The Care of Time (14 page)

That, I had to admit, was true enough. So, who had been ready to pay that twenty million for Zander’s head? There was only one possible answer left. You had to start thinking about and looking among The Ruler’s princely friends.

The sovereign state now known as the United Arab Emirates is a confederation of seven sheikhdoms lying on and off the southern shores of the Persian Gulf. Before federation they were known as the Trucial States and were British protectorates. In the old days, before the oil was found, the richest of them, then Dubai, made its money mostly by smuggling gold to India for foreign traders. Now, since the oil, all that has changed. Even the small local populations of desert nomads, fishermen and oases farmers, who used to live at a bare subsistence level, now have, on paper anyway, higher per capita incomes than West Germans or New Yorkers. They have a great many other things now, too, including some that nit-picking outsiders insist they neither need nor want – four international airports and fifty banks, a satellite communications system and a European pro-soccer manager, skyscraper office buildings and vast sports arenas, an aluminium smelting plant and a great many of the worst, as well as the most expensive, modern hotels in the world. The confederation has other claims to distinction. It may be the only Arab country to have its own chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, and among its many thousands of self-employed foreign residents are some of the wealthiest and most brazen crooks to be found anywhere.

And, of course, it has its seven princely Rulers.

Some of them are educated men who try to use their yearly
billions wisely and for the benefit of their subjects. They build roads and have plans drawn for medical clinics. But things are not easy for them. Their forefathers were pirates and their own fathers often secured the titles they now bear by murdering relatives and close friends as well as envious and ambitious neighbours. Such patterns of behaviour tend to persist, in thought if not always in deed, and the ability to write classical Arabic, read the
Wall Street Journal
and use a pocket calculator modifies them only slightly. If the murder of a fellow Ruler in order to express disapproval of his political or social goings-on is now thought an unseemly form of response, the murder of his favourite man of affairs instead might well be one of the acceptable alternatives. The employment of a notoriously expensive team of assassins for the job could serve as a delicate brotherly expression of regret for the inconvenience caused.

Trying to spot the Rasmuk tails in Milan’s lunch-time traffic proved to be a waste of time but as soon as we reached the autostrada I picked three of them up immediately. There were two in a car and one on a motorbike. They kept their distance and I saw no signs of any back-up team. There were no tricks. They went through none of the standard old-pro routines, such as passing and then tailing from in front for a while, that are supposed to fool the inexperienced quarry. They just followed, keeping their distance. They didn’t mind if I noticed that I was being tailed, but weren’t making it easy for me to get to know their faces.

In the west most passenger airports get extra busy on Fridays. Malpensa, which carries long-haul international traffic, can become badly congested. It was so that Friday. Standing by the Malpensa–Milan bus-ticket counter in the main hall was not nearly as easy as Chihani had made it sound. It is one of a small group of counters planted right in the centre of a concourse which is not particularly spacious anyway. I found that if I stood close to the counter the clerk tried, quite rightly, to sell me a ticket for the bus, or I was elbowed away by someone who did want a ticket. When I
edged along towards the counter beside it I had to fend off the attentions of a car-rental salesman. If I stood clear of the counter I became an obstruction to be cannoned into or brushed aside by hurrying travellers with glassy eyes and bruising hand luggage on their way to the departure gates.

The tail who had been on the motorbike was the first to follow me inside. I could identify him by his crash helmet. But I knew that one of the men from the car must have come in after him because the crash helmet visor kept turning from me to someone I couldn’t see who was on the far side of the check-in lines somewhere under the Air Ticket Purchase sign. I had no way of discovering what he was doing there and not much time to wonder if it mattered. Just as I was dodging, for the second time, a small boy pushing a baggage trolley in circles, I saw Chihani’s stubby girl assistant marching briskly towards me from TWA’s special check-in area.

She was wearing, of all things, a light straw stetson with a high-curl brim, a denim vest and a red-gingham shirt over jeans. A tooled-leather bag completed the ensemble. She looked like an overweight child dressed up for a school play. As she passed me and I turned to follow she issued sharp sotto voce orders out of the corner of her mouth nearest to me.

