The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (35 page)

“LuxorEON,” she said. “Broadband access, running Linux.” Her voice was a dry imitation of Nafisa’s at its most patronizing. Then she shrugged, bony shoulders hunching beneath her tee-shirt. “Why?” Hani asked. “What do you need…?”

Numbers rolled up the screen so fast they made Raf feel even more hungover than he already was. These were dead accounts at Banque de Lesseps. And he had Lady Nafisa’s account details scrawled on a scrap of paper but Hani wasn’t interested in that. The numbers on the VSV’s screen were scrambled and she had an animated on-screen helper doing something with algorithms at lightning speed as she searched for Lady Nafisa’s old account.

The computer aboard the VSV was an old stand-alone, the kind that used a satellite modem and made up in sheer memory what it lacked in speed or connectivity. It had taken Hani all of two minutes to junk every default setting and come up with a configuration she actually liked. But then, as she pointed out with a surprising lack of bitterness, if you’ve spent nine years trapped in the same house with only a computer for company, you get good at it or you get bored.

“That one,” said Hani as a 28-digit number lit red and the screen froze. Everything else on the screen disappeared and the number shuffled itself until Hani was left with the same 8-digit/3-letter sequence Raf had scrawled in front of him. She made a couple of passes with the cursor, her thumb moving lazily over a trackball, and the number disappeared. “Don’t worry,” she told Raf, just as he started to do exactly that. “It’s checking we’re legal.”

She smiled and Raf tried to smile back. He’d no idea what Hani had just done.

“Here we go,” said the child as a bank logo began to animate on screen and the account went live again. There was quiet pride in her voice and an air of competence about her that would have looked impressive on someone three times her age.

“You’re good.”

Hani nodded, taking Raf’s compliment as a statement of fact. Fingers dancing and thumb rolling her trackball, Hani opened and shut screens at the speed of thought, collecting passwords and opening and closing trapdoors. She rode a rhythm that drummed inside her own head until her fingers suddenly faltered and Raf could almost feel the child’s confidence vanish. When Raf looked round, a photograph of Lady Nafisa stared at him from the screen, arrogant and imperious.

“I’m going to use the—”

Hani slipped out of her seat before Raf could say anything and so he sat there, trying not to listen to the child throw up her breakfast. The water in the heads ran, then ran again and she came out wiping her mouth. Neither of them said anything but the first thing Hani did when she climbed back into her seat was to make Lady Nafisa disappear.

“She said she was living on her savings,” Hani said, nodding at a seemingly endless list of red figures. “She always did lie.”

Nothing in Nafisa’s accounts made obvious sense, but Raf expected that. And he was beginning to see the pattern. His sense of self might be fucked, but he could knit connections from nothing and call it logic. Just as the madersa had rich public rooms and the private rooms had been bare even of furniture, so ran Nafisa’s accounts. Money had been spent lavishly on clothes but almost nothing on food. No payments at all for Khartoum or Donna. Very little on electricity, none on Hani’s broadband connection, which meant it was either illegal or someone else was footing the bill.

So far, so predictable.

The surprise was in the brackets that ran like a sour river along the bottom line. Picking 1 January as a date and flicking back year on year showed that her account had been overdrawn for at least ten years, which was as far back as Raf bothered to check. Not huge amounts in someone like Hu San’s terms, but getting larger and literally in the red. Until this April.

“Shit.” Raf was talking to himself but Hani squinted at the screen as he highlighted a figure. Hamzah had lied. She hadn’t taken him for $2,500,000: her commission had been double that. $5,000,000 from Banque Leventine in Cyprus. Straight in and straight out again, almost immediately, only this time in two amounts. $4,500,000 to an account in El Iskandryia and $500,000 to Havana.

“Let me…” Small fingers flicked over the keyboard, numbers resolving. The name that came up meant nothing to Raf.

Caja de Cuba.

“Want me to chase it?” Hani’s voice was neutral.

“If you can.” Raf had no intention of asking when she’d learned to crack files—or how. He was far too worried she might stop.

