In any normal circumstances, such a sum must have constituted a copper-bottomed, gilt-edged insurance. But Pol was a long way away; and whoever had mounted this coup was playing for stakes worth not thousands, but hundreds of billions of pounds.
He had wondered at one time how easy it would be to get to the Embassy. But what would he tell them? What would that crimped diplomatic mentality make of his presence with no luggage, no visa, no entry stamp? If he told them everything, he was likely to meet little sympathy; for Packer was part of a conspiracy to commit murder and high treason, and if Sarah had succeeded in her mission the two of them could expect little mercy.
It was the thought of Sarah, alone in that beleaguered, silent palace 700 yards away, that decided him.
The presence of Ryderbeit, back on the salt-pan with the refuelled Fieseler Storch, he took oddly for granted. Ryderbeit had said that he would not wait more than ten minutes: but Ryderbeit was a soldier — if only a soldier of fortune — and the idea of his deserting his post at the final hour struck Packer as not so much improbable, as totally out of character. Ryderbeit might be capable, as well as guilty, of many infamies; but he would never run the risk of being called a coward.
It happened so quickly, and with such planned precision, that his suspicions were only strengthened. Across the blinding, dusty street ahead a tiny figure had appeared, walking awkwardly, heavily, as though wading through water. She was bare-headed and wore a long dress.
He leaped out and waved, frightened to shout. She saw him and began to run; tripped and nearly fell, then caught sight of the row of miniature black corpses. Her hand flew up to her mouth and she stumbled forward and reached him, gagging, her make-up streaked with sweat. For several seconds she clung to him, and he felt her whole body quivering as he dragged her up into the Range Rover.
He started the engine and reversed back up the street. As they passed the two dogs, who had been joined by several others, he put his arm round her and told her to close her eyes. It was some minutes before she could speak.
He was driving through a network of small streets, shadowy and deserted, following a route which he had already prepared from the map. He drove fast, without using his horn, and hardly checking the intersections before racing across, burrowing into another tunnel of alleys and crooked backstreets between shuttered shops and bazaars.
She sat pressed against him, still shaking, and began, in hushed breathless sentences, to tell him what had happened. His attention was distracted before she had finished. In the mirror he had caught sight of a long black car. It was the only vehicle he had seen moving anywhere in the city. He doubled back down a one-way street, the wrong way, and turned up a steep alley so narrow that the sides of the Range Rover scraped against the shutters of the shops. He came out on to a bare yellow square with a humpbacked mosque. The car behind had gone.
But now something else was beginning to worry him. The needle on the temperature gauge had crept up to maximum and was almost touching the red warning zone. The radiator would have been filled with a chemical cooling fluid which could not boil; but he knew, from his experiences in Aden, that under intense heat it could evaporate.
He slowed down, avoiding low gears wherever possible, and cut through a couple of side streets to join the main avenue to the north-west, out towards the desert and the salt-pan. Somewhere to his left a great fire was burning, and the air was full of coils of oily black smoke that left flakes of soot clinging to the dust-caked windshield.
There was a roadblock ahead, and as he prepared to stop he saw the officer in charge wave him on. Again, it happened too smoothly, too easily.
He was now driving through the Armenian quarter, where there were tanks and troop-carriers drawn up in the side streets; but everywhere was the same macabre stillness; again no one stopped him. The atmosphere in the Range Rover was suffocating, as though drained of all oxygen; when he again tried opening the windows he was blinded by dust, and the air blew in with a baking heat that was not like air at all, but hot gritty fumes.
He had been going for half a mile along the avenue when he saw the black shape shimmering again in the mirror. It looked like a Cadillac or a Lincoln, but it was still too far behind for him to make out how many people it carried. He guessed that it could easily outpace the Rover, and so made no effort to lose it; instead, over the next couple of miles, he waited to see what it would do. Sarah did not seem to have noticed it, and for the moment he did not draw her attention to it.
But he did reach down for the MI6, which he kept balanced across his knee.
The car was now about 300 yards behind, and was still making no effort to catch them. Packer was puzzled, as well as worried. Sarah had told him how Shiva Steiner had said he wanted a scapegoat. Yet he had let her go. He had also greased the wheels for their escape, through the roadblocks in the dead city. An
