him.'
'I remember the stuff in the English papers,' she replied. 'Rich family, but he turned out to be a Muslim.'
'That's him,' said the Admiral. 'And, if I am any judge, he spells real trouble. George thinks his gang not only robbed two banks for $100 million, he's just liberated the world's most dangerous group of men from an impregnable prison.'
'That's not good,' said Kathy.
'No. It's not… and the entire thing smacked of Special Forces. There were no survivors on the jail staff, no witnesses, no one wounded and left there. Everyone killed absolutely clinically. And, as usual with jails, Nimrod security was totally geared to stop anyone getting out. I'll bet no one ever gave a thought to preventing anyone from getting in.
'First thing tomorrow I want to talk to that new ambassador who just arrived here.'
'Try to be specific, my darling. Ambassador? China? Peru? Mongolia?'
'Iran, silly,' replied Admiral Morgan, smiling and shaking his head in mock exasperation. 'Iran, state sponsors of international terrorism these past twenty years… and birthplace of Major Raymond Kerman.'
4
General Ravi Rashood and Shakira Sabah sat in deep conversation in the vaulted underground teahouse of the sprawling Bazar-e Vakil in the center of the desert city of Kerman. For Ravi it was a pilgrimage, to the one place he remembered from a far-lost childhood. At least, he remembered the pastries, sweet, delicious pastries made with honey and almonds, and he remembered the covered bazaar. The actual teahouse, much more vague in the caverns of his memory, had taken two hours to find, but now they were here, and Ravi held Shakira's hand in their little booth, and told her about his mother.
For Shakira, it was a voyage of discovery rather than rediscovery. She had never been to Iran, and Ravi had never told her much about it, mainly because he could remember so little. But he had told her about the outstanding pastries he and his mother had sampled in a place with great Gothic archways and fine, elegant brickwork, like a church or a mosque. But he could not remember the tea, or the house, or anything else, which was why it had taken so long to find.
Today, they both wore Western clothes, and they had already visited the lofty, yellow stone Mosque-e Jame, Kerman's greatest building. Ravi had remembered that, and he knew that he and his family had lived very near. But, try as they did, he and Shakira could not locate the old house, principally because Ravi could only recall its walled courtyard, with a fountain and a tree casting shade on the stone floor throughout the day.
Somehow, though, the bustling, noisy teahouse had made the journey worthwhile for one of the world's most wanted men and the slender, dark-haired Palestinian beauty who was prepared to lay down her life for him, as once she had very nearly done. And that was before she knew him.
'Well,' she said, smiling. 'You kept telling me you would understand everything better if we could just come here. We are here — did it work?'
Ravi laughed softly. She always wanted answers. Direct, simple answers. Shades of truth and description, nuance and allusion, went right past her… Do you think they should all die? Will we be safe? Are the Israelis the worst people on earth? Do you love me enough to marry me?
The words maybe, possibly, and perhaps, and phrases like let's give it a little time, it depends on your point of view, and sometimes I think so might have been uttered in Mandarin Chinese so far as Shakira Sabah was concerned.
'Yes, but… ' was her standard parry, before asking the question all over again. Ravi Rashood was enchanted by her, and not just by her beauty and obvious intellect. He had witnessed her courage, her loyalty, and her determination to fight for what she believed was right. Shakira was also devout in the faith of Islam. She read the Koran to the ex-SAS Major; taught him the words of the Prophet as she had been taught; made him understand the path to Allah and the kindness and moral correctness of that vastly misunderstood religion.
These days, even the amplified call from the minarets, of the muezzins summoning their people to prayer, held a new and soulful meaning for the former Ray Kerman. In the echoing, ancient tones laid down by the Prophet 1,400 years ago, he heard the true voice of his new religion; plaintive and suffering yet rich in faith and hope.
And now the question stood before him. We are here — did it work? That ingrained English sense of mannered hedging, honed at Harrow School, urged him to, well, hedge his reply. But he knew that would be hopeless. Shakira would just ask again equally bluntly: We are here — did it work?
'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, it did.'
'How do you know?'
'Because I feel that I belong here. Almost as if I have come home. However long my parents spent turning me into an Englishman, I am not, and cannot be, English. I am Iranian, and my forbears were Bedouin. Neither my father nor the British Army could alter that. We are all what we are, even you, my darling.'
Shakira looked serious. 'But if you had never been posted to Israel, never fought in the Jerusalem Road, and never killed two men, just to save me — would you still have one day found your way home?'
'I don't think so. I would have gone on as before, and doubtless ended up in command of a battalion, and then gone into the family business. It was in Hebron that I first felt something in the market, talking to people. It was strange, but I felt an emotional tie, an excitement, just being there.'
'That was before you even knew me?'
'Yes. It was.'
'So I'm not entirely responsible for your actions?'
'No. No, you're not. I was already feeling this strange sensation, a really powerful pull toward the Palestinians. It all reminded me of a story one of my troopers told me in Northern Ireland. He was a nice guy named Pat Byrne, and he had an uncle in Philadelphia who had left Ireland when he was eleven and lived for the next fifty- six years in Pennsylvania. And then one day the old uncle — he was a widower — decided to go for a ten-day holiday to Deny, where he still had relatives but had never once visited in all those years.
'Do you know he never went back to the United States? He settled into a typical Irish village near the sea with a couple of cousins. Then he called an estate agent back in Philadelphia and told him to sell his two cars, his house, and everything in it. He's still in Ireland, some little place in Donegal, happy as a lark.
'And whatever he felt in Ireland was what I feel here in the Middle East. I've hardly any memory of Kerman, but my heart tells me I'm home.'
'But didn't you feel at home in London?'
'Yes, I did. My family was there. Everyone I knew. But I think I always felt I was different and that other people thought I was different. When you're a kid you push things like that to the back of your mind. But I knew when I got here that I wasn't different any more. And then I met you… '
'Does that mean we're not going to end up in Donegal? We're staying here?'
General Rashood laughed. 'We have a lot of work to do, you and I… '
'Yes, but are we staying here?'
'In Iran?'
'Yes.'
'I don't know. But we're going to be here for some time. And even if we leave, it will be to live in Syria, or Jordan, or even Egypt. It will be in an Islamic country, I know that. Anyway, I could never return to the West, not to live.'
'They'll hang you, eh?'
'They might.'
'Well, I won't let them. I'll blow up their silly courtroom, like that Israeli tank.'
'Then they might hang us both.'
