They reached the suburbs and there was still no car behind. The streets were almost empty of traffic, except for light military vehicles — jeeps, trucks, occasionally an armoured car or weapon carrier.
Beyond the sealed smoked windows she was aware of a ghostly stillness. The city seemed far darker than last night when she had ridden back from the Embassy; yet it was not deserted. There were men in every doorway — shadowy figures with invisible faces; static groups of men round the squares, on the steps of official buildings, near the entrances of the big international hotels.
Here, at the very centre of the city, it became so dark that she lost her bearings. Theirs was still the only car in sight, driving now on dipped headlamps, very slowly. Several times soldiers in leopard-spotted battle-dress and steel helmets stepped out and peered at them closely, the muzzles of their machine pistols trained on the front window.
They came to a street lined with camouflaged buses, and she could just make out rows of more helmets behind the windows. There were also buses up all the side streets; and the roadblock at the entrance to the square leading to the Royal Palace was now manned by at least fifty troops and two armoured cars.
The Fleetwood slid to a halt. An officer strolled up to the driver’s side. He had a thin savage face with a black moustache and sunken black eyes under the shadow of his helmet. He stepped forward and opened the door for her. As he did so, their eyes met and he looked at her with an expression of contemptuous indifference.
She got out and steadied herself against the car door. Her knees were trembling. The officer gestured towards a jeep with two men in it. She walked over. One of the men jumped down and pulled the front passenger seat forward to let her into the back. The officer said something behind her and the man grinned, but did not reply. She sat down and clutched her shawl round her, although it was a warm night.
The jeep drove off, slowly, with a single spotlight cutting through the blackness of the square. Two points of light marked the entrance to the Royal Palace ahead. The rest of the square was in total darkness.
They passed the statue of Hamid the Martyr, his head and shoulders splashed with bird droppings, his cape and boots mouldering with verdigris. The gates to the Palace were open and unguarded. They drove up to the steps leading to the pair of massive bronze doors.
The jeep stopped and the man in the passenger seat leapt down. Sarah followed, moving carefully as though she might trip and fall. She felt giddy with a sensation of being suddenly very drunk; and feared that if she did fall she would not be able to get up again.
The next few minutes passed in a silent trance in which her mind and body did not seem to be properly related. It was as though she were being wheeled through a hospital, only half conscious, aware of people round her without really seeing or hearing them.
The corridors were long and brightly lit, and there were men stationed at intervals at the high ormolu doors. Two men walked with her, but did not support her: her main concern was the highly polished floor, which seemed at every step to be sliding away beneath her feet.
They came to the end of another corridor and stopped at a smaller brass-studded mahogany door, with no handle. One of the soldiers rapped on it twice: it was instantly opened, just enough to allow Sarah to pass through. It slammed shut behind her.
She stood blinking into the room. Her imagination had anticipated a chamber of sumptuous elegance, discreetly lit, with perhaps a whiff of incense. The Ruler would be there, alone, casually attired, and would offer her champagne and golden caviar. He would take up their conversation about English country houses, and she would describe her family’s ancestral home in detail, particularly the famous garden with its lake and grottos and Palladian bridges. She had not even needed to rehearse this part, for she knew the speech off by heart. She would continue until the Ruler stopped her; he would expect her to be nervous, and with his experience she knew that he would take up the conversation without effort.
She was shocked to find that it was not going to be like this.
All the lights were on, so bright that the room seemed to be floodlit. It was not a large room, but some kind of antechamber, lined with high-backed wing chairs and Louis XV sofas. It was crowded with men, all of them standing, many of them armed with pistols or sub-machine guns.
They were silent as she came in, and watched her this time with a lewd curiosity. A man in plain clothes came forward and seized her bag. Two uniformed men stood on either side of her, very close, without touching her. The plain-clothes man riffled expertly through the contents, glanced at her passport, then passed the bag to a second plain-clothes man who nodded and disappeared with it through a pair of folding doors at the end of the room.
The first plain-clothes man turned and looked at her; then, with a dispassionate expression, slapped her across the mouth. Her head spun round and the room went red, then black, full of dancing lights, as she felt hands close round her arms and her feet seemed to leave the ground. Doors opened, then shut. She heard a man laughing and peered across a much larger room containing a four-poster bed with peacock-blue hangings.
The man was large, with a broad fleshy face. Her handbag was slung over his left arm, while in his right hand he was holding something between his thumb and forefinger. She dimly recognized
