“You’re … you’re not a policeman?” she said, feeling stupid. The constable just laughed.
She heard horns tooting, the noise of cars, all the usual London things. Then, suddenly, without warning, a second of silence. Simultaneously the car’s interior was illuminated, but poorly, as if a handful of candles had been stuffed through the window and instantly withdrawn. The noise followed an infinitesimal time afterward, a ripping down of the world from top to bottom, the thunder that would accompany the Last Trump.
Another turn, and two more in quick succession, before the car slowed to a sedate twenty miles an hour, even pausing responsibly at the next crossroads to let the first of the fire engines through, its bell clanging madly.
“Quick,” the policeman said with an admiring nod at the fire engine. “Bloody quick, that.”
He’d shed his helmet and was already half out of his uniform jacket. Leila stared at him. But before she could speak, the car had pulled into the curb, they were back where she’d started less than half an hour ago, and Halib was already gliding from the shadows like the devil’s maître d’hotel to greet her.
She got out, somehow. The night was alive with bells and sirens. At the end of the alley she glimpsed the flashing blue light of a police car as it sped by on its way to the scene of the event, as they would have called it in Beirut. It was so much easier to cope with “events” than with murder, death by burning and explosion, terrorist atrocity.
“Did you like my police officer?” Halib murmured. “Neat, yes?”
“Why didn’t you warn me?” She was too exhausted to vent anger.
“Because if you’d known what to expect, you might have seemed too relaxed and given the game away. Sorry, poppet.”
Halib took her up by the back stairs and into his room to change, again meeting nobody; saw her into her room, where Colin still snored on the carpet; produced as if by magic a fresh bottle of Laurent Perrier’s 1964 vintage champagne with its elegant oval burgundy-colored neck label and distinctive gold lettering; opened it, poured most away; bade her good night with a kiss on her sweaty cheek.
She did not undress. She lay down on the bed with her back propped up against its headboard and her arms stiff by her sides. Colin found her like that next morning, her eyes wide open and unblinking. He made a joke of his hangover, although she could see from his face that it was no laughing matter. What drug, she wondered, had Halib put into the first bottle of champagne? She had to have a cover story for still wearing her day clothes, and she chose the most obvious: she’d been too angry to put herself properly to bed because she couldn’t forget how he’d fallen down dead drunk in a stupor on their wedding night, and it was an odd thing, but as she spoke the word “dead” she burst into tears. Colin comforted her. But nothing he said or did was right, so in the end he left Leila to herself and went for a long cold shower.
And today was the first day of their honeymoon. They were flying to Paris: wonderful, wonderful. They went straight to the airport. Neither of them could face breakfast so the newspapers came to her after take-off on an empty stomach, which was as well, because the minute she clapped eyes on their headlines she had to go to the toilet, where she crossed the Channel doubled up over the basin and retching.
She just made it back to her seat in time for landing. While the aircraft taxied she was able to pick up a paper and digest the names of the twelve people she’d killed the night before. This was the price of her marriage, the cost of happiness. Some must die that she might live, and be happy ever after.
The alphabetically ordered list of dead imprinted itself on her memory. Years later she would be able to remember each name, could have told you without hesitation, for example, that between Nagma Sayyar and Peter Walters came Sara Sharett.
“Dad, nothing’s as bad as Beirut.”
“No.”
“You got us out. ‘Nothing is going to be as bad as Beirut ever again'; isn’t that what you always told us?”
“That’s right.” Colin knew that his son was mouthing phrases, anything to keep him on the road, but the words did help. He uttered a strange noise, half laugh, half grunt. “I was still trying to pay my father back, in those days.”
“Pay him back? Why, what had he done to you?”
Colin’s face tensed. He shook his head and muttered, “Perhaps they’ll feed us again soon. I’m feeling—”
“You never talk about your father. Why? After all, he was my grandfather.”
“Look, son, do me a favor, will you? I don’t want to talk about him.”
“But—”
“All right?”
“No, it bloody well isn’t,” Robbie flared. “Christ, you think this is some wonderful time to start being moody?”
“Moody? You can talk!”
