A/N: Yeah, they keep getting longer and longer ... I'm not sure what's up with that!
Dolphindreamer -- No, she never did ask him, but you'll find out in this chapter. Basically, it's something that wouldn't mean anything to anyone present except Numair.
random pineappleness -- yeah, I just finally got TC and TQ from the library last week, and I really like Aly, so I had to give her a teensy cameo appearance :).
Disclaimer: Characters invented by Tamora Pierce; I am merely doing weird stuff to them for my own amusement (and a few other people's, I hope!).
9: Conspiracy
From their vantage point on the balcony of a bootleg Internet café around the corner, Numair, Alanna and their co-conspirators heard the explosion as a brief, muffled crump followed by an unnatural, but equally brief, silence. They looked around them, startled, but saw nothing out of the ordinary, and quickly went back to their respective tasks.
"Ceremonial salute," Kaddar murmured absently.
"Or test firing," suggested his friend Zaimid. The two young men were busy on their PDAs (Kaddar's registered to a fictitious Royal University student by the name of Azan Fikret), text-messaging confederates throughout the country; Alanna (growing increasingly discouraged) was searching for architectural plans of the Royal Palace, while Numair monitored the GPS signal from Daine's mobile and followed a hunch of his own. Lindhall, sipping Turkish coffee at a table nearer the railing, played lookout, eyes on the street-level entry below. Numair had drained his cup quickly and now wished he hadn't, realizing that the last thing he needed in his present state was a jolt of caffeine; Alanna's sat untouched next to her laptop, although she was helping herself one-handed from a plate of baklava as she worked.
They had made subtle changes to their dress and general appearance, such that the prince now looked like a cheerful, scruffy student and the foreigners like bored tourists anxious to keep up with their e-mail. Alanna's bright hair and memorable eyes were obscured by sunglasses and the sort of rich-British-lady-overseas hat in which she would never have been caught dead under ordinary circumstances. In their interactions with the staff of the café, Kaddar played the part of hired interpreter while Numair and Lindhall pretended not to speak any Arabic.
Numair had been surprised at first by the ease with which the three of them had shifted from academia into plotting insurrection—himself particularly. After all, Alanna was (as he had heard her put it once) married to MI5, and Lindhall, however unexpectedly, seemed up to the eyeballs in Kaddar's secret schemes; but it was years—well over a decade—since he had been involved in any sort of skulduggery. It came as naturally to him as to any of his companions, however, and it was not long before he realized why. I'd trust you with my life, 'Mair, Daine had said. Nothing could be more natural, more right, than whatever he had to do to justify that trust, now that he had (as he saw it) betrayed it so spectacularly.
After some time Alanna sighed, massaging the back of her neck. She cracked her knuckles, stretched, raised her head – and froze, staring with her mouth open. Numair, then Kaddar and Zaimid, followed her gaze.
"What the hell," Numair said softly.
For a long time seemed to be happening, and Daine wondered what it was that the king wanted her to see. He was waiting and watching patiently, however, and he did not strike her as a patient man: something was going to happen, that much was clear. The screen showed a view of the large public square one side of which was the King Ozorne Hotel; the hotel's façade, draped with banners showing portraits of its namesake, occupied centre stage, and in the foreground, an island in the sea of people, she could see the statue of Ozorne on horseback that (perplexingly, at the time) had so amused Numair when they first arrived.
At first she had heard a very faint sound that might have been an explosion, but might equally have been her imagination; her nerves were in such a state that aural hallucinations would not have surprised her.
After some hours – or was it minutes? – a flash of movement caught Daine's eye. Startled, she gave the huge image her full attention. The hotel – her hotel, where this morning (was it this morning? Or a week ago?) she had left her husband and her friends asleep to go out into this nightmare – appeared to be haemorrhaging people. They streamed out of exits and milled about on the terraces and verandas, then, astonishingly, began to fan out along the railings, one person stationed every two or three feet. Heads and torsos began to sprout from windows on the upper three storeys. Ozorne began to chuckle quietly, and Daine tried to glance at him but found her head would not turn. Their view of the hotel-front focused in and sharpened, shutting out the surrounding scenery, and Daine gasped: every one of those people was carrying a weapon.
