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  The French were a newer addition to the North African cabal. Their place in the alliance cemented fifty years back by judicious marriages between Bonaparte princelings and both the Hohenzollerns and descendants of Mehmed V Rashid, Sublime Porte at the time of the original treaty.

  South from Place Zaghloul ran Rue Missala, a thoroughfare lined with restaurants. And right on the corner, with entrances on both Zaghloul Square and the rue sat Le Trianon, Iskandryia’s most famous Art Nouveau café. On its walls were equally famous paintings, a series of seven increasingly unlikely tableaux depicting full-breasted dancers, naked save for open shirts and jewelled slippers.

  The fox didn’t like the paintings. But then, the fox was a purist and had problems with Orientalist kitsch. And the fact that the fox was invisible to everyone but ZeeZee didn’t make it any less real. Though it wasn’t real, of course, not in the way the yellow cabs lurching along Rue Missala were real. ZeeZee had come up with a number of explanations for its existence. The fox’s favourite was that it was an autonomous construct of unprocessed dark memory.

  In other times it might have been regarded as a ghost…

  Sitting outside Le Trianon in an area roped off from pedestrians, the thin blond observer with the flowing beard and tangled dreadlocks washed down his second croissant with the dregs of his third cappuccino: and wished that what passed for breakfast at the madersa where he was staying would feed more than a stray mouse.

  Ashraf al-Mansur—known as ZeeZee to the police, his therapist and a Chinese Triad boss who was undoubtedly even now searching the world to have him killed—had hated the interior of Le Trianon on sight. But since he’d needed to find somewhere to spend his mornings, this café was where he’d taken to eating. Now he just found the interior irritating.

  “Another cappuccino, Your Excellency?”

  Adjusting his Versace shades and brushing pastry flakes from the sleeve of his black silk suit, the young man nodded. “Why not,” he said slowly. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do.

  “Very good, Your Excellency.” The Italian waiter bustled away, totally ignoring two English tourists who’d been waiting ten minutes for him to take their order. It was Saturday morning, four days after he’d arrived in the city, two days after he’d first met the industrialist Hamzah Quitrimala and one day after he’d finally agreed to marry the man’s “difficult” daughter. And every day, bar the day he’d actually arrived, he’d visited the café.

  So now he was being treated as a regular. Which made sense, because by treating him as such, the patron hoped that was what he would become. Besides, once the patron had discovered that the excellency with the matted beard and odd hair would be working upstairs, it became inevitable that ZeeZee should take his place in a magic group who got tables when they wanted, exactly where they wanted them.

  Situated directly over the café were the offices of the Third Circle of Irrigation, famous as the department where Iskandryia’s greatest poet, Constantine Cavafy, once worked. What the Third Circle actually did ZeeZee had no idea, despite having arrived on time at the offices every morning for the last three days. He was beginning to think they did nothing.

  Certainly his assistant had looked deeply shocked that first morning when ZeeZee suggested he be told how the office operated. Politely, speaking English with an immaculate accent, the older man had made a firm but smiling counter-suggestion. His excellency might like to try Le Trianon, which was where many of the other directors spent their mornings—and their afternoons, too, come to that.

  ZeeZee’s office occupied a corner site and his excellency had done enough corporate shit in the US to know the prestige that carried. What was more, it overlooked Zaghloul and Missala, making it prime real estate. And everyone in the office was polite, way too polite, which meant Hamzah Quitrimala had a big mouth. Albeit no bigger than ZeeZee’s own, because his had been the throwaway comment that started a rumour-become-certain-fact that he was a traumatized survivor from one of the greatest fundamentalist atrocities in living history.

  “Your Excellency…” It was the patron himself, rather than the waiter who’d taken the original order. Putting the cappuccino carefully on the table, the patron picked up a crumb-strewn plate and hesitated.

  “Did Your Excellency enjoy breakfast?”

  ZeeZee nodded, adding, “Mumken lehsab,” as he instinctively scrawled an imaginary pen across an imaginary payment slip in the universal demand for the bill.

