Chapter Thirty-Nine
Elias camped on one of the hills overlooking a walled compound near one of the southern cliffs of Pantelleria. Close by, on the next ridge, were regimented rows of grape vines that descended down to the wall-enclosed villa.
He raised a small telescope to his eye. The walls looked new, unweathered. Only one side was unwalled and that was the one at the edge of the cliff.
Surrounding the compound were smaller buildings – servants quarters and farm outbuildings no doubt. He would not get within four hundred yards of the compound without being spotted. Someone had made good use of Ahmed Sharrouf’s legacy.
Now he was about to destroy it.
According to the tavern keeper, no one had seen the new owner of the villa, although servants came regularly. He was told a wealthy widow lived there but she preferred to live her life in isolation. Elias doubted it.
What a useful tale that was; a little old widow, my foot. The woman was vicious and prepared to shed blood to take his son. It could not go unanswered.
The tavern owner also suspected some kind of pier had been built below the cliffs but had not taken enough interest to investigate for himself.
“I am here to sell food and wine. I mind my own business,” Elias was emphatically informed. “Wise men would do the same.”
The only entrance to the estate was through a narrow valley surrounded by sharp volcanic escarpments. It could easily be defended from a small army who would be outflanked by defenders in higher positions on the hill.
It was just as well he didn’t have a small army with him, then. He was just one man, armed with explosives.
He sat back and refined his sketch of Sharrouf’s compound based on his observations. If he could get in, he could limit the damage to within the large building and possibly reduce the number of unnecessary deaths. His target would be Sharrouf’s library. If he could destroy it, no one would ever use his network of spies ever again. He would reduce the place to rubble, just as his own home had been destroyed.
Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
He needed a few more days to better gauge the household’s movements though. He was chancing his life on getting into the inner sanctum not once but two days running and remaining invisible long enough to hide and set explosive charges.
He retracted the telescope and settled back against a tree, took a swig from the water canteen and wiped his mouth. He evaluated himself as he had done with the members of Kit’s crew before every battle. Were they at peace with their Maker? Were they at peace with their families?
Elias pulled out seasoned dried meat from his satchel and said a silent prayer over it before he ate. For his own soul, he had no concerns. He had lived his life according the Gospel as faithfully as he could. He trusted Kit and Jonathan to find Benjamin. If he died today or tomorrow, he knew he had done all a man could to do keep his responsibilities.
There was only one thing that gave him sorrow.
Laura.
If there was to be a single regret, it would always carry her name.
He retreated to the shadows to wait. He would use the cover of darkness tonight and the early rising sun to execute his next plan. He recalled the words Lord Horatio Nelson had written in his diary before the Battle of Trafalgar and, as a prayer, knew he could do no better himself.
May the Great God, whom I worship, grant to my Country, and for the benefit of Europe in general, a great and glorious Victory; and may no misconduct in any one tarnish it; and may humanity after Victory be the predominant feature in the British Fleet. For myself, individually, I commit my life to Him who made me, and may his blessing light upon my endeavors for serving my Country faithfully. To Him I resign myself and the just cause which is entrusted to me to defend. Amen. Amen. Amen.
Elias woke early along with the coastal birds roosting in the cliffs. He sent a silent prayer upwards that his climb across the cliff face would not be as difficult as he feared. But while the drop was precipitous, the early morning sun cast shadows across its face, revealing to him hand and foot holds to use.
With his weight on his left hand, Elias reached across with his right to find his next hand hold, moving back and forth, crab-like, up and along the cliff. He had climbed rock and cliff faces many a time, but never before with a weight on his back, so he kept his pack light. Just three explosive shells today. If all went well, he would explore the walled compound, hide the explosives, and return to his own nest without being discovered. Tomorrow, he would return with two more shells and four horns full of powder to set the charges.
As the morning wore on, the winds flattened him against the volcanic rock as he climbed. He looked up to see the edges of a dense hedge waving at him, encouraging him along. He made his way toward it, hoping it would provide enough cover once he reached the top. It did. He squeezed himself to the ground and peered out beneath.