But they didn't look like soldiers or guerrillas; they looked like ordinary people, dressed in suits, or khakis and shirtsleeves, or blouses and skirts. Her eyes darted from one to another and widened, horrified, as she began to recognize faces she had seen over the past several days at banquets, round-tables, and conference panels. The faces were expressionless, but in their eyes, even at this distance, she could read fear and bewilderment, panic and horror and disgust. She could not see Numair, Alanna or Lindhall among them, but with a sick, sinking feeling she spotted Alanna's friends Andrea and Nick, then a zoonotic disease researcher from the Dick School, then three members of the panel she had chaired on the first day of the conference. All were looking terrified and aiming automatic rifles out at the square, where, unseen now, cries of panic and rapid, disorganized footfalls told Daine of fleeing crowds.
"What have you done to them?" she demanded.
Straining to turn her head, she was caught off guard when the hold on her neck muscles suddenly evaporated and turned it too far and too fast, wrenching her neck painfully. Ozorne was smiling at her, an ugly, vicious smile. "Can you not guess, my dear?" he asked.
Their wedding is the simplest they can manage, although this occasions arguments with their friends.
"But everyone in two Schools knows the two of you," Alanna points out. "Practically the whole College. There'll be hurt feelings …"
"Which is precisely why we can't invite everyone we know," says Numair, patiently. "Unless the University is planning to foot our catering bill."
He realizes his mistake immediately: Lady Thayet, Alanna's bosom friend and wife of Lord Jonathan Conté, the University's Chancellor, sits up a little straighter in her seat and begins trying to catch her husband's eye.
"No, Thayet," Numair says firmly. "Absolutely not. Daine would have me skinned alive. She was extremely specific: I'm to invite you lot, and Onua, and she'll invite her friends Evin and Miri Larse, and that is all." He looks round the room—at Alanna, and George, and Thayet, and Jon—and fixes each of them with a forbidding stare. "If I find that any of you has—how shall I put this?—disregarded my fiancée's expressed wishes, I shall be very upset, and things may begin to explode in your vicinity when you least expect it. Do I make myself clear?"
It is a gift, he reflects later, to be able to intimidate such influential people. He hopes he has not gone too far.
The event itself comes off without a hitch, despite Numair's lurking anxiety that Daine will suddenly change her mind. The conversation that has by now become a ritual—"Marry me, vetkin?" "Someday, love."—one day took a different direction, and he has not yet quite got over his surprise. They speak the words of the marriage ceremony in wondering voices, their real vows and promises exchanged through their rapt mutual gaze, smoky blue eyes never leaving velvet brown.
On leaving the Register Office, Daine and Numair find that their minimalist catering arrangements have been cancelled by Thayet and are instead borne off by their friends to an extravagant—and vegetarian—dinner at their favourite restaurant.
"Since you wouldn't let me plan you a proper wedding reception," Thayet explains, with a wink.
The Coopers' three children, and the Contés' five, accompanied by Evin on the guitar, perform (in four-part harmony) a comic wedding ode of their own composition, dedicated to their adored "Aunt Daine and Uncle 'Mair."
"It was lovely of them," Daine tells him, when it is all over. "But I'm so glad to be home."
He kisses her lingeringly and carries her up to bed.
By the time the first shots echoed across the vast square, most of its occupants had already fled, not waiting to discover whether the unlikely holders of all those deadly weapons knew how to use them; there were so many that this would very likely not matter. Those who had not headed for the hills, full stop, had taken shelter in the shops and cafés that bordered the other three sides of the plaza, whose owners had then closed, locked and barred their doors and shuttered their windows, upstairs and down. Only the mad foreigners (and their local escort) on the upstairs balcony of a certain slightly dodgy café remained out in the open.
Crouching behind the balcony railing, Kaddar and Zaimid looked from Numair to Alanna and back, listening with something like awe to the most fluent, inventive and polyglot cursing they had ever heard.
"Those people are our colleagues," Alanna finally said, in a voice strained by disbelief and horror. "Our friends. They're doctors and vets and university professors. This can't—it's some kind of bizarre optical illusion, or …" Her voice trailed off; the woman who had commanded a battery of artillery in the Falklands when barely out of her teens looked as though she was about to be sick.
"It's him," said Numair. "Do you remember what he said, at that god-awful dinner party of his? That 'a progressive nation, one which focuses its resources on scientific discovery, need not live in fear of war'?"
Alanna nodded, impatient. "I remember. What has that to do with—"
"When we were students," Numair went on, "he was experimenting with a way to control animals by injecting them with a chemical compound that induced and then harnessed a biological fear response. He said—" his voice shook— "he said that if you could mass-produce this chemical, and use it on people, you would never need another weapon."
