to understand what had happened in the last couple of hours. They arrived at the airport and parked in a zone reserved in front of the police and customs building.
The car phone buzzed and Djellali spoke excitedly saying he would be back in his office in about an hour.
“Wait here a moment, I’ll be back in a moment with your exit visa and papers.”
He got out and disappeared into the building.
Ennis looked dejectedly at the two RASE men guarding the entrance to the building, they looked bored and paid little attention to the car with its ministry number plates.
He waited anxiously, five minutes passed, then ten...he looked at his watch. He wondered what was keeping Djellali; he nervously slipped his hand into his pocket feeling his passport and his plane ticket that Djellali had returned to him. His thoughts turned wildly in his head, he wanted to get out of the country as quickly as possible and if possible to recover his notes intact with his computer and equipment. Then he heard his name, he looked at the telecom screen, it flickered and the sound buzzed and crackled. Urgent! Urgent! Calling all police and frontier guards, apprehend John Ennis, American nationality, suspected of murder and robbery, believed to be in a stolen car, direction Independence Airport, by order of the Minister of the Interior.
He immediately understood. He slid over into the driver’s seat and calmly turned the key in the contact without looking at the two guards. The car started and he slowly reversed out of the parking spot and headed back in the direction of the city centre.
The Flight
His first idea was to go the American representation, there was no embassy. Then he decided for David’s apartment, it was not far from the hotel, near the market place behind the Old Port.
As soon as he arrived in the city centre and could see the Grande Cathedral with its minarets he abandoned the car, choosing a quiet side street, squeezing it between a white van and a minibus, where it could not be too easily spotted with its ministry number plates.
Fifteen minutes later he found himself standing in a street that lay off the main avenue, about one hundred meters or so from the entrance of the apartment building where David had his apartment. He hesitated, waiting, looking carefully around to be sure that the street was not being watched. He could smell cooking odours and oriental spices. There was the sound of the cars and motorbikes accelerating away from the traffic lights, the blue smoke rising in the heat of the sun. The concrete roadway was polished by the tires of the vehicles.
With the red light a driver lit his cigarette and in a practiced movement crushed the cigarette packet launching it into the gutter already overflowing with detritus. The notion of civism and public hygiene was not one of the habits of the Algharbis, who had little consideration for anything they did not own directly.
The main avenue had once been the pride of the city, where some of the regions finest restaurants, cafés and boutiques had proudly served well to do locals and many visitors, it was now renamed avenue Muhammad VI. It had been transformed in a vast slum, though to be objective, even before the revolt the broad avenue had already commenced its decline into an unkempt third class zone for the Neos.
In spite of an unemployment rate of over twenty five percent, low wages and a willing labour force, hiring of cleaners had never been envisaged. Rubbish and filth had become invisible, it was part of the everyday environment. Algharbis visiting Paris or Düsseldorf were marvelled at the cleanliness as thought it existed by some mysterious force in those cities.
After a long moment, once he was sure there was nothing suspicious he crossed the road and approached the building, the main door was locked, it required a code to enter. He hung around for some minutes in the hope that somebody entering or leaving would open the door for him, but he soon realized that he could wait a long time. Time was pressing and the police could arrive at any moment.
As he looked around he saw the light over the entrance to the basement garage flashing, the door lifted and a car drove slowly out onto the street. Quickly he slipped under the door as it closed and walked down the ramp to the first basement level where he found the door to the stairwell and the lift. He walked up the stairs and in the hallway buzzed on the visiophone.
A few moments later he was standing before the door to David’s apartment.
“I told you that this man is very dangerous, his is very close to a group of pan-Arab Islamists.”
“I thought this country was secular.”
“Secular doesn’t mean apolitical, he is a nationalist...a Muslim nationalist. People like Abdelmoumoun want an Arab traditionalist political system, an Emirate, not a Western republic.”
“But what has that got to do with me?”
