Blood Rules (34 page)

T
HE
meeting with Feisal Hanif had been fixed for twenty-one hundred hours at the Delmon Hotel. Shehabi’s masters were wavering; a push here, a bit of a fine tune there, and Nunn could make a deal, he knew he could, but now he wanted peace and quiet. “No calls,” he’d told the hotel switchboard, “unless from the following,” and then he’d given them a list of names that hadn’t included his wife’s, so when he lifted the receiver and heard a woman’s voice say, “Anne-Marie here, Dodo; how are you?” he was knocked out.

“Darling! How on earth did you manage to get through, I told them not—”

But he wasn’t angry; his first and only sensation was one of pure pleasure.

“Never underestimate a woman of a certain age, Dodo.”

“I won’t. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Sorry if I called at a bad time, but I’ve been putting two and two together, the newspapers, TV, and so on. I think I realize why you’re out there and I wanted to say ‘Hi, and I’m rooting for you.’ And I wanted to hear your voice.”

He said nothing for a while. He felt choked.

“Dodo, listen, there’s all sorts of rumors flying around here, and one of them says this Leila creature has got a child on the flight.”

“You don’t want to believe everything you read in the papers,” he said guardedly.

“Yes, I know you’ve got to say that, but anyway, can you try and understand what she’s been going through, if it’s true? Knowing that any minute the SAS or somebody might go storming in there, machine guns blazing? Try and get her out of it, Dodo. The child too.”

It astonished him, this notion of having consideration for Leila Hanif, terrorist, kidnapper, and thief. No one had suggested such a thing; no one ever would. The passengers and the plane were all that mattered.

“Dodo, are you there? I expect you think I’m quite, quite mad, don’t you, but you see, I keep asking myself, ‘What if it were Michael?’ All right, she’s a monster, but she can’t have realized when she hijacked the plane that her son would be on board; think how she must be feeling, how wretched, because whatever the outcome she won’t ever be seeing him again. This is the last time.” She paused. “This is the last time she’ll ever see her son, Dodo. Try to remember that. If it’s true about the child, I mean.”

She seemed to have dried up. When he rang her from Jak she would usually keep the ball in the air with gobbets of news, local gossip, this and that. Not tonight. Tonight she’d said what she wanted to say and now she needed a response. No … needed rescuing.

“Darling,” he said gently, “thank you very much for this. I can’t find words to tell you how much hearing your voice has helped.”

“I’m glad.” Her words came out in a breathy sigh, as if she might be close to tears. “I know you can’t tell me what’s really going on, but I wanted you to know and I could never have forgiven myself if, if—”

“I know.”

“So I hope you don’t mind.”

“I don’t.” He hesitated, but really it was stupid to pretend he had any control over the words so he spoke them as clearly and succinctly as he was able. “I do love you most awfully much, Annie, and I’m sorry I don’t say that more often, and in future I will. My dear, I’m so sorry, but someone is knocking on my door—”

“Yes, go, do go.” She was laughing now. “I love you, Dodo. I’ll say it more often too, if you like. Go, go. ‘Bye, darling.”

During those last exchanges the initial polite knock on the outer door of his suite had turned into a hammering. An assistant manager was in the corridor.

“Sorry, sir, but they couldn’t make you answer downstairs; it’s most urgent, the caller says, and he’s on your list.”

Nunn thanked him and went back to his room. He remembered having muted all his phones and saw how a pile of newspaper clippings had slipped to obscure one of them; sure enough, when he moved the papers the red light was flashing.

“Hello.”

“I warned you,” a man’s voice spat at him. “I warned you to make it quick, Nunn. Now Allah help you!”

“My dear Halib,” Nunn said smoothly, “how can I help?”

“There’s an Israeli agent aboard the plane. Maybe more than one.” “Agent?” “Mossad!”

Nunn snapped to attention. “Does Leila know?”

“
I
haven’t told her, you can be sure of
that.
But she knows this man Sharett. He’s the father of one of the people she killed in ‘69. She’s capable of blowing up the plane and everyone aboard; she can do that.
And I can’t raise her.”

“What do you mean, you can’t—”

“She won’t answer the radio.”

The implications were terrible. Andrew groped for the nearest chair. “She may already have destroyed the aircraft?”

“She may. Nunn, you have got to do something.”

“If you’re right, why haven’t the Israelis made a move before this? They don’t leave their people to rot.”

“Maybe they didn’t know he’s aboard.”

“How can that be?”

“Revenge. What if he went after her for revenge?”

The symmetry of it was so elegant, so frightful, that for a moment Nunn just stared at it in awe. Leila, a loose cannon, hijacking a plane to get her son back; Sharett, deprived of a daughter, letting her go ahead as the price of vengeance.

“What can I do?” he asked.

