The Alamut Ambush (8 page)

‘She’s an honorary life vice-president, as a matter of fact. And she’s on the educational grants sub-committee.’ Cox sounded as though he had expected Roskill to know much better what Lady Ryle did or did not do.

Education rang a bell. Old man Ryle – or was it the grandfather? – had robbed the Persian Gulf blind in the days when anything within range of a British gunboat was fair game for British mercantile enterprise. And then in a fit of conscience had divided his loot in half, one to buy the family into respectability and one to bring the blessings of education to the Arab world.

It was coming back now, a word here and a sentence there. Grandfather Ryle had been in on the ground floor in oil. But when he’d sold out he’d wrapped the share he gave back to the Arabs so tight there’d never been a breath of either scandal or do-gooding inefficiency about his Foundation; it had been constructed to show solid annual profits in terms of S.R.N.s and agricultural diplomas. No bloody arts and crafts for granddad – the words had been John’s. He remembered them quite clearly now.

‘You’re not going to tell me that there’s anything subversive about the Foundation, for God’s sake?’ Roskill came out of his nose-dive and climbed to counter-attack. ‘It’s as solid as UNESCO – probably a damn sight solider in terms of secure finance.’

‘You do know something about the Ryle Foundation then?’

Roskill gestured vaguely. ‘Second-hand stuff – I remember the Ryles talking about it now. They said – ‘

The penny dropped. Butler had said as much the night before:
They know you got Jenkins in … and Audley likes you … but I think there’s something else behind that too …
His connection with the Ryles had been the clincher: what they knew about that – the thought that they knew anything – made his flesh creep. But that wouldn’t be what interested them now: there must be something very wrong with the Foundation, whatever its appearance of respectability might be.

‘What did they say?’ Cox prompted.

Jenkins and Audley and the Ryles, thought Roskill bitterly: no wonder they’d changed their own rules to recruit him! What would have trebly disqualified him under normal circumstances made him the ideal candidate with time pressing them so hard. No time to plant a professional carefully and painstakingly in the Foundation; they needed someone with a ready-made introduction to it. And in him they had the one with the other – the sinking feeling in his stomach told him they knew it, too …

‘What’s wrong with the Ryle Foundation?’ he asked harshly.

Cox looked to Llewelyn.

‘I know some of your Arab specialists think the Foundation’s clean,’ he began.

‘Elliott Wilkinson swears it is, and he works for them,’ said Llewelyn.

Audley snorted derisively.

‘Well, I don’t agree with them,’ said Cox bluntly. ‘If Hassan’s men are here, I think they could well have come in through it. And frankly, I think they are here.’

ROSKILL WAS TIRED
and uncomfortable and thirsty and bored.

He couldn’t quite decide which sensation led the others; as he thought of each one in turn it took over the lead, but they were all jostling one another for a dead-heat.

On the whole the discomfort was probably the most acceptable. The chairs in the lecture hall were plastic and form-fitting, but the form they had been designed to fit was not his, no matter how he tried to rearrange himself. But at least he was accustomed to such a state of affairs and even expected it.

The thirst would have been bearable but for one daunting possibility which had occurred to him three seconds after he had realised he was thirsty: since this was primarily an Arab occasion the drinks promised after the lectures might be aggressively non-alcoholic, in strict deference to the Prophet’s ordinance. True, it was an Anglo-Arab evening, but the nature of the refreshment would depend on which half dominated the organising committee – the Arabs would want to cater for the boozy British, and the British would want to defer to nonexistent Arab sensibilities. He could only pray that the Arab faction had come out on top.

At the moment boredom was ahead. The speaker droned on and Roskill looked again helplessly at his watch. Theoretically the fellow should have finished ten minutes earlier, but somewhere along what he had disingenuously called his ‘lightning journey through Arab literature’ he had taken a wrong turning and had become lost in medieval Persia. It had taken a good – or bad – quarter of an hour to talk his way back to the main road and he was still two centuries behind schedule.

The organisers had unwisely kept their dullest speaker at the end. Or perhaps they hadn’t expected him to be so goddamn awful; on paper the opening session on the problems of aid and education had sounded even drearier and in practice only the obvious competence and intelligence of the young American-trained Arab who conducted it had saved it.