  “Of course… Although perhaps his excellency would like to keep a tab?”

  “Perhaps he would.”

  Make like a chameleon. Acclimatize, was what the fox said. If you had time, that was, and ZeeZee was making time. Whether his position with the Third Circle made the difference or the fact that he ranked as a bey, life in El Iskandryia was proving easier than he’d ever dreamed possible when he stepped off the plane. But then, after prison, almost anything was going to be an improvement.

  He just wished he could remember at what point the fox had disappeared. He was pretty sure it had been there right up to the point they hit Immigration. And ZeeZee always hated it when the fox went invisible on him. It was like suddenly not being able to see in the dark.

  CHAPTER 3

  29th June

  Tiri had definitely been there when ZeeZee first landed in Iskandryia, twisting itself in and out of people’s legs, sometimes so thinned by distance that ZeeZee lost track of everything but the fox’s silver tail and hacking cough.

  Too many cigarettes, a biology master had told him years before, when ZeeZee had asked why a cub stood choking in a distant field, shoulders hunched as it tried to throw up a splinter of bone. The other men present had laughed and one had rumpled the small boy’s blond hair.

  My own little wild animal, the visitor called him. That was just before ZeeZee decided to fail all his exams…

  “Read this.” An immigration officer in khaki thrust a green embarkation card into ZeeZee’s hand and waved him towards the end of a queue. There were several queues, all moving inexorably towards a row of desks where simple polygraphs stood waiting, their guts exposed to the air. A golem-featured man from the line alongside glanced over and ZeeZee thought for a moment he was going to nod or say something. But he just stared at ZeeZee’s matted hair and then looked away.

  It was one of those evenings.

  On the card was a list of statements to be read aloud, in a choice of French, Arabic, German or English…

  He wasn’t a drug addict.

  He wasn’t infectious.

  He didn’t plan to overthrow the khedive…

  So far so good. ZeeZee skimmed his eyes down the next three prohibitions against entering El Iskandryia.

  He wasn’t planning to purchase for export any classical or Pharaonic artefacts.

  He didn’t belong to a proscribed fundamentalist group.

  He’d never been charged with murder. Except he had…

  It might have been the last prohibition that made ZeeZee sweat, or it could have been the lack of air-conditioning. Whatever, he was still sweating when he reached the head of his queue to find himself facing a middle-aged man who wore a fez, an oiled moustache, a gold lapel pin shaped in the name of God and a rectangular tag that announced he was Sergeant Aziz.

  “Where did your journey begin?” demanded the sergeant.

  “America,” said ZeeZee and Aziz nodded. Given the bleached dreadlocks, hobo beard and beige elephants stampeding across an ill-fitting sports shirt it was unlikely the thin man came from anywhere else.

  “Make your declaration,” the sergeant said. So ZeeZee put his hand on the plate and let Aziz click shut a wrist band. Then he swore his beliefs away, only stumbling when he reached the final prohibition.

  “Again,” demanded the sergeant.

  “I have never murdered anybody,” said ZeeZee flatly and every diode on the cheap Matsui lie detector stayed green. On the far side of the desk the fox grinned like the fox he was and, without thinking, ZeeZe
e grinned back.

  Drugged or drunk, Aziz decided, his eyes flicking from the passenger’s darkened armpits to his bead-slicked forehead. Either way, he was suspect.

  “ID card?” Irritation made the sergeant snap his fingers.

  “I’ve got this,” ZeeZee said apologetically. The document he proffered was unmistakable, its cover pure white and hand-stitched from Moroccan leather softer than velvet.

  “Excellency…” In place of a sneering NCO stood a man in shock, career options cashing themselves in right in front of his own eyes. The diplomatic pass he now held was registered to a pashazade, the son of a pasha, senior grade. Basic survival instinct made Sergeant Aziz forget everything except his need to make the sweating tourist someone else’s problem.