“Okay.” And with that Hani squared up to the screen, smiled slightly and let her fingers loose, chasing one link after another, running searches and routines she seemed to pull out of the air. Beside her sat the rag dog, a mechanical
whirr
coming from its guts like a low growl.

“What…”

“Back up,” said Hani. “The screen talks to him and Ali-Din remembers.” She sucked at her teeth to signal that Raf shouldn’t ask any more questions and went back to work.

“Got it,” Hani said finally. “Started here/ended Seattle. You want to know everywhere the $500,000 went in between?”

Raf didn’t, so Hani cross-referenced the new account number to a customer bank database, which took almost no time at all because—unlike with Banque de Lesseps—the data at the Seattle end wasn’t double-encrypted. This time the name meant something. Clem Burke, lately of Huntsville, registered as sole owner of Seattle’s newest detective agency.

“Now the next one,” Raf told Hani. But she was already on it, leaning in close as if trying to crawl right inside the screen. Raf was forgotten, he realized. The world outside did not exist. There was a hunger to the child’s face, a intensity that reflected pure concentration. Her brows were knit, her lips clamped tight. This was the other thing in her life over which she’d had control. What she ate and what she did on screen were ring-fenced for her alone. A thin slice of a life that everybody else was parcelling up and deciding for her own good.

Ali-Din was a side issue.

“Got it,” said Hani. Numbers resolved as the screen on the VSV talked via uplink to a datacore at Banque de Lesseps and data fed back, anonymous and cold, nothing but presence and absence of electrical charge until on the other side of the screen to Hani an electron beam rastered down the glass and Hani swore.

H.E. Saeed Koenig Pasha. The General’s own personal bank account. Shit indeed. Fear played inside Raf’s head like a whistle off the walls of an empty courtyard, heard every day without really hearing, until one stumbled over oneself, sat cross-legged in the dust. Hani broke the connection without being asked.

Next they looked at payments that had come in. And the first and most obvious point was that until the $5,000,000 from Hamzah there had been nothing for at least nine months. Before that, going back five or six years, there had been regular payments, spaced maybe four or five months apart, starting big and getting less and less.

To Raf it looked like someone selling off the family silver and waking up one morning to find it was all gone. Maybe her outgoings would be more use.

“Try that,” he suggested, pointing to a small, fairly regular debit in Nafisa’s account. The last time it had been paid was the day he’d arrived in Iskandryia.

Hani went back to her screen.

CHAPTER 42

1st August

“You must be Zara bint-Hamzah,” said the boy who
opened the door to her. Before she could ask how he knew, the boy had stepped back and was ushering her through the front door of the General’s palatial mansion on Rue Riyad Pasha.

He was about her age, maybe slightly younger, dressed in a simple shirt and tan chinos. A faint—a very faint—beard could just be discerned on his face.

“This is where I ask you if you have an appointment to see the General and you say no, but it’s very important…”

Zara nodded.

“A pity. You see, the General never receives anyone without an appointment. It’s a matter of principle…”

“I thought anyone could petition the General?” Zara said. She didn’t mean to sound as upset by his news as she did.

“Of course,” said the boy with a smile. “Anyone can. Just write a note and leave it. In five weeks’ time, when the secretariat have worked their way down the pile, someone will read your note and, if necessary, bring it to his attention.”

“What counts as ‘necessary’?” Zara asked.

“A threat to his life. A threat to the life of the khedive. News of an uprising… We get a lot of those.” He ushered her though another door into what looked like a dining room, then another, this time into a small study. On the wall was an oil painting of the old khedive and a smaller—if only slightly—portrait of the General wearing full uniform, with a curved sword hanging from his belt. The sword in question stood in the corner of the room, balanced upright like an old umbrella.

“Better not stay here too long,” said the boy. “He doesn’t really like people in his office.” From the top drawer of an ornate desk, he selected a key and used it to open French windows that led out to a garden.

“Come on,” he said, then paused. “Have you been here before?”

Zara just looked at him until he shrugged.

“I’ll take that as a
No
.”

Tall cedars rose from a lawn that was emerald green. The kind of lawn that old people talked about when they mentioned the mansions that used to line Mahmoudiya Canal, even though they’d never seen the lawns themselves and had only heard of them from their grandparents.