“Why did you want to pay him back? What had he done wrong?” “I never said that.”
“Tell me!”
“I owed him a debt, you stupid—” “That’s not what you meant.”
“That’s exactly what I meant.”
“It’s what you said, but not what you meant. All right: what debt, what
kind
of debt?”
“If you’d just be quiet for one—”
Colin stopped in mid-sentence. A cool, hard ring had come to rest against the side of his head. Fouad stood there, holding his gun against Colin’s neck, and his eyes were speculative, as if he were considering which of the many exotic techniques at his disposal might most rapidly dispel ennui.
“You,” he said, in a voice devoid of emotion, “make too much noise.”
All the saliva drained from Colin’s mouth. He had brought this on. And how rich that the argument should have raged around debts owed by sons to their fathers.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “It wasn’t Robbie’s fault.”
Fouad studied him for a long moment. Then said, “She wants you.
Not
you"—Robbie had already half risen, the expression on his face changing from guilt to exultation, but Fouad nodded at Colin—"just him.”
Fouad thrust Colin through the curtain to find Selim standing by the doorway with a pistol held at chest height, covering someone hunched forward in the seat nearest him, someone whose face was averted. Then Leila rose up out of the seat across the aisle and turned to face her former husband.
“I am abandoning this operation,” she said. “Many people must die. Many, many, many. But I mean to start with two.”
She nodded at Selim. He came forward and jerked Raful to his feet, pushing him to the doorway and holding him there with the muzzle of his gun jammed against the man’s throat. Fouad went aft, buttoning the curtain behind him.
“You are going to have to die, Colin; die before you can destroy my child’s love for me.” Leila spoke with rough rapidity. “Then I shall comfort him. I shall console him for the loss of a much-loved father. I will become everything to him, as I was everything before.”
Colin looked into her eyes and shuddered.
Outside, the rotors of the helicopter coughed into life. It was time for the evening run, transporting the next batch of film. Leila glanced back at Selim. She spoke a few words and he made a signal to the camera crew on the ground, that they should wait awhile, but the rotors continued to turn.
“No hypocrisy,” Leila said. “I shan’t pretend I’m sorry.” She went into the cockpit, locking the door behind her.
For a moment, Colin felt nothing. Then the truth rammed into him and he staggered, as all the strength in his legs drained away. These were the last minutes of light he’d ever see, his last sounds were coming up, the number of breaths he could take was finite. He’d always tried to accept that the end of every human life is death, always tried to be ready, in a detached, intellectual kind of way, but this was real
and it was happening now.
Before, when he’d stood in the aisle between the gunman and Robbie, his blood had been hot, he’d lived only to save his son. Now was different. To die in cold blood…. “No,” he gasped. “No!”
He heard the swish of the curtain, but it came to him muffled. Everything inside him, each one of his senses, was now focused on the ultimate reality. Death. The end.
“Dad,” said a voice, but he scarcely heard it. Selim was going to shoot him dead, in front of his son. There was so much left that he wanted to do, places he yearned to see,
and they were going to kill him seconds from now; him and “many, “ she had said, “many, many.”
Selim stepped back, raising his gun. Raful put one hand in his pocket, took out something that glinted in the sunlight, a cigarette lighter; he put his hand up to cover his mouth and nostrils, he closed his eyes, all this in the few seconds it took Selim to retire a few steps and check his weapon; then Raful spun the lighter’s wheel, but no flame appeared.
The strange thing was that Colin understood all this. Because he was on the point of death and he didn’t want to die, because the totality of his nerves and muscles and tendons and blood and the whole of his brain were dedicated to self-preservation, he could interpret whatever happened with miraculous accuracy. Raful was going onto the attack.
As Raful held up the lighter Colin raised himself on tiptoe and spun around. His fist smashed into Fouad’s cheek, whiplashing the man’s head back against a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall. Fouad staggered but did not go down. Colin was already lifting the extinguisher off its bracket. He gripped it by its bottom, like a stubby baseball bat, and hoisted it high above his head. Fouad raised an arm, lashed out with his other hand to grab hold of Colin’s shirt. Colin swung down hard. The crack delivered itself the length of his arm and he dropped the extinguisher, red it was, red the color of the blood gushing from Fouad’s fractured skull.
