It was something he’d inherited from his mother.
Ben-Roi still had keys to Sarah’s flat – their split had not been so acrimonious that she had demanded them back. When there was no response to his knocks, and with her cell going straight to voicemail, he let himself in.
Unlike Galia, who had had a fiery temper, Sarah was not someone who was quick to anger. She’d speak her mind, certainly, and if she was annoyed she’d let you know it. In general, though, she was a calm, laid-back sort of person. Remarkably so, given some of the shit he’d shovelled her way over the years. It was one of the things that had drawn him to her in the first place. One of the many things. Just as it was one of the things he missed about her. One of the many things.
Today she
was
angry. Very angry. So much so she wasn’t even there when he got into the flat. Instead she’d left a pile of decorating equipment heaped on the hall floor – paint pots, brushes, tool box, packaged shelving units – with on top of them a note, devastating in its curtness.
Gone to Deborah’s. Get on with it.
Which is what he did for the rest of the day, the joy of preparing for the arrival of his firstborn tainted by the knowledge that his firstborn’s mother thought he was a complete arsehole.
H
OUSTON
, T
EXAS
William Barren stared down the boardroom table – a runway-sized length of highly polished red maple – and wished he hadn’t done quite such a large line of coke before coming into the meeting.
He’d actually only cut himself a small one – a thin, inch-long sliver of Bolivia’s finest, neatly marshalled with the edge of his Amex Black. A little pick-me-up to keep him on his toes after a heavy night (why did they always hold board meetings on a Saturday?).
Once the line was arranged, however, sitting there on his office desk like an emaciated threadworm, it had looked so insubstantial, so wholly inadequate for the hour of corporate tedium ahead, that rather than snorting it he had instead reopened the wrap and chivvied out another heap of crystalline powder, crunching it with the corner of his Amex and adding it to what was already there. Even that had seemed insufficient, and he’d ended up scraping off the wrap’s entire remaining contents – the best part of a third of a gram – and sweeping them into a ridge the size of his little finger. He had hoovered it with a single practised snort, using the silver coke pipe he’d had specially made for the purpose. Then, licking the wrap and swiping an arm across the table to remove any evidence, he had taken the lift up to the boardroom feeling seriously fucking good about himself.
Now, twenty minutes later, he was regretting it. His heart was thudding, he couldn’t stop grinding his teeth and his thoughts were careering around his head at such a frantic speed, and from such un-expected directions, that he could barely catch hold of them. Instead he just sat there at the head of the table jiggling his leg and gurning inanely as the other board members blahed on about leveraged buyouts and offshore trust restructuring and the Egyptian gas field tender, which, if it came off, was going to dwarf anything the corporation had done to date and push it right up there behind Cargills in the Forbes private companies list.
They despised him, he knew that. All of them, particularly Mark Roberts, the CEO. Thought he was an embarrassment. A lightweight. Not one of them. Was only on the board because he was great-grandson of the revered Joe Barren, whose tiny gold-prospecting concession up in the Sierra Nevada had spawned the multi-billion-dollar empire that was Barren Corporation. A humble, God-fearing teetotaller – born, according to family legend, in a one-room log cabin – Joe could never have imagined that three generations on his little business venture would have ballooned into a mining and petrochemicals colossus with interests across six continents and a direct line into the White House. Nor, for that matter, that his great-grandson would be sitting in the company boardroom coked off his head having spent most of the night romping with a mother-and-daughter hooker combo to celebrate wheedling his way out of yet another drink-driving rap (drink-driving – talk about the tip of the fucking iceberg!).
Yes, they despised him. Mark Roberts, Jim Slane, Hilary Rickham, Andy Rogerson – William ran his eyes round the table and felt disapproval burning off every one of the twelve board members ranged along its length. Most of all he could feel it emanating from the video conference screen at the far end of the table, where his father’s bloated, grizzled face hovered in mid-air like some sort of monstrous bumble bee.
