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  The Ethiopian pilot banked steeply in preparation for landing. Al-Ajnabi fastened his seatbelt, continuing to stare blankly at the parched landscape below.

  The beautiful and solitary Eritrean flight attendant sitting opposite him studied the man who was at once her passenger, boss, and part-time lover. Al Ajnabi knew that most of those who saw him for the first time mistook for a European, not a Ramli millionaire. And as he looked back at his ‘hostess’, Zahra, he still chuckled with amusement and some considerable embarrassment recalling the glowing and detailed descriptions of his physical appearance he had overheard Zahra giving to a new hostess, Zeinab, when Zeinab had arrived in Asmara three nights ago fresh off a flight from the Yemen

  It was Al-Ajnabi’s European blood, Russian maybe, he had heard Zahra tell Zeinab, that gave the Prince his straight nose, green eyes and dusty blond hair that was always brushed backwards over the scalp to cascade long, loose strands across a deeply tanned forehead.

  The Prince’s age? Zahra had shrugged. Al-Ajnabi looked younger than his true age, she had whispered, for the youth you attributed to him at first glance was ultimately betrayed when you got close up by rivulets of sun-hewed wrinkles around the eyes and mouth that suggested an age of anywhere between forty and fifty years. The Prince was only a little above average height, but from intimate contact, Zahra giggled, she could assure Zeinab that the Prince had a toned and athletic build.

  Recalling all this whispered conversation brought a flush to Al-Ajnabi’s face and he knew that Zahra would have no idea what his coy smile signified. Instead, he glanced away again to resume his private and varied musings that flitted as bumpily across mind as the turbulent Red Sea air outside the window.

  When his thoughts returned to his business, Al-Ajnabi’s fingers absent-mindedly creased down the full-flowing robes of Arab royalty, embroidered with black and gold sashes that he had donned for this return. Now and again he checked the positioning of his ghutra headdress, whose black and gold lattice enveloped his shoulders and upper back. The sandals were all together more comfortable than this stuffy, ceremonial gear, made of simple leather and embossed with gaudy and very real gemstones.

  The plane banked and the pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom:

  ‘We will be landing at Madinat Al Aasima in five minutes, Hadratak.’

  Al-Ajnabi looked up to catch a beautiful smile from Zahra, no doubt inspired by what she had interpreted as flirting when he had looked her up and down just a few minutes ago. Zahra was sweet, very sweet, he was forced to admit, but… He had trained himself over the years not to get too involved with any of his personal assistants, two more of which, in addition to Zeinab and Zahra, he kept discretely in villas in Cairo and Beirut. And even if he had believed in Western-style romantic love, there was no room for it in his hectic projects. This return flight to Ramliyya signified the start of the end game. It was just as well there was no emotional baggage, well, at least no recent emotional baggage, to divert even a fraction of his attention from the denouement of a project which he had spent the last eight years crafting together.

  With a sigh of regret his eyes left Zahra and he returned one final time to the view from the window, watching the whitewashed buildings of the capital skimming by underneath the wing. Red Sea oil revenue had paid for all this opulence, revenue that had been further swollen by the discovery of one of the world’s largest gold mines in the hills behind Madinat Al Aasima. The result had been to catapult Ramliyya from poverty worse than that of neighbouring Yemen to a per capita income exceeding that of any kingdom or sultanate in the Arabian Peninsula. Yet the fantastic changes wrought by supertankerloads of petrodollars held little appeal for Al-Ajnabi. Down below they could enjoy their air-conditioned marble palaces, their Mercedes, servants and swimming pools. It was illusory, short-term decadence fed by the Great Delusion. And it was precisely towards fighting the Great Delusion, while Planet Earth still had a ghost of a chance of survival, that he planned to devote his own enormous slice of the Ramli cash cake.

  Seconds later Captain Teshome cushioned the wheels of the tiny jet onto the tarmac with a precision gained from years spent landing Russian Tupolevs on the knife-edged runways of besieged hilltop garrison towns during the long Ethiopian civil war. A landing crew was already waiting at the royal terminal to facilitate His Excellency’s prompt passage from the steamy heat of the gangway to the air-conditioned interior of the terminal.