But then the young Arab had been a Ryle man, and the Foundation always paid for the best. Judging by the lightning traveller they needed the best, too: he was an educational stumbling block in himself.

Roskill tried to stretch his legs into another position. His tiredness was not so much the product of his early morning expedition along Maitland’s telephone line as the result of the afternoon’s Middle Eastern cramming lesson which had followed hard on the morning’s head-shrinking conference. The idea had been that he should not betray himself too fatuously at this evening’s bun-fight by confusing the National Liberation Movement with the Popular Democratic Front or the Palestine Liberation Movement with the Palestine Armed Struggle Command, should those mutually hostile bodies crop up casually in the conversation.

But the Foreign Office crammer had waxed something too eloquent for a good teacher. Names and initials had flowed from him: Ashbal, Mapam, Group 62, Friends of Jerusalem, Friends of Arabia, Saiqa, P.L.O., P.L.A., P.L.M., P.O.L.P., A.N.S.A.R. and A.L.F. – as an incantation, repeated quickly enough, it would probably summon djinns from the desert, but it had gone in one of Roskill’s ears and out the other.

Unfortunately it had stayed between the ears just long enough to answer the crammer’s quiz with deceptive competence.

‘Bravo, Squadron Leader,’ the crammer had beamed at him. ‘Another two or three afternoons and we’ll make an Arabist of you! And a Zionist too if you can spare a morning. The right jargon’s half the battle — just string it together with a few slogans and you can pass anywhere…

‘In action this evening? Is that the C.A.A.B.U. gathering at the Dorchester? No – the Ryle Foundation one, isn’t it? Well, not to worry, Squadron Leader – the Ryle people are as near non-partisan as it’s possible to be these days – they don’t encourage too much P.L.O. talk. Can’t afford to with all that real estate of theirs on the West Bank in Israeli hands, you know. If you don’t stick your neck out you’ll get by – you can say you’re a desalination expert. No one’s likely to know much about that … Just remember half of what I’ve told you and be a good listener – they all want to talk all the time, so that shouldn’t be too difficult…”

Boredom and tiredness combined to pull away from thirst and discomfort at last, and Roskill’s thoughts wandered back to the morning, when Audley had stood by the Triumph grinning at him triumphantly.

‘We got more than we gave away, Hugh – you put up a first-rate show, too. Not too smart to make them think twice — that was just the right note to strike!’

But that not-too-smartness had not been a consciously-struck note, Roskill had reflected uphappily, grinning back at Audley.

‘A put-up job from start to finish, of course,’ Audley had said. ‘They no more suspect Jake Shapiro than I do. It’s this Hassan they’re scared of – Llewelyn believes in him as much as Cox. Which probably means they’ve got more on him than they’re willing to admit. They just want to double-check it through me.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘We shall do what they want us to do – today, at any rate. You’d better go and see that Foreign Office crammer of theirs this afternoon – and then you can go to that Ryle meeting tonight as Cox suggested. It might even be useful, you never know.’ Audley had rubbed his hands. ‘And I’ve got a lot of catching up to do to find out what the hell’s really happening …’

Very pleased with himself, David Audley had been, like an old warhorse smelling battle on familiar territory.

Roskill had been very much less pleased; it might be a jolly game for Audley, but he sensed that in Audley’s game he was becoming something less even than a junior partner. And yet he could see no way of avoiding his downgrading: without Audley he didn’t stand a chance of attaining his own vengeance, and the big man was incapable of playing second fiddle to anyone. So all he could do was to follow instructions, keeping his own counsel and never forgetting his objective.

‘And first thing tomorrow you can slip down to Firle and scout around,’ said Audley. ‘You can reach me at home if you turn anything up. After that we may have something of our own to work on.’

Slip down to Firle! Roskill’s jaw had tightened at that – so easy to say and so agonising to carry out!

Well, there would come a time maybe when Audley wouldn’t find it so easy to control the action … there would come a time…

Roskill started guiltily, catching himself in the very act of falling off his chair. He looked around him, fearful lest he had drawn attention to himself, but the rest of the audience seemed either equally withdrawn or, like the fat Arab with the scarred face in the row ahead of him, unhappily restless. There was a subdued undercurrent of movement – of legs stretching and bottoms searching for comfort.

