the road into the smoke. This was the very last thing she should have been doing because three policemen, who had been protected from the worst effects of the stun-grenade, had spilled from the open door at the back of the truck with their rifles. Harland had no choice but to steer the Isuzu into one and then slammed a second by opening his door while the vehicle was still moving. The third man had scuttled round the truck and was taking aim. Harland got out and sprinted to tackle him. The gun went off at the moment he collided with his upper thighs and sent him into the dirt. Harland was aware that his back wouldn’t take the jolt but pushed the thought to the back of his mind. While Colonel B’s men disarmed the three policemen, Harland picked himself up painfully and went to the front to find Isis bent over her father. He appeared to have sprained his right wrist but that was all. The Peugeot getaway car had already been summoned, and before long Munroe and Selvey were being rushed towards it through the smoke. Isis stood looking utterly stricken, but then her father bent down to pick up his hat and waved a cheery goodbye over his shoulder.
It was a bizarre sight, and no one was more astonished than The Doctor, who remained in the passenger seat of the truck as if he had suffered a seizure. Foyzi opened the door and pulled him down into the road at gunpoint uttering many imprecations under his breath, then took him by the scruff of the neck and marched him to the rear of the truck. Harland and Herrick followed.
They went through all the cells. Two men were released but neither bore the slightest resemblance to Khan and were told to make a run for it while they could.
‘Maybe they’ve got him on another truck,’ suggested Colonel B, wiping his face. ‘Inform this cunt that you will shoot him if he doesn’t tell us where Karim Khan is.’
Foyzi placed the silencer of his pistol against The Doctor’s temple. After a moment of deliberation, The Doctor lifted his head and pointed inside the truck.
‘There’s a compartment in the floor,’ shouted Isis. ‘Look, there are two hinges.’
They wrenched the door up with crowbars. Beneath the steel plate Khan was lying bound, gagged and blindfolded in a space not much larger than a coffin. His feet were a blackened mess and his groin was stained with blood and urine. The rest of his clothes were sodden. They lifted him from this hold with infinite care and moved him to the light. Herrick took off the blindfold and gag and told him he was in safe hands, but he seemed not to understand and moved his head rhythmically from side to side like a blind singer.
‘For the love of God…’ said one of Colonel B’s men.
‘No,’ said Harland, remembering with an almost physical pain his own time at the hands of a torturer. He shook his head and turned to The Doctor ready to kill him.
The Colonel put up his arm. ‘We’d better be about our business,’ he said. ‘Get Khan into Harland’s vehicle and give him a shot of morphine.’
‘What about this man?’ Harland asked, pointing to The Doctor. ‘He knows Isis. We can’t leave him here.’
The Colonel nodded. ‘I rather thought we’d take him with us.’
‘And?’ said Harland.
‘Well, obviously we can’t take him all the way home to Syria or Iraq, or wherever the devil he comes from, but we can certainly give him a ride to, say, the middle of the Sinai desert.’
Harland, Isis and Foyzi got in with Khan and made their way through the remainder of the smoke. Colonel B’s men melted into the cemetery, two of them running The Doctor towards a container lorry waiting with its engine ticking over a little way off.
The radio came to life again. It was Guthrie. ‘I’m sure you’ll want to join me in thanking the Captain for a perfect landing. Local time is 4.25 p.m. The temperature is ninety-two degrees. Welcome to Cairo. Please remain seated until the aircraft has stopped moving.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The island where they took Khan lay some two hundred miles south of Cairo, below a great bend in the Nile. Thirteen hours after leaving the cemetery they made a rendezvous with a boat named Lotus, hidden at the edge of a sugar plantation. Khan’s stretcher was loaded across the bow and secured with ropes. The boatman pushed off into the current and, using only a long oar at the stern, steered them downstream towards the island. There was no man-made light to be seen for miles around and the moonless night had an infinite clarity. When the boat found a breeze in the centre of the river, Herrick peered down at Khan to see if he was cold. She watched his eyes open and then his entire face spread and relax. A curtain was being drawn back.
The Lotus glided silently towards a cleft on the island and the boatmen punted the last few yards to the bank with the oar. The shapes of several men appeared and moved down to the river’s edge to catch the boat and lead it into a berth of ancient wooden piles. One man waded through the water holding up a white robe. It was Sammi Loz. He bent down, touched Khan’s shoulder and said something. There was no response.
‘How bad is he?’ he asked Harland.
‘Not good.’
The stretcher was borne up the bank by four men to a group of single-storey buildings arranged loosely around a courtyard and hidden from the river by a screen of vegetation. At the corner of the courtyard, light came from an open door, revealing a room with a faded mural of flowers and exotic birds, a low wooden bed, some chairs and a couple of oil lamps. They lifted Khan from the stretcher and laid him on the bed. He stirred and seemed to recognise Loz, then Herrick, but he plainly doubted what he was seeing and tried to reach out to touch Loz’s face.
Loz told him to stay still, lifting Khan’s head to give him some water and a sleeping pill. When Khan’s eyes closed a few minutes later, Loz set about removing the rags from his friend’s emaciated body with a pair of surgical scissors he’d found in the medical bag. He took each strip of cloth and dropped it neatly into a pile. Then he asked Foyzi to run a light over Khan very slowly so he could see the extent of his injuries. He stopped to look at the burns on his genitals where the electrodes had been applied. He sponged away the grime and blood and dabbed the livid red and black weals with anti-bacterial ointment. With Herrick’s help he rolled Khan onto his side so that he could treat similar injuries on his back, buttocks and the inside of his thighs. Then he cleaned and dressed the chafe marks on his hands and ankles.
Khan’s feet presented a greater problem. They were so swollen and bruised that it was hard to distinguish the toes from the rest of the foot. Loz suspected there might be one or two broken bones but said he wouldn’t be able to tell until Khan had had an X-ray. There was little he could do, apart from giving him painkillers and arnica to help the bruising. He said that many weeks of physiotherapy lay ahead.
Throughout the hour he spent tending his friend, Loz paid as much attention to the general trauma as to the particular injuries, judging the position of his spine and shoulder blades now that he was in repose. He touched the back of his head, neck and pelvis lightly, gazing up to the flickering light on the ceiling to concentrate better on the distortions and misalignments that his fingers found. Occasionally he shook his head but said nothing. At length he asked Foyzi for a pen and paper, and made some notes on his lap.
Harland signalled to Herrick that he was going outside. She followed. They had agreed during the journey that one of them should always be with Khan and Loz to hear anything that passed between them, but Khan was obviously going to be out for some time and Foyzi was keeping a close eye on both of them.
They sat down on an open terrace a little distance away. For several minutes Harland stared down at the insects that had gathered round a light, then shook himself from his reverie and looked at her vacantly. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘What we need is a drink and a smoke. I’ve got some whisky in my bag. Have you got any cigarettes?’
She shook her head.
‘Damn.’
Foyzi came through the door and tossed him a packet of Camel Light. ‘Compliments of the establishment,’ he said, turning back to Loz.
‘Who the hell is Foyzi?’ asked Herrick quietly.
‘He’s in your business, actually – a freelance, as fly as you get. But he’s reliable and loyal.’
‘And all this?’
‘He must have done a deal with the local Islamist nutters for the island. This area is crawling with them.