"What you're describing is impossible," said Alanna flatly. "It wouldn't work. What could you possibly inject that would make sane, civilized, peaceful people start shooting total strangers? Who's directing them, and how? None of it makes any sense, Numair!"
Four pairs of eyes – three dark brown, one piercing blue – regarded her in silence. "Have you a better explanation?" Numair asked quietly.
As they watched, Jeeps and open trucks careened into the square from every connecting street, and armed, uniformed police and soldiers boiled out of them, heading toward the hotel. The sounds of automatic weapons fire waxed and waned; on both sides, combatants fell, but gradually those who had some idea what they were doing began to prevail.
Inside, Daine raged and screamed; she knocked Ozorne on the head, fought her way out of her prison and raced across the city to help her friends. Outside, she wept helplessly.
Finally Ozorne pressed another button, switching from whatever private feed they had been watching to Al-Jazeera, then CNN, then the BBC World Service. All told (as far as Daine could tell) the same bizarre tale: guests at a high-end hotel, many of them delegates to an international conference on bioterrorism (much was made of this irony), had suddenly and inexplicably taken up arms and staged a (strangely inept) terrorist attack, using weapons that must have been smuggled into and hidden inside the hotel at an earlier date (much speculation on the logistics of this operation); the attack had been beaten back, at some cost of life, by the local army and police.
These highly trained men, the reports implied, had done their best to disable the "terrorists" rather than killing them; as on-the-ground reports came in, it became apparent that while casualties were many, there had been few deaths. The king of this small, impoverished country was anxious to be merciful, and had offered medical care for the wounded in the city's best hospital.
Daine's breath came a little easier, now; but she mistrusted her captor all the more for this inexplicable turn of events. She forced her head to the right, fighting against muscles that shrieked in pain, so that she could glare at him.
"It is what a peace-loving, progressive leader would do, is it not?" Ozorne said.
"You set them up," she hissed between clenched teeth. "You made them do it, and then you sent your army to thrash them, and now you're playing for sympathy. What do you plan to tell the world? That they all went mad? Ate some funny couscous, or smoked the wrong hookah?"
"Oh, no," he said. "Certainly not. I shall tell them—after a thorough investigation, of course—that the attack was orchestrated by an old enemy of mine, a renegade scientist who attended the conference under false pretences in order to stir up unrest in my kingdom. It will be revealed that several neighbouring states have been conspiring with him, as well as abetting the recent terrorist campaigns along our mutual borders, and I shall request foreign financial and military aid in dealing with these threats."
Daine felt the blood drain from her face. "And you expect to be believed?" she demanded.
"There will be no question," said Ozorne. He was smiling again, his eyes cold. "The ringleader will confess, publicly, and implicate his collaborators and their governments."
"He won't."
The smile broadened. "But he will. Because if he does not, I shall torture and execute his wife."
"Have you people in the hotel?" Lindhall asked Kaddar.
"We did have," the prince replied, "but now? I would hesitate to trust anyone who may have been exposed to … to whatever agent …"
"Ka—Azan, you must excuse me," said Zaimid. He was on his feet, ready to depart. "I will rejoin you later. I can be of more use down there, now that the shooting has stopped—they will need more doctors than there are, I am sure."
"Would you—if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to go with you," said Alanna. Numair had never heard her sound so diffident. "I have some experience in combat triage, and I'm certainly no use here—I never did find those plans."
Zaimid grinned at her. "I should be honoured," he said. And, to Numair, "Do not worry. I shall look after Dr Cooper."
Numair smiled weakly. "Alanna can look after herself," he said, "as she never tires of reminding me. Ring my mobile when you've finished," he added, to Alanna, "and we'll meet up. I'll try to reach George—he'll have heard about this by now. He may have something to tell us, and if not, at least I can let him know you're safe."
"Go." Kaddar waved a hand at them, his gaze still focused sharply on the scene below. "Do what you can, and may God go with you."
As Zaimid and Alanna made their way indoors and down to street level, the others got to their feet and took seats at an abandoned table. Kaddar's Palm Pilot blipped. "One of our people in the Palace reports seeing Daine," he said after a moment. The others leaned eagerly toward him, but he shook his head sadly. "It was hours ago," he said, still reading incoming text, "and … oh dear."
"What?" chorused Lindhall and Numair.
"When last seen," the prince said slowly, "she was with him, and heading toward his private research wing." He looked up, his expression bleak. "I have no people there. There are no people there. No one enters but my uncle, unless he accompanies them. The doors are thumbprint-keyed, and the whole wing is two storeys below ground. If he has Daine there, I doubt that we can free her."
