Sheikh's Ransom

Someone like Kaifar.

The airport was northeast of the city. “Shall I tell you about our country as we pass?” Kaifar enquired. He waved a hand and without waiting for an answer, began pointing out the sights to her an ancient ruined fortress almost buried by blown sand; a wadi in the distance, palm trees against golden dunes; a small desert village, looking as though it were still in the Iron Age, except for the single satellite dish.

“That is the house of the chief man of the village. Once the possession of two mules marked his wealth. Now it is a television set,” he told her, smiling again. Yet she couldn’t relax.

Soon they were in the city. The car entered a large leafy square, and a fabulously decorated, magical building of blue mosaic tile and mirrored glass came into view. “This is our Great Mosque,” he said grandly. “It was built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by m—” he paused, as if seeking the name “—Queen Halimah. Her tomb also is here.”

Caroline gazed at it, entranced by her first live sight of such exotic beauty. After a glance at her rapt face, Kaifar slowed the car and drew in at the curb. The broad stone-paved courtyard was shaded by trees and cooled by fountains, and she watched the people—tourists and the worshippers together—strolling about. The place cast a spell of peace. A sense of wonder crept over her at the magnificence of the architecture, followed by a curious feeling of recognition. Her mouth opened in a little gasp.

“What is it, Miss Langley?”

“I think my fiancé has a miniature of this scene, painted on ivory! Is that possible?” How different, how unimaginably more impressive the place was in real life.

“Anything is possible, is it not? That a man in New York should have a miniature of such a building is not very astonishing, even if one wonders why he wants it. Has your fiancé visited my country?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

“Yet he wants a painting of the Great Mosque.”

“My fiancé is a collector.”

Kaifar was silent.

“An antiques collector, you know,” she said, thinking he might not understand the term. “He buys ancient works of art and...objects. Mostly Greek and Roman, but he does have some oriental things.”

“Ah, he buys them?” He stuck his arm out the window to wave an old man on a wobbling bicycle past. In the bicycle basket she was fascinated to see a dirty, battered computer monitor.

She smiled at his naivete. “How else could he collect them?”

He shrugged. “People have things that have been given to them. Or that they have stolen.”

Caroline bristled. “I am quite sure that David has paid for everything in his collection,” she said coldly. “Believe me, he is rich enough to buy the whole mosque, he doesn’t have to—”

His voice cut harshly across hers. “No one is rich enough to buy the Great Mosque. It is not for sale.” He sounded furious, and Caroline could have kicked herself. She didn’t want to make an enemy of her guide before her trip had even begun. Some foreigners, she knew, were offended by the casual assumption that everything, including their heritage, had a price.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that literally. Of course such a thing would never be for sale,” she said hastily.

Kaifar turned his head. “They come in the night, and they steal the treasures of the mosques and museums—even, they chip away the ancient tiles and stone monuments. Now we have a guard on many sites, and those who make the attempt and are caught are put in prison. But it is impossible to guard everything, and the danger only puts the price so high that someone can always be found to make the attempt. This is what foreign collectors do to my country’s heritage.”

Caroline was hot with a sense of communal guilt. “I’m sure David’s never done anything like that!”

“Are you?” he asked, as if the subject already bored him. “Well, then, we must not blame your fiancé for our troubles.”

In fact she knew nothing at all of David’s business practices. She said, as her father might have done, “Anyway, if people are willing to pillage their own heritage for money, that’s hardly the fault of the buyer, is it?”

He hit the brakes at an orange light so that she was flung forward against the seat belt, but when she looked in the mirror his face was impassive, and his voice when he spoke was casual.

“You yourself have no experience of what desperate things people will do for money?”

She stared at him as a slow, hot blush crept up under her skin. It was impossible, she told herself. His remark could not have been meant ironically—he probably believed she was rich. But he had scored a bull’s-eye.

Caroline had many feelings about her engagement, but never, until this moment, had she felt shame. Shame that she should be allowing David to buy her, a human being, exactly as he bought the pieces for his collection. And for just the reason Kaifar cited—because of desperation for money.

Three

Twenty minutes later she was standing in a cool, comfortable room, looking out through a glass door onto a shaded balcony and the sea beyond.

“You will want to relax, have a drink, bathe and change,” Kaifar informed her, waving at the terrace where he had instructed a porter to place a tray of ice and drinks. “I will return for you in three hours. Then we will have dinner.”

She frowned in surprise. “What do you mean? Why are you taking me to dinner?”

He shrugged. “I am a part of your prize, Miss Langley,” he said, with a smile that made her turn nervously away. “Would you like to go to a European restaurant, or do you prefer to try the foods of my country?”