  Not even bothering to stamp the carte blanche, the sergeant clicked his fingers for a jellaba-clad orderly and ordered the underling to escort the important pasha to the fast-track desk and quickly.

  Eyes like a maniac, beard like a dervish and a pair of combats that were way too long in the leg…plus the man kept looking round for something he obviously couldn’t see. Captain Yousef was worried. He had an apartment in a block off Rue Maamoun that needed repairs to its balcony, he’d only just made Captain and—God be praised—his wife was pregnant for the third time. He couldn’t afford to make a mistake.

  But which would be the mistake? To hold a notable with a carte blanche for questioning or to let through someone who couldn’t look less like a real bey? The call was impossible to make and the implications of getting it wrong were horrific—for himself and his wife, for his children, his home…

  “Sir…” Captain Yousef’s accent was elegantly Cairene. His words those of someone born not in El Iskandryia but in the capital. All the same, his voice shook as he asked his question. “Do you have some secondary form of identity?”

  The notable in the elephant shirt and shades said nothing and did nothing except shrug. It was obvious that his answer was no.

  Looking from slumped man to the elegant Ottoman diplomatic passport, Captain Yousef had real trouble reconciling the dishevelled mess in front of him with the photograph encrypted on the carte’s chip that gave his family as al-Mansur and his place of birth as Tunis.

  The passport was five years old, almost expired. The encrypted picture showed someone clean-shaven, neatly dressed, who stared hawk-eyed at the camera. While this man looked like the worst kind of American, the poor kind.

  And yet.

  And yet…

  “Ashraf Al-Mansur?”

  ZeeZee began to shrug, caught himself and smiled for the first time since he’d entered the airport. It was a rueful, what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here smile. Not the kind that the Captain had ever seen from a real bey.

  Casually Captain Yousef adjusted his red fez with one hand, while touching a discreet buzzer on the underside of his desk. Trying to enter El Iskandryia on a fake passport was a serious crime. Pretending to be a notable was even worse. And when that passport was a diplomatic one, then… The Captain didn’t waste time worrying about it further. No point. His decision was a good one and besides, it was no longer his business. Orders specifically said to pass this kind of problem straight to the top.

  CHAPTER 4

  29th June

  “Merde, merde, merde…”

  The dark-haired girl hit a key and switched search engines. Looking for one that worked. So far she’d spent twenty highly illegal minutes learning precisely nothing about her future husband, who was probably even now at the al-Mansur madersa, delivered there from the airport in some smoke-windowed Daimler stretch.

  al-Mansur

  Nothing.

  Ashraf Bey.

  Nothing.

  Pashazade Ashraf.

  Nothing.

  It was enough to set off another litany of swear words. Zara bint-Hamzah spoke Arabic but swore in perfect Cairene French for the simple reason, established in childhood, that neither of her parents understood it.

  She also spoke English, as did her father, though she spoke hers with a New York twang. Two years studying at Columbia did that to you. Only that bit of her life was dead now and she was back home. And didn’t she know it.

  Ashraf Bey might as well not exist for all the record he’d left of his life to date. “Putain de merde…” Without thinking, Zara gulped the last of her slimmers’ biscuit—rolled oats, rolled wholewheat, glycerol, sorbitol and xenical—total calories fifty-seven—and ruined any calorific benefits by pouring herself another coffee and mixing the liquid with a large teaspoon of what looked like dirty diamonds but was really raw sugar.

  Just looking at the ragged crystals made Zara long for a few good old-fashioned pop rocks of freebase, something to heighten her courage or stupefy her nerves: because misusing the Library’s LuxorEon3 terminal didn’t come easily—not to her, anyway. Only these days she was clean, had been since she was fifteen, and all she had for courage was a Sony earbead. So she upped the volume on DJ Avatar and went back to her flat panel.

  The fact that Ashraf couldn’t be found on the empire-wide voting list held at the Library of Iskandryia Zara put down to his rank as a bey. Sons of emirs were probably too rarefied to be recorded on an openly accessible database. More puzzling was his complete absence from the Library’s proscribed database and from the web itself. Out there Ottoman law meant nothing. So, on the web at least, there should have been some ghost of a record.

