Free Open Sesame by Tom Holt Page A

playing devil’s advocate to the concept of constitutional monarchy. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘what about this? And this,’ he added, ‘is a real order.’
    ‘Go on.’
    Aziz swallowed hard and tried to sound stern. He was about as good at it as a bowl of thoroughly melted ice cream, but it was the best he could manage. ‘My orders are,’ he said, ‘we find Akram. Preferably,’ he added, ‘before he finds us.’
    There was a similar feeling of dislocation at the house of Ali Baba, when it was discovered that the Master had apparently gone off in the night with two small saddlebags, a packed lunch and the unspavined camel. The most demonstrative reaction came from Yasmin, the sloe-eyed houri who (although of course she didn’t know it) was to have suggested the business with the palm-oil jars and the boiling water.
    ‘Bastard!’ she said.
    She said a great deal more, too; best years of my life, when I think of all I’ve done for him, the grapes I’ve peeled, all that wobbly dancing with a chunk of glass in my belly-button … Grief-stricken, you might say. Desolate. Inconsolable.
    So, while other members of the household busied themselves with various tasks incidental on the Master’s departure, such as the removal of small, portable valuables to places of safety and calling on the estate agent to get the house on the market as quickly as possible, Yasmin stormed off to her room to do some serious sulking, although she did stop off at the Counting-House on the way in case there was any loose cash lying around that might prove a temptation to the servants.
    ‘Coward,’ she muttered under her breath - Ali Baba hadn’t left any money on the desk, but he’d carelessly left a substantial sum in the safe hidden behind the sliding screen in the secret chamber under the false chimney-breast, where any Tom, Dick or Yusuf might find it - ‘Spineless, gutless, yellow-livered—’
    Of all the parts of a story, the Love Interest is probably the most resilient, and the nastiest to get on the wrong side of. A woman scorned is bad enough; a woman scorned when the glass slipper is, so to speak, millimetres from her foot is perhaps the most ferocious thing imaginable this side of a thermonuclear holocaust. As she stormed dramatically up the main staircase, she stopped for a moment to pick up an exquisite painted silk miniature of her beloved and press it fervendy to her heart.
    ‘You can run,’ she said to it, ‘but you can’t hide.’
    ‘Wait here,’ Akram hissed.
    The phoenix glowered at him and went on nibbling insulation off the telephone cable. It was amazing the effect that twenty thousand volts had on the creature; namely, none at all.
    Squatting uncomfortably on the window-ledge, several hundred feet above Bloomsbury, Akram fished in his pocket for his folding jemmy. If his careful reconnaissance was correct, this window would get him in to the staff toilet on the top floor of the British Museum, leaving him the relatively simple task of making his way past an impenetrable jungle of electronic pratfalls, breaking into a reinforced glass case without making a sound, and then retracing his steps back to this window. The tricky part would be persuading the phoenix to let him climb on its back again.
    ‘And don’t be all night about it’ the phoenix called after him. ‘Some of us do have better things to do than perching up draughty roofs in the freezing cold …’
    It was still squawking when Akram, having dropped twelve feet onto a stone floor, landed feather-light and froze motionless. He listened. Apart from the distant sound of the phoenix complaining to the night air about Some People Who Have No Consideration For Others (owing to the nature of his somewhat irregular lifestyle he had never married, but there had been times when, trapped in a wardrobe or linen cupboard of a house he’d burgled, he’d had opportunities to eavesdrop on matrimony, so he knew what it sounded like) there was silence. A cistern