She tried to sit up and found that her hands and feet were tied together with sash-cord. She was also aware that her nose was running, and that one of her eyelashes had come unstuck.
All the men in the room were standing very still, listening. From somewhere outside came a loud, distinct sound which she had heard many times on films and television; but the reality of it was so alien to her that she thought at first she must be mistaken. It was heavy gunfire.
The next moment, she knew there was no mistake. The floor rocked with a shuddering explosion, followed by the crash of glass; the lights dimmed, went out for a couple of seconds, then came on again. Half the men in the room had rushed through the outer door. Under the chandelier, clouds of dust were rising like smoke.
The gunfire outside seemed to be coming closer; quick chattering bursts, broken at steady intervals by a pulsating boom. Then another ear-cracking explosion, and the lights went out for good.
The room was full of dust and shouts. Several torches flashed on, catching the confused shapes of faces, wild-eyed, open-mouthed, frantic with fear. A bulky figure paused beside her. ‘Little girl —’ Tamat’s hand fastened round her elbow — ‘don’t think your friends outside are going to help you.’ He was bending over her, and she caught the harsh smell of saffron on his breath.
His fingers began to squeeze and pinch the flesh of her upper arm, while in his other hand he was holding something. In the uncertain light of the torches, it took her a few seconds to recognize the lipstick. Colonel Tamat followed her horrified gaze, and began to laugh.
His voice was shut out by an explosion which seemed this time to come from within the room; the chandelier lurched and tinkled like sleigh bells, and Sarah felt fragments of plaster spraying over her face and hair. She began to cough from the dust. Colonel Tamat had released her arm, but went on speaking in the same silky voice.
‘I would like to have had more time to spend on you, but one is forced to bow to the winds of history. You came here to kill a man, so it is fitting that you should be despatched by the same method that you intended for your victim.’ As he spoke he rolled her quickly, expertly on to her stomach.
She began to scream, as much with shame as terror. She tried, by pressing her knees into the couch, to prevent him from pulling up her dress; then she remembered that she had soiled herself, and became hysterical with humiliation. Her screams were carrying even above the sound of firing, when she felt a violent blow across her buttocks which stopped her breath in a gasp of pain.
Tamat was talking to her all the while, but in his own guttural language now, as he ripped her dress up to her waist. She felt his big brown fingers at the base of her spine, gripping the elastic of her pants; there was a long volley of bullets, so close that she could hear the swish of air and the crump as they sank into the wall above her.
Tamat had suddenly moved away, with two loping steps, and now stood swaying as though he were drunk. There was another bursting roar and she saw the front of his jacket flatten against his body. He stumbled, jerked his head up, did a quick two-step shuffle, fell over backwards, and lay still.
Sarah was not sure whether she had fainted or not. At first the darkness and noise and confusion were so concentrated as to be totally unreal: she was overcome by that detached, timeless sensation which she had experienced once after she had fallen while hunting.
The cords round her hands and feet had been cut, her dress had been pulled down, and someone had sat her up like a doll on the couch, and put a handkerchief into her hand. Her immediate concern, besides the pain in her buttocks and the embarrassment over her loose eyelash, was whether she had stained her dress.
There were more lights in the room, and more men, but they were different from the ones before. They wore combat uniforms and their rubber-soled boots made no sound on the polished floor. Several of the plain-clothes men were lying in odd lifeless positions along the wall, their bodies ash-white with dust and plaster.
A group of men came through the folding doors from the bedroom. The gunfire outside had slackened to spasmodic bursts. Sarah became aware of a hush in the room.
A man had come through the small outer door. He was wearing an olive-green smock shirt and carried a pistol. He looked slowly round the room, then at Sarah, and nodded. She stared blankly at him, as he came strolling towards her.
He stopped next to the couch, his pistol pointing at the floor. ‘You have been exceptionally lucky, my dear Sarah. For my part, I must apologize for these rather dramatic events, but they were unforeseen.’
‘What has happened?’ she pleaded, in an exhausted voice.
‘There has been a change of government,’ Shiva Steiner replied. ‘What is called a coup d’état. To be exact, it has been a coup within a coup. Certain mischievous elements within the Secret Police managed to subvert units of the army, and with the backing of the Pan-Islamic Socialists, tried to take over the country. Fortunately, the rest of the Armed Forces acted in time to forestall disaster.’
‘But the Ruler?’ she cried.
‘The Ruler?’ Steiner sighed, with a glance at the closed bedroom doors. ‘It is a matter of little importance who really killed him — you, or the head of the Secret Police. The fact