“Make Shehabi deal.” No mistaking the panic in Halib’s voice. “Do it tonight, do it now, if you want your plane back.” His voice dropped. “If you want to see any of those people alive again.”

As if you cared a tuppenny damn, Andrew wanted to say; as if you cared for anything but your fee! But instead he did something he’d never, never done, not in all his professional life: he hung up on Halib while the caller was still speaking. He picked up the direct phone to Trewin’s HQ, and without any preliminaries he said, “They won’t let me call Tel Aviv from this hotel; can you patch me in? Ministry of Defense, Hakirya Headquarters building, I can give you the extension.”

An ominous silence followed this request, broken by Philip Trewin saying, “I can. But why?”

“Sorry, explanations later. And Major … if anybody asks before you and I have had a chance to speak again, we never had this conversation and there never was any phone call to Israel.”

“Sorry, I’m out of blank checks. Give me ten minutes. Don’t leave your room.”

Colin came to in the shadow of a black rock outcrop, lying on his stomach. The air he breathed was warm, thick with the stench of barbecued meat. He licked his lips. Salt! He retched, bringing up a small amount of phlegm, and needles stabbed his arm again. His vision was blurred, but now it began to clear, slowly, although he could see nothing beyond the gravel on which he lay and the wrinkled face of the nearest rock. Then feet came to stand by his head and the effort of focusing on them caused his vision to sharpen further.

“Robbie,” he said to the feet. “Where’s … Robbie?” “He’s alive, he’s okay.” Sharett’s voice. “You must get up.” “Can’t … move.”

“Listen.” Sharett was kneeling beside him. “It’ll be dark soon. If Leila comes after us she’ll head for the site of the crash; she mustn’t find us still here.”

“How bad … am I?”

“Your back is burned. Not badly, I smothered you in time.”

“Shoulder.” Colin tried to push himself up with the palms of his hands and howled in pain. It was as if someone had forced the entire length of his right arm into boiling fat. He collapsed back onto the gravel, banging his chin. More blood came into his mouth where he’d bitten his lip.

“Not broken.” Sharett felt his way along Colin’s arm as far as the shoulder. “No dislocation. You’ve strained a tendon, I think.” He raised his voice: “Robbie!”

Through his red mist of pain, Colin heard footsteps, heard a voice he knew and loved. “Dad, oh, Christ, what have you done?”

Colin jumped as if struck by a cattle prod.
His son was alive!
He felt another hand on his neck. Robbie was stroking his hair.

“I’m all right, son.”

He wasn’t, not by a long way, but the words themselves operated like a magic spell: because he
said
he was all right, he
became
all right. He had to survive, go on, escape. For Robbie.

He seized the boy’s hand and held it tightly for a second before kissing it. “Robbie,” he said, “I want you to help me up. But I want you to listen and do exactly what I tell you, okay?”

“Okay.” Robbie’s voice shook.

“We’re going to run for it. We’re going to get as far away from here as we can. Yes?”

And all the while he spoke, the very words gave him strength, because he was speaking them for someone he loved. He manufactured strength, took what he needed, gave the rest to Robbie. On the plane he’d placed himself between his son and the gunman who wanted to shoot him. This was nothing by comparison.

“Take my left side, Robbie. Get me up on my knees.”

At a sign from Colin, Sharett came to stand behind him, clasping his waist. When he put his weight onto Robbie the boy first staggered, then held. Another massive effort, and Colin was up.

“Anyone else get out?” he asked weakly.

“One of the TV crew from the helicopter, plus Daniel Neeman, that’s the guy your son gave my message to. Nobody else.”

“What message?” When Sharett was silent, Colin asked again, more strongly this time, “What in hell are you talking about, what message?”

“He gave me a message to take back, when I came to economy that time,” Robbie said.

“And you
did
it? You let this man use you in that way?” Colin stared at his son. “Do you know what they’d have done to you if you’d been caught?”

“I wanted to help.”

Robbie’s voice had turned sulky. Colin felt a fresh kind of pain flood through him: anger and frustration at seeing a loved one do something foolish and yet not realize it, the archetypal pain of fatherhood. For a moment he was tempted to shout his son down, but common sense won out and instead he found himself saying, “Sure you’re okay, son?”

Although Robbie nodded, he would not quite meet his father’s eye. Suddenly Colin knew what was at the back of all this. Robbie was thinking of his mother, how she’d been “left behind” on the plane. The anger that had ebbed away a moment before came roaring back in a tidal wave, but then he remembered: Robbie didn’t know that Leila had instigated this hijack. He was as ignorant of her motives now as he had been when she’d confronted him hours before.

He was also ignorant of what had passed between his father and Raful Sharett back in 1982. Colin wished again that he’d been more open with Robbie.

He hugged his son close and kissed his forehead. Recriminations could wait; all that mattered now was bare, basic survival.