The first thing that struck him was the smell of exotic sweetness, not only in the flowerbeds but in the trees, large fruit-bearing plants now laden. The sound of music rose and fell with the capricious dance of the wind. He recognized the plucking of the tanbur. In and around the trees and plants were a scattering of timber arbors with the largest of them closest to the cliff edge. It was also the one closest to him. Through the whitewashed lattice work, he could see a seat or a bed, nearly as large as the gazebo itself, covered with cushions of exotic silks that glistened in the sunlight.
It was some kind of paradise, an Eden at the end of the world.
Elias was about to break cover when a figure on the bed shifted. One of the most striking women he had ever seen raised herself up. Her hair, on first appearances, looked dark but once she moved out into the sun it glowed deep red like the last banked embers of a fire. The woman wore little, a draping of silk here and there in a shade of aqua blue, diaphanous in the light.
A harem?
Elias peered as far as he could into the garden. There were no other women he could see, but then he was not close enough to the house itself. He prayed that his strategy was sound – that all their focus had been stopping outsiders from getting in via the walls. He waited a good twenty minutes by his reckoning without seeing another living soul.
He chanced a dash across open lawn to what appeared to be a stone reservoir. He opened his satchel, to slip a tunic over his clothes and wind a scarf around his head to fashion a turban. It was a weak disguise, one designed to fool only a glancing observer but, then, he didn’t plan to let anyone get close enough to see through it.
From behind the cistern, he saw numerous entrances into the villa itself through the arched colonnades. He identified the smallest entrance, most likely to be used by the servants. And considering there was also likely to be more servants than lords, he chose the middle entrance that seemed to be part of a main passageway leading right through the center of the building out to the front lawns.
Inside the building was cooler. Elias took a moment to orient himself. It was clear that much work had been done on enlarging the structure over the past year but evidence of the original, much smaller building remained.
If this place did belong to one of Selim Omar’s wives, she was more likely to inhabit the newer wings and chances were Ahmed Sharrouf’s library would be in the older sections. Again, only an educated guess. He followed a left hand passage which was obviously much older, more utilitarian and which ran away from the music he heard earlier.
Elias opened the second door on the right and nearly sank to his knees in gratitude. He had chanced upon Sharrouf’s library, floor to ceiling with shelves and papers, at the first guess. He glanced at a book laid open on a writing slope. It appeared to be a ledger of some kind. Though he spoke rudimentary Arabic, he didn’t read it. But he did recognize a few words – one in particular, Tito, and next to it the word “boy”. Elias placed an explosive shell behind the leg of one of the tables and left the room.
He would place the remaining two in the house before he left.
Elias was equally cautious heading out of the library. He saw no one, yet he was struck by the sensation of being watched. He rounded the corner that led to the main passage and came face to face with a woman. He held his breath and waited for her to scream, to sound an alarm, anything than just stare at him with wide, scared eyes.
The woman was dressed as a servant, a robe of mud brown with a colored veil of the same shade over her hair. Confused for a moment, Elias had thought the woman was a nun, until he remembered where he was.
Now what could he do? He could hardly silence a woman as he might a man.
Suddenly, there was the sound of others approaching. The woman glanced back over her shoulder toward the voices and back to him. “Come with me. Quickly!” she said in softly accented Arabic.
It took Elias a moment to comprehend. “You will not give me up?”
“No, but come now!” She dashed past him. What choice did he have? He followed.
She moved as silently as a mouse up worn stone steps to the upper story and into another room. It was home to a veritable rainbow of fabrics.
The woman turned to him. “This is my Lady Rabia’s dressing room. No one comes here but me. You are safe here for the moment.”
“Why do you protect me?” he asked.
“My mistress is cruel. Many people have died at her hand. I hate her. I’d run away if I could.”