“Nothing in particular, but he is against all that you represent. Our friend had a long record of extremist activities before he became important in Algharb. He was deported from Germany some years back, for agitation in the Turkish community under the anti-terrorism laws. When he returned to France he continued his activities and ended up with two years in prison for association with known terrorists when an army officer was injured in a reprisal attack against an army barracks. It happened soon after the death of Abdelmoumoun’s wife in a bomb attack on the Côte d’Or Mosque, which was attributed to a French right wing extremist movement. There was little doubt in official circles that it was the BLC, that’s the Brigade de la Croix de Lorraine, which was an early paramilitary organization close to le Martel.”
“Terrorism?”
“Yes, but in reality he was set up, he had been promoting Islamic schools in Paris when new legislation introduced by the Renaissance Party excluded all forms of non-traditional religious education, private or not, that is to say non Judeo-Christian.”
“What happened after?”
“Well he was again deported, this time to Algiers, but he was not to the taste of the local Mullahs, who saw him as some kind of revolutionary, they did not want agitators either.”
“…and then?”
“Well, he then turned up in Istanbul, in the Muslim Nationalist Party. They were not really what you could call fundamentalists, but were nostalgic for the glories of a Muslim empire, you know Suliman the Magnificent, the Ottoman’s and all that. They dreamt of a new oriental empire from Dacca to Rabat!”
“When you say they are not fundamentalists you don’t mean to say not religious?”
“As I said they are not fundamentalists, but they are of course believers, but in the same way as the majority of Christians in Europe. Theirs is a political movement, fighting against corruption, petro-dollar kings, and also against mullahs and such who would like to return to medieval times, but, and this is important, against the West, they see at the root of all the problems in their world.”
“A sort of Ataturk?’
“Certainly not Ataturk, in their eyes he was a traitor, he abandoned traditions, abolished the Caliphate, and attacked the foundations of the oriental world.”
“They are revolutionaries then?”
“Exactly, fanatics of a certain kind. They want to return to the traditional values of their world in which progress and change would not be excluded, but adapted to their needs.”
“But Abdelmoumoun seems to prefer extremely strong arm methods!”
“Unfortunately all those who pretend to work for the good of the people have the same ideas, they will use any means at their disposal to attain their goals, even marching over the bloodied bodies of the people they are going to save!”
“...including mine by the looks of it!”
“Unfortunately for you my unlucky friend, you fall in the category of the worst enemies, an Anglo-Saxon.”
David described Abdelmoumoun’s ideas of how the British, for their imperial needs, had destroyed the natural balance of the Middle East, setting up their puppet governments and kings, followed by the Americans with their insatiable thirst for oil, using local tyrants for their own ends. They had humiliated great leaders, Mossadeg, Nasser, Saddam, Yasser
Arafat and the whole of the Palestinian people for the profit of the Zionist colonists.
David was a most respected orientalist, whose specialty was political history, he had an enormous sympathy for the Arab world and Islam in general. Both Arabs and Westerners respected his opinions. He was a frequent contributor to the International Herald Post, valued for his balanced opinion, but above all his ability to present that of the Arabs.
“Listen we’ve got more pressing problems than a philosophical discussion, which we could talk about at a more propitious moment...let’s hope. The question is what are we going to do with you? Abdelmoumoun wants your head at any price!”
He stopped, thinking hard, his cigarette holder clenched between his teeth.
“You cannot stay here, things could turn out very badly, you would be a hostage. The Nation of France cannot help you, they wouldn’t help you given their relations with the rest of the Federation. The problem is that we have very little time, they will be here very quickly.”
He stood up and went to his library where he looked for something in a drawer whilst talking.
“Your best chance is Italy, it’s the nearest and the frontier is perhaps a little less difficult.”
He turned around holding several maps, he selected one and started to unfold it hurriedly.
“You’ll have to take small roads, I have a bike, it’s not new but it’s serviceable, you can