Daine opens the door of the flat to find both Coopers standing in the corridor.
"Hello," she says shyly; Alanna and George have never visited her at home before. "Em … come in. Please. Come and sit down. I'll make tea."
She stands aside to let them through. Griffin, Daine's large and cantankerous marmalade cat, stalks out of the kitchen and blocks their passage for a few moments, swishing his tail as he inspects the newcomers. Alanna disarms him by squatting down to scratch him behind the ears and murmuring, "You're a beauty, aren't you, laddie?"
They reach the sitting-room door and Alanna stops on the threshold, mouth open in surprise. "Good Lord," she says. "Is it always like this?"
Taken aback, Daine leans into the room to see what could possibly be the matter. It looks to her much as it always does: the mismatched second-hand furniture; the tangle of plants in the only sunny window; the cheap Ikea bookcases stacked with veterinary textbooks, cerlox-bound course kits, and mystery paperbacks; Miri's stereo and the rack of CDs surmounted by a jumbled stack of same; the trailing flex of a laptop rising over the back of the sofa on its way to the nearest wall point; the assortment of cat baskets and scratching posts –
"Oh," she says, reddening. "You mean the cats."
"Are they all yours?" George asks. He has picked his way around the obstacles to take a seat in Miri's armchair, which is shedding stuffing all down one side; its previous occupant, a grey tabby kitten, is now purring on his knee.
"Er – not that one, actually," Daine says. "Leaper's an abandoned kitten we're fostering for the SSPCA. Her two brothers are somewhere about, but they're shy. Griffin and Spots are ours – well, mine really—"
"I'm sorry," says Alanna. "We didn't come to criticize your housekeeping. It's just that – well – the way you organized Numair's office and so on, I suppose I expected …"
Daine brightens. "Oh," she says, "that's different. I'm good at organizing, just not at housekeeping. We've only got so much time to spend on tidying things, you see, and we agreed to focus on the important bits. Laundry, and washing up, and looking after the cats. Miri cooks," she explains. "I only know how to make camping food really."
Alanna nods. She is still staring at something in the middle distance.
George clears his throat. "We're sorry to drop in unannounced like this," his wife says, a little awkwardly. "We just got back from Aberdeen and we happened to be driving past …"
"You're a terrible liar, Alanna," Daine says cheerfully. "I know you must have heard the rumours. It's all right – I'm not sleeping with him, he's not taking advantage of me, I'm not after his money, and I'll still finish my degree. Sweet of you to worry, though. I'll just go and put the kettle on, and make sure Griffin isn't bullying the kittens."
As she leaves the room she hears George chuckling and sees—she is almost sure of it—Alanna putting out her tongue at him.
"You intrigue me, Veralidaine," Ozorne said conversationally. His hand was on her shoulder, fingers caressing. She wished hard for the freedom to jerk away and slap him; but by now, starved and sleep-deprived, she could no longer muster such resistance. He leaned closer, and her nostrils twitched: why must the man wear so much cologne? "It surprised me at first, I must confess, that Draper should put himself to the trouble of seducing such an unremarkable little sparrow. His taste runs usually to somewhat … showier plumage. Now that we know one another better, however, I begin to see … yes, you might make a very interesting bedmate." The caressing hand moved from Daine's shoulder up along her throat, then tilted her chin up toward him. The speculative glint in his amber eyes revolted her.
"But surely you realize, Veralidaine, that Draper would have tired of you before long; something else would have piqued his curiosity and you would have been tossed aside, as he has thrown off so many lovers and friends before …"
That did it. How dare he – how dare this monster speak that way about Numair? A cold, silent fury Daine hadn't thought herself capable of washed over her like a frigid wave; she felt it loosen, though not release, his chemical hold on her. "Numair is my husband." The choked voice didn't sound like hers – scarcely sounded human. "He loves me. And he's a hundred – a thousand times a better man than you. He doesn't need to hurt people to prove how clever he is."
He was staring at her as she spoke, still too close for comfort – too close for safety – apparently fascinated. His arrogance, his evident assurance that even now she could do nothing to him, only stoked her fury. With agonizing slowness she raised her arm, drew it back, and aimed a slap at his face. He parried the blow, as she had known he would; but she saw something in his face that had not been there before.
"Perhaps not," she heard him murmur, "but they are hurt, all the same." And she knew the hurt he meant was not the physical blow she had attempted.
Then he reached for the syringe again, and after a moment darkness swallowed her.
