put on a red clown’s nose. ‘She thought-’
‘You’re acting weird, Dad! What’s wrong?’
Louise stretched her slim girl’s hand over the table and put it on her father’s large hand.
‘I’m… It’s fine. Everything’s fine.’
He pulled a face that was supposed to be a reassuring smile, but he realised he would have to follow it up with an explanation.
‘I just suddenly got a pain in my stomach,’ he said. ‘Maybe the caviar didn’t agree with me. It’ll pass.’
Fayed was looking at him. His eyes seemed even darker than usual. It was as if he had a supernatural ability to pull them back into his head, or push his forehead out to make his face more threatening, more frightening. Al remembered that his brother had looked at him like this, in exactly the same way, when they were little and Fayed had done something wrong and was lying through his front teeth, while their father embarked on one of his tirades that became more and more frequent and passionate over the years.
And he realised, without understanding why, the significance of the fact that his mother had confused her two sons on her deathbed.
But what he couldn’t for the life of him comprehend was why his brother had chosen to come here now, three years later, completely out of the blue, and then to behave like a stranger and disrupt the routine, happy life that Al Muffet had built up with his daughters in a north-eastern corner of the US.
‘I think I have to lie down for a moment. Just for a while.’
Something’s wrong, he thought as he went upstairs. Something is very wrong and I have to pull myself together.
XXXII
Abdallah al-Rahman was woken by his own laughter.
As a rule, he slept heavily for seven hours, from eleven at night until six in the morning. But on the odd occasion, a feeling of unease woke him up. A stressful feeling of not having trained enough. Sometimes life was too hectic, even for a man who had learnt to delegate as much as possible over the last ten years. He owned a total of three hundred companies of varying sizes all over the world and they all required different kinds of follow-up from him personally. Most of them were run by people who didn’t even know he existed, in the same way that he had long ago recognised the expediency of concealing the lion’s share of his companies with the assistance of an army of lawyers, most of whom were American or British, who lived on the Cayman Islands and had impressive, luxurious offices and anorexic wives whom he almost couldn’t be bothered to greet.
Naturally, at times there was too much to do. Abdallah al-Rahman was nearly fifty and needed two hours’ hard training every day to keep himself in the shape he felt a man like him should be in; another benefit was heavy, effective sleep. When he didn’t train, his nights were restless. But fortunately, that was very seldom.
He had never been woken by his own laughter.
He sat up in bed, astonished.
He slept alone.
His wife, who was thirteen years younger and the mother of all his sons, had her own suite elsewhere in the palace. He visited her frequently, most often in the early morning, when the chill of the night still hung in the walls and made her bed even more inviting.
But he always slept alone.
The digital characters on the clock by his bed showed 03:00.
Precisely.
He propped himself up on his pillows and rubbed his eyes. Midnight in Norway, he thought to himself. They would just be starting the day that would be Thursday the 19th May.
The day before the day.
He sat completely still and tried to remember the dream that had woken him. It was impossible. He couldn’t remember anything. But he was in a remarkably good mood.
One thing was that everything had gone as it should. Not only had the abduction been carried out according to plan, but it was obvious that the finer details had also worked. It had cost him money, a lot of money, but that didn’t bother him in the slightest. It was a higher price to pay that so many in the system had to be burnt. But that didn’t really matter either.
That was the way it had to be. It was the nature of the game that the hand-picked and well-groomed objects could only be used once. Some of them were far more valuable than others, of course. Most of them, like those he had hired in Norway, were just petty criminals. Hired and paid for a job just around the corner, then no need to think about it any more. Others it had taken years to hone and prepare.
Some, like Tom O’Reilly, he had looked after personally.
But they were all
He remembered a joke that a braying, rosy-cheeked Swiss man had once told during a business meeting in Houston. They were sitting in the top storey of a skyscraper when a window-cleaner was lowered down in front of the vast panorama windows in a gondola. The corpulent businessman from Geneva had said something about how it would have been better to use one-off Mexicans. The other participants had looked at him askance. He had burst out laughing and described the queue of Mexicans on the roof, each with a cloth in his hand. They would throw themselves over the edge one by one and would each clean a stripe, the end result being you were done with both the window and the Mexicans.
No one laughed. They should have, being Americans. They didn’t find the joke in the slightest bit funny, and the Swiss man was embarrassed for about half an hour.
If you were going to use people, it would have to be to greater use than window-cleaning, Abdallah had thought.
He got up. The carpet – the fantastic carpet that his mother had knotted for him and that was the only possession he had that he would never, under any circumstances, sell – felt soft under his bare feet. He stood there for a few moments, digging his toes into the plump, cool silk. The play of colours was wonderful, even in a nearly dark room. The glow from his clock and a narrow slit of subdued light from the window was enough to make the golden tones change as he slowly crossed the carpet on his way to the enormous plasma screen. The remote control was on a small hand-made gold-chased metal table.
When he had turned the TV on, he opened a fridge and took out a bottle of mineral water. Then he lay back down on the bed, well supported by a sea of cushions.
He felt excited, almost happy.
The goddess of good fortune always smiled on the victor, Abdallah thought as he opened the bottle of water. He could never, for example, have anticipated that Warren Scifford would be sent to Norway. He had initially seen it as a serious disadvantage, but now it seemed to be the best thing that could have happened. It had proved far easier to break into a Norwegian hotel room than to get into the FBI chief’s flat in Washington DC. It had, of course, not been strictly necessary to give back the watch, once the redheaded escort girl had found out what she had been amply paid to discover.
But it was a neat detail.
Just as the sound studio in the West End of Oslo was. It had taken a long time to find it, but it was perfect. An abandoned and isolated cellar storeroom, in an area where people barely registered what their neighbours were up to, as long as they didn’t stick their necks out and had enough money to be one of them. The best thing would, of course, have been for Jeffrey Hunter to kill the President before he locked her in the storeroom. But Abdallah hadn’t even considered it. It had been necessary to take some tough measures to get the Secret Service agent to assist in the kidnapping of a person he had dedicated his life to protecting, so it would have been completely impossible to get him to kill his own president.
And what was possible was best, in Abdallah’s view. The sound studio appeared to have been the right choice. Driving far out into the countryside would have been risky; the more time it took before the President was locked away, the more risky it was for the project.
