Free Untold Story by Monica Ali

old times, with such fondness that it felt like good-bye. We traded stories of our first meeting, of how when I had bowed to her, she had curtsied in return, that glorious spark in her eye.
    After a while she grew serious again. “I’d be too afraid to die, Lawrence. Now I don’t want to be too afraid to live.”
    29 January 1998
    The night that she swam out to her new life she was raw, wild, magnificent. I had sat in the boat for nearly an hour before I spotted her, wondering if it could be possible that she had changed her mind, wondering after that if the whole “little plan” had existed only as a kind of delusional seizure of my malfunctioning brain. Then the still dark waters broke and her arm lifted up and she waved. She swam steadily toward the boat while I looked nervously around, checking for the millionth time on the possibility of being seen. The Ramesses was the only yacht this far from the harbor, keeping that royal distance to preserve her privacy.
    I reached out my hand so that she could climb into the rowing boat. She nearly pulled me out; she had the strength of a tigress, if she had roared then it would have seemed natural to me.
    I asked her if she was sure. “Row,” she said.
    But she was too impatient with my method, the near-silent slicing of the waters, the technique that I had honed, and when she had struggled into the jeans and sweater I had brought for her, she elbowed me aside.
    I asked her if there was a possibility that anyone had noticed her get up (I meant, of course, her beau, although we had discussed how they would frequently take adjacent cabins because of his propensity to snore). She said that there was not. I asked her if there were any chance that one of the security team on night watch had spotted anything. “That poor oaf,” she said. “Asleep. I checked.” Even in the moonlight I could see the high color in her cheeks.
    She had given up her royal protection long before, fearing—at best—that the officers were used to spy on her. Her beau’s family had elaborate security arrangements, high cost, high tech, and hopelessly executed. It was a boon. The security cameras on the Ramesses were never turned on, her beau had ordered it, in case it should take his fancy to lock the door of, say, the dining quarters and tickle his princess (or one of her predecessors) on the table or the floor.
    She stood up suddenly and the boat rocked. “I’ve done it,” she said, so loudly that I automatically said hush. She laughed at that. It must have been many years since someone other than her husband had ordered her to pipe down. “Do you believe it?” she said. “I’ve done it. I really have.”
    30 January 1998
    I had flown down to Brazil a few weeks earlier to conduct the “recce.” The difficulty was knowing which one of the Pernambuco beaches would be closest to the Ramesses . After a few days with friends in Buenos Aires, they had flown to Montevideo to board the yacht and begin the sail up the coast of Uruguay. The superrich do not plan their vacations like mere mortals, like a page from a catalog. It was impossible to be sure of their exact schedule. So I scouted a few of the beaches, hired boats for a day in three using false identification, one can never be too cautious. I called her on her mobile when I was back in Washington and told her my preferred location, not the main beach, certainly. I told her—or tried to tell her—my reasoning, both strategic and tactical, in planning the retreat, first from yacht to boat, then from boat to land, and from the point of disembarkation to the interior. She swatted it all aside.
    “What shall I do if he proposes?” she asked. I said I didn’t know, but that she might have to accept. “Oh Lord,” she said. I said that naturally she must speak as her heart dictated but if she turned him down and thus curtailed the holiday it would also bring about the end of the plan. “Well,” she said, “it wouldn’t be fair to string