‘Oo-it me,’ she said. ‘Queek, queek. Oo-it me. Come.’

For several confused moments I thought that she was telling me to hit her. That was how it sounded. Luckily, she supplemented her verbal orders with gestures so I was able to get the right message. ‘Oo-it’ meant ‘with’. She was telling me to walk with and beside her and not to waste time gawping.

‘Queek, queek,’ she said again.

She herself was practically running by then. I glanced back and saw the crash helmet starting after me. He did not get far. An empty invalid chair propelled by the armlock boy wearing an Alitalia cap and shoulder-boards took him in the back of the legs and sent him sprawling. I saw no more of him. My companion was still squeaking ‘Queek, queek’ but with a
new note of urgency in her voice. I looked down and realized that she had been trying to thrust a boarding card into my hand. We were approaching what a sign said in English was International Departures Gates 1–10 as well as passport control and there was a notice warning that boarding cards must be produced with passports. I just had time to see that the card she had given me was for a British airline flight before I had to show it with my passport. Then we were through and facing a security check where a one-handbag-per-passenger rule was being strictly enforced.

I had no bag to be searched so all I had to do was walk through the body-check frame. My escort joined me on the other side after retrieving her bag from the counter.

‘Where now?’ I asked. ‘London?’

‘Us be still.’

She was anxiously scanning the passport control channels which could still be seen beyond the security-check area behind us. After a moment or two we saw the boy with the wheelchair appear on the far side. He gave us an unobtrusive little wave and then turned towards a door with the wheelchair symbol on it alongside some lavatories.

‘He has passkey. Us go. You follow. Queek.’

She was away again, whipping off her cowboy hat as she went. Facing us across the departure lounge were the boarding gate doorways. She seemed at first to be heading for the duty-free shop, then suddenly she veered away towards a door with a small glass porthole in it and a sign above saying in four languages that it was for
AIRPORT PERSONNEL ONLY
. She gave the door a tentative push. It swung open. The boy in the Alitalia outfit was on the other side with his hand on the passkey ready to relock the door behind us the moment we were through.

‘Follow,’ he said.

We were in a passage, with office doorways on one side and the duty-free shop storerooms on the other. There were background sounds of aircraft noise, an unanswered telephone ringing and the clatter of a teleprinter. At the end of
the passage there were two or three steps down. That was the way we went. At the foot of the steps the passkey unlocked another door.

Beyond it we were in the open air. To the left was the steel gantry that carried the overhead walkway to the airport restaurant and also served to house aircraft service vehicles. To the right, away from the main tarmac, was a stretch of asphalt marked out with yellow lines for use as an employees’ parking lot. The jets of a plane about to taxi out to the runway began to scream as we walked smartly away between the parked cars.

Our general direction was towards an open gateway in a chain-link fence, but I saw that we were going to have to come right out into the open to reach it. We made an odd trio. It seemed unlikely that, with no crowds around, the boy’s Alitalia uniform alone could get us through unchallenged when security people spotted us. But I had done Chihani an injustice. As we were about to leave the shelter of the parked cars, a red Alfasud moved out of one of the parking slots on the far side and then backed up at speed to meet us. She herself was driving.

By the time she reached us she had the passenger door wide open and the two kids quickly scrambled through into the back seats. I got in beside her. As she drove out slowly on to the airport perimeter road she listened to a voluble report from the back. It appeared to satisfy her. She nodded approval, but she wasn’t passing up the chance of delivering a homily for my edification.

‘You saw the enemy, Mr Halliday? You saw how close they came to you?’

‘I saw three of them. That second man who came in after the guy with the crash helmet? What was he trying to do back there?’

She consulted the kids before she replied. ‘Almost certainly trying to buy a flight ticket and check in. The moment they saw that you were bound for the airport they must have feared that they were going to lose you. A ticket to stay close
to you was their only chance. They think quickly. You see why our security must be so strict?’