  ‘You have come just in time, akhuyya,’ said Prince Faysal, greeting Al-Ajnabi with four kisses on each cheek. ‘The doctor says my father will not see another night.’

  ‘He is conscious?’

  ‘Yes, but he is not strong enough to talk.’

  ‘Then let us go at once. Afterwards, we will talk.’

  The soldiers and officials who tormented the common air passenger with immigration checks and customs controls of unsurpassed severity anywhere in the world parted in grinning phalanxes in front of Prince Faysal’s entourage. Al-Ajnabi had hoped that Prince Faysal’s presence would speed things up, but as ever, he was forced to stop time and time again in a hubbub of crescendoing greetings, while one familiar face after another rushed to clasp his hand, slap his back or kiss him six times on the cheeks. And these were only the important Ramlis. Looking around at the larger groups of police, soldiers and immigration officers clasping guns or prayer beads and wearing glitzy Ray Bans, Al-Ajnabi knew that the whisper in all these clustering congregations would be that the European stranger who had saved the old sultan in his darkest hour was destined only to increase his enormous influence with the accession of the impressionable Prince Faysal. And such speculation, he felt assured, would be close to the truth.

  Outside the terminal sat two black Mercedes with tinted windows, each surrounded by a swarm of security guards, back up cars and motorcycle escorts. Al-Ajnabi ushered Zahra into the first, sending her to wait for him in his mansion tucked in the hills a half-hour’s drive from the city, before joining Faysal for the ride north along the coast to the royal palace, a ride spent exchanging more greetings and pleasantries. Most of the conversation was ritual and formulaic, as Arabian etiquette and the precarious condition of Faysal’s father dictated. Al-Ajnabi was not impatient. He would leave the more important discussions till later, till after he had said his farewells to the old man.

  In the intense glare of late afternoon, the sand flats, shore and steamy sea were blended into a confusion of blue and ochre tones. The palace sat astride a rocky promontory jutting splendidly into the Red Sea, connected only by a narrow causeway to the mainland. Since the attempted coup ten years back, the old sultan had lain up almost exclusively in this semi-island retreat. Al-Ajnabi had always been glad of the old man’s seclusion and paranoia.

  And now, dashing from the chill of the Mercedes’ interior into the icebox air conditioning of the palace, Al-Ajnabi had mixed feelings about this deathbed visit to the man whose largesse had provided him with a fabulous fortune and who had adopted his former bodyguard as a son. But Al-Ajnabi hadn’t come back just to see the weak, vain and timid old man into the next world. He had come because this was the moment. This was to be the time they had agreed upon, he and Faysal. But would Faysal have changed his mind? Would the prospect of power have corrupted the young man, made Faysal lukewarm about sponsoring the forthcoming agenda?

  ‘Father, he has come,’ Faysal announced, swinging open the gold-plated doors to the Sultan’s bedroom. A French doctor and nurse were fussing around the bed, scuttling between the drips and stands.

  Al-Ajnabi kissed the old man. The Sultan’s breath was dry, his eyes flitted fearfully here and there, lips quivering querulously underneath the oxygen mask.

  Al-Ajnabi clasped the old man’s desiccated hand and kissed the reptilian skin. He hoped that his eyes said another thing, for inside his mind raced as he held the hand of the old man whose life he had once saved This is it for you old man, and it’s no good looking at me like that, he thought. Even if I could, I would
not save you again. Today, it is your death I want. Now do what I need you to do!

  Drawn by news of the new arrival, the Sultan’s other sons, brothers and nephews began to throng the bedside. Each man came to greet Al-Ajnabi before moving closer to the bed to check the old sultan’s health. The greetings were long and tedious, and Al-Ajnabi found it difficult to restrain his impatience. It was sunset and time for maghreb prayer before the French doctor pronounced the sick man to be in need of rest. Al-Ajnabi hoped it would prove to be of the permanent variety. The sooner Sultan Adil Al-Janoubi drew his last breath, the sooner he could begin.

  Back inside the maze of reception rooms, Al-Ajnabi eventually detached Faysal from his relations, leading him outside to the terraces, where the heavy air held everything, including the sea, in stifled submission. He pressed the younger man’s elbow, looking deep into those dark eyes.