Elias looked at the woman. He had little choice but to roll the dice and trust her word. “You can leave tomorrow if you like. I’ll be back to make this place explode.” He dipped into his satchel and drew out the two remaining canisters of black powder. “With these.”
She looked at the devices blankly. He was unsure she understood what they were until she spoke. “Bombs?”
He nodded.
“You will take me with you afterwards?”
He nodded again.
“Then leave one of your bombs here. No one will find it.”
He slipped a shell behind some clothing. The woman inclined her head as though hearing something.
“You must go.”
The woman, little more than a girl really, led the way out of the room, saying nothing as they left the building and slipped through an arbor where Elias stopped briefly to hide the last shell at the base of a tree beside the outer wall. Soon they were standing in the shadows close to the edge of the cliff.
“I’ll be back tomorrow,” he promised. “Where shall I meet you?”
“My mistress rests during the noon hours. She expects the servants to be finished with their duties here before she has her morning meal. The best time is when everyone is at prayers. I shall meet you in the small pavilion under that tree.”
He looked to where she pointed.
When he looked back, she was gone – as quiet as a little brown mouse.
Elias wasn’t sure how much he had slept, if at all. The encounter with the servant woman had shaken him. Not because of the close call he’d had, but because it forced him to look directly at the real aim of his mission here. It wasn’t to destroy Ahmed Sharrouf’s records and, through that, disrupt his spy network.
It was to kill a woman.
He doubted he would have been able to kill the servant yesterday even to save his own life. If she had screamed and called for help, he probably would have just run. Even now, he could barely believe that he risked trusting her today.
Still, what choice did he have?
And what choice other than to kill the woman he now knew to be called Rabia? If he did not, how long would it be before she dispatched another wave of assassins to Sicily?
And if he and Benjamin could not be found at Villagrazia, there was Morwena and Jonathan’s home in Palermo to destroy, Kit and Sophia’s island of Catallus to attack, and, not only them, but all his shipmates from the Calliope, potentially exposed by Sharrouf’s records and prime targets for kidnap, torture and murder in the bloody quest to find Selim Omar’s only male heir.
As Elias rose and prepared himself for the climb back up the cliff, he recalled how he had wept in the arms of the young Liana just a few years ago, haunted by his first experience of killing an armed man face to face. Now, to protect his friends and, most of all, to stop Benjamin from falling into the hands of the corsairs, Elias was getting ready to kill an unarmed woman.
He wondered if, when gazing at the reflection of Medusa, did Perseus see the woman as well as the monster? Might it have stayed his hand, caused him even a moment’s hesitation, before he beheaded the Gorgon?
Elias steeled himself and looked up the cliff before him.
Rabia was a monster, too. He would look her in the face and kill her with his bare hands if necessary. And he wouldn’t hesitate.
God help him.
His body ached from the second cliff climb. He wished the task were over. He had the sense that sand was running through the hourglass faster than he thought. The sooner he did what he had to do, the quicker he could be away from Pantelleria and return to his son. The Calliope had to be due to return soon. If there was need to deal with any of Rabia’s confederates later on, at least he would have good men to back him up.
He made his way to the pavilion; the garden was quiet as promised. Perhaps it was too quiet. He kept himself to the shadows.
As he waited, he became aware of snatches of raised voices in the house or perhaps on the other side of it. The sounds came to him with the shifting of the wind. Something was wrong.
He watched a hunch-shouldered woman cross the lawn toward the pavilion. As she moved out of the shade and into the sun, he saw she was wearing brown robes.
“Sir, are you here?” she whispered. Elias emerged from his hiding place. The woman straightened herself and stood to her full height. This was not the same woman from yesterday.
At the same time, he heard the sound of swords being unsheathed behind him. The woman swept back the brown veil and exposed her head; it was the woman with the dark red hair he saw yesterday.
“Welcome Elias Winston Nash. My name is Rabia, widow of Selim Omar, cousin to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. I’ve been waiting for you.”