The high-pitched wail of a whistle screamed through the plane. Raful, yes, a signal, of course. Colin grabbed Robbie’s arm and yanked him forward. He absorbed everything in a flash: Selim lying on the floor, his face a mask of torment, feet still kicking; Raful disappearing down the emergency chute…. Shots in the cabin behind, running feet, louder and louder,
thump, thump, thump!
Colin, still clutching Robbie, bent double and hurtled for the doorway; next second the two of them were sliding down on their stomachs, trying to keep their faces off the rough, rubbery surface, to land in a tangled heap on the desert floor.
Raful was running for the helicopter. Men, sheering out of his way. A camera, dropped on the sand, still whirring. Colin raced after Raful, thinking only of the shots that would, must, come from somewhere behind him:
“Run!”
he shrieked. He was dragging Robbie along like an old duffel bag you humped when you were late for the train; the boy was crying but Colin had no time for that. Fifty yards to the chopper. Forty.
Someone behind him … and the
rat-tat-tat
of automatic fire.
Sharett slammed into the nearest member of the TV crew, sending him flying. Another man scrambled into the cockpit just as the Mossad agent reached the helicopter and laid hands on his shoulders. Two down, only one more and the pilot
A clang, several clangs. Bullets finding their target.
Feet behind him, very close now. Robbie crying.
“Mother!",
that’s what he was crying, “Don’t leave her, Dad, don’t,
don’t!”
Two Arabs lying on the ground, still as still lifes. Colin thrust the boy at Sharett, who caught him and bundled him into the helicopter. By now the rotors were warmed up, turning at full speed, and Colin had to fight their downdraft. Through the window of the open door he saw two men run toward him in a crouch, zigzagging to avoid the bullets spraying out from the plane.
Suddenly there were no more shots. Colin understood. She had forbidden them to shoot in case Robbie got hit.
The chopper crewmen weren’t armed. Sharett was screaming at the pilot. Colin somehow forced himself into a seat behind. The two other escapers reached the chopper and climbed aboard, falling onto his lap, crushing the breath out of him. The engine changed pitch. They were rising unsteadily from the ground. There was the plane, below them, no longer part of them.
The helicopter slowly veered around to the northwest and began a weaving course away from the site of the downed aircraft. Colin convulsively hugged his son. He had sworn to God to get them out and he’d done it.
He’d done it!
“Mummy!”
The boy struggled, fought, pounded his father’s body. “You left her,” he screamed. “You left her to die!”
Colin stared at his tortured face. How to explain, where to start?
Somewhere overhead, another loud
clang
… the pilot was shouting at Raful, who roared back, his voice scarcely more than a whisper above the fearful engine clatter. Out of the corner of his eye Colin saw that they were over the lowest range of foothills, black and forbidding, with a valley coming up.
The chopper dropped fifty feet, and everyone aboard cried out in panic. Then it dipped to the left, lurched, and seemed to lock itself into a tight downward spiral. The pilot was wrestling with the stick, but the angle of their dive deepened. The bottom dropped out of Colin’s stomach. Robbie’s white face was pressed against his, the boy’s body held against him by G-force. The helicopter seemed to stop moving. Then, slowly at first but soon faster and faster, the cabin itself began to spin.
Losing height rapidly now … mustn’t let Robbie burn to death…. Colin saw the ground rushing up, the angle sharp. His chest tightened, air pumped into his stomach, he wanted to shout, No! but nothing came out. Then the helicopter miraculously righted itself for a second and slowed its fatal spin. They were perhaps twenty feet, no more, above the desert. Sharett bailed out, pitching forward in a kind of somersault. Colin didn’t calculate, he just followed. He pushed Robbie in front of him, not waiting for the boy to force himself through the gap before thudding into his back and diving after him, aware of yet another person at his heels.
The world spun crazily. Colin’s shoulder hit the ground first and he screamed as he felt something give. Panic kept him moving. He crawled forward on hands and knees, half conscious but alive:
He had to get away before the crash.