What was she complaining about? She certainly didn’t want to dine alone. “Well, then, the food of the country, thank you.”

Kaifar nodded once and withdrew, leaving her on her own. Caroline went to the exotically arched patio door, drew it open, and stepped out onto terra cotta tiles delicately interspersed with a pattern in white and blue. She sighed in deep satisfaction. How good it was to get away, to be alone, to think. She seemed to have had no time for thinking since her father had first told her of David’s offer.

Far in the distance, scarcely discernible, a muezzin was calling the faithful of the city to prayer. Ahead of her stretched the fabulous blue waters of the Gulf of Barakat. Palm trees, planted in the courtyard below, stretched up to the vaulted, pillared canopy that protected half the terrace from the sun. There were plants everywhere her eye fell. A table and chairs nestled against the trunk of one of the trees, and Caroline sank down, dropped ice into a glass, and poured herself some mineral water.

The surroundings were so soothing. Her troubles and responsibilities seemed miles away. She had no choices to make, no unpleasant facts to face, tasks to perform. She was facing two weeks where she need please no one save herself.

Sayed Hajji Karim ibn Daud ibn Hassan al Quraishi reached a deceptively lazy hand out to the bowl of glistening fruit and detached a grape. He examined the grape, his curving lids hiding the expression in his eyes. The fruit was plump and purple-black, but not nearly as deeply dark as the monarch’s angry eyes, a fact which Nasir could verify a moment later, when Prince Karim slipped the juicy globelet between his white teeth and raised his piercing gaze to his secretary.

“In truth, Lord, no one save yourself and Prince Rafi and I know what your intentions are. Who could have revealed them? Only I myself have knowingly been engaged in the execution of these plans. The truth has been disguised from all the others. All has been as secretly done as you ordered, Lord.”

“And yet he did not come,” said Prince Karim.

The secretary bowed. “If I may speak plainly,” he began, but he scarcely paused for the permission the ritual question implied. He was a trusted advisor and he spoke freely in conference with his prince. “This may easily be the action of a guilty man who fears some nameless coincidence, or a busy man contemptuous of the arrangements and desires of others. It is not necessarily the action of a man who has been warned of trouble.”

“He is a man who subverted one of my own staff,” Karim said flatly. The monotone did not fool the secretary. Prince Karim advertised his anger only when there was something to be gained from a show of royal rage.

The secretary bowed his head. “True, Lord. By my eyes, he has not subverted me.”

Prince Karim lifted a hand. “No such suspicion has crossed my mind, Nasir.”

Prince Rafi spoke. “Good! Then we must operate on the assumption that there has been no leak of information, and alter our plans to suit the circumstance. All is not yet lost! The woman is here, after all!”

The sun set as she waited; the air was cooler, and a breeze moved beguilingly across the terrace. The transformation from light to dark happened quickly, a bucket of molten gold dropping down into the navy ocean and drawing after it night and a thousand stars. Now the world was magical.

She was waiting, half for Kaifar, half for a phone call to go through. She had tried and failed to call David earlier, then had given up, showered and dressed. She was wearing a green cotton sundress with wide straps and a bodice cut not too low across her breasts; a gauzy, gold-shot scarf patterned in greens with pinks and blues and yellows would cover her shoulders if necessary. Her hair was clean and obedient again, swept back from her forehead and neck as smoothly as the vibrant natural curls would allow. She wore a gold chain, gold studs, and her engagement ring.

Caroline had been absolutely astonished when her father had approached her with David Percy’s proposal of marriage. She hardly knew the man, although she was aware that he was a friend of her father’s, an antiques dealer and collector who had sold Thom Langley a few things in the old days. They had met only once or twice. She believed then that he had fallen in love with her from a distance, and she had been ready to laugh with her father over David’s middle-aged foolishness.

Then she had seen that her father wanted her to marry David Percy. And when her mother came in, Louise had made no effort to pretend her husband had not already informed her of the great news. “Oh, Caroline, isn’t it a miracle! Who would have thought that a man like David Percy would want you!” she had burst out with such relief and gratitude in her tone that Caroline understood that for both of them David Percy’s offer represented a salvation worth any sacrifice. Even a daughter’s happiness.

“But Mother, he’s so—” Caroline stopped, because she couldn’t find the words to describe the awful coldness that she felt from David. Worse, much worse, than her own father’s.

Thomas Langley had always disapproved of his elder daughter’s “emotional extremes,” her capacity for deep feeling and unguarded responses, so unlike his own nature or even that of his wife’s. Whether she was touched by the plight of a stray cat in a Caribbean resort, or moved to tears by a painting in an Italian church, her father frowned. Caroline had grown up under the constant pressure to contain her laughter, restrain her tears, to walk sedately and talk quietly.