Dazzle The Complete Unabridged Trilogy (153 page)

The rest of the group walked ahead or alongside on foot.

When the sun came up and she couldn't run off into the
dark unnoticed, they brought her camel to its knees and untied
her legs. Then they pulled her to her feet, and she felt so dizzy
and unused to standing that she fell to her knees.

One of the women instinctively rushed forward to help.

'La!' Khalid's sharp command stopped her in her tracks.

'Samahni,'
the woman murmured obediently, turning
around and going away.

Khalid pulled Daliah to her feet. 'You will walk,' he told
her roughly in English. 'If you try to escape, we will tie you
up again. Do you understand?'

'Yes,' she said shakily, and nodded, wondering if he could
hear her through her prison of thick, muffling robes. He must have because he cut through her wrist ropes with a sharp dagger, and her arms were free at long last. But she could not feel
her hands. They were totally without sensation. She tried to
clasp them together, but she couldn't get her fingers to move.
She could barely even curl them. She guessed it would be a
while before the blood would circulate properly through her
hands.

In a way, walking felt good. She had been tied up for so long, unable to move, that the exercise slowly restored her
circulation and made her feel alive. On the other hand, walking was treacherous. She kept tripping and stumbling. The
ground was never flat; it was either uphill or downhill, or
slanted sideways. Rocks and pebbles constantly gave way
beneath her feet; at other times, she sank up to her ankles in
thick sand, which made walking sluggish.

They kept her separate from the bedouin women, who from
time to time turned around and cast her sympathetic glances.
Unless it was absolutely necessary, they did not allow her to
speak to anyone. When she had to go to the toilet, it was the
woman named Fedya who took her aside, dug a hole in the sand, and helped her raise the robes so she could squat. The
indignity of it all both shamed and angered her.

From the position of the sun, Daliah guessed that they were
headed southward, but from where they had started, or where
they were headed, or where they were now, she had no idea.

The bare, dry, bleached hills all around glowed with an
incandescent haze of dust, and the dun-coloured desert was a
belt of sand and rocks. They avoided all roads, tracks, and
known paths, and stuck to the wilderness, being careful to
skirt any villages or places of habitation. Every now and then,
Khalid and one of the bedouins would go on ahead, climb each
hill that afforded a view, and scout out what lay ahead. From
time to time Daliah turned around in a complete circle, but
all she could ever see were the monotonous sun-baked hills,
jagged boulders, and barren stretches of sand. All under the towering blue of the sun-scorched sky. There was no way she
could begin to guess the location—it could have been the Sinai,
the Negev, or any of the surrounding countries. The brown mounds were featureless and entirely unmemorable.

Before noon, they stopped to rest, and the women prepared
a lunch of more bits of unleavened bread, a cup of sour goat's milk, and two more stringy strips of dried lamb. Then they
moved on again, but this time she could sense a tension, an obvious wariness. The group's sudden change in behaviour she took to mean that something important was about to
happen. She looked up at the sky. From the position of the sun, she guessed it to be about two o'clock. Everyone was
quiet, looking around constantly, searching the distant hori
zon.

Then the tension was suddenly gone. Khalid even went so
far as to change Daliah's headgear to a normal veil, so that
her eyes were free. She guessed that they must have sneaked across a border, or come close to civilization, but when she
asked, no one would reply to her questions.

Several hours later they stopped again, this time for tea.
Khalid checked the sun, a map, and his compass. Then he dug
a shortwave radio out of one of the camel's packs, raised the
antenna, and had a short conversation. After that, he checked
his compass bearings, consulted his map, and they moved on
again. Less than thirty more minutes passed and they suddenly
came upon a neglected airstrip, where a yellow twin-engine
Beechcraft was waiting.

Khalid and his two men put her aboard, climbed in, and the
pilot, who had been waiting for them, started the engines. Dust, stirred up by the propellers, boiled in a cloud.

Minutes later they were airborne and heading south. To the
west, a sunset begging for a camera heralded the coming of
night.

Najib looked out the big wall of windows in Saeed
Almoayyed's third-floor suite. He had seen the bright runway
lights outside the palace compound click on. Where there had been darkness an instant before, a dazzling two-strand white
pearl necklace now stretched half a mile across the desert.

