dishes. Ockenden was obliged to wait for vegetarian. Sophie began to look around the table when she wasn’t picking disinterestedly at the bones in her trout. She needed a diversion and was desperate to avoid conversation with the tormentor on her right. And in her agitation it seemed to her that even his copycat menu choice of fish was just another attempt to mock and unnerve her.
For a few moments the Warden recaptured Al-Ajnabi’s attention; Sophie relaxed and glanced around the table. Most of the guests looked as if they had already taken full advantage of the rich selection of wines on offer. Only Ockenden’s conspicuous fruit juice flouted the flow from the college cellars.
‘And you do not observe the Islamic ban on the consumption of alcohol?’ the tutor asked Al-Ajnabi when at last her nut roast arrived.
Al-Ajnabi took an extra-long pull on his wine glass. ‘As you can see, Ms Ockenden, I do not. For I am a great believer, even a fanatic some might say, in freedom—but by that I mean a freedom unfettered from the invisible shackles that few, even in the West, would have the courage to cast aside.’
The Warden looked worried by the barrage of insolent questions raining down on his star guest.
‘Bravo!’ he applauded. ‘There speaks an enlightened man of his religion!’
But Ockenden was enjoying herself.
‘Yet you come from one of the most conservative and repressively orthodox Islamic countries, Prince Omar, a country that refuses its people, especially its women, even the most basic of freedoms.’
‘My country is not politically free, as you quite rightly suggest, Miss Ockenden,’ he smiled again, ‘but I think that I may claim for it one small advantage over the liberal West.’
‘Which is?’ asked Stein, evidently amazed to hear a Gulf sheikh discussing politics so openly.
‘Should a dire emergency face our country, an apocalyptic threat that required tough, decisive and unpopular actions to save us from imminent catastrophe, then the will and authority of one man could achieve what was necessary. What chance here in the West? If radical change is needed that would entail even minor inconvenience to the comfort and lifestyles of the electorate, then no politician will ever even dare propose that change. Your voters will never be aware of what they need to do to save themselves because the right course of action will simply not appear as a choice at the ballot box. Your leaders necessarily care about winning elections first and foremost; principles and policies, they say, are no good without the power to implement them. So if the true path to salvation is too hard to sell, then it will not find a willing seller. The result? An insidious and lethal honey trap. Even if your electorate is diagnosed as terminally sick, a victim of a sugary diet that is slowly but steadily killing the patient, none of your professional politicians will wreck a career on a hard-sell cure. And so the spoiled child will perish, for no one could save the over-indulged brat from its miserable self.’
Amid the growing consternation around the table, even the Warden put his glass on the table. Only Ockenden looked amused. Sophie studied Al-Ajnabi, surprised to hear him voice publicly more of those dark political opinions he had raised at her interview.
‘So you do not approve of our democratic ways?’ asked the Warden glumly. Sophie could tell that the Warden liked his foreigners to be interestingly different, but wannabe British at heart—Queen, cricket and conservative with a small c. This one did not fit the mould.
Ockenden leant over the table for the kill, looking as if she hadn’t had such fun since she’d heard that one about Casanova being gay.
‘So if you agree that your Ramli monarchical system isn’t fair, and yet you despise our democracy, what politics do you approve of, Prince Omar?’
Sophie looked on with interest as Al-Ajnabi gave her tutor that malevolent half-smile she recognised from the interview, before draining his glass and pushing his plate aside with a flourish.
‘I once heard a tale from the early days of ancient Rome, Miss Ockenden,’ he eventually sighed, ‘a tale that I am sure you know far better than me. Once, in the early days of the Republic, when Rome was in imminent danger of being destroyed by its enemies, the Senate realized that desperate times called for desperate measures. So, casting aside their repugnance at the idea of kings and tyrants, they turned to one man, a retired general, and gambled everything on surrendering total power to this general to deal with the enemy, however
he saw fit. The messengers found Cincinnatus ploughing his fields. And when they told the former general that the senate had begged him to take total control of Rome under the title of dictator, Cincinnatus immediately donned his long-neglected armour, hurried to the city, raised a fresh army, and single-handedly crushed Rome’s enemies. In those days, the victors of an ancient battle would gorge themselves on the blood of the vanquished, but once again Cincinnatus showed himself to be a leader of a different calibre. For having listened to the appeals of Rome’s defeated enemies, Cincinnatus promised he would spare the lives of the conquered soldiers if their leader, the bloodthirsty Cloelius, was brought to him in chains. When the reviled Cloelius arrived, manacled and prostate before him, Cincinnatus spared the enemy leader his life by forcing him to pass under a yoke made of three spears, symbolizing his acceptance of the power of Rome. And even though he was the saviour of his country and was surely entitled to be treated as a king, six months to the day after taking office, Cincinnatus left the city, gave up the dictatorship, returned to his farm and handed the reins of government back to the people and Senate of Rome.’
When Al-Ajnabi had finished his story a reverent hush had descended on Sophie’s end of the table and she watched in fascination as silent faces stared into their plates or swilled the dregs of a wineglass in quiet contemplation.
Again, it was Ockenden who broke the silence.
‘A moving tale, Prince, and one I do indeed recall very well. But in today’s world the scars of Hitler, Stalin and Mao linger long in the collective conscience. Which is why we value our democracy come what may. Your latter-day Cincinnatus will never be invited to become set up a dictatorship here.’
‘Then maybe he will come unbidden to you,’ Al-Ajnabi smiled at the tutor with an intensity that made Sophie shudder.
The warden cleared his throat.
‘And what political leaning would you anticipate your latter-day Cincinnatus to take, my dear Prince? Would he be of the Left or the Right?’
‘Which political ideology?’ Al-Ajnabi mused, shaking his head. ‘No, no, such political ideologies are irrelevant in today’s global world, are they not, Warden? Or, to be more accurate, they have been forced into irrelevance by the triumph of the one system, yaani, the capitalism or rather the corporationism of the global free market.’