  ‘Ya Faysal, everything is still as we agreed?’

  Faysal nodded, scratching his beard in thought:

  ‘Still the same plan?’

  ‘Always the same.’

  ‘Then so am I, akhuyya. It will be as we agreed. Whatever you need is yours.’

  ‘You are a true brother, Faysal. And you will not regret your support.’

  ‘When will you leave?’ asked the younger man.

  ‘After the funeral I will leave for Beirut. There is much to organize.’

  ‘Be careful,’ Faysal urged, looking reflective once again. ‘But more than that, akhuyya—be successful!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Al-Ajnabi smiled, tasting the briny humidity as he let out a heavy sigh. ‘I will put your family’s money to better use than it has known, and maybe, ya Faysal, Ramliyya will become famous for more than its oil.’

  Chapter 2: London: Late September

  ‘What’s the low-down on the Ramliyya story?’ asked Deputy Director-General of MI6, Max Clayton, with an expectant stare at Sam Kennedy, the head of Africa and Middle East Section.

  Kennedy shuffled the papers in his folder, looking intimidated by the man some fifteen years his junior, who was sitting at right angles to him across a modest desk, watching the traffic on the Thames drift by below his South Bank office. Clayton knew full well of the reputation he had acquired in the Service. The likes of Kennedy might use labels such as ‘debonair’, ‘unconventional’ and ‘arrogant’, no doubt, to describe him in their whispered, deskie conversations around the water cooler. But Clayton knew that he was as near to Bond as today’s MI6 got, although his own fame, he would be forced to concede, was built more on the restless drive and tenacity that had impelled him through every posting in his career, rather than high-octane stunts and explosive gadgetry of the screen legend.

  When it came, Kennedy’s reply was preceded by a shrug and a sigh.

  ‘We don’t expect much fall out from old Sultan Al-Janoubi’s death. No reason why anything should change with the accession of the eldest son, Faysal.’

  ‘And what sort of chap is our young Faysal?’

  ‘Modest and reclusive. Devoted to his wife and family. Quietly religious, by all accounts.’

  ‘Whose accounts? Have we got anybody in Ramliyya?’

  ‘Nobody permanent. Nearest outstation is Riyadh. We pick up anything from the ambassador’s staff at the embassy in Madinat Al-Aasima.’

  ‘So all I’ll have to tell the minister is what he will already have heard from the Foreign Office?’

  Clayton stood up to stare out of the window, pensive and distant. It was lunchtime. Outside, the Thames glimmered feebly in the frivolous mid-September sun. A barge heading downstream was overtaken by a pleasure cruiser.

  ‘So,’ Clayton sighed, ‘we can expect the new sultan to keep serving more of the same, eh? Oil coming our way, weapons theirs. But what’s really at issue here, Kennedy, is any other plans the young sultan might have. Will he want another squadron of Tornadoes, for example? Is he going to open his chequebook to fund any lavish development projects that may interest British companies? Who else may be trying to whisper in our young sultan’s ear, trying to steal his attention? What’s his position on Israel and Iran? That’s the kind of thing I really want to know, Kennedy.’

  Kennedy sighed, rustled his papers and buttock-shuffled awkwardly while Clayton continued to look askance, masking his loosely veiled contempt with his study of the river traffic until the balding ‘deskie’ could answer.

  ‘As I’ve already said,’ Kennedy continued, ‘we don’t think anything will change in Ramliyya. The monarchy is still paranoid since the attempted coup of ’93. Don’t forget the old man nearly lost everything. Three of his brothers were killed in the fighting. We Westerners are the only real friends the regime has got. All the old sultan’s friends showed their true colours in the coup attempt. South Yemen, as it then was, backed the rebels; the North Yemenis would have liked to, too, but remained neutral when they saw their southern enemies had got in ahead. The Saudis supported the sultan but were too frightened to offer more than some supportive words. After that the old man didn’t trust anyone else except us and the Americans, and there’s no reason why his son should be radically different.’

  ‘You said the son was religious,’ Clayton interrupted. ‘How religious?’

