Assassins - Ian Watson & Andy West (28 page)

“Oh, we´re going to fly to Tehran and leave
the car here!"

“All is arranged.” Just the hint of a smile
played at the edges of his mouth. Abigail glared back in mock anger
and poked him in the ribs.

They relinquished their car at a tiny
auto-rental booth, then Kamal made a quick call on his mobile
before urging her towards the main airport building, their luggage
in tow.

“Hey, slow down!” as Abigail’s wheelie-case
slewed. Kamal grinned back over his shoulder, but didn’t slacken
the pace.

The terminal was almost empty as they rushed
through. A screen advertised scheduled departures in Farsi and
English; just two, Bandar Abbas and Tehran.

“Hang on, that departure time can’t be right!
Hey let me read…”

Kamal strode purposefully on, Abigail
trotting to keep up. He approached a man in uniform, who nodded,
then opened a side door and waved them through. A dim corridor,
doors to one side, daylight at the other end.

“Kamal! Where the hell are we going?”

“Ah my dearest, you will soon see.”

And she did. They burst out into sunlight,
and on to tarmac.

“What are you doing? We’re on the
airfield!”

“Ah, so we are.”

“But…” Abigail realised she didn’t know what
to say.

Then they were standing beside an aircraft
with a propeller, just
one
propeller. A young guy in blue
overalls grinned hugely at her, she instinctively smiled back, then
he grabbed her wheelie-case and Kamal’s piece of luggage to put
onboard.

“He’s our pilot?”

“Climb up, Abigail. Climb aboard.”

She did. The pilot and co-pilot seats were
covered in sheepskin. She turned to the rear and took a step in.
Six more seats in grey leather, smart carpeting in darker grey,
wooden panelling in the roof. She hesitated as a huge roar
announced the engine starting, and turned back. Her jaw dropped.
Kamal was in the pilot’s seat! The young guy was still on the
tarmac, his grin even wider. He closed the door.

Kamal patted the co-pilot’s seat. “Get
buckled up.”

She hurried to comply. “Can you actually fly
this thing?”

The plane lurched forward. “Hopefully. It
seems to be a Socata TBM700B.”

“You devil! You never said you could
fly.”

“I wanted to see the surprise on your face.
It was quite a picture just now!” He pointed to a mirror that
reflected the plane’s interior. “The property of a friend, this
plane.”

Kamal lined up to the runway and chatted
incomprehensibly to the control tower.

“Is that why you rushed me? Did you think I
wouldn’t get on?”

“Something like that. In our culture, a man
takes charge. I wouldn’t dream of imposing that on you ordinarily…”
as the engine noise suddenly increased and the plane rushed
forward, “but I thought a small demonstration might be fun!” He
turned and displayed a beautiful smile, which made her heart sing.
Everything shook; the din beat against her ears.

“Well I’m not complaining. It’s fun!”

What a way to be swept off her feet! The
plane leapt into the air, rocking from side to side and leaving
Abigail’s stomach behind. They banked steeply as Kamal got his
bearings, circling back over the runway and nearby highway. Looking
out of her side window, Abigail had the unnerving impression that
the window faced directly downwards. Everything on the ground was a
model from a child’s play-set, small and yet perfectly detailed.
They were not yet high.

Then Abigail saw a lone figure dressed in
black, just outside the airport’s perimeter fence. He was pointing
something at them. A rifle!

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?”

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