The Ruler felt a stab of panic, dispelled at once by a sense of outrage at his own weakness. He prided himself on his personal courage; and the fact that each morning when the sky was clear he exposed himself, alone, for half an hour, below the ring of naked mountains, was surely proof of this.
Yet there was always a moment — a fleeting second when his eye caught a gleam of refracted light from the mountains: from a pair of goggles, or a ski stick perhaps: or some sudden, unexplained noise from the town, amplified and distorted by the echo chamber of the valleys — when he instinctively flinched, his hand starting automatically to the alarm button set into the tiles beneath his chair. And it was in such moments that he became frighteningly aware of the fragile mortality of his slight, ageing body.
He waited until the helicopter began to move again, its nose dipping as it rose and chugged off in the direction of St Moritz. The Ruler pulled down his glasses and closed his eyes.
He was woken from a dreamless doze by a voice beside him. ‘I am sorry to disturb you, but we have received a message from the Ministry of the Interior.’ It spoke English, with a quiet familiarity, and just a trace of German accent. ‘It is from the Minister himself, so I thought you would like to see it at once.’
The Ruler turned his mirror gaze up to the young blond man beside him and took the typed sheet of decoded message that was held out to him. He read it quickly and handed it back. ‘Destroy it, Lutz. I do not want even a copy kept for the Black File.’
He felt the man’s shadow move across his face, shutting off the warm sun; and a chill crept through his tight-fitting black sweater and skiing trousers. ‘All right, Lutz, that is all.’ But the shadow remained across him.
‘Please, you will be sending no reply?’ the German asked.
‘No.’ The Ruler was relieved to feel the sun flow back over him again. He looked at his watch, which was of pale gold with a platinum twenty-four-hour dial that showed the time in all the major capitals of Europe and the Middle East.
In Mamounia, the sun would be at its zenith, and for the next four hours all activity in the capital would be stilled, as the timeless tradition of the siesta was enjoyed from the very highest in the land, down to the stall keepers and bazaar pedlars and fly-encrusted beggars. Only Marmut bem Letif would be awake and abroad. For of one thing the Ruler was certain: his new young Minister of the Interior did not pass the idle hours sleeping, begetting babies, or committing other harmless sins. Letif used this dead quarter of the day to pursue the special nature of his new office: skulking to some secret rendezvous; wallowing in the shaded marble pool and eating iced melon at the feet of Colonel Tamat and his fat noisy wife; or drinking mint tea with Doctor Zak and his circle of precocious Western-educated Marxist disciples. Letif would only return to his modest villa outside the capital late at night, when the Ruler’s work was done.
The Ruler knew that he was running a serious risk in entrusting so much to one individual. But with the present delicate balance of power, he preferred to trust himself to one man rather than to a dubious hegemony of a State Committee — or worse, to the hosts of acolytes who gathered round his throne like moths round a flame.
For the Ruler had chosen Letif with cunning. To the man’s colleagues — and especially to those unsubtle minds inside NAZAK — Marmut bem Letif was just such an acolyte. A nobody whose loyalty could be bent to the strongest will at hand. His unexpected elevation from a desk in the Ministry of Trade to his new office was seen by all as merely another puppet appointment. Only now there were others, besides the Ruler, who aspired to play the puppet master; and to these men Letif appeared, in his ultra-sensitive position as Minister of the Interior, to be the perfect, pliable creature of their power dreams.
But there was another, more sentimental reason why the Ruler had chosen Letif. For the young man was the only legitimate son of Hamid the Fox — later named Hamid the Martyr — one of the heroes of the long War of Liberation, which had ended in 1927 with the Glorious Reawakening, when the palsied carcass of the old feudal order had been finally dismembered, and the Ruler’s father had mounted the Emerald Throne of the Hama’anah. But not before his trusted lieutenant, Hamid the Fox, had fallen into the defenders’ hands and suffered a death whose details the Ruler had first heard as a child on his father’s knee, and which even now he shrank from contemplating.
Marmut bem Letif had only been an infant at the time — born from the loins of a Maronnite Christian who had died in childbirth — and Marmut had been suckled by goats and nursed by camp followers of the rebel army. From such harsh beginnings, he was soon to be included in the elite of the new regime; and after studying abroad, he returned as one of the best educated men of his generation.
The Ruler had quickly detected in Letif certain characteristics which had made Hamid the Fox the scourge of the old regime. Letif was quiet and cautious and dedicated; but he was also devious, cynical and ambitious, with a predisposition to intrigue. He was not an arrogant or flamboyant figure, but this the Ruler found reassuring; and while he realized that Letif’s ultimate disloyalty could cost