  ‘Pious, according to the embassy staff, but not fanatical. By that I mean he’s not the type for the Monte Carlo casinos, or smuggling planeloads of Scotch and hookers into his desert hideaway. At the worst, we reckon the young sultan might toughen up the strict ban on alcohol and immorality—you know, force our oil workers to close down their moonshine stills. But certainly no anti-Western jihad if that’s what you’re suggesting.’

  ‘Anything we’ve got on him? Any over-exuberant indiscretion unfortunately captured on camera by our boys?’

  ‘Nothing whatsoever. He studied for three months in London three years ago—Islamic Studies at the London School of Oriental and African Studies. But Faysal seems to have been totally uncorrupted by ‘Western decadence’. Brought his wife with him. Dutifully attended the local mosque five times a day. All very dull, I’m afraid.’

  ‘So my word to the minister will be, ‘business as usual with a little extra attention to cultural sensitivity’,’ Clayton summed up, an observation intended more for his own benefit than Kennedy’s. As he had expected, this item was scarcely worth a footnote in his weekly ‘little chat’ with the foreign minister.

  ‘Oh, there is one interesting story I came across while poking through our Ramliyya stuff,’ Kennedy turned around, halfway to the door.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Concerns the coup. The British Defence Systems boys who were down there at the time claim that the fellow responsible for saving the old boy was a European mercenary, widely rumoured to be a Russian. Apparently, this ‘Boris’ character single-handedly turned the tables on General Madani’s units when the sultan had as good as lost. With only a handful of loyal troops, ‘Boris’ completely routed Madani’s troops in a set-piece desert extravaganza, before rescuing the sultan and his entire family, who were being held at gunpoint in a villa in Madinat Al-Aasima. Afterwards, the sultan adopted ‘Boris’ as one of his sons, making him a millionaire many times over.’

  ‘Hmm. The story sounds familiar. Heard about this character before, I believe. And what about this Ruskie? No plans to buy his own London football club?’

  For the first time a half-smile slipped across Kennedy’s face.

  ‘No, not in the slightest. And this is the interesting bit. According to a source I met a little while ago, it turns out that the sultan’s saviour wasn’t a Russian at all but a white South African mercenary. And he still retains considerable influence in Ramliyya, despite spending most of his time in Eritrea. He’s a bosom buddy of the regime in Asmara as well and flits around here and there in darkest secrecy all over Africa and the Middle East.’

  At the mention of South Africa, Clayton broke off from this study of the Thames.

  ‘South Africa, you say Kennedy? And travels widely in Afri
ca?’

  Kennedy nodded with one hand on the door handle. Clayton left him there for some time while his brain swirled. Finally,

  ‘Let me know if and when you get any more on this enigmatic South African, will you?’

  Kennedy nodded and Clayton dismissed his colleague with a wave of hand to resume his study of the back end of the black barge, now seemingly stuck to the glutinous treacle hide of the river. As he gazed down below, he wondered if anything slower had ever floated on water, while he took himself to task: A South African? And wanders all over Africa? Spurious connection, totally spurious. There was nothing to read into Kennedy’s words, nothing at all. But despite the logical impossibility, a secret part of him had pricked up its ears at the mention of those locations and become interested in an old saga all over again that was long since dead and buried. Ridiculous! Get a grip, man!

  Chapter 3: Oxford: October 3

  Sophie Palmer watched in slow-motion horror as the Barclays Hole in the Wall swallowed her card. Term had not even started and she had already exceeded the agreed overdraft limit. Her first year at Oxford had been a financial struggle and her student debts were reaching proportions that even the wiliest of financiers would have struggled to parcel up, package and flog off to insolvent pensioners. And with no father and only a mum working part-time back home, Sophie could not expect the parental support that saw many of her friends through. To be so overdrawn so soon after the holidays was devastating. There was no way she was going to survive the coming term.

  She walked back along Broad Street in silent dejection. Turning into Hollywell Street, a notice in the Tuck Shop window caught her attention. She had seen the advert two days ago but had not paid it much attention at the time. Now it seemed to hold far more significance, even the chance of financial salvation. She pored carefully over the details:

  Rich Benefactor Offers Student Award