“Underground irrigation,” said the boy. Beds full of red and blue flowers that Zara had never seen before lined the path the boy chose. “Come on,” he said, so Zara followed. Until he stopped at a metal bench set in the shade of a bush topiaried into the shape of a perfectly crenellated wall, and indicated that Zara should sit.

“No,” she shook her head. “Not here.” A quick, almost embarrassed flick of one hand indicated him, then herself, the bench and its obvious seclusion. “How can I?”

The boy looked surprised, but not irritated. “We can walk,” he said simply and so they did: down another path until they reached a small lake with a fountain. Three stone women wearing very little stood, facing out, with their backs to each other. One of them held an apple and the other two, who were without the first’s discreet stone drapery, used their hands to hide stone pudenda.

“Nakedness is not always a sin,” said the boy lightly. Then he smiled and shrugged, before adding, “But, of course, that sentiment is probably heretical…”

He led her round the fountain and then down another path that doubled back inside the vee of greenery that the General had carved for himself out of a section of public gardens.

“So tell me,” said the boy. “What is so important that you need to see the General?”

“I’d prefer to tell him…”

“No,” he said seriously. “You misunderstand. The General is unable to see you, so I am seeing you instead. Now, what did you want to say?”

Haltingly, occasionally exasperated with herself, Zara began to tell him about Ashraf. Not everything, because she didn’t mention his time in prison or Raf’s belief that he wasn’t really a bey. But she told the boy about Felix, about how Ashraf swore that his aunt’s death was neither suicide nor his doing. Zara talked about how he’d cleaned up the house and asked her father to get rid of the office where his aunt had been killed so as not to upset Hani. And she spoke of Hani and how the child was afraid to leave Ashraf’s side…

Halfway through, the boy insisted they find a bench and walked away without waiting to see if Zara followed, though the bench he found her was out in the open, unscreened by hedges and in full view of the house. “This man,” said the boy, when Zara finally finished. “You know where he is hiding?”

The boy sighed at her silence, then shrugged.

“You don’t know, and if you did, you wouldn’t tell me?”

“Right.”

“Wrong. You do know and you still won’t tell me…” He looked at Zara, his gaze steady. “I guess that makes it love.”

After he’d listened to all the reasons why he was wrong, they changed the subject and Zara sat down again. “America,” said the boy. “You’ve been there. What’s it like?”

“New York,” she corrected, and then she explained in detail why the two were completely different. How New York was really a part of Europe that Europe had mislaid. Explaining this took more time than she intended.

At the front door, as he was showing her out, Zara paused. “You
will
tell the General what I said about Ashraf being innocent…?”

“Of course.”

“And there’s no chance of my seeing the General himself?”

The boy sighed. “What do you want with Koenig Pasha,” he asked, sounding slightly wistful, “when you’ve already seen the khedive?” And he shut the door, politely but firmly in Zara’s face.

CHAPTER 43

1st August

“Ashraf Bey,” said Raf into a brass grille set in a white
pillar on one side of a large metal gate. Above the grille a discreet
se vende
sign from an exclusive realty agent in Rue de L’Église Copte had a simple strip neatly glue-gunned across the top. When Raf put his hand up to check the
sold
sign, he discovered the glue was still sticky.

There would be a small CCTV watching his every move. Up in a tree, probably, though he hadn’t been able to spot it. Unless, of course, the Minister linked direct to a spysat, which was possible. At least ten private houses in Iskandryia were meant to be protected that way.

That it was only ten said something… On the Upper East Side whole blocks relied on nothing but spysats and a direct line to one of the top-end private police units. His mother had given him the details in one of her last e-mails, he forgot how many years before. She might have written a few more times, of course. Raf didn’t know, he hadn’t bothered to check that account much.

Static cracked from the speaker grille. “Ashraf Bey,” said Raf for the third time. So far no one had showed much interest in letting him in. He could scale the gate, no problem. Even the spikes along the top wouldn’t give him trouble unless he actually managed to fall on one. Weather, old age and too many coats of paint had made them blunt, almost rounded.