He hit the rheostat so that the room was plunged into dark
ness, slid aside one of the expanses of glass, and waited to
catch sight of the plane. If the landing approach was the same
as his, the plane would come from somewhere behind the
palace and then fly directly overhead at no more than three
hundred feet, drifting into view as it made its final descent to
the runway beyond.

He cocked his head as his ears picked up the sound of a
distant buzz-saw whine. It grew steadily louder, and then suddenly blinking wing-tip lights swooped overhead in a blur and
seemed to slow as they dropped into full view and filled the
entire window. He could faintly make out the Beechcraft's
underbelly, and then its thin elevator fin topped with a flashing
light came into view and the plane drifted over the compound wall, growing smaller and smaller as it descended to a perfect
three-point landing. In the distant glare of the runway lights
he could just make out the boxy shape of the waiting Daimler.

He walked away from the window and turned the lights
back up. His lips tightened into a mirthless smile.

So. Time had done its quantum leap and the past had finally
merged with the present. The decades had condensed. The
time was come. Daliah Boralevi had dropped out of the skies
for a date destiny had scheduled long, long ago. At this very
moment she was probably leaving the aircraft; it would
immediately refuel, and then Abdullah would be gone to
Libya.

Frowning to himself, Najib went over to Saeed
Almoayyed's built-in bar and poured himself two generous
fingers of bourbon. Raising the glass in a silent salute to Daliah
Boralevi, he swallowed it in a single gulp.

How quickly one's perspective could change, he was think
ing. Until this very moment he would have been happy to
wash his hands of the entire affair and forget it all. Now he
was suddenly glad that he had come. He understood that his presence here was as predestined as hers. If nothing else, perhaps by seeing this vendetta through he would finally be able
to make his own peace with the past and thus be liberated
from the shackles that reached across all those years.

Preparing to meet her, he donned a fresh robe and his for
mal black-and-gold-banded white headgear. Before going out,
he stopped to look at his reflection in the endless wall of mir
rors. He nodded to himself in approval, satisfied with the figure he cut. The robes made him look suitably impressive and
authoritative, like a true son of the desert.

He went through the big Nevelson doors and out into the
sculpture-lined hall. Without hurrying, he made his way to the
mezzanine of the octagonal foyer, and when he reached it, he
did not descend either set of sweeping staircases. He would wait up here, and watch her being led in from below.

Slowly he paced along the waist-high glass railing and pol
ished brass banisters, his robes swishing and rustling about his
feet. The palace was so hushed that he had the illusion he was
the only living person in it; all he could hear was the splashing
of water as it spilled and rippled down the pink marble wall.
Vaguely he wondered if, forever after, he would equate the
sound of running water with this wasteful palace in the desert.

He had to wait some fifteen minutes before they came in.
One moment there was silence, and the next a sudden flurry
of activity as the tall bronze doors below crashed open and
Khalid, Hamid, and the German girl roughly pushed a stum
bling black bundle in ahead of them.

'Move!' Monika shouted harshly from below. '
Schnell!'
There was the sound of hasty footsteps as she pushed the figure
in the black
abbeya
and veil forward. 'That way!' she ordered
sharply, pointing with her rifle. 'Through that door.'

'Leave her be.' Najib's voice echoed sternly down from
above.

Startled, they all looked up to the mezzanine. The two men
obeyed and withdrew immediately, but Monika stood her ground, her left hand clutching tightly to the shapeless black
bundle.

He took his time coming down the sweeping staircase; after all these years of waiting, he saw no need to hurry now. Head
raised, he advanced toward the two women.

He gestured for the German terrorist to move away.

Monika resolutely stood her ground. She thrust out her
chest, drew herself up with importance, and her words were clipped with that peculiar military bark. 'Abdullah gave me
clear orders! I am to guard her with my life!'

'I believe I can handle this myself,' he told her coldly. There
was no mistaking the authority in his voice. 'Get out.'

Monika's face flushed redly. Abruptly she did an about-face
and marched to the door.

The heavy bronze portals banged shut with a hollow echo.

They were alone.

The world was reduced to the foyer.

He turned to Daliah, and the instant he laid eyes on her a
sudden tightness seemed to clench inside his gut. Everything
he had felt up to now drained swiftly away. The foyer spun
dizzily.