He looked at his watch again, to find that only another five tortoise-minutes had crawled past. The bloody man was still only at the beginning of the 19th century.

‘ . .. and so we come to what may be considered the dawn of modern times…

The speaker paused to consult his notes. But as he raised his head, his mouth opening to greet the dawn, the fat Arab began to clap vigorously.

For a moment it was touch and go; the speaker looked around wildly and those of the audience who were still with him stirred uneasily. But the Arab clapped more enthusiastically than ever, looking to left and right as though to shame the laggards into action.

The crammer’s advice not to draw attention to himself flashed through Roskill’s mind, only to be instantly extinguished as his hands came together on their own initiative. The woman on his left looked at him briefly in surprise and then joined in, followed by the man on her left. Spontaneously applause flared up in a dozen different parts of the hall, those who genuinely thought the lecture had ended rushing to join the dissidents who knew all too well that it hadn’t.

Last to join in were the handful who had actually been listening, but when they did so they clapped louder than the rest to hide their embarrassment. There were even a few shouts of ‘bravo’ – one coming from the Arab himself. Such was the storm of applause that in the end the speaker’s chagrin turned to gratification. He had probably never encountered such enthusiasm before.

Altogether, thought Roskill as he joined the stampede towards the refreshment room, it was a notable landmark in Anglo-Arabian understanding: for once the silent majority had cooperated to liberate themselves.

He held back until the worst of the crush along the tables had thinned out, disagreeably aware that the contents of the silver bowls ahead of him was as fruity as he had feared. After carefully scanning the faces of the waiters and waitresses dispensing it he edged his way towards a wizened little man whose magenta nose promised sympathy, even though he was presiding over a bowl in which sliced fruit floated like dead fish depth-charged to the surface.

‘Is there any alternative to this – this – ‘ Roskill indicated the bowl ‘whatever it is?’

A glimmer of recognition lit the bloodshot eyes. There were some pale, intense English faces among the gathered friends of Arabia he had already seen, but there were also ageing, darkened skins which must have weathered in the forts of trucial levies and Arab Legion messes. There
had
to be something under the counter for them.

The eyes took in Roskill’s tan, which had been started under Israeli skies and consolidated in Greece.

Roskill slid a 50-penny piece across the white tablecloth, under the napkin by the man’s hand.

‘For the love of God,’ he hissed, ‘give me a decent drink.’

‘This is a very thirst-quenching drink, sir,’ said the little man, without looking down but with his fingers testing the coin’s heptagonal shape. ‘For the Arabian gentlemen, that is.’

He bent down briefly behind the table, reappearing with a tall glass on the side of which he deftly fastened a sliver of cucumber.

‘Window-dressing, sir – merely window-dressing,’ he murmured reassuringly.

It still looked more like a long drink suitable for the Arab gentlemen, and Roskill sniffed it suspiciously.

It was Scotch. He took a slow sip. And not just Scotch, but the purest, mellowest, most exquisite malt whisky, unadulterated and possibly the largest straight measure he had ever received. The Foundation certainly looked after its own, and with his weak head for spirits he’d have to watch his tongue.

He nodded gratefully and turned away to scrutinise the crowd again for the faces in Cox’s file of probables and possibles. So far he hadn’t seen one of them, wide though the range at the gathering was: pouchy, easy-living faces; lean, bitter faces; ugly, pitted complexions like the surface of the Moon and that almost feminine beauty which was the inheritance of Circassian ancestry.

The faces reminded him of what the Foreign Office man had said in his enthusiasm: the Middle East had melted down so many races, conquerors and slaves alike, that spotting bloodlines was a game for the experts. Turks, Mongols, Greeks, Albanians, Normans, Napoleon’s veterans and Australians oif the Imperial Light Horse – the greatest of Islam’s admirals had been red-haired.

The historical allusions had been lost on him – the fellow was as bad as Audley – but the roll of honour, or dishonour, had stuck. But with all those in the family tree, he had thought, it was surprising that there wasn’t more military talent around.