If Joe Barren had started the company, and his son George expanded it, it was Nathaniel Barren – old Joe’s grandson, William’s dad – who had transformed it into the behemoth it was today. It was Nathaniel who had diversified into oil and gas; Nathaniel who had taken the business global with subsidiaries everywhere from Russia to Israel, China to Brazil; Nathaniel who had cultivated the political links and spun the threads of obligation that had drawn governments around the world into the Barren web.
Nathaniel
was
Barren Corporation, and although age and ill-health had recently forced him to take a step back after almost four decades at the helm, even now, as non-executive chairman, he still called the shots.
Not for much longer, though. Not if William had anything to do with it. The old man was ailing, losing his touch, and William was more than ready to step up to the plate. He might have a taste for coke, cars and hookers – lesbian hookers preferably, rough-trade, two of them straddling each other while he filmed them with one hand and jacked himself off with the other – but that didn’t mean he was stupid. Far from it. He’d been spinning a few webs of his own these last few years. Nice, tight little webs. He had connections, people in high and useful places. Inside people. Looking around the table he counted at least seven of the twelve who’d side with him when the time came. Because if they despised him, they feared him a whole lot more. Like Michael Corleone in
The Godfather
, William Barren would soon be settling family business. All family business. And woe betide anyone who got in his way.
‘Something amusing you, Billy-Boy?’
An ursine growl issued from the conferencing screen. It filled the room, snapping William from his reverie. Just as they could see him, a small camera on top of the screen relayed the boardroom and its members to Nathaniel Barren, who these days rarely left the family mansion over in River Oaks. He was staring directly down the table, straight at his son.
‘Something amusing you?’ he repeated, his swollen basketball of a face radiating disapproval.
‘No, sir,’ stammered William, the words tumbling out of his mouth like dice down a craps table, which they always seemed to do when he’d taken coke. ‘Nothing.’
‘But you’re grinning, Billy-Boy. People don’t grin unless they’re amused. Please, share it with us.’
William hadn’t even been aware he
was
grinning. He squeezed his mouth taut and shifted uncomfortably as thirteen pairs of eyes bored into him. Like when he’d been a kid and the old man had humiliated him in front of the servants, made him feel like an imbecile. A loser. But he wasn’t an imbecile. And he certainly wasn’t a loser. He was a winner. And soon he’d be—
‘Billy-Boy?’
That gruff, menacing voice. Orson Wells without the bonhomie. The voice of William’s nightmares.
‘I guess I must have been thinking about the Egyptian tender,’ he mumbled, fighting to rein in the coke surges, to keep his tone slow and measured. He over-compensated, ended up sounding like Forrest Gump. ‘If we get the deal it’ll . . . take us to another level. Really put Barren on the map.’
His father stared at him from out of the video screen, a cobra eyeing a racoon. Or rather a rhino eyeing . . . whatever the hell it was rhinos eyed. This was the pivotal moment. The moment of agony. The moment that even now, aged thirty-three and vice-chair of a $50-billion-dollar-turnover multinational, still made William want to shit his pants. Would the old man go for him? Take him apart and flay him like he’d been doing for as long as he could remember? Or would he ease off and let the matter drop. William’s leg hammered up and down. The other board members sat in transfixed silence. Tension lasered from one end of the table to the other. The seconds ticked by.
‘Barren’s already on the map,’ said his father eventually, just at the point where William was about to start screaming. ‘All over the map.’
The old man gave it another moment, really cranking things up, stretching his son another couple of notches on the rack. Then, with a satisfied grunt, he settled back into his chair.
‘Hell, we own the goddamn map!’
Laughter rippled around the room and the tension dissipated. William laughed loudest of all.
‘Too frickin’ right!’ he cried, clapping his hands. ‘It’s our goddamn map! We’re all over it like flies on shit!’
It was a stupid comment, his relief and the coke getting the better of him. He regretted it immediately as around the table the smiles gave way to embarrassed coughs. Fortunately his father didn’t seem to notice. Lifting a plastic oxygen mask to his face, he took a deep, rasping breath – Christ, how William would have loved to fill that mask with sarin gas, watch the old bastard choke! – and waved the meeting on. CFO Jim Slane started number-crunching, his droning, nasal voice filling the room, draining it of life and colour.