‘Did you know that passengers have to have boarding cards as well as passports now?’

‘Of course. It is a new airport security rule.’

‘Were those real boarding cards or do you keep blanks for use on these occasions?’

‘With this enemy,’ she said sharply, ‘you use a new trick only once. Certainly the cards were real. The time of that British flight to Manchester happened to be right for us. There was a Warsaw flight that for time would have been better but one would have needed Polish visas to get boarding cards for that with any of our passports.’

‘Still, Manchester must have cost quite a bit.’

She began to suspect that I was putting her on. ‘They were stand-by economy class tickets,’ she said crisply. ‘Now, please, we shall all smile at the security police in a friendly and untroubled way. Yes, even you, Mr Halliday.’

We were approaching the perimeter-road checkpoint. The striped barrier was down and two uniformed men peered at us intently through their cabin windows. We coasted almost to a standstill, with Chihani smiling winningly and flourishing a piece of official-looking plastic at the men watching her, before the barrier went up and we were allowed through.

I pointed to the plastic. ‘Is that genuine too?’

‘No, this is a Polaroid copy of a pass we borrowed a few days ago from one of the duty-free shop people. I thought we might have a use for it. We borrowed his key for a little while too. He was cheaper than the economy fare to Manchester.’

Once clear of the airport service road she began to drive fast and away from the autostrada. Soon, we passed an old redbrick factory with the name
CAPRONI
spelled out in huge letters along its road frontage. A few hundred yards beyond it she turned on to a minor road with dirt shoulders flat enough to park on. She gave a series of orders to the back seat as she ran off the road and stopped.

‘Out please, Mr Halliday.’

I obeyed orders smartly. ‘What now?’

‘Change of plates,’ she said and went to unlock the hatchback.

They were well drilled. The boy, who had already discarded his Alitalia props, jacked up the car and went through the motions of changing a wheel for the benefit of passers-by. The girl changed the plates. Chihani covered her while she worked by leaning against the car and studying an opened-out road map. Italian car numbers are prefaced by initials denoting the place of registration. We had been wearing TO for Turin. Now we were switching to GE for Genoa.

‘What’s the point?’ I asked.

‘Those people who were trying to follow you are under strict discipline. They will not dare to return with a simple report of failure. They must at least be able to show why and how they failed. And they are not fools. They will already have figured out our exit route. So, they will also have found that the airport security police we passed at the checkpoint record all vehicle movements in and out. For those police it is a very boring routine, and they are not well paid. Do you think they will refuse a man with ten thousand lire in his hand a glance at their time sheet?’

‘I guess not.’ I thought she was crediting the enemy with faster reaction times than they probably possessed, but refrained from saying so. Her arrangements for losing the tails I had brought from Milan had worked. While I might not be an enemy target, I would, for a few days anyway, be spending time in the target area. I should be praising not carping. ‘The two kids did well,’ I said. ‘The orders you gave them can’t have been easy to carry out. They had to use their heads.’

She nodded. ‘They were trained by the patron. He trained me too. We think as one. It’s all the same with us.’

‘By the patron you mean Mr Zander?’

‘Of course. You had better know their names. That is Mokhtar tightening the wheel nuts. The girl we call Jasmin.’

‘That’s not her real name though?’

‘Oh, we never use real names.’

‘Is that language you speak between you some kind of Arabic?’

‘You must know very well that it isn’t.’ Then she shrugged. ‘I don’t see why you wish to know but, in fact, it is a Berber language.’

Five minutes later we were on the move again.

At first we headed for a place named Busto Arsizio. Then we turned towards the A8 autostrada and took a northbound on-ramp. A sign said that we were bound for Sesto C and Arona.

‘It is along here,’ she said, ‘that they would pick us up if we still had the Torino plates. All they would need would be two men with their eyes open and a little luck.’

I didn’t argue. ‘Where are we going? Whereabouts is the safe house?’