  This was a man who’d spent seven years in America. That was the point her father had used to sell the marriage: how much they’d have in common. (By which he meant they’d both been corrupted by the same culture.)

  But according to every credit agency she’d accessed, the bey’s rating wasn’t so much bad as simply non-existent. No charge cards, no bank account, no mortgage had ever been issued in his name. More bizarrely still, he’d never posted to any internet newsgroup, never chatted, never had an e-address—at least, not under his own name. The man to whom she was days away from becoming very publicly engaged had left no trace of his life to date, no shadow. Not out there in what Zara now thought of as the real world, and not in the Ottoman world, either.

  It wasn’t a good feeling.

  Her own entry in the city register was brief, short and depressing. Though flesh would be added to its bleak bones at the end of the week when data was updated to take account of her father’s new rank.

  Zara had no illusions about how he’d attained the rank effendi. A bey could not be expected to marry the granddaughter of a falah. So her elderly, half-blind grandfather was to be moved from his mud-brick home in Siwa to a new house on the outskirts of Isk. With the new house were promised orange trees he couldn’t see, irrigated lawns he’d consider a criminal waste of precious water and the honorific effendi. The fact that his father was now effendi made her father effendi, which made her respectable enough to marry.

  Zara was the price and her dowry was the prize. Love didn’t enter into it and nor, for once, did complicated family alliances. The only alliance that interested the bey’s aunt was with her father’s money. The deal stank and was morally wrong; but as her mother had angrily explained, this was how things were done. And the very fact that—for once—her mother managed to keep her hands to herself told Zara just how worried the woman was that her daughter might do something stupid, like refuse.

  Mind you, first off, they’d been worried that if they let her go to Columbia she wouldn’t return when her two years in New York were over. Then they’d been worried she might disgrace herself while over there. Now…

  Merde indeed.

  A mouthful of now-cold coffee warned Zara that she’d overrun her own safety margin. It was time for her to log off and go pack up her little cubbyhole before Zara’s boss realized what she’d been doing with her last day in the department: breaking every regulation she could find, starting with unauthorized use of a LuxorEon3.

  There was only one computer matrix in the city: IOL. Available through subterranean snakes of
optic that crawled in conduits beneath the sidewalks to feed everything from cheap edge-of-network devices in local schools to the complex hierarchy of information appliances used in the Library itself.

  The network was wired with optic rather than relying on radio because cable withstood EMP and those inconvenient, mujahadeen-inspired charged-particle things that scrambled radio signals elsewhere in North Africa. The wiring of the city had been done in record time, with roads ruthlessly ripped up, rivers drained and inconvenient buildings bulldozed. What Ove Arup had insisted would take twelve months minimum had been finished in six and even then General Koenig Pasha, the city’s governor, hadn’t been happy: he’d wanted it done in three.

  And though the city streets were an open and fluid mass of architectural styles, crammed with all races and religions, the network running beneath those streets was anything but… It was utterly hermetic, completely sealed. Only the room where Zara sat, a cupboard-like alcove of the Library, acted as a node for those with permission to swim in the wider, wilder waters where information apparently wanted to be free but mostly seemed to expect you to buy it.

  Zara clicked her way out of a credit-check site that kept demanding an account number for a charge card she no longer owned and shut down the connection.

  If she was traced then Zara could undoubtedly count for help on the fact she had no previous record. Besides, the new marble floor of the triangular foyer below came directly out of her father’s pocket. Disgrace her, and the director definitely wouldn’t get his new roof.

  Money was power. Zara was about to add Even dirty money, then amended it in her head to Especially dirty money. Dirty money carried with it the threat of unpredictability. Of course, dirty money eventually turned into new money, with all the scrabble for respectability that the term suggested. And new money lay on its back and opened its legs, or did it by proxy.

  Zara shuddered.