William rested his elbows on the table and clasped his hands, sitting as still as he could, trying to look intense and focused, sinking back into himself. They thought he didn’t understand any of it, but he did. Knew the business inside out and back to front. The figures, the angles, the deals, the sub-deals. Everything, even the stuff his dad didn’t think he knew. It was
them
who didn’t understand
him
– how clever he was, how determined, how ruthless. Just like Michael Corleone. Soon he’d be settling the family business. He had plans. He had friends. He had backup. There was going to be a bloodletting, and when it was over he’d be in control. Complete control.
L
UXOR
With its grand latticed façade and cavernous marble-floored foyer, the new police station in El-Awamaia was a profoundly ugly building with delusions of architectural grandeur.
Locals referred to it as
El-bandar
, ‘the hub’.
Those who worked there called it variously the mosque, the castle, the wedding cake and Hassani’s Folly.
Arriving on Sunday morning after his day off, Khalifa pushed through the dusty glass entrance doors, nodded a greeting to the desk sergeant and trudged upstairs to his office on the fourth floor. In the old station he’d always made a point of being at his desk by 8 a.m. at the latest – whatever else Chief Hassani had been able to fault him for, timekeeping had never been on the list. Since the move, he’d allowed things to slip. Now he was rarely in before nine, and this morning it was pushing ten when he eventually reached the top of the stairs and walked into his office.
‘Evening,’ said Ibrahim Fathi, the detective with whom he shared the room.
El-homaar
, as everyone called him: the donkey.
Khalifa ignored the sarcasm and plonked himself down behind his desk. He turned on his computer and lit a Cleopatra.
‘Any messages?’
‘None that I’ve taken,’ replied Fathi, pulling out a comb and running it through his heavily oiled hair.
‘Is Sariya in?’
‘Been and gone. Another motorboat’s had its diesel siphoned out. Third one this week. He’s down on the Corniche talking to the owner.’
Khalifa drew a lungful of smoke. There was no point in him going down to the river as well – Sariya was more than capable of dealing with things on his own. He therefore made a quick call home – he’d only left ten minutes ago, but he liked to keep in touch, make sure Zenab was OK – and started flicking through the files on his desk. The Tutotel nightclub stabbing was coming to trial in a couple of weeks, but he’d already submitted his report and there was nothing more for him to do other than show up in court and give his evidence. The dope-dealing thing in the souk still needed looking into, and he should probably drop into Karnak at some point, check out the reports he’d been hearing of thefts from the
talatat
storage magazine. In the past he would have been straight down there. This morning he decided it could wait. The souk as well. As was so often the case these days, he just wasn’t in the mood. He thought about giving Demiana Barakat a call, chasing up their conversation of the day before yesterday, but if she’d heard anything she would have called herself, so again he decided to leave it. Instead he continued to thumb through the notes with one hand while with the other he logged on to the internet and brought up one of the chat rooms he’d taken to visiting of late. Not to actually chat himself – he was way too self-conscious, even under an assumed name – but rather to read what other people were saying. People in the same boat as him. It helped a little to know he wasn’t alone.
The site loaded and he leant forward, ready to read. As he did so his mobile went off. Well, well – Demiana.
‘
Sabah el-khir, sahbitee
,’ he said, his eyes still locked on the screen. ‘I was just thinking of calling you. Everything OK?’
‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘Listen, I’m about to go into church so it’s just a quick one. I wanted to pass on some information that might be relevant to what we were discussing the day before yesterday.’
Khalifa stared at the page for a moment longer – another post from Gemal in Ismaliya, who even after two years was still struggling to come to terms with the loss of his wife – then turned away, affording his friend his full attention.
‘I’m listening,’ he said.
‘After we spoke I put the word out to see if anyone had heard of any incidents like the ones you described,’ she continued. ‘You know, wells being poisoned, people driven off their farms. No one had. Or at least not in the area you were describing. But then this morning I was talking to Marcos who runs the bookshop here and he mentioned something that did sound similar. It happened ages ago and in a completely different location, so it’s probably not connected, but I thought I’d let you know anyway.’