Such as a royal bunk-up with Sarah, thought Packer, but he made no comment.
CHAPTER 33
For the driver and his passenger the journey was a familiar one, though the route of the first stage, out of the city, varied slightly each time.
Today, Marmut bem Letif had left the Ministry at his usual time, just after noon, and had ridden in his official car, flanked by two outriders with sirens to clear the traffic, to a restaurant in the commercial centre. The car had waited outside until the last diners had left; but when it finally drove away the two men sitting in the unnumbered Ford Falcon a few doors back down the street saw that it did so without picking up its passenger.
Letif had slipped out of the back after the first course, crossed a garden and let himself into a small ground-floor flat from which he emerged a few minutes later wearing sandals and a burnous with its hood up. He went out through a gate in the garden wall, and down an alley into a small street where a taxi was waiting.
Outside the Armenian quarter, on the edge of the city, they had been stopped at a roadblock where the troops had been sleepy with the heat, hardly glancing at his card in its celluloid frame. Two hours later, they had climbed the foothills and were driving over a bleak plateau with the wall of white spiked mountains on one side, the empty glare of the desert on the other.
As soon as he saw they were coming close to the gorge — even after all these visits — Letif felt a faint ache in his bowels; but today he was more confident, sustained by his anger and outraged pride, following his last audience with the Ruler. He was even looking forward to this meeting.
The sight of the gorge was so sudden that it still amazed, even alarmed him. After driving across nearly 100 kilometres of monotonous stony wasteland, the ground stopped, like the edge of the world. Beyond was a great void, ending in a distant wall of dark sunless rock, veined and blotched like raw marble.
The doctor’s guards appeared, as always, from some mysterious covert: ragged men dressed in bits of uniforms from many armies, strapped about with an arsenal of light weapons, all of which looked modern and in working order. They examined Letif’s pass with the usual meticulous curiosity, passing it from one to the other before handing it back to him and signalling that he could get out.
It was only when he reached the edge of the precipice that he could see the bottom — a ribbon of black water several thousand feet below. The air was already cool up here, but the emptiness below seemed to give off a chill of its own. To his right rose a pillar of sandstone supporting a bridge across the chasm: a narrow catwalk sustained by steel cables that drooped away into the distance, and reinforced by two more cables attached to the top of the sandstone. These also steadied a pair of rope handrails.
Letif knew that distance and height were deceptive, and that the true span of the bridge was less than 400 metres; but whenever he stepped on to those short wind-worn planks he felt the bile rising in his throat, and turned his eyes upwards, narrowing them until he could only just make out the blurred rim of the cliff ahead. A few steps from the edge, the bridge began to sway, then to rock with a slow lurching rhythm that made him feel as though his small body were being magnified to monstrous proportions.
He was greeted on the other side with ritual courtesy. Here the men wore no uniforms, carried no guns — at least, not visibly. Letif was never introduced to them by name, but their hands were soft and they had the refined, thoughtful faces of students from good families who had rejected fashionable Western clothes and had reverted, instead, with almost religious zeal, to the plain tribal costume of their ancestors.
Beyond the summit of the cliff was a short drop into a silver-green oasis of olive trees; in the middle stood a small house with a flat white roof. A couple of goats were tethered under the trees. It was a scene of Arcadian simplicity which always struck Letif as being irritatingly mannered, as did the costumes of the young men who had greeted him. They, in turn, reminded him of those students he had met in Paris and America who wore Lenin-type caps and workmen’s boots, and had charge accounts at all the best shops and restaurants.
But he consoled himself with the image of that long room in the Palace, its walls and ceilings gilded with gold leaf, its red carpet climbing the steps to a throne of solid gold studded with 780 emeralds. The thought revived his anger and hatred, and he entered the house in a spirit of resolve.
It was a simple peasant house, with one main room, its whitewashed walls covered with ornamental hangings, except for one which was lined with books, many of them in European languages. The floor was stone, the furniture in traditional Arab style — low couches draped in woollen rugs, leather stools, small round tables of beaten brass.
Letif’s escort withdrew through the bead curtain. The windows were small and the light poor, and it took Letif several seconds to appreciate the scene.
There were only two men in the room. One was Dr Zak, sitting quietly in the corner sipping a glass of mint tea. The other was Colonel Sham Tamat.
Letif was surprised; for although Dr Zak had long enjoyed the status of being head of a licensed opposition, the
